Overprotected

by Lulu Pratt

  It feels even more awkward between us than it did when we met in our usual spot the first night we arrived, and I’m dreading what dinner is going to be like if we can’t hash all this out.

  “What are we doing?” I take a deep breath and meet Zane’s gaze, and he shrugs. That shrug lights a little jet of fire in me. How can he just shrug?

  Isn’t any of this important to him?

  “I really like you,” Zane says. “I think… I think what happened with us pretty much would have happened at some point one way or another.”

  “You do?” I stare at him in confusion.

  “Well, yeah. You’re hot, we know each other really well… I mean, I can’t be the only one who thought the sex the other day was just…” He grins.

  “But the sex the other day being great doesn’t mean it was destined to happen. It doesn’t mean that anything is supposed to come out of this. Do you want something to come out of this, or do we just say it was a fling? Like, I don’t know, some weird grown-up version of playing doctor or something?”

  My heart is pounding even faster in my chest and I don’t even know what answer I want him to give me.

  “I don’t know,” Zane admits.

  “Great, that’s great,” I say, shaking my head.

  “I don’t know because… look, my dad gave me some advice yesterday, and then again today.” He pauses and grimaces. “He knows about us, by the way — your mom told him.”

  “Of course she did,” I say with a sigh.

  “But, here’s the thing, do you even know what you want? I mean, you’re on me to tell you what I want, but where’s your head at?”

  I press my lips together. I don’t want to admit that I don’t really have an answer for that question. “What do you mean what do I want?”

  Zane half-smiles, one eyebrow raised. “Do you want to let this drop, and just make a clean break, or do you think there’s something here?”

  I lean against the trunk of the tree and think about it. I swallow.

  “I think there’s something here,” I say quietly.

  “I do too. Or at least, I think there could be,” Zane says.

  “So we both think there could be something to it.” It feels good to say that, but then it raises more questions.

  “Do we want to do something about that, though?”

  I look at Zane when he asks that question. “What choices do we have? I mean, if there’s something there, then we should do something about it, even if my mom and your dad are weird about it, right? I mean, how are we going to get through the next… I don’t even know how many years it’ll be, running into each other, knowing we could have had something, but never even tried it?”

  “But how are we going to try it? I’m still in the army, and you’re in New York. Even if we want to try it, we’re like a thousand miles or more away from each other.”

  It feels like my stomach is sinking. I have to admit he’s right.

  “You have a choice to leave the army, if you want to,” I say.

  “But I don’t know if I want to. I don’t even know what I’d do outside of the army, Harper. Would you leave your job to come and be with me?”

  “Leave my job?” I stare at Zane in shock that he’d even suggest it.

  “See? You can’t imagine leaving your job, but you just suggested I could… leave the army, and not reenlist, just so that we can try this,” Zane says.

  “I just said it because I know you’re thinking about it already!” I shake my head. “I’m not expecting you specifically to give it up for me.”

  “But if I’m in the army, and you’re in New York City, how are we ever even going to give this a shot? What point would there be in it, if we can’t ever see each other? We went five years never seeing each other, Harper, just because our vacations and whatever else never came up at the same time.”

  “So you’re saying you definitely don’t want to try this, Zane? Why didn’t you say that from the beginning?” I feel my eyes stinging, I feel hot tears beginning to gather in the corners. I take a deep breath to try to stifle the reaction.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying,” Zane says.

  “I… I know it’s probably stupid, since we’ve only had sex once, but it…” I close my eyes and almost can’t continue.

  “Say it,” Zane says.

  “If you tell me that you didn’t feel anything… that you don’t feel anything… or at least anything more for me than other people you’ve been with, then I guess I’ll just have to accept that I’m an idiot for feeling the way I do,” I say. I open my eyes and look at Zane, and I can’t make out his expression. I can’t figure out what it is behind his eyes.

  “It’s different. I just don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it,” Zane says finally.

  “So what are we going to do?” That’s the question we keep circling around, and it’s suddenly obvious to me that neither of us has an answer.

  “I don’t know,” Zane says.

  “You like me, right?” I hold his gaze as steadily as I can, and Zane nods after a moment.

  “And you like me?” I half-smile wryly.

  “I guess you could call it that,” I joke.

  “So we like each other, and the sex is good. But we… aren’t in a place where we can see each other,” Zane says.

  I nod.

  “So I guess for right now we’re just going to… I don’t know. Put this on hold?” I scrub at my face with my fingertips. I don’t know what I was expecting when I told Zane we needed to talk, but it was at least that we would come to some kind of conclusion about things.

  “We’ll talk about it after the dinner,” Zane suggests.

  “And how are we going to get through the dinner?”

  We look at each other for a few moments.

  “We won’t even bring it up. We’ll pretend nothing happened, I guess,” he says.

  “That is never going to fly and you know it,” I say.

  “What else can we do at this point?” I bite my bottom lip.

  “At least we’re not going to be screaming at each other, right? What will you tell your dad if he asks about this?”

  “We won’t need to scream at each other,” Zane said.

  “And your dad?”

  “I’ll tell him that I talked to you.”

  I sigh.”What if he asks you about what conclusion we came to? I mean, he’s probably going to want to know.”

  Zane shrugs. “I’ll say it’s between us.”

  I laugh, because I know there’s no way to get my mom to accept that answer if she asks me. But there’s nothing more that either of us can do. “Okay, then. We’ll just… keep radio silence on it, I guess,” I say.

  “Are you just going to leave?”

  “There’s nothing more to talk about, is there? Yeah, I’m going to leave.”

  Zane grabs my upper arm, and draws me tight against him. His eyes search mine for a moment, and he smooths back my hair. I’m frozen in his arms, my heart beating ninety miles an hour, my core aching for him but knowing I can’t do anything about it.

  “You’re right,” he says, and gives me a kiss. It’s a tender kiss at first, but then I feel him pull me to him and I know he wants me as much as I want him.

  I don’t know what he’s referring to as being right. Everything, I suppose. The most right thing of all is his touch and what it does to me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ZANE LEWIS

  “It’s such a nice night out,” Mom remarks as the three of us walk across the lawn to go to the Polsens’ place. “I’m glad we’re closing out our anniversary week this way.”

  “It should be a nice, restful end of the week,” Dad says, looking at me. He didn’t ask me how the talk with Harper had gone, but I knew it was probably weighing on him almost as much as it was on me.

  I know I’m about to have to deal with Nadine and Harper for at least the next few hours. Harper and I left things so up in the air that I don’t know wh
at we’re going to do other than avoid talking about anything personal all night. And how is that going to go?

  I find myself tugging at my tie, at my pants. I haven’t done that since I went into basic. I know I’m nervous when I can’t keep myself from fidgeting. Just take a chill pill, Zane. You’ll get through tonight, and whatever is going on between you and Harper, you can figure out later.

  “Bev, Nolan, Zane!”

  I can see the tension in Nadine’s eyes when she greets us at the door, but she’s got a smile on her face so I know there’s no point in saying anything about anything. It’s going to be a night of faking it until I make it.

  “Thank you so much for doing this, Nadine,” Mom says, leaning in to kiss her on either cheek. I shake hands with Marshall, and wave at Harper. When it comes time for me to kiss Nadine on the cheek, she barely lets me get close enough.

  “Nadine has been hard at work since last night,” Marshall says, leading us all into the dining room, and I take a few quick breaths, glancing at Harper to see how she’s doing. In spite of the composed look in her face, I can tell she still feels it.

  Tonight is going to be interesting as hell.

  “I remembered how you always go on about the first meal you had on your honeymoon together, so I wanted to recreate that for you,” Nadine says, and Mom’s eyes widen.

  I look at Harper again. In spite of us coming to some kind of almost-agreement that we’re going to basically pretend like the past several days didn’t happen, I can’t stop myself from looking at her.

  Even if I didn’t have a near-constant reminder in the back of my mind of how good our one time having sex was — even if it was in my parents’ bathroom — it would be impossible not to notice her. She’s wearing a little black dress with a hem that’s a couple of inches above her knee. There’s not much cleavage, but I don’t need that to remember how great her tits look, anyway. The thought of ripping the dress off her and having her again keeps floating through my mind, and I can barely stand it.

  We all sit down except for Nadine, who goes into the kitchen to get whatever she’s bringing out first. It looks like the inside of some restaurant that would cost an entire paycheck to eat at, four plates on the table in front of me, two bowls off to the side, three different glasses. The whole nine yards.

  “Nadine, I think you may have lost your mind,” Mom says, just as Harper’s mom comes out of the kitchen with a tray in her hands. There’s a bottle of wine, and six cocktail glasses with four shrimp each and two sauces.

  “Shrimp cocktail, classically served with both aioli and cocktail sauce,” Nadine says. She begins setting down the cocktail glasses on each of our top plates, and hands the wine bottle to Marshall to open.

  I swear she nearly drops my cocktail glass on top of me, on purpose, before breezing on back to her own chair. Harper gives me a quick look. Whatever is on Nadine’s mind, she obviously is not my biggest fan right now.

  “To start off the festivities the right way, Nadine and I chose a Prosecco,” Marshall explains, and for once in my life I feel like alcohol might not be the solution to an awkward situation but might actually just make it worse.

  Hopefully there won’t be enough for all of us to get drunk, because from the way Nadine is already acting, she doesn’t need any of her inhibitions lowered.

  “So, Zane, have you thought anymore about reenlisting?” I look at Nadine as she asks the question and for a second, I hate her. I can see the look in her eyes. It’s like she wants me to hurt her daughter, like she wants me to say the wrong thing, even if I’m not even sure what the right thing would be, and make Harper hate me for good.

  “I’m still thinking about it,” I say.

  “Zane’s got plenty of time to figure it out. He doesn’t have to make up his mind for a few months yet,” Mom says, and I can’t help but be grateful.

  “You know, I’ve heard that more and more women are joining the military,” Nadine says as Marshall starts pouring wine into everyone’s glasses.

  “Lots of opportunity for women these days,” Marshall comments, and I want to kick him.

  “Oh yeah, tons of opportunities for women,” Nadine says, and she gives me another one of those looks.

  “I have a lot of respect for the women I work alongside,” I say, knowing I have to do something to put a stop to this. After all her hard work, is Harper’s mom seriously trying to wreck my parents’ anniversary dinner at her house?

  “Who was that girl you brought home with you that last time you were in town, Zane? Tracy?”

  I close my eyes for a second. I’d brought Tracy home with me mostly because she didn’t have family of her own to see around the holidays. We had been involved on a strictly casual basis before and after that, though she’d already transferred off-base months before the time my parents’ anniversary came around.

  “Yeah, Tracy. She’s actually gone on to an assignment in Germany,” I say, hoping that will keep Nadine from coming up with some way to get in a dig at me.

  “That’s one thing I would never be able to deal with, in the army, the fact that at almost any time they could ship you off overseas, and your loved ones have to sort of let you go,” Nadine says.

  “Fortunately, this close to the end of his tour, that’s not a real risk for Zane,” Mom cuts in, and I try to eat my shrimp cocktail and drink some of the sparkling wine for a few moments.

  Marshall and my dad are both doing their part to keep things going, and I don’t know if Harper’s dad knows about the situation, but he’s a champ for it. They’re talking about how perfect the shrimp is, and how good both the sauces are.

  Harper is quieter than I’ve ever seen her, eating little bites of her shrimp with the different sauces, taking tiny sips of her wine. This is going to be the longest fucking dinner of my life, I think, and hope that we can both get through it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  HARPER POLSEN

  As we go from the appetizer to the soup course, I can’t think of a time when I’ve felt less like eating. But all I can do, the only way I can hope to get through this God-forsaken meal, is to keep eating as quietly as possible while Mom takes it upon herself to needle Zane and me both.

  The potato-leek soup should be delicious, but all I can do is keep my eyes either straight ahead or on my bowl and reply when someone asks me a question. I can barely even taste what I’m putting in my mouth, and I hate that fact.

  “I’ll get the next course, Mom,” I say quickly, hoping against hope that I can remind her of why we’re even having this dinner.

  “That’s okay, sweetie,” Mom counters.

  “No, no, I insist,” I say firmly, getting up from my chair and putting aside my napkin, moving towards the kitchen before she can come up with some reason for me to have to stay in my seat. My stomach is in knots, my heart is pounding. I’m actually getting angry at my mom for how petty she’s being.

  I take a deep breath. Mom has, at least, set everything up in the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to leave the table for more than a couple of minutes. I’d seen her taking the roast duck breast out of the oven ten minutes before the Lewises were due to arrive, and she’d made the gravy from the pan drippings as the final touch. You would think after going all out like that, the last thing she’d want would be to screw it up.

  I get the third-course tray, which has individual portions of steak tartare that Mom painstakingly made, along with a bottle of Beaujolais, and carefully pick it up to bring it to the table. The second dish that I’d hardly tasted, the soup course, seems to slosh around in my stomach.

  “So, Harper, you’ll be going back to the city tomorrow, to that big project of yours,” Bev says as I come out into the dining room with the tray. I hand Dad the bottle of wine and begin putting the little portions of raw steak, egg, herbs and sauce in front of each person. I hadn’t counted on how difficult it would be when I came to Zane.

  “Yeah, I am actually really excited to get back into the city,” I say, trying t
o cover any awkwardness between me and my neighbor’s son.

  “I think Harper has had enough of her vacation,” Mom says.

  “Oh? Haven’t you had fun, Harper?” Dad doesn’t know that he’s not helping, not in the slightest, but it’s hard not to feel everyone’s eyes on me.

  “I’ve had plenty of fun and relaxation,” I say, finally sitting down with my own plate of tartare while Dad uncorks the red wine to serve the rest of us. There’s another bottle of wine to go with the duck that will come next, and there’s a fourth bottle that’s supposed to go with the salad and the dessert, and even though Dad’s not pouring anyone more than about half a glass of wine per course, I can already feel it adding up.

  I pick at my steak tartare and sip my wine, and Mom has obviously decided to start pestering me instead of Zane.

  “So, Harper, I know you can’t discuss the big project much, but it seems like it’s going to limit your ability to have a personal life,” Mom says.

  “No more and no less than ever,” I counter, giving her a tight smile. I look across the table to where Zane sits.

  “I think Harper needs someone to shake her up, to give her life a little excitement,” Bev says.

  “I think Harper’s running her life fine on her own,” Zane says.

  I turn to look at him, and I’m not sure what it is he’s trying to say, there’s something and nothing in it, all at once. On my own? Does he mean that he doesn’t want to be involved with me, doesn’t want to “add excitement” to my life, or does he mean that Mom needs to butt out?

  “Thanks, I appreciate that,” I say, keeping my voice neutral. I manage to eat a few forkfuls of the steak tartare spread on some of the buttered brown bread that Mom set it up with, but the richness of it is too much for me after that, especially with the way my stomach is rolling and twisting inside me.

  “I think both Nadine and I would like to see the two of you settled in life,” Bev says, and I glance from my mom to Bev and back again. I have nothing to say to that. I don’t even know if Bev knows, and either approves or not or doesn’t care.