by Lilian Darcy
He didn’t acknowledge her back-handed apology, which was probably a good thing. In a situation like this, they could easily spend hours batting “I’m sorry” and “That’s okay” back and forth at each other like hitting practise tennis balls over a net.
Instead, he asked, “How would you feel if I asked my mother to come, too? Not my dad. He’s already told me he couldn’t take it yet, and that’s his decision, but I know Mom would like to come. She just didn’t want to get in our way.”
“Of course she should come, if she wants. I’d like to meet Maggie’s other grandmother.”
“I’ll let her know. I’ll call her as soon as I can. In the interim, let’s talk about practical things.”
It turned out he meant schedules.
Shifts.
Timetables.
Meal and shower breaks.
He didn’t want to leave Maggie without a parent at her side for much longer than it took them to get through the equivalent of a nursing shift change-over conference, at their hotel suite.
“It, uh, wasn’t very useful the way I lost control, just now,” he said. “I’m going to blame it on low-energy levels. We need to factor in good breaks for both of us.”
“Do we need to actually roster it?”
“Yes. We do. We need to keep tabs on our energy levels, the way Maggie’s nurses keep tabs on her progress.”
“We need charts?”
“I’m serious.”
Yes, she could tell.
Serious and scared, and this was how he dealt with the fear—by trying to control things that couldn’t be controlled. It didn’t make any less sense than her own far more emotional way of reacting. It was different, but it came from the same place—what they felt and feared and wanted for Maggie.
“Okay, so what’s the plan?” she asked, not arguing, keeping it simple.
For Maggie.
“Why don’t I drive back to the hotel, try and nap, relax, get room service. You take a cab there at around eight or nine and I’ll head back here to Maggie for the night, till around the same time tomorrow morning. We’ll work it that way from now on.”
“Twelve hours apart from Maggie, every day?”
“Twelve hours getting a break, knowing the other one is there, touching her if she wants to be touched, ready to call the hotel the second there’s any significant change in how she’s doing. Let’s try it, Reba. We need some structure.”
“You’re the one who needs structure,” she had to say.
“So do you. You might not want it, but wants and needs are two different things.”
“You’re heading off now, Reba?” asked Maggie’s nurse—not one of her three primary carers, who were Shirley, Angela and Helen, but a woman called Lana, whom Reba hadn’t met until this afternoon.
She seemed nice, but there was a reason why preemies were assigned the same small roster of staff whenever possible. The babies needed it, and so did the parents.
Reba hated leaving Maggie with someone new, when she was so sick. Would Lana read Maggie’s signs right? Would she cluster the care routines as carefully as the others did, at a point where Maggie even seemed jarred and stressed by the soft sound of a single familiar voice?
“I don’t want to go,” Reba answered the nurse. “But I arranged with Lucas that I would.”
“Then you should. She’s been pretty stable the last couple of hours. Sleeping a little more comfortably.”
“I guess she is.”
But Maggie’s temperature was still up a degree, despite medication, and when she had her eyes open they looked glassy while her limbs seemed limp. You didn’t have to look very hard to see that she was a very sick baby, especially when you knew every hair on her head and every pore in her skin, the way Reba did.
In the seven hours since lunch, she’d barely left Maggie’s side, and yet there was so little she could do. Nothing. Did the soundless, motionless communication of love count for anything whatsoever, when a little girl was lost amongst so much equipment, when she was feeling so bad and fighting so hard?
What would it be like to hold you, sweetheart?
Wouldn’t it help you, to have you skin to skin against me, to hear my heart and my voice, and feel my warmth?
How can it be that you’re too sick and too small, even for that?
But apparently Maggie was, so all Reba had done, the whole afternoon, was sit and worry and wait and look. She’d seen every grimace of discomfort, every dip or peak of the figures on Maggie’s monitors, and she hadn’t even felt all the aches building in her stiffly held body until she’d stood up to leave. Now they seemed to burn in every muscle and every joint.
“And you haven’t eaten yet, right?” Lana asked.
“No,” she managed to answer. “Or pumped.”
“Go. We’ll look after her.”
That’s what everyone said when Lucas and I went to the ranch. And when we got back…
What had he said this afternoon? That wants and needs were two different things? She wanted to stay with Maggie. Didn’t Maggie need her, too?
It took a huge effort of will for her to whisper goodbye to her baby and leave.
As soon as Reba walked into their suite, Lucas could see she’d had a long, difficult afternoon.
She didn’t even try to smile at him, just dumped her purse on the coffee table, sank back on the couch and launched into a shaky and barely coherent summary of everything she thought he would want to hear.
Maggie’s state.
Maggie’s monitors.
Maggie’s nurse.
He cut her off before she’d finished. “I’ll see her soon, Reba. Don’t track back through it all. It doesn’t sound as if there’s been much of a change.”
“They’re adding some new medication, but I can’t remember what it’s called. Uh! Or even what it’s for.”
“I’ll hear about it when I go in. Let’s get you taken care of, first.”
He found the information folder containing the hotel’s room service menu, opened it at the right page and went to lay it in her lap. She reached out for it and their fingers touched, and he couldn’t help stroking the side of her hands with his thumbs, then sliding them higher until he reached the soft skin of her arms.
A tiny, weary smile quivered on her face, then snuffed out like a candle. “Thanks,” she said. “Now, what is there in here that I can pretend I want?”
“I pretended pretty well with a burger and fries, earlier.”
“Could I get those mashed, I wonder, to bypass the chewing stage?”
“Pasta? Risotto? You have to eat, Reba.”
“Oh, I do?” she drawled. “Gosh! Nobody told me that.”
He ordered her a chicken and mushroom risotto and a Caesar salad, and was told over the phone, “Minimum forty minutes.” This would delay his getting back to Maggie, but he wasn’t leaving until he’d seen Reba eat, because he strongly suspected she might not do it if he wasn’t here to make her.
“Why don’t you take a shower while you wait?” he suggested, restlessness surging in his body like pain.
He’d managed a couple of hours sleep this afternoon, but after he’d awoken the time had dragged. He’d ended up shooting e-mail after e-mail to Halliday corporate headquarters in New York, on trivial matters that various junior executives were handling quite competently in his absence.
And then he’d gone on the Internet and found some stuff on what could happen with preemies if they were kept purely on intravenous feeds for too long. He didn’t plan on mentioning this to Reba, because he knew she wouldn’t want to see it.
“You might feel better if you do,” he finished. “Fresher. Hungrier, even.”
But she just lay back against the couch and shook her head. Her dark, beautiful hair looked like the back end of a witch’s broom. At some point, she’d lost or removed the circle of elastic that held her sketchy ponytail together, and he wondered how long since those silky, messed up strands had felt the touch of a brush.
He could see her brush, right now, its plastic tortoise-shell handle sticking up from a side pocket on her overnight bag, just inside the bedroom doorway. He went and got it, but came back to find Reba’s eyes still shut and her face drained of everything but sheer fatigue. He sat down beside her, the brush in his hand, uncertain of his next move.
Lord, lack of certainty had been such a rare feeling for him in the past! Now it seemed to swamp him several times a day. Hating it, he decided to let it go, at least on the issue of brushing Reba’s hair.
No more second-guessing.
Just do it.
He began to stroke the springy bristles through her wild mane—gently, in case he hurt her, slowly, to give her a chance to tell him to stop. She didn’t, not with words or movement, so he kept going, soothed and nurtured by the action more than it could possibly be soothing and nurturing her, he suspected. Her hair tickled his fingers, and made a sound that reminded him of wind combing through the trees around the cabin at Seven Mile.
Her closed lids flickered, and she said, “Mmm.”
“Lay your head in my lap,” he whispered. “I can reach more of your hair, that way, and you don’t have to do a thing.”
Without waiting for her response, he coaxed her to topple toward him and nestled the back of her head across his thighs, propped higher by his feet wedged against the edge of the coffee table.
Her hair streamed out across the pale fabric of the couch. He bundled it in his fingers and swept the brush through it again and again, learning the shape of her head and the exact progression from fine skin to downy tendrils to thick strands at her temples and behind her ears.
He’d never touched a woman’s hair like this before. He’d never shared the kind of emotional vulnerability with someone that made such an intimate action possible—the kind of vulnerability that made you want to tend each other’s simplest, most timeless needs.
He felt a surging connection to this woman—this one, unique woman—which defied everything he’d told himself and her, over the past few days, about caution and good sense. With Maggie so sick, it felt wrong for her parents to deny the comfort they could take in each other.
Just wrong.
He couldn’t hold back. Not today. He wanted to bury himself in Reba’s heart and her body, and forget completely about the future.
Cradled in Lucas’s lap, Reba felt the moment when his touch changed.
At first, his actions had been as simple and tender as those of Maggie’s nurses when they adjusted her little knit cap or changed her position. Her whole spine had rippled with a tingling cascade of delicious sensation, and she’d felt so safe, suspended in a moment that had drifted out of time and simply stopped.
But now…
She heard the plastic bump of the brush on the end table beside the couch as he put it down, and he began to stroke her hair with his fingers instead. The ball of his thumb brushed across her lower lip. “I want you,” it said, and her body answered in full agreement.
With her eyes still closed she lifted her jaw to try and find that tantalizing, bluntly expressive touch again, but she found his mouth instead. He gathered her up into his arms and she helped him, winding hers around his neck, parting her lips and printing her mouth on his, over and over, deeper and deeper, not wanting this to stop—wanting the whole universe to stop, maybe, but not this.
She remembered that they’d kissed this way before, last September, and again at the cabin on Saturday night. Two days ago. It seemed much longer. Time was so distorted since Maggie’s birth, everything was out of place.
Everything except her mouth exploring his, giving him her soul to keep safe.
Her eyes streamed with the tears that still came so easily, and he must have tasted them, or felt the cool, stinging wetness. “Reba?”
“I’m fine. It doesn’t matter if I cry. It’s good.”
“Is it, sweetheart?”
“Everything I feel is so close to the surface.”
“Always. You don’t know what that does to me. Makes me so hungry for you, takes me somewhere I’ve never been.”
He muttered something she couldn’t hear, and kissed her even more deeply, his hands moving on her body, stroking one taut, aching breast, curving around her hip, moving back and down to feel the swelling heat between her thighs.
She dragged her mouth away for a moment, opened her eyes and looked at him—at his steady amber eyes, his thick lashes, the new lines of stress around his mouth, poised so close to hers.
“Don’t stop this,” she said, her voice not steady.
“You think I could?”
“You have, before. Don’t pull this out from under my feet again, now that we’ve gone so far. I can’t remember any of your arguments from the other night, about why it was wrong. And I don’t want to.”
“Neither can I.”
Maggie’s infection had changed something in both of them. Life could be so frail. Connections could fray and rip for so many reasons. All they wanted to do was grab onto something good now, while it was here in their hands, here in their bodies and hearts.
When Lucas pulled her from the couch, she clung to him as if he might somehow evaporate or melt away. They reached the bedroom almost staggering, holding each other, so impatient. Reba crossed her arms, grabbed the hem of her china blue cotton knit sweater and pulled it over her head, then discovered Lucas watching her, riveted by the way her breasts moved.
Electrified by the evidence of his desire, she unhooked her bra, dropped it to the floor and let him see everything—the heavy fullness since Maggie’s birth, the huge, darkened peaks of her nipples, the way her breathing had already quickened in anticipation.
“Finish,” he said. “Let me watch.”
She laughed, even though she still had tears on her cheeks. “It’s that good?”
“It’s better. Your hips. Your breasts. The shadow and the light. The way you move. Everything.”
“Do I get to see, too?”
“You get anything you want.”
“I just want you, no teasing. No delays.”
She didn’t even like saying the word. Delay reminded her of another word—setback—that had tortured both of them since they’d arrived back in Denver today. She just wanted to go forward.
As soon as he was naked, khaki chinos and cream polo shirt in a heap on the floor, he came and held her and she felt the prodding ridge of his arousal and the friction and pressure of her tight, jutting breasts against his chest. They rocked their hips together, slid across each other, ran their hands over whole landscapes of hot skin and tight muscle. They tasted each other, and whispered words that no one should dare to say to another human being, except when they were joined like this.
The bed covers were already turned down. He lay back and reached for her. She straddled him, feeling the weight of his hands cupping her cheeks. She trailed her lips across his chest, arched her spine to lift herself a little higher, so she could map his face with her fingers.
She found more new lines of stress, tiny ones, around his eyes. She kissed them, kissed every crease and every tightened plane on his face, wanting her lips to have the power to make them fade again.
Would their lovemaking do that?
It seemed possible, with such passionate sensation surging inside her.
Let my body heal you. Let my body make us both forget, just for a while.
He wanted the same thing, and believed in its power just as she did. He’d even prepared for it, she found, when he opened the bedside drawer and tore one of the new foil packets littered inside.
“Let me into you, Reba,” he whispered. “Let me feel you.”
“Yes, oh yes.”
Their need surged even higher, building like a storm-driven wave across the ocean, like thunder-heads in a summer sky. He drove faster and she clung harder, squeezing him, pulsing against him, flinging her head back and gasping as her climax splintered against his already convulsing body.
She
clung to him for minutes, once they lay still, listening to the push and pull of his breathing, feeling it against her chest and her cheek. Neither of them spoke until they heard the rumble of a cart in the corridor outside.
“If that’s room service…” Lucas growled.
They listened and waited, but the cart had moved on. Not for their room, apparently.
“It’ll be here, soon, though,” he said.
“You want me to bounce up and get dressed, ready to be hungry?”
“I want to see you eat before I leave.”
“I’ll eat. Lucas…?”
“Mmm?”
“What I said before, about pulling the rug out from under me on this—on our making love again—don’t do it now, either, will you?”
“Like I said before, do you think I would? Could?”
“I think you might. I’m afraid you might. You know. Step back. Back-pedal. Go back on what we felt a few minutes ago, when it happened. And I so hate that word back right now.” Her throat tightened. “I hate it.”
He was silent for a stretched out moment, and she knew she didn’t have to explain any further what she meant.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “I hate it, too. You’re right. Let’s try not to go back. Even if going forward is monumentally doomed to—”
Rap-rap-rap at the door.
This time, they hadn’t heard the cart.
“Just a second,” Lucas called.
He rolled onto his feet like a ninja, making the sheets ripple and snap like flags in the wind. He wasn’t going to let her nourishment escape back to the hotel kitchen untouched, he was going to hunt it down and set it in front of her and make sure she dealt with it as it deserved.
Reba knew they wouldn’t get the right chance to finish this conversation tonight. Maybe not for days, or not ever. Did that matter? Hadn’t they said everything that was really important? It wasn’t too hard to come up with the general gist to the end of a sentence containing the words monumentally doomed.
She didn’t need any further input from him.
She knew everything about what she’d given him, what she risked, and what she doubted he could ever give back.