Everything was falling into place, so I waved Skye over.
She bounced past the crowded tables. “What’s up?”
I made the introductions. She fiddled with the chain around her neck. This, naturally, called attention to the vast expanse of flesh exposed by her bubblegum-pink bustier.
“Oh, of course I’ve seen Ian here before,” she said, upgrading the charm from fourteen to twenty-four karats. “You’re the one who’s always got some really long book. Last week it was The Portrait of a Lady, right?”
“Indeed it was.” His eyes lit up.
She slid onto the stool next to him. “Wow. You’re a fast reader. You must be smart, huh?”
And they were off.
Sometimes I forgot how good Skye really was. She was such a master that she made it look easy. The Michael Jordan of the flirting world.
I left them to chat and went back to emptying the ashtrays scattered across the countertop.
“Mission accomplished, I see.” Flynn came up behind me, reaching over my shoulder for an empty glass. I could feel his body heat on my bare legs.
“What mission?” I was light. I was casual.
“The Geary-Hammond merger.” He glanced at my sister, who nodded, wide-eyed, as Ian jabbed at a Tolstoy passage with his index finger. I had to hand it to her, she actually did look interested.
“Oh, that. Well, you know Skye. A regular Tolstoy monger.”
“You two get weirder and weirder,” he muttered, crouching down to grab a clean tumbler. His face was inches from my thigh. If he leaned forward he would be kissing the back of my knee.
I exhaled sharply and tipped my head back. I was flooded with memories of clinging to this boy so tightly that you couldn’t have fit a spare molecule between our bodies. All those nights on the riverbank, in the pickup truck, out in the fragrant fields. There was a time when I had thought he would be enough to keep me safe and secure forever.
As it turned out, I hadn’t wanted to be safe and secure forever. But even now, after I had come full circle around the world, I still felt that he was somehow anchoring part of me. Which was just really unfortunate because, obviously, whatever we’d once had was gone.
The man was not even looking at me. He was clinking through a row of glasses, searching for a clean one. Sneaker, my ass.
“Geary?” I felt the warm puff of air against my calf.
“Yeah?” I breathed.
“What the hell are you doing up there?”
I’m thinking of coming right here where I stand. “I’m thinking,” I said.
He straightened up and gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher. “God help us all. What about?”
“Mostly about Niagara Falls and the Hoover Dam, thanks to you.”
“There is an easy solution to this problem. Trust me, they pay me to solve problems all day. Go to the bathroom.”
I put my hands on my hips. “I can’t. My honor is at stake.”
He checked his watch. “Well, if you can tough it out for another two hours, we’ll close up and you’ll be home free. Good luck.”
Sally Hutchins outlasted almost everyone else in the bar before she finally answered the call of the stall at 12:36 A.M. and fifteen seconds. Not that I was counting. A dull ache had settled into my abdomen and my extremities were going numb. So when she bolted up from her chair and sprinted for the lavatory, I couldn’t spare a moment to savor my triumph. My sole concern was that she’d be one of those women who take forty-eight minutes in the ladies’ room doing God-knows-what with lipstick and a tin of Altoids. I needed that ladies’ room, pronto.
But my path to sweet relief was suddenly blocked by a mob of boisterous well-wishers, all of whom had been waiting for hours to crown a champion.
“We have a winner!” Skye clambered back up on the bar to incite the masses. “Give it up for my sister Faithie! She’s going to donate her winnings to buy a round for the house!”
And Flynn, damn him, threaded his way through the cheering throngs to the jukebox. He pressed a few buttons, and the heavy bass of “Eye of the Tiger” started pulsing through the room.
The populace demanded I make a victory lap, and so, in the name of giving the paying customers what they wanted, I sacrificed my own very pressing needs for those of my public. I jogged the room’s wood-paneled perimeter as best I could in three-inch heels and ended my run at the door to the ladies’ room. Where Sally Hutchins remained ensconced. I knocked a bit more vigorously than usual.
“Occupied.” Sally’s voice oozed venom through the thin layer of wood.
I was debating whether I should break the door down or try to shove through the crowd to the bathroom by the back office, almost certainly wetting my pants in the process, when Lars’s towering form emerged from the unruly crowd.
He nodded at me.
I nodded back and looked around desperately. “Yes, hi, listen, I can’t talk right now, I have sort of an emergency—”
He nodded again, blond, mute, and massive. With one hand he pushed open the door to the men’s room, and with the other he tugged my forearm.
“That’s the men’s room!” I protested. “Do you have any idea what it’s like in there?”
“Empty.” He nodded again and ushered me in. “I’ll stand guard outside.”
His voice brooked no refusal, so I stopped protesting, slammed the door, and peed.
After two hours listening to the hum of the air conditioner and Skye’s soft, even breathing, I accepted the fact that I was staring down the barrel of yet another sleepless night. My body was aching for rest, my eyes felt like they were doing that spirally cartoon thing, but my mind was swirling with conflicting desires.
I groped my way through the darkness to the bedroom door, which swelled and stuck in the summer heat, and headed down the hall to the kitchen, where I settled down with a pen and pad and tried to get some work done.
It turned out that the answering machine message lost to Skye’s wrath and the bathroom plumbing had been from my editor, who had called again that morning to encourage me to do a whimsical little piece on America’s Heartland.
“You might as well make the most of it while you’re there,” he’d said. “Your family’s out there, right? So talk to the locals, dig up some really down-home, off-beat places to eat.”
I’d been relieved to talk to him, to reconnect with my world outside the Roof Rat. It reminded me that no matter what I had felt with Flynn in the office tonight, I had a real life waiting back in California: my apartment, my career, my usual table at Carmine’s Cafe. I couldn’t get attached to life in Minnesota even if I wanted to.
Five A.M. I dropped my head into my hands, almost weepy with exhaustion, and listened to the frantic pulse of the crickets chirping outside. Why did I have such trouble completing the natural cycles? Wakefulness into sleep, motion into rest, analysis into acceptance—I simply could not finish what I started.
And that, I admitted to myself, was the problem with Flynn.
I was not finished with him. I had thought I was finished, but I wasn’t.
When I’d left for Los Angeles ten years ago, I felt like someone had pumped me full of novocaine in preparation for an emotional root canal. I’d been numb and placid as I crossed the state line in a car filled with hung-over musicians and second-hand guitars. But even through that numbness, I could feel the raw ache between my legs, a brand new sensation lingering from my last night with Flynn. He had been so careful, so gentle with me, but my body had changed in some searing, permanent way.
I had needed to be finished with Flynn. And I’d successfully escaped my eighteen-year-old life.
So what was up with all the resurgent sexual tension between us? Seriously. You could practically hear it snap, crackle and pop.
Five thirty-four A.M. Brain wide awake, body leaden with fatigue. And I had promised Leah I’d babysit—she was coming over to drop Rex off at nine. So I padded back down the shadowy hallway and inched onto the mattress next to Skye.
I wriggled my toes against the chilled cotton sheet, curled up, and finally drifted off to sleep.
I dreamed of Flynn and the ocean. The Pacific sparkling under the golden sunshine. We were lying on the gritty yellow sand together, soaking up the afternoon, lazy like cats. Lying together and not talking. Just being. Like he used to say to me, brushing a finger over my lips so we could hear the wind rustling through the grass in the dark—“Sshhh, Faith, stop thinking so much. Stop talking. Just wait a second with me here.”
When I dreamed about the ocean that night, Flynn’s body was warm and the sun was bright, and the silence between the waves was such a relief.
And then I woke up and sure enough, everything was still heading straight to hell in a handbasket.
10
Sunday morning wasn’t working out so well for me. To begin with, my stomach and lower back were wracked with pain and I had to pee approximately every three seconds. Apparently, along with bragging rights and a hundred bucks, the winner of Skye’s contest also got a bladder infection, no extra charge.
Leah showed up at nine sharp, and when I answered the door, still decked out in my pajamas, I surmised that I wasn’t the only one having issues today. One look at the gray clouds rumbling outside, Leah’s harried expression and the howling baby, and I could see that this woman had had it.
“Ah, the luxury of sleeping till nine.” She nodded at my rumpled blue boxers and white tank top and jostled Rachel on her hip. “Rach, sweetie, relax.”
Rachel responded by upping the decibel level.
I watched with dismay as the baby’s face turned crimson. “You look like you could use a cup of coffee.”
“I could use a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. But I have to take this little diva to a doctor’s appointment in Minneapolis. I really appreciate your helping me with Eli.”
I rubbed my eyes, trying to reconcile the sun-soaked remnants of my dream with the sticky, suffocating summer storm pounding the stair landing.
“Um, Mama?” piped up a small voice from the steps. “I’m Rex, Mama, not Eli.”
Leah rolled her eyes. “You have no idea how much I appreciate this, Faith. Honestly. Okay, Rex, you’re going to stay with Faith this morning.”
Rex, wearing a little yellow raincoat, peeked around the doorjamb. He grinned at me. I grinned back.
“Okay, then.” She leaned down to kiss his cheek and the baby stopped crying for a minute to observe. “Be good. Faith, you are a lifesaver. If you have any problems at all, Stan’s at the bakery. Meet you back here at three?”
“Take your time.” I waved her away, relishing my new identity as lifesaver.
Rex and I decided to go down to Main Street and hit the shops. After we checked out the goldfish tank at the pet store, he reached up and wrapped one of his chubby white hands around mine.
“Faith?”
“What’s up?”
He regarded me with wounded eyes. “Why doesn’t anybody call me Rex? Why do they keep saying Eli? I changed it. I changed my name.”
I managed not to smile. “I know you did, honey. But sometimes people don’t understand that the name your mom and dad gave you isn’t the name you’d give yourself.”
He scowled. “When I tell grown-ups that my name is Rex, they laugh.”
“I guess they think it’s cute, and that’s why they laugh.”
He yanked at the hood of his yellow slicker. “I don’t wanna be cute. I wanna be Rex.”
“Well, when you turn eighteen, you can go to court and get your name changed to whatever you want.” Leah was going to love me for this one.
“Really?” He perked up. “Is that what you did?”
I squeezed his hand. “Oh, no. Faith is what my parents named me.”
Rex tugged me over to the curb and peered into the drainage grate as rainwater swirled down dark beneath the street. “Well, what name would you pick? If you picked your own?”
“Hmm. Maybe Natalia.” A femme fatale name, very new-money and black lace.
“Natalia?” He wrinkled his nose. “Okay. You be Natalia today, and I will be Rex.”
Natalia came back to bite me in the ass less than twenty minutes later.
I lost Rex at noon, in Thompson’s Dry Goods store. The kid disappeared in the blink of an eye. He was dancing down the aisle, pointing and winking at himself in the mirrored wall like a kindergarten production of Saturday Night Fever. He brushed against a display of folded towels, two fell down, I knelt to pick them up, and that was it. He was gone. I scanned the milling crowd for a bright yellow jacket or a ruffle of thick black hair but found nothing.
My mouth dried out as my palms started to sweat. The horrors of L.A. newscasts flashed through my mind.
“Eli?” I called. No response.
Then I remembered who I was dealing with. “Rex?”
“Natalia!” Air rushed back into my lungs as I heard the chipper cry behind me. I whipped around.
“Oh, thank God. I didn’t know where you—” I broke off as Rex rounded the corner, hand in hand with Patrick Flynn.
“I found him boogying down in the housewares section. This kid’s the next Ricky Martin.” Flynn looked amused and surprisingly comfortable shepherding Rex along next to him. “Natalia.”
My cheeks caught fire. “Yes. Well, see, we were just—”
“Picking alternate names. I heard. Rex and I go way back, don’t we, buddy?”
Rex beamed up at him. “Yep. Flynn coached my T-Ball team once.”
I picked my jaw up off the floor. “You did?”
Flynn shrugged. “Yeah.” He turned to Rex. “So do I get to pick a name, too?”
The child was aghast. “No. You gotta stay Flynn.” He reached out and recaptured my hand so all three of us were linked, like a happy little family. Except none of us were related and two of us were barely on speaking terms.
“But you can still be Natalia,” Rex informed me.
“Thanks.” I tried to think of a way to get us out of here quickly and diplomatically. This little hand-holding chain was supremely awkward, and I just wasn’t up for Flynn’s editorial on my negligent childcare.
Rex tugged on my hand. “I’m hungry. Let’s go to Cherry’s!” He pointed at the small white clapboard cafe across the street. “And eat coffee cake for lunch.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
“Coffee cake! Oh boy!” He hopped up and down, gripping our hands tighter as he lifted his feet and swung between us. “And Flynn can come, too!”
“I don’t think Flynn has time for lunch right now. He’s, uh…” I turned to Flynn, who seemed to be conducting a close inspection of a pile of scarves in front of us. “What are you doing here today?”
“Working.” He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. “Talking to some people. I’m trying to organize an event. You’ll see.”
“And the dry goods store is critical to your plan?”
“New dishtowels.” He refused to look at me.
“I see.” I tried to turn this conversation around. Somewhere under this stony façade was the man who’d undressed me with his eyes in the office last night. “Well, it’s nice of you to spend your Sunday helping us out.”
“Not really.” He rocked back on his heels. “I’m just trying to bail out my investment.”
I gave up. “Okay, then. Nice talking to you. Rex and I are off to lunch now.” Swamped with a sudden wave of abdominal agony, I closed my eyes.
Rex stuck out his bottom lip. “Flynn’s not coming?”
“Look, maybe we should just head home,” I said.
The little boy’s world was crumbling before his eyes.
“After we get a piece of coffee cake to go.” I winced again, pressing both hands to my stomach. “I’m not feeling all that well.”
Flynn abandoned the scarves and got all up in my face. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.
“Nothing.”
“What’s wrong?” He met my gaze.
“You don’t want
to know,” I assured him. “Let’s just say it’s a long story and it ends with me going to the gynecologist.”
He nodded and dropped it. Minnesota men, as a rule, do not relish the gory details of Female Trouble.
“Flynn’s leaving? This is awful,” Rex wailed, wiping his nose with the sleeve of his raincoat.
Flynn knelt down. “Sorry kid, I have to do some work. But I’ll walk you to the car. And you’ll have to eat something besides coffee cake for lunch okay? Like lima beans and gruel.”
Rex laughed. “I like gruel. So there.”
We dashed through the rain toward my car, which was parked a block away across the street.
Things were looking up, I decided. Yes, there had been a few glitches today, yesterday, and well, ever since I got the phone call in Florence…but look where we were now. He was walking me to my car, and he didn’t even have a gun to his head. Next thing you know, he’d be kissing my feet and speaking to me in complete sentences.
Flynn grabbed Rex’s wrist with one hand as we crossed the street. He placed his other hand on the small of my back to guide me through traffic.
I glanced at his face as we stepped off the curb, but he seemed completely oblivious, his eyes focused on the passing cars. I wasn’t even sure if he was aware that he was touching me.
If only my abdomen weren’t a writhing mass of white-hot pain, I might have been turned on.
We reached my car safely, and none too soon. The heavy gray sky rumbled with thunder and within seconds, all three of us were drenched in warm rain. I buckled Rex into the car seat Leah had supplied and turned to thank Flynn.
And that’s when I noticed the look in his eyes. Somewhere on the way across the street, his attitude had changed. He wasn’t looking through me anymore. He wasn’t looking past me. He was looking at me. With an intensity that startled me.
I wrapped my fingers around the sleeves of my windbreaker. “Well, thanks for walking us to the car.”
He held my gaze for a long moment. We were motionless and bright against the gray pavement and the dull windy sky. Then he leaned over and kissed my cheek. His mouth barely brushed my face, but for the space of a breath, rooted to the pavement and connected to this man, I knew where I was. I was scared, I was confused, but I was home.
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