by Robin Kaye
She’d been too dumbfounded to respond. She clenched the sheet in her fists in the hopes it would anchor her in the present. Through the sheet, her manicured nails bit into the tender flesh of her palms. But even that didn’t stop the memories from bombarding her.
David had stood before her, hands on hips, in what she always thought of as his he-man pose. “That’s why you went into psychotherapy, isn’t it? To feed your desperate need to dissect every word, movement, emotion, and trauma?”
“I wanted to help people.” She cringed again at the memory; she wished she’d sounded forceful and sure of herself, but she hadn’t.
“Yes, it helps feed your need to be selfless, doesn’t it?”
“Excuse me?”
“Kendall, you’ll bend over backward to help any poor sot. It makes you feel superior.”
“Superior? You actually believe that?” Even in the midst of the traumatic event, a little voice in the back of her mind had pointed out that this was a classic example of projection on David’s part.
“Of course I do, or I wouldn’t say it.”
She couldn’t catch her breath. The sobs were coming so fast, she felt lightheaded. Thank God she hadn’t cried in front of David. No, she’d waited until she could fall apart in front of a total stranger.
She remembered the look on Jack’s face when he’d encountered her midmeltdown. He’d looked as if he’d wanted to be anywhere but there to witness her breakdown, but not willing to force anyone, even a stranger, to cry like that alone.
But not David. No, if it had been up to him, he’d have left her to discover him missing, to have no closure, save whatever he’d have written in the damn e-mail. He’d never been a good writer.
“David, we made love just yesterday. You had this all planned. You knew, and you still . . .”
He’d actually had the balls to look smug. “You’re a beautiful woman. No man in his right mind would turn you away. I just need more than a modern-day Betty Crocker with a Carl Jung fetish.”
Pain bloomed in her chest, filling every empty space, and she gasped for air. She felt violated. She wanted to stop reliving the awful scene, but the vision of his smug face stayed clear in her mind.
“I need someone who can be a partner in my life, someone who can hold her own at cocktail parties and entertain clients, not just point out their personality disorders. I need someone who is my equal—or as close as I can find. Unfortunately, that’s not you.” His voice had taken on a decidedly oily tone that made her skin crawl even in memory. She’d wondered where the boy she’d fallen in love with had gone, and mourned his loss.
Even in the midst of those painful words, she’d taken a deep breath and willed her rational, clinical side to take control. Heat had flooded her face, prickles had risen along her skin, and her fingers had clenched harder into tight fists. She’d taken a slow inventory of her emotions, categorizing them. Fear had vied for first place over hurt and anger, but it was a tight race.
She’d felt removed from the situation and wanted to know a few things. “How long have you felt like this?”
He’d shrugged, as if every word hadn’t crushed the small pieces of what was left of her heart. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s been coming into focus since after grad school.”
“For three years you’ve been lying to me?” The roar of the ocean had filled the space between her ears and swamped her with a sense of unreality. She’d felt as if someone else’s life was falling apart, not hers. But it had been her life. She’d known it then, and she had to face it now.
With David, Kendall had shared her hopes, her dreams, and her body—the whole time she’d shared a lie.
She’d realized it then, but right now, lying here crying in the cabin, the truth of it hit her like a wave of ice water. She should have seen it coming. She was a psychotherapist, and none of her training had prepared her for this eventuality, this moment in time, this kind of utter devastation. Just like when David had first dropped his bombshell news on her, she felt completely, irretrievably lost.
*
Jax heard the sobbing from outside the cabin. He broke into a run and crashed through the door of Kendall’s bedroom seconds later.
She let out a sob-filled, startled yelp.
He found her curled around a pillow. Except for a tearstained, blotchy, and slightly swollen countenance, she looked unharmed, but he still did a quick scan of the room to make sure there were no intruders. She was alone; the only threat to her health were painful-sounding, convulsive gasps.
Jax had heard people say before that they felt as if they had their heart in their throats, but he’d never experienced that particular sensation—until now. He released the breath he’d held in a whoosh, willed his heart rate to return to normal, sank onto the bed beside her, and ran a shaking hand through his hair. “You scared the shit out of me. What’s the matter?”
She hiccuped, shook her head, and tried to dry her eyes on the bedsheet.
“Are you sick?” He asked the question even though she looked as if she’d just woken from the mother of all nightmares.
She shook her head again, still sobbing but trying to hold it back, and was unable to speak through the tears.
“Just upset, then? Okay, I can handle that.” He was a pro at soothing sobbing women. He had more experience with it than he’d ever wanted. Her racking sobs still made his hair stand at attention and his chest feel as if it were stuck in an ever-tightening vise, but he ignored it. For years, his sister, Rocki, would wake sobbing. The accident that took both their parents had haunted her dreams. “Come here.” He scooped Kendall out of bed like he would a child, sat her across his lap, and rested her head on his shoulder.
Kendall curled her shaking body against his, rested her head against his chest, and buried her wet face in his neck.
He rubbed her back, kneading the tense muscles. “Kendall, I’m right here. I’m not going to let anything or anyone hurt you.”
It took her a while—he wasn’t sure how long—but eventually her sobs quieted to an occasional sniffle and her breathing evened out, the tremors lessened, and she slowly slumped against him, spent, deflated, her muscles relaxing either because of his ministrations or from sheer exhaustion.
“Shhh. Just breathe. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be okay. I promise.” That was something he could do. He wasn’t sure how, but he’d make sure that no matter what, she’d be taken care of.
After what felt like days, Kendall raised her head and met his gaze with bloodshot, swollen eyes. “I’m sorry.” Her voice sounded raw and brittle. “I’m not usually like this. Honest.” She took a breath and blinked back more tears, obviously trying to rein in her emotions. “It’s just that I woke up and everything hit me at once. One second I was reaching for David, and the next I was watching a horror flick of Godzilla stomping over my whole life.”
“It’s not your whole life—this is a temporary setback. In fifty years you’ll look back and see this as a lucky break, and thank God for it.”
“I know that—intellectually. But I—”
“Needed another good cry. I understand. It’s not a big deal, really.” Her hair smelled like jasmine and warm, sleepy woman, and felt silky when it brushed against his hand as he massaged her neck and the base of her scalp. “I hiked over to Jaime’s this morning. I needed to tell him I’m ready for more building materials, and we talked about your Jeep. He’s agreed to work on it at his place and keep mum.”
“But I don’t know how much—”
“We’re going to work it out in trade. He needs a hand, and I’ve offered to lend it.” He didn’t feel the necessity to expound upon what exactly Jaime required a hand with—namely filling his bank account with the cost of parts and labor.
“I do have money—I just don’t know how much.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. “It looks as if we have that in common.” He might not have his old knack for numbers anymore, but he’d spent years ensuring that his sister had more tha
n enough to live comfortably for the rest of her life, without worry. He’d done the same for himself.
The look on her face told him he’d missed the old solidarity target. “We really do have an amazing amount in common. Both of us recently turned corners in our lives. Neither of us are the people we were before we came here.”
She shrugged but didn’t pull away.
“And we both have the gift of time—”
“Aka unemployment.”
“If you want to mince words, be my guest. Still, we have time to take stock of our new situations, figure out who we are, and envision what we’d like our futures to hold.”
She didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure if that was good or not. “Kendall, most people spend their lives walking down the same road. Every day, they drag themselves through the same rut. After a while, that rut gets so deep, you can’t see anything but the ditch you’ve made. If either of us was in a rut, we’ve been blasted out of it now. And we have the opportunity to investigate all the new and different paths available to us.”
“I never saw my life without David, not once. He’s been a part of me for so long, I’m not sure who I am without him. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . scary.”
“All new things are scary. Scary and exciting. That’s how we know we’re alive. We’ve survived, we’ve changed, but we’re strong enough to get back up after being knocked down, or, in my case, knocked out. This is a new beginning for both of us.”
“Are you sure you weren’t a therapist in a past life?”
“Definitely.” Although he’d seen his fair share of therapists after his parents’ death. “I just turned my corner earlier than you did. I’ve been at this longer. I’ve reached the point where the shock and memories, or lack of memories, have worn off. You’ll get here—probably a lot faster than I have.”
She twisted in his arms, hers coming around him, and pulled him in for a hard hug and held on. “Thank you.” She whispered in his ear and then pulled back, looking embarrassed, as a flush rose from the plunging neckline of her nightgown he hadn’t noticed until that moment.
Holy hell. He wished to God he hadn’t noticed, or at least not while she sat on his lap. He swallowed convulsively. The warmth of her skin heated the silken material, burning his hands splayed across her back.
“When I came here yesterday, all I’d wanted was to be alone, but now I’m so thankful I’m not. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.” His voice rasped through his throat, sounding like a metal canoe dragged across a pebbled beach. He slid her off his lap and onto the bed. The skirt of her nightgown pulled taught around her thighs, and he bit back a groan.
“Jack? Are you feeling okay?”
He stood and avoided looking at her. “I’m fine.” But his voice sounded foreign, gravelly, and strained.
“You’re flushed. Do you have another headache?”
The answer depended on which head she was talking about. The one on his shoulders was doing just fine; the one in his pants was definitely aching. “No—” He felt as if he should say more, but what? “I’ll be outside if you need anything. I have work to do.”
“Oh, okay.” Her voice wavered uncertainly as he closed Kendall’s door behind him.
*
It was a difficult task to work up a sweat outside in the mountains of New Hampshire in January, but Jax accomplished it. He was unloading lumber from Jaime’s Tundra pickup, and the last thing he wanted was to slow down. If he did, he would have to talk, and talking wasn’t something Jax was interested in—not even to his friend Jaime, and definitely not about himself.
There were so many unknowns in his life right now, talking about them made his head ache worse than it already did.
Jaime came around the tailgate and leaned against the side of the truck, his gloved hands stuffed in the pockets of his Carhartt jacket. “Where’s Kendall?”
“She went for a hike up to the ridge.”
Jaime nodded and looked in that direction, spotting Kendall’s tracks in the snow.
“How long ago did she leave?” Jaime probably had a better notion of that than Jax. Jaime was a good tracker, and Jax knew damn well that he could tell from her footprints how long ago she’d taken off.
“I don’t remember.” His sense of time was so severely skewed, he couldn’t even go there. It could have been a few minutes or a hell of a lot longer—he didn’t know, and it was driving him insane.
He followed Jaime’s gaze and stared at Kendall’s footprints and the path she’d taken toward the ridge. A second later, the image of her in her negligee eclipsed everything else. He wished the vision of her hadn’t been branded on his brain, but he couldn’t unsee it. He’d tried. He’d been trying for a week. It hadn’t worked yet.
“I managed to get just about everything on your list and avoided Ernie’s questions over at the hardware store. Where do you want me to put the receipts?”
Jax slid the sheets of plywood onto the frozen, snow-covered ground. He grabbed the stack, rested it on his steel-toed boot, and walked them over to lean against the wall under what was left of the porch roof. “Just total what you spent on the lumber and groceries you brought over. My wallet’s inside on the dresser in my room. Take whatever I owe you; there’s plenty of cash.” If he was wrong, Jaime would tell him and he’d figure out how to get more. There was a lot more where that came from—or at least he thought there was. For a man who’d never had to worry about money, he had spent an inordinate amount of his life doing just that. He had a lot of money but no real life. Looking back now, he saw what a waste of time it had been.
When he’d come to, alone in the hospital after the accident, he hadn’t ached to see his bank account balance or how the market closed that day. No, he ached to see the people he loved—his sister, Rocki, and Kendall’s parents, Grace and Teddy, who had unofficially adopted them after their parents’ deaths. He remembered searching his mind, wondering if he’d forgotten someone. A woman, perhaps? But when he’d closed his eyes, the only female’s image that had come to mind that day had been the face of his late mother—so clear, so real, as if she’d come to him in his dreams. The shock of it sent him bolting upright into a sitting position. The blare of medical equipment and the movement had split his screaming head in two, and then the nurses were there, holding him down.
“But—” Jaime tore off his gloves and ran a hand through his too-long sandy brown hair and lifted an aristocratic brow, his looks at odds with his demeanor.
But what? What had they been talking about? Money. Right. “Leave the paperwork on the dresser. I’ll look at it later.” Not that it would make a bit of sense to him. Still, that didn’t stop him from trying. Who knew? Maybe his mathematical talent would return just as quickly as it had disappeared. He waited until Jaime kicked the snow off his boots and stepped into the dilapidated cabin before releasing a relieved breath. He rubbed the indentation in his skull where, a few weeks ago, doctors had drilled the hole to relieve the pressure on his brain.
Jax stared through the branches of pine trees toward the ridge where Kendall hiked, and then above it into the crisp, bright blue winter sky. The one time he took a ski vacation, he’d inadvertently ended up playing chicken with a tree and lost. One doesn’t realize what a big part numbers play in daily life, and the loss would suck for anyone. For him, a fund manager, a man who built his life on numbers, it achieved cosmic-joke status.
Breathing in the crisp, pine-scented air, Jax concentrated on the cold seeping through the soles of his work boots when he heard the cabin door slam behind him, followed by the sound of footsteps stomping through snow. He didn’t look at Jaime. He knew he’d been found out—not that he’d tried overly hard to hide it. And why was that? From the look on Jaime’s face, it was obviously something better contemplated at a later time.
“What the hell is going on with you?” Anger, urgency, and the live wire of frustration rolled off Jaime and slammed into Jax’s central nervous system with all the s
ubtlety of a no-holds-barred electroshock therapy treatment rendered by Dr. Frankenstein.
He’d known sooner or later he’d have to tell Jaime the painful truth—all of it. And he supposed, if Jaime had entered the cabin sooner, he’d have known a lot earlier. As it was, in the back of his mind, Jax had expected Jaime to confront him. After all, Jaime was smart and definitely not like one of the guys he’d worked with who would pretend to be your best friend but not really give a shit about you or your life. Still, he hadn’t been prepared for the ferocity of Jaime’s reaction.
Jax blinked, slowly moved his aching head, and focused on Jaime. Wow, he didn’t have to have a master’s degree in the study of body language to know that this was not going to be pretty. Jaime bounced on the balls of his feet in a fighter’s stance—hell, even his hands were fisted—and the look of concern mixed with anger and hurt eclipsed everything else. Shit.
He lifted a brow, hoping the subtle challenge would remind Jaime of the live-and-let-live attitude to which he usually subscribed.
“Come on, Jax. That King of the Lake House superior smirk is not going to work with me. I’ve known you since we were, what—four or five?” He lowered his shoulders and crossed his brawny arms.
Grace had shown him a picture once of his fourth birthday party, and, as always, Jaime had been there, right by his side.
“Something’s way off with you, and I want to know what it is.”
How does one say he’s lost his mind—or at least an important part of it—without sounding like a fucking basket case or a loon?
“What’s with the stack of cash in your wallet?”
“Where else do you keep cash?”
Jaime got in his face. “It’s not in order.” Each word was punctuated. He stepped back and dragged his hand through his hair. “Even when we were kids, you kept your change in different pockets because you hated when the coins were mixed. Hell, you still sort your cash by denomination and have all the faces pointing the right direction. That wallet you have in there”—he shook an accusing finger at the cabin—“is one step above wadded bills stuffed in a paper sack. Unsorted currency is normally enough to make your ass twitch. A wallet in that condition would send you completely over the edge.”