“Screw it,” he whispered to his empty house.
Doug punched in the five-digit code. The safe gave a long beep, almost as if it were deciding whether to cooperate, and then popped open with a clunk of the locking mechanism. As he reached in, his fingers grazed the handle of his Glock, causing his pulse to quicken. There were so many things a gun would solve, but Doug had never been enough of a coward to ever seriously consider suicide. His life hadn’t turned out as he’d hoped, but he was still above ground. He might not like who he had become, might still burn with the guilt of not being there when Cherie needed him, but he didn’t hate himself enough to think a violent exit would be preferable to his current life. It turned out that there were many things he was willing to do to resolve his problems, but that wasn’t one of them.
He touched the key ring, snatched up the keys, and pulled them from the safe. For a second he stared down at his half-closed hand, studied the jagged teeth of the visible keys, wondering if he could do this. Baxter and Franco would be very unhappy with him—more than unhappy, they’d probably hurt him badly. If he really wanted out of the jobs they were planning, the smart thing to do would be to give them the keys and tell them to leave him out of their plans from now on. But then the keys would still lead the cops back to Harpwell’s Garage. He would be questioned, and once he had turned his back on them he couldn’t be sure about Baxter and Franco covering for him.
“Shit,” he whispered, feeling the jagged weight of the keys in his grasp.
His decision had already been made. He had to get rid of the keys.
As he reached up to close the safe, the doorbell rang. He twisted around and stared in the direction of the front door as if he could see it through walls and floors. Barely breathing, half paralyzed, he clutched the keys and turned to glance out the window to confirm that the storm still raged outside. The snow had turned mostly to sleet and it pelted the glass in a harsh chorus. Who the hell would dare this weather to pay him a late-night visit?
The cops were definitely a possibility, here to question him or even arrest him. Baxter and Franco were another possibility. Either way, a late-night visit in an ice-and-snow storm did not bode well. Doug wetted his lips with his tongue; his throat and mouth were feeling very dry. What was he supposed to do with the keys in his hand? There was nowhere he could really hide them, which left him with only one practical choice. He put the keys back into the safe, closed the door, and relocked it.
Whoever was at the front door began to knock loudly, a series of raps followed by a long pause. He stood and listened. Then the doorbell came again and he thought he heard a distant voice, perhaps female, so faint that it might have been his imagination. He narrowed his eyes, paranoia turning to curiosity.
The house went silent. In that moment the idea of a surprise visitor seemed somehow preferable to letting whoever it was walk away without his ever knowing who it had been. He would be wondering—and fretting—about it for days.
Doug strode out of his bedroom and pounded down the steps. The sidelights on either side of the front door were veiled by gauzy curtains Cherie had picked out when they’d first moved into the house, so he couldn’t see outside. As he approached the door he had every intention of opening it, but he hesitated as he reached for the knob. The outdoor lights were off and the only noise was the skitter of sleet on the panes of the sidelight windows.
“Who is it?” he called, but too quietly.
The doorbell did not ring again, nor did anyone knock, but he had the unsettling sense that his visitor had not left, was instead waiting outside in the freezing rain.
“Hello?” he called again. “Who’s there?”
Wary, thinking again of the keys upstairs and what they might mean, and studying the dark, gauze-veiled sidelights, he forced himself to reach out and twist the dead bolt open.
When he heard the voice again there could be no mistake. His visitor was a woman. She still sounded far away but he heard the shriek of the storm around the house—the whole house shuddered with it—and he figured the wind had carried her words away.
“Doug?” she said, standing just on the other side of the door.
His first thought—a crazy, impossible dream of a thought—was that Cherie had come home. Though he had watched them lower her casket into the earth, he could not deny the sureness that came over him that somehow she had come back.
A shiver of fear ran up his back, his heart rejecting the impossible, even as he smiled excitedly and turned the knob, tugging the door open. It blew inward with such force that he nearly lost his grip on the knob. The wind blasted him and sleet spattered the tile of the foyer, wet slush immediately building up on the small rug in front of the threshold.
For a second or two, Doug didn’t recognize the woman who stood on the front stoop. She held a burgundy umbrella that dripped all around the edges. Her long coat was black, and the wet slush had begun to build up into a layer of wet ice on the fabric where the umbrella could not cover her. Wide hazel eyes gazed out from beneath black bangs, somehow both pleading and joyful. Her long hair framed her face, and it was due partly to this change in style that he did not know her at first.
“Hey,” she said softly, and for a second longer she sounded uncannily like Cherie. But of course it was Cherie that his heart had hoped for.
Doug blinked. “Angela?”
One corner of her mouth lifted in a shy smile. “Hey,” she said again. And then she shrugged, giving him an apologetic look. “Do you think I could come in? It’s kind of nasty out here.”
“Shit, yes, of course,” he said, reaching out and taking her hand to guide her in from the storm. “I’m sorry. I just wasn’t expecting anyone and I was half asleep and then I wasn’t sure if I’d heard a knock or not. And now I’m babbling like a friggin’ idiot.”
As she closed her umbrella, Angela Ristani smiled sweetly at him and he felt as if he were in some kind of alternate reality. Other than occasionally at the supermarket or in line at Carter’s Ice Cream, he hadn’t seen her since they had broken up, more than two years earlier. Somehow, in the time that had passed, Angela had become even more beautiful. There had always been an edge to her, a harshness that Doug figured maybe nurses just had to adopt in order to survive in their profession.
“You’re not an idiot, Doug,” she said, setting her umbrella on the tile floor.
Angela’s black, heavy wool greatcoat was nearly soaked through. The sleet that had accumulated on the cloth was quickly melting, some of it dripping onto the throw rug. Doug pulled himself away from her gaze long enough to shut the door and then turned back to her. For a second it seemed like she’d brought the winter inside with her—as if closing the door hadn’t been enough—and then the chill passed and the warmth of the radiators struggled to make up for the infusion of cold air.
“It’s good to see you,” she said, still smiling and searching his eyes. “Really good.”
Doug gave a nervous laugh. “You too, Angie. Really. But also a little strange. Kind of bizarre, you just showing up on my doorstep in the middle of a storm.”
She looked stricken. “You don’t want me here?”
Something in her voice, some plaintive quality, made him look at her more closely. Her beauty had never been in doubt, not even when he had ended things with her. But Angela Ristani had too many rough edges, some of them merely abrasive but some of them sharp enough to draw blood. She had been Cherie’s closest friend, but Doug had first met Angela first. They had met at a little Irish pub downtown called the Peddlar’s Daughter, both of them approaching the bar to put in orders on a crowded night. They’d joked about being beer-gophers for their friends, and soon enough they had abandoned the people they’d come in with and gone off to huddle in a corner. Angie had been a flirt and a bit of a bitch, confident and brassy, and when he asked for her phone number she had done something he would never forget: she had arched an eyebrow and her smile had been a kind of challenge.
“I could give you my
number,” she had said that night, “or you could just take me home.”
After that one night together, he had learned that Angela had a boyfriend and soon their entanglement had become a friendship. It was Angie who had first introduced him to Cherie. Years after the storm that had killed his wife and her ex-husband, they’d crossed paths in the Peddlar’s Daughter again, and found some solace in each other. For months they had tried to fuck all the grief and anger out of their hearts until Doug began to believe that they had each been only half successful, leaving him with all his grief and her with all her anger.
In the months they had spent together she had never really opened up to him. Her daughter had moved away somewhere but Angela never talked about her. In the end it was her emotional distance that had eroded the relationship to a point where it could no longer be saved. With her dark eyes and high cheekbones, and with a tall, slender figure that drew plenty of attention, she never failed to distract him with her beauty. In bed she always seemed hungry, not sexually insatiable but dissatisfied in some other way. Some nights he’d made her come again and again until at last he was too exhausted to continue, and every time she would kiss him and stroke his chest and then cuddle up close to him as if it were his heat she wanted more than his heart or his cock.
Now all those defenses seemed stripped away. She wore a smile so open that her happiness shone through and he just didn’t know what to make of it.
“It’s not that I don’t want you here,” he said. “You’re welcome anytime.”
“But?” she asked, challenging him, almost pouty. The Angela he knew was more likely to claw than to pout.
He laughed softly. “Shit, it’s just weird, okay? Come on, you’ve gotta see that. You show up at my door, soaking wet. No phone call, no text. And we didn’t end on the best of terms.” Doug sat on the bottom step and studied her. “Come on, Angie. What is it? You didn’t come over here just because you suddenly decided you missed me.”
Unbuttoning her coat, she glanced shyly away from him.
“Help me with this?” she asked.
Doug rose from the steps and grabbed the heavy coat by its collar as she slipped out of it.
“Thing is, Doug,” she said, “I did come over here because I missed you. But you’re right about one thing.”
Half turned toward him, she lifted her gaze and he saw that her mascara had started to run in the storm, turning her expression vulnerable and tragic and wild, all at the same time.
“I am soaking wet.”
She reached behind his neck and pulled him down to meet her kiss. Her lips only brushed his at first and she let out a breath as if she’d been holding it for ages, shuddering into his arms. Her kiss turned hungry, but this was a yearning, loving hunger instead of the sorrowful, bottomless hunger he had seen in her before.
“Oh my god,” she whispered, nuzzling his throat, pressing her body hard against his. “I’ve missed you so much.”
When he tried to speak, Angela silenced him with her mouth. After that he kept mostly silent, at least in terms of words.
Whenever Ella Santos made love to her husband the rest of the world vanished around them. Tonight she sat astride him, rising and falling in a slow, deliberate rhythm that made her drunk with arousal. Sometimes, especially after they’d been fighting, she wanted him to dominate her completely, to make it rough and fast and primal, so that they both felt that she was all his. Other times she wanted the other side of the coin and she took control, making love to him so exquisitely that they shuddered with each delicious moment of connection.
Ella traced the contours of his face, her heart suffused with a mixture of love and regret that she saw reflected in his eyes. Making love with TJ, she felt herself plugged in to a simpler time between them when all he had to do was pick up his guitar and she would see how he really felt about her and about their future together. Their pattern had changed in recent years. Agitated by stress factors they could not control, one or both of them would say something hurtful, something that could be forgiven but not forgotten, and those cruel things would plant seeds of discontent and anger.
Only with TJ inside her, the two of them desperately searching for the past in each other’s eyes, could she find the happiness she had once felt. Only by making love to him did her thoughts clear enough for her to recognize that there was a path back to that happiness for them, but it lay forward.
“Ella…” He reached up to caress her breasts, to run his thumbs over her nipples and pinch them gently, making her shiver.
His hips rose to meet her, his urgency growing even as she felt the crest rising within her, carrying her toward bliss. She studied his eyes and wished that he would always look at her that way.
“This is how it should be,” she said breathlessly. “You listening, honey? This, right here … we’ve got to find a way to … to bottle it. Hold on to it.”
She glimpsed a fleeting sadness in him and then, face flushed, TJ smiled.
“We could just never stop,” he suggested, thrusting suddenly upward.
Ella shivered with pleasure and bent lower over him, her hair brushing his face, suddenly weak with need and pleasure. Her legs began to shake as her orgasm approached and she gripped his shoulders fiercely, both wanting to reach her climax and wanting to hold back and savor this crest.
“Good idea,” she managed. “Just do this … forever.”
Forever. No more fighting. No more tension. Just this feeling of unity.
TJ went rigid, trapping her on top of him. They came together, which hadn’t happened in a very long time. Panting, smiling, nuzzling into each other, they sank down on the bed and tangled themselves up, limbs purposefully wound together. Aftershocks of pleasure rolled through Ella and she grabbed the back of TJ’s head and kissed him deeply, then laid her head on his chest and ran her fingers through the blond curls there.
“You’re right, you know,” TJ said quietly. “We’ve got to hold on to this.”
For long, wary seconds, she did not reply. Then at last she managed to speak.
“How do we do that? We haven’t had much luck so far.”
“We start like this,” he said. “Just talking about it. We owe it to Grace.”
“We owe it to each other, too. I do love you, you know?”
TJ shifted onto his side in bed, extricating himself from her so that they were face-to-face on the same pillow. Ella ran her hand over the scruff along his jaw that he never quite allowed to turn into a beard. She searched his gaze, heart pounding, wondering whether it was too late for them. If their relationship fell apart it would be due to neglect, and they would both be to blame.
“I love you, too,” TJ assured her. “But where do we go from here? We keep blaming each other—”
“For everything,” she agreed.
The economy had begun to recover a little, but not quickly or vigorously enough to save them financially. Not yet, anyway. Ella had done everything she could to keep The Vault from going under, changing the menu and the marketing, but the restaurant was still barely paying for itself. She hadn’t drawn a salary in years. They’d been living off whatever TJ could earn as an electrician and musician. If he hadn’t inherited their little house from his mother, there would have been no way for them to afford rent or a mortgage. It did feel as if their prospects were brightening, but she didn’t know if it would happen quickly enough to keep them above water.
“We can’t gamble on this,” Ella said. “All the bullshit and blame—they’re habits now. Maybe we need someone … a referee.”
“A therapist?” TJ asked. “You’d do that?”
“Would you?”
Ella said a silent prayer of thanks and hope. She didn’t know if they could make this moment of calm understanding last, but she certainly intended to try.
“I think we should—” she began.
Down the hall, Grace began to scream.
Jerking away from TJ, Ella scrambled from the bed. Her legs tangled in the sheets
and she fell to the floor, whacking her elbow on the hardwood. She cried out as she tore free, looked up and saw TJ pulling on a pair of sweatpants he’d discarded by the bed. He called out their daughter’s name and Ella echoed him.
“A nightmare?” TJ asked.
Ella tore the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around herself, rushing out of their bedroom behind him.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
A mother knows her baby’s cries, even when the baby in question isn’t really a baby anymore. This fearful, panicked scream had been born from more than any bad dream. They ran down the short upstairs hall, past the bathroom, and charged through Grace’s open bedroom door, TJ in the lead.
Ella ran in behind him and went straight to their daughter. Grace knelt on her bed, pressed into the corner between the headboard and the wall with a pillow clutched against her like a shield. Her eyes were wide with terror. She spared them only a single glance, her focus locked on an empty spot at the foot of the bed.
“What is it, Gracie?” TJ asked, turning right and left, searching for some threat to his girl.
When Ella took Grace in her arms the girl stopped screaming, but still could not help staring at that spot at the end of her bed.
“What happened?” Ella said quietly. “What frightened you, kiddo?”
Grace blinked, shook her head as if waking, and turned to stare at her mother.
“An old lady,” the little girl said. “Right in my room, down at the end of the bed. A ghost lady.”
Frigid fingers danced along Ella’s spine and she shivered, glancing at TJ. There were only the three of them in the room, that much could not be argued. But instead of turning to look back at Ella and Grace, TJ could not tear his gaze from the window on the far wall from Grace’s bed, which stood open a couple of narrow inches.
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