Making It Last - A Novella (Camelot Series) (14 page)

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “How to help. But I know that if you can only think of three things you want to do, you should at least fucking be able to
do
them, Amber, and you can’t. I made you cancel your gym membership and personal training because I didn’t think we could pay for it. I didn’t make it a priority. And I know you like to run in the morning, but I don’t make that a priority, either, so I’m pretty pissed off at myself. I’m glad you told me, though. I’m just—”

He met her eyes, and she saw the same anguish she’d seen in the lobby the other day, when he was getting ready to tell her that she was staying and he was leaving.

“What good am I to you?” he asked. “If I can’t even figure this stuff out? And if you don’t tell me. If you don’t tell me, and I don’t ask. What good are we to each other?”

“I don’t know.”

But she thought of the way he’d looked, braced over her last night. How he’d felt inside her. How
she’d
felt, giving him pleasure, telling her secret, opening herself up to love and possibility.

It was better than good, to be with him.

When they did it right, it was better than anything.

And her certainty in that—in this one thing—was enough to propel her forward. Because she
hoped
. In her bones, in her heart, in her body—she hoped they could do this, and she had
never stopped hoping even as she felt doomed. She’d told him what she was afraid of, and the act of telling him had knocked down a wall. Now there was mess and confusion—all those little chunks of sharp masonry on the ground, threatening their bare feet—but there was light in her heart, too. Fresh air, blowing through all her confusion.

They could figure this out. She hoped they could.

She more than hoped. She
knew
.

She took a deep breath, and she asked, “Where do you see us in ten years?”

“Ten years?” He glanced at her, then at the water, his forehead furrowing. “Jesus, Clark will be twenty.”

“That can’t be right.”

“Ant will be about done with high school, and Jake will be sixteen. They’ll all be old enough to drive. Who’s the brainless dickhead who thought
that
up?”

Amber smiled.

His expression darkened. He looked at the water again. “I don’t think I’m gonna be building houses anymore.”

“What will you be doing?”

“Whatever work I can get, if I can keep the company afloat. Or else working for Prange. He’s always saying we should join forces.”

“You hate Dale Prange.”

“I don’t
hate
him. I don’t hate anybody.”

“Well, you don’t want to work for him. He doesn’t pay his people enough, and he does shoddy detail work. Plus, his wife is kind of a raging bitch.”

Tony smiled faintly. “I know all that.”

“So why? Is it that bad?”

A long pause, and then he nodded. “The margin’s not as good on houses, and with Patrick gone … if he’s not coming back.”

He wasn’t coming back. He was spiraling downward, and it made her stomach sink to think of him. To think of Tony thinking of Patrick, trying—as he had been trying for so long—to figure out what he was supposed to do when there was nothing left to be done.

“So you’re going to do Patrick’s job and give up Mazzara Homes?”

The thought made her heart ache. The idea of Tony giving up his dream.

“I have to. I can’t find enough money, and I keep thinking if I work harder—”

“You can’t work harder. No one can work harder than you work, and it’s killing us.”

His shoulders rolled restlessly. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“I know. But it’s too much.”

“Okay.” He sighed. Closed his eyes. Her hand curled around his, clenched in a fist, his whole body so tense. So tight. “Okay, hon.”

“Couldn’t you sell the commercial end of the business instead? You’ve said before that you have a small fortune in equipment that you only use on Mazzara Construction jobs—sometimes barely use at all.”

“Somebody would have to want to buy it.”

“Prange?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It was my dad’s, you know? He always said you get an asset like that, you hang on to it. If he knew I was thinking about selling machinery, he’d tell me I was a fucking idiot.”

“You’re not your dad.” She gripped his hand harder. “And you’re not an idiot. You were never an idiot. It wasn’t fair for him to tell you that.”

Tony was silent. He never had a bad word to say about his parents.

He kept his eyes on the sand. “I’m not sure it even matters.”

“What do you mean? Of course it matters.”

“Ten years from now … What about us?” He looked up at her, his eyes troubled. “What about us
one
year from now, or two? Because if you’re not with me … if you’re better off without me …”

His gaze fell to the sand again. “If you’re not with me, it’s like before. Before we met, I didn’t much care what I did. And I think that’s how it would be again. Without you.”

And then she understood, all in a rush.

He thinks you’re getting divorced, you dope. He thinks you’re going to leave him. That’s why he flew back to Jamaica. That’s why he looks so damn scared
.

But she would never.

She hadn’t considered it. It took her breath away, even to know he’d been thinking about it.

She found his arm, higher up, and clutched it. Her nails made marks in his skin, and she
tried to relax, but she found that she couldn’t. She couldn’t even get enough air.

“Tony, I’m with you.” She felt choked. “You know that, right?”

But he didn’t know. Tony never gave himself enough credit. He didn’t know how amazing he was. Everything he’d accomplished, everything he gave her and their family.

He didn’t know what she thought, how she felt, because she didn’t tell him. She’d walled herself off, kept too many secrets, hid too many disappointments because she didn’t want to hurt him, and now she was hurting him anyway.

“Next week,” she said. “Next year. The year after. Ten years from now. I’m not
going
anywhere. I’m—I’m not
leaving
you, Tony.”

“You’re not?”

She looked into his eyes. “No. I didn’t even think of it.”

He took her face between both hands and kissed her.

Amber hooked her hands at his elbows, and he was trembling. Or she was. She didn’t know, he kissed her so deeply, so long, with so much feeling in it that she knew she was right. He’d come here because he’d been afraid. He was still afraid.

She
was making him afraid, and it had to stop.

He put his tongue in her mouth, his fingers plowing through her hair, pressing her into his body. Demanding everything she would give him, so she gave him all of it.

Her love. Her fear. Her heart and her body, her disappointment in both of them that they should have spent so long cowering, afraid, instead of looking for each other.

They could have been side by side this whole time. Holding hands in the dark.

When he broke the kiss, it was only to say, “I didn’t know what to think, bun. You’ve been so—so quiet. Even when you were talking.” He buried his face in her neck and held her tight. Tight.

“I know I have. I know, but I wasn’t going to leave. I thought …”

She’d thought they would go on in the marriage no matter what. Plod forward into the future, one foot in front of the other, indefinitely.

But she didn’t
want
that. She didn’t want to lose Tony by leaving him or driving him away until he left her, and she didn’t want to stay with him and lose him, either. She wanted him right
here
. Wanted to feel this close to him, arms around him, his mouth on hers, sharing the same breath.

She wanted to be his wife.

And it seemed possible, then, that this was a choice she could make. Hadn’t she already made it? Back when they met, stuck together in a basement during a tornado, she’d decided she would say whatever she liked to him and not give a damn about the consequences—that she’d rather be bold and go after what she desired most than live in fear. When she got pregnant and he’d broken into her apartment, she’d made up her mind that it was Tony she wanted, for better or for worse. For richer or for poorer.

Here they were, worse off than they had been, poorer than they wanted to be, but so what? She had Tony.

She had this chance—this third chance or fifth chance or tenth chance—to pick Tony again, to choose their life together, and to ask herself—really
ask
herself—how to make that life into what she wanted.

To leave off feeling resigned, doomed, and remember that this was all the life she would ever get, so she had to make it
hers
.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she kissed him again, trying to tell him with her mouth and her arms around him that he’d had it wrong—had
her
wrong—and so had she. “I’m sorry.” She kissed his jaw and his nose, the space between his eyebrows. His closed eyelids.

She’d known this about him—known it from the day they met. His worst fear, that he would fuck up, let down his guard, and lose what meant the most to him.

“I wasn’t leaving you,” she told him. “I’m not ever going to leave you.”

He exhaled, softening into her body.

He held her, and the surf chased itself up the beach, over their toes.

“Whatever happens, Tony—and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever it is—I want you with me.”

“You mean it.”

It wasn’t quite a question. More of a demand that she promise.

“I do. I swear.”

He let go of her then. Took both her hands in his and spread them out to the sides. “Amber Clark Mazzara. Look down.”

She looked down. She saw wet feet. She looked from side to side and saw her hands clasped in Tony’s.

“I’m looking,” she said. “This is who you are.”

“Who?”

“You.”

“That’s not actually all that helpful.”

But she smiled when she said it. Because it was, kind of.

It was helpful to know that he saw something when he looked at her. That he saw
her
, believed in her. That he didn’t want to lose her.

Tony met her eyes and grinned. “Sorry. We’ll work on it, okay? You’ll have to make another list, and I’ll be your coach. I’ll sit next to you and say things like, ‘What about opera?’ and ‘Have you considered an Ultimate Frisbee league?’ ”

“That won’t help. At all.”

“I know it won’t, but you’ll get annoyed with me, and then you’ll be all fired up and realize you
do
actually know what you want. It’s only that you haven’t given yourself permission to consider it.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. Because you’re my wife, and I love you, and I wouldn’t have married you if you weren’t also the smartest, most capable, most interesting, hottest chick I’d ever met.”

Amber rolled her eyes. “Laying it on a little thick there, Stevie.”

He dropped one hand and lifted the other above her head and nudged it, urging her to spin around in a circle. It was silly. She felt silly. The water rushed over her feet, then back, sucking away the sand beneath her heels, and she spun until she got dizzy and he caught her.

Tony caught her. And grabbed her ass.

She felt fast and alive, awake to possibility.

She felt as though they could do this. That they had always been able to do this.

“Your neck is blushing,” he said.

“Is not.”

“I like your new haircut.”

“Do you really?”

His hand was still on her ass, and as he hauled her up his thigh, the squeeze moved deep into not-public-appropriate territory. “Yeah,” he said. Looking right into her eyes. “Both
haircuts.”

She swatted his arm, and he grinned, and after he kissed her and kissed her some more, they started to walk again, wandering at first. Meandering. Laughing.

They kissed again, and Tony got pretty handsy, and then they turned around and walked in a straight line back toward the room. Back toward the resort.

Back toward the plane that would take them home.

It was dark when they landed in Columbus, and cold enough in the parking garage to see her breath. They piled into Tony’s truck and started home, stopping in Johnstown for gas and something to drink.

Amber sipped peppermint tea and looked out the windshield, wondering why Ohio didn’t feel like it belonged to her anymore.

It wasn’t as though she’d left her heart in Jamaica. She’d found it.

Before she left, she’d been longing for a break in the weather. She’d felt as if her life were on pause, and she’d needed proof that she wasn’t locked in ice, trapped in snow forever.

Now everything she saw out the window looked as though it was part of a transition, the forward movement of time creating the snowbanks, erasing them, replacing them with crocuses soon enough.

It would be spring, then summer.

Her children would grow up. They would leave.

Sooner or later, she would find herself alone with Tony, the rest of their lives still ahead of them.

Amber inhaled the smell of peppermint, and she let herself accept, for the first time, that what she’d been afraid of was just this. This movement forward into the future. How to navigate it. What to do
next
.

All three of her children were out of the house all day long. Her father was recovering. Tony was absorbed in work. She had empty space around her where before there had been only pressing demands, and it was in that space that her fear had grown too large and her secrets too big.

She looked at Tony’s hands on the steering wheel. Those beat-up, capable hands one of the first things she’d noticed about him back when she worked at the community center and he’d been in charge of putting the addition onto the building.

In the beautiful early days of their relationship, they’d pursued every possible intimacy—stripped off their clothes, bared their souls to each other, because they’d both needed that, then.
Needed to be seen and understood by another person who could tell them,
You’re fine. You’re more than fine. You’re wonderful
.

He’d given her the gift of her body and his regard. He’d
seen
her—really seen her—in a way that no one else ever had, and partly that was because she’d allowed him to.