Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) (27 page)

Even now, she could see the remnants of grief on his face.  She
understood that he didn’t like reliving this story any more than she did.

“Then we had finals,” Joe said.

Sarah remembered vividly the two of them trying to study in between
phone conferences with his father and brother.  Joe’s mother was fading
quickly, and every phone call marked the further decline.  It finally got to
the point where Joe couldn’t bear to answer the phone.  He let it go to
voicemail so he could just listen, and process the information on his own
without having to say anything to his dad.

“Advanced Federal Tax Law,” Joe said.  My last final.  December
twentieth.”

Sarah remembered how nervous he was about it, even though he’d always
done well in the class.  He planned to take the test, then immediately head
home for the winter break.  The two of them had kissed goodbye that morning,
and Sarah wished him good luck with everything.  He promised to call her later.

He never did.  And it was the last kiss they shared for six years,
until Sarah passed out and woke up in the medical clinic at Snowbird.

“What was so important about that class?” Joe asked her, a new look of
pain settling onto his face.  “Can you tell me?  You were there.  Why did I
think it was so important to stay?  What was wrong with me?”

Sarah shook her head.  She was afraid to answer.  Because suddenly she
remembered something on her own.

When she didn’t hear from Joe for days, and then a whole week, she
finally did some investigation.  She had her suspicions about what had
happened, so she searched the public record.

“It wasn’t that day was it?” she asked, her voice choking on the
question.

He nodded.

“Oh,
Joe
. . . ”

“I was four hours too late,” he said.  “She died before I got home.”

The look of anguish on his face was too much.  Sarah got up and went to
him.  She bent down and wrapped her arms around him and held him hard.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“Because of this,” he said.  “Because of exactly what you’re doing
right now.  You would have tried to comfort me.”

“Of course I would!”

“No.  You would have said it was okay,” Joe told her.  “And it wasn’t. 
I screwed up, Sarah.  I wasn’t there.  I never saw her again.”

Sarah couldn’t stand it another minute.  Couldn’t stand hearing him
talk like that, knowing he’d carried it with him all alone for all these
years.  She crawled onto his lap and wrapped her arms around him and held him
the way she wished she could have back then, the way she knew he must have
wanted, but he hadn’t let her, and that hurt her more than she could bear.

“Joe, you should have told me,” she said, tears spilling down her
cheeks.  “I loved you.  I would have helped you.  You know I would.”

“I couldn’t think,” he said, his voice thick.  “It was so . . . .  And
then it went on from there:  the funeral, her ashes, Nate and dad and I
spreading them in her garden—”

A sound escaped his lips, but he covered it with a cough.  Sarah could
feel his body tighten.  He gently pulled away from her, reached for his beer,
and drank it to the bottom.  Then he patted her on the rear and told her she
could go sit down again.

Sarah returned to the couch, but it wasn’t where she wanted to be.  Joe
might not need the comfort right now, but she did.  A pain was spreading from
the center of her chest outward, and she needed to hold on to him more than he
seemed to need her.

But she wrapped herself in the blanket and waited to hear whatever else
he wanted to say.

“So then there was you,” he said.

Sarah swallowed hard.

“I really did love you,” Joe said, looking at her with a different kind
of anguish in his eyes.  “But it was too much.  I couldn’t be happy right
then—it would have been wrong.  I felt so . . . ”  He looked upward as if
searching for the word.  “ . . . ‘guilty’ doesn’t even cover it.  I was a total,
unmitigated asshole for not being at my mother’s side.  Why didn’t I go home
once I knew how close she was?  Why did I think any of my finals or my grades
were so damn important?”

“Joe, you didn’t know . . . ”

“See?” he said, laughing in a way she supposed was meant to disguise
his pain.  “That’s how you would have been.  You would have tried to make me
feel better.  You would have been so
loving
and
supportive
—”

“Of course I would,” Sarah said.  “I loved you.  I wanted to marry
you.”  She hadn’t meant to say that last part, but the two truths were tied
together.  She thought she was part of his life back then—soon to be part of
his family.  But instead he had kept all of this from her.

“So I did what I had to,” he went on, his voice losing its steam.  “I
came back and I made sure you’d never try to console me.  Made sure you’d back
away and never try to love me again.”

Sarah bowed her head with a grief all her own.  It was like reliving
her own death, and hearing now how he’d orchestrated it, how he set out to hurt
her so much she would never come near him, felt like a blow upon a blow.  So
cold, so deliberate, while meanwhile her heart had been disintegrating into a
thousand miniscule pieces.

Joe’s voice sounded dull now, empty.  “It’s amazing how good it feels
to self-destruct.  I thought it would be harder, but it was easy once I
started.  It helped that I stayed drunk most of the time—”

“You did?”  She hadn’t noticed that.  Then again, she avoided him as
much as possible that last semester.

“First thing in the morning,” Joe said, “some Jack in my coffee.  Couple
of beers at lunch, then the really serious drinking started in the afternoons.”

It explained so much, Sarah thought.  The stony, expressionless look on
his face whenever she passed him.  The reckless way he’d grab some girl and
grope her if he knew Sarah was watching.  The complete and deliberate
destruction of their relationship.

“Joe, all this time, I’ve . . . ”

“You’ve hated me,” he said.  “I know.  You should have.  It’s why I
never tried to contact you, even after I sobered up.  I know I hurt you, Sarah,
and I’m so sorry for that.  It’s eaten away at me for years.  Then for whatever
reason, I got the gift of you walking into that deposition in San Diego.  It
was like you just dropped from the sky.  And ever since then . . . ”

“Your strategy is to be nice to me,” Sarah said.

Joe nodded.

The two of them sat apart for a long time, while Sarah took it all in.

“Can I tell you now?” she finally asked, getting up from the couch and
going over to him again.  She climbed onto his lap and wrapped her arms around
his neck.  “I’m so sorry, Joe.  You’re a good man.  I’m sorry all of that
happened to you.  It must have been so awful . . . ”

She held his face between her hands and began kissing his cheeks, his
jaw, his temple.  Treating him tenderly the way she would have back then.  Then
she brought her lips back to his mouth where they belonged.

Joe deepened the kiss.  He shifted her so that she faced him, and she
sat astride him on the chair.  He threaded his hands through her hair and
kissed her with a kind of need different from any he’d shown her so far.

He left her mouth and began kissing a trail down her throat.  She undid
the top two buttons of her blouse so he could continue following the line down.

There was nothing frantic or playful about how quickly their clothes
fell away this time, it was more of a necessity, Sarah thought, one steady,
continuous movement from where they had been to where they needed to be.  He
lifted her and carried her into his bedroom.  Then laid her down gently on his
bed and continued the slow, steady course toward reminding her why she fell for
him in the first place, and how she might find her way back there again.

“Sarah—”

But she silenced him with a kiss.  She couldn’t hear any more—not
tonight.  She needed to be in her body now, to feel his, not to think or hear,
but just shut out the world and be with him.

She kissed him the way she used to, with a kind of sweetness she had
been careful not to show him since they began again on her birthday.

Joe seemed to know the difference, too.  He pulled back and looked into
her eyes.

“That’s it, Red,” he said.  “That’s what I’ve missed.”

Thirty

Sarah’s phone rang far too early.  She had retrieved it from her jacket
some time during the night and plugged into the outlet beside Joe’s bed.  Now she
regretted not letting the battery die.

“What,” she answered irritably.  She saw who it was on her display.

“Morning, killer.  They want a meeting with you as soon as possible.  I
volunteered to wake you up.”

“Mickey . . . ”  Sarah batted away Joe’s hand, which was already
creeping up her torso.  “I got in late.  I need sleep.”

“Then you shouldn’t send out e-mails with the tantalizing subject line
of ‘How We Will Win Our Case.’  People get excited.”

Sarah pressed the phone closer to her ear.  She wasn’t sure if Joe
could hear Mickey’s side of the conversation.

“I’ll come in this afternoon,” Sarah said.  “I’m too beat.”

“If by this afternoon you mean nine o’clock this morning, then that
should be fine.”

“Mickey.”

“Sarah.  You’re doing good work—Calvin’s impressed.  So tell whoever’s
there to get off of you so you can come in and show off.”

“No one’s here,” Sarah said, squeezing Joe’s fingers to keep them from
straying higher.  Then she gave him a light elbow in the chest to get him to
knock it off.

“See you in two hours,” Mickey said.

She groaned.  “Yeah.”

Then she hung up and burrowed deeper into Joe’s arms.

“Mickey, huh?” he asked.  “He still after you?”

“Only in the vaguest of ways.  But he got me this job, so . . . ” 
Sarah yawned and spread her hands on top of Joe’s.  “ . . . if you’re enjoying
feeling my breasts right now, you have him to thank.”

Joe kissed the back of her neck.  “I’ll send him some champagne.”

He got out of bed just when Sarah was looking forward to falling asleep
with him again.

“Want some coffee?” he said.

“I don’t, but yes.  Really strong, please.”

Sarah fought reality as long as she could, but had to pry open her eyes
once Joe returned with mugs for both of them and climbed back into bed.  Sarah
propped up her pillow next to him, and draped her leg over his while they
drank.

“Now for the legal issue,” she said, sighing a little with the effort
of it.

It had been easier to push aside when it was just sex.  Or just sex and
maybe a little more.

But since last night she had no way of rationalizing anymore why it
might be all right—an exception to the ethical rule—for her to continue an
intimate personal relationship with her opposing counsel.

“Let’s lay out the options,” Sarah said, trying to sound professional
and lawyerly while lounging naked in her opponent’s bed.  “I tell Calvin, you
tell whoever your boss is, we both get fired.”

“Option A,” Joe said.

“Option B,” Sarah continued, “one of us withdraws from the case and frees
the other one to continue.”  She took another sip of blacker than black
coffee—Joe really had taken her at her word and made it strong enough that she
could feel it searing through her bloodstream—and waited for him to say
something.

“Let’s . . . hold off a while longer,” he said.

“How much longer?  Joe, we could get into serious trouble—”

“We’ll be careful,” he said.  He set down his coffee and looped his
arms around her waist.  “I don’t want to talk shop right now.  You and I have
plenty of work to do today—we can be lawyers later.  Right now we’re off duty.”

He made a persuasive case, especially since one of his hands was
currently threading between her thighs.

“Okay, but we need to talk about it,” she insisted as she set her mug
on the bedside table and slid back to horizontal.  “Tonight, all right?”

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Joe, focus . . . ”

“I am focusing,” he murmured as his hands and lips continued to
explore.

They would talk about it that night, Sarah promised herself.  Make a
decision about what to do.

But for the moment she had to admit that Joe’s topic of focus was a lot
more enjoyable than hers.

***

“Welcome back to civilization,” Mickey said, leading her toward the
conference room.  “This is what we call an ‘office.’  And those are lawyers,”
he said, pointing to the various people working there on a Saturday morning. 
“They’re not bell hops, so don’t try to tip them.”

Sarah yawned.

“Come on, now, killer,” Mickey said.  “Look sharp.  Today’s a big day
for Sarah Henley.”