One Night With You

by Gwynne Forster

  “You’ve had it pretty tough your first day back, ma’am,” Carl Running Moon Howard said when he handed her the following day’s schedule. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Thanks, Carl, but I’m fine. I’m going home and get some rest. See you in the morning.”

  She’d barely had time to pull off her shoes when the phone rang. “This is Reid. How’d it go?”

  “I had Emerson all day again,” she said. “He’s a very incompetent defense attorney, and he has a problem with me. I had to put him in his place the first day I was in that court. So I didn’t dare let my attention drift today, and it was a struggle. I’d love to kiss you, but I’d have to keep it light.”

  “I’ll bring you some supper and get my kiss, but I won’t stay very long. Be over in about an hour.”

  “Thanks. Call before you leave home, because I’m going to lie down, and if I fall asleep, I might not hear you knock.”

  She wondered at his long silence. Then he said, “I wouldn’t want to awaken you. If you have food in the house, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got several cans of soup, bread and eggs. I can make a meal of that, but I’d love to kiss you.”

  “And I’d love to get a kiss, but I don’t think I’d enjoy its aftereffect. Get some rest. See you tomorrow.”

  She arrived at the theater in the park an hour early that Thursday night because she hadn’t attended the Tuesday night rehearsal and she wanted to familiarize herself with the stage and with Mike’s stage directions. What a night, she thought, as the warm breeze brushed her face and stars blanketed the sky. It seemed to her that the moon’s brilliance made electric light redundant. She went backstage and spoke with Mike.

  “You only have to worry about the second act,” he said. “It’s very emotional, real drama and it may exhaust you, because you’re not up to snuff. So don’t use up too much energy there. You have another act facing you.”

  “All right. Thanks for alerting me.”

  However, she failed to heed his warning. At the beginning of the second act, Lissa said to Don, “Betty’s got a job at the casino, making fistfuls of money. I think I’ll try it. She said she can get me in.”

  Don got up from his favorite chair, walked over to her and, with his face an inch from hers, said, “No, you are not. There’s adequate money for Tonya’s education in the trust fund I set up for her the day she was born. I make enough to support my family and save adequately for our retirement. We don’t even need the money from your job as an administrative assistant, so why the devil do you need to work at a gambling casino? You don’t need fistfuls of money.”

  “You’re telling me what I can’t do? I didn’t marry you to get a boss,” Lissa said. “I married you for a husband and a lover, and if I want to be a croupier I’ll take the course and apply for the job.”

  “Dammit, letting me take care of you is like eating ground glass, isn’t it? You had to have your own car, and why? I drive right past the building you work in every morning on my way to work, and pass back by there every evening. You also had to have your own bank account, even though I put your name on mine.”

  Lissa jerked away from Don and pranced across the room. “I need my own identity. Left to you, you’ll take over my life. A woman needs her own life, her own name and her own authority.”

  “Yeah? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means she won’t allow herself to be smothered by a man. That’s what it means, and if I want to deal blackjack at a casino, you are not going to stop me.”

  “We’ll see about that. You know I can make you do anything I want you to do.”

  Lissa started backing away from Don. “That’s what you think. You get nothing here tonight, buddy.”

  “Who said so? And don’t you call me buddy.” His hand went to her right breast. “If I get my mouth on you, I can be inside you in a minute.”

  “It’s not true,” she said, and suddenly she forgot that it was Lissa and not Kendra speaking. “You’re out of line.”

  “Really?” Don said. “It’ll give me great pleasure to prove it.” His right hand caressed her other breast. The curtain fell, and the audience rose as one, applauding and yelling, “Bravo!”

  “You weren’t supposed to do that, man,” Mike said when he rushed to them. “Kendra, I told you not to get carried away in this act.” He threw up his hands. “Go take a bow.”

  “You rewrote the script, not to speak of the stage directions,” Mike said after they took a bow. “True, the audience loved it, but this is not a reality show.” He threw up his hands again. “It’s a howling success, so what the hell?”

  Suddenly, Mike seemed to sober up. “Reid,” he said, “in the next act, please try to remember that Kendra is Judge Kendra Rutherford, and keep your hands off her pretty breasts. I’d hate to see her slap your face and ruin the play.”

  “Do you really think that you only have to touch me, and you can do anything to me that you like?” Kendra asked Reid when he took her key to open her back door. “I wouldn’t be much of a woman if I was that weak.”

  “And I wouldn’t be much of a man if, at this age, I didn’t know how to get a woman, so let’s not fight about it.”

  “You were still mad because I tried to cook Sunday and made a mess.”

  “You also pulled that T-shirt on against the doctor’s orders. Were you trying to show me that you didn’t need me, and doing it at the risk of injuring yourself permanently?”

  So that was it. She realized then that she had hurt him and that he had a deeply ingrained desire to know that she needed him. “Oh, Reid. I needed your help when I couldn’t look after myself, but that’s not the important way that I need you. I need you to hold me when I hurt, to laugh with me when I’m happy, to share good news and bad news. I need you to love me. When I see a beautiful sunset or an exquisite painting, I want you to see it with me, or if I hear beautiful music or a funny joke, I have a need to share it with you. I need you, Reid!”

  “When you say things like that to me, I’m almost happy.” The tremors in his voice told her more than his words, and she opened her arms to him.

  “Someday soon, I hope this secretiveness won’t be necessary,” she said and tightened her arms around him. “You’re such a sweet man, and I…I don’t like to remember what my life was like before you made it so beautiful.”

  He gazed down at her, saying nothing, seemingly content to look at her. She couldn’t divine his mood or what he might be thinking. “Say something,” she said to him.

  “I don’t trust myself to talk right now. Hold me for a minute, and then I’ll leave.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to spoil one of the truly wonderful moments of my life.” After a minute, he kissed her cheek and left. She didn’t understand his behavior, but it didn’t matter, for she had seen in his eyes, his countenance, his whole demeanor, pure love for her, and it was what she felt when she held him.

  Her phone rang, and she answered it, knowing that Reid was the caller. “Are you going to tell me why you left so suddenly?”

  “Words of love, I mean genuine love, such as you expressed to me are…I don’t know. What you said to me was like a healing potion, something sacred, and I didn’t want to diminish it by following it with anything else, not even something that I valued. What I’m saying, Kendra, is that it wasn’t a time for lovemaking, although I wanted that, needed it like I needed air to breathe. I left because your sweetness and gentleness only made me want you more. All things in their season.”

  Reid left home Saturday morning around nine for a drive to Edenton. He wanted to see that office space in daylight on a weekend, and he also wanted to inspect the neighborhood at night. He wanted Kendra’s appraisal of it, too. When it came to real estate, he didn’t take the owner’s word. As he approached a traffic light one block from the building in which he lived, he slammed on the brakes with such suddenness that, had anyone been following him, he would have caused an accident
. It couldn’t possibly be, he assured himself, collected his wits and drove on. But who else looked like that? God forbid he should have problems with Myrna just as he’d begun to enjoy living once more.

  Chapter 10

  “I was in Edenton this morning,” Reid told Kendra after he returned to Queenstown, “and I liked the office space I found. It suits my current needs. It’s in a decent-looking building and the neighborhood’s presentable. But I need to see the area at night, and I’d like you to look at it. You may see something that I missed.”

  “Sure. When do you want to go?”

  “Now, if you have time.” They drove to Edenton, and he watched her carefully for her gut reaction to the building and office space.

  “After you renovate the bathroom, you’ll have excellent accommodations,” she said. He liked that way she had of making her criticisms sound almost like compliments.

  “My thoughts exactly,” he said. “Let’s hang out someplace until dark. I want to see how this area looks at night.”

  He parked across from the city park, went to a convenience story and bought two large cups of pecan-praline ice cream and a bag of roasted peanuts. He took her hand. “Let’s walk over by the river and feed the squirrels.” They sat on a bench at the edge of the Chowan River, ate ice cream and shelled nuts for the squirrels.

  Kendra gazed down at his bare feet, and though she didn’t frown, she seemed skeptical. “Do you always pull off your shoes when you sit down?” she asked him.

  “Let’s put it this way. I only wear shoes when I have no alternative. Why? Couldn’t you live with a man who goes around barefooted all the time?”

  She cast him a sidelong glance and leaned back. When she did, her T-shirt tightened across her breasts causing them to jut out, and he nearly swallowed his tongue. “I could if he always washed his feet before he went to bed.”

  He didn’t know why, but he’d almost guessed she’d say that. “If I tell you I don’t have a single bad habit, can we live together?” He hadn’t planned to ask her that, but he had, and he’d go with it. “I can move here to Edenton, and you’d only have a half-hour commute.”

  She stopped eating ice cream and placed the lid on the container and appeared thoughtful, for she realized that he wasn’t smiling. “Is that a serious suggestion, and how am I supposed to take it?”

  “I need to be with you, Kendra. We love each other, so why can’t we live together?”

  “The answer to that shouldn’t cost you any sweat, Reid. We’re not married. I’m a judge, and your case may come before me. To me, shacking up is a way to avoid commitment, and if a man won’t commit to me, I’m not going to live with him.”

  “I am committed to you, and you know it. Oh, hell, if you don’t want it, I’m not going to nag.”

  Her shrug told him that she had dug in, and that she wouldn’t be moved. “You mean you’re not going to beg. I didn’t say I don’t want to live with you, I’m saying that I am not going to shack up with you.”

  “It would only be temporary,” he said.

  “And that could be a problem, couldn’t it?” she said. She ate the remainder of her ice cream, and he took the empty cup from her and threw it into the refuse basket. When he returned to the bench, she looked down at his bare feet.

  “The grass under my feet is a great feeling,” he said. “Pull off your shoes and try it. It’s like getting back to nature.”

  She pulled off her shoes and as he stared into her eyes, he rubbed her toes with his own. “I’d give anything, yes, anything, to kiss you senseless right here, right now.”

  “And that would be the minute in which the county clerk would stroll by,” she said. “We’re safer watching the sunset.”

  But, somehow, when the big round disc slipped behind the distant hills, he’d never felt lonelier in his life. Lonely, although his arm was tight around her.

  When twilight settled, he drove back to the street where he would open his office, and circled the area block by block. “This doesn’t seem real,” he said to her. “It’s Saturday night, the streets are empty, and it’s so quiet that the sound of your footsteps would scare you to death.”

  “It’s on the edge of a residential area,” she said. “I think it’s a good spot.”

  “So do I,” he said. “I was going to suggest we go to a restaurant, but I’m not hungry.”

  “Neither am I. I suppose it was the ice cream. I ate some peanuts, too.”

  “Let’s pick up something interesting at one of those gourmet take-out shops on the square and eat it when we get home. What do you say?”

  He bought crab cakes, leek soup, biscuits, asparagus, corn on the cob and a green salad. “Anything else you’d like?” he asked her. “We could have some of those big shrimp.

  “A pound of shrimp,” he said to the clerk.

  “How can we eat all that?” she asked him.

  “I don’t believe in being hungry when it isn’t necessary.”

  They reached Queenstown shortly after eight o’clock.

  “Would you like to eat at my place?” he asked. He loved her smile and the way in which she used it to reinforce her contentment with him.

  “Sounds good to me. I’ll go home, walk through the alley and knock on your back door.”

  Always hiding their relationship. He hated it, but he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so he smiled. “Don’t take too long.”

  By the time she knocked on his door, he’d set the table, put out the food and had the leek soup warming. “I wish I’d thought to get a flower for you,” he said. “We have candles and some really good white burgundy to go with this wonderful food, and flowers are all that’s missing.”

  They had nearly finished the meal when she said, “With you here, Reid, nothing is missing. Absolutely nothing.”

  He stopped eating, dropped his fork on the side of his plate and said, “You’re my soul mate, the only true love I’ve ever known. There are times when what I feel for you nearly overwhelms me.”

  “Darling…Oh, Reid, you don’t know how deeply you’ve touched me.”

  He stood, but at that moment the doorbell rang. “Damn the lousy timing! Who the hell can that be?”

  He opened the door, and his heart plummeted to the pit of his belly. “What the…What are you doing here?”

  “May I come in?” She pushed her hair away from her face, let her bottom lip drop slightly and looked at him from slightly lowered lashes. “I came all the way from Baltimore just to see you.”

  “I’ll bet you did. Same old Myrna.” He laughed, realized that he enjoyed it and let the laughter pour out of him. “Looks as if you’ve had some experience at selling your…self. You’ve been reading the Maryland Journal, too. Well, babe, there’s nothing you can do for me.” He slammed the door shut, leaned against it and let himself breathe.

  “Who was that woman?”

  “My ex-wife. This is the first time I’ve seen or heard from her since she told me that poverty wasn’t her style. The news of my contracts with Reginald English and my consultancy with Marks and Connerly was reported in the Maryland Journal, and she wasted no time getting here.”

  “What for? Isn’t your divorce final?”

  “It’s been final for almost seven years, but this is her style. She plans to lie herself back into my life, but there isn’t a chance of that. Not if she was the last woman alive on this earth.”

  “Oh, I believe you.”

  “Yes, and what a moment for her to barge in.” He couldn’t get back into the mood that Myrna had interrupted. That was a time different from any he had ever experienced, and he knew that a minute later he would have sunk to his knees and asked Kendra Rutherford to be his wife and the mother of his children. He gazed down at her, and her forlorn expression told him that she knew it, too.

  “It was wonderful,” she said, “but it’s getting late, and I’m tired. I think I’ll be going.”

  She didn’t succeed in hiding her disappointment, and as desperately
as he longed to, he couldn’t give her the reassurance she needed. The very sight of Myrna had destroyed any tenderness that had resided in him.

  “I’ll take you home.” He held her hand as they walked through the alley to her house. “This was a terrible time for her to show up,” he said as they stood at Kendra’s back door. “All of my anger and distaste for her resurfaced, ruining my mood and my disposition.”

  She focused on the bit of floor between them. “I know, and I sure hope you get over it soon. When you came back to me, it was like having a bucket of cold water dashed into my face. It’s over between you, so please let it lie, Reid.”

  “I’ll try. I won’t give her the power to blot out my happiness.”

  He bent to kiss her, and while she put her arms around him, she didn’t part her lips, for she was no better at pretending than he. “I love you,” he whispered, and left her.

  It didn’t surprise him that when he arrived in the lobby of the building in which he lived, Myrna waited for him. If she had been less tenacious, he probably would not have married her. “What do you want with me?” he roared, anger billowing from him like smoke from a chimney.

  “Can’t we talk? I’ve been looking for you for the longest time. I wanted you to know how sorry I was, and that I made the biggest mistake of my life.”

  “Yes, it was, wasn’t it? Whose Jaguar are you driving around in these days? And where’s all that gold and those diamonds I bought you? You never used to leave the house without them. What happened? Did you pawn it? It’s interesting that you didn’t find me until I was out of the ditch, until you read that I had a multimillion-dollar contract. Well, you listen to this. You have spent the last one of my pennies that you will ever spend. You are wasting your time, and I don’t intend to allow you to waste mine.”

  She sidled up to him and put her hands on his chest. “You don’t mean it. There’s no way you could forget how I used to tie you into knots in bed.”