Going Back

by Judith Arnold

  “Is he the love of your life?” he asked quietly, a curious smile teasing his lips as he directed his gaze toward the red-haired man dropping ice cubes into the cup for Daphne.

  “No,” she clarified. “I’m the love of his life. Paul, this is Brad Torrance. Brad, Paul Costello.”

  Paul twisted around, noticed Brad’s outstretched right hand and hastily set the bottle of ginger ale on the counter so he could return the handshake. “So, you’re the man of the hour,” he said grandly. “One of that old Cornell gang of Daphne’s. Shall we burst into a chorus of High Above Cayuga’s Waters?”

  “Spare us,” Daphne cut him off with a laugh.

  “So,” Paul said, his eyes shuttling between Brad and Daphne, “why aren’t you two watching the show in the living room? Those two actors teach a course in how to choreograph stage fights. I caught part of their performance, and they’re really convincing.”

  “We’d rather listen to you drone on and on about sixties rock-and-roll,” Daphne joked, taking the cup from Paul and sipping some of the icy beverage.

  Brad had drifted to the refrigerator, where he helped himself to a bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap and took a long drink. Then he smiled. “I’m not into fights, either as a spectator or a participant,” he said, then added, “Daphne and I were talking.” Daphne briefly wondered whether he’d taken seriously Paul’s claim about her being the love of his life, and whether he felt obliged to reassure Paul about what he and Daphne had been up to.

  “Talking, huh,” Paul repeated, mixing himself a gin and tonic. “Let me tell you something about this old schoolmate of yours, Brad—she generously volunteered to do all the driving tonight, so I can get plastered. Tell me, am I wrong to be madly in love with her?”

  “Even if she didn’t let you get plastered, you wouldn’t be wrong,” Brad answered, shooting Daphne an amused look.

  It took Daphne a moment to remember that one of the reasons she’d brought Paul with her was to prove to Brad that she hadn’t been permanently scarred by the events of that frat party eight years ago. Her strategy seemed to be working; Brad evidently believed that Paul was Daphne’s boyfriend.

  She was unexpectedly overcome by the urge to correct the impression Paul had created. She didn’t want Brad thinking erroneously that anything more than a friendship existed between her and Paul. Not ten minutes ago Brad had bared his soul to her when he’d described to her his worries about his parents. He had trusted her enough to share his deepest concerns with her. She couldn’t deliberately mislead him.

  But before she could say anything, Paul was talking again. “You’re right, Brad, you’re absolutely right. Plastered or stone-cold sober, I adore this lady.” He slipped his arm around her narrow waist and pulled her to him. “Dorothy Parker had it wrong—men do make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

  “I’m a woman, not a girl,” Daphne pointed out sternly.

  “Don’t complain, sweetheart. I got the gender right, didn’t I?” He tasted his drink, grimaced, then leaned across the table to get the green plastic lime-juice container. He added a few drops of to his drink, tasted it again, and nodded in satisfaction. “So, Brad, Daphne tells me you’re in the market for a new house.”

  “She ought to know,” Brad confirmed. “She’s my real estate agent.”

  “She’s the best,” Paul said.

  Whatever her strategy might have been, she couldn’t help thinking that Paul was laying on the compliments a little thick. She could tell by his tone that his exaggerated flattery was a result partly of his zany sense of humor and partly of the number of gin and tonics he’d consumed, but Brad couldn’t know that. “Paul and I are just good friends,” she informed him, realizing at once what a cliche that was.

  “No truth to the rumor,” Paul chimed in, embellishing the cliche. “We’re just friends.” He leaned forward confidentially and whispered, “More’s the pity, Brad, given that she’s dynamite in bed.”

  Daphne almost dropped her drink in embarrassment. Paul couldn’t have realized that Brad was in a better position than anyone else to know how untrue Paul’s flippant remark was. But if anyone knew how dreadful Daphne could be in bed, it was Brad.

  Too many times after that ghastly night, Daphne had berated herself for her lack of skill and seductiveness. If only she’d been more experienced, more talented, more romantic, the incident wouldn’t have been so horrible. It had been bad because she’d been bad. She hadn’t been dynamite in bed—she’d been a dud.

  Paul could have made such a silly, meaningless remark in front of anyone else and Daphne could have brushed it off with a laugh. But not in front of Brad. Not in front of the one man who knew from experience the extent of Daphne’s utter failure as a sex partner.

  “Excuse me,” she muttered, spinning on her heel and storming out of the kitchen. She hated herself for overreacting to Paul’s teasing, but she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as Brad. She couldn’t bear the possibility that her eyes might accidentally meet his, and she’d see cruel laughter in his gaze, remembrance and mockery. She couldn’t bear it.

  So, once again, she ran away.

  Chapter Five

  GUILT, BRAD CONCLUDED, was a peculiar affliction. Just when you were beginning to believe that it could be in permanent remission, it reared up again in a more virulent form.

  Right now, he was feeling doubly guilty: guilty for what he’d done to Daphne eight years ago, and guilty for having thought that he no longer had any reason to feel guilty. Just because he and Daphne had managed to spend a few more or less amicable days in each other’s company while they looked at houses didn’t mean Daphne had recovered from their disastrous interlude in his fraternity house bedroom. Just because Brad had felt extraordinarily comfortable with Daphne when she’d sought him out at the party last night—just because talking to her about his parents had boosted his spirits so much—didn’t mean Daphne had forgiven him for his past actions.

  He steered off the interstate at the Verona exit and braked to a stop at the end of the ramp. According to the directions Andrea had given him, Daphne’s house was only a few minutes’ drive from the exit. A few minutes wasn’t nearly enough time for Brad to figure out what he’d say to Daphne when he saw her—assuming he did see her. Given the unseasonably balmy weather that afternoon, she could be out for the day, enjoying the great outdoors in the park she had driven past the first time he’d visited her office. Or she could be working; realtors sometimes met with clients or hosted “Open Houses” on Sundays. Or she could be out on a date with that boyfriend of hers.

  That idiot boyfriend of hers, Brad amended, indignant on Daphne’s behalf. The guy had the audacity to take her to a party, claim in front of witnesses that he was madly in love with her, and then make a crack about her performance in bed! Admittedly, what he’d said had been complimentary, but it had obviously embarrassed the hell out of Daphne. Teasing like that might be okay coming from a friend, but not from a lover.

  Brad recognized that Daphne had been more than just embarrassed by her boyfriend’s joke. The instant her gaze had intersected with Brad’s across the kitchen, her cheeks had turned crimson and she’d fled from the room.

  It was all Brad’s fault, entirely his fault for having once made her feel inadequate in bed. He’d been the one who’d been inadequate, and she shouldn’t ever, ever be embarrassed about her part in what had happened—or hadn’t happened. That was what he’d come to Verona to tell her—if only he could figure out a way to put it into words without embarrassing them both even more.

  A driver in a car behind him on the exit ramp honked his horn, jolting Brad’s attention back to the road. He glanced at the GPS the rental agency had included with the car, turned right, and headed north toward Bloomfield Avenue.

  Daphne’s house sat on a small lot at the end of a winding side street. An ancient maple tree stood squarely on the front lawn, casting a massive shadow over the sloping roof of the house. In another era, the L-shaped brick-an
d-redwood ranch house, with its broad picture window and its attached two-car garage, might have been considered a modest middle-class dwelling. But nowadays, in this neighborhood, Brad estimated its worth at half of a million dollars. Despite all the house-hunting he’d done in the past week, he still found it hilarious that he and his school friends could be living in houses with such astronomical price tags.

  Daphne was kneeling in the grass beside the flower bed underneath the picture window, yanking weeds out of the dark, loamy soil. She had on an oversize shirt, blue jeans and sneakers; her hair was held back in a bandanna and her hands were protected by work gloves. Next to her on the grass was a small straw basket and a hand spade. She used a garden claw to loosen the weeds from the soil.

  Brad coasted to a halt at the curb. Engrossed in her labor, Daphne didn’t look up. He permitted himself a moment to admire the bright yellow daffodils and red tulips she’d grown before focusing fully on her.

  The shirt she was wearing wasn’t just large. It was a man’s dress shirt, with tails that fell to her knees and shoulder seams that drooped down her arms. She had rolled the sleeves up to her elbows and left the collar and the second button undone. The shirt made her look thinner than she was, a tiny, fragile creature lost within the voluminous garment.

  He didn’t want to think of Daphne as tiny and fragile. He wanted to think of her as strong, indomitable, the sort of woman likely to leave dozens of men with sentimental smiles spread across their faces as they reminisced about how dynamite she was in bed.

  But he knew that wasn’t the case. And, while he hated the idea, he suspected that his asshole behavior eight years ago were at least partly to blame.

  He shoved open the car door, and the squeak of the hinge caught Daphne’s attention. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Brad. Scowling, she tossed the garden claw onto the grass and stood, dusting the dirt from the knees of her jeans.

  Praying for courage, he took a deep breath and started toward the front walk. “Hello, Daphne,” he said quietly.

  She continued to stare at him. The color in her cheeks was as high as it had been last night at the party. Brad wanted to believe that was a result of working in her garden in the warm spring sunshine, but he couldn’t shake the comprehension that his presence was what was causing her to blush.

  The sun glared on the lenses of her eyeglasses, making her eyes invisible to him. He wished she would move her head so he’d be able to see her eyes again, and perhaps find in them a hint of how she felt about his unexpected visit. If he was to be denied a view of her eyes, then he wished she would speak, giving him an opening so he’d know how to proceed.

  But she did neither. She remained motionless, her hands encased in those huge work gloves, her lips pursed, her hair frizzing beneath the bandanna in the afternoon heat.

  “We need to talk,” he announced. He realized that he’d stated his request too bluntly, but her silence wasn’t making this easy for him.

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned and bent to study her flowers. Then she exhaled, tugged off her gloves, and dropped them into the basket. After gathering her tools and lifting the basket, she straightened up and shrugged.

  The gentle rise and fall of her shoulders beneath the baggy cotton of her shirt forced Brad to acknowledge again how slight she looked. The one thing he didn’t want to think of her as was delicate, and he clung to the image of her wielding her spade and claw, conquering the weeds in her garden. He wanted to believe that any woman who could kill weeds and grow beautiful flowers could also forgive and forget—and allow the forgiven party to forget, too.

  Without a word, she headed around the side of the house. Brad followed. The back yard was spacious, blessed with several adult fruit trees and rimmed by dense evergreen hedges. An enclosed porch extended from the rear of the house. Brad trailed Daphne up the concrete steps to the porch and through the screen door.

  While she placed her gardening equipment on a shelf in one corner, he stood idle, his patience beginning to unravel as he waited for her to say something. When Daphne moved toward the door leading into the house, he checked himself before following her inside. He had enough sense to understand that she might not want him in her home, and she confirmed his guess by waving toward one of the wrought-iron porch chairs which were placed around a matching glass-topped table. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked, reaching for the door knob.

  Brad supposed the situation might be more palatable if he were crocked. “What have you got?” he asked.

  “Apple juice, orange juice, ginger ale, iced tea...”

  So much for getting crocked. “Iced tea sounds good,” he said.

  She vanished into the house.

  Brad settled himself on the chair and took a deep breath. The air here smelled much better than what he’d been inhaling in Manhattan. It was clean, fresh, fragrant with the scent of grass and spring blossoms. At Eric’s apartment, whenever you opened a window you were nearly knocked off your feet by the sour smell of automobile exhausts.

  Maybe air pollution was what had driven Daphne to leave the party early last night, Brad thought hopefully.

  He discarded that idea with a silent curse. Daphne had left early for one reason only: because her dick-head boyfriend had made a joke about her skill as a lover—in front of Brad.

  She’d been drinking ginger ale at the party last night, he recalled. All sorts of booze had been available, but she’d taken her ginger ale straight. She had avoided liquor the day she’d taken Brad out for lunch when he was house-hunting, too. Maybe she was a teetotaler.

  If she was...perhaps he was being paranoid, but it didn’t seem unreasonable to assume that he was to blame for that, too. She’d been drinking the night of their encounter at the frat house. Everyone had been drinking, but Daphne had clearly been under the influence. Now she didn’t touch alcohol—at least not when Brad was around. Maybe she wasn’t actually a teetotaler, but simply was afraid to drink in Brad’s presence.

  Brad sighed grimly. He was definitely becoming paranoid.

  Daphne returned to the porch with two tumblers of iced tea. She had taken off the bandanna and washed her face, and she didn’t appear so flushed anymore. She set a glass down in front of Brad at the table, then moved to the opposite side of the table with her own glass. Brad eyed the two other chairs she might have chosen to sit in; obviously, she wanted to sit as far as possible from him.

  “Maybe I’m paranoid,” he said aloud.

  She arched her eyebrows slightly, then took a sip of her drink. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well...” No, he wasn’t going to waste his breath grilling her about why she’d chosen to sit on one particular chair instead the others. He hadn’t driven all this way on a beautiful Sunday afternoon to be evasive and cowardly. “You left the party awfully early last night,” he noted.

  Again, he wondered if he was being too blunt. If he was, Daphne seemed willing to accept his tone. She didn’t even question his seeming non sequitur. “Did I miss anything exciting?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “As far as I was concerned, the highlight of the party was the time I spent in the bedroom with you.” He could tell by her startled expression that he’d expressed himself poorly, and he quickly came up with a more tactful phrasing. “I mean talking with you, Daphne. It really felt good to talk to you about my mother.”

  She nodded again. “Paul and I would have stayed later,” she explained, “but he had an early day planned for today, and he wanted to get home before midnight.”

  She was lying. Even if Brad hadn’t been able to tell by her shifting green eyes and her fidgeting fingers, he would have known she was lying. He knew why she’d left early—and she knew he knew.

  “We’re going to have to talk about it,” he resolved.

  “Talk about what?” she asked, batting her eyes nervously.

  “You know damned well what.” He was angry that she was forcing him to spell it out,
but now that he’d gotten started, he wasn’t going to back down. “The time we slept together.”

  Daphne pressed her lips into a straight, tense line and dropped her gaze to her glass. If she’d blushed before, now she appeared pale to him, clearly distraught. She took a bracing gulp of iced tea, then eyed Brad over the rim of her glass. “We didn’t actually sleep together,” she reminded him.

  All right. She had acknowledged the subject. It existed for both of them; they wouldn’t be able to retreat from it any longer. They were going to talk about it, talk it out, talk it through. They were going to clear the air and, if they both survived, establish a lasting truce.

  “You’re right,” he conceded. “We didn’t sleep together. That was a big part of the problem.”

  “Was it?” She laughed uneasily. “There were so many problems, Brad—I hardly think it matters whether or not we actually fell asleep.”

  “It did matter, Daphne,” he argued. “It does matter. Can we talk about this?” he belatedly thought to ask.

  Daphne laughed again, a little less nervously this time. “If you think it’ll make a difference.”

  “God, I hope it will,” he groaned. Then his gaze met Daphne’s and he reluctantly joined her laughter. Last night, when he’d been keyed up about his parents, Daphne had gotten him to relax. Today, when he was twice as keyed up, she was getting him to relax again. He wondered if she was aware of how much he appreciated her knack for calming him. “Daphne,” he said, reaching across the table to take her hand, then thinking better of it and drumming his fingers against the glass surface. “Daphne, I still feel like shit about that night. I know, it’s been a long time, and I’d always assumed—or at least hoped—that you’d forgotten all about it. But last night, when your boyfriend made that comment and you bolted—”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Daphne corrected him.