Love in Maine

by Connie Falconeri

  Her eyes were still closed, and the tears were beginning to seep out. “You kept everything from me, Hank. Not just where you were these past few months, but all your feelings. Everything. The whole time.”

  He leaned in and kissed her neck and reached under her shirt again, lightly touching her stomach. “I might have been quiet, but you always knew how I felt. You’ve always known that I loved you, since the minute you walked into my mother’s living room and you were supposed to be some little old lady. But you were you.” Hank took a quick breath. “And I was a mess. I just . . . I’m better now, I swear. I’m talking to the right people—”

  Maddie opened her moist eyes and stared into his. “You are?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. I am. Big man meets shrink. You good with that?”

  Maddie nodded and smiled, but she was still sad. “I’m glad someone is there for you.”

  “It’s all because of you, Maddie. You were there for me.”

  She looked like that wasn’t correct either.

  He shook his head. “No, that’s not right. It’s not because of you in that way that leaves you with the burden. It’s thanks to you . . . for making me see it was possible . . . that everything was possible. I had no incentive to really connect with other people after I left the Army. You were amazingly incentivizing . . .” Hank kept one hand under her shirt and one hand at the back of her neck. And waited.

  Reaching up to touch his cheek, Maddie finally released her arms from the defensive posture across her chest. “I missed you so much . . .” She touched his cheek, and his eyes softened. The relief of her touch. The relief of being there with her.

  Hank had been worried that he might have concocted the power of their connection. Now he knew for sure it was entirely real. She took his hand from her neck and put it to her chest. “I can feel my heart starting to beat again,” she said softly. “I felt sort of dead when you were gone. It’s not healthy. It’s wrong. I feel like I’m disappearing when we’re not together.”

  Hank pulled her hard and fast into the solid wall of his stomach and chest, then heaved them both onto the bed, nearly crushing her beneath his desperate body. “You could never disappear.”

  “My body needs you. I need you. I worried about you all the time. If anything happened to you—” Her words flew out in a rush.

  He lifted her hands so he could look at the ravaged cuticles and nonexistent fingernail tips. “I’m supposed to be the one looking out for you, not the other way around.”

  Maddie smiled and looked embarrassed. “I became rather knowledgeable about military deployments in Afghanistan.”

  “Oh, you did, did you?” He was kissing her neck and unbuttoning her pants. “What’s your favorite river?”

  “The Panj. Or maybe the Arghandab.”

  He smiled. “Why those?” He leaned back on his knees and pulled off her jeans, then pulled off his own shirt.

  “Because they usually show soldiers, so I can picture you there.” Her voice was getting reedy as it always did when she was losing her focus on the words and transitioning into the world of their pleasure.

  “Forgive me, Maddie.” Hank leaned his lips into the warm turn of her neck. “Please,” he whispered near her ear.

  She arched up into him and then turned her lips to his. Their forty-eight-hour clock was ticking and she didn’t want to waste another minute.

  CHAPTER 21

  Maddie rolled over into her pillow and thought she had been dreaming about Hank again. The pillow smelled like him. But she was alone in her single bed in Providence. Disoriented, she got up and pulled her robe from the closet. She wrapped the belt around her waist and rubbed her eyes as she opened the door into the kitchen. Hank was sitting at the table in his gray button-down shirt and military-looking pants and drawing something, or taking notes, and talking to Deeanna.

  Taking a few seconds to just stare at him, here in her world. Not in the Ritz-Carlton or on the perimeter. Really here. At her kitchen table with her roommate. Deeanna saw her first and she gave Hank a quick tap with her elbow. He stopped what he was doing and looked up at Maddie.

  His smile spread across his face, and Maddie was almost embarrassed that Deeanna had seen such a display of . . . everything.

  Maddie pulled her bathrobe more tightly around her because that smile made her feel naked. She walked over to make a new pot of coffee. “How long did I sleep?” she asked.

  “It’s almost one,” Hank said.

  “In the afternoon?!” Maddie almost dropped the glass coffee carafe into the ceramic sink. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  When no one answered, Maddie finished refilling the water, poured it into the coffeemaker, and turned to look at them, folding her arms across her chest. “Well?”

  Hank stood up, and Deeanna looked at the paper he had been working on and pretended not to pay attention.

  “Because you were tired,” Hank said, snaking his arms around her waist. She pretended to stay irritated.

  “We’ve wasted precious hours,” Maddie mumbled, keeping her arms crossed, but starting to dip her lips to his chest to get a kiss.

  He smiled and hugged her close. “We’re good. Pack a bag. Jump in the shower. We’ve got plans for the weekend.”

  When Maddie looked up, her eyes were alive and expectant. “Really?”

  “Unless you’re too busy?”

  “As it turns out, I’ve had a lot of time to devote to my studies lately.” She smirked.

  “Then let’s go.” Hank turned her around and pushed her toward her bedroom. “Hurry up!”

  She stumbled in with a stupid grin, looking around at her messy room. The clothes that she’d worn the night before, and slept in—the same clothes that Hank had taken off her with slow, deliberate care that morning—were strewn all over the floor. The makeshift pallet that poor Sam Pruitt had slept on was still crumpled next to the bed. The bed . . . looked like it had gone through a tornado.

  Maddie smiled when she looked at the mangled sheets and remembered how good it felt to be there again with Hank—

  “Why are you still standing in the middle of the room in your bathrobe? Chop chop! Let’s go!” Hank was smiling but he wasn’t joking. “It was fun to have a toss in a single bed for old times’ sake, but we’ve got places to go . . . places with big beds and no one around for miles—”

  “Okay! Okay!” Maddie ran over to her closet and pulled out her duffle bag. She packed, jumped in the shower, and threw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt.

  When she came out to the kitchen, Deeanna was bent over another piece of paper talking to Hank. He had put on his sweater and his shiny boots while Maddie had been in the shower, and he looked so great.

  “What are you two up to?” Maddie asked, leaning over their shoulders to see what they were working on. She rested a hand on Hank’s shoulder, and he touched his cheek to the back of her hand for a second. The paper they were studying was covered in an incomprehensible spray of numbers and arrows.

  “Oh.” Deeanna looked up. “Henry was just telling me about some of the mesh composites he’s been working on. I’ve been talking to my chemistry teacher about some ideas I had about that sort of thing for vascular reinforcement, and I just thought I’d run them past Henry . . . while he was here . . .”

  Maddie looked from one to the other. “Miss Candy-harr and Mr. I-Clean-the-Bottom-of-Boats for a living? You two are ridiculous.”

  Deeanna pretended to be offended, then smiled and pulled together her homework papers. “Thanks, Henry. It was really great meeting you. Sorry about the are-you-the-one-she-picked-up comment earlier.”

  Hank was standing and reached down to shake her hand. “I think we’ll probably see each other again.” He looked quickly at Maddie, then back to Deeanna. “It was good to meet you, too. Say bye to Emily and Leah for me.”

  “Will do. Have a good rest of the weekend, you guys.”

  Maddie smiled, and Hank took her hand and led her back toward the living room and ou
t the front door.

  When they’d walked down the few steps to the street, Hank turned to Maddie and smiled. “I don’t even know what kind of car you have.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Nope.”

  He led her toward his black rental car. “What do you do? How do you get around?” He took her bag and threw it in the back, then opened the passenger door to let her get in.

  “I run everywhere.”

  He smiled down at her, then shut the door and walked around the front of the car and got in.

  He started up the car and headed down the hill from her house.

  “Oooh!” Maddie clapped her hands. “Are we going to the Ritz? Please-please-please!”

  “God I’ve missed you like hell.”

  Maddie looked out the window and furrowed her brow and stared at the row of houses in her neighborhood. “I was right here the whole time.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mad. It was all wrong. I had to get some stuff sorted out. You of all people knew that. But we’re going to be good, right?” He reached for her hand, and she gave him hers.

  “It’s going to be good,” she said, bringing his hand to her lips. She set their clasped hands down on the armrest between them. “But . . .”

  Hank took a deep breath and blew out a loud sigh. “But?”

  “But . . . where the hell have you been? When will I see you again? Where are you going to be next year? How am I supposed to plan for the rest of my life?” That last bit might have been going a bit far. Or not.

  Somewhere along the line, this whole summer-fling-thing had catapulted headlong into love-of-my-life please-don’t-ever-leave-me territory.

  Hank smiled slowly. Victorious was the word that came to mind when Maddie looked at him just then. “Thinking about the rest of your life, are you, Maddie?”

  She looked a little guilty. “Well, yeah . . . but also where you’ve been and all that other stuff. But, yeah, all right, I admit it. I want to be with you. There. I said it. I want to live in the same house. I want to sleep in the same bed. Eventually, I want to sleep in the same bed and make lots of little Hanks and Maddies, and if that makes me some sort of jumping-the-gun weirdo well, then that’s just—”

  Maddie stopped when she realized Hank was smiling so broadly that he was almost laughing at her.

  “Are you laughing at me? At a time like this?”

  They were on the highway by then. Hank slammed on the brakes, pulled the car to the side of the road, and pushed the gear handle into park. He unbuckled his seat belt, then hers, and pulled Maddie so hard and fast into his arms that she pretty much melted there on the spot. “I want every single one of those things,” he said hot and fast into her ear. “I want them yesterday. I have a ring in my pocket right now and we are driving to a beautiful house on the Cape so I can propose to you somewhere gorgeous and memorable, because I want to do everything right by you, Madison Post. I want to make you so happy that you never have that look on your face that I saw this morning when you opened your front door and you were not happy to see me. If I ever see that sadness on your face again, I think I will . . . behave very badly.” He kissed her again. “That redhead escaped with his life.”

  Maddie was crying and laughing and kissing him. She had wriggled into his lap, on her knees, holding his face in her hands.

  When she put her lips to his, she transferred all of the pent-up desire and commitment and love that she had been harboring for the past eight months without him physically there to receive it all. “Please don’t ever leave me again, okay?” she whispered. She scraped her fingertips across his scalp, loving the tingle of his short hair against her skin.

  “Okay.” He smiled, but it was thin. “I have to finish this assignment, sweetheart, but I swear, in August I’ll be done, and we’ll be set, financially at least. We can do whatever we want.” He helped her get settled back on her side of the car. “Let’s get to the Cape and get those clothes off and just take care of one thing at a time.”

  “All right. But I don’t like it.” She pouted, and he smiled.

  Hank looked into his side mirror and his rear mirror, then over his shoulder before pulling back out onto the highway. “You don’t like the idea of being naked in an empty house with me to entertain you?”

  “You know that’s not it. I don’t like you being all secretive and unavailable. I know I’m just being grumpy and selfish. But we don’t need the money. Is that wrong of me to say?”

  “It’s not just the money, and you know it. I’m not going to marry you and live off your inheritance. Neither are you, for that matter. I know you would never do that. Why would you expect me to?”

  Maddie twisted her mouth into a frustrated pinch. After a few minutes of contemplating the truth of what he said, she threw up her arms and cried, “Oh! Of course you’re right! But I am just so sick and tired of waiting-waiting-waiting for everything.”

  Hank burst out laughing. “Maddie! You’re twenty-one years old! What are you even saying? What have you ever had to wait for?”

  She gave him a guilty smile. “Well,” she bounced her left knee impatiently, “it feels like twenty-one . . . thousand. It was a nightmare. Honestly, I can’t tell you what it’s been like to watch that damn television and see all those soldiers and not know if you’re there or somewhere else, and if you are working with explosives—”

  “Maddie—”

  “What? You don’t think I can look up the job description of an Army Diver Engineer . . . right there in little letters after all the other good deeds, like building bridges and fortifying dams and all that structural stuff . . . explosives.”

  Hank kept staring straight out the window.

  “Are you going to deny it?”

  “What’s the point?” Hank shrugged. “I work with explosives.”

  Maddie was becoming impatient, then realized that Hank’s face had changed and that something about the conversation was becoming far more difficult for him than discussing minor things like, oh, getting married.

  “What is it?” Maddie asked in a softer voice.

  “What is what?” Hank asked back.

  “Why don’t you want to talk to me about the explosives? Something happened—”

  “Maddie. Of course things happened. I was in the Army for ten years. Six of those years I was actively deployed in the Middle East.” Maddie could tell that Hank had probably practiced saying those sentences. He sounded like he wanted to add all sorts of epithets, and she had to give him credit for keeping it even-keeled.

  “Oh-kaay.” Maddie stretched out the two syllables. “Sooooo.” She tried to think of the best way to get him to tell her a loose outline of what had happened. “Why don’t we just approach it like an interview, just hand me your résumé. I don’t want an emotional hazmat situation any more than you do. But I would like to at least know where you were, just loosely.” He stayed quiet. “If you can.” She squeezed his hand gently to encourage him.

  “We’ll talk about everything, I promise. Let’s just enjoy the drive for now. Okay?” Hank asked.

  “Of course.” Maddie felt guilty for pushing him. “Whenever you feel like it.” She looked out the car window and saw that they were getting toward the more remote reaches of Cape Cod. She loved the feelings of isolation and space this place had always evoked for her. “What a gorgeous day.”

  The spring air felt new, and the weight of winter had been scrubbed from the landscape. The ocean was still that metallic gray of those freezing months, but the dunes and grasses were a stunning, vibrant green. They listened to the radio and drove the rest of the way talking about nothing in particular, what they wanted to make for dinner, how her thesis was going. Maddie felt like the urgency she had felt even a few minutes before, wanting to know everything right that instant, had begun to abate. They had the rest of their lives for everything to unfold.

  Hank pulled the car up in front of a small general store when they pulled into
Wellfleet. They filled a hand basket with some vegetables, milk, coffee, a bottle of wine, and some pasta. A few minutes later, they were back in the car, and Hank turned it down an unpaved lane that ended at a quintessential shake-shingle Cape Cod home, with the sea extending beyond it in every direction. The trim around the windows and doors was a bright white against the patina of age that the salt air had imparted to the cedar shingles over the passage of time.

  They grabbed their luggage and the groceries, and walked into the house.

  “No key?” Maddie asked.

  “No. My friend has someone who lives nearby and checks on the place and opened it for us.”

  “You were pretty confident I would just fall into your arms, huh?” They were unpacking the groceries in the old farm kitchen. The red countertops looked cheerful and enduring, like someone had thought they would be a really good idea in 1960.

  “Either that or I’d need to drown my sorrows in a lost weekend of blackout drinking. So, I figured I’d need this place either way.” He was joking, but Maddie felt the idea of Hank at that level of misery lance through her. She walked up behind him where he was setting the fruit and vegetables into a large wooden bowl on the counter.

  “Let’s forget the blackout drinking part and have our own lost weekend.” She began to unbutton his pants, reaching around from behind and undoing the belt buckle. He stopped organizing the produce and put his hands flat on the counter and his forehead against the wood kitchen cabinet.

  “Maddie . . .”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” She had her hips pressed against his ass and her eyes closed, the better to feel the metal of his belt buckle against her trembling fingertips as she unfastened it.

  “Maddie . . .” he whispered, strained.

  “Mmmmmm.” She turned and rested her cheek against his back.

  He whipped around, buttoned his pants quickly, and lifted her up into his arms. “Let the weekend begin!” He strode out of the kitchen and into the living room. “We’re not going to make it to the bedroom.” He tossed her down on the huge sofa and undid his pants. “We’re not even going to make it to getting-our-clothes-off.”