It Takes Two

by Judith Arnold

  “Or we could go back to my mother’s house and rustle something up,” he said. “I’m a decent cook. I could dig my cordless speakers out of a carton and see if our song plan will work for Ed.”

  “Your mother’s house?”

  “I’m staying there for the time being.” Until I leave. Until I move across the country to a city where I might not be able to hear the ocean.

  She hesitated, then relented with a shy smile. “I’m a decent cook, too.”

  Chapter Eleven

  She must be crazy, going to his house. His mother’s house, she reminded herself as she followed his car’s taillights through the night-dark streets of Brogan’s Point. But his mother was at the Faulk Street Tavern right now, and Ed was there with her. Brianna and Will would be at the house all by themselves.

  So what? They were adults. They didn’t need a chaperone. They could cook and eat a meal, wash the dishes, and look at his cordless speakers. And then she could go home.

  A memory of the kiss he’d given her that morning argued against the last item on the agenda she’d conjured up. If she went to his house for dinner, would she want to go home?

  Whether or not she wanted to, she’d have to. This relationship—if that wasn’t too grand a word for what she and Will had—was doomed. He wasn’t going to stick around in Brogan’s Point. And she wasn’t cut out for one-night stands, or even one-month stands. She knew herself. She knew that if she made love with Will, she would want it to be more than just sex.

  Why was she even thinking about sex? She clicked on her turn signal two seconds after he clicked on his, and followed his car around the corner, meandering through a tranquil residential neighborhood of modest houses. He might have kissed her that morning, but they’d spent the rest of their time together plotting, strategizing, talking. Not jumping each other’s bones.

  She had priorities. Her top priority was winning the Town Hall commission. Will implied that, if it were up to him, he’d choose Rollie’s proposal over hers, even knowing that Rollie was sleazing his way through the cost projections. She shouldn’t even be thinking about sex with someone who’d choose that flamboyant, futuristic monstrosity with its fraudulent budget over her tasteful renovation of a historically significant building.

  She didn’t resent Will’s preference, and she appreciated his honesty. But if he had any interest in pursuing a relationship with her—that loaded word again—wouldn’t he lie and tell her he thought her proposal was infinitely better than Rollie’s?

  Their morning kiss notwithstanding, sex was clearly not on his mind. She shoved it out of her own mind, as well.

  He pulled into the driveway of a cozy-looking ranch house. She parked at the curb in front of the house and joined him on the slate front walk. “This house is lovely,” she said, doing her best to appraise the brick and shingle façade in the dark.

  “I should have left the porch light on,” he apologized, pointing out the two steps to the front porch so she wouldn’t trip on them. He unlocked the door and led her inside.

  She felt as if she’d entered a time capsule. The house was classic mid-twentieth-century, the rooms and windows squared off, the carpet a neutral tan, the living room fireplace flanked by rectangular gray stones in a horizontal pattern. The room could have been the stage set for a television sit-com from her parents’ era.

  The kitchen was similarly old-fashioned, although the appliances had been updated about twenty years ago, by Brianna’s estimate. The room felt warm and welcoming, the ceiling lights illuminating it more brightly than the focused chandeliers that were more in fashion these days.

  “I’ll take your coat,” Will said, shrugging out of his own jacket. For once, Brianna hadn’t left her coat in the back seat of her car. She removed it and handed it to him, then wandered around the kitchen while he vanished somewhere to hang the coats up.

  “This is such a charming house,” Brianna said. “Everybody these days wants big, modern houses with all the bells and whistles. But this feels so solid.”

  “It’s solid, all right,” Will said. “It’s weathered plenty of nor’easters and blizzards. It could use a little updating, though.”

  “It needs a bigger window above the sink,” Brianna said, crossing to the sink and peering out the window at the darkness beyond. “You know what would look beautiful here?”

  “One of those greenhouse windows,” he said.

  “Exactly. You could put some potted herbs there. This window faces south, doesn’t it? You must get tons of sunshine here during the day.” She turned and smiled at him, intrigued that he’d also thought of a greenhouse window.

  “I’d mention it to my mother, except that if our plan for Ed works, they’ll wind up married and she’ll probably just sell this place. His house is newer and bigger.”

  “Bigger isn’t always better,” she said. “Have you heard about the tiny house movement?”

  Gliding to the refrigerator, Will chuckled. “I shared an apartment with two other guys for eight years. That caused enough claustrophobia.” He pulled some food items out of the refrigerator and stacked them on the nearest counter. “My idea of comfortable living is not bumping into other people every time I walk from one room to another.”

  She nodded in agreement. Moving toward the counter, she asked, “Can I help?”

  “Is spaghetti with clam sauce okay? I don’t have any fresh clams, and the fish market shut down hours ago. But I can make a passable sauce with canned clams.”

  “Sounds great. I can fix a salad, if you’d like.”

  Will set her up beside the sink with a bowl, a knife, a head of romaine, a couple of carrots, a bell pepper, and a tomato as hard as a tennis ball—the only kind of tomato easily available in New England in the early spring. While she assembled the salad, he busied himself at the stove, setting a pot of water to boil and then concocting his clam sauce. Within minutes, the kitchen filled with the aromas of hot olive oil, simmering garlic, and white wine. She chopped. He stirred. It all felt so comfortable. So natural.

  “Did you learn how to cook while living in your claustrophobic apartment with your roommates?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “My brother and I got pretty good at cooking by the time we were teenagers. My mother was always at the tavern at dinnertime. When we were younger, she paid a woman to stay with us from when we got home from school until whenever my mother made it home. Mary Pavlovek. She’d let us help in the kitchen once we were done with our homework. When I was about twelve or thirteen, my mother decided we were old enough to get dinner on our own. We fixed some wild and crazy dinners in those days,” he remembered.

  “Not spaghetti with clam sauce?”

  He snorted. “Peanut-butter and tuna-fish sandwiches. Chocolate-chip scrambled eggs. Potato-chip nachos.”

  “That last one sounds almost good.”

  “The potato chips got really soggy under all that melted cheese. It was a mess.” He tossed some dry pasta into the pot of boiling water. “It did taste almost good, though. Kind of like melted cheese with a grainy texture. Cleaning the pan was a major hassle.” He shot her a smile. “Be grateful I’m not making that for you tonight.”

  “I’m extremely grateful,” she said, returning his smile. “Did you ever fix any of those grotesque dishes for your roommates?”

  “Hell, no! They were my friends. I wanted them to stay my friends.” He shot her a grin. “We were so broke back then, potato chips were a luxury. We lived on ramen noodles and Cheerios. Every now and then, we’d splurge on pizza.”

  “Are they still living—was it Cambridge?”

  “The Allston part of Boston, and no. They’re already out in Seattle. They were my partners in the start-up we created. We met in college and worked together until our company was acquired by Pacific Dynamic.”

  “What does your company do?”

  “We developed an inventory management software that works much better than what’s on the mark
et now. With more and more consumers shopping online, businesses need more efficient platforms to manage their inventory. I won’t bore you with the details. I’ll just say Pacific Dynamic threw a ton of money at us, and then they offered us all R&D jobs within their company.”

  “So you’ll be joining your roommates soon,” Brianna said, wishing that thought didn’t sadden her. It shouldn’t. She and Will didn’t have a relationship. “Maybe you could all live together again.”

  “Not a chance,” Will said. “I love those guys, but we’re well past the ramen-noodle stage of our lives.”

  She was glad he’d set the small table in the kitchen, rather than the fancy table in the dining room, which she spied through an arched doorway connecting the two rooms. She didn’t want this to be a formal event. She liked the relaxed mood, the gentle laughter, the focus with which they each prepared their contributions to the meal. Once the food was on the table, Will filled two goblets from the bottle of wine he’d opened for his clam sauce. “A toast,” he said, lifting his glass in her direction.

  “To your mother’s marriage,” Brianna suggested.

  “To a magnificent new Town Hall and a fat payday for you,” Will countered.

  That sounded promising. Maybe he wasn’t as enamored of Rollie’s design as she’d thought.

  As if he could read her mind, he asked, “So, what was the deal with you and Davenport? Just an affair that turned sour? I get the feeling it was something more.”

  A nosy question, but she was feeling too comfortable with Will to resent his curiosity. The wine was dry and smooth, the pasta delicious, the salad as good as it had to be. “It was an awkward thing, because I was working at Cahill Associates. That’s the architecture firm where he works.”

  “A workplace romance? I guess that can get messy. Not that I’d know,” he added under his breath. “In my field, there are so few women, only the gay guys have a decent shot at hooking up with anyone through work.”

  “Well, my workplace romance got messy,” she acknowledged. “It felt very uncomfortable to me. I told Rollie I didn’t think we should pursue anything, because I worked for him. He wasn’t technically my boss, but he was kind of my mentor. I was so new, fresh out of a graduate program. I was kind of an apprentice. I still had a lot to learn about architecture.”

  Will nodded.

  “Anyway, since I didn’t feel comfortable dating someone I was working for, Rollie suggested that I leave the firm so we could be together. He said he loved me, but he realized I was right that we shouldn’t get involved if I was his underling. He promised he’d find me a position at another firm. I resigned from Cahill. It was the ethical thing to do.”

  Will nodded again.

  “And then Rollie—well, I guess you could say he dumped me. He didn’t give me references. He didn’t contact colleagues at other firms. I was still so new in the field, and no one was hiring. And he started having an affair with the woman he hired to replace me. So yes, it was something more than an affair that turned sour.”

  “Wow. What a bastard.” Will scowled and shook his head.

  “It took a while, but I’ve finally landed on my feet.” Sort of, she added silently. Michael had created a position for her, generously turning his one-man operation into a two-person operation. But she still had to prove herself.

  “Now that we’ve taken care of Ed,” Will said, “we should take care of Davenport.”

  “We could have him build his Town Hall and then dynamite it,” she suggested.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of decapitating him and displaying his head on a pike.”

  “Gruesome,” she said.

  “But fun.”

  They shared a laugh.

  Much as she’d enjoyed having a lobster roll with him at the Lobster Shack, this was so much nicer. Maybe because her body wasn’t still flooded with adrenaline from having to present her proposal at the town meeting, or with bile from having to sit beside Rollie and behave civilly while he dazzled the attendees with his design. Maybe because she’d spent so much of today with Will. Maybe because he’d kissed her that morning.

  Which didn’t mean they had a relationship. He would be joining his old roommates in Seattle any day.

  Still, the comfort level was amazing. When she’d been seeing Rollie, she had never felt so easy with him. She’d always felt he was instructing and evaluating her. She’d felt so much was at stake—her heart, her soul, her career. She’d been anxious, worried about falling short in his eyes.

  She didn’t need to win any points with Will. Whether he favored her Town Hall design or Rollie’s didn’t matter. They were just friends, helping each other out. She would help him get his mother to accept her boyfriend’s marriage proposal. Will would help her alert the town to Rollie’s dubious cost estimate.

  It took two, baby.

  ***

  He could think of only one negative about spending the evening with Brianna: leaving her. He wouldn’t be leaving her today or tomorrow, but in a few weeks, he’d be joining his erstwhile ramen-eating buddies out in Seattle, just as she’d said. And he wanted to join them, he really did, except…

  Except that Brianna was here, not there.

  But such was life. You could cross paths with someone, enjoy that person for as long as those paths intersected, and then move on. You could treasure the time you had, the rapport you established, and then tuck the experience away in your memory bank and move on.

  If only talking to her wasn’t so easy. If only she didn’t have such long, silky hair, such an infectious smile, such a sharp mind. If only he didn’t feel as if he’d known her forever, and would continue to know her forever.

  Once they finished supper, Will topped off their wine glasses and led her down the hall to what had once been his brother’s bedroom. He’d set up a temporary workspace for himself there—two computers and three monitors arrayed on the desk where his brother had once done his homework, a printer on the dresser, books piled on the night stand. The bed was a little rumpled, since he often sprawled out on it when he was reading.

  “Here are my cordless speakers,” he said, pulling them out of an open shipping carton beneath the window. “I can sync them to my phone, hide them behind the jukebox, and then, when Ed is ready to make his move, I can have my phone play whatever songs he chooses. What do you think?”

  “Is there enough room behind the jukebox to squeeze them there? It’s pushed up against the wall, isn’t it?”

  “I’d have to check. There might be space underneath the jukebox, too, but they might be noticeable there.”

  “How is the sound quality of your speakers? The jukebox is pretty high-fidelity.”

  “Yeah, especially given its age.” He pulled his phone from his pocket, tapped it awake, and set the speakers up on the dresser. Then he clicked on a song—loud heavy metal, nothing that would ever emerge from the jukebox in his mother’s tavern.

  She pressed her hands to her ears. The music was loud and grating.

  “Not a metal fan, huh,” he guessed with a grin. “All right, let me find something a little more appropriate.” He scrolled through an app. “Well, I know you like this song,” he said, pressing his index finger against the phone’s screen.

  She immediately recognized the intro, the bright horns, the pulsing bass, the woman’s voice and then the man’s, back and forth, singing about how one person could have a dream but it took two to make the dream come true.

  The song didn’t have quite the mesmerizing effect it had had when the tavern’s jukebox had played it. It didn’t have to. Will was mesmerized by Brianna, by her smile, by the glow in her big, dark eyes.

  Impulsively, he swooped her into his arms and started dancing with her. Not that he was a particularly good dancer, and not that this bouncy, lively song lent itself to the kind of slow dance they were doing, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to hold her. He just wanted to share the song with her.

&nb
sp; But as her body moved with his, as her arms circled around him, he realized that wasn’t true. He didn’t just want to hold her. He wanted a hell of a lot more.

  The kiss he gave her was impulsive, too—and then it wasn’t. It was intentional. It was steamy. It let her know how much more he wanted.

  Given the way she kissed him back, he understood that she wanted exactly what he wanted.

  Chapter Twelve

  The song ended, but they were still kissing. Their feet had stopped moving, but their tongues remained intertwined. Will combed his fingers through her hair, brushing his fingertips against her ears, holding her head steady while he kissed and kissed and kissed her.

  All right, so this was a relationship. Not one that would last forever, not one that would lead to rings and vows and ’til-death-do-us-part, but more than a dream. Two made the dream real, as the song said.

  Will slid his hands to the nape of her neck, caressing, sending ripples of heat down her spine. She stroked her hands up and down his back, feeling its sleek contours through his sweater. As her hands rose, his descended, down to her waist, to her hips, pulling her snugly against him. She could feel his arousal through his jeans and her slacks.

  She could feel her own arousal throughout her entire body.

  They moved together toward the bed. It was narrow, with a plaid blanket and dark blue linens, a single pillow propped against the maple headboard. She could imagine a boy sleeping in this bed, a teenager, a college kid. She could not imagine a couple making love on it.

  She didn’t have to imagine that. She was about to live it. It wasn’t a dream. It was real.

  Will eased her down to sit on the bed, then sat next to her. Then kissed her again. He was moving more slowly now, giving her plenty of opportunity to stop him if she wished. What she wished was that he would remove his sweater, and she let him know by gripping the ribbed edge and tugging upward. He made her wish come true, freeing his arms from the sleeves, yanking it over his head and tossing it away. His gray T-shirt followed, landing on the floor atop the sweater.