by Addison Fox
Point Reynolds.
Whatever he might have left unspoken between them, she’d brought into the open. This was a date. And a day spent together, if he had anything to say about it.
“The ones at ten o’clock. Definitely.” Fender scanned past the couple he’d pointed out, then on down another few tables. “And those guys at the table next to the newsstand. They’re on a date, too. First one, if I’m not mistaken.”
She leaned once again across the small table that divided them, her gaze conspiratorial as she shot the couple a glance before returning her attention to him. “First-date jitters, definitely. The guy in the button down is smiling a bit too eagerly, but T-shirt and shorts doesn’t seem to mind. They’ve got good chemistry. My money says there’s a second date.”
“Not taking that bet.”
Harlow stilled, seeming ready to ask a question before shifting gears.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “Really, nothing.”
He nearly dropped it, but decided to push. He had an idea of where she was going and was curious to see if he was right.
“You’re surprised I don’t have a problem with two guys on a date?”
She shook her head. “Not surprised. Really I’m not.” She paused, gathered her thoughts. “It’s just a contrast, is all.”
“Contrast how?”
“A few months back. I was on a date with a guy. Third date, so we were at the stage where I needed to make a decision.”
“Sex?”
“Among other things.” She shrugged. “Though I’m not sure sex has a date stamp on it. But that’s another conversation. What I meant was that we were at that stage where we were either dating or we weren’t, you know?”
He did know. And while the two of them hadn’t followed any of those social norms, he’d been beholden to them in the past as well. What constituted dating? When did a woman become a girlfriend? What was casual or serious?
He’d been through it all and hadn’t found any of it nearly half as interesting as having coffee with this woman.
“So what happened?”
“Aside from the fact that he was a homophobic asshole?”
Fender’s eyes widened at the description. “How’d you discover that attractive tidbit?”
“When I found him nearly beating up a guy outside the men’s room at a summer concert in the park.”
Fender sucked in a hard breath, well able to imagine the scene. “What did you do?”
“Yelled and screamed. Embarrassed him a bit. And broke things off immediately.”
“He do anything to you?”
“Twisted it all around. Pulled the frigid-bitch card, and he was done with me anyway. The usual small-minded response to being called out as a jerk.”
“People are funny. Even when they’re not.”
“You’ve had a similar experience?” she asked.
“More than a few times. A mechanic’s shop is a surprising bastion of humanity. You’ve got whatever drama is playing out in the workplace that week bumping up against the consistently obnoxious attitude some people have about the service industry.”
“Sounds like you’re describing my mother.”
He knew his attitude toward Gretchen Reynolds was strained at best, but there was something beneath her words that caught him. “Something upset you?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Yes. This morning, as a matter of fact.”
Fender sat back, more than willing to listen. When he got a winding, frustrated tale of an aging parent and an increasingly bad attitude, he had to admit to himself that Harlow was dealing with more than he’d given her credit for since everything had started with his mother.
“Has she always been like this?”
“My mother has a good streak of snob in her, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s changed over the past year. I’m not sure why or what triggered it, but something is going on.”
“Maybe she’s finally dealing with being cheated on.”
Chapter Eight
“We’re going to go there?” Harlow knew for a fact she’d never been on a date that had shifted to such serious topics so quickly. And she certainly hadn’t come here expecting to talk about her mother.
More than that, she hadn’t expected to talk about her father. Because there was no way to talk about Gretchen Reynolds’s dysfunction and unhappiness without discussing the man who’d created nearly all of it.
Fender shrugged. “It’s an elephant. Might as well acknowledge it.”
“I thought that’s all we’ve been doing.”
“I don’t know. You’ve apologized for your mother’s behavior way too many times. And both of us know the lingering specter of what happened makes us a bad match. I’m not sure that qualifies as talking about it.”
He had a point, but Harlow couldn’t quite fight the sudden desire to crawl under the small table that sat between them. She’d always considered herself well able to deal with her family drama. She’d acknowledged her father’s choices and had firmly put them in the box of “not something I can control.”
So why was it suddenly so mortifying to have the box placed in her lap, as open as a well-worn book?
“I’ll go first,” Fender said. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it bothers me that my mother thought it was okay to do a married guy.”
“Oh.”
He shrugged, but where she’d have expected a layer of bravado, all she saw was open honesty. “Louisa Mills saved me. There’s no other way to say that. She picked me up out of my shit life as a kid and gave me a shiny new one. Gave me brothers. Even gave me a grandmother, though I’d have gladly given that one back this morning.”
“What?”
He grinned and waved it off. “Later. What I mean is that she changed my life. Every good thing that’s come to me was because she changed my path. So it’s humbling and upsetting to realize she’s human and made a shitty mistake that hurt people.” Fender stilled. “That hurt you.”
“My father did the hurting.”
“Yeah, well, he had to do it with someone.”
Or multiple someones, Harlow thought. “I guess. That’s certainly my mother’s problem. She’s so determined to lash out at someone, and the one she needs to yell and scream at is dead.”
“How’d he go?”
“Heart attack. About ten years ago. It was quick, you know? It happened in a matter of hours. One moment I had a father, and the next he was gone. There’s no preparing for that.”
“No, there isn’t.” Fender quietly agreed.
“And once it happens, it seems really terrible and awful to list their bad qualities. He wasn’t all bad.” Something fierce gripped her, rising up with all the force of a volcano. “I think that’s what bothers me the most. He wasn’t all bad. We used to eat chocolate ice cream together while watching TV. And he called me Pip which was short for Pipsqueak. And he bought my mother roses every Valentine’s Day. You could smell them for days. He wasn’t all bad.”
Fender reached over and took her hand across the small table that separated them. Callouses pressed against her skin, the rough outward sign of a working man. She considered this—and how good that felt—as she shifted her hand beneath his, fitting their palms to each other.
“No one’s all bad.” He laced his fingers with hers.
“I think we use those terms to protect ourselves.”
The seriousness she’d seen in his gaze moments before darkened even further, something quiet and gloomy filling those depths. “You think?”
“If we add labels to the boxes we put people in, it’s way easier to catalog them in our minds,” she said. “‘Good person’ or ‘bad person’ has a place. A way to think about them. It keeps us from the real work of understanding who they are.”
“I suppose.” Fender nodded. “But some people belong in the bad box you put them in and don’t deserve to be let out.”
It didn’t take a big leap to understand who he meant. Nor
did she need a sign to tell her pushing into that area was off limits. But oh, how she wanted to ask.
Wanted to know about that darkness.
His honesty about Louisa “saving him” was steeped in something she’d never understand, no matter how dysfunctional her own family had been or become. Abuse or neglect or whatever else he might have suffered before his adoption was a far cry from her own experiences.
What caught her was how much she wanted to understand. Wanted to dig deep and know the demons that shaped and made an abused child grow into a good and fine man.
* * *
Fender held Harlow’s hand as they roamed through another cavernous room at the Met. He’d never been big on art and had been more than skeptical that he’d enjoy a jaunt to the museum, but couldn’t fight the excitement in her voice over a Gauguin exhibit when she’d suggested they walk up to the museum after coffee.
Hell, it was a day with her, and he was fast coming to believe that staring at a bunch of art with her was preferable to doing just about anything without her.
Which was . . . whoa.
Fender fought off the shot of panic that pooled in his gut and rooted his feet to the spot. Thoughts like that pointed directly toward Relationshipville, and they were nowhere near that.
Right?
Harlow tugged on his hand, pulling him forward from his spot in front of a colorful painting of a figure standing in a red cape. The move was enough to jar his relationship thoughts so they were left to rattle around his brain while he followed her through the museum.
It left those same thoughts room to bump up against the other ones that had been simmering since they shared coffee. He’d asked her directly about her father yet she’d sidestepped it, focusing on her mother’s reaction.
Deliberate?
He suspected it was and wouldn’t fault her for it. He wasn’t exactly spilling his guts over his old man, so fair was fair.
But the ready defense of her father’s good qualities had captured him. And it gave him a small measure of understanding of what might have driven his mother’s choices. No one was all bad. His mother certainly wasn’t, and he assumed she hadn’t fallen in love with a total asshole. Whether that love was a good idea or not was another problem. On a moral scale, it sucked. In the messy world of human relationships, it was way harder to navigate.
He wasn’t condoning his mother’s choices, but he loved her and he couldn’t see his way to condemning her, either. Landon hadn’t had it quite so easy. His brother was moving past it—Daphne had helped that—but he’d taken the news hard. For himself, Fender knew, it had been more of an awakening. That the woman he had on a pedestal had her feet firmly on broken ground.
“You really are bored, aren’t you?”
Grateful for the reprieve from shit he usually avoided thinking about, Fender focused on the woman he was with. Yeah, there was stuff they had to figure out. And spending time with her probably was a bad idea. But staring at that heartbreakingly gorgeous face, he couldn’t quite summon up a single reason to walk away.
“I’m not.”
“Liar.”
“I never lie.”
Her eyes narrowed, those blue eyes calculating. “Never?”
“It’s not my style. I may keep my mouth shut, but that’s not lying.”
“It’s omission.”
“Or just knowing when my opinion isn’t needed.”
Her skepticism broke, a wide smile filling its place. “I think you may be that rare creature who walks through life quietly assessing the world. Sort of a mix of John Wayne and the Dalai Lama.”
“I’m no cowboy. And I’m not particularly spiritual. But I do think the world would be far better off if people knew their place.”
“Some people think it’s their place to comment on others. Lift them up somehow.”
“I know those people. They’re the ones who think speaking is a replacement for action. The same ones who left a kid in a shitty situation were the same ones who criticized a single woman for adopting him.” Fender shook his head, some of the old anger he’d carried as a kid rising up to swamp him.
Anger he’d believed long forgotten.
“Far as I’m concerned, people need to know when to keep their mouth shut,” he added, finished with the subject.
“So noted.” She squeezed his hand once more. “Now let me show you one of my favorites.”
Was Harlow done with the subject too? Most women would take an opening like that and run for the end zone of personal information and insights, yet she hadn’t pushed. “A painting?”
“A temple.”
“Here?” He owned his lack of enthusiasm about art, but what was she talking about?
“You bet. Come on.”
Because he was helpless to do anything else, Fender followed her.
* * *
“The Temple of Dendur.” Harlow waved a hand toward the Egyptian temple that rose up in splendor in a western, window-filled room of the Met, overlooking Central Park.
“A freaking temple in the middle of Manhattan.” Fender said.
“Exactly.”
He moved closer, his attention completely captured by the temple that had stood on the banks of the Nile for nearly twenty centuries. “Unbelievable.”
“It was a gift from Egypt in the sixties, but it also had a practical purpose which may interest you. Once the Nile was dammed up as Lake Nasser with the building of the Aswan Dam, the water was going to harm the structure. This temple, along with several archaeological sites, had to be moved and resettled.”
That sharp green gaze roamed up over the heavy sandstone columns before coming back to her. “So the Egyptians got a modern marvel of engineering and had gifts to give away to boot.”
“Pretty much.”
“Human ingenuity at its best.”
“And diplomacy,” Harlow added. “We can’t forget that.”
He smiled, and his attention returned once again to the carvings in the sandstone.
Well aware her knowledge of the temple bordered on fanaticism, she opted to press on, in full teacher mode now. “The temple was built to honor Isis.”
Fender’s gaze swung back around, his attention clearly switched from the temple to her. “I know you know a lot about art, but how do you know that? And all the other stuff, too? This is amazing and all, but it’s a far cry from your gallery and those paintings we looked at downstairs. I didn’t realize art expert extended to geological history lessons.”
“I like the temple.”
“And?” He stood there, expectant, and she knew it was her turn to share. In the quiet cavern of the large wing that housed the temple, strangers milling around them, it was easier to do than she’d have imagined.
“I used to come here. When I was younger. Well—” She fought the heat that crept up her neck. “When I was younger and last week. And lots of weeks before that. I like this place. It makes me happy, and it takes me away.”
“From what?”
“When I come here I know that people can still create beauty no matter what mess is going on around them.”
“I can see that. I didn’t love the stuff downstairs, but I can see the appeal. The talent and the gift that made them.”
“Those talents were used through wars and famines. Through death and destruction and whatever problems their own family had dreamed up. Art is the proof we can find beauty even when the world around us is a mess.”
Fender had stood still before her as she spoke, that stillness belying the energy she usually saw rippling off him. He was a man in motion, constantly, whether it was his fingers tapping to a beat only he could hear or his feet shifting and moving as he considered things.
Only now he was still, paying attention to her. It was heady.
More than that, it was fascinating to realize how that change in rhythm could telegraph so much.
He listened to her.
Had she ever met anyone in her life, romantically or not, who did that?
She was attracted, yes. And she wanted him, in the same, age-old way that the men and women who’d walked around this very temple two thousand years ago had wanted.
Yet even with the attraction and sexual need, Harlow knew these feelings were bigger. They held more.
If she let herself, it would be oh so easy to fall in love. And it was the one thing she couldn’t allow herself to do with him.
Yet increasingly, it was the crazy, wonderful, persistently scary drumbeat that wouldn’t let her go.
* * *
Louisa put the last of the brunch dishes away and set a cup of coffee to brew on the Nespresso. Fender had given the machine to her for Christmas, and the handy single-cup brewer had quickly become her favorite appliance.
Her son did love his gadgets, and the newer and flashier something was, the better. She’d only known it as George Clooney coffee, but Fender had seen the practical application along with the convenience.
And she loved it.
When the machine finished brewing, she took her mug and settled in at the kitchen table with her laptop. Landon had taught her how to update her campaign website, and she wanted to add a few appearances she’d scheduled for the week. The opportunity to talk to the Kiwanis on Thursday had come into her inbox the night before, and Father Thad had just that morning confirmed a discussion session for all the candidates at the church the following week.
There was much to do.
Which meant it was considerably more fun to do none of it and contemplate her boys. Fender had her thoughts at the moment, his quiet in the face of Emily Weston’s ribbing earlier a curious thing that had nagged at her throughout brunch. She knew Emily had been excited about her jaunt to the End Zone on Friday night. At the time, Louisa wasn’t sure what the old woman had loved more—that she’d been accepted at the table of young people, or that she’d taken an Uber to get there—but now that she’d heard the conversation with Fender, Louisa knew better.
Something was going on with Harlow Reynolds.