Because of Joe

by Because Of Joe [Contemporary Rom. ] (lit)

  "If you came to take me to dinner," she said, trying to ignore the feeling, "how come you're eating the vegetable soup that would have been my lunch for the rest of the week?"

  He took another bite. "Wouldn't want it to go to waste."

  "It wouldn't go to waste if I was eating it," she explained patiently.

  "You can't eat it if you're not here." He got up, carrying his bowl to the stove to refill it. "This is so good. I know you're a Yankee, but your cooking is-"

  "Not here?" she said, deciding it was her turn to interrupt. "I'm not going anywhere."

  "Would you?" He poured more tea into their glasses, the tinkling ice sounding much like music, adding to the unexplainable deliciousness of the conversation with her ex-husband.

  "Would I what?" She sipped the tea, running her tongue over her lips to capture the moisture that gathered there. She saw his gaze move to her mouth and made the motion again. Slower.

  "Go somewhere." Tell resumed eating, paying close attention to his bowl. He avoided her gaze, but his eyes danced, the laugh lines fanning out like starbursts from their corners.

  "To dinner," she said, making her voice firm even though her insides were taking on the consistency of Jell-O.

  "Um. That, too." He moved forward in his chair, capturing her bare feet between his and rubbing the calves of his jeans against the calves of her sweatpants.

  She tried to tug free. Sort of. "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm going to take a little tour to get the pictures Joe wants. Up through Indiana and Michigan and then back down into the Appalachians. I thought I'd stop and see Ben and wait for Joe to meet me there." He put down the spoon and reached for her hands, and his eyes still danced and shimmered when he looked at her. "Come with me, Rags."

  Oh, yes, her heart cried. "Have you completely lost it?" she said aloud. "I can't just take off out of the blue. How long do you intend this trip to last?"

  "Couple of weeks, give or take. Why can't you?"

  "Why, because there are things I have to do. I volunteer at places and they count on me. There's the house to take care of. The twins will be on fall break soon. This isn't like last time, when it was an emergency." She threw up her hands even as excitement had her heart tumbling and skipping like water over stones in the creek at the bottom of her backyard.

  "Micah and Marley are spending fall break at my house, with friends. Mama's going to stay out there to make sure the walls survive intact." He waved an arm, seeming to encompass her entire spotless house. "Your kitchen floor is waxed. You can take care of the other responsibilities with a few phone calls." His gaze fell on the philodendron and he shuddered. "There is the off chance that thing will take over the house while you're gone, but surely you can risk that."

  His legs surrounded hers, not rubbing any more, but still there, reminding her of what it was like to wake in the same bed with him. His slumbering sprawl seemed to be without direction, but he always touched her, whether it was with a hand on her breast or waist or a leg lying across hers.

  The heat began. She felt it in her belly, in the sudden heaviness of her breasts, between her thighs. Oh, God.

  "Tell, I can't...be with you and then not with you and then with you again." Her face was burning. "Sex is still a big deal to me."

  She couldn't tell him how hard it had been to walk away from him in Pensacola; pride wouldn't let her form the words. She couldn't say she didn't know if she could do it again.

  "And to me," he said. "But we don't have to share a room or a bed, Rags." He got up, taking their bowls to the sink. "It's so new to me, this freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want, and I don't want to give it up." He smiled over his shoulder at her. "I don't imagine you want to relinquish yours, either."

  She shook her head mutely, unable to admit even to herself that she'd give it up in a New York minute. There were a lot of women who liked being on their own, and Rags admired them; she just didn't happen to be one of them. However, that didn't mean she wanted to be someone's responsibility, not even Tell's.

  "I don't think it's a good idea," she said sturdily. "Call me a coward if you like, but I can look up that road going to Michigan and see myself getting hurt before we get to Fort Wayne."

  "South Bend."

  "What?"

  "I want to head straight up State Road 31 to South Bend. I'd like to make this trip without benefit of interstates."

  "But-" That was the way she preferred to travel, not Tell. She drove on two-lane roads, many of them without so much as a white line dissecting them. Tell had always been in too much of a hurry for that.

  "The sooner we get there," he used to say, "the sooner we can relax with things like running water and a television with a remote control."

  Only she'd considered picnics in roadside parks relaxing, had reveled in the occasional night spent in an off-the-beaten-track motel room without quite enough beds.

  But Tell had never really relaxed. He'd had a car phone long before they were fashionable, a laptop computer as soon as they became available, a beeper when no one else had them except doctors.

  Maybe this time...

  But no. No one changed that much. He'd be driving sixty-seven miles per hour down a country road in order to get somewhere before dusk. So he could relax. The very idea of traveling with him was ludicrous.

  Then he spoke. "It's for Joe. It's the only way I can shoot the kind of pictures he wants."

  He met her eyes from across the room. All the dancing lights were gone from his gaze, replaced by the heartrending appearance of broken glass. "I'm so scared for him," he admitted, his voice bumpy and uneven like Rags' favorite kind of road. "He's asked very little of me in his life, and this is something I can do."

  She watched as he used momentary silence to breathe slow and deep and smooth out the bumps. "But I need you," he said. "You know him in ways I don't, and you could help me give him this one thing he's asked."

  "Tell." She wanted the word to be a protest, but it wasn't. You're asking too much. But the words didn't come.

  "I need you," he repeated.

  "I'll go."

  Chapter Nine

  The black Monte Carlo was so new there were still traces of the adhesive that had held its sticker to the passenger window. Rags raised her eyebrows at sight of the vehicle that practically screamed that it was a family car. Tell had driven a sporty convertible as long as she'd known him. She hadn't liked them, but he had.

  In all fairness, he'd hated her minivans, too, but he'd never complained about them.

  "What's this?" she asked, handing him her bags to put into the trunk.

  "A compromise. It has a sunroof, so I still get the light. It also has a top, so you won't obsess about no protection in the event we roll it over."

  "It's pretty."

  "Uh-huh." He closed the trunk and stretched his hand toward her. "Here."

  She took the keys and tucked them into her handbag as though she'd never lost the habit. They'd always carried each other's spare keys in case one of them locked a set inside the vehicle. The one time it had happened, the spare set had been locked in the car, too.

  "No," he said, "you can drive."

  "All right." She stepped to the driver's door and arrowed him a look over the top of the car. "If you back seat drive just once, buster, you're out of the car." This could well be the shortest trip in history. Tell had always driven when they were together because he couldn't keep his mouth shut when she did; it had seemed an expedient way to save the marriage. It hadn't worked, of course. The marriage had died anyway, but not because they'd fought about driving.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  As she backed out of her driveway, he said, "Watch for the mailbox," and grinned gleefully at her.

  "Want to go to Brown County first?" she asked, heading toward the highway.

  "What's that?"

  The look she tossed him was mildly scandalized. "How can you have been to Indiana a hundred times and not know about Brown County?"


  "Because I usually came for homecomings, graduations, and appendectomies," he reminded her. "You never wanted to come back here while we were married, and the kids weren't much for being tourists when I came afterward. They were more concerned with trying to get my permission for something you'd already denied them."

  She laughed, unable to refute the truth of what he said. "You know what, though, Tell? We did it right."

  They had. They'd bent over backward to accommodate each other. When Tell had visited the children in Indiana, he'd stayed in the house with them and Rags had moved into Linda's guest room. On Rags' few quick trips to Florida over the years, Tell had spent the nights with his parents while she was with the children at his townhouse.

  "We were always where we belonged," Ben had said once. "You and Dad shuffled back and forth, but we didn't. We just had two homes. That's more than a lot of divorced kids have."

  Tell smiled at her, and the car suddenly felt too small, as though its leather-lined proportions couldn't contain the emotion flowing between its occupants. "We did," he agreed, and laid his hand on hers where it rested on the floor shifter. "Now, what's Brown County?"

  She turned south. "It's a state park, and after New England, one of the most popular 'color sightings' in the country each fall. It's early yet, but already the traffic will be horrendous, with people just driving through and looking."

  Since it was a weekday, however, the traffic was somewhat less than horrendous. That didn't mean they progressed very quickly through the park, since Tell yelled, "Stop right here," every five minutes and then jumped out of the car to run around taking photographs.

  Rags watched as he charmed the socks off an elementary school teacher chaperoning her small class of special education students. The seven kids swarmed around his legs, and he bent to their level and charmed them, too, then snapped their pictures as they ran among the gold and orange leaves that had already fallen.

  "Rags," he called, "I need releases and business cards."

  So that was it. He'd wanted her along to be a gofer. Well, they'd just have to talk about that.

  But then the children drew her into their circle of joy, and she ended up sitting on the ground with the teacher and her aides while the six-and-seven-year-olds threw leaves at them in a frenzy of delight.

  After dinner in Nashville, an arty little town near the park, they were on the road again, driving north through the darkness.

  "Thanks," said Tell. "That was great."

  "I'm glad it was worthwhile," she said. "Do you think you got some good ones?"

  He shrugged. "I haven't done this for years, so I'm not sure I can judge my own skill level. I hope I did. We'll look at them in the hotel."

  "Look at them? Don't you have to develop them?"

  "Nope. I used the digital camera. I'll load them on the computer and send them off to Joe tonight, but we'll be able to view them, too."

  "Wow." Rags' knowledge of cameras began and ended with the kind you bought near the checkout lanes in Wal-Mart. You took all the pictures on them and then, if you remembered, you dropped them off to be developed while you bought your groceries. If you forgot, as was often the case, you ended up with a whole bunch of pictures of the boyfriend your daughter broke up with two years before.

  "You can stop whenever you want to," he said carelessly.

  Rags couldn't imagine stopping. She felt energized and almost giddy. She was having fun, she realized. "Are you tired?" she asked.

  "No."

  "Me, either."

  So they drove till well past midnight, stopping at a tearoom in a small town for pie and coffee along the way. They talked about everything from-as Ellis Ann would have said-soup to nuts, and then some. They played the road games they'd played with the children when they were young, booing each other and laughing uproariously at things that wouldn't have been the least bit funny outside the car.

  As he had promised, Tell got separate rooms when they stopped at a Holiday Inn somewhere in lower Michigan. They said goodnight with airy cheek kisses and parted outside the doors to the adjoining rooms.

  When Rags stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, she discovered that her hasty packing had not included anything to sleep in. She considered sweats, but knew they would be far too hot, and she wasn't comfortable with the idea of sleeping naked between hotel sheets.

  Clutching the towel closed between her breasts, she tapped on the door that adjoined her room to Tell's.

  He opened the door instantly, a towel that matched hers wrapped around his hips.

  She looked from his feet to his muscular legs, skipped over the towel-covered portion, and focused on the hair that dusted his belly and thickened on his chest. Silver and gold strands glinted among the light brown, seeming almost to wink at her. To invite. To turn her knees to wobbly toothpicks that couldn't hold her up.

  Oh, dear Lord.

  "Rags?" Tell's voice hitched like a pubescent boy's, and he cleared his throat. All his big talk about freedom hadn't stopped him wanting her for a single minute. He'd wanted her in her kitchen when she was in her raggedy sweats and he wanted her now. He could smell her soap, the soft flower scent of her shampoo, and the fainter tang that was inherently Rags. And that wasn't even addressing what he saw: the curvy length of her legs, the slope of her breasts, the delicate arch of her neck. He didn't allow himself to think about what was under the towel. Not the fleshy softness of her abdomen or the sweet places beneath her breasts or...oh, shit.

  He cleared his throat again. "What do you need?"

  "Uh."

  Tell almost laughed. She was no less affected by him than he was by her. "Old...Rags?"

  She looked confused for a moment, then her face cleared. "A tee shirt. Do you have a tee shirt I can borrow? Or something."

  "Sure." He went to get her one from his duffel bag. "Here you go."

  "Thanks." She smiled fleetingly and walked away, not closing the door between their rooms.

  He didn't close it, either.

  Her television came on a few minutes later, its volume turned low. Tell sat at the table near his window with the laptop. He was pretty sure he could hear her breathing, an idea that made him shake his head and decide his imagination was working overtime. He wondered if she was lying on her bed or sitting in a chair with her feet propped up.

  She'd picked up a USA Today in the hotel lobby, and by now her glasses were probably halfway down her nose as she pored over the newspaper. She was undoubtedly checking to see if any of the pictures were Joe's.

  Thinking of that made Tell remember the first time he'd seen his son's name in the credits in a national magazine. He'd had the phone picked up to call Rags and say, "Did you see it? Did you see what our boy did?" before he realized that since the children were grown, he no longer had their mother's home phone number. He'd called her office and left a message on her machine to check out this week's Newsweek. She'd left a message with his secretary the next day thanking him for letting her know.

  He shook his head at the bittersweet recollection and returned his attention to the computer.

  Some of the pictures were awful, he acknowledged a few minutes later, staring at the screen in consternation. They strongly resembled the first rolls of film Joe had run through the old camera he'd rescued. Some were pretty, but nothing jumped out at you and made you continue to look at them.

  A minute later, he got to the ones of the kids. Oh, yeah, this was more like it. He could look at the photographs and still hear them laughing, still feel the October air with its hint of chill the afternoon sunlight couldn't dispel, still see the leaves cascading over the adults sitting on the ground.

  "Rags," he called, "come look."

  With his tee shirt flapping around her thighs and the newspaper in her hand, she came into the room. She pushed up her glasses and smiled sleepily. "How are they?"

  "Look for yourself." He started to get up, but she forestalled him with a hand on his shoulder and stood behind him to look, la
ying the paper on the table beside the laptop.

  "Oh," she said, and then, "Oh, Tell."

  As she leaned closer, he felt the pressure of her breasts against his bare shoulders. The warmth of her skin seemed to brand him through the fabric of the shirt.

  "They're splendid!" she said, and the delight in her voice went shivering down his spine. Goose bumps rose on his skin and she asked, "Are you cold?"

  "No." He reached up, capturing the hand that was pointing at the screen in his. "But cold would be good, old lady."

  Rags knew she should withdraw her hand, should back away from where the contact with his skin had sensitized her nipples nearly to the point of making them hurt. She was playing with fire, and fascination with the flames held her fast.

  But for all their beauty, fires burned. They maimed and destroyed, leaving only shells of what had been strong structures.

  She drew away. "Those ones with the kids," she said in a shaky voice, "are terrific. Joe will be pleased."

  He nodded without looking at her, and she wondered if he felt the flames licking at him, too.

  "Well," she said, reaching around for her newspaper. "Goodnight, Tell."

  "'Night, Rags." He smiled up at her then, his expression inscrutable.

  She closed the connecting door behind her when she returned to her room.

  It was going to be a long two weeks, give or take.

  Chapter Ten

  "Daddy's not going?" Marley's eyes were wide, her question incredulous. "He always goes on vacation with us."

  "Not this year, sweetie." Rags hoped her tight-lipped smile was convincing to the children handing her their duffel bags to be stowed in the back of the minivan. "He's really busy at work right now."

  "Isn't he always?" muttered Joe, holding his precious camera out of her reach. "Was he like this before I came, Mama?"

  "Sure, he was," said Ben quickly. He handed Rags the cooler, his solemn eyes telegraphing a message. Don't tell him it's gotten worse. You'll hurt his feelings.