Going Back (12 page)

He discarded that idea with a
silent curse. Daphne had left early for one reason only: because
her dick-head boyfriend had made a joke about her skill as a
lover—in front of Brad.

She’d been drinking ginger ale at
the party last night, he recalled. All sorts of booze had been
available, but she’d taken her ginger ale straight. She had avoided
liquor the day she’d taken Brad out for lunch when he was
house-hunting, too. Maybe she was a teetotaler.

If she was...perhaps he was being
paranoid, but it didn’t seem unreasonable to assume that he was to
blame for that, too. She’d been drinking the night of their
encounter at the frat house. Everyone had been drinking, but Daphne
had clearly been under the influence. Now she didn’t touch
alcohol—at least not when Brad was around. Maybe she wasn’t
actually a teetotaler, but simply was afraid to drink in Brad’s
presence.

Brad sighed grimly. He was
definitely becoming paranoid.

Daphne returned to the porch with
two tumblers of iced tea. She had taken off the bandanna and washed
her face, and she didn’t appear so flushed anymore. She set a glass
down in front of Brad at the table, then moved to the opposite side
of the table with her own glass. Brad eyed the two other chairs she
might have chosen to sit in; obviously, she wanted to sit as far as
possible from him.

“Maybe I’m paranoid,” he said
aloud.

She arched her eyebrows slightly,
then took a sip of her drink. “What makes you think
that?”

“Well...” No, he wasn’t going to
waste his breath grilling her about why she’d chosen to sit on one
particular chair instead the others. He hadn’t driven all this way
on a beautiful Sunday afternoon to be evasive and cowardly. “You
left the party awfully early last night,” he noted.

Again, he wondered if he was being
too blunt. If he was, Daphne seemed willing to accept his tone. She
didn’t even question his seeming non sequitur. “Did I miss anything
exciting?” she asked.

He shrugged. “As far as I was
concerned, the highlight of the party was the time I spent in the
bedroom with you.” He could tell by her startled expression that
he’d expressed himself poorly, and he quickly came up with a more
tactful phrasing. “I mean talking with you, Daphne. It really felt
good to talk to you about my mother.”

She nodded again. “Paul and I would
have stayed later,” she explained, “but he had an early day planned
for today, and he wanted to get home before midnight.”

She was lying. Even if Brad hadn’t
been able to tell by her shifting green eyes and her fidgeting
fingers, he would have known she was lying. He knew why she’d left
early—and she knew he knew.

“We’re going to have to talk about
it,” he resolved.

“Talk about what?” she asked,
batting her eyes nervously.

“You know damned well what.” He was
angry that she was forcing him to spell it out, but now that he’d
gotten started, he wasn’t going to back down. “The time we slept
together.”

Daphne pressed
her lips into a straight, tense line and dropped her gaze to her
glass. If she’d blushed before, now she appeared pale to him,
clearly distraught. She took a bracing gulp of iced tea, then eyed
Brad over the rim of her glass. “We didn’t actually
sleep
together,” she
reminded him.

All right. She had acknowledged the
subject. It existed for both of them; they wouldn’t be able to
retreat from it any longer. They were going to talk about it, talk
it out, talk it through. They were going to clear the air and, if
they both survived, establish a lasting truce.

“You’re right,” he conceded. “We
didn’t sleep together. That was a big part of the
problem.”

“Was it?” She laughed uneasily.
“There were so many problems, Brad—I hardly think it matters
whether or not we actually fell asleep.”

“It did matter, Daphne,” he argued.
“It does matter. Can we talk about this?” he belatedly thought to
ask.

Daphne laughed again, a little less
nervously this time. “If you think it’ll make a
difference.”

“God, I hope it will,” he groaned.
Then his gaze met Daphne’s and he reluctantly joined her laughter.
Last night, when he’d been keyed up about his parents, Daphne had
gotten him to relax. Today, when he was twice as keyed up, she was
getting him to relax again. He wondered if she was aware of how
much he appreciated her knack for calming him. “Daphne,” he said,
reaching across the table to take her hand, then thinking better of
it and drumming his fingers against the glass surface. “Daphne, I
still feel like shit about that night. I know, it’s been a long
time, and I’d always assumed—or at least hoped—that you’d forgotten
all about it. But last night, when your boyfriend made that comment
and you bolted—”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Daphne
corrected him.

Brad frowned. He had been sure the
two were a couple. The guy might have been a dick-head, but he’d
certainly seemed affectionate toward Daphne. “He’s not?” he asked,
seeking an explanation for why a man who claimed to adore Daphne
wasn’t her partner. “Why not? Is he gay or something?”

“No.” Daphne took a frustratingly
long time to sip her iced tea. She lowered the glass, propped her
feet up on an adjacent chair and folded her arms across her knees.
“We tried dating for a while, but it fizzled out,” she informed
him. “We really are just good friends, and we’ve never been much
more than that.”

“Then why was he saying all those
things, about how much he loves you?”

“That’s his sense of humor,
augmented by a few drinks,” she explained, then reconsidered and
added, “I guess he loves me as a pal. He was only kidding around
last night. He couldn’t have known you were the wrong audience to
kid around in front of.”

“He doesn’t know about
us?”

“Us
?” Daphne scoffed. “One night
notwithstanding, Brad, I’d hardly consider you and me an
‘
us
.
’”

“You know what I mean,” Brad
countered. It was suddenly vitally important to him to know who,
besides himself and Daphne, might be aware of what a bastard he’d
been with her back in college.

He was right. She knew what he
meant. “I never told anyone,” she said. “Did you?”

“Not a soul.”

“Not even Eric?” At Brad’s solemn
shake of the head, she asked, “Why not?”

His laughter this time was
derisive. “Do you think I want the word spreading around that I
suck in bed? Do you think I’d want anyone—even my best friend—to
know I botched it so badly a lady stormed out of my room teetering
on the brink of tears? No, Daphne, that’s not the sort of news I’d
like publicized, thank you.”

Daphne’s eyes
grew round, as if Brad’s description of what had occurred was
unfathomable to her. “
I’m
the one who botched it, Brad.
I’m
the one who was inadequate in
bed.”

“No. It was my fault. And even if
I’m about eight years overdue, I want to apologize. It was my
fault. I did a terrible thing, taking advantage of you—”

“Taking
advantage—!” Far from accepting his apology, she seemed ready to
hurl her glass at his head. He’d never seen her so infuriated in
his life. She swung her feet down to the floor, shoved herself out
of her chair, and marched to the end of the porch and back. When
she reached the table, she planted her hands on its surface and
bore down on him. “Let me tell you something, Brad:
I
was the one who
engineered that little bit of stupidity.
I
was the one who went up to your
room. You didn’t gag me and tie me up and haul me over your
shoulder. I went, voluntarily. I knew what we were going to do
upstairs, and I went. So don’t hand me that bullshit about how you
took advantage of me!”

Brad was dumbfounded. When he had
tried to predict Daphne’s reaction to his apology, he had
anticipated that she might deny he was as much of a bastard as he
claimed to be: “Oh, don’t feel so bad, Brad, it’s over and done
with.” Or she might agree totally with him: “You’re right, what you
did was horrible and you should be sorry.” What he hadn’t expected
was that she’d fight with him over who deserved the bulk of the
credit for the fiasco.

“Daphne,” he said placatingly,
wishing she would sit back down so they could talk reasonably.
“Daphne, you were drunk at the time.”

“So were you,” she
retorted.

“Not as drunk as you were,” he
argued.

“Oh, yeah?”

He tried hard to maintain his
equanimity under this latest assault of hers. “Daphne, given my
body weight...given my higher tolerance for alcohol...” The hell
with it. Why quibble? He hadn’t been completely sober that night.
If he had been, he would have done a better job of making love to
her—or he wouldn’t have made love to her at all.

She folded her arms across her chest, her
expression oddly triumphant.

“Sit down,” he ordered her. He
couldn’t organize his thoughts when she was so close to him,
glowering down at him with those big green eyes of hers. “Sit down
and let’s straighten this thing out.”

She glared at him for a moment
longer, then begrudgingly resumed her seat across the table from
him. He studied her, taking in the tangled blond mop of hair
framing her face, the tautness around her lips, the two vertical
lines pinched into her forehead above the bridge of her nose. There
was something perversely funny about Daphne’s inability to see that
night for what it had really been, but he didn’t dare to
smile.

“Daphne,” he said in his most
ameliorating voice. “What I sense here is that you’re letting some
misplaced feminist sentiments cloud your memory.”

“Who said anything about feminist
sentiments?” she asked loftily. “You’re the one making ridiculous
claims about the ability of men to tolerate alcohol.”

“Forget about the alcohol,” he
snapped. “What I’m talking about is taking responsibility for what
happened. It was a college party. I brought you to my room. I plied
you with wine—”

“I accepted the wine,” she cut him
off. “I could have refused it, but I accepted it and I drank it.”
She shook her head in amazement. “I can’t believe you’re saying
this. I approached you, remember? I invited myself upstairs. It was
my doing, my fault, and, yes, I take full responsibility for it. I
can’t believe you think you did anything wrong.”

“I can think of at least one thing
I did horrendously,” he muttered, cringing at his memory of the
cold, bitter look she’d given him as his body had slid away from
hers.

“That was my fault, too,” she said
softly, her rage spent. “Contrary to popular rumor, I’m not
dynamite in bed.”

“That’s beside the point,” he
debated, although he was fast losing track of what the point was.
“I should have made you feel good, and I failed.”

“I failed, too,” Daphne remarked.
“I know, you’re a man, so you must have enjoyed it on a certain
level, but—”

“It doesn’t work that way, really,”
he said gently. He was overwhelmed by the sudden, desperate need to
hold her, to make her see things the way they truly were. This time
when he extended his arm across the table he completed the gesture
and clasped her hand with his. She didn’t pull back, so he closed
his fingers around hers and smiled pensively. “For a man, there’s
relief and there’s ecstasy. Maybe what I felt at the time was
relief—but that’s not what it’s all about. The ecstasy comes only
if your partner is right there with you. If I’d done a better job
of it, we both would have been satisfied. As it turned out, neither
of us was.”

The corners of Daphne’s lips
twitched upward. “So, it was a job, was it?”

If she hadn’t been wearing that
mysterious smile, if she hadn’t woven her fingers comfortingly
through his, he would have thought she was being sarcastic. She
wasn’t, though. She was being ironic, which Brad considered
appropriate under the circumstances. “Why did you approach me that
night?” he asked, genuinely curious. It was one of the questions
that had haunted him long after she’d stalked out of his room. “We
hardly knew each other, Daff. Why me?”

“Oh, Brad...” She sighed, but her
lips remained curved in that tenuous smile. “It’s a long
story.”

“I’m all ears.”

She sighed again. “Well, to start
with...I was in a pretty bad mood that day,” she told him. “I had
just found out that the person I considered the love of my life was
going to marry my sister.”

“Your prom
date?”
That son of a bitch!
One thing about Daphne—she sure knew how to pick
losers. Her prom date left her for her own sister, her date at
Eric’s party made tasteless jokes about her sexual prowess…and Brad
himself was probably the biggest loser of the
bunch.

“Dennis was more than just a prom
date. We’d known each other for years, and we’d...” She issued a
shaky breath and abandoned the thought. “Anyway, when I found out
he was going to marry Helen, I—I went a little crazy. That’s not to
imply that I didn’t know what I was doing with you,” she added
quickly. “I did. I just—maybe I just stepped a little bit out of
character.”