Indecent

by Tori Carrington

  Or could he?

  He closed the paper, finally giving up on making any sense out of it, his mind catching on to the patterns that made up his own life.

  In medical school, professional detachment had been drummed into him and his fellow students from day one. Words like limitations and boundaries had seen more emphasis than the words compassion and dedication and do no harm, which were outlined in the Hippocratic oath. After all, he had to protect and maintain and recognize his own personal borders. So when he faced patients like the Hansens, listened to their marital problems, and looked at his watch to tick off the minutes until the session was over, he excused himself for his indifference, telling himself there was only so much he could do.

  His pattern of behavior was just as damning as Lucky’s was. Possibly worse, because hers had been born of tragedy and pain while his stemmed from the detachment he’d been taught and had taken literally.

  No, it was no longer detachment now, was it? Instead it had morphed into passivity and ignorance.

  The people who sought his attention were at the ends of their ropes. If he didn’t go the extra mile to help them hold on to it and give them the tools they needed to climb back up, what was he really doing but playing the role of sounding board?

  The more he thought about the situation, the more agitated he became, and the greater the temptation to excuse himself grew.

  But not this time. No. This time he was going to do something about it, one step at a time, one foot in front of the other. His wasn’t a job that could be forgotten about the moment he walked out of the office at 5:00 p.m. He didn’t work at a textile plant; he was being entrusted with people’s lives. And it was long past time he began giving them the attention they not only needed, but deserved.

  And maybe, just maybe, through them, through correcting his own ugly patterns, he would learn how to get through to Lucky.

  LUCKY SPRAYED foam cleaner on the glass then in slow, lethargic circles ran a cloth over the front window of Women Only, her mind a million miles away. Her heart was across town, held tightly by a man she had resolved to pack away into the past, the way she had packed so much of her life.

  Only Colin refused to be packed away. Not physically. Physically he hadn’t contacted her, hadn’t sought her out. And, she told herself, she was glad he hadn’t. Happy he was staying true to his promise not to pursue her.

  But still he was always there, lingering on the fringes of every thought, present with every beat of her heart.

  Something significant had happened to her Monday night. Something she couldn’t begin to explain. Something she feared she wouldn’t completely understand even with twenty years of thought. But when she’d opened up the battered, weathered door to her past and let out the contents for Colin to see, the ghosts hadn’t gone back into the closet. Instead they stood right in front of her, no longer looming as the undefeatable enemies she combated with sex and drink. Rather they seem to coalesce into one giant, oversized, ugly puppet, staring at her, waiting for her to tell it what to do.

  And she had no idea what to instruct it.

  And since that Monday night when she’d sat on Colin’s balcony and drunk herself into a stupor before going stone-cold sober in the light of his refusal to let her run, she hadn’t had a drop of alcohol. In fact, last night she’d thrown every last bottle hidden around her apartment into the garbage bin, then hauled it all out to the curbside where she’d stood and watched the city refuse collectors pick it up this morning.

  She’d expected to feel panic at the sight. To be assailed with the desire to run out and replenish her supply.

  Instead she’d felt…relief. Something akin to freedom. Or maybe not so much freedom. Instead it felt as if she’d ascended to a step from which the world looked slightly different from the reality she’d known for so long.

  “Uh oh. Trouble in Lover Land.”

  Lucky blinked at the square foot of glass she had been rubbing for the past five minutes, then looked at Renae standing in the open doorway, her arms crossed, her smile bright as the morning sun.

  Lucky offered up a genuine smile. Over the past week and a half, she’d become attached to Women Only, Renae and owner Ginger Wasserman and the other employees in a way she’d never allowed herself to before. She’d even quit her second job at the pancake house across town despite the hole it would mean in her income, and she found she looked forward to coming to work, chatting with the others, talking to the customers. And instead of knocking off directly at closing time, she more often than not lingered on, doing work that could be left to morning, so she could prolong her contact with Renae, brainstorming ideas for new products and displays and services.

  And she’d been immensely thankful that although Renae seemed to sense something was wrong, she hadn’t said anything.

  Until now. Until this morning.

  “Renae, I think I’ve screwed up the best thing that’s ever happened to me because of a past I haven’t been able to get over.”

  Lucky thought she should feel surprised that she’d revealed something of such a deeply personal nature, but she didn’t. And she wasn’t shocked, either, when Renae didn’t blink at her, change the subject or turn the other way.

  “Pretty screwed-up childhood, huh?”

  Renae’s words, however, did shock her.

  She didn’t know what to say so she said nothing.

  Renae smiled. “Lucky, I can spot another damaged soul at fifty paces. It’s part of the reason I hired you without any solid previous retail experience.” She glanced at a car pulling up into a space in front of the store next door. “We lost souls have to look out for each other, you know?”

  Lucky felt such a burst of gratitude and warmth toward the other woman she was incapable of speech.

  Renae turned her gaze back on her. “You mind if I share a bit of advice I learned a little while ago?”

  Lucky stared at her, unsure if she wanted to hear what her friend had to say. “Please,” she managed to squeeze out of her tight throat, her hands clutching the cloth.

  “You know all the bad stuff you have no control over when you’re a kid? I believe that anything that happens before you’re eighteen, you’re a victim of.” She seemed to search Lucky’s face, as if checking to see if she was really listening. “Everything that happens after that? Well, it makes you a volunteer.” She seemed to reflect on something Lucky wasn’t privy to, then said, “Hell, girl, we’re all screwed up in some way or another as a result of our childhoods. All you have to do is look at the guys who drink at the strip joint down the way—and the girls who strip there—for an easy example. It’s what you do after you grow up that separates those who can take the experience and use it to make them stronger from those who allow the tragedies to destroy them.”

  Words so easily said. And so difficult to implement. “How do you do that? How do you use them to make you stronger?”

  “How?” Renae asked, moving toward her and gently grasping her arms. She turned her to face the lot and the world beyond. “By looking forward.”

  “And forgetting the past?”

  Renae briefly tightened the arm over her shoulders. “No. By accepting it. By knowing it’s there and there’s nothing you can do to change it, but acknowledging that it doesn’t hold power over you anymore. That you are in charge of your life, your future. By moving forward, step by step, breath by breath.”

  Lucky’s gratitude toward the woman next to her ballooned exponentially.

  She lifted her arm, linking it around Renae’s slender waist, touching her in a way that she hadn’t touched another woman since her mother had died. Then she stared out at the future Renae painted. A future that she was determined to look forward to with a new mind-set and a full heart.

  COLIN CONSIDERED the day of work he’d put in so far and felt oddly good about what he’d done. While he didn’t expect changes overnight, recognizing that things had to change, that he had to change, was enough for now. As long as he knew there
was more work to be done tomorrow.

  He glanced at his watch. His couples session with the Hansens was set to begin in five minutes. They’d cancelled their appointment last Monday, and requested to move their weekly sessions to Friday. Something Colin didn’t have a problem with.

  He leaned forward in his chair and opened their case file. He was disappointed to discover his notes on their sessions were so sparse, horrified to find that he’d passed judgment on them during their first meeting and hadn’t done anything really to help them since.

  He pulled a fresh notepad form his drawer and began writing.

  He was still writing when Jocelyn and Larry Hansen entered and started to take the seats across the room where Colin usually accepted his patients.

  Instead he motioned them to sit in the two chairs positioned in front of his desk.

  He’d come to the realization today that sitting face to face in a more relaxed environment was preferable when dealing one on one with a single patient. But in the case of couples and groups, sitting close to them, becoming one of them, made it too easy to take on the group mentality, too tempting to tune out.

  Also the participants looked upon him as one of them and it was easy for them to disregard his advice and guidance.

  Sitting across a desk from them in a position of authority, much like a teacher with students, created a more serious atmosphere.

  He noticed the changes in Jocelyn and Larry immediately. Usually Jocelyn would already be tearing her husband down, telling him she’d been waiting all week to tell Colin something, and thus launch into the Jocelyn hour, dominating the conversation and the session.

  Now she was uncharacteristically quiet, and she had her feet crossed at the ankles and her hands clasped in her lap, much like a child sent to the principal’s office.

  Colin made a few more notes, then he put his pen down on top of the pad.

  “Larry,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “Do you love your wife?”

  There was a heartbeat of silence while Colin waited for an answer. He knew it was risky, asking a question this personal. Normally he would be inquiring about what progress and setbacks the couples had experienced over the seven days since their last session.

  But he’d decided that remaining impersonal in what were very personal cases wasn’t going to get him—or the Hansens—anywhere.

  “Of…course I do,” Larry finally uttered after looking back and forth between Colin and his wife several times.

  Colin nodded, giving a mental sigh of relief. The session would have gone very differently indeed if Larry had answered in the negative.

  “When’s the last time you told her?”

  Silence. Larry didn’t appear to know what to say, and Colin wasn’t going to help him out.

  “He tells me every day,” Jocelyn said.

  Colin looked at her. “I don’t mean at the end of a brief phone call when you two aren’t together and you’re distracted.” He glanced back at Larry. “I’m talking about when you’re both at home, perhaps the kids are in bed, and it’s just the two of you. Maybe you’re sitting in front of the television and you look at your wife and remember the first time you ever set eyes on her. Or think about that moment when you realized this was the woman for you out of all the other women in the world, the one that you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, the one you wanted to create a family with.”

  Larry blinked at him and Jocelyn’s silence spoke volumes.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you agree it’s been a long time?” Colin prompted.

  Larry nodded. “Yes. Yes, I would agree.”

  The other man seemed to look at his wife in a way that didn’t speak of frustration or impatience or exasperation. Rather he appeared to be remembering exactly what Colin had asked him to remember.

  And Jocelyn’s open, questioning expression in response made even Colin sit up and take notice.

  “No,” Colin said, writing something down on his notepad. “I don’t want you to tell her now, Larry.”

  “Why not?” Jocelyn wanted to know.

  Colin held his hand up and smiled. “Because it wouldn’t count. Instead, Larry, I want you to remember this moment. I want you to think about it throughout today, into tomorrow and over the next week. And then, when you’re really feeling it, you know, when it seems even your toes are bursting with the love you feel for this woman, your wife, I want you to tell her. Then and only then.”

  In the reflective silence that followed his suggestion, Colin considered that maybe Lucky’s secret wasn’t what had precipitated this change in him; perhaps his love for Lucky was the true catalyst. Because in order to understand love you had to experience it.

  And at that moment he felt he understood it completely.

  16

  THE SATURDAY-MORNING sunshine spotlighted Colin as he sat on his living-room sofa going over the materials private investigator Jenny Mathena had couriered over to him that morning. Following his last visit with his attorney, he’d decided that he could no longer wait to see what Jamie Polson would do next. He had to take action. He had to protect himself and Lucky from Jamie’s escalating obsession with him.

  And Jenny Mathena had provided him with the means to do so.

  He sat back, thumbing through the photos she’d provided. She’d had one of her people cover Lucky, as well. Colin’s eyes lingered on a shot of her standing outside Women Only, her gaze far away. As far away as she was from him right now. As far away as she’d always been from him…and from herself.

  He traced his finger down the side of her hauntingly beautiful face, wondering if there would ever be a time he could approach her again. Wondering if she’d welcome him if she saw him at her door or if she’d turn him away.

  Had she grouped him with the clutter of men that littered her past? Was she even now using their sad parting as another reason to barricade herself from the world, to continue on being an unhappy soul?

  He yearned for her so intensely it was a physical, constant ache. Not merely in his chest, but his stomach. He hadn’t known what love was until she’d unwittingly shown him.

  It seemed ironical, then, that she would turn that love away when he revealed it.

  Colin put the photograph down with the others and closed his eyes, missing Lucky with every molecule of his being.

  Lucky…

  It seemed incongruous to him that someone named Lucky should have had such an unlucky life. But what remained was that while he could see her pain, analyze it, he could never truly understand it. Know what it was like to have lived in her shoes.

  What he did understand was that until she was ready to open up, to seek help with her journey, he was helpless to do anything but stand back and watch her let the bitter sadness of her past destroy her. Destroy any chance they had for a future.

  Destroy their love.

  He glanced at his watch. He’d contacted the housemother at Crossroads and asked if it was possible for him to stop by and visit Melissa.

  She’d been surprised by his call, but welcomed his visit. It meant forgoing his weekly tennis match with Will, but he felt this was more important to him right now. More important to him and to Melissa.

  Besides, Will had his own problems to work out now with his young resident and the impasse they’d reached in their sex life. Colin couldn’t begin to help him with those problems.

  He slid the photographs and the information back into the envelope in which there’d been de livered, then grabbed the small bag of items he’d bought for Melissa—the latest best-selling young adult novel, cosmetics designed to make any girl her age feel pretty, and a small, white stuffed bear wearing a T-shirt that said Princess. Personal items she’d unfairly never gotten and that he wanted to help her start to re-accumulate, if just to learn they weren’t important in the overall scheme of things.

  No, he might not be able to help Lucky and, by extension, them as a couple.

  But maybe he would be just in time to
help Melissa.

  THE ONLY sounds in Lucky’s apartment that night came from the small transistor radio tuned to her favorite oldies station—the tinny rendition of “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” seemed to characterize the hot, humid June night—and the cadence of crickets outside her open window. Around her the meager items that constituted the whole of her life were packed away into bags and boxes, ready to move, although she didn’t know where she would be moving to yet.

  Lucky sat at the chipped linoleum-covered table, a single box the size of a crate in front of her. She hadn’t opened the box in over five years, but it had moved with her from place to place, apartment to apartment, the first thing in, the last thing out when she came and went. She slowly moved her hands over the top and sides, considering what it held, the significance of what she was about to do. The box and its contents represented the past that she’d left behind. The box was the last bruise against her heart.

  She took a deep breath and lifted the top, allowing it to slide off to the side. She didn’t realize she’d closed her eyes until she opened them to stare at the contents within.

  The first thing that caught her eye was a small pillow covered in eyelet lace that was as familiar to her as her own reflection. Her mother had made it for her when she was five and she had had a hand in decorating her room for the first time. Every morning when she’d made her bed it had been the last thing she’d put on top. Every night before she’d gone to bed, it had been the first thing she’d taken off.

  The ghost of a smile played along her lips as she lifted the heart-shaped pillow to her face then pressed it to her nose, breathing in the scent of lavender and rosemary, the smells of her child hood, flooding her mind with happy memories of her mother, of her family, before everything fell apart.

  It had been so long since she’d thought about that time in her life. The laughter, the holiday meals, so many milestones that she’d blocked out in favor of clutching the blackness that had fallen over her.