I do think certain things in life are out of our control.
The notion that certain things in life were out of her control scared the hell out of Erika. What she'd loved about riding was the confidence that she could control a thousand-pound beast as it stormed down a track and launched itself over a fence. What she'd loved about sailing was that she could control a boat's response to gale winds and tides. What she'd loved about skiing was that, no matter how steep the slope or how icy the snow, she could control her speed with a mere turn of her ankles, a bend of her knees, a shift in her weight.
But she couldn't control her feelings for Ted. Not this time.
Why had she been able to control her feelings so much more effectively when she'd been younger? She was an adult now. She was experienced. She had a clear idea of the direction she wanted her life to take. She knew what mattered to her.
Having a partner, a significant other, a man in her life hadn't mattered ... until Ted invaded her life.
Where from here?
He had a girlfriend. Thinking about that caused a sour taste to rise in Erika's mouth. She hated the possibility that she could be a home-wrecker. Not that he was married. Not that Erika could be named as a co-respondent in divorce proceedings. But she prided herself on being ethical when it came to relationships. If a guy was taken, she stayed away.
If Ted was taken, why had he gone dancing with her? Why had he looked at her the way he had, all night long, and touched her, and hugged her? Why had he told her she was etched into his mind?
Where from here? Nowhere, she thought grimly. Dancing half the night away with him had been lovely, but she hadn't forgotten the words he'd spoken so many years ago. Those words were etched just as deeply into her mind: I will never be with you again, I could never be this hurt again.
So where from here?
Ted knew he should tell her he was single. But trust was so damned hard.
He'd found an apartment in Hoboken and moved out of the place in Brooklyn he'd been sharing with Marissa. He checked on her a few times and she told him to bug off. He imagined she would recover quickly enough from their breakup. Even when they'd been together, when she'd been pushing for more of a commitment from him, he'd never sensed that she was any more in love with him than he was with her.
She'd wanted a baby and she'd been anxious about her age. He'd been the boyfriend at hand. He'd liked her, obviously. You didn't stay with a woman for three years if you didn't like her. But he hadn't wanted to have a child with her. Maybe if he'd loved her more, he would have been willing. But ...
He didn't do in love.
So she'd have to find another sperm donor, and he had no doubt she would. She was beautiful, smart, all that.
His new apartment was no great shakes. It had what it needed and not much more. Maybe if he were a vice president at a big bank, he could afford an apartment in Manhattan. East River Marketing was a great place to work, but Hoboken was more in his price range. Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, the one-time scruffy blue-collar enclave was deep in the throes of gentrification. Fortunately not completely gentrified, or Ted might not have been able to afford Hoboken, either.
Although he worked in Manhattan, it had always seemed like a magical place, just beyond his reach. Emerald City. El Dorado. He was a New Jersey boy, the kid who pumped gas instead of going to college. Manhattan was the sort of place where a princess like Erika would live.
He tried to picture her apartment. She'd mentioned, somewhere along the line, that she lived in Gramercy Park. What little he knew about the Gramercy Park area was that it was ritzy, full of grand old buildings bordering an actual park that was so exclusive, only residents of the neighborhood were allowed to enter it. The park was surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence, and residents got keys or pass cards or something. He imagined her living in one of those grand old buildings, in an apartment with nine-foot ceilings, parquet floors, and a wood-burning fireplace. One bedroom at least, maybe two, and a bathroom-or twowith marble counters and a claw-foot tub. He pictured ornate chandeliers and decorative moldings and windowsills wide enough to hold potted geraniums.
What did bank vice presidents earn? Enough to pay for such an apartment, he assumed.
Could he go to her apartment and keep his defenses up? Could he visit her there, make love to her there, spend the night with her there, and leave the next morning with his heart intact? Could she destroy him all over again if he let her?
God, yes.
If he let her.
That weekend, they went to Coney Island, Brooklyn's answer to the honky-tonk boardwalks along the Jersey Shore. They strolled along the boardwalk, inhaling the distinct blend of scents: ocean, coconut-perfumed sunscreen, cotton candy, and the hot grease of pizza and fried bread; and listening to a symphony of beach sounds: the wind, the surf pounding against the sand, the electronic beeps and boings emerging from the arcades, the shrieks of thousands upon thousands of people romping in the ocean, shouting to one another across the beach, screaming on the Ferris wheel, the roller coaster, and the Tilt-A-Whirl.
Summer had officially arrived, and Erika felt her skin soaking in the sun's baking rays. Although her coloring was fair for a halfLatina woman-her father's Northern European genes seemed to have trumped her mother's South American genes-Erika tanned easily. By the end of the day, her bare arms and her legs below the hems of her shorts were sure to be a rich tawny hue.
Next to her, Ted frequently paused to peek into a kiosk or an arcade, clearly tempted to try his luck shooting an air rifle at a moving target in one booth or to rack up points on one of the elaborate pinball machines in another. But he never gave in to the temptation. He shambled along, his hair glinting beneath the sun, his hands in the pockets of his loose-fitting shorts.
Erika wished he would take her hand.
She wished she wasn't wishing for that. They were just friends, after all-although she found it odd that he would choose to spend a Saturday afternoon with her rather than his girlfriend. She could tell by the pensive line of his mouth and the way he kept gazing out toward the horizon that he had something on his mind. So many years later, she was still able to read Ted. Today, she could tell that he was not in the most carefree of moods, despite his having chosen to ride the subway to Coney Island with her.
He motioned with his chin toward a food stand. "You hungry?"
She shrugged. She could use some food, but not the oily, fatty, sugary junk most of the vendors were offering. The stand he had gestured toward sold Italian ices. Not oily or fatty. "Sure," she said.
She got a cup of lemon ice, and he bought himself a large, doughy pretzel dotted with crystals of salt. They found an empty bench facing the ocean and sat. Ted propped his feet on the railing bordering the boardwalk and stared out at the ocean.
He took a bite of his pretzel, chewed and swallowed. "What?" Erika goaded him.
He glanced at her and laughed. "What? What? Remember when I proved how wrong you were about saying `What?"'
She laughed, too. "Oh, yes." They'd been in high school then, and she'd explained her theory about why girls always said, "What?" when someone told them something they wanted to hear. If a guy said, "You're looking good," a girl would say, "What?" If he said, "I love you," she'd say, "What?" The reason, Erika had explained, was that the girl wanted to hear the guy say it again. Ted had contemplated her theory for a few minutes, then abruptly called her the foulest, most obscene word a guy could ever call a girl. "What!" she'd erupted, shocked that he could say such a thing. "There goes your theory," he'd said.
"You didn't say anything," she pointed out now. "That's why I said `what.' I feel like there's something you want to say, but you aren't saying it."
"Hmm." He ate some more of his pretzel. Erika tried not to stare at his beautifully chiseled profile, the angles of his jaw as he chewed, the sexy glint in his eyes, half closed against the glaring sun.
She shouldn't push him. She had no right to know his secrets, no righ
t to ask him more than he wanted to volunteer. But she couldn't help herself. "So? Are you going to say it?"
"I'm single."
"Single what?"
"Single, as in unattached."
Erika's heart gave a little stutter. She shouldn't have been happy to hear this, but she was. More than happy. She was delirious.
She tried to tamp down her joy. Just because Ted was unattached didn't mean he had any intention of attaching himself to her. He'd told her he would never love her again, and she believed him.
She shunted aside all thoughts of herself and focused on him. "Are you okay?"
"Now that I'm eating this pretzel, yeah," he said. "I was starving."
"No-I mean about the breakup."
"Oh." He shifted on the hard slats of the bench and broke off a curved loop of his pretzel. "Yeah."
"You were with her for a long time."
He shrugged. "It wasn't going where she wanted it to go, so I felt breaking up was the only fair thing to do."
"Is she all right?"
"She's probably better off now than she was when we were together."
Erika refrained from arguing that he was a damned good catch and that no sane woman would feel she was better off without him than with him. "Did you have to move out?"
"Yeah. I found a place in Hoboken. Most of our stuff was hers, so the move wasn't too hard."
"When did all this happen?"
He shot her a glance, then turned his gaze back to the horizon. "Before we went dancing the other night."
She wondered why he hadn't told her then. Maybe he had told her, sort of. He'd told her she was etched into his mind. And he'd hugged her on the dance floor, and she'd felt so connected to him, as if a circuit had been closed, sending an electric current through her. She hadn't dared to ask then if the current had spun through him, too-because she'd thought he was still with his girlfriend.
But he hadn't been.
Where from here?
She counseled herself not to ask any more questions. She'd asked more than she should have, and he'd been generous enough to answer. To press him for more would be unfair. She should be satisfied with the knowledge that he was now available, that if there was any chance that he would change his mind about never being with her again, the odds had just risen a percentage or two. And that was good enough for now.
"I need to have the shit scared out of me," she announced, slurping her rapidly melting Italian ice. "As soon as we finish our snack, we should go on the Cyclone. Or the Tilt-A-Whirl. Which do you want to go on?"
"Which one will we be less likely to puke from?"
"Don't be a wuss. The Tilt-A-Whirl it is."
From: Erika Fredell
To: Ted Skala
Who knows why this is happening now? I can't answer that question for you, and I can't tell you what's going to happen next. I can only tell you how I feel when I'm with you, which is really nice and comfortable, peaceful and secure.
We need to be clearheaded and honest, and the right things will happen.
I'd love to be lying down under a tree. I'm still dizzy from that flippin' tilt-a-whirl.
Ted reread the email she'd sent him the day after their Coney Island outing, and then read it a third time. He was dizzy, too, and the Tilt-A-Whirl had nothing to do with it.
He hadn't meant to tell her he was a single man.
He hadn't meant to want her so much.
He slouched on the sofa, his BlackBerry in one hand and a cold Budweiser and the remote control in the other. He pressed the channel button and the screen flipped through a sequence of shows: a blast of sitcom laughter, a cloying advertising jingle, a ranting pundit, two eerily good-looking people running down a dark alley, a Yankees game. He stopped channel-surfing and let the Yankees invade his living room. They were playing the Red Sox, which meant it would be an intense, meaningful game. But he couldn't bring himself to care about the outcome.
You're setting yourself up for disaster, Skala. This is Erika we're talking about. Erika Fredell, who tore your heart out of your chest and crushed it beneath the cold, hard heels of her knee-high riding boots. Erika, whose friends laughed at you when you flew like a lovesick headcase to Denver and gave her a stuffed teddy bear. Erika, who you knocked yourself out trying to impress, and who was never impressed.
Erika, who said no when you asked her to marry you.
Erika, who wounded you so badly, you swore you'd never trust a woman that way again.
Across the room, Derek Jeter hit an RBI double and Ted couldn't even rouse himself to cheer along with the crowds at Yankee Stadium. He angled the beer bottle against his mouth and let a few long swallows of beer slide down his throat, then sighed. How was he going to protect himself from Erika?
For years, he'd done fine. He'd lived here and there, wound up back in New Jersey, built a career for himself in New York, brick by brick. He'd been with women. He'd had relationships. And he hadn't let anyone hurt him.
He'd decided to contact Erika last month only because Marissa had deserved something and he needed to figure out if he was the one to provide it. Not just a baby but a commitment. An acceptance that the past was over and he was fully healed, and the time had come to shed at least one layer of his protective armor.
Not just for Marissa but for himself, he'd had to ascertain that he was truly over Erika. So he'd gotten in touch and agreed to meet her at that SoHo bar.
And damn it, he'd discovered that he wasn't over her.
How long could a love hang on? Wasn't love like a flower that shriveled and died if you didn't water it? Wasn't it like a fire that burned itself out if you didn't add more fuel?
He would run out of bad metaphors for love before his love for Erika died.
The inning ended with Jeter stranded at third base, and Ted closed his eyes. The television screen was replaced by the screen of his imagination, his memory-and Erika was the star of the show being broadcast there. Erika on the boardwalk at Coney Island, with the wind rolling off the ocean and lifting her hair. Her long, beautiful hair, not that ghastly short hair she'd had at the airport in Denver. She'd looked fine in short hair-she was so beautiful, she'd look fine bald-but he'd hated that haircut because it had represented the new person she'd become, her rejection of who she'd been.
Who she'd been was Ted's girl. When she'd hacked off her hair, she might as well have been hacking him out of her life.
But her hair was long again, long the way it had been during that magical summer so many years ago. The Coney Island sun had lifted the golden highlights to the surface as it had darkened her skin.
You swore off Latina women, Skala. Don't you remember?
He laughed, even though he felt more miserable than amused. Yeah, he'd sworn off Latina women, and now the prima Latina was back in his life.
He tossed the remote control onto the scuffed coffee table in front of him and lifted his BlackBerry. A few clicks brought up his saved emails and he read what she'd written to him: We need to be clearheaded and honest, and the right things will happen.
How could she be so sure of that? The right things hadn't happened the last time they were together.
But he hadn't been clearheaded then. Honest, yes-and damn it, she'd been as honest as he was. But his head had been about as clear as gouache, a paint he particularly liked working with because it was so opaque. Beautiful stuff, dense with color. But not the least bit clear.
He'd been dense. Intense. He'd loved her obsessively, and then when she'd left him, he'd cleared his head by smoking his way through Tempe, Seattle, and Costa Rica, where Bob, that crazy old surfer dude, had kept him happily stoned when they weren't riding the waves, and sometimes when they were.
Clearheaded then, no. Now? Now a voice inside him warned that he was being too clearheaded. He didn't trust that voice. It was the voice that lured him into taking risks, some of which turned out pretty damned good, some not so good.
He drained his bottle, the cold, bitter beverage cleansing h
im. Okay, he was going to be clearheaded. Not in spite of having just chugged a bottle of beer but because of it, he thought with a grin.
Clear thoughts: He wanted Erika. Wanted her as much as he'd wanted her in high school. No, he wanted her more now than he'd wanted her then. Now she was a woman. She'd always been cool and confident, but now she was seasoned. She'd seen the world. All those adventures she'd dreamed of, she'd lived, and experience was like a unique element in her blood. She radiated strength and self-knowledge.
She was just ... amazing.
Clear thoughts, he reminded himself.
He wanted her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to lie with her, on top of her, underneath her. He wanted to envelop her. He wanted to feel her skin against his skin. He wanted to feel her hair raining down onto his face. He wanted to come inside her and feel her coming around him.
Christ. Think about Erika for more than a minute and his brain zoomed south to take up residence in his groin.
Clear thoughts. He wanted her. He wanted hot sex with her. Surely he could have hot sex with her while keeping a cool head, couldn't he? He could give her his body while protecting his heart.
He read her email one more time. Neither of them knew why this was happening now, or what would happen next. But whatever it was, she was up for it. He sure as hell wasn't going to let her be more daring than he was.
He clicked her number and listened to the purr of her phone ringing on the other end. "Hello?"
"Let's go on a date," he said.
TED HAD ASKED HER TO PICK A TIME and day for their date. Easier said than done. Her schedule was so insane. Work made impossible demands on her, and she was departing tomorrow on a long-planned trip to Sun Valley. But she'd planned to leave work a little early the day before her trip, so that seemed like a good evening to get together. He'd agreed to pick her up at her apartment at six.
That he'd offered to come to her home was important to her. It meant this was really, truly a date, not just a casual after-work get-together. Meeting him someplace straight from work might have been easier-she wouldn't have had the time to fuss with her hair and her lipstick, and she wouldn't have had to fret over what to do if he asked to come upstairs. Her apartment was so small-just one room, a glorified bedroom that also served as a living room, dining room, den, and office.
Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows) Page 17