“Hold me,” he finally whispered into her shoulder. “Hold me.”
And she clung, because to let go was to lose him. To let go was to lose now. And now was all they had.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked when his fingers found her cheeks damp.
“No,” she whispered. But you will. You will. "But I hurt you." She leaned forward and pressed her lips agains the imprint her teeth had left in his shoulder, white against tan. Stricken with guilt, she raised her head to kiss, to apologize with actions because she had no words she dared to speak.
Where were the bubbles of laughter, of joy? His heat had boiled them out of her. She didn’t feel there was any laughter left in her, so intense was the response he had pulled from her.
“You’ve got the weekend, Cecilia,” he murmured against her. “Stay again with me tonight.”
She stroked his temple. “I have to go home.”
~o0o~
An hour later Jeff stood by helplessly as Cecilia scurried up the stairs for the fourth time, disappeared into the spare room, came out again. “What are you looking for?” he asked again.
She shook her head. “Nothing. Just making sure I don’t leave anything.”
He had supplied her with the only apparel he could come up with that even came close to being appropriate. In the midday light, her skin was pale against his old University of Texas T-shirt and faded worn, black biking shorts. Her dress, shoes and stockings were in the brown bag she clutched in her hand. Her eyes were large and dark in her pale face. Even her freckles seemed to have been swallowed up by her pallor. She acted as if she felt displaced.
His arms ached to encircle her again. His hands wanted to seek the tangled confusion of her hair. He wanted to pull her into his lap and convince her the world wasn’t ending just because she was going home. He wanted to believe it himself.
She waited by the door, hardly seeming to notice him as she stared into the spotless living room where newspapers no longer spread helter skelter across the floor and the stereo system now played his jazz.
And then her gaze landed on Toulouse. Her eyebrows met in a frown. She stepped up to the parrot. Toulouse ruffled his neck feathers and lowered his head, aiming his orange-eyed glare at her.
Before Jeff could stop her, she offered the bird her hand.
The bird struck with a squawk and a beating of wings and bit her.
Cecilia jerked her hand back but stood firmly in front of the perch. Jeff lunged forward, his hand raised. “I ought to—”
She grabbed his wrist, her blood hot and wet, bonding them. “No. It’s not his fault.”
He clasped her hand. “Why did you—Cecilia, what were you thinking?” He pulled out a handkerchief to stanch the flow of blood. “For pete’s sake, what were you thinking?”
She watched him work on her finger without flinching. “I thought maybe if I met him halfway."
Jeff shook his head, confused. “What’s wrong, Cecil?”
She ran her uninjured hand through her hair, brushing it out of her face, avoiding his eyes. “I’m tired, that’s all. I need to go home.”
He didn’t want to let go of her hand. He didn’t want to let her leave. He touched her face, tracing her cheek, her jaw, then placed a curled finger under her chin and gently forced her to look at him. Her eyes shimmered; her lower lip quivered. “Cecilia, something has happened between us, and I don’t know what.”
“I can’t talk about it now.”
“Whatever it is, promise me we’ll talk about it later.”
She glanced away, then back again.
“Don’t shut me out, Cecil.”
She smiled tremulously and he felt the tightness in his middle lessen.
She raised her bound finger between them. “I might sue your lousy bird.”
He tweaked her chin. “How about an out-of-court settlement?”
“Maybe...” Her smile took on a devious glint. “And there’s also the matter of you making me miss the hottest basketball game of the season.”
“What do you want from me? Blood?”
“Blood doesn’t work.” She grimaced, then smirked. “How about you meeting Peter halfway?”
Her question was casual, yet he could feel her tension. “Halfway to Peter is still a long, long way, and I’m not sure it’s worth the trip.”
She stiffened. She wasn’t smiling.
Damn it, she couldn’t even tell he was teasing. "That was supposed to be a joke, kid."
She narrowed her eyes. "Next time you attempt to be clever, warn me, okay?"
"How about I just let him bite my finger?"
This time she slugged him in the arm, but with a laugh. She gave him a quick hug.
Relief swept through him.
Until he thought about meeting Peter halfway to anywhere. The kid hated him.
Somehow he had dodged a bullet and stepped straight into a spray of machine-gun fire.
~o0o~
When they pulled up in front of Cecilia’s house, the black Mercedes was parked in the driveway. Jeff saw her glance guiltily at her clothes.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The kids were supposed to be with Robert all weekend. They were actually looking forward to it for a change. Robert was taking them to the zoo today and fishing tomorrow.” Her hands clenched in her lap. “I hope nothing’s happened.”
She slammed the door as she got out. Jeff winced. She was halfway across the yard before he caught up with her. “It’s okay,” he murmured, grabbing her elbow.
“Why, Cecilia, there you are.” Monica stood poised in the arched doorway. “Robert got called to Odessa. Business, you know.”
"How well I remember," she said. “I hope you made yourself at home.”
Jeff wondered how she could sound so casual, so welcoming.
“The kids are out back. I guess now that you’re here, I’ll go on.”
“Thanks for staying with them.” Cecilia stopped in the hallway and waited by the door while Monica gathered her purse and paperback.
Jeff stood by the stairs, out of the line of fire.
“How long have y’all been here?” Cecilia asked.
“Three hours. When Robert asked me to drop them off, he assumed you’d be home.” She glanced significantly from Cecilia to Jeff. “Obviously he was wrong.”
“I hope they weren’t any problem.”
“That Peter is such a sweetheart. You hardly know he’s there. He’s an intelligent child, isn’t he?” Monica said. Her perfectly arched eyebrows met in a slight frown. “I suppose the others will mature nicely, given time.”
Jeff stood straighter. “Yes, those two are delightful little scamps, aren’t they?”
He didn’t know who seemed more startled, Monica or Cecilia. He slipped his arm around Cecilia’s shoulders. “Especially Anne-Elizabeth. But, then, she takes after her mother.”
“Oh, yes.” Monica rubbed her upper arm. “I’ve noticed.”
She left with little further ado, and only then did Jeff finally allow himself the luxury of laughter. “Can you see her trying to handle those kids by herself for three hours? It’s a wonder the house is still standing.”
Cecilia’s icy glare hit him full force. “What else would you expect?”
Ouch. He followed her to the screened back porch. The children didn’t hear them approach. Anne-Elizabeth’s squeals pierced the air.
“Giddyap!” Anne-Elizabeth clutched Peter’s wiry shoulders and neck as he galloped across the lush green lawn. “Faster!” she cried, bouncing on his back.
Peter accommodated her, his thin legs pumping. They rounded a tree and came back.
Brad seemed unaffected as they raced by him. He simply kept juggling his soccer ball. “Thirty-one.” Off his knee. “Thirty-two.” Off his other knee. “Thirty-three— Oh, shoot!” The ball glanced off his toe and sailed into the bushes, where Ralph lay, his long tongue hanging out. Brad looked up and saw his mother.
“Mom! I set a new re
cord! Thirty-three times without touching the ground! Didja see me?” He bounded toward them, his red hair glinting in the sunlight.
Peter stopped, heaving for breath, and his sister slid off his back to the ground.
“Mommy!” Anne-Elizabeth flung herself into Cecilia’s arms.
By the time Peter caught up, Cecilia was hugging her squirming, squealing, sweating children.
“Where were you?” Brad asked. “We waited forever!”
At that moment, Peter looked up and saw Jeff. He looked back at his mother, at her clothing. “Shut up, Brad.”
“But where—”
“Let’s get something to drink.” Cecilia grabbed Peter by one hand and her daughter by the other. “Get your ball, Brad, before Ralph buries it. We’ll fix lemonade.”
“Those were neat pictures you took,” Brad said as they ambled toward the house. “I stuck ’em on my bulletin board, except the one where I was in the middle of the air.” Brad tucked the soccer ball under his arm and smiled up at Jeff. “That one looked real neat, like Cristiano Ronaldo, or somethin’. I gave it to my dad, ’cause he hardly ever gets to go to my games. Even Monica said she liked it, even though she was still mad at me for breakin’ the lamp.”
Jeff stopped. “You broke a lamp?”
“It wasn’t my fault. I was jugglin’ and Anne-Elizabeth bumped into me, and when we crashed the ball kinda went wild.” The impish grin on his face showed he felt little remorse. “Monica went crazy.”
“I can well imagine,” Jeff said sternly.
Brad shrugged. “She’s stupid. She only likes Peter ’cause he doesn’t cause any trouble. She thinks me and Anne-Elizabeth are demons. She said so the first time we ever went over there, just ’cause Annie cried at night when Monica tried to tuck her in, and she wanted to go home and wouldn’t let my dad near her, and I snuck off and called Mom. Monica said we were trying to make her look bad.”
“And what did Peter do during all this?” Jeff asked, morbidly interested in spite of himself.
“He apologized. He told Monica that Annie and me were just upset. He’s the biggest fake.”
“What do you mean?”
“By the time Mom got there, he’d already packed our bags and acted all like the boss, and Dad said he was proud of him for bein’ the one in charge... and then as soon as we got in the car he started bawlin’ just like me an’ Anne-Elizabeth.” Brad kicked a large red rock, and it made a heavy scuttering sound as it rolled down the walk.
“What did your mom do?” Jeff asked quietly.
Brad stood still for a minute, frowning. Suddenly his face lit up. “Oh, yeah! That was the night she took us to Uncle Stan’s, and he let us play. I played the drums and Annie played the keyboard and Peter played the electric guitar—It was awful!” He burst into giggles. “Then we went to Burger Barn—they’re open till after midnight! That was neat.” Suddenly his face fell. “And the next day she made us all apologize, all except Annie, ’cause she was too little, and Peter had already apologized, so that meant me. Just me. I told Monica I was sorry and—and—” He turned a disgusted face up to Jeff. “She kissed me! She left big fat red lips marks on my face. It was gross!”
Anne-Elizabeth burst through the door. “Mommy said come in!” She whirled and ran back, without pausing to see if they followed.
When Jeff entered the kitchen, the pitcher of lemonade was on the counter, Peter was nowhere to be seen and Cecilia seemed upset.
“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked.
“I thought maybe Carol would take me back over to your place so I could pick up my car, but nobody’s home over there.”
“I can take you back. What’s the problem?”
“I can’t just go off and leave the kids.”
“Of course you can’t.” He tried to hide the strain he was under, tried to make his voice casual. “They’ll go with us. What’s the big deal?”
“But your car is so small,” she began, but Brad broke in. “It’s not too small. Me and Peter and Anne-Elizabeth can squeeze in the back seat.” He turned to Jeff. “Is the top down?”
Jeff nodded, and Brad let out a shout. He ran toward the front door, calling his brother and sister. “Come on, we’re going to Jeff’s!”
“Brad!” Jeff called, and the boy stopped just short of a collision with a lamp table. “The ball stays here.”
Jeff watched as Brad tossed it and bounced it off his head, following it with a cocky grin as it landed in an easy chair. “Okay.”
Maybe his apartment would survive.
~o0o~
Late that night, Cecilia sat alone on the front porch swing. She had wrapped herself in a faded old quilt, the fabric and stitches of a great-grandmother she’d never known. They offered her no comfort, not tonight.
One weekend had come and gone and somehow shattered her warm, untidy little world into a thousand frightening pieces. She didn’t want to quiver with need for a man’s touch. She didn’t want to find a man’s presence so comforting.
Damn it, Jeff had been wrong for her all those years ago. How dared he come into her life and seem so right for her now? How dared he look into her heart and pronounce so analytically and understandingly that the goals she’d set for herself were wrong?
How dared he understand her better than she’d been understanding herself lately?
But the most shattering effect of their time together was the knowledge that she would go back for more. She couldn’t turn her back on what he offered. She couldn’t deny herself the pleasure of his company, the aching response to his touch.
Perhaps there was a satisfactory solution: to share and enjoy without possessing or needing. Surely they were mature enough for that. After all, Jeff couldn’t want the shackles of a permanent relationship with her any more than she wanted one with him.
The swing creaked and she smiled in spite of herself, remembering... chocolate and raspberry ice cream, a black feather boa, red tartan boxer shorts.
At least their relationship wouldn’t be boring.
~o0o~
Time was whizzing past like one of the kids’ frisbees. Over the past eight weeks, no matter how demanding her schedule, nothing had kept her mind off Jeff for longer than ten minutes at a time, if that long. Brad and Anne-Elizabeth had jointly decided Jeff was okay. Peter, most decidedly, had not. She sighed.
Today the boys were in school and Anne-Elizabeth was playing army next door with Vinny. Cecilia had nothing more pressing than a dirty kitchen to distract her from Jeff.
Fat chance. She turned her back on the mess and drifted into the bedroom.
In the studio this morning, a word, a single word uttered by a sound technician, had brought Jeff into fullblown, Cinemascope focus, and she’d stuttered, messing up the opening to an advertising jingle for a national fried chicken franchise. Three times.
Cecilia grabbed a laundry basket and carried it into her bedroom, then dropped to the floor, prepared to sort socks and underwear. She flipped the radio onto a classic rock station and closed her eyes, letting the dulcet harmonies of Boys II Men flow through her. The attic fan sucked a steady draft of warm, honeysuckle-scented May air through the open window beside her, and the sun shone through the sheer lace curtains and cast a dimpling gold glaze over the worn hardwood floors. She felt lazy. Tired, but nicely so.
Jeff had stayed late the night before. They had talked quietly on the porch swing, with the first fireflies dancing on the lawn. The kids had been upstairs asleep, yet other than nestling against him, she had not allowed herself the luxury of kisses and caresses. Kisses and caresses might lead to far more than she was comfortable with under the same roof with her children. Yet when he finally left, the kiss he gave her had been potent with hunger, so potent she had been at the brink of asking him inside, when he had pulled away abruptly and given her the saddest of moonlit smiles to haunt her for the rest of the night.
Alone in the darkness, it was the sadness, the longing, that had permeated her with a slow, throbbing ac
he. She didn’t want to kiss him good-night at the door and spend the long and lonely nights alone like a lovesick teenager. Her heart was that of a woman, selfish enough to want him completely, and damn the consequences.
Consequences. What a simple, generic term for two little boys, a little girl, a dog and a bird... not to mention conflicting life-styles from A to Z. She knew that Jeff’s tendency to pick up her towels even before they hit the floor could get old fast. They had discovered during their rare weekends at his apartment that while she woke up singing and happily clattering around in the kitchen, Jeff was more inclined to growl and cover up his head.
How would he survive mornings with squealing and laughter and a game of hide-and-seek that would end up under her bed, more likely than not? He didn’t even appreciate the breakfast omelets with chilies, onions and cheese, which were her specialty, nor did she appreciate his obsession with keeping every receipt filed, every mile logged, every item in a checkbook balanced and accounted for—
“An accountant,” she groaned. “How did I ever let myself go and fall in love with an accountant?”
She sat up so abruptly she knocked over the basket of clothes.
“I didn’t say that,” she announced loudly to the floral wallpaper. But the thumping of her heart and the spasm in her stomach announced just as loudly that whether or not she had said it, she had meant it. She sprang to her feet.
“I love him.” The world didn’t crumble around her head, but it might as well have. “Oh, God,” she moaned, clenching her fists to her temples. “I do, I do. I love him.” And then, as shock and frustration overcame the initial astonishment, she grabbed a pillow off the bed and hurled it at the ceiling. It landed on her head, then bounced to the floor. “How could you?” she demanded, meeting her own angry glare in the mottled mirror over her antique oak dresser. “How could you do this to me?”
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