Going Back (11 page)

“Spare us,” Daphne cut him off with
a laugh.

“So,” Paul said, his eyes shuttling
between Brad and Daphne, “why aren’t you two watching the show in
the living room? Those two actors teach a course in how to
choreograph stage fights. I caught part of their performance, and
they’re really convincing.”

“We’d rather listen to you drone on
and on about sixties rock-and-roll,” Daphne joked, taking the cup
from Paul and sipping some of the icy beverage.

Brad had drifted to the
refrigerator, where he helped himself to a bottle of beer. He
twisted off the cap and took a long drink. Then he smiled. “I’m not
into fights, either as a spectator or a participant,” he said, then
added, “Daphne and I were talking.” Daphne briefly wondered whether
he’d taken seriously Paul’s claim about her being the love of his
life, and whether he felt obliged to reassure Paul about what he
and Daphne had been up to.

“Talking, huh,” Paul repeated,
mixing himself a gin and tonic. “Let me tell you something about
this old schoolmate of yours, Brad—she generously volunteered to do
all the driving tonight, so I can get plastered. Tell me, am I
wrong to be madly in love with her?”

“Even if she didn’t let you get
plastered, you wouldn’t be wrong,” Brad answered, shooting Daphne
an amused look.

It took Daphne a moment to remember
that one of the reasons she’d brought Paul with her was to prove to
Brad that she hadn’t been permanently scarred by the events of that
frat party eight years ago. Her strategy seemed to be working; Brad
evidently believed that Paul was Daphne’s boyfriend.

She was unexpectedly overcome by
the urge to correct the impression Paul had created. She didn’t
want Brad thinking erroneously that anything more than a friendship
existed between her and Paul. Not ten minutes ago Brad had bared
his soul to her when he’d described to her his worries about his
parents. He had trusted her enough to share his deepest concerns
with her. She couldn’t deliberately mislead him.

But before she could say anything,
Paul was talking again. “You’re right, Brad, you’re absolutely
right. Plastered or stone-cold sober, I adore this lady.” He
slipped his arm around her narrow waist and pulled her to him.
“Dorothy Parker had it wrong—men do make passes at girls who wear
glasses.”

“I’m a woman, not a girl,” Daphne
pointed out sternly.

“Don’t complain, sweetheart. I got
the gender right, didn’t I?” He tasted his drink, grimaced, then
leaned across the table to get the green plastic lime-juice
container. He added a few drops of to his drink, tasted it again,
and nodded in satisfaction. “So, Brad, Daphne tells me you’re in
the market for a new house.”

“She ought to know,” Brad
confirmed. “She’s my real estate agent.”

“She’s the best,” Paul
said.

Whatever her strategy might have
been, she couldn’t help thinking that Paul was laying on the
compliments a little thick. She could tell by his tone that his
exaggerated flattery was a result partly of his zany sense of humor
and partly of the number of gin and tonics he’d consumed, but Brad
couldn’t know that. “Paul and I are just good friends,” she
informed him, realizing at once what a cliche that was.

“No truth to the rumor,” Paul
chimed in, embellishing the cliche. “We’re just friends.” He leaned
forward confidentially and whispered, “More’s the pity, Brad, given
that she’s dynamite in bed.”

Daphne almost dropped her drink in
embarrassment. Paul couldn’t have realized that Brad was in a
better position than anyone else to know how untrue Paul’s flippant
remark was. But if anyone knew how dreadful Daphne could be in bed,
it was Brad.

Too many times
after that ghastly night, Daphne had berated herself for her lack
of skill and seductiveness. If only she’d been more experienced,
more talented, more romantic, the incident wouldn’t have been so
horrible. It had been bad because
she’d
been bad. She hadn’t been
dynamite in bed—she’d been a dud.

Paul could have made such a silly,
meaningless remark in front of anyone else and Daphne could have
brushed it off with a laugh. But not in front of Brad. Not in front
of the one man who knew from experience the extent of Daphne’s
utter failure as a sex partner.

“Excuse me,” she muttered, spinning
on her heel and storming out of the kitchen. She hated herself for
overreacting to Paul’s teasing, but she couldn’t bear to be in the
same room as Brad. She couldn’t bear the possibility that her eyes
might accidentally meet his, and she’d see cruel laughter in his
gaze, remembrance and mockery. She couldn’t bear it.

So, once again, she ran away.

GUILT, BRAD CONCLUDED, was a
peculiar affliction. Just when you were beginning to believe that
it could be in permanent remission, it reared up again in a more
virulent form.

Right now, he was feeling doubly
guilty: guilty for what he’d done to Daphne eight years ago, and
guilty for having thought that he no longer had any reason to feel
guilty. Just because he and Daphne had managed to spend a few more
or less amicable days in each other’s company while they looked at
houses didn’t mean Daphne had recovered from their disastrous
interlude in his fraternity house bedroom. Just because Brad had
felt extraordinarily comfortable with Daphne when she’d sought him
out at the party last night—just because talking to her about his
parents had boosted his spirits so much—didn’t mean Daphne had
forgiven him for his past actions.

He steered off the interstate at
the Verona exit and braked to a stop at the end of the ramp.
According to the directions Andrea had given him, Daphne’s house
was only a few minutes’ drive from the exit. A few minutes wasn’t
nearly enough time for Brad to figure out what he’d say to Daphne
when he saw her—assuming he did see her. Given the unseasonably
balmy weather that afternoon, she could be out for the day,
enjoying the great outdoors in the park she had driven past the
first time he’d visited her office. Or she could be working;
realtors sometimes met with clients or hosted “Open Houses” on
Sundays. Or she could be out on a date with that boyfriend of
hers.

That idiot boyfriend of hers, Brad
amended, indignant on Daphne’s behalf. The guy had the audacity to
take her to a party, claim in front of witnesses that he was madly
in love with her, and then make a crack about her performance in
bed! Admittedly, what he’d said had been complimentary, but it had
obviously embarrassed the hell out of Daphne. Teasing like that
might be okay coming from a friend, but not from a
lover.

Brad recognized that Daphne had
been more than just embarrassed by her boyfriend’s joke. The
instant her gaze had intersected with Brad’s across the kitchen,
her cheeks had turned crimson and she’d fled from the
room.

It was all Brad’s
fault, entirely his fault for having once made her feel inadequate
in bed. He’d been the one who’d been inadequate, and she shouldn’t
ever,
ever
be
embarrassed about her part in what had happened—or hadn’t happened.
That was what he’d come to Verona to tell her—if only he could
figure out a way to put it into words without embarrassing them
both even more.

A driver in a car behind him on the
exit ramp honked his horn, jolting Brad’s attention back to the
road. He glanced at the GPS the rental agency had included with the
car, turned right, and headed north toward Bloomfield
Avenue.

Daphne’s house sat on a small lot
at the end of a winding side street. An ancient maple tree stood
squarely on the front lawn, casting a massive shadow over the
sloping roof of the house. In another era, the L-shaped
brick-and-redwood ranch house, with its broad picture window and
its attached two-car garage, might have been considered a modest
middle-class dwelling. But nowadays, in this neighborhood, Brad
estimated its worth at half of a million dollars. Despite all the
house-hunting he’d done in the past week, he still found it
hilarious that he and his school friends could be living in houses
with such astronomical price tags.

Daphne was kneeling in the grass
beside the flower bed underneath the picture window, yanking weeds
out of the dark, loamy soil. She had on an oversize shirt, blue
jeans and sneakers; her hair was held back in a bandanna and her
hands were protected by work gloves. Next to her on the grass was a
small straw basket and a hand spade. She used a garden claw to
loosen the weeds from the soil.

Brad coasted to a halt at the curb.
Engrossed in her labor, Daphne didn’t look up. He permitted himself
a moment to admire the bright yellow daffodils and red tulips she’d
grown before focusing fully on her.

The shirt she was wearing wasn’t
just large. It was a man’s dress shirt, with tails that fell to her
knees and shoulder seams that drooped down her arms. She had rolled
the sleeves up to her elbows and left the collar and the second
button undone. The shirt made her look thinner than she was, a
tiny, fragile creature lost within the voluminous
garment.

He didn’t want to think of Daphne
as tiny and fragile. He wanted to think of her as strong,
indomitable, the sort of woman likely to leave dozens of men with
sentimental smiles spread across their faces as they reminisced
about how dynamite she was in bed.

But he knew that wasn’t the case.
And, while he hated the idea, he suspected that his asshole
behavior eight years ago were at least partly to blame.

He shoved open the car door, and
the squeak of the hinge caught Daphne’s attention. She glanced over
her shoulder and saw Brad. Scowling, she tossed the garden claw
onto the grass and stood, dusting the dirt from the knees of her
jeans.

Praying for courage, he took a deep
breath and started toward the front walk. “Hello, Daphne,” he said
quietly.

She continued to stare at him. The
color in her cheeks was as high as it had been last night at the
party. Brad wanted to believe that was a result of working in her
garden in the warm spring sunshine, but he couldn’t shake the
comprehension that his presence was what was causing her to
blush.

The sun glared on the lenses of her
eyeglasses, making her eyes invisible to him. He wished she would
move her head so he’d be able to see her eyes again, and perhaps
find in them a hint of how she felt about his unexpected visit. If
he was to be denied a view of her eyes, then he wished she would
speak, giving him an opening so he’d know how to
proceed.

But she did neither. She remained
motionless, her hands encased in those huge work gloves, her lips
pursed, her hair frizzing beneath the bandanna in the afternoon
heat.

“We need to talk,” he announced. He
realized that he’d stated his request too bluntly, but her silence
wasn’t making this easy for him.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

She turned and bent to study her
flowers. Then she exhaled, tugged off her gloves, and dropped them
into the basket. After gathering her tools and lifting the basket,
she straightened up and shrugged.

The gentle rise and fall of her
shoulders beneath the baggy cotton of her shirt forced Brad to
acknowledge again how slight she looked. The one thing he didn’t
want to think of her as was delicate, and he clung to the image of
her wielding her spade and claw, conquering the weeds in her
garden. He wanted to believe that any woman who could kill weeds
and grow beautiful flowers could also forgive and forget—and allow
the forgiven party to forget, too.

Without a word, she headed around
the side of the house. Brad followed. The back yard was spacious,
blessed with several adult fruit trees and rimmed by dense
evergreen hedges. An enclosed porch extended from the rear of the
house. Brad trailed Daphne up the concrete steps to the porch and
through the screen door.

While she placed her gardening
equipment on a shelf in one corner, he stood idle, his patience
beginning to unravel as he waited for her to say something. When
Daphne moved toward the door leading into the house, he checked
himself before following her inside. He had enough sense to
understand that she might not want him in her home, and she
confirmed his guess by waving toward one of the wrought-iron porch
chairs which were placed around a matching glass-topped table.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked, reaching for the
door knob.

Brad supposed the situation might
be more palatable if he were crocked. “What have you got?” he
asked.

“Apple juice, orange juice, ginger
ale, iced tea...”

So much for getting crocked. “Iced
tea sounds good,” he said.

She vanished into the house.

Brad settled himself on the chair
and took a deep breath. The air here smelled much better than what
he’d been inhaling in Manhattan. It was clean, fresh, fragrant with
the scent of grass and spring blossoms. At Eric’s apartment,
whenever you opened a window you were nearly knocked off your feet
by the sour smell of automobile exhausts.

Maybe air pollution was what had driven Daphne
to leave the party early last night, Brad thought
hopefully.