by Carol Rose
Pete looked up and Max met his gaze squarely.
“I…can’t excuse what I did with your wife. I let her get too close and, I’ll admit it—I wavered when she offered—“ Max stopped, unable to continue forcing the painful words out in a even tone. “You have every right to detest me.”
“I know, and I did hate you…for at least two years,” Pete admitted after a few moments. “But that actually just seems to keep the hurt alive. I realized that a while back. Besides, you’ve already apologized…and it wasn’t like I didn’t know Alexa’s true colors. But by that time, Ryan had come along and…I guess I didn’t know how to deal with it. Our marriage wasn’t good. I guess that was as much my fault as hers.”
“Women are intrinsically destructive. The only way they feel power is by bringing us to our knees,” Max declared with a surge of anger at his own weakness. In a moment of stupidity, he’d lost sight of his responsibility to his brother and allowed a woman to nearly ruin their relationship.
Would his insanity with Nicole take an even bigger toll?
He hadn’t been able to work for days now. Once again, his words were gone. Dried up like a precarious spring, his mind refused to work on anything of importance. Brooding about Nicole didn’t count.
The book was due in one week. Just seven days. Only one hundred and sixty-eight hours.
And he couldn’t finish it. Didn’t have a typist, didn’t have the words.
The bitch had left him powerless.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I think you should try to get her back,” Pete said abruptly a few minutes later. He’d put down his fork and, his square face serious, now regarded Max with a level gaze.
Jolted out of his brooding distraction, Max said, “You’re kidding, right?”
“No.” Pete shook his head. “I think you should call her and patch things up.”
Max stopped pretending interest in eating. “Why would I do that?”
His brother stared at him for a moment, his gaze fixed. “She seems good for you.”
Nonplussed, Max inquired, “On what do you base this conclusion?”
“Well,” Pete picked up his fork again, “first off, I’m not sure you’d be here eating with me if it wasn’t for her. You said she nagged you into coming to the banquet so we could patch things up.”
“Which was a huge success,” Max retorted sarcastically.
Pete shrugged. “It got us talking again. Sort of broke the deadlock.”
“Only because we were tired of being estranged,” Max argued, as much to convince himself as anything. “We probably would have found a way to make contact if I hadn’t gone to the banquet. It’s not like I needed her harping at me about you for weeks. I knew I wanted to reconnect.”
“Sometimes,” Pete said stubbornly, “we know we need to do things, but we don’t do them until someone cares enough about us to harp at us about it. I’m just saying she was the catalyst for you. Not just with me. You also said she got you going on your book. I don’t know…she seemed nice.”
Struck by his brother’s persistence, Max said suddenly, “You like her. That’s why you’re pleading her case.”
“Sure, I liked her. What’s not to like?” Pete met his gaze staunchly.
The remnants of Max’s appetite deserted him as he sat with his brooding gaze on his plate, but Pete went on eating with his usual bedrock kind of immobility.
“Don’t get stuck on the past or what happened in my relationship,” Pete said awkwardly. “Nicole has a major thing for you. She’s not like Alexa. Now, if you don’t treat her right…then things might go wrong, but otherwise….”
Max hesitated for a moment, not wanting to disrupt their relatively pleasant interaction. “Is that what happened in your marriage? You didn’t treat Alexa right?”
“That was part of it,” Pete admitted, pausing to take a drink. “Apparently, I’m not very good at listening. Not to feelings anyway.”
Waiting, Max wondered for the first time if Alexa ever had remorse for the events between them.
For a brief moment, Pete’s usually stoic face showed both resignation and sadness. “She said I shut her out, which I probably did. I don’t talk about emotional things much.”
He looked up at Max. “You know how we were raised. No one talked at all, much less about ourselves or our feelings.”
“Not the ideal family,” Max concurred.
“No.” Pete shook his head. “Even when things were falling apart with Alexa and me—and they were falling apart for several years—I didn’t want to talk about it. She tried. I guess I was afraid. If I didn’t talk about it, it was like it wasn’t there.”
An abstracted silence ticked by for several minutes. Remembering Nicole’s smile, Max struggled against the sweep of emotion that came over him. She represented so many things he knew he couldn’t have, couldn’t do…but despite that he wanted her with a fierceness that left him immobilized. Along with the more vague feelings came anger, blasting through his brain. How could she have just walked out on him like that?
“Have you ever let yourself love someone?” Pete asked abruptly, his reverie apparently suspended.
Max knew he met his brother’s eyes with a troubled gaze. How could he ever really love? How could anyone, when they saw the devastation it brought? If Pete, in his normalcy, couldn’t make it work, what chance did Max have?
“I’m not sure I know what that means,” Max acknowledged finally.
“Well,” Pete said, “I’m learning what it means. I love Ryan more than I thought possible—“
“He’s your son,” Max murmured with a dismissive grimace. “You can’t keep from loving him.”
“Our parents managed.”
Grimly acknowledging the justice of this, Max nodded. “True.”
Drawing a pattern on the tablecloth with the end of a butter knife, Pete said, “Have you ever loved a woman? Really loved her? I thought Alexa and I loved each other and then things went wrong. I know I was part of the problems. We started out okay, but we lost each other somehow.”
“Isn’t that the problem?” Max raised an ironic eyebrow. “People get horny and sappy and they call it love. How many of us know how to hold on to that?”
“Horny and sappy are not love,” Pete declared, his voice flat. “Love is different. When you love someone you…you want everything good for that person, even if it scares you. I’m figuring that out. It’s about not holding her back, even if you have to learn to deal with your own fears. Fears of losing her or yourself.”
“Sounds great,” Max said, keeping the bitterness in his voice to a minimum.
Pete said abruptly, “So, do you love Nicole?”
“Why are you asking?” Max inquired, irritated.
“I’m not interested in her myself,” his brother denied impatiently. “I’m just…trying to help you keep from making my mistakes. I let my fear get control of me in my relationship. You shouldn’t make the same mistakes.”
Max stared across the table at his brother’s solemn, almost pugnacious face.
“I’ve spent the last three years hating you,” Pete said roughly, “but that doesn’t mean I haven’t loved you, too.”
Max fidgeted with his cutlery, uncomfortable with the sudden clog of emotion in his throat and the prickling behind his eyes. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Pete said, his manner awkward as if he, too, were uncomfortable being so warm and fuzzy. “I just think if you love Nicole and she’s good for you, you ought to go after her, that’s all.”
“Oh.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
Finishing their meal with a new kind of constraint between them, they made plans for lunch the next Thursday and parted after a brief, hesitant, and thoroughly awkward, hug.
Walking away from the restaurant, Max tried to come to grips with the jumble inside him. Although he knew he was grateful for the healing between he and Pete, he couldn’t easily sort through his emotions about Nicole.
Whenever he attempted the unaccustomed act of checking into his emotional state regarding her, he felt the blast of anger, then a kind of empty, choked blankness. He walked along the crowded, noisy streets and forced himself to sort, strand by strand, through the inner shell of himself. Several blocks later, he’d come to realize his anger was only the surface of a complex mix. Beyond the haze of his fury with Nicole, he found a loss and a grief so strong, he felt himself seeking for the rage again. That emotion at least wouldn’t leave him feeling imploded.
His footsteps carrying him homeward, he resisted the urge to block the troubled flow of his thoughts. Memories of her clogged his mind, catching and pausing in his consciousness like the leftovers of a flood. He kept seeing her climbing the stairs to the landing where he worked, her brow furrowed over a scribbled word. The time she’d been so furious with him after learning of his stupidity with Alexa…and still she’d been able to hear his voice in his work. She’d come up to his bedroom with awe in her face to tell him how his work had moved her.
Hands clenching against a shudder that shook him, Max hunched his head lower and walked unseeing along the street. This was why he fought to keep from thinking of her. This cresting, drowning loss. He felt he couldn’t breath for the wave of grief crashing over him and he struggled to hide the harsh gasping sound of his breathing from those he passed on the sidewalk. Hearing himself, he realized the absurdity of it. From the sound of it, he should have been running a marathon rather than this easy walk back to his building.
She’d said she cared for him. He felt overwhelmed, suddenly desperate for her affection and caring, needy and hungry to soak her into his pores. He felt terrified, too, by the very desperation of his reaction.
God, he wanted to hear her voice again.
No matter how he looked at it, calling Nicole wouldn’t change who he was. He’d set certain parameters on their relationship. Even as those had changed and evolved to include their sexual intimacy, he couldn’t see a way to become a man she could love. All his life, he’d followed that path seldom seen by others. It hadn’t really been a choice. He couldn’t change his uniqueness anymore than he could alter the pigment of his skin.
She couldn’t accept him for who he was and he couldn’t change into what she wanted him to be. Therein lie the problem.
Approaching his apartment building, Max paused as the doorman held the door open.
“Good afternoon, sir.”
As if yanked up from the spinning, drowning tarn of his thoughts, Max looked up, his unfocused gaze sharpening on the doorman who had spoken to him.
In his gray and black uniform, the man was a tall, slender, dark-skinned figure with a shy-doe smile.
To Max’s surprise, he found himself responding automatically to the other man’s facial expression. His own was a pitiful attempt at a smile, but an immediate broadening of the answering grin on the other man’s face startled Max.
“Afternoon,” he said gruffly, awkwardly.
“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it, sir?”
Max mumbled an assent.
Passing through the door, he got into the elevator wondering how many times he’d walked through that same lobby, past that same man and never even heard the tentative greeting that had surely been offered before. He could never remember responding in kind before.
As the elevator door opened on his floor, Max walked down the hall, his mind mulling over the incident. That and the times he’d gone down to the coffee house. Those moments felt new and strange to him, as if he’d briefly, tentatively reached beyond the wall that separated him from the rest of the human race. As if suddenly, he couldn’t not respond.
A smile twisted his lips as he unlocked the door to his apartment. Nicole. She’d have a field day with the train of his thoughts, he knew. See, she’d say confidently, you’re changing!
As if he’d conjured her up, thoughts of Nicole swamped him, crowding in closer than before. Pushing the door shut, Max leaned back against it, the tightness in his lungs nearly unbearable, his head all at once feeling as if it was splitting.
“Go!” he yelled out, his voice echoing in the empty space. “Leave me alone!”
His head thrown back against the door, he glared into the gloomy hallway as if he could see her standing there tormenting him. But he was alone. Still. Always.
Hadn’t he always been alone?
Shoving roughly away from the door, he crossed the hall and pushed the office door open. When he’d left for lunch earlier, he’d closed it, not admitting to himself how unable he was to bear the yawning emptiness. Now, he snapped on the light and made himself face the room. Her room, her space. Going over to the desk, Max sat down in the chair and gently placed his fingers on the computer keyboard, the monitor screen suddenly flashing to life.
As if groveling for some wisp of Nicole, he rested his fingers where hers had sat.
He’d lived here six years in this building, this apartment. Always alone, except for the typists and Ruth or Cynthia. Even his occasional sex partners had never come home with him. He was accustomed to this aloneness. Why now did the space echo so badly?
Clenching his fists, he bent to rest his head on the keyboard, the damn thing he couldn’t conquer. If only she were here again, how the ache in his soul would ease.
His soul! The woman had somehow altered his very soul.
Lifting his gaze to the ambient space above the monitor, Max replayed his brother’s words.
“Love is different. You want everything good for a person you love, even if it scares you. I’m figuring that out. It’s about not holding them back, even if you have to learn to deal with your own fears. Fears of losing them or yourself.”
Max sat back in her chair, his fingers sliding off the keyboard as his arms dropped to his sides.
It sounded so damned scary, so impossible, so wrong, to think of changing himself for her. But hadn’t he already been doing that? Not particularly for her, but because she made it seem so obvious and…necessary. He couldn’t quite get it to fit in his brain. Changing for her, changing for himself. It all seemed to mesh together. Not easily though…nothing was particularly easy about this reorienting in his head.
He’d resisted reaching out to Pete, too…but now he could only be glad he’d done it.
Where was she? Max wondered, a jagged jolt of pain ripping through him. He loved her, God help him. He loved her. For the first time in all his life, he’d let a woman matter.
* * *
“Ms. Cavanaugh!” a boy called out, swiveling around as he passed her in the hall. “Who sent you the flowers? You got a man now?”
“Never mind, Shane,” she said, trying to keep her voice level, the threat of tears making her eyes burn. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”
Shane smirked, his adolescent swagger harmless and amusing if she’d been able to find amusement in anything at that moment. “Ms. Tibbons sent me to the office with a message. Oh, yeah! I’m legally in the halls during class!”
“Fine.” The bowl of fragile pink flowers held out in front of her as if it were nuclear waste, Nicole hurried past him, catching his startled look out of the corner of her eye.
Normally, she enjoyed the give and take with teenagers that her job allowed. They could be maddening in their stumbling, awkward earnestness, but she loved being part of their lives.
Right now, however, she could hardly breath for the panic and grief clutching at her heart. Loving and losing someone was bad enough, but loving him and being offered a wisp of a chance to linger nearby and suffer more pain and damage…that was harder. More tempting and more destructive, all at once.
He’d sent her a delicate cluster of pink roses and something that looked like blue bells…in the fall yet. Of course, a hundred dollars or so was small change to a man of his wealth.
Driving home, the damned thing sitting innocently in the seat next to her like a bomb in a teddy bear, she could barely see for the tears streaming over her cheeks
.
His card had said simply, “Call me. Max.”
As if that was all it took.
What a simplistic, typical male reaction. As if nothing could be so bad or so ugly that a credit card and a call to a florist couldn’t fix it. As if she were a pet to be given a treat after having been beaten.
Arriving home, she marched straight into the kitchen and dumped the arrangement into the trash, wincing at the sound of the beautiful bowl cracking as it landed.
Without letting herself hesitate, she took the garbage bag out to the curb.
* * *
The next morning, Nicole stared out at the September wind, busily scrubbing the leaves from the trees. She’d made it through another week and that in itself should have been reason to rejoice the coming of the weekend.
From her kitchen window she could see the white garbage bag by the curb, its loose folds flapping in the gusty, frigid air. Today of all days the trash pick-up had to be later than usual. She had to stare at the damned bag knowing it’s contents.
Why would Max send her flowers?
Of course, for all she knew, he routinely sent flowers to his sex partners. Hell, he could have an account with a florist and get a cut-rate.
A particularly strong gust of air hit the garbage bag tumbling it to its side.
Blinking, she tried not to think about the sweet pink roses falling, scattered, out of their bowl, their petals turning purple with the cold.
She should have dumped the thing in the dumpster behind the school. She should have never gone to New York at all.
Forcing herself to turn away from the window over her kitchen sink, she ignored the breakfast she’d made herself cook. It sat now congealing on the table.
Soon, this blackness had to lift.