The Heartbreaker

by Vicki Lewis Thompson

  “I didn’t actually say you should tell her. I just think that if you do, she’s the one responsible for her actions if she decides to come back.”

  Beth was silent for a while. “If she does come home while you’re here, are you planning to say anything about your feelings for me?”

  “That’s up to you.” He looked at her. “But personally I think it’s time we got this all out in the open.”

  Her voice was almost too low to hear above the radio. “If she thinks you care for me instead of her, she might hate me.”

  His heart ached for her. Reaching for the volume knob, he turned down the radio. “I can’t believe that she would,” he said gently. “She might be upset at first, but she loves you, Beth. Ultimately she’d want you to be happy.”

  “And would I be happy, Mike?”

  The question hit him hard. What did he think he was doing, asking her to risk her heart and her relationship with her sister for some guy who wouldn’t make promises? “Maybe not. Maybe I’d better keep my damn mouth shut, and after my dad’s out of the woods, I’ll just leave town again.”

  She didn’t respond to that.

  As they reached the outskirts of Benson, he cleared his throat. “Still want that ice cream?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Why not, indeed.”

  “I hope they still have butterscotch dipped cones.”

  “How long since you’ve been there?”

  “Too long.” She moved her seat back and stretched out her legs.

  He kept his attention on the road and away from her slender legs with great difficulty.

  After a while Beth spoke again. “You know, there was a special feeling in the air during those years when the five of us were always doing things together. Life was just plain fun most of the time.”

  “Pete and Ernie were a great combination. What one didn’t come up with, the other one did.”

  “I miss the excitement of those times, Mike.” She glanced at him. “I suppose they don’t seem so exciting, considering what you’ve experienced down in South America.”

  “My adventures were a different kind of excitement.” He was beginning to think that knocking around the Amazon jungle for eight years had been an effort to replace that sense of excitement and wonder that he’d had growing up with Pete and Ernie and the girls around to make things interesting. Surely not. Life in a small town would be boring to him now, wouldn’t it? So why was he so looking forward to the relatively simple pleasure of a Dairy Queen?

  The ice cream shop, located right next to the main road going through Benson, was busy. Mike scored a parking spot by staying alert, and they left the windows down so the car interior wouldn’t heat up while they were buying their cones.

  The atmosphere inside the Dairy Queen’s small service area was pure summer, with sunburned people in shorts and flip-flops crowding into the space, debating their choices as they stared up at the array of treats displayed in sun-faded Technicolor on the back wall. Mike thought of all the native children he’d met who had never tasted ice cream. With luck they never would, because that would mean their simple way of life had been destroyed.

  But Mike wasn’t truly of their world, and when the freckle-faced kid behind the window handed a butterscotch-dipped cone to Beth and a chocolate-dipped one to him, he experienced a moment of déjà vu, and it felt good. Then another thought came to him, completely unbidden. He wondered what it would feel like to bring his own kid here. Now he’d never considered something like that before. Oddly enough, the idea didn’t panic him the way he might have expected it would.

  “Let’s sit out on the picnic table and eat these.” He remembered that’s what Ernie and Pete had always suggested, probably to save the seat covers.

  “Do we have time?”

  “With the temperature what it is outside, we’ll have to eat these puppies in twenty seconds flat or they’ll be soup. I think we have time.”

  When Beth and Mike walked outside, a family with two little children, a boy about four and a girl about three, were just leaving the picnic table in a shady spot next to the ice cream shop. While Mike bit off the top section of his cone he watched the family. The kids skipped around the parents, who were holding hands and laughing as they dodged the children’s game of tag. It was a sweet scene, and Mike watched it with uncharacteristic longing as he took a seat on one side of the old wooden picnic table.

  “Mike, you’re dripping.”

  He looked at his cone and sure enough, a white river was running from underneath the chocolate layer over the lip of the cone and down between his fingers. He turned the cone sideways and sucked out the melting ice cream before licking the ice cream from his fingers.

  “Do you know those people?” Beth asked.

  He glanced across the table at her. She was busily attending to her own cone, and the action of her pink tongue and full lips was so unknowingly provocative that the material of his shorts tightened over his straining erection once again. “No, I don’t know them. They just looked like a nice family.”

  Beth watched the four people get into a minivan and pull out into traffic. “I wonder what it would have been like to have a mother around.”

  “Nice, I guess.” He glanced at her while he continued to eat his cone as quickly as possible. She would make a terrific mother—creative, empathetic, firm without being bossy. Any kid would be lucky to end up with her as a mom. He pictured a couple of little kids sitting beside her, eating their cones and getting the ice cream on their noses and their chins. He smiled.

  “What’s that for?” She’d reduced the swirl of ice cream to a cylindrical mound that stuck up over the edge of the cone by about two inches. All the butterscotch was gone.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “You’d better watch out. When people start grinning for no reason the guys in white coats come after them with butterfly nets.” Then she took the mound of ice cream in her mouth.

  Mike was transfixed by the image. In fact, the image gave him definite pain in the lower reaches of his body. He must have let out a little growl of male anticipation, because she looked up at him, a question in her eyes.

  Then she glanced down at his cone. “Flash flood, Mike.”

  “Damn.” While he’d been lost in a fantasy orgy with Beth, melted ice cream had covered his hand and dripped all over his shorts.

  “Looks like I can’t take you anywhere,” she said, grinning. “Better go over to the drinking fountain and see if you can clean yourself up.”

  He did, tossing the cone in the trash can on his way. He had to wait for a couple of boys who were drinking from the old porcelain fountain as if they’d just crossed the Sahara on their hands and knees. The fountain had also been the cleanup spot when he was a kid, he remembered as he finally got his turn and ran his sticky hand under the stream of water. Then he took the bandanna from his pocket, wet it down and began dabbing at the front of his shorts.

  Beth came over to watch. “You’re a mess. I don’t remember you dripping all over yourself like that when you were ten.”

  Mike kept working away at the spots as the front of his shorts got wetter and wetter. “That’s because at ten I had absolutely no imagination.”

  “No imagination? You were the one who convinced me the drainage ditch near your house had.crocodiles in it.”

  “I mean no imagination about more adult things.” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “Like how a cylinder of ice cream could stand for something else, especially when a certain woman you’re highly attracted to takes it into her mouth with such skill.”

  Beth’s hoot of laughter bounced off the whitewashed block wall of the Dairy Queen. “You truly are obsessed. That’s how I always eat my ice cream cones, and it has no subliminal meaning whatsoever,” she said, still chuckling.

  “Good practice,” he muttered.

  “And what makes you think I’d want to practice?”

  He stopped dabbing and balled the damp bandanna in on
e hand as he straightened to look at her. “Because you’re one of the sexiest women I’ve ever known.”

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  “So do I. It’s been a revelation to me that little Beth, the girl I spent all those clueless years goofing around with, would turn out to be the one woman who can sexually wrap me around her little finger.”

  “Could always be the forbidden fruit syndrome.”

  “I’ve thought of that. But the way things are going, I’ll probably never know.”

  “And how are things going?”

  “You’re ready to give in and enjoy the moment just when I’m having a huge attack of conscience about ruining your life forever with my base and greedy nature.”

  “So that’s your evaluation?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  She adjusted her sunglasses. “I think that huge attack of conscience might have something to do with being scared.”

  “Scared? Of what?”

  “Finding out that you need a woman for more than just sex.”

  He stared at her in silence while he tried to come up with a convincing denial of that statement. Trouble was, his gut was telling him she could, just possibly, be right.

  “Come on.” She started for the car. “We’d better get moving if we want to catch Ernie before his sleep medication kicks in.”

  The radio filled in the lack of conversation between them during the rest of the trip. Mike was busy thinking, and he figured Beth must be, too. Every time he glanced over at her she looked as if she was a million miles away. The twist she’d put on his motives didn’t make him seem like quite the nice guy he’d been telling himself he was.

  All this time the emphasis had been on how a physical relationship between them would affect Beth, with the assumption being it wouldn’t affect Mike at all. Maybe he’d begun to realize that wasn’t true. If it turned out he couldn’t live without Beth around, he’d be in a world of hurt. Right now he hadn’t established any connections that demanding, so he was free to pursue his life in any way he chose.

  What had begun as a simple need to make love to her had become much more complicated. It was quite possible that she possessed the power to completely upend his life as he knew it. He remembered Pete used to say Be careful what you wish for. Mike hadn’t understood the wisdom in that warning until now.

  He found a space in the TMC parking lot and they walked together, not touching, into the building.

  As they headed for Ernie’s room, Beth spoke for the first time since they’d left Benson. “I didn’t bring him anything. I’d meant to get him something to make him laugh, and I—forgot.”

  “I didn’t bring him anything, either,” Mike said. “But as far as making him laugh, the ice cream splotches on my shorts should do the trick, don’t you think?”

  Beth smiled. “Are you planning to tell him how you got in that condition?”

  “No, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that part of the story to yourself, if you don’t mind. We can just say it was very hot and I couldn’t eat fast enough.”

  “What was very hot?” she asked, a mischievous gleam in her eye.

  “You’re turning out to be a lot of trouble, you know.”

  “Oh, I do know.” Her knowing gaze met his.

  “After we see Ernie, we’ll talk.”

  “Okay.”

  They were only a few yards from Ernie’s room when activity erupted from it. A gurney was shoved out and attendants pushed it at a rapid clip down the hall away from them while a physician running behind barked orders.

  Mike glanced at Beth in horror and without speaking they took off at a run down the hallway after the gurney. Mike arrived at the hurried procession first.

  “That’s my dad!” he cried, grabbing the physician by the arm as he reached him. “What’s happened?”

  “We’re taking him to ICU,” the doctor said. “Could be a pulmonary embolism.”

  “You mean a blood clot?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is it serious?”

  The doctor glanced at him. “Let’s hope not.”

  8

  AS THE WAITING ROOM VIGIL outside the Intensive Care Unit wore on, Mike realized that Beth’s presence was essential to his sanity. They took turns going in to see Ernie for brief visits, and whenever she left him alone in the waiting room, he nearly went out of his mind. The doctors had tried to calm his fears by telling him that the intravenous drug was dissolving the blood clot in his dad’s lung and he was progressing well. Mike knew that if the blood clot had been a little larger, it could have killed his father in seconds. He got the shakes every time he thought about that. He couldn’t lose his dad now.

  He and Beth satisfied what little hunger they had from vending machine snack food and drank countless cups of coffee. Other people, checking on other patients in ICU, drifted in and out of the waiting room, but every group seemed huddled inside its own tragedy, unwilling to strike up conversations with outsiders.

  To pass the time, Beth drew him into talking about his experiences in the rain forest He knew she was doing it to distract him, and he was grateful. Somewhere along the way he found himself describing the encounter with the black caiman, except this time he didn’t pretty it up, or make jokes as he had in the letter home to his father.

  “The zoologist in the party I was guiding wanted to search out a species of crocodile called caimans, so I took him out in a boat at night,” he said, sitting forward on the Naugahyde couch and letting his hands hang loose between his knees. “If you shine a flashlight on the water, the iris of a crocodile eye will reflect in it. The smaller ones, the speckled caimans, show up yellow, but the black caimans glow red.”

  “That’s spooky, right there,” Beth said. “Looking for red-eyed creatures on a jungle river at night.”

  “Well, that’s how you find them. So we’d located and measured about six of the speckled caimans, which are pretty harmless, when the black caiman showed up in the flashlight beam. From the size of his eyes I figured him to be at least twenty feet long.”

  “My God.”

  “Usually the big ones will sink out of sight. They’re shy. But this one wasn’t moving.” He laced his fingers together because they’d begun to tremble slightly. “I told the zoologist we should get the hell out of there, but he ordered me closer so he could measure it.” He glanced at her. “That’s when the caiman took a hunk out of the boat.”

  Beth gasped. “How close to you?”

  “Too damn close. I dove out. So did the zoologist. We made it to shore while the caiman was busy destroying the boat, along with all the guy’s equipment. After it was over I threw up.” When she didn’t respond to the end of the story, he glanced around at her. Her face was white with strain. Filled with remorse, he took her icy hand in his. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that one. Let’s get back to one of my monkey stories. One time I—”

  “No, Mike. Don’t insult me by treating me like a child. Your story may frighten me, but I’m not weak.”

  “I know you’re not.” In her eyes he rediscovered the strength that he’d depended on more than he’d realized over the years. “I didn’t tell my dad exactly what happened with that monster. I don’t think he needs to know the details.”

  “I’m glad you chose to tell me.”

  “So am I.” He rubbed her hand to warm it. “I stayed awake all night, thinking. I’d had some close calls, but I’d never thought any of them would kill me. This time was different.” He tightened his hold on her hand. “This isn’t a line, Beth. I swear it isn’t I thought about you that night.”

  She held his gaze and her throat moved in a convulsive swallow.

  “I thought about my dad, too, and my life so far. I couldn’t justify much of it as being worth anything. And the worst part was knowing that if the caiman had killed me, my dad would be the only one who’d care.”

  “Not the only one.”

  “I didn’t know that.” He savored th
e warmth in her eyes and wondered how she managed to look so damned good after hanging around a waiting room until four in the morning. “I don’t know what I would have done without having you here.”

  Beth gave him a tired smile. “I don’t know what I would have done without you here, either. When Ernie had the heart attack, Alana came down from Phoenix, so at least we had each other to lean on.” She paused and glanced at her watch. “She’s due to call in three hours. If I’m not home yet, she’ll just get the answering machine. I have no idea how to reach her.”

  “It’s just as well.”

  She glanced at him. “In what way?”

  He sighed and squeezed her hand. “In all ways. By the time she could get back here, he’ll either be out of danger, or...he won’t If he’s out of danger soon there’s no point in her coming back now. And if he doesn’t...get out of danger, then...” He discovered he couldn’t finish the sentence. Something seemed to be lodged in his throat.

  Beth’s hand tightened in his. “He’s going to make it”

  He returned the pressure of her hand. “Yep. He has to. He just has to.”

  “Do you think he realizes we drove up here together? I told him, but because they haven’t wanted both of us in there at the same time, I don’t know if he understood what I was saying.”

  “He’s fuzzy on what’s happening, that’s for sure.” Mike smiled faintly. “Although one of the interns told me they had a hard time getting an oxygen mask on him at first because he wanted to keep his rubber cigar.”

  Beth stared at him. “His what?”

  “One of the nurses bought him a fake cigar at a costume shop. It looks pretty damned real. Yesterday morning when I walked in, he had it stuck in the corner of his mouth, just the way he’s always had a real one for as long as I can remember. I went ballistic. He got the biggest kick out of my reaction.”

  Beth leaned her head back on the cushion. “What a guy. When did he notice the bite mark on your lip?”

  “He mentioned that to you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “When?”

  “When I called last night after we met for dinner. He didn’t just mention it, either. He lectured me about not doing it again. Shades of our childhood.”