by London Casey
“And the first of the long, festive weekend of traumatic mishaps.”
She nodded. “Yeah. The weekend started early.”
“I thought that smile was a little fake.” He held a chair for her and she dropped onto the seat, relieved to be off her feet. “Do you want something to eat?”
“No. I don’t really have the stomach for food right now. Maybe later tonight. You should eat, though. You’re going on shift soon?”
“I had a late lunch.” Seth sat across from her. Eden frowned at the distance but didn’t say anything. The kiss was more than she’d anticipated, anyway. Maybe that was the extent of his openness to a public display.
“I’m glad you were able to stop by,” she said, tilting her head and drinking up the details of his appearance. His hair was shorter than when she’d seen him last, trimmed neat at his temples, and his shave was recent. The open collar of his polo hinted at a shadow of chest hair. She curled her hands in her lap and briefly entertained a notion to invite him into an empty room. Beds were in short supply, however, and responsibility overruled fantasy.
He folded his forearms on the table. “I need to say some things. I wanted to talk to you in person.”
Her stomach dropped, a flash of insecurity that she wasn’t expecting. She paced her breathing, met his eyes calmly. “All right.”
“You know I’m divorced,” he said.
Eden nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“Her name’s Joanne. She’s an accountant. We knew each other…” He shrugged. “A long time. That’s the way things work in my family’s circle. My father owns a financial firm. It’s very corporate and civilized. Joanne and I married in 2000, a few months after I graduated from Georgetown.”
“You were young,” she realized out loud.
“Old enough. I took a permanent position at the firm. Joanne and I had bought and furnished a house prior to saying our vows, so we moved right into it. She worked long hours and I did too. But then I was buttoning my shirt and Joanne turned on the news to the first 9/11 plane crash. And I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt like the lowest coward, making my fifteen minute commute in my over-priced SUV, spending my days with file cabinets full of numbers.” He frowned down at the table. “I didn’t feel like a man, Eden. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought of before that moment, but afterward, I couldn’t look at myself. Joanne…didn’t understand. She dealt with it when I started looking into civil service exams and she only fought a little when I decided to move us from Philadelphia to Rochester.”
Eden reached across the table and covered his hands with hers. A dull ache throbbed in her chest, responding to the hoarse quality of his voice. His forearms tensed but he didn’t otherwise react to her touch. Stubbornly, she held him tighter.
He shook himself and exhaled. “We’d only been married a couple of years by that point, and she was young too. She wanted me to sit down to dinner with her every night and share a daily division of chores and after three years of my dropping my end of the agreement we’d both made, we weren’t even sleeping in the same bed. I disturbed her if I came in while she was still asleep, and half the time she was already gone by the time I finished a shift. I had to work through Thanksgiving. We had obligations, though. I sent her ahead of me, with the intention of joining her Friday night. I didn’t make it until Saturday morning and when I got there, my cousin Brent was in her bed.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. “You didn’t deserve that.”
A harsh laugh broke between them. “You are the first person who’s thought so. According to my mother, I made a promise to her and failed to keep it. She needed someone—”
“She made a promise, too,” Eden interrupted, aborting his self-blame. “That goes two ways. When two people make promises to each other, they both have responsibilities. Even if all they can do is tell the truth and admit their feelings and needs have changed. You were honest with her. When you changed, you told her.”
“When I changed, I didn’t ask her.”
“I don’t really believe someone can give permission for that sort of thing. It’s either accept or own up that you can’t accept, you know?” Her pager vibrated and chirped in the pocket of her coat. Eden stiffened. “Seth, I’m sorry—”
“It’s what you’re called to do.” He exhaled and eased out from under her hands. “I understand calling. You should go.”
“I’m sorry anyway.” She stood and leaned across the table, crowd be damned, to kiss the corner of his mouth. He turned his head at the last minute and forced her lips against his, hard and fierce. She lingered until her pager went off again, then broke away reluctantly. “Call me any time.”
“I will,” he said as she turned away.
“I’m off now until Monday night,” Eden said. “I’m on my way to a thing with a friend, but otherwise I’m clear. You finish tomorrow morning?”
“At seven a.m. You won’t want to see me then.”
“Are you kidding? I love that time of morning. Dawn does amazing things for tired eyes. I always look my best when I’m squinting into the sunrise on my way home from the hospital. We could have breakfast.”
Seth leaned against the wall beside the phone in the station kitchen, summoning a memory of her smiling lips. He could hear the good humor in her voice but that open, unabashed smile eroded some of the frustration that came with having only spoken to her via voice mail and abbreviated phone calls during the week since he’d told her about Joanne and Brent. The first time he’d had to say no to an invitation to see her, he’d expected a hurt, pouting response. What he got was a simple statement of acceptance and understanding, followed by a counteroffer of a different time that he’d again been forced to refuse. Their shifts hadn’t lined up until now, and even then she would only be available the first two of his four days off. He was tempted to agree to first thing in the morning when his shift ended but she deserved better than the cranky, abrupt mood that always followed him through the first day of his off rotation. The afternoon would be better.
“Have dinner with me instead,” he suggested. “Sleep in my bed tomorrow night.” Her breath caught and he grinned, satisfied to have gotten the response.
“I like the idea of dinner. And I love the idea of your bed. But I still need breakfast. Call me for a long-distance date?”
“Your sleepy voice doesn’t make me very interested in food,” he countered.
“Seth,” she said, the smile gone from her voice. “Call me for whatever.”
Male voices filtered into the room. He straightened and turned his back on the open door that led to the engine bay. “Tell me what to call you for.”
“I could help you, ah, what did you call it? Taking the edge off?”
His whole body tightened. “Maybe you could. Sleep naked for me again.”
“I need to teach you about the merits of pajamas,” she said faintly.
“Teach me about them when I can peel them off you.” A telephone rang in another part of the building and a buzzing alarm sounded shortly after the ring cut off. Time was up.
“You have to go,” Eden said.
“Yeah. Come to my apartment tomorrow.” He gave her the address.
“Call me when you can.”
Seth started to hang up but the sound of her drawing breath kept him on the line. “Eden?”
“Be careful.”
He promised to do so and hung up, already working on the mental switch from lover to responder. He left the break room at a fast clip and suited up while the garage doors clattered open. Ryan Edwards landed in the jump seat beside him. Seth nodded a greeting. He had expected that working with Ryan would be tense, but that wasn’t the case. He liked the man on a professional level and sharing shifts meant Ryan wasn’t with Eden any more frequently than Seth was. He didn’t like the twisted sense of satisfaction he felt knowing they weren’t together, but he preferred it to the gnawing jealousy that plagued him when he didn’t know.
Minutes after she hung up
with Seth, Eden’s phone rang. A quick flutter of hope jumped to her throat. Intellectually, she knew it wouldn’t be him calling back. The fire engine’s jump seat didn’t have a phone and he’d told her he didn’t carry his cell phone at work. Still, she couldn’t help the hope as she doubled back to the living room to take the call. Michael’s cell phone number showed on the caller ID window.
“Hey Angel,” he said by way of greeting. “Are you about ready?”
“I am. You?”
“I feel like a reluctant virgin being persuaded to give it up to a hairy old man, but otherwise, yeah. Meet me out front in ten?”
Eden chuckled sympathetically. “I’m sorry. Maybe if we show up early, we’ll be able to sneak out early.”
“Maybe. No promises, though. I’ll see you soon.”
Eden picked her shoes and changed her handbag before leaving to walk the few dozen yards to the townhouse Michael and Ryan shared. She walked up the drive in time to watch Michael pat his pockets in a three-point check for wallet, cell phone and keys. In a moment of clarity she realized something. Tonight she would smile at Michael and slip into the role of his companion, a pretty blonde package wrapped to impress and project an image of being possessed. It wasn’t the first time.
Both Michael and Ryan were good company. Intelligent, engaging, attractive. Ry possessed an easy-going charm that bobbed to the surface more readily than Michael’s more thoughtful, private likeability, and she always had more fun with Ry simply as a byproduct of their childhood antics, but she never experienced a bad time with Michael. Both men loved her and she loved them. But she wasn’t in love with either of them and while she fingered the edge of her lilac silk wrap, she realized she didn’t crave Michael’s company the way she craved Seth’s.
Seth couldn’t possibly know that, though. He only knew that a man escorted a woman to an engagement because he needed to communicate that security and power that stemmed from showing the world his ability to possess the pretty wrapped package. Her chest tightened uncomfortably. Given Seth’s emotional history, she would have to either do something to convince him of her capacity for fidelity or she would have to disengage herself from her friends’ social lives.
“I know that look.”
Michael’s voice stopped the downhill slide of her thoughts Eden mentally shook herself and gave him a weak smile. “I’ve been suffering from wandering thoughts lately.”
“The technical term for that is preoccupation.” He unlocked the car and opened the passenger door for her. “Some with more romantic notions would call it love.”
“Yes, I suppose some would.” Eden tucked the flirty ruffle of her hem around her knees and fastened her seat belt while Michael rounded the car.
“Ry’s still worried about you,” he said when he joined her.
“I’m all right.”
“It’s really easy to get confused between sex and love.”
“I’m not confused,” she said firmly.
Michael nodded and dropped the subject. He navigated traffic deftly, focused on the road. Eden refused to lose control over her thoughts for the rest of the evening.
“This is a big event,” she said after a while.
His forehead creased. “You’ll know most everyone there. People from the office and their spouses. The usual crowd.”
“I mean big in purpose. Do you want to run for DA?”
“Campaigning is a nuisance.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “But with the end of Mark’s term approaching, it might be a necessary evil. Don Haskins will be the other candidate. His politics won’t be good for the district. I want to protect Ry and I want to keep our house a private matter, but it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.”
“You know he understands the need to sacrifice personal comfort for something bigger,” she said, thinking of Seth and his ex-wife despite her intentions otherwise.
“I know.” Michael muttered a curse. “But he sacrifices that comfort every damned day. I should be the one person who doesn’t ask him to give up even more.”
“Michael, he loves you. Nothing you need is a hardship for him, not enough for him to turn away from it. If this is something you need, not just something you want, you should tell him.”
His shoulders flexed. “There’s nothing to tell yet.”
“But there might be tonight?” She asked as he slowed and turned onto a shaded, SUV-lined street.
He exhaled slowly. “Yeah, there might be tonight.”
Mark Arrildt, the exiting DA and Michael’s boss, owned a stately Colonial. The other houses on the street were smaller and more modern but no less elegant. Even if Eden hadn’t known the neighborhood, she would have guessed its residents to be politicians, doctors and scholarly professionals.
Michael held her elbow as they walked up the sloped sidewalk and angled around the landscaped flower beds to the large garden in the back. Soft music, laughter and splashing water beckoned them to join the already-underway party.
Someone else hailed them and Michael led her to a cluster of people gathered on the Arrildts’ patio. Soon, she had a frosty, fruity drink in one hand and a long list of names and faces jockeying for position in her head. She’d been worried that the barbecue would drag with a stuffy dullness, but time flowed as quickly as the cocktails that circulated through the crowd. At one point late in the evening, Michael left her in the company of a few wives and stepped away with the DA and another man whose name and position escaped her.
“No diamond yet,” Julie Arrildt said archly, taking Eden’s hand. “Maybe after the election?”
Eden blinked at the question and forced an airy laugh. “Michael is too infatuated with justice to settle for a mortal woman.”
“And Eden has a career of her own,” Mary Levins interjected, gesturing with her wine glass.
Conversation ebbed away from her and onto a discussion of the demands involved with marrying an attorney. By the time Michael rejoined her, dark had settled and garden lamps lit the area. A dozen people had cleared the patio of furniture and turned it into a crowded, jostling dance floor.
“Join me by the pool?” Michael extricated her from the clutches of wives and together they found a vacant poolside tent. Once they had stepped beneath the net roof, Michael loosed a loud sigh. “Mark knows now. He still wants to back my candidacy.”
Eden stared at him. “He knows? So you’re going to run?”
Michael shook his head. “That is still undecided. I told him I’d give him a decision by Monday. If we decide to keep things the way they are, Mark will keep quiet. Now I have to talk to Ry.”
Ry’s name acted as an invocation. No sooner did it leave Michael’s lips than the wail of fire engine sirens rose over the sounds of music and laughter. By habit, Eden thought a small prayer for Ry’s safety. Then she added Seth’s name to her brief, silent request.
“Someone got stupid with their grill,” Michael said. He sat on one of the chaise lounges. Eden joined him, waiting for the fire engine to pass by instead of trying to talk over the noise. When it didn’t, he stood again. “Maybe we got stupid with the grill.”
Eden frowned as Michael moved to stand at the tent’s opening. The music outside competed with the siren another moment, then it ceased. The siren stopped as well, not in the fade of moving away but in the abrupt silence of destination reached. She rose when voices outside raised to a confused volume. Michael stepped out of the tent. Eden emerged behind him in time to see a firefighter in full gear appear around the side of the house. Even in the flickering light of the garden lamps, she recognized Seth towering over the people around him. His head turned and she felt the force of his stare across the span of the pool. Gaze locked on hers, he said something into his head set. A second firefighter emerged through the kitchen door.
“I’m going to find out what’s going on,” Michael said.
“I’ll wait here.” Eden swallowed and moistened her lips. Seth turned away and joined his colleague. Within minutes, two ot
her firemen appeared and declared the house safe. From the bits and pieces she heard, Eden gathered the owners’ fire alarm had malfunctioned. She didn’t care about the details. Her focus was on Seth. He efficiently checked the grills before he walked around the pool, pulling the mask off his face as he neared her.
“How many other men are you seeing?” He asked roughly, stopping out of arm’s reach. “You’re not fucking them. What are you doing?”
Breathing was suddenly difficult. A wave of dizziness made her head spin. “You don’t understand. And I can’t talk about it here. Seth, please.”
“Don’t ‘please’ me, Eden. Tell me the damned truth.”
“I—sometimes Michael and Ry need dates. That’s all it is. There’s nobody else. Please. I can’t talk about this right now. Someone might hear.”
“Like who? Edwards? Hell, why not. Let’s get him in on the discussion, too.” Seth turned away from her, his jaw set as he scanned the crowd.
Eden covered her face with her hands and blew through her fingers, trying to smother the panic rising in her throat. She needed to touch him, to reassure him, but the nearness of the crowd, the responsibility of her role and the fear of gossip that would plague Michael’s office froze her elbows at her sides. Over the tips of her fingers, she spotted Michael and Ryan standing together apart from the others on the patio. Ryan had removed his glove. His bare hand rested on Michael’s shoulder and his head was bowed. Eden dropped her hands and scanned the area, hoping none of the rest of his crew were in the vicinity, relieved to realize the remainder of the team had returned either to the house or the truck out front.
“Or maybe there isn’t a discussion at all,” Seth said tightly.
Eden raised her eyes to his. “I love you.”
He shuddered visibly, turned away from her. “I have work. Don’t call me.”
Her knees buckled. She managed to make it to a nearby deck chair before she fell on her ass, but Seth didn’t stop. He stalked past Ryan and Michael without so much as a pause. Ryan saw him, though, and his hand fell from Michael’s shoulder. A tight expression twisted Ryan’s face. He said something to Michael before the two parted, Ryan going after Seth, Michael coming toward her. How had this gotten so complicated so fast? And how was she going to fix it?