Fire and Glass

by Linda Seed

  “Why should she have to?” Gen had stopped yelling at him, and her tone was calmer now. More reasonable. Which made him feel even more like an idiot. “Why should she have to chase you down and beg you to give her the benefit of the doubt? I get you being upset, Daniel, but didn’t she at least deserve a conversation?”

  “Yeah.” He couldn’t quite meet Gen’s gaze. “Jesus. Yeah.”

  The idea that he’d made a terrible mistake settled into his gut like a stomach virus. He felt relief that maybe Lacy hadn’t chosen someone else over him, but beneath that was shame at how he’d treated her, and something else he couldn’t quite name. Or maybe he just didn’t want to name it, because if he had, its name would have been Fear. And that would have been less than flattering to Daniel’s manly self-image.

  “Look … just … ease up, would you?” he said. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “You need to do more than talk to her,” Gen said, her eyes hard and accusing. “You need to decide how you feel about her. Because she loves you. She’s in it. And if you’re not, then it’s better that she knows that now.”

  Gen turned to the box Daniel had brought in. “Now, what did you bring me?”

  Daniel hadn’t gone into Jitters for his coffee for days, because he was avoiding Lacy. Instead, he’d been making it himself at home, or going into the Redwood Café for his caffeine fix.

  So when he finally bolstered his courage and walked through the doors into Jitters, it was with some trepidation that Lacy might serve him his hot coffee by pouring it down his pants.

  As he walked in, the bells above the front door jingled. Lacy, who was standing behind the counter, turned to see who had entered, a professional, pleasant expression on her face. When she saw who it was, she froze, and the smile dissolved.

  “Hey,” he said. He gave her a tentative little wave with his fingers.

  “Oh,” she said, as though his arrival had somehow answered a question for her.

  “Listen.” He stepped up to the counter and lowered his voice. “Could we maybe talk?”

  “I’m working.” To demonstrate, she picked up an empty stainless steel milk pitcher and began to wash it in the sink. She looked so tense that if the pitcher had been ceramic or glass, it probably would have shattered in her hands.

  “Lacy—”

  “Do you want to order something? If not, then you should probably leave, because the table space is for customers only.”

  It hurt to be treated this way by her, especially when the memory of their last encounter, when she’d given herself to him with all of the lust and intensity of his secret fantasies, was so fresh that he could still smell her skin. But he figured he deserved it. He just had to ride it out until her anger started to wane, and then they could talk. And once they were talking, he was sure they would be able to work this thing out.

  “Ah … yeah.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Give me a large coffee.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to order?” Lacy scowled. “We’ve got a business to run here, and I don’t know what you think we’re going to do with a dollar seventy-five.”

  Okay, so that was how this was going to go. He let out a sigh.

  “Fine. Give me a café mocha. And one of those cinnamon roll kind of deals over there.” He pointed to an item in the bakery case. “And … a blueberry muffin.”

  “God, Daniel. You don’t even eat pastries. Now you’re just humoring me.”

  She was glaring at him as though she wanted to rip his face off and wear it as a hat.

  Maybe this was going to be harder than he thought.

  “Just the mocha, then.”

  She rang up the purchase, took his money by snatching it out of his hand, and slapped his change down on the counter before turning crisply to make his drink. He hoped she didn’t have any rat poison back there that she could slip in instead of sweetener.

  There was only one other person in the coffeehouse—a middle-aged guy who’d settled in at a table with his coffee and a crossword puzzle—so Daniel figured he could try talking to her here and now, if she wouldn’t let him do it any other way.

  She was busy making his drink, so he used the opportunity to lean across the counter and plead his case while she worked.

  “Look. All I knew was that you’d been hugging that guy. And people kept coming up to me and telling me they were sorry about our breakup. That you were going to marry him after all. What the hell was I supposed to think?”

  “You were supposed to take my phone calls, so I could explain it!” she hissed at him as she steamed his milk.

  “Fair enough. I was hurt, so I acted like an ass. I get that. And I’m sorry.”

  She poured his steamed milk into the cup, finished the drink, slapped a lid on it, and plunked it on the counter.

  Daniel lifted the lid and peered inside.

  “Where’s my whipped cream?”

  “You can shove your whipped cream up your ass.”

  So, no whipped cream, then.

  “Lacy. It was just a misunderstanding. People have misunderstandings. I said I’m sorry, and I really am. Can’t we just move past this?”

  She propped a hand on her hip and blew a stray lock of hair out of her face. “No, I don’t think we can.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you didn’t trust me.” Her face started to redden, and he was horrified to see tears welling up in her eyes. “When people started saying things, you didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. You just believed the rumors. And then you didn’t even respect me enough to talk to me about it.”

  A fat tear fell from her eye and down her cheek, and she wiped it away with the heel of her hand.

  “I can’t have a relationship with someone who can just … just write me off that easily.”

  She went to the bakery case and grabbed the blueberry muffin he’d initially ordered.

  “Take the muffin. On the house.”

  And she wound up like a Major League pitcher and threw it at him with all of the force her girly arm could muster.

  The muffin hit him in the center of the chest and exploded into a mess of blueberry-scented crumbs.

  The guy with the crossword puzzle looked up, raised his eyebrows questioningly, then looked back down at his puzzle.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Daniel tried to look on the bright side and just get on with things. The bright side being that now his life, with its quiet, its routine, its order, would continue uninterrupted. He wouldn’t have to worry about what his relationship with Lacy, with her desire for six children, would bring. He didn’t have to feel threatened by every asshole who leered at her or flirted with her, or hugged her at Jitters. He didn’t have to think about things like adding a second story onto his house.

  But he also wouldn’t get to laugh with her, or walk Zzyzx with her, or do any of the other little things he did with her that seemed impossibly perfect—like small glimpses of some better, shining world—now that he would never do them again.

  He wouldn’t get to make love to her on the table in his studio again, wouldn’t touch her skin, wouldn’t taste the delicious hollow of her throat.

  There was no bright side here, no matter how hard he tried to find one.

  So, he tried to just get on with his days.

  He worked. He watched football on TV. He let Zzyzx sleep on the bed with him, so he wouldn’t feel so alone.

  He avoided Vince Jordan, leaving the house renovation plans up in the air. He didn’t think he could face Lacy’s father, and even if he could, there was always the chance that he would run into Lacy if he tried to talk to the man.

  When they were in public, she’d thrown a muffin at him. What might she throw at him, or even bludgeon him with, on her own home territory?

  “It’s good to be single guys,” he told Zzyzx one night as they were settling in on the couch to watch some TV. Daniel had a bottle of beer on the table beside him, and Z had a chew toy between his paws. They had
everything they needed.

  Z looked up at him and whined.

  “Yeah, I know it’s bullshit. But I’m trying here,” he told the dog.

  He took a long pull from the bottle and flipped the channels, hoping to find something that could distract him from the growing ache in his chest.

  He’d had a good thing—possibly the very best thing—and he’d blown it.

  “I’m an idiot,” he told Zzyzx.

  The dog didn’t argue.

  Lacy didn’t want to talk about it.

  Her friends had heard about the muffin-throwing incident—apparently it was possible for gossip to spread even when the only witness was one man with a crossword puzzle—and had approached her with concern.

  She brushed them off, insisting she was fine. She’d had breakups before, and she’d survived them. Of course, she would survive this.

  It didn’t matter, she said. Daniel was just her rebound man, anyway.

  Of course, it was all a steaming pile of horseshit. Even she didn’t believe what she was telling them.

  Normally, she would deal with any disappointment in her life by hashing it out with her friends, but this particular disappointment was so real, so raw, so immense in its awfulness that the only thing to do was to deny its existence.

  Not that this approach was helping.

  She went to work every day, and then she went home. Christmas came and went, without the joy it usually brought her. She buried herself in her romance novels, because the books had the happy endings, the fulfillment of true love, that she apparently wasn’t going to get for herself.

  At least, not this time.

  The trouble was, she had the nagging suspicion that this time was going to be the only time that mattered.

  Because of the Titanic-like disaster that was her love life, Lacy was no longer speaking to her mother—at least, not in any substantial way. They still exchanged pleasantries, still said good night and good morning, hello and goodbye. But Lacy said the minimum she could without being blatantly rude, and then retreated into her trailer or into a room where Nancy wasn’t.

  If Nancy had just refrained from meddling, if she had just kept her opinions and her comments out of Lacy’s business, none of this would have happened. Of course, Nancy’s interference hadn’t caused the issue of Daniel not trusting her, of him shutting her out as soon as her true feelings for him had come into question. Nancy had only exposed those issues. And if she hadn’t done it, someone else—or something else—would have.

  Still, it hadn’t been someone or something else. It had been Nancy.

  And Lacy could barely look at her.

  It had been a week of Lacy holing up in her Airstream, avoiding the family home, when Jess came over one day and knocked on the Airstream door, tentatively poking her head in when she found it unlocked.

  “Lacy?” Jess seemed reluctant to come in, as though Lacy might bite her head off if she attempted to enter. Which she might have done, had it been Nancy.

  Lacy was lying on her bed reading a novel about a medieval knight and a hot maiden he’d accidentally married through a case of mistaken identity. She’d been reading so long that when she looked up at Jess, it took a moment for her to readjust her reality.

  “Oh. Hey,” Lacy said in listless greeting.

  “Are you okay?” Jess asked. “Mom says you haven’t been to the house in a while.”

  “Yeah, well.” Lacy marked her place and put down the book. “That’s because I don’t really want to talk to her.”

  Jess scowled at her. “Well, you have to forgive her. She’s our mom.”

  Lacy sat up on her bed, glowering at Jess. “I know she’s our mom. And I love her, and I will forgive her. I’m just not ready yet.”

  Jess sighed and sat down on the bed next to Lacy. “That’s fair enough, I guess.”

  Jess patted Lacy’s knee in a very motherly, Jess-like fashion. “You know, while you’re thinking about forgiving people, you could forgive Daniel.”

  Lacy looked at Jess curiously. “I thought everybody wanted me to marry Brandon.”

  Jess made a scoffing sound. “Not everybody. I’ve always thought he was kind of an ass.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “What was I supposed to say?” Jess got up from the bed and started to pace the tiny trailer. “I thought you were in love. You don’t tell somebody that the person they’re in love with is an ass. What if he’d become my brother-in-law? Then that’s always there between us, that you love him and I think he’s an ass.”

  “Well, okay,” Lacy said.

  “I don’t think Daniel’s an ass,” Jess added. “I think he’s a guy who acted like an ass once. But I think he can get over that.” She grinned slightly. “I don’t think it’s a curable condition for Brandon.”

  Of course, the idea of simply forgiving Daniel wasn’t entirely new to Lacy. She was tempted every minute of every day to just go over to his place and tell him she was over it, and she had to constantly remind herself to be strong. Because forgiving him wouldn’t change the fact that the first moment something had gone wrong between them, he’d shut her out.

  It wouldn’t change his awkward silence when she’d said she loved him.

  “Tell Mom I’m okay,” Lacy said.

  “You could tell her yourself.”

  “Not yet.”

  When Jess left, Lacy went back to her book. Fictional love was better than no love at all.

  Chapter Thirty

  It was one thing when Lacy told her friends she didn’t want to talk about Daniel. But when she stopped spending time with them, opting instead to hide inside her trailer like a woodland animal barricading itself in a burrow whenever she wasn’t at Jitters, they decided they had to do something.

  More specifically, Rose decided she had to do something.

  If she’d called Lacy and said, I want you to come to my house so I can force you to talk to Daniel, Lacy would have balked. So instead, she told Lacy that she needed help painting the baby’s room.

  Lacy resisted, claiming first that she was too busy, then that she had to work. Finally, she admitted that she was just too damned sad to leave the trailer. Rose, who was committed to her plan, put as much stress into her voice as she could muster, complaining that Will was sick, and the baby was going to come any day, and she had nothing ready. What was she supposed to do? Did Lacy want her to do it all herself? Was she expected to get on a ladder in her compromised state, possibly falling off and risking the lives of both the baby and herself? Was that what Lacy wanted?

  At last, Lacy had agreed to drag herself out of the Airstream and come to Rose’s house.

  What she didn’t know was that the nursery was already painted, and had been for more than a week. She also didn’t know that Will had called Daniel with pretty much the same story, minus the bit about falling off a ladder.

  And that was how it came to pass that Lacy walked in the front door of Rose’s house at ten a.m. on a Tuesday to find Rose with a smug look on her face, and Daniel just looking confused.

  “What’s going on?” Lacy looked at Rose accusingly, and then at Daniel. He was standing there looking awkward as hell, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, carefully avoiding eye contact.

  “What’s going on is I lied to you to get you here so you could work things out. Deal with it,” Rose said.

  “Ah, jeez,” Daniel groaned.

  Lacy turned and started to walk toward the door, but Rose, moving faster than one would expect given her girth, blocked the door with her body.

  “You’re not going anywhere, so you might as well sit down,” she said.

  “I don’t want to sit down.” Lacy sounded, even to herself, like a petulant child refusing to clean her room. She turned to Daniel. “Was this your idea?”

  He raised his hands in helpless surrender. “I had nothing to do with it. I thought I was here to help paint.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Though, now that we’re here, I woul
dn’t mind talking.”

  “There you go,” Rose said encouragingly.

  “This is pointless,” Lacy said, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at Rose.

  “Well, that might be. But you’re at least going to try to sort things out.” Rose sounded surprisingly cheerful, though she looked tired, as though she hadn’t slept well. “I’ve got pizza, wine, and premium ice cream. You’re welcome to any and all of it, as long as you talk to each other.”

  “It’s ten in the morning,” Daniel pointed out.

  “So what? That’s never stopped me,” Rose said.

  Daniel, apparently clinging to the fiction under which he’d been brought there, said, “Where the hell is Will?”

  “He’s teaching a class,” Rose said.

  “That son of a bitch lied to me,” Daniel grumbled.

  “Yeah, but it was for a good cause,” Rose replied.

  Rose told them she was going to her room so they could have some privacy to talk about whatever needed to be talked about. She acknowledged that there would be nothing to keep them from leaving, but she let it be known that anyone who was too pigheaded to at least try to work things out would be permanently stained by shame and disgrace.

  “Well, I don’t want to be stained by shame and disgrace,” Daniel said when Rose was gone. “You want the pizza or the ice cream?”

  Lacy glared at him. “What kind of ice cream?”

  Daniel went into the kitchen and peeked into the freezer. “Chunky Monkey.”

  Lacy rolled her eyes. Rose was playing dirty.

  “Hand it over,” Lacy said.

  Daniel brought her the carton and a spoon.

  Lacy took the lid off the carton and took a spoonful of ice cream, partly because she couldn’t resist Chunky Monkey—as Rose well knew—and partly because it allowed her to avoid looking at Daniel.

  Daniel took a slice of pizza from a box on the kitchen counter, wondering aloud where she’d managed to get pizza at this time of the morning. He put the slice on a plate that Rose had left beside the box.

  “Look,” he said. “Rose went to a lot of trouble here. We might as well … you know.” He gestured toward the kitchen table, and Lacy reluctantly sat down.