“So, what kinds of things did you do after you and Isabelle separated?”
“Oh, no.” He shook his head for emphasis. “We’re not going there tonight. ’Cuz, a part of me—maybe more than one—is still trying to get you into bed with me sometime very soon. It’s too early in our physical relationship for me to tell you my sordid tales.” He winked at her. “But, even though I’ve been giving you shit, you gotta know, I do get it. I do empathize with you being at this stage. This beginning of the end of the marriage. So, just because in a lot of ways it’s a Very Bad Idea for you to sleep with me tonight, and vice versa, I’m not going to discourage it. I’m just trying to be open with you about the dangers. For both of us, really.”
Again, it was the ease with which he said stuff like this. The way he perceived it and processed it. She was stepping into brand new territory when they communicated. He was so direct. His understanding of human frailty so strong. He didn’t let her get away with anything, yet he was still so compassionate. She’d never met anyone like him. Not ever.
She had walked through his front door having fantasized a thousand times about the two of them having hot sex. Knowing it could be a reality for her, though—and being able to visualize it for real—gave her the courage to pull back. To say to him, “I want to be with you, but you’re right. This isn’t ideal timing. Maybe tonight we can just talk, snuggle, kiss.”
“Sure, Tamara. And while we’re doing that, you need to tell me if or when you want it to stop. You especially need to tell me if you think there’s even a one-billionth chance that you’ve changed your mind and you want to stay with Jon. Just don’t try to hide from me what you really want and really need. I know it’ll be confusing and inconsistent. I know it’ll change from one moment to the next. That’s okay. Just keep telling me the truth.”
She leaned over, and just before she kissed him again, she whispered, “Okay.”
And for the longest time, those were the last words spoken aloud. They shifted positions on the sofa until their bodies were stretched out—his partly curling over hers—and they made out like the teenagers they hadn’t been for decades. It was passionate, involving, and the tenderness of his touch almost made Tamara cry.
At one point, it must have been an hour or more later, they suddenly realized they were both cold and ravenous. Aaron got up to revive the dwindling fire and to bring them hastily made ham and cheese sandwiches. It was after seven, completely dark outside and a forbiddingly nippy night. Tamara was glad she didn’t have to go out there alone and walk back into her equally chilly house.
Aaron caught her staring out the window. “Do you need anything from home? Contact solution? Toothbrush?”
“I don’t wear contacts,” she said. “And I’ll finger brush and borrow your mouthwash. Deal?”
“Oooh. Nothin’ says hot to me like a freshly finger-brushed mouth.”
She laughed and they ate their sandwiches in companionable silence. Then, revived by the exercise, or maybe the nourishment, they slid back to their languorous spots on the sofa, and Aaron started kissing her again. This time harder, heavier, with more feeling and force.
He was doing it, she realized. He was doing just what he had said he would do: trying to get her to sleep with him. He had candidly admitted to it being a bad idea, but also confessed his intentions for giving it a shot. Aaron was honest that way. And this time, he did more than curl onto half of her. Fully clothed, he put more of his weight on her legs, her hips, her chest. He pressed deeper against her everywhere their bodies touched. With his hands, he explored any region of her not covered by any other part of him. Through his jeans and hers, she could feel his erection. She didn’t have to fantasize—or visualize, for that matter—anything at all. It was all right there. It was all too tangible to be trapped in her imagination.
Nevertheless, she broke their kiss long enough to ask a question she’d wondered on a number of occasions. “Do you have a tool belt?”
He groaned. “Oh, God. You’re one of those.”
“C’mon, Aaron. It’s sexy. Tell me you’ve—”
She didn’t have a chance to finish because he rolled fully atop her, crushed his mouth to hers and rammed his pelvis hard against her. She gasped. Guess he wore his tools all day, every day.
He yanked at her waistband. “These need to come off.” He sprung off her, pulled her upright and moved about the room, snapping the blinds closed completely and adding another log to the fire. Then he wandered into the bathroom, dug around in there for a minute and returned, only to begin tossing the cushions off the sofa.
“What are you doing?”
He lobbed a handful of Trojans onto the coffee table and pulled out the bed inside the couch. “Sleeper sofa.” He pointed to the thin mattress. “My bed’s softer, but there’s no fireplace upstairs.”
“And these?” she asked, waving her open palm at the condoms.
“Better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. Isn’t that what you told me once?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So, I’m breaking that rule. Tell me yes or no. I can escort you home right now because, as I’ve already been compelled to warn you, this is a supremely bad idea. But I’m not going to fight against well-informed bad judgments. You have all the background. You know we shouldn’t be doing this. It’s not wise, even if you’ll be legally separated soon. But it’s also been a long time for me and, like I said, I wanna nail you in front of a roaring fire, so…”
Oh, this was interesting. She hadn’t asked him much about his love life post-divorce. “How long has it been?”
“Five months, almost six—so, expect enthusiasm.”
They met each other’s gaze and laughed. And this—this, too—was something she had never had with Jon. Or even with the handful of men she had slept with before getting married.
Suddenly, a conversation with her aunt from years ago finally made sense. Aunt Eliza had said her husband was funny in bed. That they could joke about everything, even their sex life. Tamara hadn’t experienced that. Jon took every aspect of their life and their relationship seriously. He took himself even more so. In their bedroom, he was either solemn or intense. A workaholic in there as he was everywhere. And, after a while, she’d lost what little bit of humor she’d had about intimacy. When Aunt Eliza told her this about her uncle, Tamara had already been married for a dozen years. She could understand intellectually what her beloved aunt was saying, but it had never seemed real to her. Not until this night.
She unbuttoned her jeans. “I’m staying.”
He made a weird sound that seemed to come from the very back of his throat. “Good.” He unbuttoned his jeans, too, and pulled them off. He nodded in the direction of her pullover. “I wouldn’t cry if you took that off also.”
She disrobed to her underwear and planted herself on the now-open sofa bed. She struck a languid pose, waiting for him to slide onto the mattress next to her. Which he did in a matter of seconds.
She ran the tips of her fingers over his bare arm, enjoying the texture of the muscle just below his skin. In a dreamy voice, she said, “So, you’re saying, if I stay here tonight, we can just cuddle?”
Through heavy-lidded eyes, she watched his jaw tighten. Watched him swallow and nod. Very slowly. “We can just cuddle,” he said through a sigh. “Are you telling me that’s what you want?”
She opened her eyes wide and grinned at him. “Nope. I want you to nail me in front of the fire. Try to make me regret this—how did you put it? ‘Well-informed bad judgment.’ I dare you.”
“Did I not say you were the manipulative one? Hmm?” Then he embraced her, engulfed her, rocked into her. And, even though she knew this was a fling and it could never last beyond a few pleasurable, transitional months, she had to acknowledge Aaron was much better than her vibrating bunny.
Still, in the quiet hours of the night, she couldn’t help but suffer the stabs of guilt she would have to be a hard-hearted bitch not to feel. How arrogant she
was, really, to act as though she and Aaron had both made these terrible marital choices. Didn’t everyone know a spousal crisis took two people to form? Based on both her behavior and Aaron’s—it was likely they were each the causes of their respective marital rifts, not just the injured victims. In which case, perhaps they deserved each other.
“Hey,” he said, his voice sleepy since it was probably two A.M. She was facing away from him, but he caressed her shoulder and pulled higher the blanket he had thrown onto them earlier. “Are you regretting?”
She twisted toward him so she could look him in the eye. “No, Aaron. Not a bit.”
They chatted a little longer, finally finished the last of the Sauvignon Blanc, channel surfed until they had watched snippets of about ten different stupid cable sitcoms and made love again. This time so long and leisurely, she was left drained of the energy to even dwell on the mess she would have to deal with at home.
Exhausted, she and Aaron fell deeply asleep and woke up embarrassingly late the next morning.
As it turned out, no one would have been any the wiser if Tamara had not left her cell phone at home.
Jennifer and Bridget stared at each other as the clock inched ten minutes past nine, then twenty minutes past nine, then thirty…and, still, Tamara hadn’t shown up for their standing coffee date.
“It’s not like her to blow us off,” Bridget said. “She’s never done that before.”
Jennifer agreed. “She’s always at least called or e-mailed one of us.” She pulled out her cell phone, dialed Tamara’s home number and got the answering machine.
“She’s not there?” Bridget asked.
Jennifer shook her head and tried Tamara’s cell number but got the same result.
Bridget bit her lip. “Should we be worried? Maybe go over there?”
“Let’s give her a few hours. If we don’t hear from her by noon, I can drive over and check up on her. Hard for me to believe she just forgot. Something must’ve happened.”
Of course, Tamara did—eventually—wake up. She remembered the Indigo Moon Café and her friends, and she said, “Oh, shit.”
Using Aaron’s cell, she left an apology message on Bridget’s machine. With Jennifer, she got a hold of her in person.
“Sorry. I just overslept,” Tamara lied (in principle if not in fact).
Jennifer thought herself quite charitable to go along with this charade. But there was the odd phone number that showed up on her Caller ID and the even odder tone in Tamara’s voice, which her friend might have camouflaged on voice mail, but not in a real-time interaction.
Jennifer wasn’t fooled. She knew all about covering up.
20
Jennifer
Saturday, November 13
In the past couple of weeks since the big Halloween party, the stalemate between Jennifer and Michael only solidified. She wasn’t sure how they had managed it, but somehow they both acquired the useful skill of never occupying the same room at the same time. Veronica and Shelby, understandably, found this disconcerting.
Jennifer didn’t know how Michael chose to answer their daughters’ questions about why one of them always slept on the couch these days (something she and Michael typically did only on rare occasion, when one person was up all night with a bad cold or flu). Her pat response to the girls’ expressions of concern was to tell them, “Don’t worry. Your father and I are just going through a difficult patch in our relationship. We need time to think.” Then, to Shelby’s inevitable, “How long is this gonna last?” and Veronica’s infuriated, “I knew something was going on! What happened?” Jennifer, again, never veered from her answer of “We just had a disagreement about something. It doesn’t involve either of you girls. We’ll work it out.”
Veronica huffed and stalked away, not even bothering to correct her on the use of “girls” versus “women.” Shelby just hid in her room.
Michael, whose conversation to her in the past week had been limited to scintillating phrases such as, “I sent in the mortgage payment yesterday,” “I’ll pick up Shelby from her friend’s house” or “I’ve got a department meeting that goes until four-thirty,” addressed her briefly that morning (as he slipped by her, hastily retreating from the kitchen as she entered it). “Are you going to be gone tonight?” he asked.
Over a number of days, she had thought a great deal about her answer to that question and her reason for it, but to Michael she only said, “Yes.” She said it, however, very clearly.
He emitted a noise, something she took to be disgust, and sometime around noon he left the house with both of their daughters for a movie day. Shelby shot Jennifer an anxious glance on her way out the door. Veronica narrowed her eyes at her mom and dramatically threw her palms up in a show of chronic irritation.
By two-thirty, however, Jennifer had packed an overnight bag—just in case she needed it (a snowstorm in mid-November wasn’t unheard of in the Midwest), finished a number of chores around the house, double-checked her e-mail and voice mail (each contained messages from David, which she returned quickly—“Yes, I’m coming!”) and chose an outfit to wear that was both comfortable for driving three hours round-trip and, also, flattering on her. She wasn’t a fashion hound like Tamara, but she hadn’t seen anyone, except for that one time with David, since graduation. It wouldn’t kill her to look nice.
The reunion started at five o’clock (well, 5:07, to be exact), but with weekend traffic to consider, lane closures on the toll roads or any other surprises, she’d give herself an hour’s leeway.
There was a familiarity to her drive down to C-IL-U, which made her thankful for her prior excursion last month. She knew precisely which landmarks she could expect to see on the interstate and which radio stations came in clearest in her car. That, at least, was comforting. Just as before, though, she was assaulted by gloomy melodies on the station she’d tuned in to, which convinced her that the seventies were a dreadfully depressing era. (“Fire and Rain” by James Taylor, anyone?) But flipping stations didn’t help. Neither the eighties power ballads nor the angsty nineties grunge eased her anxiety. Country hits, rap and alternative were not consistently cheering. And nothing about the new, post-millennium music her daughters loaded onto their iPods could soothe her either.
So, it was back to the decade of disco, bell-bottoms and the original Star Wars action figures. But, between Yvonne Elliman belting out “If I Can’t Have You” and that disturbing song called—can you believe it?—“Torn Between Two Lovers,” Jennifer found herself wishing for one of Luke Skywalker’s light sabers so she could slit her wrists.
By the time she reached campus, her road trip (morose melodic accompaniment aside) had successfully helped her transition from her Michael world to her David one. Although, in remembering Tamara’s question—“Which world are you in when you’re alone?”—Jennifer still had no answer. Was there an independent Jennifer World out there, or was her “world” simply comprised of fractured pieces…collected castoffs of her parents’ lives, her time with David, her marriage with Michael, her small circle of friends and her daughters? And how did some people instinctively know who they were and where they belonged? She felt herself to be little more than camouflage-colored wallpaper on the screen of her own life. A lost chameleon.
Even after a leisurely drive through town and the careful selection of a parking space, she was still too early to venture over to the Vat Building. So, she sat in her car and applied a light layer of powder and a little lipstick. Then she stared out the window, watching as the sun descended on the campus of her youth.
Her cell phone rang. David.
“You here yet?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, come to the lounge. Help me set up.”
“Isn’t Mitch there helping?” she asked him. “I don’t want to get in the way.”
“Please, Jenn.”
And that was how she found herself facing an assembly of acquaintances—a few who had actually been close friends back then
—a full half hour prior to the start of the event. In fact, of the fifteen confirmed attendees, eleven were there early, so eager were they to reestablish that fleeting sense of unity and techie supremacy they’d felt within these walls. It had once flowed like electricity through their fingertips. That night, it was clear this was no longer the case but for a select few.
The first person to see her walk through the door was Pete, one of the CPU regulars from their college years. “Whoa, Jennifer?” he said, grinning. “Time’s been good to you. You look great.”
She couldn’t honestly exclaim the same—he’d grown both bald and pudgy—but what a warm, welcoming smile he still had. She grinned back and said, “Thanks, Pete. It’s wonderful to see you, too. How have you been?”
He told her a bit about his wife, their three little ones and the newest baby boy that’d arrived in April. The love he had for his family, however, could not mask the wistfulness he felt in being back in this room. Jennifer understood that. The world had once been limitless inside the Vat Building. They had once been untouchable. Neither was true anymore.
She saw David watching her from across the room. He lifted his hand in a wave and indicated he’d be there in a minute. She turned her attention back to Pete, who was still chattering sweetly about his family.
“Oh, but this story is really cute,” he said, and launched into a tale about his four-year-old daughter. But before he got out more than one sentence about her attachment to “Dolly” her stuffed llama, he was interrupted by Bill—one of the always obnoxious Ehle brothers—carrying a cheese, sausage and cracker tray into the Techie Lounge.
“Yo, Jennifer. Long time, sunshine,” Bill the more annoying twin said. “Hey, Pete, can you set this down on that table over there for me? Thanks, man.” He deposited the tray into Pete’s hands and, with a turn of his head, dismissed him. Pete blinked and slunk away as if slapped.
Friday Mornings at Nine Page 30