A Place Called Home (16 page)

Thea’s smile widened. She felt a crumb on her lip and caught it with the tip of her tongue. That small action seemed to arrest Mitch’s gaze. Thea quickly tore the napkin from her lap and applied it to her mouth in a self-conscious manner. She imagined her lips smeared with butter, powdered sugar, and syrup and hoped she didn’t have little black kiwi seeds between her teeth. From behind her napkin, she asked, “What time did you get back?”

“Gina dropped me off a little after eleven,” he said. “I wanted to explain about that. I meant to—”

Thea put her napkin down and held up one hand. “You don’t have to explain yourself—”

Mitch cut in. “I know I don’t. I
want
to.” When she merely regarded him politely, Mitch sighed. “You must have wondered what happened to us.”

“I figured I knew,” she said. There was no accusation in her voice. “Gina told me that you and she had not had any time alone. The children, though, were worried.”

“They were?”

“I suppose that’s why their account of last night was abbreviated. They got rather fractious as the evening wore on and you didn’t appear.” Thea could see he was genuinely surprised by this. “Didn’t you suspect they might get anxious about whether you were coming back?”

“Not coming back?” His brows lifted. “How could they think—” Mitch stopped himself. He removed his glasses and set them on the table, then rubbed the area at his left temple while he stared at his plate. “Jesus,” he said softly. “I never thought they wouldn’t know I was coming back.”

“When you consider it from their perspective ... their recent experience ...” Thea’s voice trailed off. She laid her hand over his forearm, mirroring the comforting gesture he had extended earlier to her.

“Jesus,” he said again.

Thea watched him slip his arm out from under her touch and stand. He was like a sleepwalker as he left the table and disappeared into his studio. When he reappeared he was holding the cussing jar. Still without expression, he placed it on the counter and dug in his pocket for some change. He came out with a couple of bills and stuffed them in the container, establishing credit for what was coming next.

His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Fuck me.” He leaned back against the counter, shaking his head slowly. “Why didn’t I anticipate that? I drove Gina a little crazy worrying about them, and here I was worrying about all the wrong things.”

“Well, that’s easy enough to understand,” she said. “You were entrusting them to me.”

His glance was sharp and unamused. “Stop it. You left a door open. Big deal. I left them afraid.”

“Hey,” she said quietly. “You didn’t leave them alone. We muddled through, Mitch. There were tears, but we had plenty of tissues to go around and superhero bandages for the really big wounds.” Thea saw that puzzlement had slightly softened his expression and she explained the events of the early part of the evening to him. “After that was over, we played a board game for too long, ate too much junk, and ended up with some unsportsmanlike conduct that needed a referee. I phoned Joel for a personal time-out after we finished cleaning up the mess and the kids went up to bed. Someone called a cuddle and we fell asleep in the middle of it.”

“In my bed,” he said.

Not for the first time Thea wished her complexion was not so fair. There was nothing she could do to hide the wash of color in her face. It wasn’t embarrassment that gave rise to this flush, but discomfort. She had no desire to explain the distinction to Mitch, though she disliked the idea that he would think her absurdly disingenuous. She was thirty-two, engaged to be married, and knew something about being in a man’s bed. “Joel called back,” she said coolly, “and I had to go to your room to answer the phone. Emilie and the twins followed me there, I suppose because they hoped it was you.” Thea saw Mitch wince slightly around the eyes as she said this last. “I’m sorry. That sounded as if I was blaming you. I didn’t mean to. I could have called you myself when I realized the kids were getting uneasy. I think the boys wanted me to, but Emilie was determined to tough it out. I probably made the wrong decision.”

Mitch ran a hand through his hair. “Right. Wrong. Who knows? There probably is no such thing when it comes to stuff like this. I meant to be back before ten. I thought I’d catch Emilie before she conked.” He pushed away from the counter and picked up his coffee mug. He took one swallow, made a face, and got up again to put the mug in the microwave. “Since Gina drove, she had the car keys and when I told her I wanted to get back to the house, she was ... well, she was ...”

“Less than thrilled?”

“Young,” he said. “I was thinking she was just young.”

“Oh.”

Mitch shrugged. “She didn’t get it. We ended up having an argument.”

“I’m sorry.” It made Thea think of the awkwardness of her own conversation with Joel, and she felt a little guilty for not giving it much consideration before now. “I know how that goes.”

One of his brows lifted. “You and Joel?”

Thea nodded. “He doesn’t know yet that I spent the night. I think he’s going to be ... well, he’ll be ...”

“Old?”

Thea gave a small laugh. “Old? Joel Strahern? You don’t know him at all, if you think that. Let me just say that he’ll be less than thrilled and leave it there.”

The timer on the microwave went off and Mitch popped open the door and took out his steaming coffee. He played hot potato with the mug, passing it gingerly back and forth between his hands until he got it to the table. Sitting down again, he regarded Thea with interest. “So Strahern’s not even a little old-fashioned?”

“Only in the way that recalling the love-ins of the sixties makes him long for that simpler time. Pre-disco, rap, and hip-hop. Pre-HIV. Pre-AK47s in the workplace and our schools. Things like that.”

Mitch found himself chuckling. “I’m not sure I disagree with him.”

Smiling, Thea said, “We’ll work it out. What about you?”

“The same, I suppose.”

Thea could not hear any hint that he was invested in the outcome. “How long have you been engaged?”

Mitch brought his coffee up too quickly and almost burned his mouth on the lip of the ceramic mug. “About our engagement,” he said slowly. He blew on the coffee, making the dark surface ripple, added cream, then took a tentative sip. “Gina and I ...”

“You’re not really engaged,” Thea finished for him.

Mitch had the grace to duck his head. It was a small gesture for the amount of guilt he felt. “Thanks. I was having trouble saying that.”

“Why say so in the first place?”

He regarded her frankly. The truth was hardly going to cast him in a good light. Mitch said it anyway. “I was feeling caught and looking for a way out. You seemed to be saying that your impending marriage was reason enough not to take the children. I wanted the same excuse to level the playing field.”

Thea nodded, no longer meeting his eyes. “I suppose it seemed that way. There’s more to it than that.”

“What more?”

The full line of Thea’s mouth thinned as she pressed her lips together. When she finally spoke it was to deflect his question with one of her own. “Does it matter? You don’t really want to give up the children, do you?”

Mitch was a long time in answering. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t want to give them up.” Not knowing quite what to do with himself in the face of the enormity of this admission, Mitch stood and began clearing the table. “It doesn’t mean that I don’t want or need your help, Thea.”

She simply stared at his back as he scraped and rinsed the dishes at the sink. “What would I do?” So much silence followed that Thea was not certain he’d heard her. “Mitch?

Turning, he picked up his glasses and put them on again. “Put the syrup in the fridge, will you? Do you want the rest of your orange juice?” Thea took her tumbler out from under his hovering hand, giving him her answer. He picked up her plate instead. Only a smear of syrup remained. “You’ll do what you can do,” he said. “Call a cuddle. Pay the cussing fines. Get the knots out. And above all, let me know when I’m screwing up.”

Thea was already shaking her head. “Oh, Mitch, I don’t know. Especially about the last. I don’t think I have that right.”

“Kathy and Gabe gave you that right,” he said flatly. “I’m making sure you know I know it. We might live apart, Thea, but we have to figure out a way to raise these kids together.”

“It’s like we’re divorced.”

Mitch was thinking the same thing. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Just like that.”

Thea got up slowly, carrying the syrup and her glass of juice with her. “Do you think it’s an advantage or a disadvantage that we never had a marriage?”

Mitch watched Thea open the refrigerator door, put her orange juice inside, and absently lift the plastic syrup bottle to her lips. She caught herself before a fat dollop of distilled maple sugar landed in her mouth. He laughed as she flushed to the roots of her hair and ducked into the refrigerator again to make the exchange. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “My guess is that there’s an equal number of pros and cons. It’s more to the point that we don’t know each other, in or out of a marriage. We should probably do something about that.”

“Like what?” She finished off her orange juice with the desperate gusto of throwing back a shot.
If only.
That thought brought Thea up short. She had almost missed it. It was a reminder that she could not afford to get too comfortable. Handing Mitch the glass to rinse, she opened up the dishwasher and began loading it.

“Well,” he said, “like talking a couple times a week. Not just about the kids but about what we’re doing. That couldn’t hurt.”

Thea considered that. “I suppose not, though I’m pretty boring.”

“Then I’ll call you before I go to bed,” he said. “And you can put me to sleep.”

There was nothing about that image that helped slow Thea’s racing heart. She laughed and hoped it wasn’t as unsteady as it sounded to her own ears. “Maybe it would be a good idea if you met Joel,” she said.
Okay, where the
hell
had that come from?
This is what happened when anxiety caused a disconnect between her mouth and her brain. Mitch was probably wondering how she’d made a career of thinking on her feet with sound bites like that. Wouldn’t the creative teams at Foster and Wyndham be yucking it up now? “What do you think? You and Gina and me and Joel?”
It was
still
happening.
Thea looked past Mitch to the stove. It was gas. She considered doing a Sylvia Plath until she realized that an automatic pilot light made that a no-go. “Dinner some night? We could come out here or you could come into town.”

“Great idea. I think Gina would like that.” His voice dropped to confidential tones. “Frankly, I think she was a little worried about you.”

“Worried?” It was a relief to Thea that the single word was uttered in a casually interested tone. She was still reeling from his “great idea” comment. “Why would Gina be worried about me?” To give herself something to do, Thea began rearranging some of the plates and bowls in the dishwasher to maximize space.

“She knows I’ve asked you out before.”

“Then she knows I said no. All four times.”

“Five.”

Thea frowned and glanced up. “You’re not counting Kathy and Gabe’s fire hall wedding reception, are you?”

“That was the first.”

“You were the best man, stupid with alcohol, and invited me to go neck with you in one of the fire trucks.”

“You looked great in that dress.”

“There were two other women wearing gowns in the same awful shade of lilac with tiny capped sleeves and sweetheart necklines. You couldn’t tell us apart.”

Mitch pretended to consider this. “Well, if that’s true, all three of you turned me down.”

Thea couldn’t help herself. She laughed. It occurred to her that in the little time she’d spent in Mitch’s company, she’d been doing quite a bit of that—at least when he wasn’t making her crazy. “I can talk to Regina, if you like,” she said. “Let her know you’re safe with me.”

Once Mitch got past the feeling that he’d been insulted, he was able to respond with a certain wryness in tone. “My suspicion is that would be like waving a red flag. I think if she sees you and Joel together, it will be enough. But thank you for the offer.” He paused and then plunged ahead. “Although it begs the question: Do I
want
to be safe from you?”

Thea’s head snapped up. “That’s a rhetorical question, right?”

“If you like.”

“I like.”

Mitch did not press. A shutter had closed over Thea’s green eyes, leaving them dark and expressionless. He stared at the crown of her head as she bent over the dishwasher rack again. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I have to run it anyway so there will be room for dinner dishes.”

“Sure. I didn’t realize.” She slid the top and bottom racks into place. “Where do you keep your detergent?”

Mitch opened the cupboard under the sink and got out the bottle. He filled the dispensers, closed the door, and put the detergent away. He ran water in the sink for about thirty seconds until it was hot before he told her to start the washer. Her response was as stiff as his words.

With the dishwasher door closed, the space between them seemed to have narrowed. Thea took a step backward and found herself squarely in a corner. “I have to go.” She didn’t move and neither did Mitch. “I never meant to spend the night.”

“So you said. Maybe I can talk to Joel. Let him know that three kids gave you all the protection you needed.”

The shutters over Thea’s eyes slipped and for just a moment she pleaded with him. “Don’t, Mitch.”

“It’s always been there, Thea, whether you admit it or not. Why not admit it?”

There seemed to be no way to respond to that without confirming exactly what she was trying to deny. “I’ll call you this week after I talk to Joel. We can decide then where we want—”

One step closed the distance between them. Mitch placed his palms on either side of Thea’s shoulders, flat against the pantry cupboard at her back. He made no move to touch her, simply studying her face for some acknowledgment, no matter how fleeting, that he was not acting against her will. It came in the breathy little sigh and the sweet parting of her lips. Mitch bent his head and touched her mouth with his own.