by Caro Carson
Everyone knows women get emotional. She’s throwing words around, angry at everything in general. It’s a meaningless rant.
But the platitudes and excuses which had enabled him to ignore anyone else’s inconvenient feelings had stopped working the same moment a small plane’s propeller had stopped working. Mallory knew precisely what she was saying and to whom she was saying it. She’d listened to him tonight, better than he’d listened to himself.
She pulled his glove off her left hand, one clean jerk. “So, who should I feel sorry for? Little girls who hope that being good will lead to a good life? Or you, a man who thinks he’s too good to have a hero?”
He stood there, shocked. Mallory had summed him up accurately and succinctly: compared to hopeful little girls, he sucked.
He should say something. “I didn’t—I didn’t realize your feelings were—” You already said that. Her feelings weren’t doing anything. You are the problem.
She shook his glove at him. “Here. Take it, take it. I have to go.” She gave the other glove a vicious pull, then held the pair out in one quivering fist. “Take them, please. I need to go before I c-cry.” But her tears were already falling. She was in pain.
He grabbed her wrist and tugged her close, wrapping her in his arms as if he could shield her, but her pain wasn’t coming from something he could break or beat or buy. She tucked her chin and pressed her wet cheek against his neck, hiding her face. Sobs wracked her body.
He was appalled. It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem fair. This lovely woman who’d demanded his attention, who’d laughed at his sullen silence, who’d spoken to the stars and to a fire and to a stranger, now was genuinely heartbroken. He wasn’t certain why.
“P-people are staring. I want to g-go.”
“Then, we’ll go.” It didn’t matter why she was crying. It only mattered that she was.
He glanced around for a quick escape, then shepherded her in between two booths, keeping an arm around her shoulders and turning them both sideways to squeeze past a few propane tanks and cardboard boxes. The area behind the booths was darker, just a grassy parking area for those who worked in the booths. Quieter, too, because the speakers that had begun playing prerecorded holiday music were pointed away from them. Only a few other people were back here, smokers taking a break, mostly. The tips of their cigarettes glowed orange in the night.
Eli led Mallory in between two parked pickup trucks. There, in semi-privacy, he leaned against the side of one of the trucks and wrapped Mallory in his arms again.
“I’m fine,” she said, and then she set her cheek on his shoulder, looking away from him, and gulped in shaky breaths that did not sound fine.
He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He had no idea how a cup of hot chocolate had led to this situation. He didn’t want to see her cry, but as he held Mallory in her sturdy wool coat, he felt...he felt... He didn’t mind being the one she cried on.
Step one is to name your emotions. His therapist wanted him to work on that. Eli had consulted a therapist a few weeks after the crash, of course. He was no fool. People who faced near-death events generally needed professional advice to process the experience—and Eli’s ability to sleep had been shot.
He’d hired a highly sought-after and very discreet counselor. Can you put a name to your emotion, Mr. Taylor? Terror. And in that final second, regret.
Mallory shifted a little, murmuring something apologetic. Eli cupped her head in his hand lightly to keep her as she was, so she wouldn’t feel obliged to raise her head and step back if she didn’t want to.
She didn’t want to; she rested more heavily on his shoulder. He smoothed back a few strands of her hair, which were tickling his nose—a nuisance. Then he put his arm back around her and settled into her as she settled into him, and none of it felt like a nuisance.
Trouble?
It didn’t feel like that, either.
When you can identify an emotion, Mr. Taylor, then you can accept it for what it is, no more, no less. As Mallory’s breathing grew more and more calm, Eli looked at the stars over the silhouettes of the trees, and he felt calmer, too.
Calm was an emotion. There; he’d identified it. Like any other emotion, even terror, calm wouldn’t last. He closed his eyes to soak it in while he could, the feel of another human being in his arms, the feel of having a person to hug.
His eyes flew open again. A hug. He’d almost forgotten it had a name.
There was nothing similar to it in his life. When he greeted his parents, his father shook his hand. His mother kissed his cheek. His brother and sister, twins born more than a decade after him, had turned eight during his freshman year at Masterson University. They’d rarely been part of his life once he’d left home for college.
The touches Eli gave and received were handshakes, firm ones that served the purpose of gauging a person’s mindset or sealing a deal. When he made the time, there was contact during evening dinner dates—an arm offered in escort, or a hand on the small of a woman’s back—followed by a night of sex.
He was relieved to remember that he’d had sex fairly regularly, before September. Not as often as people thought, but frequently enough. He wasn’t some strange creature that existed in a world devoid of human contact.
But sex was not this. Sex had a goal. Every touch had a purpose: to entice, to increase arousal, to ramp up the craving for the climax, which then finished the need to touch. A shower. A drink. A civilized goodbye until next time.
He closed his eyes again. After a moment, he tilted his cheek toward Mallory’s hair, seeking that tickle, that touch that didn’t have any purpose.
At the hay bales, when Mallory had first grabbed his arm for balance, he’d practically shaken her touch from his sleeve the moment she’d let go. But after she’d lectured him, and after he’d seen her face in the firelight, it had felt different when she’d sat behind him and plopped her arms on top of his head. The sensation had been foreign, unexpected, but not unpleasant, in its way.
He’d grumbled about it, but he hadn’t moved away. Maybe he’d wanted a touch that was neither business nor sex, without knowing he wanted it. Was that an emotion with a name? Was there a term for that kind of desire?
I like being with Mallory.
That analysis was specific enough for now. He wouldn’t move away. He wouldn’t shake off her touch.
He’d hold Mallory for as long as she’d let him hold her.
* * *
This was the most mortifying date Mallory had ever been on, real or fake.
Nobody wanted to have a big epiphany about the psychology behind their failures. Nobody wanted that to happen while they were at a holiday festival with a handsome man. Nobody wanted that handsome man to be the one who revealed how her old hero had led her astray.
Mallory was so angry at herself. Her hero hadn’t even been real. Cinderella was only a character in a fairy tale that had been told centuries before the Brothers Grimm had written it down, yet Mallory had absorbed this nonexistent person’s values: suffer patiently, voice no complaints. She’d let them influence her real life, of which twenty-nine years were now gone.
Mallory had been even angrier at the man who’d pointed out the obvious flaws in the fairy tale, but stating the obvious was all Eli had done. When she’d freaked out, he’d come after her. She’d castigated him for not having heroes, but he was holding her right now, anyway, and it felt incredibly good. He was as big and strong as he was broody and gorgeous. The way he glared at the world made her feel all the more protected in his arms.
It was an illusion. The strongest arms couldn’t undo her past. Tonight, she could taste the shame and despair she’d felt two years ago, when she’d finished the last page of How to Taylor Your Business Plan, turned out the light and seen the truth.
Another shudder went through her. Eli tightened his hug. He didn’t say
everything was okay. He didn’t tell her to pull herself together. He was simply here, holding her, and he didn’t seem to be in any hurry for her to dry her tears and move on. She’d insulted him, yet he was being a nice guy...which meant she was the jerk, here.
Never apologize for being right, E.L. Taylor said.
Mallory hadn’t been right.
When I know I’m the one in the wrong, I don’t believe in making someone wait on my apology. That was what her grandpa would say.
Thoughts of her grandpa were making her homesick now, too. Knowing she’d have to leave the temporary security of Eli’s strong arms and return to standing on her own two feet wasn’t much of a motivation to dry her tears.
Eventually, they dried up, anyway. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, keeping her cheek on Eli’s shoulder.
“Don’t be,” he said.
“Yes, I should be sorry. I said some harsh things.”
“You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
He sounded so matter-of-fact about it, in a resigned way. I know I’m uninspired. Poor man. No wonder he was so grim.
“I failed to see that I was upsetting you. I should have recognized that you were defending Cinderella so passionately because she’s your personal hero.”
“She isn’t.” Mallory hiccupped, miserable on every level. “But she was. I think I’ve watched every movie version of Cinderella there is. She always keeps her dignity, but she never tries to leave, not until she meets Prince Charming. Her story did shape my thinking, without a doubt. You’re the one who didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. You can’t imagine how much I wish it hadn’t been true. I wasted so many years emulating that exact kind of servitude to my family. I didn’t realize it until it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
She picked up her head and moved back just far enough to look at his face, shocked that he couldn’t see the obvious. “For what? Do you really have to ask that?”
He kept an arm around her as he brushed her hair from her wet cheeks. Her shame and regrets and misery built with each strand of hair he smoothed back, until, with an unbearable sincerity, he repeated, “Too late for what?”
The dam burst. Her words came tumbling out over hiccups and tears. “Look at me. Just look at me. I’m twenty-nine. I’m still in college. I live in a dorm. You can joke all you want and mock me for thinking that twenty-nine is ancient, but that’s because you aren’t in my shoes. You can’t understand how it feels to be this far behind. You already have a house, and you have a career, and you could be married if you wanted to be, but you don’t want to be, because men don’t have to be married to get sex.”
His eyebrows rose. “What?”
“It’s true.” She was talking too fast, but it was too hard to slow down. “It’s true, my grandpa says so. He told me that when he was young, if you wanted to have sex, you had to find a wife. Marriage meant sex. It was a big proof of your manhood to have a wife. He says that’s why men today don’t get married right out of school anymore, because they can have all the sex they want.”
“Ah... Okay?”
She swallowed bitter tears. “It never occurs to anyone to point out that women aren’t getting married now, either, and it’s not because they’re home alone, wasting away as spinsters. They have careers, and they don’t have to marry to get all the sex they want. Women like to have sex, too, you know.”
He cleared his throat. “That’s excellent news.”
A second passed.
Mallory did a quick mental replay of her whole dam-burst. Somehow, Eli had kept a perfectly straight face. Excellent news. She gasped a laugh. Sort of.
“Is that a chuckle?” Eli dipped his chin to catch her eye. “You’re trying not to laugh, aren’t you?”
She gave his shoulder a weak push. “You’re mildly funny, sometimes.”
“Good.” His smile was brief. “But I’m also insufferable, sometimes. I want you to know that if I’d had any idea how important Cinderella was to you, I wouldn’t have said anything.”
She still had his gloves in one fist. She spread the fingers of her other hand wide, then turned her hand over, looking for signs of all the labors it had performed. There weren’t any. She had nothing to show for years of caregiving. Nothing.
“I spent a lot of time trying to please a family that thought I was a convenience for them. Why did I allow that? I kept agreeing to their demands. I was obedient.”
“Mallory.” He brushed her hair behind her shoulder, then gave it a little tug, as if she were his sister. “Why do I find ‘obedient’ so hard to picture?”
She took the question seriously. Why hadn’t Eli recognized that the woman arguing with him on the park bench was the girl who’d let herself get stuck with the work nobody else in her family wanted to do?
Because she wasn’t that girl any longer. She’d made a plan for a different life, and it was working. Eli was seeing her at her worst tonight, but her worst wasn’t as pathetic as it would have been two years ago. She looked into Eli’s silver-blue eyes and saw that the Cinderella reflection didn’t fit over her image anymore.
“I wish I’d met you on my twentieth birthday.” She longed to reach up and push his hair back, the way he did himself. She wanted to trail her fingers along that heavily stubbled jaw. “If we’d debated fairy tales back then, I might have wised up sooner. In case you were wondering, I have wised up. You might find that hard to believe after this evening, but I wouldn’t be here in Texas tonight, otherwise. I’d be freezing in Ohio.”
“You said a friend gave you some advice two years ago, and you made some hard choices.”
“Yes, he...he did.” It was flattering that Eli remembered that. She needed to remember that she’d called a book her friend.
It was. Her business plan had saved her from her fairy tale.
“Tell me more.”
She’d said that earlier, too. Eli’s expression was hard to decipher. When he’d stood over her like this at the hay bales, he’d been looking at her like they needed to risk that public indecency charge. He was focused entirely on her once more, but this time, she wasn’t certain... “Why?”
“We agreed to pretend to date your way. Talking.”
They weren’t in public. They didn’t have to talk. He must realize that. “Are you trying to be nice to me because I was crying?”
“Not at all. I’m practicing my complete sentences.”
He was more than mildly funny, really. She gave his shoulder another push.
As if she’d actually imparted any momentum, he fell back against the pickup truck and stayed there, settling in to spend more time with her.
“Hard choices?” he prompted.
“That’s not a complete sentence.” She was being difficult, and not entirely by accident. If she wasn’t careful, she’d start thinking this was the beginning of a special something. She, the twenty-nine-year-old coed in rain boots and a pink peacoat, starting something new with him, the silver-eyed man in the pricey bomber jacket who had enough unconscious swagger for ten action heroes.
Not likely. Not even in the movies.
“Allow me a second attempt. Mallory, you made an earlier comment concerning a friend’s advice and the resultant hard choices you made for yourself and the direction of your life. Share one or two examples with me, if you would.”
“You’re such a comedian. Who’d have thought it?”
He waited.
She supposed she could answer his question. If it made her sad, well, he’d already seen the worst.
“I had a long talk with that friend, then with myself, trying to get to the essential, underlying question. It was simple, really. ‘Am I going to finish my degree?’ Yes or no. I’d been waiting for my family’s permission to finish college.”
She kept her chin up, but she didn’t look into the mirror
of his eyes. She knew how weak that looked.
“I did need their money, but only because I’d let them convince me that all of the work I was doing was merely part of being a family member, not actually a job. Nobody else in my family was doing the nursing and caretaking, though. Just me. Was I going to finish my degree? The answer was yes, so I had to draw a line in the sand. I told them I wasn’t willing to continue without a salary.
“My friend explained things in an unemotional way. I followed his directions to—” That sounded odd. She tried to cover for herself. “To have alternate in-home care options ready to present to them. I even made an appointment with them for us to sit down and discuss it, like I was pitching an opportunity to invest in a start-up.”
“A start-up.” The corners of Eli’s eyes crinkled just a little, that tenth of a smile.
“I was the start-up. They could invest the money in me and get reliable live-in care at a bargain rate in return, or they could hire someone five times more expensive and I’d find someone else to invest in me. One way or another, the new Mallory Ames start-up was going to bring in some money, then turn it into a diploma.”
“Well done.”
His smile, his approval, his interest in her little tale were each their own champagne bubble. The effervescence was pleasant, but champagne wasn’t powerful enough to make her forget the reality of where she was and how she’d gotten here.
“Don’t think too highly of me. I meant I’d get a job at the Golden Arches or something. But if McDonald’s had invested minimum wage in Mallory Ames, that would have been more money than my family had invested, and McDonald’s would have gotten one heck of a burger flipper in return.”
“Exactly. Well done.”
“It was a bluff.” Mallory ran her thumb over the cable-knit hat protruding from her pocket, over all the ups and downs and ins and outs. “If I’d moved out and gotten a job somewhere else, I would have had to spend almost every penny I earned on renting someone else’s spare bedroom. To make sure it wouldn’t come down to that, I only asked for a salary that would amount to this year’s tuition. It wasn’t even a quarter of what hiring a stranger would cost. It was still so hard, though. I had just moved into my grandpa’s house to care for him, so he was at the meeting, and his sister, my dad, my brother and my brother’s wife. Five against one. But my—my friend had gone through every possibility with me beforehand. I was ready when the shouting started.”