Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (21 page)

Had he once felt that way about
Perry
?

Could I ever feel it about someone else?

Was it
necessarily
Burke in my visions of living in this house? In the most obvious sense, yes. But having grown up an only child, heavily reliant on my imagination, I think most of my imaginings were of me cooking dinner in the kitchen, me waking up to the expanding green outside the window, me on the porch in the summer with the fireflies and toasted marshmallows.… Certainly I’d loved Burke. Enough to marry him. And I would have been a good wife. But I think maybe a big part of my heartbreak after the breakup was the whole imagined life I’d lost, not just the man.

I sat heavily on the old wing chair by the stairs and spent a good few minutes reveling in my own pity party. This was the perfect place for it. No other environment could have made so much emotion bubble up in me so fast.

In a way I was glad the place had remained abandoned, though I recognized that was selfish of me. But it just would have been too weird, too sad, to think of someone else here, some stranger, living the life I’d thought I’d have.

Interesting how garbled and confusing the past becomes under the anesthesia of time. You try to count the years and make some sense of them, but almost immediately they blur and become one big thing.

The past
.

I stood up and walked through the little rooms, remembering stories I’d heard about some of the things on the walls and tables. Knickknacks and tchotchkes collected around the world during Burke’s grandparents’ younger and more adventurous days. There were a lot of pieces from Ireland in particular, as Burke and Frank’s grandfather had believed Irish Thoroughbreds to be superior and infused his stock with plenty of Irish blood.

I paused at the door to the little bedroom we used to sneak off to. It took a minute to gather myself enough to look. When I did, it was like looking at a snapshot. Like everything else in the house, the bedroom remained unchanged. That might have seemed more strange had it been a high school bedroom in a generic house in suburbia, but here it seemed right, in this room with its four-poster bed topped with a hand-sewn Pennsylvania Dutch bedspread and a thick warm duvet from Germany.

I remembered what it felt like snuggling up under the sheets on cold winter nights. In my mind’s eye, I could see Burke’s forearm, strong with prominent veins, pulling it up and over us. It felt protective. Funny how safe I’d felt in those days, how completely carefree, when my adult self realized I should have been terrified my parents might have found out I wasn’t really sleeping over at my girlfriends’ houses.

Or, worse, Burke’s grandparents could have come out and discovered us. That had the potential to be tremendously embarrassing. In so many different ways.

But, like I said, no one paid much attention to the little house on the edge of the property.

“Enjoy yourself while you can,” I said to the ghost of the younger me. Or, rather, to the empty bed. Even though it all still looked frozen in time, I was deeply aware that it was not. Time had passed. So many things outside these walls had changed. “Relish every moment, because, like every sorry old song will tell you, you don’t have forever.”

I felt tears threaten and chastised myself for being able to work up angst about this so long after the fact.

Glenn was right, there was nothing healthy about being imprisoned by the past. Every layer of my consciousness, right down to the deepest subregions, knew that even though a lot of things
looked
the same, they weren’t. It was so easy not to notice you were getting older when every single day was pretty much the same as the last or the next. Before you knew it, you’d aged, but who could say at one point it had happened? It happened at no point, and at every point.

I didn’t want to feel like this.

More accurately, I couldn’t afford to feel like this. If I’d been given a million emotional dollars at birth, I’d already spent 999,099 of them.

The screen door banged, startling me out of my melancholy thoughts, and giving my heart the jolt of touching a live wire.

I whirled around to see Frank coming in, which repeated the whole adrenaline-jolt thing.

He must have seen the shock on my face. “The door was open,” he said, as if he owed
me
an explanation for coming in to find me stalking on his family’s private property.

“I know, I—” I what? I found it that way myself? That would set off false alarms. Better to just tell the truth, or at least enough of it to explain the inexcusable. “I’m supposed to meet Dottie, but she’s not here, so I thought I’d kill some time, and…” There was no way I could let him know what a basket case I was. I had to, at least, make the effort to sound detached, so I added, “I wondered if it was the same in here, so I couldn’t resist coming in to take a look.”

He took slow deliberate steps toward me. “Exactly the same, huh?” He looked around, and I thought I could see, in his expression, the same tender sadness I’d felt looking at it.

“I know you think I’m impervious to it, but I hate to see it go too.”

“Do you come here a lot?”

“Not in ages. I don’t even know how long.” He shook his head. “I think I put a few things in storage a few years ago, but I can’t remember what, or when. Just in and out. I didn’t stop and look around.”

I swallowed. My history here had always been inside of me, a feeling remembered, even if there weren’t descriptions attached to it anymore. “I kind of wish I hadn’t. It’s kind of sad.”

He tilted his head ever so slightly and looked at me. “I remember when you used to come as a kid. Seeing you in here like this is kind of like seeing a ghost.”

My face grew warm under his gaze and I shook my head. “Ghosts don’t age.”

“Seems like you don’t either.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is.” He stopped a few feet away, far enough to take me in entirely, and I felt him do exactly that as certainly as if he’d touched me. “When I first saw you the other night. Whew.” He paused, looked lost in thought, then met my eyes again. “I loved you once, you know.”

“
What?”
It wasn’t quite the needle scratching across the record, but the effect was the same. “You loved
me
?”

He narrowed his eyes.
Come on.

I waited.

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten our own history, short as it was?” he said, lifting an eyebrow. He was defensive too. Maybe not
as
defensive as I was, but certainly on alert.

“Bad subject,” I amended, hoping to close it before it got even more uncomfortable. “Bad time in general.”

He gave a hollow laugh. “Yeah, that’ll make it go away.”

“There’s no reason to revisit it.”

“Nope, you’re probably right.” He took another step toward me and I felt it as surely as if he’d touched me.

More disturbingly, I felt like I
wanted
him to touch me.

A flush spread over me. What was
with
me? Not only feeling everything, but showing everything I felt. Suddenly the most reliable thing in my life was my body’s betrayal of me.

Was my need for “revenge” against Burke still so great that I had an internal instinct to do this?

Or was it just the prospect of comfort, the
relief
, of letting go of control and letting someone else—someone capable—handle things that was appealing to me?

The one thing I knew for sure was I was
not
interested in Frank Morrison. It was just too much to have serious relationships with two different brothers.

“Where is Dottie?” I asked, my voice sounding a little high and fast, even to my own ears. I took out the phone and hit redial, all but tapping my toe and chanting,
Answer answer answer please, Dottie, answer
.

She did not.

“I think she had a doctor’s appointment,” he said, and he really seemed unaware of the rising turmoil inside of me. “Maybe it was a lawyer. Some sort of appointment.”

“Well, who knows how long she’ll be, then?” I swallowed hard and tried to take a step backward, but I couldn’t force myself to move. “Maybe you could just tell her I came by but I had to get back to the shop?”

“Do you?” With one final step he closed the distance between us. Now he was directly in front of me, looking down into my eyes. I could feel the heat of his body. Smell him, his clothes, his skin, his hair.

It was like
safety
was within reach, but that was crazy.

No
, I told myself. Just,
No
.
Wrong guy.

But I wasn’t a good listener. “Do I what?” I asked.

He reached out and touched my cheek, idly brushing his thumb along my skin. “Have to get back to the shop?”

“Yes.” My voice was barely a whisper.

He cupped his other hand on my rib cage and trailed it down a few inches before pulling me against him. “Now?” He moved his mouth next to mine. I could feel his breath on my skin.

I nodded. Mute. And made an effort to step back but couldn’t.

My phone rang.

I jumped and put a hand to my chest, lifting it to my ear. “Hello?”

“Quinn, dear, it’s Dottie. I am so sorry to do this to you, but I am stuck in Middleburg and I don’t think I can be there inside of an hour. Could be even longer. Can we reschedule?”

“Sure.” My breath was still uneven. “Call me when you know what works best for you.”

“I will. I will do that. And, honey, I am so sorry. This is very poor manners. I assure you I know your time is worth more than this.”

“It’s all right,” I said, probably not convincingly, and we hung up.

“Dottie?” he asked.

I nodded. “She’s not coming.”

“That’s a shame.” He put his hands on my shoulders. Braced them, warm against my skin, but light. But if I’d wanted to move, and he wanted to stop me, there was no question who would have won. I’d have been Lot’s wife, frozen into a pillar of salt.

But I didn’t want to move. “Is it?”

Then he smiled, unexpectedly. Rakishly. “Yeah, it is. I’ve got an appointment I’ve got to get to even though I’d rather”—he tilted his head so slightly I almost missed it—“try and figure you out.” He took a step back, still regarding me.

“Not much to figure out.”

“That’s definitely not true. Never was.” He shrugged and looked at his watch, then back at me. “Good to see you again, Quinn. I’d like to…” He hesitated and, for the first time, I saw an uncharacteristic uncertainty cross his expression. “See you later.”

And with that he left, and I wondered if he meant he’d like to see me later or if he was only throwing the standard good-bye at me.

And I wondered why I wondered.

Chapter 15

“Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

Ironic timing for that question, given how much Vegas had been on my mind, and trotted through my fantasies, lately.

The bride-to-be was in her mid-forties, lived in Maryland, but had come down to the shop after a friend had told her about me.

“I was there once,” I said. Then gave the kind of shrug I knew she’d interpret as,
I basically lived my own version of
The Hangover, and added, “Can’t say I recall much.”

She laughed. “I’m hearing that a lot. Would you believe I’ve
never
been there? Forty-six years old and I’ve never been to Las Vegas. In fact, the only time I went out West I was twelve and with my parents. We went to Disneyland. I hear that’s kind of what Vegas is like. Only with drinks.”

“Lots of drinks.”

“Only champagne for me! This is going to be a real big celebration weekend for us! We both vowed we’d never get married again, but here we are, going for it.”

“So you’ve both been married before?”

“Just the one time. To each other.”

“Ooooh, it’s a
reunion
wedding!” I liked that. “I don’t get many of those.”

“Most people don’t.” She laughed. “Most people are smart enough to remember they ended it for a reason in the first place, but not us. What can I say? We love each other.”

I smiled. “Pretty good reason to get married.”

“I hope so.” She nodded. “No toaster was wasted on us after all. I’ll grant you it’s been twenty years since the first wedding, but … I do still have the KitchenAid my aunt gave me. Hopefully I’ll have time to use it to make my husband something this time!”

“That’s the attitude!”

“What can I say?”

“It’s all good. So what do you have in mind to wear?”

“Oh! That’s the best part. I hope this will be fun for you. I just want the tackiest, most sequined thing you can possible conjure. I mean, I want it sexy, maybe to about here”—she karate-chopped her mid-thigh—“and low-cut, because when you’ve got big boobs like I do, the lower the neck, the skinnier you look. I’m sure you know that.”

She meant because of my sewing expertise, not because of my obviously lacking cleavage. “True. Colors?”

“Red. Red, red, red. If you’re gonna go, go big, right?”

“Huge!” I could already picture it. She was clearly a firecracker to begin with.

My job was to make her totally look like one.

We went over some designs and did some measurements and talked so much that when she finally had to go, the place felt deflated without her energy in it.

So I turned the
CLOSED
sign twelve minutes early—sue me—and went next door to Glenn’s.

“Maytag blue,” I said. “Stat.”

He laughed and cut a slice of cheese and threw it unceremoniously onto one of the sample plates along with some crostini. “Here. What’s up?”

“I’m miserable.”

“Then I guess I should have asked,
What’s new?
”

“Very funny.”

“Only not very funny. What happened?”

“Nothing.” I ate some of the cheese. It was tangy and creamy and wonderful, and I could totally understand how people gained loads of weight when depressed. A night of cheese, perhaps followed by chocolate fondue, and I would have been okay for
hours
. “I’ve just had so many happy, excited brides in lately.”