by Kim Boykin
The plane landed and most everyone powered on their cell phones. Jake’s rang immediately. He didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with Tara in Chicago, so he pretended the call wasn’t from Lou.
“Jake Randall.”
“So, how’s the shit show?”
“We’re in Chicago, waiting to get off the plane. What do you want?”
“Tara’s not ready, but you already know that.”
“In your opinion.”
“I would like to have seen more of you, Jake.”
“Do you have a point?”
“I called Dick McGregor at Janzen this morning and gave him my assessment. I told him Tara Jordan was out of her league, and he should be ready for anything.”
“That wasn’t your place.”
“They have a lot of money invested in this disaster. Dick’s a friend, I thought he deserved to know,” she paused. “I did it for you, Jake.”
“Go fuck yourself.” He ended the call just as it was time to deplane.
“Who was that?” Tara asked following the line of passengers in front of her.
“It was nobody.”
They checked into the hotel, this time without adjoining rooms, but that didn’t matter. He opened the hotel room door and threw his bags on the bed, along with his cell phone. Tara stood in the doorway, looking at her key to the room across the hall. He wanted to yank her into the room, close the door behind her, and not resurface for a couple of days. If she didn’t open that door soon, that’s exactly what he would do.
My body was a jumbled mess. He was just a few feet away, and already I missed him. My body hummed at the sight of him, revved when he casually touched me. By now, I felt like I was going to explode if Jake Randall didn’t make love to me.
Was he right from the beginning, and this wasn’t a good idea? Could I change his mind? Was I even ready for this? But I didn’t want to be separated from Jake, not by a hotel room, not by anything. My hands trembled as I swiped the keycard in the lock. I pushed the door open. “Stay with me, Jake.” I barely got the words out before he swept me up in his arms, kicked the door closed behind us, and deposited me on the bed.
From the first day I met Jake Randall, I’d dreamed about what that first moment would be like. I’d imagined undressing him slowly, opening him like a present. Taking our sweet time until we came together. But going slow was impossible. We were starving for each other. I’m not even sure how we took our clothes off, I just knew that Jake Randall was inside me and nothing else mattered. He was raw, powerful, with the same feral need for me that I had for him.
“Two things.” Jake pressed tiny kisses along my jawline to my ear. “I promise it’ll last longer next time, it’ll be better.”
“Better might kill me.” I tried to slow my breathing. “What’s the second thing?”
Jake didn’t say anything for a minute; he rolled onto his side to face me. Sweaty and gorgeous and way better than my fantasy of him on a horse. “We—I didn’t use a condom.” The bottom fell out of the rainbow. I couldn’t look at him. “Whatever happens, Tara, it’ll be okay. I promise.”
I didn’t feel young and feral anymore. I felt old, way older than forty. “Jake, I wanted kids a lot. But I can’t get pregnant. Ever.”
“As long as I have you, it doesn’t matter,” said the thirty-year-old man who’d only known me for a week and wasn’t ready to have children. And then he spent the rest of the night making me believe what we had said was true.
Chapter Thirteen
‡
Jake watched the crowd wrapped around the outside of the Barnes and Noble on North State Street in Chicago. Mostly women, clutching their copies of Thirty Days To The Perfect Marriage. There were some men in the crowd, but no sign of Jim Jordan. Maybe Jake worried too much. He’d done a lot of that since he’d made love to her. Not worried about the tour as much as worry about her. He knew it had wrecked her to tell him she couldn’t have kids, and she seemed fragile again. Maybe Lou was wrong and her husband wouldn’t come back. He’d have to be one sick son of a bitch to take everything from Tara and then come back to destroy what was left.
But what if Jim Jordan wanted her back? What if he tried to worm his way back into her life? He had a fifteen year history of Christmases and anniversaries and birthdays, and Jake only had eight days. And then there was the baby thing.
It didn’t matter to him that she couldn’t have kids. Really, it didn’t matter. Back in college, his girlfriend, Kate, had thought she was pregnant once. They’d been terrified, especially Kate. It took two weeks for them to get up the courage to buy a pregnancy test. By that time, Jake kind of liked to the idea of being a parent, but not Kate. Both her older brother and her dad were schizophrenic. Even though she wasn’t, growing up with a mentally ill father and brother was hard, and the last thing she wanted was to bring a child into the world who might end up that way.
When the test was negative and she saw Jake was as disappointed as he was grateful, Kate changed. She knew he wanted kids one day and wanted to break up. He talked her out of it, told her it was stupid, that they were too young to make those decisions. Two weeks later, her brother killed himself, and she ended things with Jake for good.
Tara wanted to have kids. Telling him she couldn’t was like ripping open an old wound that had scarred over and was barely visible. Part of him felt good, not because of what she had said, but that she trusted him enough to tell him. And part of him felt sad that she’d wanted a child so badly and couldn’t have one.
He walked back into the bookstore and watched her talking to each fan who came with an open book, ready to sign. Most of them gushed about what the book had done for their marriages, the others pushed their book forward with tears in their eyes because they wanted to believe a better marriage really was possible.
The signing ended around two and Jake brought the rental car around. When he went into the store to get her, Tara was still hugging fans and then some of the bookstore employees who were now converts.
“We have to go.” He picked up her briefcase and followed her to the exit, walking just behind her, but close enough to touch her. “You were great.”
“I guess it would be unprofessional for me to thank you like I did the last time you handed out that compliment.”
“Just not a good idea in this traffic, but later—”
Jake and I headed over to the Chicago Theatre, a thirty-six-hundred-seat venue that Jake thought was a good testing ground for the show format. The Janzen army was led by a woman named Amy Hill, who went over things again with us and had the rest of the crew hustling around like Beyoncé was in the building.
“You’re sort of our guinea pig, Tara, our first author event. We do mostly concerts but management believes there’s a great market for this kind of thing,” Amy said. No pressure there. “David Sedaris was just here and he was spectacular. I came to see his show to see how a reading would work in the space, and he was remarkable. Your book is funny too, and with the audience participation, I think your events can be equally successful, Tara. And the public must agree. We’ve sold out every city except Denver, and it’s close to selling out. Of course you’ll have a few more bells and whistles than Sedaris does at his readings, but I think this event is going to be fabulous.”
My stomach churned at the thought of all those showy adjectives and the expectations for me to deliver. Add to that a whole theater full of couples who thought I’d come to save them and their marriage, and I could barely breathe. I’d seen that same desire on the faces of men and women who came to my book signings, like they believed if they touch the hem of my skirt, their marriage would be whole again.
“Excuse me.” I was suffocating, almost running toward one of the exits and gasping for breath by the time I got to the concourse. Jake pushed through the doors with Amy, who looked terrified that Lou Rosen was right, I wasn’t ready for this. I could feel Jake wanted to hold me, and I needed him as much as I needed to breathe.
; He looked at Amy. “Give us a minute. She’ll be fine.” Amy nodded toward a First Aid room and walked off, punching a call into her cell phone, probably to tell the Janzen people they’d bet on the wrong horse.
Jake pulled me into the room and held me. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“But I do, Jake. I need the money, and it’s money I don’t have to wait on. If I can do this, I can do the other shows, and can pay Marsha back. I’ll be able to stay afloat until the houses sell or the money from my books comes in.”
“Or you can walk away, Tara. Now.”
From his tone, I knew he meant my obligations, but it also felt like an opening to back out of what we had and where it was going. His dark eyes searched mine for an answer. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s do this.”
Tara looked beautiful. Cobalt blue silk shirt, white slacks, her hair drawn back in some kind of messy bun, trying so damn hard not to act nervous. The stylist finished her makeup and helped the sound tech mike Tara up. Jake glanced at his watch, fifteeen minutes until show time.
She’d surprised him after her meltdown earlier, plowing through the sound check, determined to make these shows he was sure would be a disaster a week ago successful. The setup looked great, huge screen to the right of the podium. The Janzen people had her reading most of the program off of a teleprompter. They also would be pre-selecting questions from the crowd while they waited to get into the theater. They’d bring the questions to her dressing room about an hour before the curtain went up. “I’d like to choose the questions myself; with Jake,” Tara had said. Amy Hill didn’t like it, but she agreed.
Still, Jake was a little nervous, he pulled out his phone and scrolled through the itinerary. Tomorrow would be brutal, a flight to Minneapolis at the ass crack of dawn, two bookstore appearances and then a show at eight. But Tara seemed up for it. Until now. “Would you step out for a minute?” he asked the stylist. She and the sound woman nodded and left the room.
A huge breath gushed out of Tara and then another and another. Face pale. “I can’t do this, Jake.” Hyperventilating. “I thought I could, but I can’t. I—.”
He kissed her, long and slow. Forcing her to breathe through her nose. Her body melted into his, and her breathing became less frantic. She pulled away, forehead on his chin. “Thanks, I needed that,” she whispered, “I need you.” And man, if he wasn’t already a goner, he was now.
“I have something for you.”
“But I’m dressed and you’ll mess up my hair,” she smiled against his lips.
He pulled the little trinket out of his pocket, opened her hand that was fisted in his shirt and gave it to her. It was just a little thing he’d found at one of the shops when he was on the island, a palm tree about the size of a quarter made out of pewter.
“Oh, Jake.” Shit, she was going to cry. She slipped it into her pocket. “Thank you.”
“I am so damn proud of you, Tara, I—.”
A young woman with a headset knocked, then poked her head in the door. “Ms. Jordan, curtain in ten. Time to go.”
Tara took a studdery breath, dabbed under her eyes. She smiled and his heart squeezed a little bit. “Ready,” she said and started out the door.
Jake stood in the doorway and watched her go down the hallway toward the wings. She turned and looked over her shoulder at him and then said something to the headset girl before hurrying back to him. She closed the door, charged back across the room, and kissed him like it was her last kiss. Ever. “I am so falling for you, Jake Randall.”
Terrified. That’s the only word to describe what it feels like to look out into the crowd and see the first few rows packed and know the house is packed too. All 3,617 people there to see me.
I looked down at the teleprompter at the intro, the words the Janzen people had written for me and froze. Someone coughed and it sounded like a gunshot. I looked up again toward the audience and opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I looked down again at the cursor, waiting for me to start reading the introduction.
Not my words. Words are what I know. They mean something to me. I shoved my hand in my pocket and fingered the palm tree Jake gave me, my own IOP magic. A few people in the audience began to murmur.
“Wow,” I said, a little too close to the mike. The sound screeched. Everyone laughed, but instead of becoming more nervous, if that was even possible, I felt my body relax a little. “I am so very honored you’re here tonight, hopefully with your significant other, your husband, your wife.” I could feel the Janzen people wherever they were in the theater, begging me to keep to the script, but if I was going to fail, I was going to do it on my own terms.
“At a bookstore this morning I saw a sign that said, marriage is like a deck of cards in the beginning. All you need are two hearts and a diamond. By the end, you wish you had a club or a spade.” More laughter. “Even though going in, you know that marriage is a partnership, that it’s work. The truth is, there is no perfect marriage.” No gasps, but the volume on the murmurs went up. “Over the years, but especially more recently, I’ve learned about partnerships, how valuable they are, how precious they are, especially in the beginning.
“You see, the beginning is part of the problem. We start out with so much love. In the book, I call it hyper-love. All he has to do is say your name and your heart beats out of your chest. All she has to do is walk into the room, and suddenly no one exists but her. Nothing compares with that newness, it’s exciting, almost addictive. The trick is to take all of those things that we have in our new beginning, the lust and the love, the patience and the kindness, the awareness, you name it, and learn how to save it, how to preserve it. How to grow it, because if you don’t continue to grow love, you will soon discover it has limits. We don’t like to believe that love has limits, but it gets used up, and when that happens, it’s so very hard to get back.
“I’ve seen this in my own life, how easy it is to nurture the beginning, to revel in it and we absolutely should. But there is so much more beyond the beginning, beyond hoping the marriage, the partnership never ends. That’s what we’re here to talk about tonight, the good stuff that comes long after the spectacular beginning.” I looked at the gigantic screen to my right, the technical guy’s cue cut to show the first email I received from a fan.
I stuck to the format for the rest of the show, but didn’t look at the teleprompter. I stumbled at times. Laughed at myself when I screwed up. When the lights came up for the audience participation portion of the program, I couldn’t see very far into the crowd. The Janzen people collected the cards, gave them to Jake and me about an hour before curtain. We rifled through them, picked about a dozen that would be read by the audience members who wrote them in the Q&A portion.
The last question came from a woman who looked to be in her fifties. The Janzen rep shoved a microphone in her face and I felt for her. She looked more nervous than I’d been earlier. “I’ve been married for thirty-four years. What if any advice…What if any…,” her voice breaking. She looked up from the card. “What if your partner has given up?”
“Then you find another new beginning, and when you do, you and your partner make it last.”
Chapter Fourteen
‡
Twelve cities and three weeks into the tour, I was more comfortable with the fucking itinerary as Jake lovingly called it. Actually, the itinerary was the only bother I had because I had Jake Randall in my bed every night. As long as he was with me, I felt like I could do anything, including entertain an arena full of people just by reading to them.
I was back in Charlotte, with book signings at the Barnes and Noble stores around town and two sold-out shows at the Belk Theater. I’d wired Marsha the thirty-five thousand dollars I owed her and let her know I’d gotten my check from Penguin for my romance series. I wasn’t surprised when she called, but she was surprised I still wanted to invest my money with her.
“Don’t be silly, Marsha. I trust you. Besides,
you stuck by me after Jim left.”
“God, I’ve missed you, Tara; I want to see you. Noticed you’re not staying at the house.”
“No, we’re at the staying at the Westin. It really is good to hear your voice. I want to see you too.”
“Looks like the real estate market is picking up here. I’ve seen a bunch of couples going through the lake house. How are things going with the beach house?”
“I got an offer a few days ago. My lawyer’s trying to contact Jim so he can sign the papers. I filed for a divorce, too.”
“Sounds like you’re taking good care of yourself, although I do hate to see you leave town. But you looked so happy with Jake, Tara, happier than I’ve seen you in a long time.”
“We’re still trying to figure things out as far as his work and mine, but I love him, Marsha.”
“I’m glad, honey. You deserve to be happy, but I sure miss you.”
“Me too. I called to see if you’d like some tickets to the show tonight.”
“I bought some online the minute they went on sale, and still ended up near the back of the theater.”
“Give those to someone. I’ll leave two on the front row for you at Will Call. Maybe we can have dinner and catch up afterwards.” I was excited about seeing Marsha and her seeing the show. I wondered if she’d bring Mike or if she would come with one of my old girlfriends who never called after Jim left.
Jake could see Tara was nervous. He wanted to put his arms around her, but knew he couldn’t. At least not now. “You’re on in fifteen minutes.” The tech at the CBS affiliate in Charlotte miked Tara up and then hurried into the studio, leaving him and Tara sitting at a bar top table in the large room that overlooked the news set.