Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(112)

“It’s a full life.”

“I’ll go out Saturday night.”

“With?”

She loved, loved, loved the edge in his voice. “Are you jealous?”

Silence again. Had she gone too far?

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I am.”

Her heart pounded and she got hot all over, even her fingers and toes and knees and ears. He was jealous. Jealous. He didn’t want her to be with someone else tomorrow night.

“I’ll probably go out with my friend Rachel.”

“Where do you go?”

“A bar, usually.”

Silence. Then, “Do you get picked up?”

“Sometimes.”

She heard him take a deep breath and she waited, but no words came from his end of the phone.

“If it helps, I’ve been on a remarkable number of really bad dates since I last saw you.”

“What made them so bad?”

They weren’t you. “Oh, all kinds of things. Conversational voids, hygiene issues, epic lack of chemistry.”

“We don’t have those problems.”

She loved the low hum of his post-sex voice, close to her ear, intimate. “The hygiene issues are easier to avoid when you’re having phone sex,” she pointed out.

“True. But the conversational voids can be really grueling. In person would be better. So much better.”

Right then, laughing with him, she made a decision. A crazy, crazy decision.

Of course, you could also question the sanity of things she’d already done. She’d picked up a random guy at a New Year’s Eve party, danced dirty with him, kissed him at midnight, and allowed herself to feel all kinds of things that better sense should have forbidden. She’d stalked him on Facebook and Twitter, tracked him down, and then stalked him once again, to the intimacy of his own phone.

She’d had phone sex with him.

Yet what she was contemplating doing next was crazier than any of those things. Stalker-lady crazy. Big-money, big-gesture crazy. No-turning-back crazy.

But she was realizing something important.

She was crazy about him.

And in a twisted sort of illogical way, that caused all the other kinds of crazy to make sense.





Chapter 6


In the early days after Deena’s departure, Miles had been too hurt and angry to do much of anything other than consult his lawyer, sulk, and drink too much. There were gaps on the bookshelves and in the CD and DVD racks where Deena’s belongings had been. Empty drawers where her knitting projects had lived. Squares and rectangles of lighter-colored paint on the walls where her paintings and posters had hung. He’d wallowed, too much, in those daily reminders of his right to be wounded and furious, and he’d indulged too much in those emotions.

But after New Year’s, something had shifted.

He’d watched Nora at that party. She’d never stopped moving, never seemed to lose her sense of direction. While he hovered at the edge, she dwelled thoroughly in the room, part of it. When he’d talked to her and kissed her, she’d invited him into her vibrancy and purpose somehow, made him feel as if he could take a few, uncertain steps forward, come unstuck. She’d made him believe he could stop fixating on empty spaces and absent objects. That he could touch the world again.

He’d flown back to Cleveland and he’d poured himself into projects. Purging and rearranging the book and media shelves to erase the evidence of Deena’s departure. Repainting walls and hanging new paintings and posters in the gaps. And then, step by step, working on neglected bits of the house. He’d paid to have the floor refinished, but he taught himself to do everything else. He replaced all the quarter-round trim along the new floors. He hung shelves in his study. He re-sided the front of the house. With each project, he saw Nora in his mind’s eye, her luminosity undiminished by the intervening months, like a beacon shining at him through a tunnel.

Sometimes he thought he might try to track her down, bring her out of his thoughts and into his life. But the thing that had stopped him was a fear that his darkness would diminish her brilliance. So he left her where she was, hovering in his mind as he gained a sense of mastery over not only wood and nails, anchors and the grumpy electric drill, but also his emotions. The anger subsided to a dull murmur, like the ocean on a calm night.

He could go on like this for a long time, tackling one project after another, fighting entropy with his own sweat and effort. It was solitary work, but it was good work, and it made him forget how much he missed them. The people. His staff, the board members he’d scrapped with so many times, the children in the videos and on his trips around the country, the ones who thanked him for bringing breakfast to their schools and the ones who blithely informed him that they’d been happier with peanut butter crackers and soda and could take or leave his stupid nutritious lunches.