When I'm With You

by JoAnn Ross

  Joanna laughed, forced the door shut against a rising wind, and peeled off her jacket, hanging it gingerly on a hook on the antique coat tree next to the door. What the well-dressed woman wears to a civilized divorce, she thought.

  And then she didn’t feel like laughing anymore.

  Teague was back from the kitchen. “Dry off,” he ordered. “I’ll get the dog food.”

  Joanna kicked off her sodden shoes and wandered into the living room, with its pegged plank floors, and stood in front of the natural rock fireplace, where a lively blaze crackled. Sammy followed, shook himself again, and curled up on the hooked rug at her feet.

  She heard Teague come in and slam the door behind him.

  Hair dripping, he lugged the twenty-five-pound bag of kibble past her, retracing the route to the kitchen.

  “Twenty-five pounds, Joanna?” he asked. “We’re spending the weekend, not burrowing in for the winter!”

  “I might stay,” she heard herself say. “Start that novel I’ve been wanting to write.”

  The dog-food bag thunked to the kitchen floor, and Teague appeared in the doorway. For the first time, Joanna noticed that he’d exchanged his suit for jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. In those clothes, with his hair damp and curling around his ears, he looked younger, more like the Teague Darby she’d known and loved.

  “We agreed to sell the cottage,” he reminded her.

  “No,” Joanna said mildly, “we didn’t agree. You said we should sell it and split the proceeds, and I said I wasn’t so sure. I think Sammy and I could be very happy here.” She looked down at the dog. His fur was curling, too, just like Teague’s hair, and he seemed so pathetically happy to be home.

  “Not that again,” Teague said.

  “You travel a lot,” Joanna pointed out. “He’d be with me most of the time anyway.”

  Some of the tension in Teague’s shoulders eased. “Maybe I’d like to live here,” he said. “I could build my boat.”

  “You’ll never build that boat,” Joanna said.

  “You’ll never write a novel,” Teague retorted, “so I guess we’re even.”

  Sammy made a soft, mournful sound.

  “Let’s not argue,” Joanna said. “We ought to be able to be civil to each other for a weekend.”

  “Civil,” Teague replied. “We ought to be able to manage that. We’ve been ‘civil’ for months—when we’ve spoken at all.”

  Joanna felt cold, even though she was standing close to a blazing fire. She turned her head so Teague wouldn’t see the tears that sprang to her eyes.

  “Change your clothes, Joanna,” Teague said after a long time, and much more gently. “You’ll catch your death if you don’t.”

  She nodded without looking at him and scurried into their bedroom.

  Her wardrobe choices were limited, but she found a set of gray sweats and pulled them on. When she got to the kitchen, Teague had already opened a bottle of wine and busied himself making salad. Sammy was crunching away on a large serving of kibble.

  Outside, the wind howled off the nearby water, and the lights flickered as Teague poured wine for them both—a Sauvignon Blanc, to complement the lobster topping their salads.

  “I didn’t know you still wanted to write a novel,” Teague said.

  “I didn’t know you still wanted to build a boat,” Joanna replied. She sat down at the table, and Teague took his usual place directly across from her.

  “Why a novel?” Teague asked thoughtfully. “Your cookbooks are best-sellers—you were even offered your own show on the Food Network.”

  “Why build a boat?” Joanna inquired, taking a sip of her wine. “You can certainly afford to buy one.”

  “I asked you first,” Teague said, watching her over the rim of his wineglass. She wondered what he was thinking—that she ought to get a face-lift? Maybe have some lipo?

  Her spine stiffened. “I’ve always wanted to write a novel,” she said. Weren’t you listening at all, back when we used to talk about our dreams? “And this cottage would be the perfect place to do it.”

  “It would also be the perfect place to build a boat.”

  The lights went out, then flared on again.

  Thunder rolled over the roof.

  Sammy went right on crunching his kibble. He’d never been afraid of storms.

  “Remember how Caitlin used to squirm under the blankets with us in the middle of the night when the weather was like this?” Teague asked. He’d set down his wineglass and taken up his fork, but it was suspended midway between his mouth and the plate.

  “Do you think she’s happy in California?” Joanna mused. “Happy with Peter?”

  “They’re newlyweds,” Teague said. “She has a glamorous job, just like she always wanted. Of course she’s happy.”

  “So were we, once.” Joanna reddened when she realized she’d spoken the words aloud. She’d only meant to think them, not say them.

  “What happened, Joanna?” Teague asked.

  The lights went out again, and the fan in the furnace died with a creaky whir.

  Teague left the table, went to the drawer, and rummaged until he found a candle. Plunking the taper into a ceramic holder Caitlin had made at day camp the summer she was eleven, he struck a match to the wick.

  Joanna figured he’d forgotten the question, but it turned out he hadn’t.

  “What happened?” he repeated.

  She sighed, turning the stem of her wineglass slowly between two fingers. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I guess we just grew apart, once Caitlin left for college.”

  “I guess so,” Teague said. “Is there somebody else, Joanna?”

  She bristled. “Of course not,” she said. “How could you possibly think—?”

  In the light of the candle, Teague’s features looked especially rugged. Again, Joanna had that strange feeling of time slipping backward, without her noticing until just this moment.

  He didn’t answer.

  She took a gulp of wine this time, instead of a sip as before. “What about you? Have you—well—is there—?”

  “No,” Teague said in an angry undertone. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

  “The same kind of question you asked me,” Joanna fired back, though she was careful to keep her tone even, for Sammy’s sake. “We haven’t had sex for weeks. You bought a sports car. Next thing I know, you’ll be squiring around some girl barely older than Caitlin—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Teague interrupted. “Maybe we’re on the skids, but we’re still married—and I bought a sports car because I wanted a sports car.”

  “You’re forty-one. You’ve just sold a company you worked half your life to build. You bought a sports car. Enter wife number two, who has probably already targeted you as fair game.”

  “Good God, Joanna. You should write a novel, because you have one hell of an imagination!”

  “I don’t need an imagination. Half the guys you play golf with have trophy wives, while the women who bore their children and helped them build their companies and their bloody portfolios are still wondering what hit them!”

  Sammy crossed the kitchen, toenails clicking on the tile floor, and laid his muzzle on Joanna’s lap.

  She stroked his head. “It’s all right,” she told him. “We’re not going to fight.”

  Teague shoved back his chair and stood. “It’s not all right,” he growled. “What kind of man do you think I am?”

  The furnace tried mightily to come back on, but there wasn’t enough juice.

  “I don’t know anymore,” Joanna admitted quietly. “Do you think the electricity is going to come back on soon? It’s getting cold in here.”

  “I have no idea,” Teague said. “If you’re cold, go sit by the fire.”

  “I will,” Joanna said loftily, refilling her wineglass before she left the table.

  Sammy trotted after her, his tags jingling hopefully on his collar. The cottage had always been a happy place, w
ith the exception of last summer, when Joanna had cried a time or two. No doubt, the dog expected things to morph back to normal at any moment.

  It would be nice, Joanna reflected, to be a dog.

  Teague followed and threw another chunk of wood onto the fire, causing sparks to rise, swirling, up the chimney.

  Joanna plunked into the overstuffed armchair a few feet away, at the edge of the firelight. She swirled her wine in her glass but didn’t drink. “Maybe we should go back to the city,” she said. “We could catch the six o’clock ferry.”

  “Go if you want,” Teague replied coolly. “Sammy and I are staying here.”

  Joanna closed her eyes for a moment, trying to keep from being swept downstream into the Sammy conflict again. “If he’s staying,” she said, “I’m staying.”

  To her surprise, Teague laughed. It was a raw sound, gruff and low. “Damn,” he said. “One thing hasn’t changed, anyway. You’re still as stubborn as a toothless old bulldog with a bone.”

  “Are you comparing me to a toothless old bulldog?”

  Teague shoved a hand through his hair, swearing under his breath.

  Joanna set her wineglass aside on the table next to her chair. “Okay,” she conceded. “I might be a little stubborn, but I am not old or toothless.”

  “A little stubborn?” He moved out of the firelight and began rummaging again in the darkness. Just when Joanna had decided he was definitely going to strike her with a blunt object or stab her with an ice pick—by her own admission, she’d watched way too many episodes of Forensic Files and Body of Evidence—she heard the staticky crackle of a transistor radio.

  He was turning the tuning knob, probably looking for a weather report.

  “—ferries temporarily out of commission,” a disembodied male voice said, between buzzing bursts of static, “widespread power outages—winds reaching—”

  Joanna sat up very straight and reached for her wine again. “We’re stranded,” she said.

  Sammy, lying on the rug in front of the fireplace, rolled onto his back, paws in the air and belly exposed, and snored.

  “I see the dog’s terrified,” Teague quipped.

  “Teague, this is serious. What are we going to do?”

  “Well, we could tell ghost stories. Or play checkers.” He paused. “Or tear off each other’s clothes and have sex on the floor like we used to, whenever we came out here without Caitlin and half her Girl Scout troop.”

  A hot chill went through Joanna, making her ache in some very private places. In danger of spilling the wine, she set it aside again with a thunk.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

  And suddenly Teague was in front of her, kneeling, parting her legs.

  An involuntary groan escaped her.

  Teague slipped his hands up under her sweatshirt and cupped her bare breasts in his hands. Ran the pads of his thumbs over her nipples until they hardened.

  Joanna groaned again. “Teague—”

  He pushed her shirt up, tongued her breasts, then suckled.

  “This is—” She paused, gasping. “This won’t solve anything—”

  He was pulling at the elastic band of her sweatpants, drawing them skillfully down, off, away. “Maybe not,” he murmured, raising one of her bare legs and placing it over his shoulder, “but it’s going to feel good.” The other leg went over the other shoulder. “Don’t be quiet, Joanna,” he said, sliding his hands under her backside and raising her until she felt the warmth of his breath through the nest of curls at the juncture of her thighs. “Please, don’t be quiet.”

  Clawing at the arms of her chair, bucking against Teague’s mouth, sobbing as she reached the first of several shattering orgasms, Joanna was anything but quiet.

  And the dog didn’t even wake up.

  Chapter Two

  She was so beautiful, lying there asleep on the floor in front of the hearth, her supple body spent by their lovemaking, her features gilded in flickering firelight. The glow caught in her chin-length blond hair, all atangle now, and gleamed on the long sweep of her eyelashes. Joanna was Teague’s age—forty-one—and yet she looked so much younger, with her guard down like that.

  Teague wanted to stretch out a hand and caress the flawless line of her cheek with a light pass of the backs of his knuckles, the way he’d done a million times before, when things were good between them.

  A dog snore ripped the darkness, and Teague smiled slightly, sadly. Sammy was zonked out, too, on the cushions of the window seat built into the bay windows overlooking the water. Not so long ago, Caitlin, coltish and spirited, would have been curled up there with the dog.

  Where had the time gone?

  One minute, Sammy was a pup and Caitlin was a ten-year-old.

  Now, suddenly, the retriever was getting old, and Caitlin was a college graduate and a wife living far away, in California. Teague’s eyes smarted, and he was glad of the power failure, glad of the darkness, glad Joanna was sleeping and couldn’t see how close he was to losing it.

  Losing it? He was losing her. How had he managed to accomplish that marvelous feat? Simple neglect, probably. He’d been so busy, building his career, building houses and office buildings, being a man-among-men and all that other crap, that all the ordinary little things connecting him and Joanna to each other had slowly withered and disappeared.

  He didn’t know her anymore.

  And she certainly didn’t know him, if she really thought he wanted to trade her in for a younger model, one of those calculatingly sweet chicks with the grapefruit boobs and sleek hair and the acquisitive instincts of a shark on the hunt.

  Teague felt betrayed, and for a brief moment, he seethed.

  Then he sighed and shoved a hand through his love-rumpled hair. Joanna wasn’t a stupid woman—anything but. She’d helped him set up and then maintain the company. She’d raised their daughter, and done a hell of a good job in the process. And in addition to all that, she’d established a successful career of her own.

  And yet she was willing to condemn him on the purchase of a sports car?

  Teague sighed. Joanna had been right earlier: half the couples they’d socialized with over the years had split up, longtime wives replaced by talking mannequins composed more of silicone than flesh and blood and soul. And too often the process started, innocuously enough, with the buying of a sleek, expensive two-seater car.

  Joanna stirred in her sleep and stretched, one breast bared by the motion.

  Teague took a few moments to admire that breast, then gently replaced the quilt because the room was cold, even with the fire going. Beyond the sturdy stone walls of the cottage, the storm still raged, cutting Firefly Island off from the mainland.

  Silently, he blessed the forces of wind and rain and high tides lashing at the rocky shore. Just then, he could have spent the rest of eternity, not just this last poignant weekend, alternately making love to Joanna and watching her sleep.

  Sammy made a whimpering sound, chasing rabbits in his dreams.

  Teague spoke quietly to him, and he sighed and settled deeper into his slumbers.

  The faint jingle of Teague’s cell phone, resting on a nearby end table, reminded him that there was no escaping the outside world, not even on Firefly Island in the middle of the storm of the century.

  Afraid of waking Joanna, he scrambled for the phone and flipped it open.

  “Teague Darby,” he said, whispering.

  “Dad?”

  “Caitlin,” he said, his voice warming. “Babe, it’s the middle of the night. Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” Caitlin answered and immediately burst into tears.

  “Hey,” Teague said as Joanna stirred again, sat up, and yawned. “What’s wrong?”

  “I keep thinking about you and Mom getting divorced,” Caitlin wailed. “I can’t believe it!”

  “Caitlin?” Joanna mouthed, reaching for the sweatshirt Teague had dragged off over her head earlier and pulling it on.

  Teague nodded.
“You should be asleep, sweetheart,” he told his daughter. “We can talk about this tomorrow.”

  “I can’t sleep,” Caitlin said. “There are so many things going around and around in my head—”

  “Like?”

  “Like what’s going to happen to Sammy when you two split up? Tell me you’re not planning to take him to the pound!”

  “Caitlin, of course we’re not planning on taking Sammy to the pound.”

  Joanna smiled and shook her head, then reached for her sweatpants and shimmied into them. “I’ll put the coffee on,” she said, then remembered that the power was off and looked stymied for a moment. The pump would work—for a while—so there was water, but the pot was electric.

  “Oh, good,” Caitlin snuffled. “I was so afraid—”

  “Don’t be. Everything is okay, honey.”

  “No, it isn’t! You and Mom are getting divorced! The world is ending!”

  If Caitlin’s career in advertising didn’t work out, Teague figured, she could probably land a part on a soap opera. She had the crying part down pat.

  “Honey—”

  Joanna approached, took in Teague’s naked frame with a lift of her eyebrows, and held out one hand.

  Teague gladly surrendered the phone.

  “Cait,” Joanna said, watching as Teague pulled on his jeans and headed for the kitchen, probably intending to engineer some solution to the coffee problem. “It’s Mom.”

  “Mooooooom!” Caitlin sobbed.

  Usually, Caitlin was coolheaded, self-possessed, certainly not given to hysterics.

  “Sweetheart,” Joanna began, following a prompt from her well-developed intuition, “are you pregnant, by any chance?”

  Caitlin gulped. “Yes! And what kind of family is this baby going to have, I ask you? Peter’s parents have been divorced since he was ten. Now you and Dad are going your separate ways! What is my child supposed to do for grandparents?”

  Teague came out of the dark kitchen, brandishing a metal coffeepot they used for camping.

  He was a blurry shape to Joanna because her eyes were full of tears.

  “Sweetheart,” Joanna said carefully, “grandparents don’t have to be married to each other to do grandparent-type things.”