Rebound (4 page)

“Nate Jordan?”

“
That was a
year before she met you. And she just curled up in a ball for three
or four hours, and
then
she started crying.
Ten minutes after the waterworks started, she snapped right out of
it and we went for pizza at Pete’s.”

Kevin sighed on the
other end of the connection. “She cried for a couple of hours last
night, and she’s still catatonic.”

“Well, she and Nate
had only dated for a week, and they never slept together. He came
out the next semester and became the president of Lambda
Lambda.”

“Oh.”

“So, since she was in
love with and slept with shit-head for close to two years, I think
it might take a little longer for her to snap out of it.”

“So I should just
wait?”

“What, are you just
dying to hit the beach or something? What else do you have that’s
pressing?”

“Funny,” he said, his
voice turning serious. “But what should I do if she does snap out
of it?”

Liz gave up on trying
to figure out what the second painting was. She turned to her
assistant, Lance, as she covered the mouthpiece of her cellphone.
“Hang the damn thing in the back by the bathroom. Maybe some
bulimic supermodel will fall in love with it when she goes to barf
up all the refreshments she’s inhaled.” Supermodels were known to
hit parties hard for food, trot off to the ladies room and purge.
After that, they usually got toasted on champagne...then they would
throw that up too.

“Liz?” Kevin’s voice
spoke into her ear.

“For Christ’s sake,
Kevin, you’ve known her for seven goddamn years! You’re telling me
you won’t have anything to say to her?” Liz breezed back to her
office and started flipping through her Rolodex. “Use that
melon-sized head for something and think. What does Susan like?
What used to cheer her up back in college?”

“What used to cheer
her up?” Kevin murmured. “In college?”

“There you go! I can
practically hear the gears moving around in that mammoth skull of
yours already. Now leave me alone, mommy’s got work to do!” Liz
hung up on Kevin, her eyes honed on the business card she’d plucked
from her Rolodex.

Denton Crane: Private Investigator.

Liz remembered that
Denton had been crude and lecherous, hitting on her with a dogged
perversity that only made her want to slap the hell out of him. Who
better to find Mark than one of his own kind?

Chapter 3

Standing in that
crowded vestibule again, Susan’s dress felt so heavy, but that
goddamn cocktail napkin was heavier by far. How many times had she
been there? This moment always seemed to take forever, as if she’d
stood there for hours before her life had dissolved around her and
evaporated.

Things finally moved
forward to her crying in Liz’s arms, but only for a moment, before
everything crashed around her, shattering like crystal on concrete.
The scene shuffled, flipping swiftly through disjointed moments,
some from childhood, like when she’d fallen out of the neighbor’s
tree house and broken her leg.

The next moment she
was standing in the library at Dartmouth, and Liz was chewing gum
and checking her makeup, bitching about the B she’d gotten on her
Art History paper. “I even blew the little bastard too!”

There was a flash of
Kevin smiling at her for the first time. She could still remember
how she had pitied him, and yet couldn’t bear to send him away,
like a cute, though geeky, puppy.

She was dancing like
a fool in her dorm room with Kevin--couldn’t remember the song,
just how happy it made her.

And then there was
Mark, handsome and sexy as all hell, his dark brown eyes like
melted chocolate as he asked her out for the first time. She
couldn’t remember how they had met that day, only that he both
irritated and turned her on.

She flickered through
the romantic things, through the sex, stopping and holding on for
dear life to a panel of memory where she remembered how his body
fit against hers, and how she always lost herself in his scent.
This she grabbed hold of with all her strength, until it faded away
in her desperate embrace.

She was back in that
dress, in the vestibule, and that goddamn napkin was burning a hole
in her hand again.

And that was when
something outside the dream started to bleed through. The song. The
song she couldn’t remember, the one she’d been dancing so happily
with Kevin to. It was playing, the final chords of it.

Susan’s eyes shot
open just as the last of it faded into nothingness.

The room was
unfamiliar and dark, the shades drawn, the only light coming from
the door at her back. The song started again--Sheryl Crow’s
All I Wanna
Do
. When Susan moved, her body
was stiff with entropy, her head cloudy, as was her vision. She
stumbled as she stood, the room turning slowly around her. She
grabbed the nightstand and closed her eyes, willing everything to
stop moving.

When, blessedly, the
room did stop turning, Susan moved toward the open door, toward the
music. But the urge to pee hit her so hard she turned tail and
bolted for the bathroom, groaning with anguished satisfaction as
she voided the contents of her bladder for almost a full
minute.

Standing back up, she
groaned again at the stiffness in her legs and back. Susan caught
sight of herself in the bathroom mirror and gasped. Hair was
frizzed out and tangled on one side, the other side matted down
almost perfectly flat. But the sallow flesh of her face, and the
violently black circles under her eyes, those made her clamp her
eyes shut hard, made her turn and walk fast for the bathroom
door.

Sheryl Crow was still
singing about car washes and bars and Billy. Adding to the music
was an aroma that made Susan’s mouth water and her empty stomach
growl in protest like a Bengal tiger. The scent was so familiar,
yet she couldn’t quite place it. As she moved cautiously through
the foreign hallway, out into the rather glaring light of day, she
was struck by the gorgeous view--the white sand beach, the palm
trees swaying in the breeze, the deep, clear blue waters making the
sky pale in comparison.

“Oh shit,” Susan
mumbled. “I’m in Cancun.” She wondered who was with her. Had the
dream about the cocktail napkin been just that? Was she on her
honeymoon?

A man walked out from
the kitchen area of the suite with a pizza box in his hand. She
didn’t recognize him at first. Not until he shot Susan with a
million-watt smile.

“Kevin?”

His smile turned into
a grimace, but he laughed good-naturedly.

The last time Susan
had seen Kevin was in college. Skinny and nerdy, yet cute, in a
younger brother kind of way. But the guy in front of Susan wasn’t
only built like an underwear model, his boyish face had turned
handsome. Had he grown a few inches too?

He seemed more like a
man now.

But something else
flooded her mind. The dream about the napkin hadn’t been just a
dream. Mark wasn’t there. He had really stood her up at the altar.
And Kevin...

“You’ve been taking
care of me,” she said, not a question but a realization. “You’ve
been with me the entire time.”

Susan thought she saw
a hurt look flash in his eyes, but he closed them so fast that she
couldn’t be sure.

“Where else would I
be?” When he opened his eyes again they were happy, if not
downright smart assed. He shook the pizza box just as Sheryl
started singing again. “I’ve got your favorite. Pete’s Pizza.”

Susan made a humph
sound in her throat and gave him an incredulous look. “Pete’s back
in Hanover...New Hampshire?”

“The same.” Kevin
walked over and set the box on the coffee table, plopping down in
the overstuffed couch cushions--just like he used to back in
college.

Susan moved closer.
It certainly smelled like Pete’s Pizza, her absolute favorite pizza
in the world. “But how?”

“Had it shipped
frozen FedEx.” He wriggled his eyebrows. “Had them cook it when I
was ready to wake you up.”

“You thought Pete’s
Pizza and Sheryl Crow would wake me up?”

His smile was
devilish. “It was that or the Anne Rice way.”

“The Anne Rice way?”
Susan sat down on the couch gingerly, her body still stiff.

“Remember those
Sleeping Beauty books Liz had you two reading? The ones she wrote
as A.N.Roquelaure?”

Susan’s
expression dropped and her cheeks flushed.
The Erotic Adventures of Sleeping
Beauty.
“So you...”

“Read ’em too. Yeah.
You girls had some kinky reading habits back then.”

She shook her head.
“What does that have to do with waking me up?”

Kevin’s smile was
downright naughty. “How did the prince wake Beauty?”

Susan looked away
trying to remember, and then it hit her. “Oh!” The prince had
screwed Beauty out of her coma.

“Aren’t you glad I
came up with another way?”

Susan’s mouth hung
open, so she shut it abruptly, making a clinking sound with her
teeth. “You have pizza?” She changed the subject. Kevin had never
made her feel like that before--all warm and tingly. Maybe it was
just the memory of those super hot Anne Rice fairy tales.

Kevin held out some
napkins. “I remember you need lots of these.”

“Are you saying I’m a
slob?” she said, a warning in her voice, though a smile spread its
way across her face. It was the first smile she’d had since the
wedding that wasn’t, and she felt it evaporated a moment later.

“I’m not saying
you’re a slob.”

“Good,” Susan
said.

“I’m saying we’ll
need these to cover the furniture. ’Cause I remember how fast you
eat pizza. How you could devour almost the whole thing while I was
getting us something to drink from the fridge.”

Susan gasped. “I seem
to remember Mr. Skin and Bones here eating enough food to feed half
of Ethiopia!” She glared at him. “And yet never gained a
pound.”

She poked a
finger into Kevin’s gut, expecting the old way-too-thin stick under
his t-shirt. But what she felt was lean and hard, and only made her
face burn all the more.
God, he’s changed
, she
thought as she turned rigidly toward the pizza and opened the
lid.

Frozen and air
shipped or not, Pete’s Pizza was still the most intoxicating food
on the planet, instantly blotting out her prior inappropriate
thoughts about Kevin’s new body, and about her wedding fiasco, and
even the soreness in all her muscles. All there was were the scent
and the taste as Susan scooped up a piece and bit greedily into the
sauce and cheese and crispy crust. The pepperoni was still a few
degrees hotter than the usual pizza pepperoni. She fell back in
bliss against the overstuffed couch cushions, chewing with rapture
coursing through her.

“Can I have another?”
Susan said before Kevin had taken a second bite of his piece. Kevin
scooped up another piece and slapped it on the napkin in her hand.
She inhaled that piece too, licking her lips, ready for another
slice--but she looked too long at the napkin in her hand. Though it
had pizza grease on it, and it was wrinkled, its generic whiteness
reminded her too much of “the napkin,” and she sat there staring
down at it, tears forming in her eyes.

The Sheryl Crow song
started again.

This made her look up
and sniffle back her tears, her lips spreading into a grin. “What’s
with that song? You got it on replay or something?”

“Just like in
college, remember?”

And she did. She
remembered how he’d put it on repeat and they would dance around
her dorm room like a couple of fools. She felt her own grin start
to fade, remembering how happy she had been.

Suddenly Kevin was on
his feet, pulling her up under her arms until she was on hers too.
He twirled her around a couple times, twisting her so she was
inadvertently dancing along with him. Before she knew it, Susan was
dancing, swaying her hips, moving her feet, and as her fingers
started snapping along with the music, her lips spread into a grin,
and then an honest-to-goodness smile.

He twirled her again,
and a husky laugh erupted from her lips.

* * * *

Kevin had forgotten
the sound of Susan’s laugh. Even with their weekly phone calls,
hearing that wonderful belly laugh in person was a completely
different thing. It made all his misgivings, all the pull and tug
of his dormant feelings, worth it.

As they bumped hips
and Susan jumped up on the couch and shook her ass to the music, he
could see how her emotional turmoil was finally fading away. It
didn’t matter that the happiness she was feeling was simply
nostalgia. As long as it was a taste of happiness, that was the
important thing.

Susan jumped off the
couch and into Kevin’s arms, wrapping her arms around his neck as
her legs wound around his hips. She leaned back and howled like an
animal--maybe it was just her singing voice? Or maybe just a feral
howl. Either way, at least she couldn’t see Kevin’s face, and he
was grateful for that. The feel of her body wrapped around his and
the smell of her, even after two days of not showering, took his
breath away.

Susan stopped and sat
up, disentangling herself from Kevin’s body.

“You okay?” Kevin
said, afraid she’d felt his woody growing between them.

“No, I’m not okay! I
just caught my reflection in the mirror!”

Susan dashed to the
back of the suite, to the bathroom, and slammed the door shut
behind her. The hiss of the shower kicked on just as the last
chords of Sheryl’s song played. Kevin reached down and turned the
music off.