Just My Type (35 page)
“That was completely obvious though. You were just being a jerk.”
“Yeah, well, you’re being a jerk now, so I guess we’ll be even.” Mac kept his eyes forward. Sam was treading on thin ice, to be sure, but hitting him wouldn’t get Mac anything.
He tipped back his can of soda and decided ignoring Sam was the best course of action.
Probably the most impossible too.
“You made a promise to me, Mac,” Sam said quietly.
It was the serious tone that finally pulled Mac’s eyes away from the car chase and machine guns.
“What?”
Just My Type
“You promised me she would be happy.”
Mac stared at his friend. He and Sam had been through a lot. Sam knew him. Mac’s mouth felt dry, his throat scratchy with regret as he said simply, “Yeah.” Sam’s expression was somber. “So tell me what the hell this is.” Mac had beat himself up in every way possible. He’d been drunk every night he hadn’t worked and had gladly suffered the hangovers the next morning.
He’d suffered through seeing Sara twice and not being able to touch her, hold her,
really
talk to her. It was all superficial—much more than it had been when they were just friends—and it felt wrong.
It was punishment he deserved.
He hadn’t been sleeping or eating worth a damn. When he did sleep he tossed and turned with dreams and nightmares of Sara being hurt, never seeing her again, and having her hate him.
And there wasn’t a minute in the day when he didn’t think of her. Most of the calls they’d had at work had been routine, not requiring much mental power beyond the tasks he could literally do in his sleep.
Simply put, he was tortured. He was mentally and physically hurting and exhausted. With no end in sight.
Now, on top of all of that, his best friend was pissed at him.
“She wants things I can’t give her,” Mac finally said. “I thought I could show her that life with me wasn’t what she wanted. Turns out, life with her isn’t what I want.”
“Bullshit.” Sam came to stand right in front of him, blocking the TV. “There’s never been a thing that Sara’s wanted you couldn’t or wouldn’t do.”
“Now there is.”
“The one thing you’ve always done is kept her from being hurt.”
“Right. That’s what I’m doing.”
“She’s hurt
now
, Mac. By you. She’s miserable. It’s been almost three fucking months.” Mac didn’t want to be happy about that. He shouldn’t want her to miss him. That was ridiculous when he was the one that told her to leave. “She said she’s miserable?”
“No. I’ve barely seen her,” Sam said. He paced a few steps away, then back. “It’s driving us all nuts.”
“All?”
“No one has seen her much. She’s not home most evenings. She doesn’t always answer her cell. She comes to about half the dinners and stuff we invite her to. What’s going on?” Mac frowned. It wasn’t his problem. It couldn’t be his problem. That was the mistake he’d made in the first place—getting too involved with Sara, jumping in when she did something a little out of character.
“How should I know? I haven’t seen or talked to her.”
“She’d take your call.”
Mac shook his head, positive that wasn’t true. “I’m the last one she would talk to.”
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“What happened?”
Instead of angry, Sam suddenly sounded worried and that was a hell of a lot harder to resist. “I can’t talk to you about it.”
“Why the hell not? She’s my sister—”
“Exactly. I’m not talking about my marriage to your sister with you.” Sam stared at him. “It’s about sex?”
Mac sighed. “Kind of.” But not really. That was just how the whole thing had manifested.
“You want to talk to Kevin about it?” Sam asked.
“No.” He couldn’t talk to his reformed Christian friend about the deeper meaning of nipple clamps.
“Ben’s in surgery,” Sam said. “What about Jess or Danika?”
“Well, Jessica is also Sara’s sibling so she’s out,” Mac said dryly.
“Right. Dani?”
Mac thought about that. “Where’s Dooley?”
“Dooley? You want to talk about a
relationship
with Dooley?”
“He might get it.”
Sam was clearly confused by that. “Dooley? Doug Miller? The guy who panics if a woman expects him to spend more than fifty bucks on a date?
He
might get this?” Mac shrugged. He agreed it seemed strange. “One time he said some things that got me thinking.”
“Oh, my God, hell is freezing over as we speak,” Sam muttered, starting for the door into the kitchen area. “Fine. I’ll go get him. Whatever it takes to pull your head out of your ass.” Two minutes later, Dooley strode in. “It’s a sad day when you’re looking for my advice.” Mac agreed, but didn’t say so out loud. “Do you have any?”
“Advice?” Dooley took the chair to Mac’s right and propped his feet on the coffee table. “About Sara? Hell yeah.”
Mac waited. Dooley watched a building blow up in the movie. “You want to share it?” Mac asked, sounding more patient than he felt.
“I did.”
“When?”
“That first day I saw you after you guys broke up.”
Mac thought back, scowling. Everyone had shared advice and opinions from a simple,
You’re an idiot
to
Leave her alone
to
Take her back to St. Croix
.
“What did you say?”
Dooley pinned him with an intent look. “I said to just do whatever it is she wants you to do.”
“Yeah, that sounds easy, but…”
“And now I have more to add to that advice,” Dooley interrupted.
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Just My Type
“Okay,” Mac said slowly. “Lay it on me.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Listen to her.”
Mac thought there might be more, but when Dooley turned back to the movie, he had to ask, “What does that mean?”
Dooley kept his eyes on the TV. “Just listen to her. None of us really do that.”
“How do you… What do you mean?”
Dooley swung his feet back to the floor and leaned his forearms on his thighs, looking at Mac again.
“I’ve been spending more time with Miss Sara since you haven’t been around. Old habits die hard and Sam and Ben wanted Kevin and I to still hang out with her when she’s at the center.”
“She went back to work?” Mac couldn’t explain why that disappointed him a little. Sara had realized she wasn’t rewarded working there in a made-up job.
“She’s volunteering like the rest of us,” Dooley corrected. “Anyway, I’ve been spending more time with her. As long as you’ve been around the rest of us didn’t spend more than an hour or so with her at a time. Now I’ve been spending like half a day. And I realized a couple of things.”
“Things I missed?” Mac was angered by the insinuation. More by the fact that it might be true.
“Yeah,” Dooley said, never one to worry much about someone else’s feelings. “She’s not who you, we, think she is.”
“She said something like that too.”
“I’ll give you an example. The other day she unstopped a toilet at the center.” Mac could admit Dooley had surprised him with that. “A toilet?” Dooley nodded. “Yep. And it wasn’t the first time. She was pretty comfortable with the plunger.” That was hard to believe.
“And one of the boys got a bloody nose playing basketball and she took care of it.”
“Blood?” Mac asked. That didn’t seem like Sara at all.
“Yeah. No problem. The kids said she’s done it several times. But you wouldn’t know that because if you’d been there you would have taken care of it.”
“And she would have happily let me.”
“Maybe,” Dooley agreed. “But it doesn’t mean she
can’t
handle something just because she chooses not to.”
Mac had to give him that point.
“Did you know she got a snake out of the farmhouse by herself?” Mac’s eyes widened. “A snake?”
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“A completely harmless garter snake,” Dooley said. “But she didn’t know it was completely harmless.
Which makes all the difference.”
Mac tried to picture it. Sara and a snake. Sara not freaking out about a snake. Sara handling a snake.
He couldn’t quite do it. But he was impressed anyway.
“What are you really saying, Dooley?”
“That she isn’t the little girl who needed someone to help her with math or drive her to piano lessons or nurse her through chicken pox.”
“I’m just supposed to snap my fingers, change my mind, take twelve years of habits and change them overnight? I’ve tried. Believe me, I want to. I can’t.” Dooley pushed to his feet. “No. You can’t just change your mind like that.”
“Then what?”
“Date her.”
“What?”
“Date your wife. Listen to her. Get to know her.”
“I know her. I know her better than anyone.”
“You know her as your friend’s little sister who’s always been around as part of our group, who’s there for pizza night, who can kick your butt at most video games, who taught you how to do the Macarena.
You don’t know her as a woman, someone you could have a one-on-one relationship with, someone who will love you even when you screw up.”
Mac wasn’t sure what shocked him more—that Dooley was making a big speech about relationships and emotions or that he was right.
“The one-on-one thing is probably the hard part,” Dooley concluded. “You’ve always had the rest of us to buffer your not-great moments.”
“My not-great moments?”
“We all have them. But when we’re all together, they don’t seem so bad. When you’re one on one there’s a lot better chance she’ll realize that you make mistakes, say stupid things and don’t always have the answers.”
Mac missed the next explosion in the movie. He didn’t care about the car chase. He didn’t even care about the heroine with the ripped tank top showing a bunch of skin.
He just sat and stared at Dooley, processing his words.
Finally he said, “Holy crap.”
“What?” Dooley had been watching the girl with the ripped-up tank top.
“
You’re
not supposed to be the smartest one of us.” Dooley smirked and pushed to his feet. “Just because I don’t share my insights, doesn’t mean I don’t have them.” Dooley grabbed a soda from the fridge, popped the top and left the room whistling.
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An annulment was surprisingly easy to get when both parties were agreeable, when they hadn’t been married long enough to have any shared assets and when Mac had helped save the life of a very grateful judge.
The day it was final, Mac had gotten blisteringly drunk.
He knew an annulment was the right decision. He wanted to be married to her, but she had to want it too. They needed to start from scratch in several ways.
In addition, their friends had been very clear about the fact that they were not going to choose between Mac and Sara and everything had to be just as it was before. So for the past three months everyone had been acting like they always had, like the kiss at Sam’s wedding, the trip to St. Croix and the marriage had never happened. And they were all stubborn enough to pull it off. Mostly.
“I have something I need to tell all of you,” Sara said as she passed the bowl of salad to Kevin.
All conversation around Jessica’s dining room table ceased immediately. It had always been that way, the spotlight on her whenever she wanted it, but lately there was a general feel that no one knew what to expect from Sara. Announcements got major attention.
This one was likely even more monumental because the near-weekly dinner their group had enjoyed for years had only occurred three times since Sara had moved back to Omaha.
“What’s up?” Sam asked.
Mac could see he was trying hard for a nonchalant expression.
“I’m taking a vacation.”
Jessica stared at her. “You just took one.”
That was as close as anyone had come to bringing up St. Croix, or anything remotely related, with Sara and Mac both in the room. It was as if everyone was holding their breath.
“I know. I have to go again.”
“I thought you had this class now.”
Mac frowned. He didn’t know she was taking a class. Were the massage therapy classes starting already? He’d thought she had to wait until the new session started in January.
“It will be done by the time I leave. I’m going in a few weeks.”
“Where?” Kevin asked.
“Italy.”
“With who?”
“Alone.”
“No, you’re not.” Sam plunked a piece of bread onto his plate. “You’re not running off again. And certainly not alone.”
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“I am.” She said it calmly, looking directly at her brother. “There is absolutely no reason for me not to.”
“You’re a young woman who would be traveling alone in a strange country. You don’t speak Italian, you don’t know the money exchange…”
“
Mi imparare l’italiano. Mi fa molto bene
.”
Sam just blinked at her.
“I’m learning Italian. I’m very good at it,” Sara repeated in English. “That’s the class I’m taking. And I do know the money exchange. I talked to the bank about how to prepare and…”
“You’re taking
Italian
in this class?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. Turns out I have an affinity for foreign language. Who knew?” Sara picked up her wineglass and lifted it toward her brother. “And I’m learning about wines and some Italian art and history. There’s a house for rent that I can…”
“No!” Sam said firmly. “For God’s sake, Sara. You know this isn’t a good idea.”
“Really, Sara,” Jessica agreed. “Another country? What about a trip to New York or something?” Mac watched the exchange with a growing mix of emotions. He had been taking Dooley’s advice and had been simply listening to Sara more. What he was witnessing was a variation on a scene that had repeated itself hundreds of times over the years. Sara was talking, proving she had put thought and preparation into the idea, but all Sam and Jessica heard—and all he would have heard prior to Dooley’s insight—was that she wanted to do something that worried them.
