Authors: Kelly Jamieson
Once again, Nate found Krissa in the kitchen in the morning, reading the paper and drinking coffee. She looked like she’d just come from a funeral. Or had a really bad cold. Still gorgeous though, luminous green eyes surrounded by long thick eyelashes, glossy dark hair falling over her shoulders and down her back.
She wore plaid flannel shorts and a gray T-shirt. Pretty ugly clothes. Bare toes tipped with pink polish rested on the rung of the stool and the way they curved around it fascinated him, made him ache with tenderness. Her small toes almost looked like a child’s and reminded him of the reason for her unhappiness.
“Good morning.” She looked up, then quickly away, as if she was embarrassed.
“Morning.” He knew where the coffee mugs were now and helped himself. “You okay?”
She nodded. “I’m really sorry about last night, Nate.”
She was apologizing—to him! “No need,” he said curtly, not looking at her.
“Yes. I was rude. I was just…”
“I know. Derek told me.”
“He did?” Her eyes widened and her lips parted. “Oh.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Well…he…yeah.”
“He’s my friend.”
“I know.” She folded up the newspaper and pushed it over to him. He found the sports section, but it was damn hard to read the small print with dark glasses on. He gave up.
“What do you want to know?” She dragged the paper back to herself. “Baseball? Dodgers?”
He stared at her. She flipped open the paper and her eyes moved up and down. “Dodgers five, Marlins two.”
“How’d you know…?”
“I remember. You were a big baseball fan. Remember when the four of us drove to L.A. for a game?” She smiled wistfully. “That was fun.”
He said nothing. He remembered. It had only been a couple of weeks before Lauren’s car crash. It had been fun—two happy couples, carefree and innocent. He and Lauren had just found out they were going to be parents. A surprise, but a good one. They hadn’t even told anyone.
“Thanks.” His voice came out scratchy and he cleared his throat.
“I really liked Lauren,” Krissa continued. “She was a sweetheart. So funny and kind. So loyal.”
Nate choked on his coffee. “Yeah, right.”
She gave him a funny look.
“How about the Angels? Did they win? I think they played Tampa Bay.”
She turned her attention back to the newspaper. “Lost. Eight-six.”
“Damn.” He sipped more coffee. “Don’t you ever work?”
“Yes. I work from home. I have some things to do for a presentation I’m doing next week. But I should be able to get that done this morning. After lunch, I need to go shopping.”
“Ah.”
“For groceries.” She smiled.
“Oh. Can I come?”
She lifted a brow. “You want to come grocery shopping?”
“Yeah. I like food.”
“Okay. Sure.” She shook her head. “Derek won’t set foot in the grocery store.”
“I’ll cook dinner for you two one night,” Nate offered. “I don’t want you to feel like you’re doing extra because I’m here. I don’t want to be any trouble. I know I showed up at a bad time.”
Her mouth twisted. “Kind of bad, yeah.” She hitched a small shoulder. “It’s okay, though.”
He studied her. “What are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?” She tipped her head to one side.
“Sounds like Derek’s pretty firm on not adopting.”
“Or having me impregnated with another man’s sperm.”
“Uh…yeah.” He shifted on his stool. “So…? You’re okay with that?”
Her full lips pushed out. “No. I’m not okay with that.” She swiped up a drop of coffee off the granite counter with a fingertip. “I don’t think Derek understands how much I want children.”
Children. Plural. One baby from China wasn’t going to do it.
“Why?”
She frowned at him.
“Why is it so important? And why doesn’t Derek get it?”
“It’s the most important thing in the world,” she said slowly. “It’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I feel like …” she hesitated, looked around the room. “I feel like I have all this love in me.” She put a hand over her chest, drawing his attention to her breasts beneath the grey cotton. He couldn’t help but notice she wore no bra, pointy little nipples poking through as she pressed the fabric to her chest. “I have to…share it. I need to. I want to bring a new life into the world and…love it and look after it.” Her eyes glistened.
Ah, shit, she was going to start crying again. He glanced around for a box of tissues, but saw none.
“Do you know what I mean?”
He recalled the emotions that had chased through him at the news he was going to be a father. Excitement. Awe. Fear. Because, like she said, it was so important. Screwing up was not an option. He nodded. “I guess so.”
“Derek doesn’t. And now I feel so betrayed. I thought he understood, I thought he felt the same until last night. We’ve talked about what we’d do if we couldn’t have children of our own. But…” She hesitated.
“What?”
“Derek always believed it was my fault.”
“It’s not anybody’s fault.” He couldn’t let that go. There seemed to be a lot of blame flying. “It isn’t something you can control. If you weren’t able to get pregnant for some medical reason, he couldn’t blame you.”
“But that’s how I felt. Like he was blaming me for all the shit we were going through. And I do feel responsible. Even now…when we know it’s him.”
“Again, not his fault.”
“I didn’t say that,” she snapped. Then she sighed. “Sorry. I don’t blame him, Nate. I still feel like it’s all my fault, because I’m the one who wants a baby so badly.”
“He doesn’t?” That didn’t make sense.
“Not the same way. He wants a baby because that’s what you do. People get married, have kids. But he doesn’t agonize over it like I do. So even though I’m sure he’s devastated by knowing he can’t have children, he’d be fine without.”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
She laughed. “Oh yes I can. And Derek…well, never mind. Want some breakfast?”
“Just some toast, maybe.”
They talked while she toasted bread, spread peanut butter, poured more coffee. He ate six slices of toast. Could have eaten two more. His appetite had returned with a vengeance.
He listened to her as she talked about her best friend Cameron’s children, her three-month-old baby, her three-year-old twins. How envious Krissa was. How she hadn’t even told Cameron they’d been trying to have a baby.
“Why not?”
“Because she doesn’t think I should have kids.”
He shook his head. “Huh? She has three but she doesn’t think you should have any?”
Her lips quirked. “Not because I’d be a bad mother or anything. She’s just overwhelmed right now. Kids are a lot of work.”
“Well, yeah, but…”
She laughed. “I know, I know. So it’s easier if I just don’t say anything about it. I don’t want to get in a big discussion about the pros and cons of being a parent. According to her, it’s all cons. And I know that’s not true but if I try to tell her that, she just says I don’t know what I’m talking about because I don’t have kids. So it’s just easier.”
He nodded.
“I’m going to get some work done.” She hesitated. “I feel bad just leaving you…”
“I told you, I’m not here to be entertained. I’ll go for a walk on the beach or something.” He squinted out the window at the bright sky. “I forgot how it never rains here in the summer. All this sun is killing me.”
“I love the sun.”
“Normally, me too. Any chance I could get to be outside, taking pictures…especially water.”
“I know. Your photographs are beautiful, Nate.”
“I saw you have one. In the family room.”
“Yes. We bought it on-line.”
“I’d have given it to you, if you’d asked.”
“Don’t be silly. That’s how you earn your living. I looked at all the ones on your website and I picked that one. It was hard though, they’re all so…serene. Soulful.”
“Yeah.”
“There was an article about you in the newspaper—local boy makes good kind of story.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.” The reporter had interviewed him by phone. He sighed, not liking the reminder of what he couldn’t do.
Krissa disappeared and he took his walk, sat and stared at the ocean until his eyes burned from the brightness despite the glasses and he was forced back into the house.
He ran into Krissa in the hall, still dressed in her ugly shorts, although the legs they revealed were spectacular. His eyes were streaming water, but he could still make out an attractive pair of legs.
“Are you okay?” Concern edged her voice.
“Yeah.” Embarrassed, he wiped his face. “The sun was getting to my eyes.”
“Oh, God. What can you do…just sit in the dark?”
“I have some drops the eye doctor gave me.” He grimaced. “I just hate putting them in.”
She blinked. “Why?
“I can’t stand anything in my eyes.” He shuddered.
“Go get the drops,” she said. “I have no problem touching eyeballs.”
“Nobody is touching my eyeballs.”
She laughed. “Okay, I won’t touch them. But I can put the drops in for you.”
“Uh…that’s okay.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t be such a baby. Get the drops.”
He hesitated, then went into his room and returned, holding up a small bottle.
She took the bottle from him. “Come and lay down on the couch.”
They went into the family room. “Lean your head back.” She gave the bottle a shake then unscrewed the cap. He did as she asked, removing the sunglasses as he rested his head on the soft cushion, his body tightened in preparation for the torture she was about to deliver.
Krissa gazed down at Nate’s closed eyelids, dark lashes fanning on his high cheekbones. He was…incredibly beautiful.
Her heart skipped a beat, then started thudding unreasonably in her chest. The fingers holding the tiny bottle trembled. She touched a fingertip beside his left eye. “Can you open this eye?” Her voice came out in a whisper.
He opened the eye and stared at the ceiling. His eyes were a beautiful aquamarine color, like a Caribbean cove. Clear and translucent. She compressed the bottle and a drop fell into his eye. He immediately squeezed it shut and hissed.
“Does that hurt?” She sank her teeth into her bottom lip. She didn’t want to hurt him.
“Like a bitch,” he muttered.
She waited before doing the other eye, then capped the bottle, watching him screw up his face. Still gorgeous.
He lay there for long moments, the house quiet, until he huffed out a breath and blinked his eyes open.
“Better?” she whispered. Tenderness expanded in her chest.
He looked up at her and their eyes met. And held.
Nate blinked rapidly, and Krissa couldn’t drag her eyes away from his face. Those eyes pulled at her like a receding wave in the ocean and she swallowed.
“I’m going to change and then go do my shopping.” She set the bottle on the table. “If you still want to come, we could go get some lunch somewhere.”
“Nah, never mind.”
She blinked. “Oh. I thought you wanted to come with me.”
He rose to his feet. “I changed my mind.”
He turned his back on her and walked stiffly toward the stairs.
Disappointment flooded her. She’d been looking forward to having company while she did her grocery shopping. “What’s wrong, Nate? Are your eyes bothering you that much?”
“They’re fine,” he snapped without turning. “Just leave me alone.”
She stood there, watched his retreating back. Ooookay. Rude prick. God, she was surrounded by grouchy testosterone.
Then she felt ashamed of that thought. He wasn’t a prick. Just like Derek, he had big problems. And didn’t want to talk about it. Fine.
Besides, she’d been a bitch herself last night. Guess she deserved that. They were all behaving badly.
She went to her own bedroom to change out of her plaid shorts. She pulled on a short denim skirt and a T-shirt, brushed her hair. As she slicked some gloss on her lips, she heard a knock on her door.
The door was open, so she just turned. Nate stood there hands in his pockets, dark glasses shielding his eyes. She looked at him. Waited.
“I…uh…I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.”
She nodded, twisted the cap back onto her lip gloss and dropped it into her purse.
“I would still like to come,” he said. “If you don’t mind some unpleasant company.”
She swallowed a laugh. “I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully, slinging her purse over one shoulder. “If you’re going to be an asshole I’d rather do my shopping alone.”
“I’ll behave.” The corners of his mouth tipped up.
“Okay, then. How about lunch?”
“Could we go to Darby’s?” She smiled at the hopeful note in his voice. “I get cravings for their bacon mushroom cheeseburger.”
She laughed. “Then you should have one. Come on, let’s go.”
They sat on the outdoor deck at Darby’s in the shade of a huge fig tree, enjoying the quiet neighborhood with only a faint hum of traffic in the background. Krissa plunged her straw into the glass of iced tea she’d ordered.
“Lauren liked it here, too,” she remarked, extending her bare legs under the table. Her foot bumped Nate’s, his legs much longer than hers. “Sorry.” She shifted her feet in her flip flops away.
He said nothing.
“You must miss her.”
“I don’t want to talk about Lauren.”
She blinked. She, too, wore sunglasses now. “Why not?”
Was it still that painful for him to talk about her? It had been over two years since she’d died. Surely he should be moving on by now.
“I just don’t want to.” His voice was hard.
“But it would be good for you…if you can’t get past it, talking about her might help. You must miss her.”
“No. I don’t.”
Astonished, she stared at him, her glass of tea half way from the table to her lips. “You don’t miss her?”
He shook his head, gave the menu his attention. Then he snapped it shut. “Don’t know why I’m even looking at that. I already know what I want.”
“Bacon mushroom cheeseburger.”
“You got it.”
Krissa looked at her own menu, decided on a spinach salad and they ordered.
“Nate. What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
He knew exactly what she meant. The lack of eye contact was driving her crazy, but she felt his understanding. “Lauren. Why don’t you miss her? Why don’t you want to talk about her?”
He sighed. “It’s a crappy story, Krissa. You liked Lauren. I don’t want to spoil your memories of her.”
“Well, you definitely can’t say something like that and then not tell me what you mean.” She sipped her drink. “What would spoil my memories of her?”
Nate turned his face and looked across the street at the small used book store. “Just drop it, okay.”
“No.”
It wasn’t like her to push for an uncomfortable conversation. She normally tried to avoid that. But she had to know. That morning when they’d been talking about Lauren, something had made her feel funny, something Nate had said. And his reaction didn’t seem normal to her. He should be at the point where he wanted to talk about his wife—sharing happy memories. But clearly he wasn’t.
“I want to know,” she said softly, leaning forward. “Truly, Nate, it will help to talk about it. I told you about wanting to have a baby. I’ve never told anybody else that, except Derek.”
He tipped his head to the side as if thinking about that. “Nobody?”
She moved her head side to side. “Not even Cameron.”
He gnawed on his bottom lip. “Well, I’ve never told anybody this, either.”
Something tightly coiled inside her softened. “I won’t tell anyone else.”
“Yeah.” He paused, studied the glass of Coke in front of him, took a deep breath. “After Lauren died, I went through her stuff. I found her journal. She wrote in it all the time, but it was personal. I probably shouldn’t have read it, but I wanted to connect with her one last time…to know her thoughts and feelings. That must sound crazy.”
“No. Not at all.” She ached for how he must have felt. “I think it would feel like talking to her…one last time.”
Their eyes met and held. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s it. Anyway, I started reading the most recent stuff. About…well, stuff. Anyway.” He cleared his throat. “She’d been having an affair.”
Oh. Dear. God. Krissa stared at him, mouth open. “Oh, Nate. Are you sure? That can’t be.”
“Unless her journal was fiction, I’m sure.”
“Who was it?”
“I have no idea. She never mentioned a name. She called him ‘my lover’.” Krissa heard the disgust in the rough tone of his voice. “She wrote about what they did.” His voice deepened even more. “Where they went. What they talked about. How guilty she felt, but yet she couldn’t stop seeing him. It started when I was away in Thailand for two months.”
Krissa remembered that trip. She’d wondered at the time how Nate could leave his wife for that long, but believed their marriage was strong enough to handle a couple of months. After all, many couples spent much longer periods of time apart. “That’s awful.”
He lifted a big shoulder, turned the glass of Coke between his hands. “It was shitty, yeah. Here she’d just died and I was all broken up inside about that, and then I found out she’d been cheating on me. Our whole life for months before she died was a lie.”
Krissa closed her eyes against the pain she felt for Nate. She knew the agony of wondering if her husband had cheated, and even though he hadn’t, she could imagine how painful it would be. “It must be even worse that she’s dead. You can’t even ask her about it…why she did it.”
“Yeah.” He was silent. She sensed there was more but she didn’t press this time.
“Derek doesn’t know about that?”
“No. And please don’t tell him. I’m a big enough loser with my eye problems right now.”
“But he’s your friend. You could talk to him about it…”
“Maybe some day. He’s got enough problems.”
“Oh, Nate.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” he growled, the corners of his mouth turned down. “I know how pathetic I am, but I don’t like the world feeling sorry for me.”
“It’s not like that. I am sorry…sorry that you had to go through that. That you’re still going through it. But I don’t think you’re pathetic. Not at all.” She tried a smile. “I think you’re an amazing, strong man, Nate.”
He snorted, turned away again.
The waiter arrived with their lunches.
They talked about other things while they ate, but Krissa couldn’t get her mind off the fact that Lauren had cheated on Nate. It was shocking. Hurtful. And Nate was right—it did change her feelings about Lauren, all the pretty memories she had of her friend. She and Lauren hadn’t been best friends or anything, but because Nate and Derek were such good friends, they’d spent a lot of time together. She’d thought she knew Lauren, and learning this about her made her feel betrayed too. God. It must be a thousand times worse for Nate.
Nate accompanied her to the grocery store, and they discussed choices of steaks for grilling that night, what size of shrimp to buy, what kind of mushrooms would complement the steaks. “I want shiitake mushrooms,” she decided, but when they looked in the produce department there were none. She asked the produce manager.
“Sorry, ma’am, we’re out right now. Should get some in tomorrow.”
Krissa pouted briefly. “We’ll stop at another store on the way home.” She loved good food, loved to cook and especially loved to feed people, so debating shiitake versus oyster mushrooms was so much fun she could almost forget the mess her life was in.
“Are you going to marinate the steaks?” Nate asked, pushing the cart for her down an aisle.
“I was going to use a rub…I make a really good one.”
“What’s in it?”
She told him the seasonings she used and he made approving noises. “Sounds good. Should we get some wine?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Nate knew wine, too, and they lingered over selecting a red and a white. Then he insisted on paying for the wine and half the groceries.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ll let you buy the wine, but not the food.”
“I’m costing you guys money.”
“We can afford to have a guest for a while.”
“I can afford to contribute.”
They looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Tell me how much you make,” she challenged him. “And I’ll tell you how much I make.”
He grinned. “Never mind. I’m sure you’re raking it in.”
She grimaced. “Not. Derek makes way more than I do. My business is just new. I’m doing okay, though.”
She started lifting items out of the cart and piling them on the checkout counter. Nate leaned into the cart too, to help, his shoulder brushing hers.
“I know you’re doing more than okay, with the prices of those photographs. And it was in the news how much you made off that deal with House and Home.”
He grinned. “Yeah. That was sweet. After I made that deal, I was able to travel wherever I wanted, do what I wanted. And the prices my images are selling for still blows my mind.”
He placed the steaks on the conveyor.
“That show in L.A. you mentioned…is it a sale?”
“Yeah. At Gallery 228. A new dealer. Generally I do really well at those shows.”
She nodded. She felt…proud. It had taken Nate a while to find his way, too, though not as long as it had taken her. When she’d met him and Derek, Nate had been running a business renting bicycles at the beach. He’d done well, had lots of flexibility and was outside a lot, as he loved to be, near the ocean. When he and Derek weren’t doing triathlons, he’d played around taking pictures, displaying them every Sunday at the Arts and Crafts show on Cabrillo Boulevard, selling the odd one. Selling photographs was tough in Santa Barbara because of the big photography school. Everyone was a photographer. She was so happy it had turned into such a successful career for him.
“So, the money’s good…but you love it, don’t you?”
He paused, a bottle of wine in each hand. “Yeah. I love it.” He set the wine down.
“Your eyes are going to get better,” she said softly, putting a hand on his forearm. Strong, bare, soft with dark hair. She felt the muscles tighten beneath her fingers. “I know it.”
He nodded, reached into the cart again, removing his arm from her touch, and she moved through the checkout, pulling her wallet out of her purse to pay.
When they stopped at another grocery store, they, too, had no shiitake mushrooms. “Damn.” Krissa stood there, arms folded. “Well, there’s one more place we can try.”
“Do we have to have shiitake? How about oyster mushrooms? They have those.”
“I want shiitake.”
He shrugged. When they had no luck at the next store, Krissa could have screamed.
Nate put his hand on her back and rubbed. “Hey. Mushrooms are not an important thing.”
His touch and his words calmed her. He was right. She was just being her usual stubborn self. She shook her head, and they selected mushrooms from the types available at that store.
Nate helped her carry the groceries into the house and put them away in the kitchen. Then he sat at the counter while she mixed up the rub for the steaks.
As she pressed the spice mixture into the meat the phone rang.
“Want me to get it?” Nate asked.
“Sure.”
He grabbed the cordless phone. “Hi. Hey, Derek.” He listened, looked at Krissa. “Okay. What time? Yeah. I’ll tell her.” He pressed the button to disconnect and set the phone down.
Krissa’s stomach tightened. “He’s not coming home for dinner, is he?”