Fix You (8 page)

             
Like hell
.

**

              “He’s claiming
what
?” Jessica snapped and the teenagers at the next table over shot her alarmed glances.

             
“Emotional and psychological abuse,” her attorney, Amanda, said from the other end of the cell phone Jess had pressed to her ear. Jo had taken the day off from work to watch Tyler and Willa while Jess went to her interview and Jess now sat at a table in Wildflour bakery, waiting to meet her sister and the kids for lunch, flipping through the real estate booklet she’d snitched. Amanda’s call was rapidly turning her crappy day to absolute shit.

             
“Son of a bitch. How is that even possible?
He
cheated on
me
.”

             
“Exactly, which is why he’ll use anything at his disposal to try and prove he wasn’t the at-fault party because he was unfaithful. Dylan’s claiming that you were – well, do you want to hear?”

             
“Of course.”

             
Amanda breathed a note of regret. “You were, according to him, ‘distant, critical, and unreceptive to his sexual advances - ’”

             
“Oh, that is such a goddamn lie - ”

             
The teenagers were about to lose their eyeballs if they bugged any further.

             
“ – and he also claims that your family ‘intentionally excluded him’ in all things from conversations to outings.”

             
“They didn’t!” she said, maybe a touch too defensively given what her dad and brothers had said about never liking Dylan. “Why is he doing this? I’m not contesting anything; I just want the damn divorce.”

             
“My guess is he doesn’t feel the same way,” Amanda said. “I’ve seen this a lot: one party drags their feet in hopes the divorce never gets finalized and they can eventually reconcile.”

             
“Yeah, well that’s
never
happening.”

             
“That’s what I needed to know.” There was a crisp sound of paper shuffling on the other end of the line. “Okay, I’ve got a call into his attorney and I’ll ring you when I know something more, alright?”

             
“Yeah,” Jess sighed, and disconnected.

             
Though her personal life was in tatters, the rest of the world didn’t know it; sun poured in through the glazed windows, warm on the side of her face. She was surrounded by patrons in shorts and flip-flops, most of them young and oblivious to any drama that existed outside their personal circles of who-kissed-whom and who-bought-what at the mall. The bakery smelled like fresh cupcakes and coffee, and Jess was trying to focus on that instead of the accusation that she was cruel and frigid.

             
The girls at the neighboring table resumed their discussion of nail polish and her eyes dropped back to her booklet. The last page she’d been scanning when Amanda called was full of farm properties, all of them in the million dollar bracket. Frowning, she turned the page and let her gaze wander over the five bed, three-and-a-half bath places she couldn’t hope to afford; and then, for some reason, a listing down in the very corner of the page caught her interest.

             
8 BED/6 BTH Victorian mansion on Lake Allatoona. Original hardwoods. Vintage charm. Ideal for inn or B&B. Staff quarters. Guest cottage. 7 acres. MUST SELL. $220K.

             
The listing agent was someone named Millie and at two-hundred-twenty-thousand, the massive house was less expensive than any of the three bedroom homes she’d been considering. If Dylan ever stopped dicking around and agreed to a divorce settlement, she’d have a sum to put down on a new house, but not one anything like what she’d grown accustomed to. She’d been preparing herself for an apartment or two bedroom grandma cottage, maybe even a duplex, and here was a Victorian mansion full of hardwoods and charm for less than any townhouse she’d come across so far.

             
Ideal for inn or B&B,
her eyes traced over again. For the meager six months of her career, she’d run the hell out of a hotel. It had been years, but she could do it again. Maybe.

             
“Mama!” she heard, and lifted her head to see Tyler leading the way across the bakery. Jo followed, Willa on her hip. If it weren’t for her long, dark pigtails and her little cherub face, someone would have thought the toddler in the overalls was a boy. She might have looked like her father, but was rapidly being turned into her mother.

             
“Hi, sweetie,” Jess greeted and opened her arms, folding Tyler into them. His soft hair against her cheek and the grass and dirt smell of his clothes warmed the bitter edges of her heart. He was smiling when he pulled back, happier and brighter than she’d seen him in days. “You having a good day?”

             
“Uh-huh,” he said as Jo settled into the chair across from her, Willa on her lap. “Aunt Jo played Tonka trucks with me outside.”

             
“I see that.” She passed her thumb across a smudge of dirt on his cheek and then patted the seat of the chair next to her. “You hungry?”

             
“Yeah!”

             
“Sit here with Jo and I’ll go get our food, okay?”

             
He nodded vigorously as she got to her feet.

             
“How’d your interview go?” Jo asked, already frowning.

             
Jess shook her head and started toward the counter.

             
When she had sandwiches and drinks in hand, she returned to their window table and saw Jo looking at the real estate listings.

             
“Check out the Victorian,” Jess said as she balanced the tray on the edge of the table and started passing out baskets.

             
“The one on the lake?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“And do what, wish I lived in a mansion?”

             
“Look at the price.” Jess settled into her seat and reached for her turkey club.

             
Jo’s eyes came up from the paper, doubtful. “Sure. Because the
price
is what’s keeping you from jumping all over it.”

             
“I - ” There was no sense arguing, she knew, because Jo was right. “Yeah, I know.” She tried to wave it off, but she took the booklet from her sister and slipped it into your purse.

             
“So the interview,” Jo said, and the house was forgotten for the moment.

**

             
Marathon Man
was what popped into Ellie’s head when she heard Jordan’s key in the backdoor that night. All afternoon she’d reminded herself that whatever he’d had with Janet Jennings was in the past, that he’d spent the past two and a half years coming home to her every night. He loved her. He was such a good husband. But Janet’s smile wouldn’t leave her alone.

             
“Hey, baby,” he called as the door closed behind him. She heard the backpack he insisted on carrying instead of a briefcase hit the bench of the hall tree. “It smells good.”

             
She had rosemary chicken in the oven and was peeling potatoes at the kitchen’s center island, venting her frustrations on them. Jordan hadn’t done anything wrong – she wasn’t even angry with him, not really – but as his footsteps came down the back hall and into the kitchen, she tensed, the potato peeler skinning off thick, irregular chunks of peel as she dashed it against the potato in her hand.

             
“Hey,” he repeated as he drew up beside her at the counter and propped his elbows on the island. “You alright?”

             
She twitched a smile and said, “Uh-huh,” as he leaned over and pressed a kiss to her temple. At some point in the last two months, she’d turned his home-from-work kiss into a little peck he dropped on her face somewhere. He’d protested it at first, had hooked a finger under her chin and brought her mouth up to his, but he’d quit fighting since.

             
And how does being frigid help?
She scolded herself. That’s what she needed to do: let worry over all the Janets from his past turn her cold until he was forced to turn to one of them again.

             
“Hi,” she amended with a truer smile. She forced her hands to still and turned to press a fast kiss to his lips.

             
He reached up and caught the back of her head in his palm, held her to him. He opened his mouth against hers and tried to deepen the kiss, but she pulled back.

             
“I have to finish dinner,” Ellie said lamely, and nose-to-nose and going cross-eyed with the effect, she still saw his face fall before he turned her loose and dropped his gaze down to the bowl of cubed potatoes in front of her.

             
It was silent a beat too long before he asked, “How’d it go at the doc?”

             
You mean aside from meeting your former lover, Marathon Man
? she thought sourly, and regretted it right away. She was being ridiculous. “It went well,” she said, and forced her mind away from Janet and back to the solitude of the exam room and the quick double rap of her girls’ heartbeats. She smiled as she picked up her knife and started quartering the potato. “Doctor Carson says they’re small, but that they look healthy. She did the 3D ultrasound and – I wish you’d been there to see it – they’re all snuggled up together. I was so worried,” she said, throat suddenly tight, “about having sisters who got along like Nikki and I do, but they’re already best friends and…” She shook her head, not wanting to say anything else for fear she’d get emotional.

             
Jordan had moved to stand behind her while she was talking and his hands slipped around what had once been her waist, smoothing across the front of her dress and her rounded stomach. “They won’t be like Nikki and you,” he said against her ear and a warm, welcome flush went sweeping through her. He was a funny, expressionless smartass most of the time, but with her he was so sweet and attentive. “What else did the doc say?” he asked, and one of his hands slid down the curve of her belly and went even lower. “We can still…you know…right?”

             
A part of her was desperate for him to touch her, but another part of her squirmed with self-conscious worry as he pressed her dress flat and slipped a hand between her legs. She didn’t look like the girl he’d married. She didn’t look like Janet Jennings. She was this pregnant cow he couldn’t possibly be attracted to right now.

             
She set her knife down and her hand went to his wrist, her fingers curling tight in a silent plea for him to withdraw without her having to ask him to.

             
“Is Paige home?” he asked.

             
“She will be.” Ellie heard the tremor in her voice. “I’ll take care of you after dinner, okay?”

             
His hand pulled away and then the other did too. He went to the fridge and a moment later she heard the cap of a beer bottle skitter across the counter. “I’m not a dog, you know,” he said in the sort of carefully flat voice that meant he was trying not to sound as offended as he really was. “You don’t have to ‘take care’ of me.” The look he shot her on his way into the living room stilled her hand on the knife.

             
“You don’t want -?” she started, and he cut her off.

             
“I want our sex life back. I don’t wanna feel like some shithead guilting you into a blowjob every night.”

**

              “Thanks, anyway,” Jess said. She hung up her cell and let it fall to the mattress beside her. 12:02 the bedside clock read, and if nothing else, the hour was proof that Amanda Collins of Schneider, Matthews & Collins was worth her legal fees: making phone calls after midnight. She hadn’t been successful yet, though, because Dylan was still claiming lasting emotional damage thanks to her cold, sexless harpy’s heart.

             
It was both of us!
She wanted to scream at him. They’d both drifted apart: it happened. But he had drifted right into some counterculture fetish-land he knew she would never follow him to, so he’d turned elsewhere, and blamed it all on her. It wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t…

             
But maybe it was
, a tiny voice in the back of her head kept whispering.

             
She rolled over – in her brother’s bed, in her brother’s room, between his old plaid sheets that had been washed to near disintegration – exasperated with every damn thing, and her eyes fell on the real estate booklet she’d left on her nightstand. Mindlessly, she snatched it up and laid it on the sheets beside her, flipping right away to the Victorian mansion that had fascinated her at first glance.