Hot and Bothered(82)

                But when the screen kept scrolling up, he started to get what Elisa was telling him.

                “How many?” he asked.

                “I don’t know. Twenty? Thirty?”

                “And why doesn’t it work out?”

                “Different reasons. No chemistry, usually. They’re boring. They’re self-involved. She doesn’t like their taste in ties. Never lasts past the second date, by the way. Make of that what you will.”

                No sex, Elisa meant. Twenty or thirty men who should have been perfect for Haven, and no sex.

                She had never taken off her clothes for them. She had never taken down her hair or cleaned her apartment. She’d certainly never left it uncleaned because she was in a heated, hungry rush. And no one had to tell him that she had not jacked them in the backseat of a cab or let them lick her to orgasm in a dressing room.

                She had never told them why those things were so hard for her.

                She had never let them in.

                He thought of how it had been at the fund-raiser. He’d seen panic overtake her when Suellen had asked her for the truth and the way she’d covered it up with that peculiar expressionless face, the Haven mask. That was what had hurt the most, the lack of emotion. It had said to him that her public self was still in charge. She was still going to protect her image before her own heart—or his.

                But over the past few days, he’d started to see it differently, started to hear her words, the ones she’d spoken on the curb, in his head. Is that what you’re afraid of?

                He saw now that he had answered Suellen for her, to keep her from having a chance to answer. He’d answered for her, just as she accused him, because he was afraid that she couldn’t possibly want the man he really was.

                Deep in his heart, he knew otherwise. She, of all people, saw who he was and had helped him find his way back to himself.

                And he knew who she was. He knew her, and he knew that, as Elisa had said, for all the time she spent thinking about people’s outsides, she spent at least as much thinking about their insides.

                If he’d only given himself the chance, he could have helped her see her own insides as clearly as she saw his. He could still help her see that messy wasn’t dangerous, that her mess plus his mess equaled something vastly greater than one plus one, that somewhere in all that chaos was truth and home and love. They could have something that would carry them as far as they needed to go.

                “Mark,” Elisa said.

                He looked up from the screen. He’d been staring blankly at it for he wasn’t sure how long.

                “You aren’t the man she thinks she wants.”

                “I know,” he said.

                “You’re the man she knows she needs. That’s not an easy job.”

                He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, Elisa was regarding him with an expression of deep sympathy. “How do I fix things?” he asked her.

                “Ah,” she said. “To quote one of my favorite movies, ‘I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.’”





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