Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (41 page)

In
, for better or for worse.

She shook her head. “Well. That sucks. A lot. For you.”

“For you, too.”

“Does it?”

“ ‘Mom, I’m dating this guy. He’s charged with embezzling three hundred thousand dollars from an organization that feeds kids.’ ‘Oh, hon, that’s
great
!’ ”

“I’d say, ‘Mom, I’m dating this guy. He’s been falsely accused of embezzlement, but he’s innocent.’ ”

“Would you?”

“Of course I would.”

He closed his eyes, and Nora couldn’t figure out the look on his face for a moment, until she realized he was trying to keep some emotion in check.

“Miles?”

“Give me a minute.”

She did, and when he opened his eyes again, he said, “At the New Year’s party? I was on the rebound, too. Or something like that. My fiancée had just dumped me. Because she found out
about the investigation.”

“Oh,
God
, Miles.”

“So … I might have … I didn’t … I wouldn’t have taken it for granted that you’d stand up for me, that’s all.”

His
fiancée
. The woman he’d been planning to marry. Someone who should have stood by him no matter what.

“At least you found that out about her,” she said.

“I thank God for that every day. Also, I wouldn’t have been single on New Year’s if she hadn’t left me. And I probably wouldn’t have been quite so—”

He stopped.

“I told you that you were a fuck-you to Henry,” she said. “You can hardly say anything more obnoxious than that.”

“I was going to say that I was ‘hard up’ that night.”

She hooted with laughter. “Okay, yeah, that’s pretty bad.”

“I was,” he said. “I was a mess. Angry, sad, all kinds of bad. The worst. Probably capable of wreaking havoc.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“You danced with me.”

“Yes.”

“And kissed me.”

His eyes were dark on her face. Steady. “Yes. But then, if you’ll recall, I tried to beat some guy up for also kissing you.”

“True. Not smart. But kind of a turn-on.”

“We can be glad our exes were such idiots,” he said.

“Definitely.”

He stepped toward her then and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, rested his head against hers. They stood there, and she could feel the forces that drew them together, but quieter now, at bay for the moment. Later tonight she’d want him to tear her clothes off again and make love to her slowly, thrusting and withdrawing, his body over hers, his breath against her cheek when his mouth wasn’t on hers. But right now she wanted this. This time together, a sacred space
in the madness, an acknowledgment of the magic.

* * *

“What made you want to be a sixth-grade science teacher?”

They sat at a cozy table in a corner of his favorite restaurant, the Farmhouse Table in Cleveland Heights. Two music venues and the art-house theater were right near there, and they could linger as long as they wanted at dinner and then decide what they were in the mood for next. And Miles had in the back of his head that maybe they wouldn’t be in the mood to go out after. Maybe they’d be in the mood to go back to his place. That was what he was
already
in the mood to do, because he’d spotted a scrap of royal-blue satin on top of the pile of clothes she carried into the bathroom to change for dinner. He’d bet it was somewhere on her person. He bet if he peeled off her pretty flowered top and lifted her long brown skirt, he’d find it.

She paused with her fork still in the papardelle-and-mushroom pasta she’d been demolishing. “I started out wanting to be a doctor. I was pre-med in college, took a ton of science classes. And then someone very wisely suggested I spend a day shadowing a doctor. So I did. And I stood there, watching what she did, thinking, oh,
God
, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to take people’s lives in my hands like that. Not every day. Not ever, actually.”

She was so animated when she talked, hands moving, her skin glowing, cheeks pink, her eyes bright with excitement. He thought of the conversation he’d had with her on the phone, the urgency of the desire she’d called up in him. Even without visual contact, all her vivacity had found its way across the phone line and under his skin. That was her power over him.

“And then I thought, wait, if this is the best way to understand what a job is like, I should shadow some other people. I asked everyone I knew, my parents’ friends and stuff, if I could go to work with them. I went to work with, like, ten different people, and it all left me cold. Then I went to work with a woman who had been my babysitter when I was a little kid. She was a seventh-grade science teacher. And, honestly, she wasn’t
that
good at it. I kept thinking, Wait! I have a better way to explain that! I wanted to butt in so bad it
hurt
to shut up. So I knew.”

He’d like to watch her teach sometime. Maybe he’d go visit her in Boston soon, and he’d ask if he could see her in action.

If there was no criminal charge against him. That would probably put a damper on his
ability to spend time inside a middle school.

When she’d asked him if he’d embezzled the money, every little thing inside him ground to a halt. It had become so quiet in his own head that for the first time in months he’d been able to hear something else. His heart. He wanted, with a kind of fervor he couldn’t understand, to tell her everything. How terrible it was to be accused, how terrible it was to be doubted, how quietly desperate it felt, knowing no one believed he was innocent.

It was connected somehow to the moments he’d first seen her, at the party. To the way she’d been then: So open, so completely in the world. So willing to pull everyone else in with her. If only he could pour everything out to her, he could be there, too. With her.

But when he had opened his mouth, none of that came out. Only the barest facts, the simplest delineations of what you could read in a newspaper. His assertion of his own innocence had felt like way too little, way less than he needed her to know. Not an invitation into the world, just a reminder that he was in a place no one else could live in with him.

“Miles?”

“Sorry.”

“You went somewhere.”

“I was thinking about—” But he didn’t want to return them to the darker topic, didn’t want to suffocate her ebullience. Didn’t want to subdue the sparkle that was all over her skin, something he could lick off later and hope would get into his own blood. “You’re lucky you had someone to tell you to do the shadowing. I don’t think enough people think to do that.”

“They don’t,” she agreed. “How’d you figure out what you wanted to do?”

“I was in I-banking after college. Not because it was the right thing for me particularly, but I was graduating and I didn’t know what I wanted to do and it was there. They came right on campus to recruit us, and it was a solution to not knowing, so I did it. And I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money—”

He heard the words coming out, felt them like a slug in the gut. He’d said that phrase a hundred times, probably a thousand times, told the same story to countless people, but for the first time, it was ugly.

“Shh,” she said. She took his hand across the table.

The warmth of her hand, the warmth in her eyes, helped steady his breathing. Again he felt the urge, the need, to pour himself out to her.
I’m innocent!
It would be a kind of anguished
cry, an insistence bigger than the words.
I’m innocent, and I need you and everyone in the whole world to know and see.…

Help me. Help me tell them
.

And maybe she would. If there was anyone in the world who would, it was Nora.

“It’s fine. I know what you meant. Go on.”

Her voice, so quiet and even. Free of judgment. She wasn’t disturbed by his situation, but she might be turned off by his desperation.

And he’d been stoic so long, he wasn’t sure what would happen if he stopped. He’d made a science out of the stoicism, knew exactly how to wrap his arms around all the pieces and hold them together. The thing inside him—it had the feel of a genie in a corked bottle, all unintended consequences and wishes for things you could only approach, could never have. Weren’t fairy tales full of those kinds of stories?
I want her to know what I’m thinking. Feeling
. Only no one did, really. No one wanted to be that kind of naked and exposed.

He swallowed it—the bigness of what he desperately wanted to say—and went on with his story, more careful this time to listen to his own words. He wouldn’t say something like that again. Something that might make her doubt him.
I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money
. Jesus.

“It didn’t feel like the right thing for me to be doing, taking people’s money and using it to grow this big business, this too-big-to-fail bank. I didn’t hate it—I loved the thrill of it, convincing people to take my word for where their money would work hardest for them. But I had this sense that the ends didn’t justify the means. And then one of my customers started asking me about investing in some ‘do-good’ companies and nonprofits and so on, and things started to take shape in my mind. I went back to school, got a nonprofit management degree, started my organization, and the rest is more or less history.”

“So it didn’t start with some huge philanthropic vision. You kind of found the philanthropy.”

“It found me.”

“You love it?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re good at it?”

He could only nod. Several months before the investigation had opened, his organization
had appeared on a national list of the best-run charitable organizations. He remembered thinking,
This is the beginning. Everything good from here on out
. His alma mater, Yale, had contacted him about an interview for the alumni magazine, a short feature on his organization and him. After news had broken about the investigation, the magazine editor had called him back to put the project “on hold.”

Even if he was acquitted, the Internet would never be sponged free of links between his name and the crime. The stain would follow him, and it would corrupt Nora, too, if she stayed in his life. She wouldn’t lose her job, but she might have trouble finding subsequent ones, because there would be guilt-by-association issues. Especially if they combined their finances. If they—

Had he been about to let himself think that?
If they got married
.

Fifteen minutes at the party plus four phone calls plus one day was still only a day of knowing her. It was just the way she’d occupied his mind for months, just the
wanting
, that made it feel like longer.

The waitress came and cleared their plates. “Can I leave dessert menus with you?”

He raised an eyebrow at Nora, and she nodded vehemently. He laughed, and the cloud lifted for a moment. Over and over she made him feel as if things were somehow, improbably, going to be okay, the kind of okay her whole world seemed to be made of.

He wanted to believe in it. He desperately did.

“Miles?” she asked, when the waitress was gone.

“Yeah?”

“Can we make another date? Like, for another weekend? You could come to Boston.”

“Of course,” he said.

“And if money’s an issue … You said—”

“We’ll make it work.”

But, despite his certainty, his heart beat against his ribs like something trying to escape, and he wanted to hold his hands there to keep it where it belonged. So many things he didn’t know: where the money would come from, how they would handle the thousand miles between them, how she would react if he was charged with embezzlement, if the case went to trial, if he was found guilty, if he went to jail…

She was gazing across the table at him with such earnestness, such
openness
, that it made his chest hurt. Shocking that a woman whose boyfriend had slept with another woman for nine
months without telling her could still have that kind of willingness to open herself up.

He didn’t understand how she did it, how she could stand to be out there so far, on a limb, all her feelings
raw
like they were. He wanted to crawl back inside himself and zip up.

“Miles.” She put her hand over his. “Don’t panic. It’s just another date.”

“I think we’re past ‘just.’ I think we flew past ‘just’ sometime shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve.”

She laughed. “You may be right.”

“I’m not panicking the way you think. I’m not panicking about
us
. I’m panicking about me. I don’t know anything. Nora, I don’t know
anything
.”

“You don’t have to know anything,” she said. “You only have to—it’s a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other thing.”

One foot in front of the other. Just another date
.

He could do this. He wanted to do this. For her. With her.

He turned his hand over and squeezed hers tight. “What are you doing next weekend?” In the wide-openness of her expression, something softened further, and he felt an echo in his chest.

“Hanging with you.” Within the cup of his hand, the smooth back of hers slid along his palm, a caress. A suggestion.

He almost couldn’t bear it—not her touch, not the sense of release her expression had provoked in him, not the answering rebound of fear, the way his brain wanted to lock down on his hopefulness.
Nothing’s changed. You’re still a suspect. You’re still broke. You’re still a liability
.

Unfit
.

The waitress hesitated a few feet from their table.

“Can I … get you some dessert?”

Molten chocolate cake for Nora. A cup of decaf for Miles.

The waitress absorbed the order and stepped away, and Nora grinned at him. “Let’s go dancing. I want to dance with you again.”

Her words called up all the visual and tactile memories of Nora—dancing, the way she’d looked, the way she’d felt against him—and he was well on his way to hard. He dug in his pocket for his phone so he could look up clubs in Cleveland Heights. “Damn it. Left my phone in
my jeans when we changed to come here.”