by Julia London
Instead of soothing her he was making her angry—she’d heard this song a few times too many now and was getting sick of it. She shoved against him, breaking his grip on her and making him spill his beer on the carpet. He moved to get something to clean it, but she threw a towel down and stomped on it, grinding it into the carpet. “Just tell me how many other women are going to come crawling out of the woodwork and claim some sort of relationship with you?”
“What does it matter? There is no one else, and there won’t be now that I have found you again.”
“It matters! What am I supposed to do, just pretend like none of it bothers me? Like it doesn’t hurt all over again? Or make me feel like an idiot for believing we could go back?”
“Did you believe that?” he asked, surprised.
Her hands curled into fists. “Yes,” she said bitterly. “For a moment, one single, solitary moment, I believed it. But I didn’t know you jumped back into the dating pool with both feet. Not me. It took me years to get over you. It took me years to get up the nerve to date again, because I didn’t think I could ever love anyone like I loved you, and if by some miracle I did, I couldn’t stand to go through it all again and risk being dumped like a bag of garbage one day. So it’s not exactly easy to keep running across all these women you’ve dated and been with and try and act like it doesn’t bother me.”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked angrily. “I can’t turn back the clock; I can’t do anything but tell you there is no one else. The fact that there are so many of them cropping up all of a sudden should be more evidence that I could never manage to maintain a relationship for more than a few weeks. They weren’t you, Leah.”
She glared at him. Michael glared back. She kicked her suitcase shut. He tossed the beer into her trash can.
“So?” he asked.
“So?”
“So where does this leave us?”
She gave him a petulant shrug and looked at the floor. “I’m not sure.”
“Maybe it leaves us with dinner.”
“Maybe it leaves us with a gash too deep to heal, Michael.”
“Come on, baby,” he said, moving closer, stroking her cheek with his knuckles. “Trust me. Believe me.”
Bite me, she thought bitterly. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know if I can.”
“Okay, look,” he said, just as wearily. “We can’t expect to fix everything gone wrong between us in a matter of days, right? So let’s just have some dinner and see how it goes. What do you say?”
He was right—old, deep, gaping wounds took time to heal. She just had a funny feeling that she hadn’t quite found all her wounds, or knew how deep they ran. “All right,” she said. “Just let me change.”
He nodded and walked out, leaving her behind, the space between them opening up like a gulf.
Dinner did nothing to improve their mood. Michael tried to talk about work and how he was looking forward to finally getting to Washington and the actual filming. His talk of Washington reminded Leah that Jill, yet another woman Michael had dated at some point in the last five years, had told them when Michael had showed up to boot camp that they had gone white-water rafting with the other guys a couple of years ago in Washington.
Leah could picture herself at dinner parties and Hollywood affairs with Michael, meeting woman after woman Michael had once dated, or taken white-water rafting, or flown to Paris, or whatever. She grew more sullen. He grew more exasperated with her sullenness, professing an inability to understand why she couldn’t just accept what he was saying, and that made her angry all over again.
“So what you’re saying is that basically, I shouldn’t have any feelings about the women you’ve slept with, is that it?” she snapped.
“Hey,” he said low, looking at her darkly. “I told you, I didn’t sleep with all those women.”
“You slept with some of them. You dated all of them.”
He said nothing, but clenched his jaw tightly shut.
“And could you please just explain to me why they all have to end up on this film?”
He drove his fork into his food. “I told you that, too, Leah,” he said sharply. “Jack thought it would be funny.”
“Ha ha,” she said, and pushed her plate aside.
“Jesus, will you stop persecuting me?” he asked, dropping his fork. “I can’t change the past. I can’t make it go away.”
“Right,” she said nodding furiously. “And maybe you shouldn’t try. Maybe I shouldn’t either. Maybe we should just let the past lie.”
“Oh for Chrissakes,” he said, and pushed his plate away, too. He started looking around for a waiter. “This is going nowhere. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
“Fine with me,” she snapped.
They sat in stone-cold silence until the waiter came and gave them a bill. Michael tossed a few bills on the table and stood up. So did Leah. And together, they marched out of the restaurant, the gulf that had started to creep between them spilling into an ocean by the time they reached the car.
Michael drove like a maniac back to Leah’s house, clearly ready to be rid of her, and the feeling was entirely mutual. At that moment, Leah didn’t care if she ever saw him again. But when they pulled into the drive, and she reached for the door, Michael put a hand on her leg. “Leah. We can leave it like this. Or we can agree that it’s something we’re going to have to work through if we want to be together.”
She hated logic. “Or, we can just call it a day and move on,” she said, her hand falling away from the door.
“We could. But I don’t want that. Do you really want that?” he asked as his hand sought hers.
“I don’t know what I want,” she said morosely, and let him twine his fingers with hers.
“I understand that. But please don’t jump off the deep end on me, baby. Give me a chance.”
Leah looked at the brown eyes so beautiful they almost made her weep, at the chiseled face, the sexy five o’clock shadow, and as always, that thick strand of black hair across his brow. No, she wasn’t ready to give up. She didn’t know what to think or what to believe, or what really was bothering her, but she wasn’t ready to quit.
Michael, like always, seemed to know what she was thinking and leaned across the console, touched his lips lightly to hers. His hand fell on her cheek, his fingers spreading across her face. Leah gripped his wrist, clinging to him, feeling the power of his desire seep through her skin. She didn’t want to let go, she wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t seem to swim past old, hurtful feelings that kept surfacing. Mixed in with the joy of having discovered her one true love again were bits of anger and distrust and that dreadful feeling that she was headed for the biggest fall yet.
So she pushed back from him and turned away, looking blindly out the window. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said softly, and got out of the car, shut the door, and hurried to her front door without looking at him, without seeing that expression in his eyes that could make her forget herself.
Michael waited until she was safely inside, then put the car in reverse, spinning out of her drive and getting the hell out of dodge.
Frankly, he was beginning to wonder if a man could ever go back again, or if it was always just too late. He loved Leah, more than anything. But he didn’t relish the thought of apologizing for his past all the rest of his days. At some point, if she wanted to be with him, she had to accept what had happened and move on. Or, if she couldn’t let go of her grudge, she could just simply move on now, like she said. Without him.
Either way, at the moment he didn’t give a shit what she did, because he had a splitting headache.
Subject: Old Times
From: rtj0431
To: Michael Raney
Time: 4:32 pm
Yo, bro, been trying to get hold of you. Rex here—remember your old pal? The one who is actually trying to save your ass? Listen, you’ll want to hear what I have to tell y
ou. It concerns an old friend of yours who is no longer in the place you left him. Give me a call on the usual line, but call soon.
Chapter Twenty
LEAH was exhausted when she showed up for work the next morning, having spent yet another sleepless night, courtesy of Michael Raney. What happened to that vow she’d made to herself one hundred years ago that she’d not lose one more moment of sleep because of him, anyway?
As Leah marched across the parking lot, backpack in hand, Trudy, who was waiting at the gate, lifted her psychedelic shades and peered closely at her. “What’s the matter?” she asked when Leah reached her.
“Nothing,” Leah said. “I just didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Oh no,” she said knowingly, and hands on hips, she nodded sagely as she sized Leah up. “Oh, honey,” she said, with a sympathetic shake of her head. “You look like shit. That’s the deal with these movie guys—they’ll say anything to fuck you. So what did he say this time?”
What hadn’t he said? Leah shifted her backpack from one shoulder to the other. “Nothing, really.” She didn’t want to rehash it all again—she’d just spent the better part of one night rehashing it over and over and over, until her head felt like it was literally going to explode off her shoulders. “So don’t we have a meeting with the director this morning?”
“Yeah,” Trudy said, and put her arm around Leah’s shoulders, squeezing her tight. “Let’s go show him that Yin and Yang are the best he’s got.”
Leah let Trudy pull her along.
They rehearsed the battle scenes all morning with the director and Charlene Ribisi and Nicole Redding, who, Trudy pointed out in a stage whisper, couldn’t carry her cell phone if the director asked it, much less the scene. Charlene Ribisi, on the other hand, was a professional and about as buff as any woman Leah had ever seen. In one scene, Charlene had to push her down, and for a woman weighing all of 110 pounds at 5’10”, she sure packed a punch.
The most telling part of the rehearsal came just before they broke for lunch, when the director, looking through a camera lens, shook his head and yelled cut.
“Were we filming?” Nicole asked, clearly annoyed.
“No. And it’s a good thing we weren’t,” Harold said. “Honey, you’re going to have to lose a few pounds in the next week. You’ve got a couple of places that aren’t coming across very well.”
Next to Leah, Trudy gasped. Leah was shocked, too—Nicole was so tiny that she was hardly even there. Not in particularly great shape, but tiny nonetheless.
Nicole apparently thought the same thing, because she said, “Me? I’m the smallest one out here! Why doesn’t she have to lose any weight?” she cried, pointing directly at Leah.
Leah instantly looked down; Trudy gasped again.
“Because she’s nobody. You’re the star, Nicole, and you need to drop a few L.B.’s, or it’s going to look like we’ve got Attila the Hun lumbering through these scenes.”
“Shut up, Harold,” Nicole said, and flounced off.
“Her ass is looking a little large,” Trudy whispered.
But Leah was mortified. “What does that make me? How huge am I?”
“Not to worry, hon,” Trudy said confidently. “You probably won’t have that much time on screen anyway.”
Talk about going from bad to worse. By the time lunch rolled around, Leah was really in a foul mood. She begged off lunch with Trudy, Jamie, and Michele, who were intent on shopping for rafting clothes. “What are rafting clothes?” Leah asked.
Trudy’s mouth dropped open. “Are you kidding? Cute little bathing suit tops and shorts.”
“And don’t forget the sandals,” Michele added. “I am definitely getting some of those new all-terrain sandals. You can run in them, too.”
Right, like Michele was ever going to run after they wrapped this film.
“Thanks, but I’m going to pass,” Leah said. “I don’t know if they carry size jumbo where you’re going. And besides, Jumbo is really hungry.”
“Don’t do that to yourself,” Trudy said, shoving her psychedelic sunglasses on her face. “You’re beautiful! But maybe just a salad,” she suggested.
“Come on you guys,” Jamie cried. “We’ve got to be back in an hour and a half, and the outdoor gear store is across town.”
Leah watched them run across the parking lot to Jamie’s car, then made her way to the commissary, where she intended to have a salad of lettuce, period.
Later she was sitting at a table near the back, her lettuce leaves consumed and leaving her wanting more, reading a novel she’d started months ago, when someone jostled her table by falling into a seat across from her.
Leah glanced up; a smile instantly curved her lips. “Hi, Adolfo.”
“Mi amor, my heart is warm now that I see you,” Adolfo said, and took her hand, brought it to his lips, and with his gaze on her eyes, he kissed her knuckles lovingly.
Leah laughed and tugged her hand free. “So what are you up to, today, Adolfo? Trolling the commissary tent looking for women?”
“Women! I have no need of women!” he said dramatically with an incongruent wink. “It is only you I wish to see, mi amor. Only you who fills my dreams with smiles,” he said, his hands doing a flowery little flitter. “Only you with the nectar that lures me to you.”
“Nice,” she said, nodding. “Your lines are getting better all the time.”
“Gracias,” he said, inclining his head in acknowledgment of her compliment. “I do it all for you.”
Leah snorted, resumed reading.
“You don’t believe me?” He looked wounded. “Look, then, look what I have brought for you.” He pulled a brown paper bag from his back pocket, removed a small picture frame, spread the bag flat, and placed the picture on it, turning it so Leah could see it.
She leaned over to look and blinked with surprise. It was a picture of her. She recognized the setting—she was wearing camouflage, and it was the day they had been fitted. She was standing with someone else, who had been cropped from the picture, and she was laughing. Her eyes were crinkled, her mouth open as she laughed. She had to admit; it was an appealing picture.
“Adolfo!” She picked up the picture. “How in the world did you manage this?”
“How!” he scoffed, throwing his arms wide. “I am in the lighting, mi amor. My friends, they are the photographers, of course.”
“You mean the camera guys?” she asked. “I haven’t seen any of the crew yet.”
“They come one day for the pictures that will appear in the papers and television.”
“And you had them take a picture of me?” she asked, looking at him skeptically.
Adolfo smiled. “No. I will be liar if I tell you this. I choose this from many pictures they take.”
She still looked at him skeptically, but his smile just deepened, and he lifted his shoulders, palms up. “You do not trust me?”
“No,” she said with a laugh, but looked at the picture again. “This is really great, Adolfo. A little memento of the movie. It was really very sweet of you.”
“For you, sweetheart, I do it. You must have this wonderful picture of you.”
“Thank you.”
“So now you will come to dinner with me, no?”
Leah laughed at his tenacity. “Maybe someday.”
“Someday. When is this someday?” Adolfo whined, looking exceedingly charming nonetheless. “Is it this man again?”
“What man?” she asked coyly.
“The man, the man,” he blustered, gesturing impatiently. “The bastard who does not deserve you. The bastard who makes your heart sad. This man.”
“Oh. That man.”
“Si, si, that man.”
“Well . . .” she picked up the picture again and admired it. “It seems he gets around a lot.” She peeked up at him. “He dates a lot of women.” Adolfo lifted a dark brow. “A lot,” Leah added emphatically.
“Ah,” Adolfo said, and nodded. “I know this man. Let me
tell you something. This man will promise you many things, but he will never give himself completely to you. Do you understand?”
“Better than you know.”
“There, you see? I am the man for you. When will you have the dinner with me?”
“Maybe when we get back from Washington.”
“As long as that!” he exclaimed, but then softened, took her hand in his once more and kissed her knuckles. “I shall wait, mi amor, I shall wait as long as you will torture me with this hope,” he said, and let go of her hand, smiled very sexily.
For some reason, the way he said it, the way his brown eyes seemed to sparkle through when he smiled, made her toes curl a little. She laughed a little, slipped the picture into the bag, and picked up her backpack. “Thanks again. And now, I have to go. See you, Adolfo,” she said. She stood up, gave him a little wave with her free hand, and walked out of the commissary tent, almost colliding with a pole because she was too giddy to see it.
WHEN Michael showed up to work that morning, he looked at the package on the passenger seat and debated. This was stupid—he should have just left well enough alone instead of rifling through the little box that contained mementos from the few highlights of his life—a mathlete badge from the eighth grade, a Valentine’s Day card a teacher had once given him. A cork from a rare bottle of wine he had shared with a European prince. A pair of panties he couldn’t remember the specifics about anymore, but he figured it had to be good because he had kept them.
And a couple of other things, like Leah’s phone number scrawled on a cocktail napkin, a playbill from one of the first plays he ever saw her in, before she even knew he existed. It was that stupid playbill he’d taken and had engraved and framed. The original playbill was yellowed with age and stained by a glass of wine he’d had with his date the night he’d seen Leah’s play, a woman whose name he could no longer remember.
But that had been Leah’s first Broadway play, and she’d been spectacular. He’d heard about it from the guy who had introduced him to Leah at a party, and he’d been so intrigued he’d taken his date to see Leah’s play. His date never knew he was looking at Leah, that he was admiring her every move on stage. Even then he’d known there was something different about her. To think he’d contributed to ending such a bright and promising career filled him with grief.