Rebound (13 page)

But she could make an
exception. He’d be easy to seduce. All that pent up sexual energy,
with no outlet, and she had years of experience making men beg to
sleep with her. It would be for a good cause. He’d been there for
Susan, and for Liz. He wasn’t nearly the asshole she’d pegged him
for in college.

Seven years, and he
hadn’t made a move on Susan yet. Liz thought about that. Maybe he
was gay? She shook her head at the thought. Either way, he was a
good guy, and Susan was a fool for not seeing he was a catch.

Liz gave herself a
mental head slap. It was Kevin! Kevin Jacobs. She had hated him
since the moment she’d laid eyes on him. Oh well, she’d hated
Picasso when she first saw his work, yet she’d bought her apartment
last year with her commission from selling one of his smaller works
in a silent auction. Things changed.

Neither Susan nor
Kevin did more than move their food around their plates. No wonder
they were so tired looking. They’d both been too depressed to
eat.

Liz took a long gulp
of her Cosmo, then ordered another. She looked at Kevin and told
him, “Time for girl talk. So why don’t you go take a walk on the
beach, okay?”

Kevin looked up,
surprised. Obviously he’d been off in his own little world, and as
he stood up and walked away, looking like a zombie, Liz was pretty
sure he still was.

* * * *

Susan hadn’t
heard a word Liz had said since they’d sat down. She was trying to
keep from crawling onto Kevin’s lap and making a complete spectacle
of herself. It would feel so good to be pressed against him, but
Liz would go ballistic. She might even try to disembowel Kevin with
her salad fork. But she wanted the taste of
him
on
her tongue, not the syrup from the French toast she’d ordered and
had yet to touch.

She needed to break
it to Liz quietly, gently, and preferably while she was comatose
from knock-out drops, or chained to a wall. Susan wondered if the
concierge could get her some chains, and some horse
tranquilizers.

She jumped when Liz
told Kevin to go take a walk. As he stood, it took every ounce of
restraint for her not to grab him and pull him back down in the
chair. She didn’t want him going anywhere. As he walked away, not
even turning to look back, Susan felt a deep pang of despair. Why
didn’t he look back?

Liz was snapping her
fingers in her face. “Hey, coma girl, what’s up with the blank
stare?”

Susan shook her head
and tried to pull her mind from the image of Kevin walking out of
the restaurant. That was a bad thing to think about. It made her
feel all cold and stiff inside. She concentrated hard on Liz, on
what she was saying.

What the
hell
was
she saying?

“I understand,
sweetie, with the wedding-that-wasn’t, and being stuck on this
godforsaken island with Kevin--I’m sure that was a blast!--that
you’re all post traumatic stressed out. And I guess sending you on
your honeymoon wasn’t the brightest idea I ever had...well, I think
that was Kevin’s idea, or maybe we had it at the same time.
Whatever. What I’m saying is it’s not your fault you’re all wound
in knots still.”

Susan was trying to
keep up, and all she got was the ‘wound in knots part’. Was she
wound in knots? She did feel pretty tense. And Liz was picking up
on it already. She’d have it all figured out by dinner, and she’d
be screaming and throwing things, and Kevin would have a salad fork
sticking out of his stomach...that nice, flat stomach. Now that was
what all stomachs should look like, and never did.

Liz was staring at
her, her brows knitted in a serious scowl. Susan gulped and waited
for Liz to pounce. She couldn’t possibly read her mind, Susan
thought. Yet Liz just sat there and stared, her ruby lipstick-ed
mouth drawing into a perfect rose bud.

Don’t make any sudden moves, she can
sense fear.
And Susan thought of Kevin again. The way he felt
against her, on top of her, beneath her, inside her. She thought of
him just walking out of the restaurant and felt her whole body turn
from hot to cold in the blink of an eye.

Liz’s eyes turned
from hard and questioning to soft and sympathetic. She reached out
and took Susan’s hand. “God, you’re a mess.” She caught the eye of
a passing waiter, not even their waiter. “Take away her plate and
bring her a martini.”

The waiter looked
completely bedazzled as he took in the sleek, polished sight of
Liz. He looked down at Susan’s plate. “Was there something wrong
with your meal, ma’am?”

Liz leaned in and
speared him straight through with one of her super-mega-watt
sex-kitten smiles. “She has man troubles. That calls for alcohol,
not bacon.”

“I’ll have a
margarita.” Susan slumped in her chair. Kevin made good
margaritas--the best. She zoned out, thinking about how long it
would be before she was back in Kevin’s arms again.

And then she heard
Liz say, “We’ll start hunting for Mr. Rebound.”

“No!” Susan blurted,
realizing too late the word came out too fast. Liz would be
suspicious. She tried to say something to defuse it, but no other
words came to her. All she had left was “no,” and it was ready to
shriek from her lips again.

Liz sat back in her
chair, her eyebrows raised. “Okay...don’t go having a heart attack,
or another coma over it.”

The waiter dropped
off Susan’s frozen margarita. Just looking at it made Susan yearn
for Kevin all the more.

Liz proposed a toast
to Susan’s independence, the clink of their glasses making Susan
wince. She had to go find him. She had to tell him…

But tell him
what?

Susan sat
there, trying to listen to Liz talk about some trip she’d just
taken to Aspen, but all she could think was,
What am I going to do?

* * * *

A half hour later,
Susan led Liz into the hotel suite, and was unpleasantly surprised
not to find Kevin sitting on the couch. She rushed back to Kevin’s
room, feeling her stomach tightening, nervous to see him, not
knowing what she’d say, but whatever it was, she needed to make him
stay with her.

She found his room
empty. The clothes he’d had setting out on the dresser, his duffle
bag--gone. The closet door was open, and the hangers hung empty on
the rod. And then she saw the note sitting on the bed.

Suze,

Liz is here now, and
I’ve got to go back home. I’ll call soon.

Kevin

Susan stood there,
reading the letter over again. It didn’t say anything...

She turned it over to
check out the other side of the paper--nothing.

What was it with guys
and leaving completely inadequate notes? She would have laughed if
tears weren’t already streaming hot and heavy down her cheeks. She
would have screamed, but she couldn’t breathe. And she would’ve run
from the hotel and all the way to the airport to catch him, but her
legs gave out and she sat down hard on her butt, in the middle of
Kevin’s room, clutching the note to her stomach.

She felt like she was
going to throw up, thought she was going to pass out or rip apart,
tearing right down the middle like a sheet of paper. Like the paper
she held in her hand.

“There you are!” Liz
said, standing in the doorway. “You’ve got to quit this
disappearing thing, it’s getting…” She stopped talking and dropped
to the floor next to Susan, wrapping her arms around her, making
soft cooing noises as she kissed the top of her head.

Susan dissolved into
tears, her breaths so ragged, so hard, that all the thoughts in her
head couldn’t form a single word. She just sobbed, maybe harder
than she had in her entire life.

“It’s okay, let it
out. He’s not good enough for you...he never was.”

“Yes, he is!” Susan
screamed, the words coming out garbled and choked.

“Mark--” Liz said the
name like it was actually leaving a bad taste in her mouth. “--is
not good enough for you. And he’s certainly not worth one of your
tears.”

Liz thought she was
crying over Mark, but she didn’t give a damn about Mark! She needed
Kevin!

Susan tried to take a
breath, tried to tell Liz to go find Kevin, to bring him back to
her, but she couldn’t stop sobbing, couldn’t catch her breath long
enough to form one coherent word.

She needed
Kevin.
Someone
bring him back.

* * * *

The plane ride home
was bumpy, a storm front standing between the island and the
mainland. Kevin sat staring out at the dark black thunderheads,
wishing he was still with Susan, wanting her so much, the pain was
excruciating. His lungs burned when he took a breath, his head
heavy, each thought that moved through it a clanging weight.

“
Would you like
another drink?” the perky flight attendant asked. Her blond hair
wasn’t a bit like Susan’s. Susan’s was real. The shade of blond on
this woman Kevin had only seen on the cover of a
Playboy
.

He smiled without
conviction and handed her his empty plastic tumbler. “Make it a
double.”

The attendant must
have sensed there was something wrong, because her cheerful
expression wavered as she leaned in and took his cup from him.

Kevin looked back to
the window, out on the blackness that had enveloped them. Flashes
of lightning flickered in the distance.

Maybe they’d crash...
Kevin tried to push thoughts of Susan, warm and soft and naked, out
of his mind. At least he wouldn’t have to remember anymore.

Chapter 10

Six
months later…

“You’re breaking up
with me?” Susan’s voice cracked on the word “breaking” and squeaked
a whole octave higher by “me.” She sat there dumbfounded. This
couldn’t be happening to her again. What had she done? How could
Dr. Garvin do this to her? The good doctor was all that had gotten
Susan through all of this!

Susan’s body
stiffened, from her toes all the way up her spine and neck. Even
her arms had gone rigid, and her fingers were threatening to tear
right through the soft leather of her portfolio case. Her eyeballs
felt like they were about to pop right out of her skull.

And on the day of the
initial presentation... Susan didn’t believe in signs, but since
she’d run through three pairs of pantyhose, had accidentally
flushed her watch down the toilet, and had broken a heel getting
into a cab, she was starting to feel paranoid.

Now sitting there in
her new Prada sling-backs, using her cellphone as a watch, and
wearing her PMS--two sizes too large--pantyhose, Susan saw an
uncomfortable look flash over Dr. Garvin’s pretty face. She
adjusted her glasses and shifted her weight in her comfy looking
chair.

“No, Susan, this is
not a...well, we’re not in a relationship, we’re...” Dr. Garvin
flipped through the thin manila file folder with Susan’s name
neatly typed on its index tab. “What I meant to say is, your
therapy isn’t going anywhere. I don’t see any real clinical reason
to continue working on issues that don’t seem to actually exist.”
Dr. Garvin stopped, looking up from the file folder.

“What do you mean?”
Susan’s voice was small and tremulous. “Are you saying we don’t
have a future?”

Dr. Garvin gulped and
eyed the intercom button nervously. She looked like she wanted to
call for reinforcements…like security or the National Guard.

Dr. Garvin sat up
straighter in her seat and looked at Susan with stern reproach.
“What I mean is you came to me with a very specific problem--that
you couldn’t get over your fiancé standing you up at the
altar.”

Susan winced
when Dr. Garvin said the word
altar
. It hadn’t
been the altar! He’d broken up with her via a cocktail napkin in
the vestibule. Did the woman even listen to her?

“We set a very
specific goal, Susan. For you to start dating within two months.”
She was reading off page one of the file. She flipped the page over
and read from the back. “As of our last session you haven’t
mentioned going on even one date.” Her finger traced down the page.
“And you haven’t mentioned your ex-fiancé since our second
session.”

Susan shook her head
and tried to speak. She squeaked, coughed and cleared her throat,
then tried again. “But we haven’t been at this all that long, and
what does Mark or going out on a date have--”

“It’s been six
months, Susan.”

Six months? It
couldn’t be six months. That meant...she hadn’t heard from Kevin in
six months.

“Oh God.”

* * * *

It was Dr. Garvin’s
turn to wince. She knew “Oh God” usually signaled an imminent bout
of tears or hyperventilation. She went on anyway, determined she
would set them both free, and today. She couldn’t hear another
boring installment of “spinster architect in Chicago.” At any
moment Susan would be telling her about her new cat.

“Think of this as a
big, very positive step. A good sign,” Dr. Garvin started. Susan
looked up at her with a surprised expression on her face. “This
means you’re practically cured.”

“It does?”

Dr. Garvin smiled,
pausing to rummage through her mind for a plausible yet convenient
explanation. All she was coming up with were old moth eaten socks
and bad spinster-cat jokes. She nodded and flipped the single page
of Susan Rhodes’s file over, and then over again.

The answer
wasn’t there. She was desperate to cut Susan loose. After all,
she’d nicknamed her
Susan Snoring
.

Think
.