She took a sip that seemed more like a gulp and waited for the next sentence completion. This little game that Lex concocted was what made him so dangerous. You got drawn in by the good looks, the athletic body, the quick wit, but you just never counted on his intelligence. He called her super brain and Harvard, but he was no slouch in the smarts department. He calculated his moves. She knew an ulterior motive for all of this existed; she just couldn’t figure out his game.
“You ready?” he asked as he returned to the chair.
Sighing and rolling her eyes, Lu looked up at him and wished she hadn’t. “Fire away, AJ.”
Chuckling, Lex sat back in his chair, thoroughly enjoying himself. “Jo is my savior because …”
“She saved Nina.”
“Really?” he asked, forgetting the game.
“Absolutely.”
“I didn’t fight because …”
Lu jerked up, as though she’d been stuck with an electric prod. Her eyes locked with Lex’s. “What did you say?” she whispered.
“I didn’t fight because …”
Lu couldn’t answer. Caught off guard by the question, she continued to stare at Lex. He didn’t look like he was enjoying himself anymore. He looked deadly serious, his green eyes boring into her. Nervous about his motives and intentions, Lu couldn’t figure out how to perceive the question.
“Fight what, Lex?”
“Any of it, all of it. Your mother, my mother. Why did you just fold? I left because I knew that when I came back you would be there with our child. I never doubted that. But you just crumpled. You let everyone else dictate the course of our lives. I just want to know why.”
He didn’t scream or yell. Leaning back in the chair with his legs stretched out in front of him, you could have mistaken his body language to mean that he was discussing the weather. No smile lingered on his face, but no anger lurked either. Without meaning to, Lu thought back to their exchange in the Sunday-school room. He’d been completely distant, as if some other man, one that she didn’t know, had pinned her to the wall and invaded her. Now it appeared as though the answers mattered but didn’t. As much as she’d hated what they had done to each other that day, she understood his passion and his anger. She wasn’t sure she understood his seeming indifference.
“I was seventeen, for God’s sake, Lex,” she said, exasperation clear in her voice.
“You were never seventeen, babe. You were old the day you were born.”
She didn’t want to admit that her mother had worn her down. That as the days had gone by and there’d been no word from him, that she’d begun to lose faith. She couldn’t tell him that Willa’s looks of contempt for her blind faith had chipped away at her confidence in him. She’d never been a typical teenager, but she’d felt like one during that time. She felt insecure and silly for thinking that she could have found the person she would spend her life with at six. She didn’t trust him to react in the way she needed him to react.
“Why Nina?” Lex asked suddenly.
Lu couldn’t help it, she smiled. “Her name?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t remember?”
He looked at her quizzically. “Remember what?”
“It’s stupid, really. But I had no idea what to name her. And I was kind of shocked I had a girl. I thought for sure you’d produce a boy.” They both smiled. “Anyway, in the aftermath of her birth, I couldn’t think. I didn’t know. She was a day old and they came by to do the birth certificate. For some reason I thought of us playing—” Lu stopped. “We’ve played this before.”
Lex nodded. “A couple different versions,” he agreed with a big, smug smile and a gleam in his eye.
“I thought of us playing this game where we’d pick things out of a group that we liked best. We did Columbus’s ships for some reason and you chose the Nina. So in my morphine-induced high, I blurted, ‘Nina Pellitteri Knight.’ Later, Dr. J. asked me why I didn’t name her Alexandra. I couldn’t. It was too much. Even for her saving me, I couldn’t give her your name. But I could live with the middle name.”
“I like it.”
She tried not to think of him exploring her body and asking about her tattoo. She’d lied to him and she wasn’t ready to go there.
“Lex, we can amend her birth certificate if you want and change her last name.”
He looked at her with gratitude. “Thanks, but I don’t think that’s my call. Nina can decide if and when she wants to change her name. She’s had to deal with plenty and more change might not be in her best interest.”