by Nina Lane
Her eyes barely flick to Liv. I struggle to control a wave of resentment.
“At any rate, I would certainly expect Archer to be here within a day or so,” my mother says. “People have already been asking where he is.”
I feel Liv’s worried gaze on me. She doesn’t need to be dragged into any of this again. Neither do I, but I’m here and I can already feel myself surrendering to the inevitable.
“I’ll look into it, Mom.”
“Good.”
“Dean.” My father opens his eyes, his voice a raspy whisper. “When did you get here?”
“Few hours ago.” I move to his bedside. “How do you feel?”
“They tell me I’ll make it.”
“Do you need anything, Richard?” my mother asks. “Water?”
My father shakes his head. His gaze shifts to the flowers. “What’re those?”
“Flowers from Liv.” I step aside so he can see Liv standing by the door.
She gives him a wave. “Good to see you, Mr. West. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“How long are you both staying?”
“Until you’re released from the hospital,” I say.
Liv touches my arm and tells me she’s going to the restroom. As soon as she leaves, my parents and I fall silent. I can’t remember the last time I was alone with them. The silence almost vibrates, filled with unpleasant memories.
My mother smooths the blanket, picks up a few fallen flower petals, refills the water pitcher, straightens the stuff on the bedside table.
Then, for lack of anything else to do, she picks up her purse. “Well, I suppose the doctor will be in soon. Dean, Paige and I will go home, now that you’re here.”
She gives my father a perfunctory kiss. Her heels click on the floor as she leaves.
“She says Archer is coming back,” I tell my father.
He shrugs. He resigned himself years ago to the idea that this is how things have to be. Thirty-five years of pretending means nothing will ever change. My parents would have divorced if my father had retired from the bench and gone into private practice, but he’s been associate justice on the California Supreme Court for over twenty-two years, having been elected and retained by voters in three elections. For him, divorce fell off the radar long ago.
Despite staying married, for all practical purposes, he and my mother are separated. My father spends most of his time hearing cases in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Sacramento. He has an apartment in the city and, more than likely, several mistresses. My mother travels a lot on her own little vacations. They maintain the “perfect marriage” act when they’re both in town, and I suppose they’ve come to some sort of understanding about it.
But I know neither of them has ever been happy.
“So how’s work?” my father asks.
I tell him about the upcoming conference, the IHR grant, my classes and students. He tells me about recent court cases, policies of the California judicial council, what he thinks of the governor’s new appointments secretary.
After an hour, the doctor comes in for a consultation about the heart cath he’s planned to determine further treatment. My father waves me out of the room with instructions to come back tomorrow.
I find Liv in the waiting room, eating from a bag of vending-machine fruit snacks.
“When is the surgery?” she asks as we walk to the parking lot.
“Early next week, probably. They’ll schedule it tomorrow after they do some more tests.”
Before opening the car door for her, I put my arm around her waist. She turns to me, her body bowing against mine. Her lips are candy-sweet and warm. I rest my palm against her cheek and deepen the kiss.
Peaches and sugar. Everything good. The girl who has refused to prove herself to anyone except herself. The girl whose strength comes from inside.
“What?” Her whisper is soft against my mouth. She pulls back to look at me. “Are you still upset with me for wanting to come with you?”
“No.” I brush a few strands of hair off her forehead. I love all the locks of hair that are constantly escaping her ponytail or falling around her shoulders. Those stray tendrils have given me endless excuses to touch her.
“Then what?” Liv asks.
I shake my head. The questions jam into my throat.
Why was I suddenly not enough for you?
What if I fail you again?
A hard rush of love and pain fills me.
It’s an unrealistic urge, I know, this need to protect my wife from everything. But it will never go away. I felt it the minute I saw her, and now it’s part of my blood. I even hate that I wasn’t there for Liv all those years she was alone. When her godforsaken mother failed her, when bastards abused her, when—
“Dean?” Her voice slides through my bitter thoughts.
I take a breath. “I’m booking us into a hotel.”
“Why?”
“It’ll be easier on you. I don’t know how often Helen will be at the house, but there’s less chance of running into her if we’re not staying there. Not to mention my mother and sister.”
“No.” Liv shakes her head. “If we go to a hotel, your mother will be upset and… no.”
Irritation spreads through me. “I don’t want you under any stress.”
“Then don’t create any by trying to… to isolate me, Dean.” She gives me a mutinous look. “Who do you think your mother will blame if we leave the house? Me. And she’d be right, because we all know you wouldn’t stay in a hotel if you were here alone.”
Shit.
“Please, Dean.” Liv puts her hand on my chest. “Please don’t be upset. I need to do this. And you need to let me.”
“We’re only staying until my father is out of the hospital.”
“We’re staying as long as your parents need you.”
None of my family needs me anymore. That’s the reason I’ve distanced myself from them. The reason I chose Liv. If I had to do it all over again, I would. The exact same way.
I pull open the passenger side door, then go around to the driver’s seat. I still don’t know what I did to fuck things up so badly with Liv last year. It wasn’t just keeping my first marriage a secret, because things were bad before I told her the truth.
And the fact that I don’t know what went wrong makes me even more afraid that it could happen again. Like a punch you don’t see coming.
Helen is gone by the time we get back to my parents’ house. My mother and sister are out on the back terrace. I persuade Liv to go and rest for a while, then I head into the library.
My brother’s telephone number is scribbled on a pad beside the phone. An automated voicemail answers after I dial.
“Archer, it’s Dean. I’m at the house. Mom has been trying to reach you, so call as soon as you get this.”
I hang up and turn to the computer. An email from Nancy the real-estate agent appears in my inbox.
Crap. Almost forgot about the house for sale.
Dean, there have been a few more showings, so we’re expecting multiple offers. Do you have mortgage preapproval yet, if you’re applying? Must talk down payment. Call me soon.
I try not to dwell on Liv’s reluctance about buying a house. I get where it comes from. It’s the reason I agreed to stay in that apartment for so long. Because Liv wanted to, because she never learned how to feel secure living in one place, because she’s scared something will happen and we’ll have to leave.
But now everything has changed.
I dial Nancy’s number and explain that I’m in California for the next week or two.
“If you want to make an offer, we should do it today,” she tells me. “There were three showings this morning alone.”
“Email me the papers to sign. I’ll fax
them back to you this afternoon.”
We discuss the offer, and she agrees to write it up. I hang up the phone and go back to the living room. My mother and sister are still sitting on the terrace, both of them holding take-out cups of coffee they must have picked up on the way home from the hospital.
I go upstairs to my wife. Liv is asleep by the window, her head resting on one of the wings of the chair. I slide one arm beneath her knees and the other around her back. She shifts, but doesn’t wake as I move her to the bed and pull a blanket over her.
I look at her for a minute—the pretty curve of her mouth, her eyelashes feathery against her cheeks, the strands of hair escaping her ponytail.
Before her, I had never known a woman who could make the noise of the world and everyone in it disappear. I’d never wanted to prove myself to anyone the way I did to her.
I liked her too much. Liked the way I didn’t feel cold inside when I was with her. The way I didn’t think about anything except her. I liked that she was a mystery, a maze with numerous winding pathways and secret corners.
And she was such a relief. Though we met in the fall, she was like spring to me, especially after the darkness of the previous year. Everything about her made me feel good.
“It’s beautiful.” One Friday afternoon a couple of months into our relationship, Liv leafed through the pages of the glossy hardcover book I’d written on medieval architecture. A box of the newly published books had arrived at my apartment that morning.
“How long did it take you to write it?” she asked.
“Two years. One year of research, then I did most of the writing when I was dealing with my grandfather before he died.”
I couldn’t bring myself to say taking care of my grandfather since I hadn’t wanted to be around him. The most I could do was deal with him.
Liv looked at me, cautious. “How did he die?”
“Lung cancer.”
What could I tell her? How Victor West was never a pleasant person and became miserable when he got sick? He hated being in the hospital, hated the treatments. He was demanding, mean. I lost track of the number of times the nurses called me to tell me he’d become belligerent and they needed my help.
“And you took care of him?” Liv asked.
I didn’t want her to think I’d been a martyr. I’d hated it almost as much as Victor had—the antiseptic smell of the hospital, the oxygen tanks, the sounds of the machines, the rasp of his voice.
“He was eighty-three,” I told Liv. “Had a contentious relationship with my parents. They’d stopped talking years ago. I was the only one he’d talk to.”
“Is that why you ended up taking care of him?” Liv asked.
“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck. Tried to smother the shame and bitterness. “Because no one else would.”
“Where he did live?”
“Orange County. I went to stay at his house after he was diagnosed.”
“How long were you there?”
“Almost a year,” I said. “Worked on my book at night. Got him to his doctor’s appointments during the day and helped with stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Just cooking, cleaning. He had plenty of money to hire nurses to come to the house, but he didn’t like them much.”
“So he relied on you,” Liv guessed.
I nodded. For a year, my world had distilled to the two vocabularies of medieval architecture and cancer treatments that, at some point, became bizarrely indistinguishable.
Hemoptysis. Cruciform piers. Hypercalcemia. Plate tracery. TNM classification. Equilateral arch. Metastases. Geometrical manipulation.
I looked at Liv and realized this was the first time I’d ever talked about it. She was watching me with unnerving perception, as if she sensed all that I wasn’t saying. As if she knew that had been just one other situation I couldn’t fix.
“The book didn’t delay my career, at least,” I finally said. “I applied for the Wisconsin professorship last fall. My grandfather died in the spring, about a month before I heard I’d gotten the position.”
“So…” Liv tilted her head. She was still holding my book. She smoothed her hand over the cover before setting it on a table. “You told me you hadn’t been in a relationship all that time.”
“True.”
“When was the last time you were with a woman?”
“I’d just heard about my grandfather’s diagnosis,” I said. “I turned down an offer from the University of Toronto because I knew I’d have to help him. I had an affair with a woman who worked at a legal firm I’d contacted to deal with his estate.”
I was uncomfortably aware of Liv’s gaze. The affair had been brief and unsatisfying. I couldn’t remember the other woman’s name. Sandra? Sarah?
“It wasn’t good,” I admitted. “Not for either of us.”
Christ. Liv was going to turn and walk away from me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What?”
“Sorry you had to… go through that. The whole thing sounds rough.”
“Well, it’s over.”
That was a lie. It wasn’t over. My grandfather had managed to control things even in death, which was both frustrating and almost funny.
“Hey.” I grabbed Liv around the waist and hauled her close to me on the sofa. “Enough of that. What’d you do today?”
“Just classes. Thought about you when I was supposed to be thinking about database management.” She settled against me with one of her breathy little sighs that made me hard in half a second. She was all pillowy breasts, long hair, and soft skin. Her clean smell sweetened my thoughts.
“Yeah?” Whether or not that was true, I liked hearing it. “What were you thinking?”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve been waiting to show you.”
Her mouth came down on mine. I loved it when she initiated a kiss. Warmth spread into my blood. Whatever her reasons for remaining a virgin, there was nothing frigid in the way she moved her mouth against mine, spread her hands over my chest, pressed herself against me. She’d gotten more comfortable with me over the past couple of weeks, but now it was as if knowing about my recent abstinence had emboldened her.
I grasped her ass and squeezed. Pulled her up so she was sprawled on top of me. She shifted. A silver chain laced around her neck, a pendant dangling between her breasts. I’d noticed it before, but never paid much attention to it. Now the pendant brushed against my chest.
I took it in my hand. Warm from resting against her skin, it was a plain, brass disk etched with the Latin phrase Fortune favors the brave.
“Is that your motto?” I asked.
“Sort of.” Something flickered in her brown eyes. She took the disk and held it in her palm.
“Where’d you get it?”
“An old friend made it for me.”
“What old friend?” I tried to keep the jealousy from my voice and failed.
Liv flashed me a smile. “You remember I told you about North?”
“Northern Star, you mean?” My trepidation eased a little. With Liv’s strange and nomadic life with her mother, it shouldn’t have surprised me that she had a friend named Northern Star. One who lived on a commune, no less.
“He made it for me,” Liv said. “Thought I should be brave.”
She dropped the pendant back around her neck and clambered off me. “I’m getting hungry. The cake should be ready soon.”
She went into the kitchen, where she’d made a coffee-cake from a boxed mix. I took a magazine from the table, but kept my gaze on Liv as she reached up to take a mug out of the cupboard. Our kiss and the feel of her on top of me had turned my thoughts lusty.
Liv’s v
oice was a pleasant hum as she started chattering about some tickets to something. Her white shirt molded to her body. Beneath the stretchy material, her breasts looked full and round.
“Want some?” Liv asked.
Yeah, I want some.
A blue, polka-dot skirt flowed over her hips and legs. I wanted to grab fistfuls of the skirt and hike it all the way up to her waist, spread her smooth thighs....
“Dean?”
“Sorry, what?” I pulled my gaze back to her face.
She held up a mug. “Hot chocolate. Want some?”
“Uh, no thanks.”
Her hair was tugged back into a ponytail. I wished she’d leave it loose, all tangled around her shoulders. I shifted, painfully aware of my growing erection.
“So they said they’d still have tickets available at the box office Saturday night.” She bent to take the cake out of the oven. I looked at the curve of her ass and imagined it bare. “We just need to get there a little early to pick them up.”
I couldn’t remember what performance we were seeing tomorrow night, but I made a noise of agreement. Then I went back to gazing at her breasts. I wondered what color her nipples were.
“Dean?”
“Huh?”
Liv turned and put her hands on her hips. Her eyes narrowed. “I said, do you want to get dinner before or after the show?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What is your problem? Why are you not listening to anything I’m saying?”
Because all the blood in my brain has gone to my dick.
I tore my gaze away from her and looked back at the magazine. “I’m listening.”
“You are not.”
“Tickets at the box office, dinner before.”
She tapped her fingers on the counter. “What’s the performance?”
You and me getting naked.
“Uh…”
“Uh huh.” She arched an eyebrow, then picked up her mug and went to sit in a chair across from the sofa. “It’s an acrobatic dance troupe called Diabolo.”
Oh, good Lord.
“Sounds great,” I said.
She smirked. “Guess you should have been listening when I asked if you wanted to go.”