He was a good mile and a half from his house. That meant no matter how he felt, his old ass had to get back up again. Unless he stroked out right here on the bench.
There had to be some other, less horrifying way to tighten up the places that loosened while he wasn’t paying attention. He’d have to find it if he was serious about this getting back in shape thing, and he was almost sure he was. Less sure than he was the first few steps out his door this morning, but still pretty sure.
Nancy aged really, really well. Much better than him and that was a problem, mostly for his ego, but also in another way. The more he saw of her the more wanted to see, but as exciting as it was to imagine her body looking as good as it felt, it only brought attention to his other, much bigger, problem.
His dick didn’t work.
At least not the last couple times he tried to put it to use anyway.
“Shit.” Paul twisted, trying to get more comfortable. The hard wood slats of the bench were digging into his shoulder blades through the sweatshirt he threw on, making the flesh around them hurt. Giving up, he pulled himself into a sitting position and pushed his head between his knees.
After a few more minutes, the urge to vomit and the threat of passing out from lack of oxygen began to subside. Unfortunately without the discomfort to distract him, he now had plenty of brain capacity to focus on what he was only just now willing to acknowledge. Mostly because he never truly believed this thing with Nancy would ever make it this far.
What woman wanted a man who couldn’t fuck her? Sure, there was more than one way to skin a cat. There was no doubt in his mind he could please her other ways, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t for a man, and he could only assume it wasn’t for a woman either.
“Hi Paul.”
He jerked up straight. The sudden movement made him dizzy and brought back the nausea. Or it was something else making him sick to his stomach.
Carol stood close in front of him, smiling brightly.
Paul squinted up at her. He remembered Nancy’s younger sister from high school but still probably wouldn’t have recognized her yesterday if she and Nancy didn’t look so much alike. Carol wore too much make-up and her hair was a weird color, plus he was fairly certain she had some of that paralyzing stuff Hazel was so keen on in her face, but otherwise, they could almost be twins.
He gave her a nod. “Carol.”
There was nothing good he had to say to the woman so it was best to keep it short. Since he was still not caught up on his oxygen intake it was easy to do.
“I’m glad I ran into you.” She sat down beside him clearly unaware he didn’t have any intentions of conversing with her. “Can you think of any way I could smooth things over with Nancy?” She crossed one leg over the other and leaned ever so slightly toward him. “I just don’t know how I can show her how sorry I am.”
He considered suggesting she just leave. Considering her past behavior it wasn’t too far out of the realm of possibilities. Unfortunately, it looked like she was planning on staying around, at least for now.
Carol scooted even closer. She blinked long and slow at him and when she spoke again her voice was low and soft. “I mean, how was she able to get you to forgive her for what she did to you?”
This was uncharted territory for him. Up until now, anyone who he considered a threat to Nancy had a sack between their legs. If they got out of line, he’d gently put them back where they belonged. Usually with his fists. But that option was off the table in this scenario.
“Just leave her alone.” He scooted down the bench needing a little more distance from the woman whose mere presence threatened the happiness of the person who meant more to him than anyone in the world.
“Oh Paul!” Carols eyes quickly filled with tears. “I never realized how deeply I hurt her.” She flung her arms out as she leaned his direction.
He slid off the edge of the bench, narrowly avoiding her body as she attempted to collapse against him. She caught herself and looked up at him, crocodile tears running down her cheeks.
Paul stepped back, making sure he was far outside her reach. He wasn’t ever going to be her shoulder to cry on. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
He immediately turned and took back off in a decent jog, anger propelling him forward as he pushed himself to put as much distance between them as possible. That woman had some nerve trying to put him in the middle of her mess. If she thought he would ever put the trust Nancy had in him on the line to help her, well she would be dead wrong.
Before he knew it, his legs were carrying him up the steps to his front porch. He was back at home. Not too awfully sick feeling or even too terribly tired. Breathing a little heavy, but in a good way.
Maybe Mina was on to something after all. It just took the right emotion to get moving. In his case, anger.
Letting himself in, Paul grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and stood in the middle of the room, tapping one foot as he sipped.
He felt better than he had this morning when he finally gave up on sleeping and drug his exhausted ass out of bed. The feeling of being ready to crawl out of his skin as he pulled out every hair in his head was all but gone. He pulled out a chair at the table and sat down, stretching his legs out in front and leaning back.
He’d tossed and turned all night trying to figure out what in the hell his problem was. For years, he’d stayed away from Nancy, always for the most noble sounding reasons. Her husband died. She was busy raising two boys. She had a business to run. Most recently, Rich died.
The reasons always sounded right and respectful and honorable, but deep down, they were all one thing and one thing only.
Lies.
He didn’t stay away from Nancy for her. He stayed away from Nancy for himself. He made every excuse he could think of to stay away from her. All for one reason.
He was a chicken shit.
A scaredy cat.
A pussy.
Deep down, he never blamed Nancy for choosing Sam, because deep down he always thought Sam was better. At least until he found out the kind of husband Sam had really been to her. He’d been a shitty friend, but it never really occurred to Paul he would be just as shitty of a husband.
But even once he found out just what Sam was, he still didn’t pursue Nancy. He made a million excuses why, but the real reason was one he never could admit to.
Now he was faced with all those excuses being shot down. And he still was grasping at straws, trying to find some bullshit reason to step away from the only woman he’d ever really wanted.
What the fuck was wrong with him? Even as she told him she wanted him, needed him, all he could do was try to think of reasons she shouldn’t. Try to think of reasons to leave her alone, and he couldn’t figure out why.
Until this morning anyway. As he was panting his way down the sidewalk, wondering what in the hell he was thinking deciding to just up and take off for a run, he realized exactly what he was doing.
He was still trying to make himself good enough for her.
****
“You are shitting me.”
Nancy leaned her face into her hands. “You have no idea how much I wish I was.”
“Son of a bitch.” Thomas leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “Did she leave?”
“I don’t know.” She hoped so. It was awful to say, but there was no reason for her to stay. The only reason Nancy would have ever hoped for Carol’s return was gone now, a victim of his mother’s selfish decisions.
“Does she have any idea what she did to Rich?”
“I don’t know.” Carol had never really been one to think of how her actions might affect other people. Obviously.
Nancy always assumed it was due to the fact they lost their mother at a young age. Jim did his best, but his own grief kept him from being there the way two young girls needed. Carol ended up so focused on her own feelings of loss and sadness that she never learned to think about anyone else’s emotions,
even her own son’s. As a result, she put Rich through exactly what she experienced as a child.
Worse actually. Their mother didn’t choose to leave them. Cancer made the decision for her.
“Are you going to tell Beth?”
Thomas had so many questions and Nancy had no answers for him. “I think that’s something we need to talk about.”
“She needs to know.” Mina looked up from across the table.
Thank God. Nancy was beginning to worry that the person whose opinion she really wanted was not going to offer it up. Mina had been quiet for the entire conversation. Probably as shocked by the whole thing as Nancy was.
Mina leaned onto the table. “You can’t shelter her. She’s strong. She needs to know.”
Nancy could feel her emotions tightening her throat. “I just worry it will do more harm than good.” Beth appeared to be doing better, coming out of the dark place she was in after Rich’s death and Carol showing up could derail her progress.
It sure as hell was screwing up Nancy’s.
“I don’t think so.” Mina looked at Nancy across the table. “It’s difficult to be angry at someone who’s dead. Even if they deserve it.”
Boy, didn’t she know that. If Rich was still alive she would want to kick his ass. But he wasn’t. He was dead. Coming to terms with that was the easy part. Dealing with who he was at the end was…
Mina shrugged. “It might actually help her to have someone to direct her anger at. Even if she never sees her face to face, just being able to feel angry with no guilty strings attached might help her move in the right direction.”
It was all so overwhelming. Nancy tipped her head back and tried to relax as tension started to build in her shoulders. “I don’t know how to tell her.”
“I know, but it has to come from you.” Mina reached across the table to grab her hand. “I don’t know if you realize how important you are to Beth, especially right now.”
Nancy shook her head. “I know I help her out with the girls, but she and her mother are so close.”
Mina squeezed her hand. “That’s all well and good, but her mother has never been through anything like what Beth is going through right now.” Mina leaned closer, her eyes serious. “You are the only person who has lost exactly what Beth has lost. She needs you.”
Nancy propped her elbows on the table and held her head in her hands, using the fingertips of each hand to massage her temples. This was not something she was equipped to deal with, let alone help someone else deal with. “I don’t know that I can be any help to her.”
At this point Nancy didn’t know how she felt about Carol’s sudden reappearance. Part of her was angry. Part of her was confused.
Part of her was suspicious.
Why in the hell did she just show up after all these years? She said it was because she thought Nancy needed her, but Carol was never one to want to help anyone.
At least not the Carol who left her son in her sister’s care and skipped town.
Nancy sat up straight. She was going to have to tackle this situation head on. “I think I need to talk to Carol before I tell Beth.”
Beth was as much her daughter as Rich was her son, and Nancy would be damned if she risked her well-being simply because she didn’t want to deal with her difficult sister. “Maybe she won’t be as big of a pain in the ass as she was thirty years ago.”
One could only hope.
“I wish there was something I could do to help.” Mina’s brow was furrowed with concern.
Thomas straightened. “I’ll go with you.”
Nancy patted his arm. “No. I’ll be fine.”
Now that she thought about it, talking to Carol might make her better than fine. There was a lot Nancy wanted to say to her. For herself, for Beth and the girls.
For Rich.
“I have a lot to say to your aunt Carol. There’s some things she and I need to get straight if the woman wants to have a snowball’s chance to meet Beth.” It was time for Carol to understand exactly what she did when she left all those years ago. To realize how her decision affected people then, and continued to cause pain for people now. Of course this all hinged on one thing her sister wasn’t known for.
Being willing to listen to someone’s mouth besides her own.
SIXTEEN
Paul groaned as he forced his aching body out of the truck. As miserable as he felt yesterday during his run, it was nothing compared to the agony he was in today. Every muscle in his body screamed in protest of any move he made.
He took the hottest shower he could stand hoping it would help, and it did, for all of five minutes. Now, after sitting in his truck the mere fifteen minutes it took to get to Nancy’s, his body was already tightened back up. Lifting his feet from the ground was nearly impossible, forcing him to shuffle along like an eighty-year-old man.
The door swung open. Paul tried to straighten up and walk like a normal human instead of the missing link, but it quickly became obvious his attempts were ineffective. The concern furrowing Nancy’s brow was visible even from twenty feet away and it only became worse the closer he came.
“Are you okay? Why are you walking like that?” She stepped to the side letting him walk inside before closing the door.
He stopped, needing to rest just a minute and give the muscles twitching in the back of his legs a chance to calm down. “I’m fine, just a little stiff.”
He felt her hands gently tug at the shoulders of his jacket, slipping it down his arms. If it hadn’t been such a struggle to get it on, he might have put up a fight over her babying him. How in the hell his arms and shoulders ended up just as sore as his legs, he’d never know. Unfortunately, he wasn’t so sure he could get the damn thing off himself so he let her take it and hang it up.
“Are you hurt?” She ran her hands over him, slowly.
He wanted to explain, but the feel of her hands as they softly ran across his back to his shoulders and down his arms was such a welcome distraction to the self-inflicted discomfort he’d been suffering from made it hard to focus on anything else besides the feel of her touching him.
Suddenly she stopped. Paul’s eyes flew open. He hadn’t even realized he’d closed them. She was standing in front of him, her brow furrowed and a frown on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been asking you the same thing.”
He cleared his throat as he tried to clear his mind and refocus. “I went for a run and I’m a little sore.”
“A run.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “What possessed you to go on a run?”
He mentally tossed around different explanations he could give and tried to come up with the least embarrassing yet still plausible option.
“Osteoporosis.” He read an article that people who partook in regular weight bearing exercise were less likely to suffer from osteoporosis. While he wasn’t old by any stretch of the imagination, it wasn’t as far off as it was twenty years ago.
Nancy smiled, her lips were smooth and satiny looking as they separated to expose her teeth. All perfectly aligned, with the exception of a small gap between her front teeth that he would argue was also perfect.
“I don’t know that osteoporosis is something you should be worrying about.”
“I could say it is something everyone should be worried about.” He eyed her trying to gauge if she believed his excuse. He’d hoped to be able to simply tighten some things up without anyone, most importantly Nancy, noticing. Especially since his reasoning was rooted in insecurity.
“Fair enough.” She took a step toward the kitchen. “Hungry?”
She would quickly discover that was a question where he would never answer no. When it came to good food, he was always hungry. “I am.”
He was quickly becoming spoiled. In the past week he hadn’t eaten cold bologna once. He spent almost every night with Nancy and she cooked each one of them, sending him home with any leftovers.
Paul followed Na
ncy into the kitchen, the smell of dinner making his empty stomach growl. He’d skipped lunch just in case and now he was beyond starving.
Man was he glad he did.
Nancy made chili with homemade cornbread. The chili had chunks of meat mixed in with the normal ground beef and two types of beans. The cornbread had cheese and jalapenos making it rich and spicy and the perfect accompaniment to the chili.
He ate more than he should have, but it was hard to stop. Just like everything else was with Nancy. Hard to stop once he started.
Nancy smiled across the table at him as she finished the last spoonful of her dinner. “Good?”
“Very.” He resisted the urge to rub his stomach, instead leaning back against the chair.
“See what you missed out on by not getting married?” Her eyes were glued to him as the words left her mouth.
He could tell her that’s not why he never got married. He could tell her she was the only woman he’d ever imagined himself marrying. But he wouldn’t. Not yet anyway.
So, he just smiled and stood up, stacking her bowl in his and taking them to the sink. As he ran the water, she came behind him, hooking one finger in the belt loop on the side of his jeans.
“You can leave those.” She leaned into his side, her breast rubbing across the outside of his bicep. “We can watch a movie.” She looked up at him, her eyes holding his as she shifted her weight allowing her breast to drag back across him. The pale blue of her eyes filled with the blackness of her pupils as they dilated. Her lips parted and a barely perceptible flush tinted her skin.
It was a look he’d imagined seeing on her face many times over the years but now only struck fear deep inside him. Nancy wanted him and the realization was enough to make him consider another run. One that would be straight to the driver’s seat of his truck.
Because as much as he might want to take her in every way she wanted him to, based on recent history, the chances of that being possible were slim.
Regret (Never Waste a Second Chance Book 2) Page 14