by Gina Wilkins
She had blamed him at first for having such a defeatist attitude toward their relationship, but now she could see that she had done the same thing. She had simply assumed from the start that what they had couldn’t last.
It had been a self-fulfilling prediction, she realized now. One a scientist should know better than to make without compelling evidence. But the experiment had failed, for whatever reason, and she still wasn’t sure exactly what she had learned as a result.
She wished she knew what he was doing now. Where he was working. Whether he was happy. And she wondered if she would ever stop missing him.
She was pushing a grocery cart out of a local supermarket on a sunny afternoon in February when she heard a familiar voice speak her name. “Hey, Catherine.”
Turning, she saw Bob Sharp pushing a delivery cart toward the store entrance, dressed in a blue work uniform, his bright red hair flowing from beneath a blue cap emblazoned with his company’s name. A pang went through her at the reminder of Mike. The two months that had passed since she had last seen him had not lessened the ache that accompanied every thought of him.
“Hello, Bob. How are you?” she asked as she moved her cart out of the way of patrons on their way in and out of the supermarket.
“If I was any better, I wouldn’t be able to stand myself.”
His cocky answer made her smile. “I’m glad to hear that. It’s really good to see you again.”
He winked at her. “You, too, Dr. Gorgeous. How’s that hot, single lawyer friend of yours? Did you ever tell her about the fantastic, fun guy you found for her?”
She shook her head, her chin brushing against the warm green cashmere scarf she wore with a quilted ski jacket to protect her from the winter chill. “The truth is, she just doesn’t deserve you, Bob.”
He heaved a sigh. “Though that could go either way, I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“You should. It was meant as one.”
He reached out to chuck her chin with his knuckles. “Thanks, Doc. So, how’ve you been? Still seeing that cardiologist?”
“I was never seeing a cardiologist,” she replied tartly. “That was just an unfounded rumor.”
His red eyebrows rose in surprise. “Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Mike’s an idiot.”
Surprisingly, her lips twitched with a near smile. After a moment she asked, “How is he?”
“I don’t see him much,” Bob replied with a shrug. “He’s real busy being a full-time student and all. He’s got a part-time job working for the university. Doing some odd jobs around campus for extra cash.”
“He’s going to school full-time?”
Bob nodded. “He sort of made the decision at the last minute, almost too late to enroll for the semester. I think it was sometime during Christmas. He’d been moping around for days, and then he just jumped into this plan. He’s been going like a windup bunny ever since, hardly ever giving himself a chance to breathe, as far as I can tell.”
Her fingers tightened almost painfully around the handle of her shopping cart. “Do you know if he’s declared a major?”
Bob grinned. “You might not believe it. It’s education. He says he wants to be a teacher. When I think back about what he was like in school, and remember what a trial he was to all his own teachers, I can’t help but laugh.”
But Catherine wasn’t laughing. In fact, she was having a hard time not bursting into tears. “I think it’s great,” she said, forcing out the words.
Bob’s grin faded as he searched her face. “Hey, you want me to give him a message from you next time I talk to him?”
There were so many messages she would have liked to send. I’m proud of you. I miss you. I’m still in love with you. But all she said was, “Just give him my best.”
“Catherine—”
“Gosh, I’d better get going. I have frozen things melting in my cart as we stand here.” It was a patently flimsy excuse, since the temperature was hardly warm enough to melt anything for some time yet. But she couldn’t stand there any longer, trying to keep her raw feelings hidden. “Goodbye, Bob. It was great to see you.”
He didn’t try to detain her. But she knew he watched her closely as she hurried away.
Hands in the pockets of his jeans, Mike looked up at the window above his head, smiling a little when he saw a black-and-white head peering back down at him from the windowsill inside. Funny how much he had missed that sight in the past months.
The last time he’d stood here it had been cold, and a Christmas wreath had hung from a big red bow on the balcony above him. Bundled into a coat against the bleak December day, he had stood in this very spot for a long time, gazing up at Norman as they had silently said their goodbyes before Mike walked away for the last time. Of course he had known Norman hadn’t really been aware that it was goodbye, but Mike had liked carrying that fantasy away with him when he’d climbed into his loaded truck and driven away from the apartments that had been his home for such a short time.
Now Norman sat in the very same place, as though he hadn’t moved in the meantime, even though May flowers bloomed around the complex and Mike wore a short-sleeved shirt with his jeans and sneakers. It had been gray and cloudy that day; now the sky was a brilliant blue dotted with only a few fluffy white cotton-candy puffs. So many things were different—not the least of which was Mike, himself.
He knew Catherine was home, because her car was in its usual space. What he didn’t know was how she would react at finding him at her door. Half tempted to turn around and climb back into his truck, he wondered where he was going to find the nerve to climb those stairs and find out.
Catherine moved to answer her door, still distracted by an article she had been reading, when someone rang the bell. It was with only idle curiosity that she checked the peephole to see who stood on the other side.
The scientific journal fell unnoticed to her feet when she saw who it was. She pressed a hand to her chest, where her heart was suddenly pounding, and stared at the doorknob, trying to remember how to use it.
Norman butted against her leg, meowing with what sounded like impatience for her to open the door. Spurred into action, she reached out and opened the door. “Mike?”
He looked exactly as he had the first time she had seen him, though he wasn’t wearing the ID badge this time. His dark-blond hair was still a little shaggy and wind tossed, and his eyes were as vividly blue as ever. He still looked like someone who should be cavorting on a beach somewhere, or posing for ads for casual men’s wear.
He was still the most attractive man Catherine could ever imagine meeting.
“Bob was only partially right,” he said, for all the world as if only moments had passed since they had last spoken. “It wasn’t our relationship I was trying to sabotage. It was everything it represented.”
She had no clue what she was supposed to say in response to that. Except… “Um, would you like to come in?”
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, but he shook his head when she automatically waved him to a seat. “No, I need to say this,” he said, looking as though he had rehearsed a speech and wanted to get it all out before he forgot any of it. “Even if this is the last time we see each other, you deserve to know what I finally figured out about myself since we split.”
“And what is that?” she asked, studying him curiously, her racing pulse beginning to slow, but not by much.
“I wasn’t afraid of competing with your friends,” he admitted. “I was afraid of becoming one of them. Grown up. Responsible. Tied down. I liked not being committed to anything, not even to the classes I was taking just to appease other people. I didn’t have to care about my grades because I wasn’t really trying to earn a degree, anyway. I didn’t have to worry too much about my responsibilities to my job, because it was one I could walk away from at any time. And I figured I didn’t have to work too hard at our relationship because it wasn’t going to last, anyway. And there was a p
art of me that liked it that way.”
He paused to draw a breath, then added, “Those things I said about not having the right education or not fitting in with your friends—those were just excuses I told myself. I knew they weren’t insurmountable obstacles between us, but it was easier to pretend that they were. Like I said, they were excuses for me to walk away.”
The words hurt. But as he had said, she deserved to hear them. “And have you come here today to tell me you’ve changed your attitude about those things?”
He shook his head and pulled a folded sheet of paper out of the pocket of his shirt. “I came to show you this.”
She took the crumpled sheet from him curiously, unfolding it after an encouraging nod from him. It was a grade sheet, she saw immediately. He had taken four classes, a total of thirteen credit hours. He had two As—one in the four-hour class—and two Bs.
“This is a very good transcript,” she said slowly, looking up at his face again. “Why did you want me to see it?”
“You’re a scientist. You need proof,” he said lightly, though his eyes were entirely serious. “That’s why I made myself wait this long to come to you, even though I knew I was taking a risk that you’d have moved on. Forgotten all about me.”
Forget about him? Fat chance, she thought, though she remained quiet as he continued speaking.
“It took commitment to get those grades. I had to work my butt off. And I did it for me, not for you. Not for anyone else. It took commitment to sign the papers for student loans I’m going to have to pay back eventually. I knew when I signed them that I couldn’t just walk away this time. Scared the socks off me, but I signed them. For my sake.”
She had to speak up then. “I never cared whether you had a degree.”
He nodded. “I know. You really didn’t care that I was a maintenance worker. I was the one who wasn’t any more committed to that job than I was to my classes. I liked the job well enough, but when I looked ahead long-term, I knew it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. It wasn’t the commitment I wanted to make. Bob helped me understand that, too.”
“What did he say?”
“It wasn’t what he said. I just took a good look at him. That delivery job? He loves it. He sticks with it because it’s exactly what he wants to be doing. He likes being outside, likes being mobile, likes gabbing with all the people he encounters during the day. He says maybe someday he’ll aim for a promotion, maybe a district supervisor in the same field, but in the meantime, he’s genuinely happy with his job. He could go into a group of your friends with his head held high and genuine pride in his work because he chose that job for the right reasons. I didn’t have that same satisfaction in my own job, which I chose mostly because it didn’t require much of me.”
“And yet you did it very well,” she pointed out, hating to hear him criticize himself quite so harshly.
He nodded. “Yeah. Even when I was trying to convince myself I wasn’t the responsible and committed type, I took pride in my work. That’s one of the things that convinced me that maybe I wasn’t a hopeless cause, after all.”
“I never thought you were hopeless,” she murmured.
“No,” he said quietly. “You always said you supported me no matter what I wanted to do. Whether it was maintenance work, or teaching and coaching, you didn’t really seem to care. All you ever asked for from me was honesty. And I wasn’t giving you that. That’s what you were trying to tell me.”
She nodded. For the first time since he had shown up at her door, she allowed herself a glimmer of hope.
“It wouldn’t be easy being involved with a debt-ridden college student. Your friends who are further along in their careers would think you were lowering yourself, maybe. Even though they were perfectly nice to me when I did spend an evening with them,” he added quickly. “Well, except for Julia, maybe, but I could win her over with time.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you could,” she murmured, fighting a sudden, inappropriate urge to smile.
“So, here’s the thing,” Mike said after another deep breath, looking as though he were launching back into the prepared speech. “I don’t need your money—I have loans and a part-time job to cover my education. I don’t need to be tutored—I made those grades on my own. What I need is someone to be by my side—on my side—as I work toward my goals.”
He held up a hand when she started to speak. “I haven’t told you what I have to offer in return,” he reminded her. “I’m an entertaining guy. I know how to help a serious workaholic relax and have fun every once in a while. I’m handy around the house. I have a good track record of rescuing runaway cats. I’ve got some terrific little nieces and nephews I’d be happy to share with an aspiring book-and-chemistry-set-giving aunt. I’ve got a heart filled with love. I’ve spent the past six months learning how to make commitments. I’m prepared to make one to you, as soon as you’re ready to accept it. And I can be patient. I’ll give you as much time as you want, to decide if you’re willing to take another risk on me.”
He had said so much, given her so many things to think about—but only one statement stood out to her. Had he really said he loved her?
Looking increasingly anxious as she continued to remain silent, Mike asked, “Is it no use, Catherine? Do you want me to go?”
Norman butted her leg again, meowing rather loudly.
She moistened her lips. “You’ve been so busy blaming yourself for everything that went wrong that you haven’t given me a chance to tell you how I contributed to the sabotage.”
He shook his head, looking suddenly stubborn. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I was the one who—”
“My turn,” she broke in. “Hear me out. You said you were using the excuse that you weren’t good enough for me. I had the same fears, you know. I was protecting myself, predicting the worst, refusing to fight for us for similar reasons.”
“How could you possibly think you weren’t good enough for me?”
“It wasn’t like that, exactly. But I was afraid that maybe I wasn’t interesting enough to hold your attention. Your other friends seemed so much younger and zanier and more fun. Prettier, wittier, more impulsive. For all I knew, you would grow bored with dating a boring scientist with staid, quiet friends. So maybe I wanted to be the one to end it first, before I got hurt.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said, staring at her as if she had suddenly started speaking in a foreign language.
“No more ridiculous than you thinking I would dump you because I was embarrassed about your job,” she answered tartly.
“How could you possibly think I would get bored with you? I’m in love with you. I have been since almost the beginning, and that hasn’t changed even during all the time we’ve been apart.”
“And how could you think I really cared if you had a degree or what uniform you wore to your job?” she returned. “I’m in love with you, not your résumé.”
He went very still. Realizing exactly what she had just said, she did the same. They stood there for a long time, simply staring at each other. And then Mike reached out for her.
Norman retreated in satisfaction as Catherine melted into Mike’s arms.
“You were gone for so long,” she sighed a while later as he loomed over her in her bed.
He cupped her face between his hands and smiled ruefully down at her. “I had a lot of growing up to do.”
“I suppose we both did,” she replied, tugging him down to her. Apparently, they had both learned some valuable lessons during the past months, Catherine thought, eagerly welcoming him home. “But you’re back now.”
“I’m back now,” he repeated against her lips. “And this time I’m here to stay.”
ISBN: 978-1-4592-1755-3
LOVE LESSONS
Copyright © 2006 by Gina Wilkins
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