by Mary Gorman
They fell into a comfortable routine. Denise would greet Dave in his office when she came in for her shift, then he’d run out to bring her back a take-out dinner and they’d eat together. Most days he’d leave before her shift was over. Most of the weekends were spent together. Sometimes he’d go with her to a station promotion, if she had one scheduled, but other days they’d go to an art museum or a Red Sox game, take in a show or take Dave’s niece and nephew to the zoo or the aquarium.
Dave taught Denise how to cook Italian, inviting her over to his place to show her how to make chicken piccata or pizzellas or some other family specialty. And they went shopping together for a new, queen-sized mattress to replace the full-sized one in his room. Together, they shopped for new bedding, settling on a multicolored quilt and a set of plain red sheets. Then, of course, they had to try the new bedding out. And, Lord, she did look good on red sheets.
Denise’s favorite times with Dave were the quiet times together, just holding hands or talking. Sometimes she’d be recognized when they were out together and he’d step back and let her hold court, signing autographs and making small talk, but all she’d have to do would be to look his way and he would be back at her side, his hand of the small of her back possessively, ready to extricate her if she was ready to move along. He was funny and sweet and made her feel like the most special woman in the world. Some days she felt like she had it all — success, independence, and a relationship with a man whom she really loved.
In July, the annual station outing came and went — a harbor cruise this time. Because Denise was no longer the new-man-on-the-team, she was able to pass her shift to one of the newer people, and so she didn’t have to leave early. Todd O’Connor, Dave wasn’t sorry to hear, couldn’t get out of his daily work obligation and so couldn’t join them on the cruise, so Dave only had to contend with Presley as a distraction as they sat in lounge chairs and drank fruity drinks with umbrellas in them. And Presley had started to grow on him, even if she did sometimes act like she was personally responsible for their getting together. At least, he supposed, she seemed to be on his side. Presley and Kirk had, as predicted, eventually lost interest in each other, but as near as Dave could tell, it was an amicable parting. There was no animosity. Thank God.
In spite of Dave’s coaching, Denise went 0-for-4 at the next match up of the ’MTR staff against the visiting Soap Opera Stars the following July. But she went down with laughter and grace, willing to poke fun at her own lack of ability — which was a good thing, considering the morning crew made repeated references to her lack of ball-playing skills on the morning show. No one ever said that being a celebrity was easy.
As the summer days wore on, their days were full of long walks, porch swings and lemonade, and Dave began to think that he might actually begin to believe in happily ever after.
Chapter Fifteen: The Misunderstanding
It was too early for the bar to be very crowded, and so Dave and Kirk were able to grab seats in a booth while they waited for the takeout pizza they’d ordered to finish cooking. Denise and her mother were picking up Julie, Denise’s younger sister, whose cruise ship had put into Boston Harbor for two days in order to restock and to pick up passengers for a cruise to Bermuda. Dave hadn’t met Julie yet, but he was invited to a cook out at Judy’s house the next day to meet her. Ghoulie’s Shelby was home as well, and so it was just Dave and Kirk tonight, sharing pizza and a baseball game that was only viewable with Kirk’s satellite TV subscription.
“I learned a new expression,” Dave told Kirk as he took a sip of his light beer. He never seemed to actually lose any weight, but for Denise’s sake, he was cutting calories where he could.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, ‘too stupid to live.’ I picked it up from Denise’s Mom.”
“Not describing you, I hope?”
Dave flashed his friend a playful scowl. “No. I guess it’s a term romance writers use when there’s a book where the heroine does something really, really stupid.”
Kirk smiled. “You mean the people who write those kind of characters know how stupid they are?”
“Maybe not the author herself, no, but Judy says that one of the things romance writers hate is when they read a book where the author has the characters do something that makes no sense, just to move the plot along.”
“You talked to Judy about romance novels?” Kirk asked. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll out yourself?”
Dave shrugged. “I told her I’d read one or two of hers.” He’d actually read them all. “Since I’m dating her daughter, I don’t think that sounded too weird. It’s kind of normal for her to talk about romance books, since she writes them. I’ll say, ‘How’s the book going?’ and she’ll start talking.”
“So have you learned anything useful?”
“That it’s a lot more complicated than I thought. Once you get Judy going on the topic, she’s kind of hard to stop.”
“For example?”
“Well, in the beginning, romances had to be really formulaic. There was a weak, passive heroine who had to be saved from danger by a big, honking hunk. The chapters had to be a certain length — there was even a set rule that they had to have sex between pages, say, seventy and a hundred and ten.”
Kirk snorted. “So you really only had to read between pages seventy and one ten?”
“Very funny, Kirk. As women became more liberated, the heroines became stronger. Now it’s not that weird to have the heroine save herself and the hero. And the lines between different kinds of books has blurred. A book can be a romance and a mystery, or a romance and a paranormal, or a romance and a comedy … ”
“So were Shelby’s bottom shelfers all older books?”
Dave turned his palms up to show that he didn’t know the answer. “Maybe. I didn’t check the dates. But get this, romances are the most popular books in the country. More than half of all books published in the U.S. are romance novels.”
Kirk looked stunned. “Do you suppose that means we’re not the only men reading them?”
“Maybe. Judy says that she knows of about a dozen romance writers who are men.”
“Straight men?” Kirk sounded astonished.
“Presumably. Judy says there are publishers now who specialize in gay romances, the same way there are publishers who specialize in stories where the hero and heroine are something other than Caucasian. She says they’re called ‘multicultural romances.’”
“Huh.”
“Some of them co-write with their wives. Judy says all of them publish under a pseudonym, either gender-neutral or decidedly female.”
“Sort of the opposite of that old TV show, Remington Steele,” Kirk mused, recalling a seventies TV series where a female detective used a male “front” to gain business respectability.
“Kind of. It’s really interesting to talk to Judy about the books she writes. She’s kind of got her own set of rules. She won’t write historicals because she doesn’t know enough about history. She won’t write a story where the heroine is a virgin because she thinks stories where the heroine had multiple organisms the same time she loses her virginity are unrealistic. She won’t write erotica because she says they’re more about the sex than the characters. And she won’t write any book where the entire plot hinges on a misunderstanding, because she thinks if a couple really has a solid relationship, then it’s not believable that they’d be broken up by a situation that could be resolved with a simple conversation.”
“I’ve read a few of those,” Kirk said.
Dave nodded. “Yup. The key to any good relationship has got to be good communication.”
• • •
Denise was looking forward to spending her Friday night after work with Dave. She had been in a pissy mood since the morning before, when Presley had shown her a clipping from the society pages of the New York Times. Ja
son Douglas, entrepreneur and the heir to the Douglas fortune was engaged to be married for the second time to his former assistant.
That in itself would have given Denise pause — as much as she hated to admit it, she was still hurt over the fact that her marriage had ended, and to think that that … that cocksucker had finally won him in the end galled her to no end. But she could have gotten over that, with Presley’s help, with a cat session of making bitchy comments about the bride to be.
No, the thing that had really pissed her off was the fact that in the picture that accompanied the announcement, the simpering bride-to-be was wearing a pin in the shape of a dragonfly. The picture was in black and white, but Denise knew that the dragonfly’s body was made of sapphires and its eyes were diamonds. She knew that because that was her pin the bitch was wearing. At least it had been. She supposed that since she’d left it behind, it was Jason’s to do with what he would. She just never thought that a man with as much money as he had would resort to gifting his new wife with the old one’s jewelry. She hoped that the point would come loose, scratch the bitch who was wearing it, and give her blood poisoning. Not that she was a vindictive person, but really …
She hadn’t said anything to Dave about it. She sensed that it made him uncomfortable whenever the subject of Jason came up. And it didn’t really matter to her anymore what Jason did. She had Dave. He was all she needed to be happy.
So she was relieved that it was Friday, and that she’d be spending the evening with Dave. He’d promised her a surprise but she was still shocked when he pulled up to the building driving a pickup truck at the end of her shift. “What’s up with the truck?” she asked, as he held the truck door open for her.
Dave just smiled and said, “I borrowed it from Kirk’s brother.”
Denise got into the car and waited. One of the things she loved best about Dave was his spontaneity. Whether it was a picnic on a blanket at a small town Fourth of July fireworks display or an afternoon trip to the zoo or a Saturday morning at a museum, she loved the things that she and Dave did together. He wasn’t stuck on the traditional idea of a date — dinner followed by a movie or show as a prelude to sex. The things that they found to do together were simple, intimate, and fun — much like Dave himself.
Her excitement waned just a little as he drove out of Boston and toward the Northwest, but her curiosity remained intact. “Where are we going?” she asked again.
“You’ll see,” he assured her, reaching his hand over to lace his fingers through hers. “Just hang on. It’s a long ride, but it will be worth it, I promise.”
He curled his hand into hers, tightening his grip gently and then easing the pressure again. She loved the way he’d always squeeze her hand like this or touch the small of her back as he guided her to his car; small physical gestures that both surprised and pleased her. It made her realize just how much she had been missing in her marriage. Toward the end, the only time Jason had ever touched her in public was to take her arm as he paraded her into a public function, a gesture that she now realized was more proprietary than affectionate. Dave’s touch was much more pleasant than Jason’s had been toward the end. He might not have been the kind of guy to turn others women’s heads the way Jason had with his taut body and tailored clothing, but he looked at her and touched her in a way that was as protective as it was affectionate. Even when he saw her at home on weekends, grubbed out with jeans and a sweatshirt, sans makeup and her hair pulled back into a ponytail, he still acted as if she were the most wonderful woman that he had ever seen. With Dave she felt … appreciated.
She made a vague note of the exit he took when they left the highway, but was quickly lost as he shifted to back roads and streets that lacked signs. He seemed to know where he was, because he didn’t hesitate and signaled his turns long before she even realized that there was a side street ahead. Still, she couldn’t help asking, “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” when he pulled onto a dirt road in a heavily forested area.
“Uh huh.” He squeezed her hand again, just for a second or two, then said, “Don’t worry. We’re almost there.”
“Where?” she asked. “This doesn’t look like we’re anywhere.”
“I guess you could say we’re off the beaten path,” he told her.
“Obviously.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure if we’re in Saugus or Melrose. One of the two. And I don’t know the name of the road. But I do know where we are.”
“All right,” she gave in.
He let go of her hand to turn the steering wheel, pulling off the road into a small overlook so that the front end of the truck was almost up to a guard rail that seemed to mark a drop off — at least, it looked that way in the headlights. He put the truck into park, turned off the engine and killed the headlights. “All right,” he told her. “We’re here. Now undo your seatbelt and I’ll meet you in the middle.” He reached for the release to his own belt.
Denise looked up at him curiously. “Is that why you borrowed the pick up? So we could go parking?” It had been sort of a running joke between them. Her car had bucket seats with a stick shift between them, and his not only had a stick shift, but seat and shoulder belts that automatically wrapped around the driver as long as the car door was closed. If you opened the car door, then the overhead light came on so that not only did you have to lean over the shift to get to each other, but every landlady, neighbor, and mother who happened to be looking out the window could see every move they made. “Partly,” he told her cheerfully. “Now get over here, woman.”
Dave scooted toward the middle of the bench seat, resting his arm along the back so that when Denise finally did manage to find the release to her seatbelt, Dave’s arm immediately wrapped around her shoulders and pulled her close. She shifted a little, levering her body so that it snuggled against him. “Just partly?” she asked.
“Mmm hmm. Now watch out the windshield for a minute.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
“Dave, I’m sure there must be a great view out there, but it’s pitch dark. I can’t see a thing past the hood.”
“Just wait,” he insisted. “Do you want me to turn on the radio? I think when I’d go parking as a teenager, we usually had music on the radio, although to be honest, I can’t remember ever actually listening to a single song.”
“Probably because you had some girl’s tongue in your ear,” she said, a little snootily. “Is this where you used to go parking when you were a teenager?”
“You’re giving me way too much credit,” he told her. “But yes, it is. We used to — ”
“Oh my God, look!” she interrupted, sitting up out of his arms and pointing. A bright shooting star streaked briefly across the sky in front of them before fading quickly into nothingness.
“That’s the real reason we’re here,” Dave told her. “It’s the Perseid meteor shower. The weatherman on channel four said that it happens every year in August and for the next couple of nights, if the conditions are right, you should be able to see a shooting star about every minute. You can’t see them so well in the cities or in well lit places, so I thought we’d come up here to watch them. And if we happened to have a vehicle without a stick shift, bucket seats, or shoulder belts designed by the Boston strangler … Well, I thought you might like it.”
She leaned back into his arms. “You are so sweet, you know that?”
She knew that he was smiling when he said. “I try my best. So you like it?”
“I love it,” she told him, leaning in to kiss him. “Thank you.”
He let the kiss go on for a long minute before he pushed her back a little. “There’s something in the glove compartment. You’d better take it out before I get distracted and forget it’s there.”
“Condoms?” she asked, reaching over to fumble with the latch.
&
nbsp; “Better,” he told her. She mastered the latch, pulled down the small door, and laughed. In the small light from the glove compartment, she could see what he had brought — a tray full of Sky Bars and a bag of Milky Way bars.
“You really planned this out, didn’t you?” she asked him, pulling the candy from the glove box and setting it up on the dashboard.
“You, me, the stars, and chocolate. What more could you possibly hope for?”
“You, me, the stars, chocolate, and a make out mobile,” she amended. “Sounds pretty darn good to me,” she told him. And then she turned and lowered her mouth to cover his.
• • •
In the wee small hours, Dave sat back against the locked driver’s side door of the truck, and Denise sat reclined against him. She rested heavily against his chest as his clever hands reached up beneath her shirt and he traced lazy circles on the sides of her breasts. Together they watched through the windshield as the stars twinkled and fell. He leaned his head down to kiss the side of her neck. “Happy?” he asked her.
She reached up to caress the arm that disappeared up into her shirt. “Mmm hmm,” she confirmed. Another shooting star skittered across the night sky before fading into blackness. “There goes another one.”
“I was a little worried that we might not be able to see any, but I guess the weatherman came through for us.”
She smiled. “Yup.”
“This is nice.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Two more streakers shot across the sky. “Did you make a wish?” he asked, suddenly remembering the tradition that said if you make a wish on a star, it would come true.
“I wish it could always be like this,” she told him.
He drew in a long breath, a sudden idea hitting him. He suddenly heard himself saying, “It can be.” He hadn’t planned this, hadn’t thought specifically about it at all, but now that he had thought of it, he wanted it more than anything else in the world. She half turned to look at him questioningly. “Marry me,” he said softly. “Please. Marry me and I promise you that it will always be like this.”