Hard Time (11 page)

And finally,
I’ll do my best to forget about you.

As I drove home that night, I hoped I could do the same. Forget him, forget everything about this affair, except for the way it had returned things I’d thought I’d lost. All the emotions I was still capable of feeling. Lust and longing . . . and maybe even love.

I just hoped someday I’d prove myself wrong about another worry, and find I was capable of feeling those things for a man who actually deserved them. Of course that brought me back to Eric, and forgetting about him. He’d taken up so much of me, there wouldn’t be room for anybody else until I banished him from my system.

But there was a far scarier and more pressing concern that needed my attention. What if he decided he didn’t want to be forgotten?

He’s sad now. But what if he gets angry?

And I now knew what happened when Eric Collier got angry.

And it was so much worse than some drunk boy’s fist boxing my ear.

Yet as I drove home that night, it wasn’t fear that weighed my body down. The fear stabbed me now and then, but it didn’t stick. Didn’t linger. Not the way the grief did.

And that made me think about girls who said of their questionable infatuations,
I’ve got it so bad.

I wanted to tell them,
Honey, you don’t have the first clue what bad feels like.

The Tuesday of Eric’s release came and went. I thought of him at eight that morning, as I drove to Larkhaven for my day on the children’s ward. I thought of him constantly, alternately stung by fear and gnawed by regret. My Friday at Cousins was bleak, cold without the heat of our affair taking the edge off the despair of that place. But there was a bright side to it, in a way.

If Eric Collier wanted to come after me, he knew when and where to do it. I scanned the road on the way in to Cousins. Nothing. I scanned it again in the evening darkness, squinting along the shoulder. Checked for tailing vehicles the entire drive home. Nothing. I looked over my shoulder all weekend, jerked my head at the smallest sounds through my library shift on Monday. Still nothing. Nothing that week, nothing the next. And as my panic eased, fading to a more shapeless shadow of foolishness and regret . . .

I began to miss him.

And in time, my eyes stopped scanning. And started seeking. Four thirty on a Monday, a couple of weeks before Christmas, the sun was already sunk low. I said good night to colleagues and the few patrons who’d braved the weather, pulling on my gloves and hat as I headed for the door. I was eager to get home and finish my online Christmas shopping.

Winter wouldn’t technically arrive for a week, but this fact was wasted on Michigan. The parking lot was down a block, the sidewalk half cleared of the mess left by a small storm that afternoon.
Wintry mix.
God, how I loathed that term. Too perky. Ought to be called
hell cake,
all those treacherous layers of snow and slush and black ice.

The glazed white blanket draped over the library’s front lawn was stained pink by the dusk. A worker was chipping away the slippery, lumpy crust uncovered by a snowblower, stabbing it apart with a sort of hoe. Behind him another man was shoveling the pieces aside and spreading salt in his wake.

The passage was narrow, and the man with the pick thing crunched onto the snow-covered lawn to let me pass. As he looked up, his dark eyes widened.

I stopped short, nearly falling on the ice. Eric’s hand came out to steady me, but he yanked it back just as quick, looking alarmed by the impulse.

I gaped, heart pounding hard, too hard. “Oh my God.”

“Annie.” His voice. His body. All of him, right here before me.

“You’re here. Why are you here? Why are you where I work?”

“I’m sorry. It’s my job—I go where the city sends me.”

For a long moment we just stared, then he took a breath, seeming to calm. That made one of us. This man I’d thought of nonstop, but not actually seen outside my memories for nearly a month . . . Not since our breakup—if it could be called that.

“I was afraid this might happen,” he said. “I’d have warned you if I’d known how. The last thing I wanted to do was scare you.”

My panic eased some, but I was still high as a kite, pulsing with adrenaline. “Jesus . . .”

“Sorry. Feel free to . . .” He nodded down the sidewalk, inviting me to go on my merry way.

It was either take the invitation or stand there, paralyzed, so I took it. “Thank you,” I added stupidly. “For clearing the sidewalk. Take care.”

And I ran away. Almost literally. I skirted the guy with the shovel and salt and hurried around the corner to the library’s lot.

Safe in my wagon, I turned the key and let the heater warm up. I held the wheel and counted my breaths, commanded the panic to ebb.

“That was true,” I muttered aloud, startled by my own voice.
He really had been afraid that would happen.
I’d seen it in his eyes. And our last meeting at Cousins, it had been just the same. His eyes had matched his words—full of regret.

“Maybe he’d even started forgetting about me,” I told the car, breath steaming. The thought was a sock in the guts. Did it hurt as badly as my reaction just now might have made him feel? My running away and telling that man,
Yes, I am scared of you.
He’d omitted so much, but no, he hadn’t lied. Had I lied, with all those sweet words I’d handed him, only to snatch them away in the end? Had my body lied to him just now? Running, telling him I was still afraid, when I knew in my heart I wasn’t? Shit.

I could go back.

And say what? There was no question I could think of—and no corresponding answer he might offer—that would make us a good idea. But to go home now, with the edges of everything still so frayed . . .

“What are you
doing
?” I sighed, shaking my head as I turned off the engine. I shouldered my purse and headed back down the block. It was growing dark, Eric and his colleague now little more than silhouettes before the library’s glowing front windows. His coworker was a quarter block behind him, meaning I might steal a few words without holding up their progress. But what words?

Guess I’ll find out.

I skirted the shoveling man again, high-stepping through the snow to pass Eric, then turned, hugging my bag.

He looked up, went still. Christ, he was handsome. That face I’d memorized, and touched in my imagination on a million lonely nights. So exactly as I remembered, only lit by streetlight and sunset now. His hair covered by a knit cap. His navy uniform gone, replaced by jeans and a black coat. This man I’d maybe known, maybe not, disguised in different clothes and suddenly standing in my everyday world. In the open air.

“Hi,” he said, clearly uncertain what to make of my return.

“You’re really not coming after me, are you? Ever?”

His eyes widened but he shook his head. “No. I’m not.”

“You think I’m scared of you, don’t you?”

He nodded, sadness lowering his lids.

“I’m not, though. Not anymore.”

“No?”

We stared at each other a moment, the sound of his colleague’s shoveling growing closer an inch at a time, nibbling away at our privacy. My gaze dropped to Eric’s mouth, his chin. I could see a sliver of his neck, red from the cold.

“You should be wearing a scarf.”

The barest crack of a smile. “I’ll be all right.” A pause, a swallow. He looked nervous, as though a guard might be watching us. A hard habit to break, I imagined, after five-plus years under relentless scrutiny.

“I swear I’m not here on purpose,” he told me again. “I don’t have much say where I get sent, for work. I want you to believe that, so bad.”

“I do.”

“Do you?” he asked, hope in his voice.

I nodded.

His posture drooped with relief. “When I first saw you, I was like, oh shit. She’s gonna think I’m stalking her.”

And perhaps I had, if only for a breath. But no need to underline this. Instead I asked, “How have you been?”

He shrugged, big shoulders hidden by his coat yet burned so indelibly across my memory, tan and gleaming in the summer sun. “I’m good, I guess. Got a job. Got a place.”

I eyed his mouth, entirely without meaning to.
Have you kissed a woman, since you got out?
It wouldn’t be hard. Not in three weeks. He was handsome, dark, dangerous. Magnetic. And was I really so special, now? I’d been accessible, inside. That had been my appeal, hadn’t it? An accessible, attractive young woman. A rarity in prison, but now that he was out, maybe girls like me were a dime a dozen. Prettier ones. And ones who hadn’t broken this man’s heart. The jealousy burned, and its heat was so unexpected, I winced.

“How’ve you been?” he asked. “Still at Cousins every week?”

“Yup. Same old, same old. Is it . . . Is it okay that we’re talking? I’m not going to get you in trouble, right? I don’t really know how parole works.”

“It’s fine, long as I get my job done. Nothing like work release.”

“You’re a free man.”

He made a face. “More or less.”

I rubbed my hands, cold asserting itself now with the panic drained away. “When are you done for the day?”

He kept his expression neutral save for a tensing of his brows just under the fold of his cap. Hopeful or skeptical or confused, I couldn’t guess which. “When this sidewalk’s cleared.”

“Any chance you’d like to get a coffee?”

“With you?”

“Yeah. Nothing serious, but yeah.”

“I’d like that,” he said, nodding faintly, then more vigorously. “I have a couple things I want to say to you. Stuff I messed up, the last time we talked.”

What else has happened since we last talked? Have you taken a woman to bed? Felt all those things we wrote to each other about, with someone else?
Christ, the mere idea made me feral.

“Want to meet me at the corner there when you’re done?” I pointed to a chain donut shop across the nearest intersection.

“I’ll be there.” He didn’t smile, but I saw something brighten in his features. “Maybe twenty minutes?”

I nodded and left him, heading to the corner.

While I waited I ordered a tea, and my anxiety was just . . . gone. Lifted like a smothering blanket.

That old giddiness from the letter-writing times was long gone, too, but I could breathe again. He wouldn’t hurt me, not the way he’d hurt that man. Not the way Justin had hurt me.

I could see him from where I sat near the front window, a black shape steadily working its way down the block. Once done, he and his colleague disappeared, then he was back, walking to the corner, tools abandoned in some unseen vehicle. I watched him cross the street, jogging between cars, hands in his pockets. Watched his face materialize in the light of the front window, his eyes catching mine. A jingle of the door, and there he was, tall and familiar.

I managed a smile when he pulled out the chair opposite me. His coat was dark gray, not black as I’d thought, and as he shed it he asked, “So, how you been?”

I shrugged. “Fine. Just working. Counting down the days to Christmas, so I can see my family.”

He nodded for a long beat, staring at my hands or my cup. I studied his clothes in return, ones he’d picked for himself after years in that navy blue uniform. Nothing fancy. The collar of a white tee behind a red wool sweater. He looked good in red. He looked
way
too good in jeans. He’d lost his summer glow, his skin nearly pale against his black stubble and brows and sideburns, and there was that same dark hair I’d imagined between my fingers, overgrown as ever as he took off his snow-dusted cap. Those brown eyes, rippling with every emotion a man could feel.

“Can I get you something?” I asked.

He shook his head, looking flustered. Looking like he’d not come here for coffee and small talk. I sat back in my chair, letting my posture tell him I was ready to listen to whatever he needed heard.

Spreading his fingers on the tabletop and giving them his attention, he said, “I messed up so bad, the last time we talked. Telling you I didn’t regret what I’d done.”

I toyed with my tea bag’s string. “If it was the truth, then it wasn’t a mistake. I wanted the truth from you. I
deserved
the truth. Especially . . . especially given the circumstances. Given how intense we’d gotten.”

“I know you did.”

“And that what I thought was reality—that you weren’t getting out for
years . . .
That was unfair enough, you not telling me. I’m glad you didn’t pull any punches when you told me about your . . . crime.”

“That was so stupid, though. Telling you I’d do it again.”

“Would you?”

He pursed his lips.

“You would,” I said, surprised to hear the exasperation in my voice. I was annoyed. I really
wasn’t
scared anymore. “You’d do it again.”

“I don’t have any choice.”

“Can you imagine how I’d feel,” I said quietly, “if my ex tried that bull on me? Told me he only hit me because he didn’t have any other choice except to give in to his impulses or whatever?”

Eric looked like he’d been struck himself, irises framed all around with white for a breath. He looked so hurt, I regretted my own impulse, blushing.

“Sorry. Maybe that was harsh . . . But for all I know, the two are perfectly comparable.”

His features softened. “Did you deserve what your ex did to you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then it’s not the same at all. At
all.
That guy I beat deserved everything I gave him. If I hadn’t done that, he’d never have felt what he had coming to him.”

“You went to prison so you’d have a chance to realize how bad you messed up,” I said. “That you’d done something wrong. And you came out without learning that lesson at all.”

He frowned. “I’m different than I was when I went in.”

“It doesn’t sound like it.”

Pink rose in his cheeks, nothing to do with the cold. But his anger or frustration didn’t frighten me. It didn’t reach his eyes.

“If I went in and came out thinking that guy got more than he deserved, when I beat him down . . . If that’s reformed, I don’t want to be reformed, then. Call my parole officer and get me sent back to Cousins, because I don’t regret what I did. If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t change a thing aside from have the common sense to not tell the judge I would’ve killed the guy if I hadn’t been stopped.”

My mouth dropped open. “You told the judge that?”

He looked embarrassed, then steeled. “Yeah. I was pissed. And it was probably true.”

“But that’s so . . . foolish.”

“I was young and dumb. And righteous. The prosecution wanted me in for life, for intent to kill. My lawyer wanted me in for plain old assault with a deadly weapon. The judge split the difference with intent to maim, even with my fool ass telling her I wanted the guy dead. She believed my lawyer, that it was a crime of passion. That I wasn’t in my right mind, I was so upset.”

“You wouldn’t tell me why you did it. What he did to you.”

“And I still won’t. Look it up if you want—it made the local news. Play detective if that’s what you need.”

“I did—enough to corroborate what you told me about it. But the why of it’s clearly personal. I’m not going to get the answers I need in some old news blurb. I want to hear it from you.”

He shook his head. “There’s business at the heart of it that nobody ought to know. If people find out, it won’t be from me.”

Jesus, he was stubborn. “Are you an angry man, Eric?”

He gave that a long moment’s serious consideration, then met my eyes squarely. “No. No I’m not. I’m actually a real sensitive guy. Calmer than most folks.”