by Mary McNear
She nodded curtly.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
She hesitated a moment too long.
“What’s wrong with him?” he asked.
“There’s nothing’s wrong with him,” she said. “He’s just not right for Daisy.”
“But that’s your opinion, isn’t it? As opposed to, say, Daisy’s?” Jack said. His blue eyes were teasing again, but also gentle.
“Yes, it’s my opinion,” Caroline conceded. “But I don’t know if Daisy knows her own opinion right now.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she hasn’t been herself this summer, Jack,” she said. No, since before this summer, since Jack had come back into her life, since she’d started keeping secrets from Caroline. But she didn’t say this out loud.
“How hasn’t she been herself?” Jack pressed.
Caroline sipped her iced tea, a little fretfully. “I don’t know, Jack. It’s hard to explain. It’s sort of like one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies. Remember those? She looks like herself on the outside, but on the inside, Jack, there’s nobody home. I mean, she walks around all day in a complete daze. This morning, I had to ask her the same question three times. Three times, Jack.”
“Caroline, she’s in love,” he said, his blue eyes gentle again.
“Did she tell you that?” she asked, and she was suddenly jealous of Daisy and Jack’s new closeness. Last week, for instance, Daisy had gone to a fish fry with him, and the two of them had ended up staying for hours.
“Not in those exact words. But she’s exhibiting all the symptoms. You remember what those are, don’t you?” he asked, with the hint of a smile.
Caroline flushed, and so he wouldn’t notice, she got up and took the pitcher of tea out of the refrigerator. But after she’d brought it back to the table and refilled both of their glasses, she was suddenly aware of his maddening proximity to her. This kitchen, she decided, wasn’t big enough for the two of them—not with Jack looking so . . . so good. If living in a run-down cabin and subsisting on frozen pizza was his secret, then millions of other men might want to try it, too.
He brushed his hair out of his eyes now, and Caroline was reminded of how much she’d always liked his brown hair when it had started to get a little too long, and he’d have to brush it out of his eyes. And those eyes. They were almost criminally blue, especially against his summertime tan. He’d gotten that working outside on the cabin, obviously, but that wasn’t all he’d gotten. Because through his pale blue work shirt and darker blue jeans, she could see that his body had changed this summer too. It had gotten harder, and leaner, better defined, though if she were honest with herself, there had been nothing wrong with it when he’d walked into Pearl’s at the beginning of the summer.
When Caroline realized that she’d been staring at Jack for a long time and that he was staring back at her with a quiet intensity she didn’t usually associate with him, she looked away and busied herself with tearing off another piece of French bread.
“So you feel like Daisy is there, without really being there?” Jack asked when they’d been silent for a little while.
“Yes, exactly. I know you’ll think this is silly, and that I’m one of those parents who can’t let go or who insist on living their life through their child. But that’s not it, Jack. It’s just . . . I miss her. I do; I can’t help it.”
“Caroline, she’s been away at college for three years,” Jack said, surprised.
“Oh, I don’t mean I miss her that way,” she said. “I’m used to her living away from home by now, during the school year, anyway. I mean I miss being close to her, Jack. I miss the way we used to talk about everything. And now, this summer . . . nothing. She comes home at night and goes straight to her room. She’s so secretive, all of a sudden; it’s like living with a stranger.”
“A stranger you happen to know very well,” Jack pointed out.
“I . . . I don’t know if that’s true anymore,” Caroline said honestly. “The other day, our lives happened to overlap for about five minutes at the breakfast table. She was sitting where you’re sitting now, eating a bowl of Raisin Bran, and I looked over at her and I thought, ‘Who is this person? Really, who is she?’”
“Caroline, now you’re being overly dramatic.”
“Well, maybe a little.” She sighed. “But you didn’t know her before this, Jack. Maybe you did a little, this past year, but not like I did. And you haven’t known her for as long as I have. And I’m telling you, she’s changed—a lot. I mean, you and everyone else, too, seems to think it’s perfectly normal that she’s distracted by this boy she’s dating, and maybe, for most people, it would be. But Daisy isn’t most people. She’s always been so focused; she was born focused. I mean, she’s known since the age of six that she wanted to be a psychologist. Who does that Jack? Who knows at that age exactly what they want to do with their lives?
“But now, dating this boy? She’s dated boys before, of course. But she’s always had something in common with them, academics or sports. She has nothing in common with Will that I can see. And then she starts hanging out with him every night at some dive bar, while the course books she brought home to read this summer sit on her desk unopened? I’m sorry, say what you want. But she’s not the same person she was before.”
“Love changes people, Caroline,” Jack said simply.
“Oh, love,” she said, exasperated, and she started to make a dismissive gesture with her hand, but something stopped her. She was remembering someone else she had known, a long time ago, and another summer, a long time ago. She was remembering herself, the summer she was Daisy’s age, the summer she met Jack. She sighed and closed her eyes. What had she been like before she met Jack? A lot like Daisy, actually. Not as book smart, of course, or as driven, either. But she’d been responsible like Daisy, and, in her own way, she’d been ambitious. She’d wanted to get married, have children, buy a little house, maybe, so that she and her family didn’t have to spend their whole lives living above Pearl’s the way her mom and dad had. And she’d wanted to build the restaurant, too, build it into something her grandmother, who’d started it, would have been proud of.
But then she’d met Jack, and everything had changed. She’d fallen in love with him, of course, and, as she recalled, she’d been much worse than Daisy. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t breathe almost. And her parents? Her parents had been driven almost to distraction by it. They were so worried that she’d do something crazy, or stupid, or reckless. And, it turned out, they’d been right to be worried.
She rubbed her tired eyes and wondered if history was repeating itself. It certainly seemed as if it was. Because the boy Daisy was in love with, as far as Caroline was concerned, was exactly like Jack, a young Jack—irresponsible, and shiftless, and, if the rumor she’d heard about him was true, completely unimpressed by the institution of marriage . . .
“Hey,” Jack said, leaning closer and touching her hand, which was still rubbing her eyes. She stopped rubbing them, and he came into focus. “I said love changes people, Caroline. But I don’t think you need to worry about Daisy. She’ll keep the best of who she is, you’ll see. Just give her a little time to get used to the way she’s feeling now; just . . . just be patient.”
“You’re telling me to be patient, Jack? You, who’ve never been able to wait for anything?”
“I’m waiting now,” he said quietly, his blue eyes resting on her.
Her face flushed hotly, and she stood up abruptly from the table. “I’ll walk you to the door, Jack,” she said. “I have some, um, paperwork I need to do.”
“At nine o’clock on a Saturday night?” he asked, reluctantly following her out of the kitchen.
“That’s right,” she said crisply, standing beside the front door. “And you’ve probably got to be getting back, too.”
“To my cabin?” he asked, the corners of his mouth tugging upward. “I think it can manage without me for a little while
longer.”
He came closer then, and Caroline felt a warning spike of adrenaline. Oh, no you don’t, Jack, she thought. Not tonight. Not any night. And she took a step back so that her back was, quite literally, against the wall.
He didn’t move any closer. But he looked at her in a way that was like moving closer. He looked at her in a way that was like touching her.
“Don’t, Jack,” she said quietly, wishing she could put more conviction into that one word.
“Don’t what?” he asked, his blue eyes dark.
“Don’t do what you’re about to do,” she murmured, already furious at herself for giving in. With Jack, forewarned was not necessarily forearmed.
“What am I about to do, Caroline?”
Her heart knocked against her rib cage. “You’re about to kiss me,” she said.
“Is that what you think?” he asked, and, reaching out his hand, he clasped her chin gently and ran his thumb slowly over her lower lip. “You think I’m going to kiss you? Here?” He pressed down on her lip with his thumb.
“Aren’t you?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, I am. But I’m only going to start here. Because after that,” he said, running his thumb along her lower lip again, “I’m going to kiss every single inch of you. I figure it’ll take, conservatively, about ten hours. But it just so happens that ten hours is almost exactly how much time we have between now and the time Pearl’s opens tomorrow morning.”
At some point during this little speech, Caroline stopped breathing. But Jack didn’t move. He stood perfectly still, his eyes never leaving her eyes.
Finally, she sucked in a little breath. “I thought you didn’t want to spend the night with me.”
“What gave you that impression?”
“The night you made me the grilled cheese sandwich . . .”
He shook his head. “I did want to spend the night with you that night. But you’d been drinking, Caroline, and I thought under the circumstances it would be a mistake. Tonight, though, you are stone cold sober.”
Actually, Caroline thought, she was feeling a little drunk right now—drunk on iced tea, drunk on Jack.
He took a step closer to her, and she put her hands behind her back as a precautionary measure, since they suddenly wanted, so badly, to reach out and touch him. Then, in a last-ditch effort to stop what was happening, she decided to try a different tack with him. “What about Daisy, Jack? She’ll be home soon.”
“This early?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Maybe,” she breathed. Unlikely, she thought.
“Well, we are her parents, Caroline. She knows we’ve done this at least once before.” The right corner of his mouth quirked up in another almost smile.
The man has a point, she thought. He stroked her bottom lip with his thumb again, and she felt her insides quiver.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jack,” she said. “Just kiss me already.”
He smiled then. He smiled that smile, and then he took another step closer, and, keeping his hand on her chin, he tipped her mouth up to his, and kissed her, really kissed her. When they’d kissed that night at Pearl’s, she realized now, he’d held something back. Something small, but important. Well, he wasn’t holding anything back now—because this kiss was classic Jack Keegan. This kiss had all the bells and whistles. This kiss has probably undressed a hundred women, she thought. No, more, she decided. Two hundred and fifty women, none of whom had ever seen it coming; one minute Jack Keegan was kissing them and the next minute their clothes were on the floor, and they were hoping—praying—it wouldn’t end soon. And, because it was Jack, it didn’t. It went on and on and on, until they thought they’d die with pleasure. Except they didn’t. Because when they woke up in the morning, there was Jack, ready to start all over again.
These thoughts should have bothered her. Did bother her, in fact. But they didn’t bother her enough to tell him to stop.
He leaned into her now, pushing the small of her back against the wall, and his kiss deepened. Deepened so much that Caroline really did stop breathing, for a moment, trying to absorb his tongue’s almost relentless assault on her mouth. Then Jack stopped kissing her, stopped long enough for her to draw in a deep breath. But when he turned his lips to her neck, when she felt his warm breath against her bare skin, she shivered violently and squirmed against him.
“Oh, Caroline,” he said into the nape of her neck, and his voice sounded thick and gravelly. “Let me make love to you, please. Let me take you to your bedroom now.”
“I don’t know,” she murmured, as he kissed her neck. He kissed it lavishly, unabashedly, in a way that made her put her fingers in his hair and drag them through it a little violently. “Did you mean it, Jack?” she said suddenly. “What you said about moving back here for me?”
“Yes, Caroline. I meant it,” he rasped, pulling his lips away from her neck. “I meant every goddamned word of it. Now come to bed with me. Or I’ll make love to you right here. Right now.” And Caroline realized, belatedly, that one of Jack’s hands was sliding up the front of her blouse, and the other had reached up under her skirt and was sliding up the inside of her thigh.
His hands were a little rough, she noted, probably from all the work he’d done on the cabin. But their roughness wasn’t unpleasant; it was just the opposite, actually, especially when the things his hands were doing to her felt so amazing.
“We’ve done it before, standing up like this. Remember?” Jack said against her ear. And Caroline remembered. Oh, God, she remembered. She and Jack had been newly dating then, and it seemed to her now that they’d both spent every waking minute thinking about when and where they could next make love. One afternoon, when her parents were away from Pearl’s, Jack had come by and Caroline had left several tables waiting and taken Jack into the storage room. She’d locked the door and turned off the lights, and he’d backed her up against the wall, pulled her skirt up and her panties down, and made love to her right then and there, while her customers waited with varying degrees of impatience.
But that was then, she reminded herself, as Jack’s hands continued to work their magic. And this was now; she was older now, and wiser. Sex was one thing, but love, commitment, responsibility . . . those were other, more important things. Was Jack ready for those things now? she wondered. She had no idea. But she wasn’t ready to give him the benefit of the doubt yet. And it occurred to her now, standing there, that she might never be ready.
“Jack, you need to go,” she said, her fingers still wound in his hair.
He ignored her, though, and turned his tongue’s attention instead to her right ear, or more specifically, to the area below and behind her right ear. This was patently unfair. Jack knew, from experience, how sensitive this area was for her, and how kissing it this way could drive her slowly, and deliciously, crazy, as it was threatening to do now. Right. Now.
“Jack, please leave,” she said, wriggling away from him. But as soon as his lips left her skin, she thought better of it, and, pulling him closer, she kissed him on the mouth again. God, she loved the way he tasted.
He kissed her back, but then pulled away a little. “I think you’re sending me a mixed message, Caroline.”
“I know I am. I’m sorry. I’ll stop,” she said then, putting her hands flat on his chest and trying to put a little distance between them. Jack, breathing hard, reluctantly removed one hand from inside her blouse, and the other from under her skirt.
Then he ran his fingers through his hair, hair that Caroline had already left in almost comic disarray, and looking at her through slightly hooded eyes, he said, “You sure about my leaving?”
“Positive.”
He nodded, kissed her quickly on the forehead, and left, closing the door behind him.
When she heard the door to the building close behind him, Caroline leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, her heart still pounding. I dodged another bullet, she thought. She waited then for the feeling of relief to wash over
her, but it never did. Instead, all she felt was a burning sensation everywhere his hands, and his lips, had touched her.
A couple of days later, Caroline was sitting in her office, her chin resting in her palm, her elbow resting on the desktop. There was a stack of paperwork in front of her, which she’d ostensibly come back here to do, but she was staring at a poster on the wall instead. The poster was of a beach in Bermuda, a pink beach, and it had been hanging there for so long she could no longer remember where it had come from or who had first tacked it up there. It had been years, in fact, since she’d even noticed it. But for some reason now, she was remembering how when Daisy was a little kid, they’d both been delighted to think there could be such a thing as a pink beach. So much so that Caroline had told her that maybe, one day, they’d go there, to that very beach, on that very island. It hadn’t seemed impossible then either. Caroline had figured they were one good year, maybe two good years, away from being able to do something like that.
But now she got up, walked over to the poster, and ripped it off the wall. Then she stuffed it into the little wastebasket beside her desk and sat back down again. She reached into her top desk drawer, took out a pen, and turned her attention to her paperwork. It was impossible, though, for her to make any headway on it, and, after a few minutes, she folded her arms over it and put her head down on her arms in an admission of defeat.
No sooner had she done this, though, then she remembered something her grandma Pearl had once told her. She’d said that when Caroline was feeling discouraged, she should make a list of all the things in her life that were going right. So Caroline made a list in her head right now, or she tried to, anyway. It wasn’t easy. It was much easier, she decided, finally, to make the other list, the list of all the things in her life that were going wrong.
Let’s see . . . there was, first and foremost, the future of Pearl’s, which had narrowed recently to two options: default on the loan and let the bank take it, or sell it, repay the loan, and save her credit rating, if not her dignity. Neither option appealed to her. But there it was.