Uncommon Pleasure (33 page)

You’ve screwed this up from the first move, Winthrop. Like the Chinese fortune cookie joke, you read her perfectly…in bed. You unearthed, explored, and satisfied her every need…in bed. Emotionally, you missed the boat, the bus, the point. Everything. You missed everything.

She and Ben were still jabbing at each other, if he could call Abby lashing out and Ben standing there like he’d been carved out of rock jabbing.

“The badge says I can,” Ben said. “Pick up those keys and I’ll call dispatch. You’ll be pulled over in less than a mile.”

“On what charge?”

Ben’s smile walked a fine line between edgy and mean, like maybe he’d had enough. “The traffic ordinance book is two inches thick, Abby. Any cop with a month on the street will find something.”

In all of Sean’s strategizing to get Abby back, casting her uniformed lover in the role of bad cop never occurred to him. This was clearly an abject failure of imagination on his part. But Ben wasn’t her target. Time to shift her attention.

“Abby.”

Still shaking like she would fly apart she jerked around to face him, and he felt a moment’s anguish for what was coming, what it would likely do to them—finish them like they should have been finished ten months earlier. No matter the consequences for him, she had to get loose from this, to walk into the future she chose to create.

With or without him.

“Stay. Please.”

She was white with rage, her freckles standing out like burning stars from her hairline to the waistband of her jeans. She didn’t say anything, just buttoned her blouse with trembling, jerky fingers, but it was clear from the way she refused to look at Ben that she wisely wasn’t going to put his ultimatum to the test.

Ben nodded at Abby’s keys, still on the tall, square table by the door. “If she leaves before she’s gotten some sleep, call me.” He stepped through the front door and closed it quietly behind him.

The shaking intensified. Abby probably didn’t realize she was doing it, or what it meant, because she’d had no support, no CO or sergeant to watch over her, no friends with deployed boyfriends or husbands, a disinterested mother and a self-interested father. No boyfriend/fiancé/husband checking in on her mental state. That was his fault, his failure. Or so he assumed.

Time to stop making assumptions and start getting the story from the boots on the ground.

“Abby, tell me how you felt when you got my e-mail.”

*   *   *

“That’s old news,” Abby said. Her fingers refused to function on
her shirt buttons because she couldn’t slip the green pearl button through the hole. She flicked her fingers to get them working again. “I felt then what I do now. A little disappointed, then nothing. It’s over and gone, in the past.”

“No it’s not,” he said. He stood in front of her, shirtless, his cargo pants riding low on his hips, legs braced, hands shoved in his pockets, his face grave. “It’s in this room, right now, between us. How you felt a year ago is at the heart of what we just did, and why. So tell me.”

She stopped, swallowed hard against the lump in her throat. Truth be told, it made her sick to think about it. Her stomach churned. Funny how a ménage with two men—so dirty! so bad! so wrong!—left her limp with pleasure, near peace, and remembering how she felt when she got an e-mail turned her guts to water.

Then she realized that this was the final nail in the coffin. This was the best way to prove to him that she was over him, by rehashing this like it was no big deal. She shoved her sweaty, tangled hair behind her ears and folded her arms across her chest.
Be specific. Use details.

“I was sitting in the front parlor,” she said. “Reading e-mail on my laptop, looking out the front window. This is important because I’d gotten the biggest yellow ribbons I could find, the kind with the big bows and rosettes on them, and tied them around the trees in the front yard. You know how your mind drifts when you’re just hanging out…you hadn’t written for a couple of days, and I was worried about you, and the men in your platoon…and thinking about those ribbons and wondering what they’d look like after a year.

“And then there was an e-mail from you. No subject line. I was so disappointed when I opened it because it was really short. When you were in training, you sent me two single-spaced pages, full of description and funny stories about your men. Then you deployed, and it dropped to a page, then a couple of paragraphs. Then this. Four sentences.
Abby, I think it’s better if we end our relationship. You’re in a transitory stage in your life, with a lot of growing up yet to do. It’s not fair to ask you to support me through the next year when I’m not able to make the same commitment to you. I wish you all the best in the future. Sean
.”

“I had a long response written that I just deleted, because me telling you that I’d hung yellow ribbons and joined the local group for wives and girlfriends of deployed personnel wouldn’t make a difference. And when I thought about the time we’d spent together I realized I was just a distraction. I didn’t think about it when we were together, but you’re a Naval Academy graduate. A Rhodes Scholar. A lieutenant in the Marine Corps. And I was just out of college, a fun fling for a few weeks, but not enough for you long term. If you want to know how I felt, that’s how I felt. Stupid for believing that it would work, that ribbons and social events and e-mails and video chat would get us through, that maybe you’d come home and mar—”

Her mouth shut with a click, and the now-silent air rang with the echoes of her raised voice. He’d never said anything about marrying her, never even said he loved her. She was the one with the fairy-tale dreams of love at first sight. She hunched into her folded arms, looked away, then back at him.

“The support group would have fixed that, though. I admired those women so much. Some of them were going through second or third deployments with little kids to care for, working and raising families and taking care of houses and yards, and they were so strong. They served something bigger than themselves just like their husbands and boyfriends and fiancés. I could have grown up in their
company. I knew the deployment would be hell for both of us in totally different ways, but sometimes you grow up because you go through hell, and you keep going, and when you emerge you’re stronger and wiser and more mature. I know I wasn’t then, when we met, but I could have been. You deprived
us
of the chance to go through that
together
, to let the experience shape
us
and make
us
stronger. You quit on
us
. You said Marines don’t quit, and you did.”

Her voice was now almost silent in the dimly lit room, and she was proud of that. She wasn’t yelling at him, just calmly stating facts. “I loved you. I’d fallen head over heels, passionately, completely, and totally in love with you, with your brains and your sly sense of humor, how scared you were, how much you cared, how strong you were despite your fear. I loved you, and when that e-mail sank in, I hated you. I hated you so much. I went to the front yard with my mother’s pinking shears, and I cut the ribbons off the trees. Then I cut them into tiny little pieces and threw them in the trash. Do you want to know what happened to the paint on my back bumper? I used nail polish remover to peel off the bumper sticker, the one that said
Forget Prince Charming, I have a U.S. Marine
on it….”

At that he looked away. For the first time in the weeks since he’d been back, he broke eye contact first. There was no victory in the achievement. She went on, because she had to finish this.

“I loved you, Sean. I could have loved you forever, but now I hate you. I hate you as much and as fiercely and as passionately as I loved you. I know you got me a new battery and mowed the lawn because you’re trying to get me back, and I love you but I hate you, too, and it’s all just so tangled up inside I can’t figure out how to breathe around you.”

She really couldn’t breathe. Panic set in, air in short supply, as she looked around for her purse, found it on the table by the door. “I have to get out of here,” she said, and shocked herself with how matter-of-fact and rational that sounded. She turned for the door,
but in the blink of an eye Sean was across the room, palm flat to the door.

“You’re not leaving,” he said. “Not in this condition. You’ll wreck, or wreck someone else.”

“I’ll walk.”

“It’s miles to your house, Abby,” he said rationally, implacably. “Please. Stay. You can’t go out like you are right now.”

“Try to stop me,” she said, and dug her fingernails into his wrist in an effort to get his hand off the doorknob.

He put his whole body between her and the door. “I’ll call Ben,” he said.

She shoved him, but he wouldn’t move away from the door. His face was ravaged. This was no stoic Marine. Her words raked grooves around his mouth, hollowed his cheeks, darkened his eyes, pulling down the mask he’d worn for the last few weeks; behind that curtain was a man who’d used every tactic in the book to gain his objective—her—because he wanted her. Desperately. Completely.

A second shove, this one hard enough to force the air from his lungs, but he didn’t try to hold her or contain her, just wouldn’t move from the goddamned door, and finally she gave up, spun on her heel and stalked down the hallway to the master bedroom.

Where the big, wrecked bed confronted her, making her face what she’d just done, and with whom, and why. She’d just had the most amazing, intimate sexual experience of her life, with Sean, and she’d used it to destroy whatever remained of what they had.

They were finally over.

She slammed the door behind her, not caring if Sean was in the doorway, in the hall, or still standing in the living room. Then she sank down to the floor, buried her face in her bent knees, and sobbed like she hadn’t when she’d gotten the e-mail ten months ago, as if her heart was breaking.

Because it was. All over again.

So much for the most expensive, elite education the American
taxpayers could provide. A decade’s worth of tactics training and he’d just made the most basic mistake a young officer could make, and he didn’t even have the excuse of youth. He’d failed to turn the map around and consider things from Abby’s perspective. He’d assumed she was ready to be won back, that if he showed her how much he cared she’d understand he was sorry, and regretful, and wanted a second chance. He forgot about emotions, about all the steps they skipped going straight from seeing each other to bed. Abby didn’t play sophisticated sex games. That first night in the No Limits parking lot she’d as good as told him to back the fuck off, she wasn’t ready to be wooed, let alone won, and he’d missed the signals entirely.

What a mess.
What a fucking ugly sewage pit of a mess he’d just spent his leave stirring.

Abby fled down the hall in full-fledged retreat, then the bedroom door slammed hard enough to crack drywall, and he flinched.
Again. Her sobs from the bedroom were heartbreaking to hear, full of the passion lacking in her flat recitation of events from ten months ago, but he forced himself to walk over to the sofa, sit down on it, and listen. She was here, she was safe, and that would have to be enough for now. In the morning he would…they could…

You idiot. It’s over. You lost.

When the bitter, wracking sobs tapered off, water ran in the bathroom, sending the pipes knocking against the wall again. Then the sheets rustled, followed by a single, shuddering sigh, then silence. Half an hour into the silence he stood, walked silently down the hallway, and used a pen to unlock the bedroom door. Abby slept in a tight ball on the far side of the bed, her tear-ravaged face turned to the bedroom window. He closed the door, then walked through the living room to the sliding door that led to the deck. In the yard he pulled one of Camilla’s chaise lounges to the spot on the grass where the tree branches didn’t block the sky, where the low, gray clouds hid the stars. He stretched out on the chaise, folded his arms across his chest, and stared up at the sky until dawn turned the clouds pearl gray.

Then he went back into the house and started coffee, because Abby’s life would go on without him. A few minutes later she emerged from the bedroom, but even with her face downcast to the carpet he could see her swollen, red eyes and cheeks. He stepped back and shoved his hands in his pockets as she hurried by him, a washcloth in her hand. In the kitchen she dumped ice into a bowl, ran water over the ice, then immersed it into the bowl. When it was saturated she wrung it out over the sink, came back into the living room, lay down on the sofa with her head on the middle cushion and her feet dangling over the arm, and put the cold cloth over her eyes.

He sat down on the ottoman, braced his forearms on his knees, and waited. There was no point in rushing now. Despite the fact that she hadn’t headed right for the front door, it was over.

One hand massaged her temple while the other held the cloth tightly against her eyes. “I don’t really hate you,” she said finally.

“Oh, I think you do,” he said. His own voice was raw, thick, scored with exhaustion. He cleared his throat, and waited some more.

“When Dad got sick I just pushed it all away, deep down inside, so I could cope with what was in front of me, which sounds very much like what you did when you broke up with me.” She paused. “Funny how you can do something that seems so right at the time and have it be all wrong.”

“Yeah,” he offered quietly, then kept waiting.

There was another longer pause, then she said, “I’m not over you.”

“I’m not over you, either.”

“If I was really grown-up and mature, I would have said something rational like
Sean, I’m really angry with you and I can’t get past that, so you need to move on
. But I didn’t know I was still angry. It was almost a year ago. Who stays angry for a year?”

“Someone who’s badly hurt?” A bitter laugh huffed from his chest. “I could have been more mature about this, too. Who goes after a woman like she’s an epic battle with the fate of the world in the balance?”