Mitch stopped by Monday, as promised, but it was awkward. Mel wanted to ask about Ashleigh and how things had gone with the two of them on Sunday, but she couldn’t quite get up the nerve. Meanwhile, Mitch was so embarrassed that he’d kissed her that he was reluctant to even touch her, except his necessary examination of her knee.
As Mel had suspected, it had only been a minor twist, and it already felt better. She was getting much better on crutches, and while the two weeks of help Mitch recommended hadn’t officially passed, Mel felt confident that she could get by with only the occasional helper or visitor.
If Mitch had offered to stay, of course she would have let him, but he didn’t offer. He didn’t even check if there was someone else to help out. He seemed totally distant, which honestly hurt Mel much more than she could have anticipated.
Subha’s words kept ringing in her head. She couldn’t help but wonder whether Mitch did have feelings for her, at some level. If he did, then her stopping him during their kiss on Sunday was probably the worst thing Mel could have done in terms of his psyche. Mel wished she had the courage to bring it up, or to somehow get past that hurdle. What if, by some miracle, he did like her, after all? How could anything ever happen between them again, having left it all like this?
Finally, as Mitch was rising to leave, and Mel desperately wanted him to stay, she impulsively said, “Hey, Mitch? Before you go…”
He turned to look at her. “Yeah?”
Her mind was blank. What could she say? What would sound natural? Nothing came to mind, and the longer the silence stretched, the more uncomfortable it became.
Finally, Mitch said, “What is it, Mel?”
The resignation in his voice made her panic, and before she could realize what she was saying, she blurted out, “I really want you to stay, but I can’t figure out a good way to ask.”
As soon as she said it, she slapped her hand over her mouth, utterly astonished that something so ridiculous had just come out of it. But Mitch was actually laughing out loud. He said, “I am so glad you said that. Oh my God. Mel, I feel so stupid. We had the best week together, and an awesome weekend, and then I ruined it all.”
“You didn’t,” she insisted, shaking her head. “Honestly. I feel like I’m the one who ruined it.”
Mitch smiled a broad, sincere smile and knelt again beside the couch. “I wanted to stay, and especially with your knee in such bad shape. I just didn’t think you would want me to.”
Mel smiled, too, bashful though it was, and took a deep breath. “Okay. Good. I like having you here.”
Mitch cocked his head slightly, and they just looked at each other for a quiet moment, eyes locked. “Me too,” he said.
It would have been the right time to kiss her, if he’d wanted to. But after she’d stopped him before, how could he try again? Mel wasn’t really hopeful, though she was open to it. If he really did like her, she wouldn’t stop him from kissing her again.
But he didn’t try. The same impulse that had caused him to be so respectful of her wishes the day before still held. He didn’t try anything all day. Not when they ate dinner together, not when they watched a movie together on Mel’s laptop, and not when he helped her ice her knee again before bed. Never for a moment did he try anything.
It was only in his eyes, the way he looked at her, the way he watched her with this wry smile, as though she was always a little funny. That was the only thing Mel noticed that might have given Subha any idea of his liking her. And who knew? Maybe he just thought she was funny, and that was that. Mel was always glad to have Mitch around, but watching him that afternoon, she knew she wanted more than he did.
Mitch went home that night, but promised to come early the next morning. When he came, things finally seemed really normal between them again. The occasional lingering stare might have passed on her side, but other than that, it was back to Mel and Mitch: the guy who still loved his ex and the girl who wanted to sing to him to grant his deepest wish. So just your regular, everyday friendship.
Mitch told Mel Tuesday morning that Ashleigh had been weird since Sunday. “She’s supposed to take a cruise with Sam the week before Christmas,” he explained. “His whole family does it every year, and this year, she’s invited. It’s a huge thing, and he’s paying so she can’t use money as an excuse not to come, and Aiden told me that she thinks Sam might propose there.”
Mel raised her eyebrows. Putting aside that that was a very weird thing to tell her five-year-old son, that seemed to be moving pretty fast. According to Mitch, he and Ashleigh had only split in September.
“Wow,” Mel said. “That’s a big deal.”
“It is,” Mitch confirmed. “And she’s been super excited about it, like she can’t wait to do it and talks about it constantly. Which is why I was, like, one thousand percent shocked when I got this text.”
Mitch fished his phone out of his pocket, unlocked it, and handed it to Mel. In a text, Ashleigh had written, “I don’t know if I’m taking cruise after all. Might be too much too fast. What do you think?”
Mel’s eyes widened. “Whoa. ‘What do you think?’ She’s seriously asking you whether you think she should go on a cruise with the other man, basically? What did you say?”
“Scroll down,” Mitch said, and Mel did. She saw a string of texts in which, in vague terms, Mitch told Ashleigh he only wanted her to be happy, and Ashleigh fawned over him for wanting that. The last, unanswered text from Ashleigh read: I just see you trying and it reminds me of the kind of man you can be.
Mel was downright astonished. Was Mitch going to get his deepest wish anyway, without her input? Actually speechless, she handed Mitch back his phone.
“What in the world?” she said under her breath, and Mitch gave her that little smile again, the one that made her feel suddenly exposed, like he could see every part of her.
“My thoughts exactly,” he said, pocketing the phone again. “I don’t even know what to say to that. Like, when she sees me ‘trying’? What does that mean?”
Mel looked at Mitch and cocked her head. “Do you really not know what it means?”
“No! Why, do you?”
“It means she sees you trying with me. With helping me with my knee and everything.”
Mitch shook his head, confused. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“She’s jealous of me. Explains a lot, actually,” Mel said. “That’s why she hates me so much.”
“Jealous. Huh. That didn’t occur to me.” Mitch looked like he wasn’t quite sure what he thought of that. “I thought maybe it meant she still had feelings for me.”
“Same difference,” Mel said, resenting the stupidity of men that required her to explain the behavior of the woman he loved to the man she wished was in love with her instead. “She wouldn’t have a problem with me if she didn’t still want you, at least on some level.”
The cocky smile was on his face before he could stop it, and Mel cried, “Come on!” just as Mitch was laughing and saying, “What?” He ducked as Mel swatted him with a throw pillow, saying with a playful but serious tone, “You are so cocky. Stop that. You were together for five years; of course, she still has feelings. Don’t be insensitive. This is what you want, isn’t it?”
Mitch was still smiling incredulously, and he gave a slight nod. “Yeah. Yeah, of course it is. I mean…” The expression in his face was enough to make Mel’s heart drop into her stomach. “Yeah.” Then, in a lighter tone, he added, “It’s just nice to be liked, that’s all.”
Feeling almost desperate to be the one he wanted instead, Mel said, “Well, you’re very likeable so you might as well learn to accept it graciously and have a little humility.”
“You think I’m likeable,” Mitch gloated, but then he returned to his phone, probably to text Ashleigh back. Mel genuinely wished she hasn’t said anything, but supposed that was more or less the response she deserved for such ill-timed flirting. If she’d needed any more proof that Mitch didn’t like her i
n that way, here it was.
Mitch stopped staying overnight with Mel, which wasn’t a big deal, but they never discussed why. Probably because it wasn’t necessary. He just came over in the morning and stayed with her basically all day, every day that week. Mel knew he had taken time off from work—time he’d probably originally planned on spending with Aiden, or Ashleigh, or both. So why was he devoting so much of his time to her?
When she asked him, Mitch told her that Aiden had kindergarten every day, and Ashleigh usually had Sam over.
Mel wanted to make sure she understood. “So, in your house that you pay for and own, your ex lives and regularly invites her new boyfriend to dinner?”
Mitch nodded an affirmative. “Until they move in together, yeah. They want to wait until Aiden’s school year ends to move, though.”
“And you’re okay with this?”
Mitch looked at Mel like she was crazy. “Are you kidding me? No, I’m not okay with it. Remember when we first met? I was losing my mind over it.”
Oh, that’s right. Mel did remember. He had been too miserable to practice medicine appropriately, which was a pretty big deal. Just as Mel was about to ask Mitch what had changed, Mitch said, “If I hadn’t met you, I don’t know what I would have done.”
Mel looked into Mitch’s eyes and saw that he was sincere. No joking, no teasing. It totally disarmed her, and she said, “That’s—wow. I don’t know what to say.”
But his look was serious, though his words were complimentary. “You don’t have to say anything, Mel. I was a zombie. I thought my life was over. You woke me up. You reminded me that the things I want are worth fighting for, and I have the ability to do something.”
“I’m not sure how I did that,” Mel answered self-consciously. “I’m pretty sure I’ve made a point of never giving you any advice about it.”
Mitch laughed. “That’s true. But now I have you to listen, and you let me talk. That’s how I figured out how I felt. I had somebody to work through it with. Just you being you—that’s enough.”
A warm feeling spread all through Mel’s body at his words. That might have been the nicest compliment she had ever received. But she couldn’t bask in it long. The next moment, he said, “But you’re right. I can’t avoid the house just because Sam is there.”
It took Mel a moment to figure out what Mitch meant, and then she was confused by his saying she’d been right when she was pretty sure she hadn’t said anything of the kind. But, she at least agreed on one point: if he took time off to see more of his son, then that’s what he ought to do. She told him as much, saying, “Especially since that’s where Aiden is. Really, I just think he’d love to see more of you.”
Mitch smiled at her. “Yeah? It was awesome how well you two got along, by the way.”
“Thanks,” Mel said, unsure how to respond. It didn’t seem to matter; Mitch was only half-listening again.
“Will you be okay if I take off a little early and have dinner with them?” Mitch asked.
It was a Friday night, and Mel had officially been getting around on her Franken-knee for two weeks. There was no need for extra help now, by her own doctor’s admission. So, she could honestly say, “Yes, I’ll be fine.”
Mitch nodded. He seemed a little bit nervous when he said, “I guess I’ll call Ashleigh.”
He left the room, and Mel sat on the couch, knee feeling almost perfect, and every other part of her feeling suddenly miserable. Was she an idiot? Was she actually the stupidest person in the world? She couldn’t believe she was willingly, repeatedly putting herself in this position. Why did she have feelings for Mitch? Why was she torturing herself like this?
Mel stared into the fire lit in the fireplace. Mitch had figured out how to light it earlier this week, and the whole effect was so nice. It would have been perfect, to be honest, if everything weren’t totally, completely, one hundred percent wrong.
Chapter 9
Mel could have kicked herself. Why, oh, why had she told the man she had feelings for to spend more time with his ex and kid? She’d practically driven him into Ashleigh’s waiting arms, and for what? To fall back into the same patterns of misery that had driven them apart in the first place?
Mel, in her anger and envy toward Ashleigh, thought there was no reason to believe that a relationship that had ended so badly before could ever progress in a positive direction. Ashleigh had dumped him, for heaven’s sake! She’d actually begun and continued a relationship with somebody else, right on the heels of her break-up with a man who, for all intents and purposes, was her husband. Mel didn’t personally have any experience with being left for another person, but she had plenty of friends who did, and she knew that this sort of behavior was really tough to come back from.
The fact that the person who left also somehow had the moral high ground in this particular relationship also seemed very bizarre to Mel. For the person who was abandoned to be the one apologizing and trying to come back—it was truly a mess. Mel knew Mitch could do better, but she couldn’t deny that she wanted to be the one he did better with. Mel couldn’t help but like him. Sure, he was clueless sometimes, but he was so sincere. He always wanted to help her, and did so much for her while asking for nothing in return. Plus, they had a lot in common. Mel had caught herself on more than one occasion fantasizing about him, just in an everyday sort of way—running together after her knee healed, or taking Aiden to do something fun, just the three of them. To be struck with the painful reality that this man wasn’t hers, that this child wasn’t hers, that nothing in this situation was hers to keep, was jarring and weighty. It hurt on every level and from every angle. And she couldn’t help but feel that she was bringing at least some of that pain on herself.
So why had she sent Mitch away? She knew why. It was because of her gift. Her stupid, burdensome, wearying, inexplicable gift. It was as though, after so many years of only making other people happy, she no longer even understood how to make herself happy. She knew that if she had tried to keep Mitch for herself, despite knowing that what he truly wanted was somebody else, she would have always wondered what would have happened if she’d done “the right thing”—assuming, of course, that using her gift was in fact the right thing, which she had no real proof of. As she’d learned in the past, sometimes the gift could be meddlesome and unpleasant, and sometimes it felt like it had a mind of its own and was running her life. But it was a simple fact that never had the gift been so unpleasant to her personally as it was this year with Mitch—and she hadn’t even used it yet.
Maybe the gift wasn’t the only one to blame for this mess. Maybe this time, it was on her.
Mel spent the rest of Friday evening trying to cheer herself up. She wasn’t the kind of person to stay down for long, so she forced herself to do things that would make her break out of her funk. She made more yarn animals for the kids—a unicorn for Riley-bug and a dragon for Caleb. She baked and cleaned. She even made a couple little booties for her niece-to-be. When she finally went to bed at eleven o’clock, she’d used two and a half skeins of yarn and her fingers weren’t exactly sore, but they definitely had earned a rest.
She hadn’t been in bed more than half an hour when she heard the front door lock turn.
A light sleeper, Mel hopped out of bed, reaching for the baseball bat that her mother insisted she keep behind her bedroom door in case of intruders. Gripping the bat with white knuckles, Mel called, “Hello? Is someone there?” into the dark hallway.
“It’s me,” Mitch said, then “Ow!” and Mel grimaced, remembering that she’d left her crutches on the floor of the entryway. She came, blinking, into the living room, where Mitch had just flipped on the lights.
“What are you doing here?” Mel asked. “It’s almost midnight.”
“I’m sorry,” Mitch said. “I just—I didn’t want to go back to my apartment, and I figured…I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
But Mel, already waking up more and more, said, “No, don’t apologize. You know you
’re always welcome, Mitch.”
“Do I know that?” he said, again smiling wryly at her, though it looked like it required much more exertion on his part than usual.
“You do now,” she said. “Sorry, I left those out,” she gestured to the crutches. “I really was going to use them, but I had all this yarn to carry, so I thought it would be easier if I just hopped—”
Mitch laughed. “Oh, if I can’t apologize for breaking into your house in the middle of the night, you definitely can’t apologize for leaving your crutches out in the privacy of your own home.”
“But I wasn’t using them like I’m supposed to, and you’re my doctor,” she pointed out.
The look Mitch gave her when she said it, she wished she could bottle up and keep forever. But, in a moment, it was gone.
“Do you mind if I crash here? In the guest room?” he said.
“That’s fine,” Mel said. After she offered him something to eat or drink, which he declined, they said goodnight.
He went down the hall to his room, and she to hers, but she lied awake in bed for a long time, thinking about the way he’d looked at her, and the fact that he’d come at all—to her house, of all places, in the middle of the night, and the knowledge that the man she spent most of her waking hours thinking about was only two walls away.
In the morning, Mel talked herself back into behaving neutrally around Mitch. She had to stay focused. She had to remember that he had a family, and that if she wanted to be a real friend to him, she had to be supportive of him and what he wanted. Him coming over in the middle of the night didn’t necessarily mean anything. It might just be because that’s where he was last, and he wanted to check on her knee. He was a good friend to her, and she was determined to be a good friend to him.
But her resolution didn’t make it any easier to hear him say, “So, Ashleigh told me she canceled the cruise with Sam. She thinks they’re moving too fast.”
Christmas Melody: a romance for the holidays Page 11