Bombshell

by Lynda Curnyn

  So we fell under the spell of mutual possibility, shutting out the world, ordering in dinner. We even indulged in a video rental, which resulted in our first true argument right there in the video store, where he fixated on some old Civil War movie and I lobbied for Casablanca. We settled on Brave-heart as a compromise. A little history. A lot of Mel. It seemed appropriate. Or at least Angie might have thought so, since she had Mel-Gibsonized Jonathan in her mind. I understood why, once Jonathan and I were snuggled in bed, watching Mel struggle with grief after the love of his life was brutally killed, before he moved on to conquer the world as he knew it, and even lay down with the queen.

  I was feeling a bit like a queen myself when Jonathan treated me to a full-body massage before bedtime. I was about to maneuver the massage into a full-frontal attack, since those big hands were putting my body into a state of arousal, when the phone rang.

  “You’re a pretty popular lady,” Jonathan commented. The phone had rung quite a few times over the course of the day, though I hadn’t bothered to pick up. Once had been Claudia, trying to coax me off to a day at the spa, where she doubtless hoped to slough off her most recent rage. The second call had been my mother, and I might have picked up if I hadn’t been in the midst of a most pleasant tangle with Jonathan. The sound of my mother’s voice—followed by my father’s, who chirped a cheery hello into my machine when my mother passed him the phone—seemed to send Jonathan into a strange spasm of momentary embarrassment. I guess it wasn’t easy sharing a carnal moment with the daughter of the man he had exchanged some of his loftiest ideas with.

  Then there was, of course, Angie, who gave me a momentary fright when I heard her voice on my machine. “I know you’re there, Grace, pick up. Grace?” She hesitated, and for one paralyzing moment, I feared she might begin lecturing me on how I was avoiding talking about Jonathan. But something—perhaps some fluttering, romantic hope—stopped her. As if she sensed she might violate some Girlfriend pact of silence in the event that I wasn’t alone. Thank God for that. The phone rang a few more times during the day, and the caller—likely Angie—wisely hung up. Now as it rang out, a bit late for a Sunday night, I grabbed the receiver, fearing Angie might go into a paroxysm of anxiety and be unable to hold her peace any longer.

  “Hello?” I said somewhat throatily into the phone as Jonathan’s hands moved down to the back of my thighs.

  “Grace!” Angie shouted in my ear, clearly in a state of frenzy, just as I suspected. “Where have you been?”

  “Right here,” I said sleepily.

  “Why haven’t you been picking up the phone?” she demanded irritably. Then, as realization struck, “You’re not alone, are you?”

  “Uh-uh,” I said, stifling a groan of pleasure as Jonathan massaged away a knot I had not even known I had in my calf. I heard him let out a little grunt of pleasure, himself, as if it satisfied him to find something on my body still in need of soothing.

  “Grace, if that’s Bad Billy I hear in the background, I’m going to kill you.”

  “What are you crazy?” I said, realizing suddenly how insane I had been to think a booty call, even one as bootylicious as Bad Billy, could keep me satisfied.

  “Then it must be—oh, my God, Grace! Don’t tell me— Jonathan is there?”

  I smiled. “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? Oh never mind that, I want to hear everything!” she demanded. Then, before I could utter another word, she finished, “Tomorrow.” And hung up.

  Sending a bubble of laughter through me that shook my whole body.

  Jonathan let go of my calf, flopping down on the pillow beside me and peering into my face.

  “What’s so funny?”

  As I looked at him, that burst of laughter turned into an out-and-out belly laugh. I realized that I had not felt such an urge to laugh in a long, long time.

  I gained control of myself and flipped over to face him. “Oh, nothing,” I said, looking into Jonathan’s beautiful eyes. “Well, everything.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “I’m just happy, you know?”

  His expression turned a bit puzzled, as if the idea of happiness were just as bewildering. Then he smiled, relenting. “Yes,” he said, a bit shyly. “I know.”

  I suppose it was natural for a woman who had suffered as many heartaches as I had to worry that the bubble of happiness she found herself in would somehow burst. Because once Jonathan walked out the door on Monday morning, leaving me at the corner with one tender, albeit brief kiss before we headed off to our different destinations, I found myself filled with the kind of icy fear that had done in lesser relationships in my life. As I strolled across town, choosing to face the bracing cold over the crowded bus when I couldn’t find a cab, I found myself mulling over the tenderness we had shared, the vulnerabilities we had revealed while lying side by side. And felt a sense of déjà vu. I had been in this happy little place before. With Michael, I realized, remembering well that feeling of possibility, of longing for all that could be, that I had experienced with the Dubrow heir. I might even have experienced this same floating feeling with Drew and Ethan. At least in the beginning. Before reality had set in. And it always did.

  Which was exactly why I had laid my emotional cards on the table this weekend with Jonathan, telling him about Kristina, how I had found her—and lost her. I worried he might look at me differently once he discovered I didn’t share the same gene pool with his admirable former colleague Dr. Thomas Noonan. I had learned the hard way that to some men it mattered. Like Drew.

  Whereas Jonathan…

  Jonathan pulled me into his arms, holding me as if he could wash away whatever sorrow I had suffered with the strength of his touch. I very nearly cried.

  But I didn’t, of course. I didn’t want the first man I felt I could truly open up to thinking of me as some kind of emotional basketcase.

  “Okay, give me all of it,” Angie said as she sat across from me at a sandwich shop near my office. She had cornered me at high noon, calling from her cell phone to let me know she was on her way uptown to have lunch and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Apparently she believed whatever happened between me and Jonathan warranted a trip uptown, which only raised my romance-filled weekend to a level that positively frightened me.

  So I did what I could to bring it down to earth. I shrugged, carefully pulling the wrap from my sandwich. “We spent the weekend together. It was nice.”

  Her eyebrows drew down. “Nice? C’mon, Grace, what happened? Start from the beginning! What happened when he called Saturday morning?”

  “That was Claudia. Jonathan called around six. From the lobby of my building.” I couldn’t curtail the smile that tugged at the corner of my mouth.

  “The lobby—holy cow! He obviously wasn’t taking no for an answer.” She sighed. “I bet he couldn’t bear the thought of being without you!”

  Or maybe he couldn’t bear the thought of not finishing what he started the other night, I thought suddenly, remembering how quickly that box of condoms had come out.

  “What was he wearing?”

  I looked at her. “What does that matter?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m trying to picture it!”

  “A really bad sweater and a clashing wool blazer.”

  “So he’s a fixer upper. Go on.”

  I sighed, realizing there was no way I could downplay these little interludes to Angie. So I gave in. Just a little. “He was carrying flowers. They were pink—pale pink….”

  Angie clearly couldn’t care if those roses were plaid. “Oh, my God, Grace! He’s amazing! What did he say next? What did he do?”

  I smiled, nearly blushing at the memory—and I’m not the type to blush. “Well, it was more like what we did.”

  Her eyes widened and her mouth opened on an “O” of understanding. Then she smiled, clearly pleased with herself. As if she had somehow orchestrated the whole thing. “So, uh, how was it?”

&nbs
p; Then, as if I could no longer suppress the joy that had been simmering beneath the surface of my words, I said, somewhat breathily, “It was beautiful.”

  Angie sighed, her eyes going misty. It was almost more than I could bear. “Aren’t you going to eat that?” I practically barked at her.

  She looked down at her sandwich as if she’d forgotten about it, then picked it up and took a bite, chewing fiercely and swallowing quickly. “Then what?”

  “Let’s see,” I said, remembering how we had lain back on the bed, just holding one another. Not that that had lasted very long. It seemed to me our breathing had barely returned to normal when his hand found my hip and he pulled me in for another round. “We, umm, we did it again,” I said. Which had surprised me at the time. It was as if he’d just been released from prison. Then it occurred to me that maybe Jonathan had, in a sense, been released from a prison of his own making. Was it possible he hadn’t had sex since his wife died? No way, my mind argued back, while another part of me wondered if that was what had driven him to my apartment, multipack of condoms in tow. Fear curled through me. Was that all I had been to him? A way to release all his pent-up sexual frustrations?

  “Grace? Heeellllo?”

  I came down to earth with a resounding thud. “What?” I asked, taking in her puzzled expression and realizing I’d never find the answers I needed there.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, distractedly. I hadn’t even heard her, my mind was so filled with the unbearable weight of other questions.

  “What did you guys talk about? I mean you must have talked at some point.”

  “Right,” I said, relief sheeting through me. We had talked. About our pasts. And more importantly, about our dreams for the future. But while I remembered the sadness and the hopefulness I had felt as Jonathan had told me how much he had wanted to start a family with his wife, I realized now that I might have read a little too much into his somewhat wistful tale. So much so, I realized, I had fallen asleep last night, filled with a vision of a hazel-eyed baby with thick, dark lashes…. My baby. And Jonathan’s.

  I know, crazy right? Even crazier when I remembered that I had heard a man pull out the baby banter in bed. Michael. And that had been merely…pillow talk.

  “So when are you going to see him again?” Angie prodded.

  I looked at her, feeling that arrow of fear hit its mark. “I don’t know.”

  That was just it. It was too soon to know anything. Despite my realization that I was ready…for everything.

  18

  “All I wanted is just what everyone else wants, you know, to be loved.”

  —Rita Hayworth

  Because I wasn’t able to weave the kind of romantic fairy tale Angie tried to make out of my weekend with Jonathan without more to go on, I decided to take matters into my own hands and call him that afternoon. After all, the man had spent the weekend in my apartment—in my bed.

  “Dr. Somerfield, please,” I said into the phone once I was seated behind my desk and grounded firmly in reality once more.

  “Uh, just a sec,” came the youthful voice that answered.

  “Dr. Somerfield speaking,” he said a moment later.

  Feeling suddenly like the naughty schoolgirl about to lure the innocent professor to a dirty deed, I said, “Well, hello, handsome.”

  “Grace,” he replied, his voice a mixture of surprise and, I sensed, anticipation.

  I warmed inside and decided to take the leap. “I need to see you. Soon.”

  He cleared his throat, becoming once again the befuddled professor I adored. “Well, let’s see here,” he began.

  I heard the shuffle of papers and realized he was likely looking for his calendar. I had lived through this sort of thing with way too many New York men. You know, the ones who are so busy they need a Palm Pilot to keep track of everything from their next meeting to their next orgasm. It was clear to me, from all that paper rustling around, that Jonathan didn’t own a Palm Pilot. I only hoped he had time for his next orgasm this week. Because I really didn’t want to wait till the weekend for mine…

  “I have class until six, then I’m meeting with a student right after….”

  Oh my, the man wanted to see me all right. Tonight.

  He did have it bad.

  As I did. “Why don’t I drop by your apartment? I could pick us up dinner at Zabar’s. Some wine…”

  He hesitated, but only for a moment. “Why don’t I just come by your place? I’ll get dinner. Besides, I’m not sure how long I’ll be.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, though his sudden change of venue made me realize why I had suggested his apartment in the first place. He had already seen my world. I wanted to see his.

  Still, I didn’t push it. The point was to see him, wasn’t it? To verify that all that had happened between us this weekend might have a follow-up act.

  So I told him, in a low, husky voice designed to raise his temperature a few degrees, that I would be waiting for him.

  And I was waiting for him that night…and the one after that, too. It was as if we couldn’t get enough of one another. We made love and we talked and it was good. So good, I wanted more. Not too much more. Just an invitation, really. To his place, as I explained to Shelley during our session that week.

  “Maybe he’s a private person,” Shelley said, once again becoming a fellow female with advice rather than the probing therapist she had been up until my little sob fest the week before. I think she saw the way I had opened up to her as progress. Because she seemed to be rewarding me with something that was starting to feel like friendship.

  Of course, that didn’t mean she stopped going where I didn’t want to go.

  “You’re a pretty private person yourself from what I can see. The way you keep people at a distance,” she said now.

  I would have argued with her, but I could no longer hide from the truth. I hadn’t let my own parents in on anything that was really going on with me as of late. Like Jonathan. Or Kristina…

  I cringed. Yes, I was private. God, I was practically living in a…cell, I realized. I didn’t want to let anyone in. The only one who had gotten in lately was Angie, probably because she was always pounding on the door. And Shelley, whom I was paying to pound on that door.

  And Jonathan…

  I sighed. “You know, I have opened up to him. I told him everything about me, I think.”

  “Yes, you probably did,” she conceded. “Everything, of course, except how you feel.”

  I wasn’t going to give Shelley that point. Because the truth was, I didn’t know how I felt. Well, yes, I felt happy. And positively lustful. But since I was overflowing with the possibility of more, especially given all the time Jonathan and I were spending together, I decided to pound on the door of his cell a bit.

  “So what do you say we cook together on Saturday night?” I said, after we lay back on the sheets on Thursday, our bodies still buzzing from making love.

  “Sounds good,” he said, one hand going to caress my head as I laid it on his chest, probably to avoid his gaze, as I added, “at your place.”

  His hand paused and I held my breath, realizing that all my suspicions had been right. He was afraid. Afraid of letting me in. Literally.

  I closed my eyes, bracing myself for rejection. Which probably accounted for the avalanche of relief that washed through me when he finally said, in the softest voice I had ever heard come out of him, “Sure.”

  I lifted my head, needing to see his eyes, to know whether or not his reply had come from politeness or some desire to take things a step further.

  He gazed at me, and I saw sadness and worry and a bit of the usual bewilderment. But I also saw, shining beneath all that, hope.

  “What’s with you?” Claudia said as I sat across from her in the small conference room Friday morning, where we were finalizing our marketing plans for the consumer launch of Roxy D. We had been discussing the cost effectiveness of givin
g away a free sample of the Packs-a-Punch Pink lipstick with purchase and I had just turned away to start typing the financials into the Excel sheet on my laptop.

  Lori paused in her note-taking and sat blinking at me, a smile tugging at her lips.

  “What?” I replied, looking at them both.

  Lori giggled. “Grace, you’re singing.”

  The chorus of P.J. Harvey’s “This Is Love” had been buzzing through my head—God, had I actually started singing out loud? I almost laughed myself.

  Buoyed by the memory of the man who had inspired this happy little tune, I suddenly blurted out, “I have a date tonight.”

  The minute I confessed to my new relationship, I was sorry. Lori nearly bounded out of her seat with apparent joy. “Oh, Grace, what fun!”

  Then, before she could leap into the next three questions that were clearly on the tip of her tongue—likely who, where and how—Claudia replied in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “Well, la-dee-da.”

  I should have expected that from Claudia. I knew well enough that no one was allowed to show even a glimmer of happiness in her presence, especially when she was miserable. And Claudia had hit an all time low since the publication of that harrowing photo of her in W. In fact, the only thing that seemed to keep her afloat was that she had used her considerable connections to get an appointment with the best plastic surgeon in New York City.

  “Well, come on,” she continued. “Out with it. Tell us all about this incredible new man you’ve managed to scrounge up from the muck.”