Balancing Act (Silhouette Special Edition)

by Darcy, Lilian

  “Maybe I should call you that.” He dropped his voice. “Give me a hug, Ibby.”

  She went into his arms, with a wooden spoon still in her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, before he’d even gotten a chance to kiss her. Now her mouth was moving too fast, and she was holding him stiffly, with her arm held out behind his back so he wouldn’t get mushroom juice on his shirt. “Dinner isn’t going to be much. Spaghetti, with sauce from a jar I found in your pantry. I’m adding some mushrooms to ours. Colleen and I only got home maybe ten minutes ago.”

  “Hey. Who says you had to cook at all?”

  “Well, I know you like it.”

  “I like to see you looking fresh and relaxed, too, instead of exhausted. You’re under no obligation, Libby. What were you doing today? I stopped home for lunch, and you weren’t here.”

  “I, uh…”

  Silence.

  A long enough, thick enough silence for him to feel the stirrings of unease, and even anger. Libby had turned back to the stove to mess with those mushrooms. What was she doing? Buying time to put together her story?

  She was. Something like that, anyhow. Something less than upfront. Only she wasn’t as adept at thinking up ways to fob him off as Stacey had always been.

  The helium-balloon feeling in his heart deflated, and he had the same trapped, angry, frustrated tension all through him that had sometimes seemed like the keynote to his whole marriage.

  Maybe Libby was right. So Scarlett had said “Toween” and “Ibby”? Big deal. As she’d said, it was no reason to get emotional. It was no reason to want to hug Libby and feel her warm, curvy body against his, becoming more familiar to his senses every time they touched.

  These other, too-familiar feelings, on the other hand, grew more of a big deal with every second in which she didn’t answer him.

  Finally, she took in a deep breath. “I… Well, I started a new job today.” She was still facing the stove, and she sounded very reluctant. “It’s good. Full-time hours, Monday to Friday, with Colleen welcome there. But there are a couple of difficult kids, and kids with major food allergies, and it’ll probably have me feeling a little tired until I adjust. The hours are from six until three.”

  Now it was Brady’s turn to fall silent. He wanted to say, “You didn’t tell me,” but that line sounded too familiar, and he’d heard her probable answer before, too.

  “I’m telling you now,” she’d say.

  They’d had this whole conversation ten days ago, in this very same room, when he’d seen that scratch on her arm. She wasn’t obliged to share every little detail of her life with him, of course. And when she did give him information, he’d had no reason as yet to think that she was lying. Silence was lying. He’d told her that, but it wasn’t always true. So this probably wasn’t a big deal.

  All the same, he didn’t like it. A new job wasn’t a little detail. It was a major decision, and it affected both of them. He had a right to know in advance, didn’t he? He’d believed she was considering the position he’d found out about for her at Scarlett’s day-care center, but she obviously hadn’t been considering it at all. Why hadn’t she been upfront about that?

  It gave him a sense of discomfort, made him wonder if the foundation of trust they were trying to build together was still a lot thinner than he’d been imagining, especially since Saturday night.

  Okay, was he going to let this go? He’d gotten very good at that, during his marriage. Just getting his head down, going on with his life, convincing himself it didn’t matter. In the short term, it was the easy option, but the long term was a different story.

  “So,” he said at last, his voice a little tight. “Not at Scarlett’s day-care center, I’m guessing.”

  “No. I—I really needed full-time, Brady.”

  “You could have been clearer on that. A heck of a lot clearer. I wouldn’t have wasted your time and mine, not to mention the manager’s time at Scarlett’s day care, exploring the other option.”

  “I know. I’ll…try to be clearer, next time.”

  What next time? he wondered at once. Did she anticipate more situations like this? Did she already have a couple in the pipeline? More things she wasn’t talking about?

  “Okay, let me tell you about it now,” she went on. She lifted her chin and took a breath. “It’s at a place called Toyland Children’s Center, out toward Dublin.”

  “That’s a drive. Although I guess you won’t be traveling it at peak traffic hours. Six in the morning is an early start.”

  “It is,” she answered. “But that’s okay. The other…uh…yes, the other thing that happened today is that I’ve found an apartment. Well, the Realtor called me back and offered one. You remember, the garden apartment complex that I liked? It has a two-bedroom available from the beginning of December. That will take ten minutes each way off the drive.”

  “That’s good. So it’s all worked out?”

  “I wouldn’t say all.” She smiled, still looking tight and strained. “I mean, it’s fine. I’m just tired.”

  No. There was something else going on. He’d put money on it, and he wasn’t a betting man.

  “Yeah, I’m tired, too, Libby,” he answered her, and didn’t try to hide his anger anymore. “I’m not real happy with the way you handled this.”

  He glanced at the meal she was cooking, irritated by her attention to this sort of detail, when they both had more important things to focus on. What was she doing? Trying to create some sixties sitcom illusion that they had a perfect little domestic life cooking away, here? Clearly, they didn’t.

  “And I should tell you,” he added. “Make a note of it, if you want, for future reference in the kitchen. I don’t like mushrooms.”

  “Right,” she answered thinly. “I’ll remember that.”

  “Can you see anything?” Libby asked the sonogram technician.

  The woman’s face was focused and serious, with scarcely a muscle moving, and certainly none of the seven muscles needed to create the human smile. She moved the probe, or whatever it was called, back and forth across the slippery gel coating Libby’s abdomen.

  “You’ll need to hear the report from your doctor,” she answered, not taking her eyes from the screen. “I’m not qualified to give you any kind of diagnosis.”

  “Right. I understand.”

  Libby lay back patiently, still hearing Colleen’s earlier crying in her ears. Colleen was at Toyland, and although Libby had made her appointment for today, Friday, with the deliberate goal of giving her daughter several days to settle in, Colleen still hadn’t wanted to be left. Libby sometimes wondered about how clingy she often was.

  Was there, somewhere in her subconscious, a sense of abandonment after the dislocation of being left at the orphanage, and then spirited off by her new mommy to a completely different life half a world away?

  No, she was probably being oversensitive to the issue. Since her appointment with Dr. Peel on Monday, Libby couldn’t help viewing everything in the blackest light.

  A lot of young children went through a clingy stage, she reminded herself.

  Libby hadn’t wanted to leave Colleen at Toyland this afternoon, but she’d been told it was inadvisable to bring a young child along to the radiologist, and now she understood why. She’d had to wait half an hour, and the test itself was taking longer than she’d anticipated, with the probe thingy being moved back and forth, and pressed quite firmly and painfully into her abdomen at times.

  She had the X ray scheduled next.

  As long as it’s not cancer, I’ll put up with any level of discomfort and pain.

  Libby had been telling herself this for four days.

  And she’d told only herself.

  Oh, she’d wanted to tell Brady. She’d rehearsed the words fifty times in her head. But the words sang and buzzed in her mind whenever she was with him.

  On Monday night, she’d gone to him after their tense, awkward meal, when the girls were already asleep. He�
��d been watching TV, and she’d put a hand on his shoulder, thinking to herself, “Now. I’ll say it now. And if he doesn’t react the way I need, that’s fine, I’ll just deal with it. I’ll survive.”

  But he hadn’t given her a chance. And to be honest, she’d needed more than a chance. It wasn’t fair to blame him. She’d needed a great big push. He’d thought her hand on his shoulder was the prelude to a communication of a different kind, and they’d ended up in bed just minutes later.

  It was good. It was wonderful. She’d begun to understand what a considerate, generous lover he was. It was as if he could hear the music of her body through his hands. He seemed to know when his touch was right, and to know instantly and explosively when it was so right that seconds later she had to gulp back sounds that were almost screams.

  She had a harder time being as sensitive to him. Things got in the way. Things that shouldn’t get in the way. For example, she wasn’t convinced, at first, that he’d want her to be so greedy or so honest about what she wanted. She’d never experienced a man’s desire for her to be such an active partner. Monday night, when they hadn’t remotely resolved certain issues out of bed, they’d definitely resolved a few in it.

  He’d propped himself on his elbows above her, the shadowy dimness in the room making his face look almost fierce. She’d felt the muscles in his upper arms knotting against her ribs, rock hard as they supported his weight. She’d felt his arousal, too, between her thighs, and she’d understood what an effort he was making to hold himself back.

  “Tell me what you want,” he’d said. “I mean that, Lib. Or show me. Move me. Put my hands where you want them.”

  He’d slid sideways, freeing his hand. “If you want me to touch you here, or kiss you here, caress you with my fingers or my tongue. If you want me off the edge of the bed, kneeling on the floor. If I’m too fast or too slow or too hard or too soft, then you have to show it. Or say it.”

  And for the first time, she found that she could. In the ripe heat of her need, she gasped out simple words that she’d spoken a million times before, but never in this intimate context. “There! Yes! Oh, yes! Softer. Yes. Yes…”

  Oh, she’d blushed afterward. She’d felt hot, tentative, stripped raw, and she’d waited with dread for him to deny her in some way—distance himself, close off, or say the wrong thing. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t said much at all. He’d just kissed her and held her in his arms. It was so nice. So good.

  And of course she could have told him then about her fears. But the words had felt like balls of lead in her throat, too heavy to push out. She remembered the trauma of Glenn’s diagnosis, and how angry he’d been when she’d admitted how much she was mourning the loss of a future baby.

  “That?” he’d said. “I might be terminally ill, and you’re crying about that? A being who doesn’t even exist?”

  “Who never will exist, Glenn. It’s a loss, isn’t it? It’s a part of what we’ve both lost through this. It’s not the only thing. I know that. But…don’t ask me to separate the strands in what I’m grieving for.”

  “You’re being incredibly selfish, Lisa-Belle.”

  Maybe she had been. Maybe she still was, because, lying in Brady’s arms on Monday night, she’d known that she couldn’t tell him about any of this. Just thinking about it made her stomach cave in.

  “Okay, we’re done,” the technician said. “You can get dressed and wait in Reception until you’re called for your X ray. We’ll courier the reports over to your doctor by the end of the day.”

  “Can I call him for the results?”

  “You have a follow-up appointment with him, right?”

  “Yes. For Monday.”

  “He’ll talk to you about it on Monday.”

  She remembered that it had been like this with Glenn’s illness, too. There were these agonizing periods of waiting that you just had to suffer through. She probably had fibroids. And Dr. Peel probably had no idea how endlessly long this weekend would seem to her.

  By the time she got back to Toyland at a quarter after two, Colleen had cried herself to sleep.

  Chapter Nine

  “The two of you need to go out,” Delia Buchanan decreed that same Friday afternoon.

  She’d brought Scarlett home after their regular day together just a few minutes after Libby and Colleen had arrived. Brady was still at his office. “Dealing with all the garbage that gets thrown at him,” Delia had said.

  There was a fine November rain falling out of a sky that darkened far too early now that daylight saving time had ended, and the furnace was humming in the basement, sending warm wafts of air through the vents.

  “Would you like to stay for coffee?” Libby had asked, and then to make sure that Mrs. Buchanan knew she meant it, she’d added, “Please do.” She hadn’t seen much of Brady’s mom yet, but what she had seen, she liked.

  Ten minutes later, here they were, sitting on Brady’s leather couches and sipping coffee while they watched the girls playing with blocks on the big square of Persian carpet that covered the hardwood floor.

  “You need some time,” Delia added.

  “Oh, we’re doing fine,” Libby answered automatically.

  Probably fibroids.

  The doctor will tell you on Monday.

  “Well, no, honey,” Delia said. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you look tired and tense, and Brady’s had a horrible week at work, with two of his best people quitting on him. You had the football game last weekend, but that wasn’t enough. Let me get to know my new grandchild a little. Let me sit for you tonight, and you can go out to eat.”

  “He might prefer to go out with some friends.”

  “He might,” Delia agreed, “and so might you. But it seems to me you need to spend a little more time together without the girls. You need to get to know each other better just as adults, not as the parent of your daughter’s other half. If I know Brady, even though you’re sharing the same house, he’s standing back and giving you so much space you hardly know what he looks like.”

  Well, no, that’s not exactly the problem.

  Libby had a pretty detailed idea of what Brady looked like. And yet his mother was partially right. In other ways, he was giving her a lot of space. He’d stepped back over the past few days. He hadn’t pushed in any way, and Libby found him hard to read.

  Since Tuesday morning, thanks to her new schedule, the girls had stopped sleeping and waking in sync. Libby had been getting up an hour and a half earlier than Brady did, and she’d left the house before he was even awake. They’d only overlapped for an hour or two each evening, and after an evening meal and night-time routine mainly taken up with catering to the girls, he’d muttered about “work to catch up on” in his home office.

  He’d still been in there when she was ready to say good-night, and she hadn’t felt right about going into the room and into his arms. She’d stood in the doorway, and he’d stayed in his desk chair, and though the intervening air had heated immediately, as if someone had opened a blast-furnace door, he hadn’t acted on it, and neither had she.

  She didn’t quite know why. It was coming more from him, she thought.

  “I wouldn’t mind getting out,” Libby admitted to Delia.

  She was due to move into her new apartment in three weeks. The two of them could discuss practical plans for bringing the girls together once she and Colleen were no longer living here. If they were going to do sleepovers, they’d need to double up on things like cribs and high chairs.

  Her thought track collided with the strong sense that these issues weren’t really the important ones, but she swerved away from it.

  “I’ll make eggs for the girls,” Delia said. She added, half as a question and half as an accusation, “Brady says you cook every night.”

  “It’s therapy.”

  “Even from therapy you need a night off,” Delia said firmly.

  “No, Tarwett! It’s mine!” A little scuffle erupted on the carpet.

>   “They’re saying each other’s names?” Delia crowed with delight.

  “Since Monday,” Libby told her.

  “And they’re fighting!”

  “Only occasionally.”

  “That has to be normal, even for twins.”

  “Normal is good,” Libby said, as she scrambled down to floor level to resolve the situation. “Normal is very good!”

  Brady got home to find his mom and Libby finishing cups of coffee and talking like old friends.

  Libby hadn’t cooked. Passing through the kitchen, he’d seen the bare, clean counters, the lack of pots and pans on the stove, and the cold, dark window of the oven. He was a real jerk to feel disappointed about it, especially since he was getting more and more convinced it was her way of wallpapering over the cracks in their relationship—an effective way, his hungry stomach said.

  How could anything be really wrong, when a man came home to little shell soaps in his powder room and the smell of heaven on a plate every evening?

  And that was Libby’s goal, wasn’t it? To make him believe that nothing was wrong. She probably would have cooked if Mom hadn’t been here.

  He’d felt himself brewing to a confrontation more than once since Monday night. They’d slept together after her belated revelation about the job, and his angry, inadequate reaction to what she’d said. They shouldn’t have, he’d since decided. Making the moves so that they’d end up sleeping together was his way of wallpapering over the cracks.

  Tempting and easy, but wrong. He remembered too many times when he’d let Stacey seduce him into forgetting that he was angry with her. It was okay while it was happening, but afterward the anger simmered inside him and got worse.

  Sex—even great sex, like he and Libby had—didn’t always make for a great relationship.

  So he’d deliberately held back, biding his time, waiting for answers, waiting until he felt more certain that things were really okay, and they hadn’t slept together since.

  “You’re earlier than we were expecting,” his mother said.