Authors: Noelle Adams
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Contemporary Fiction
Lynn gasped, dumbstruck by how the words were a mirror of
the same words she’d heard spoken earlier today.
She stared at Victoria—dark hair, slender figure, eyes
shifting between blue and gray—and then turned to stare blankly at Nathan.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his forehead creasing.
“Nothing,” Lynn managed to say.
But it was a lie. She’d just been struck by a bizarre
possibility that was indeed absolutely, incredibly
wrong
.
***
Victoria went to use the restroom as
they were leaving, and Lynn and Nathan waited for her in the quiet hall.
Nathan reached over and turned her to face him gently.
“What’s wrong, Lynn?”
“Nothing,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “I
thought it went fine.”
“It did go fine. I think Victoria likes you, but you’ve been
distracted or something. What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” she said again—the idea was too tenuous in
her mind to even pursue at the moment. “I had a good time. Victoria is lovely.
I wouldn’t mind spending more time with her, but it’s entirely up to you. She’s
your daughter, so whatever you think is best.”
Nathan took her face in his hands and peered into it with
such scrutiny that Lynn was afraid he could read her mind. Then his hands
gentled, and he slid his fingers back into her hair. “Thanks for meeting her,”
he said, his voice a little thick. “It meant a lot to her. To me.”
Lynn felt her cheeks warm. “No problem. I enjoyed it.”
Something was fluttering in her stomach now, and it had nothing to do with the
inexplicable idea she'd had earlier. “She’s a really good kid.”
Nathan leaned into a soft kiss, his lips brushing hers
gently. When a rush of feeling washed over her, Lynn wrapped her arms around
him.
He was warm and solid and hard against her, and he felt
real, human—strong and vulnerable both. She melted into the embrace.
Pulling his mouth away at last, Nathan leaned his forehead
against hers. “I’ll call you later tonight, and maybe we can get together
tomorrow night.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I’m free.”
He kissed her again, and, even wrapped up in the heady
sensations, Lynn was suddenly terrified.
She was feeling way too much for him, far too deeply.
It just wasn’t casual for her anymore.
She was about to pull away in some sort of protective
gesture, but they were interrupted in a different way.
“Oh, please.” Victoria’s voice came from the entrance of the
bathroom. “I really didn’t need to see
that
.”
***
Lynn was confused and agitated and
restless on leaving the restaurant. So instead of heading home, she went to the
coffee shop down the block from the
Cooler
’s offices.
It was crowded but, after she’d gotten a cup of coffee, she
spotted Beth sitting with her laptop at a small table in the corner.
Lynn went to join her.
“How did it go?” Beth asked, looking surprised and smiling
in a way that now seemed eerily familiar.
“Good, I think. She’s a nice girl.”
“Good.” Beth adjusted her glasses. “How did he act? Was he
happy with how things went?”
“I…I think so.” Lynn peered at Beth, trying to reconcile
what was real with what had crossed her mind at dinner earlier. “I didn’t mean
to interrupt your studying. You can go ahead, and I’ll just sit here quietly.”
Beth laughed. She’d been laughing more often recently—Lynn
realized—than she had when she first started the internship. She was a reserved
girl by nature, and life had clearly hurt her. But she seemed to trust Lynn and
like her. “I needed a break anyway.”
“Did your dad ever date anyone?” Lynn asked, hoping she
wasn’t over-stepping. The walls still came up quickly with Beth, and Lynn was
beginning to suspect why that was.
“Not much. He did when I was young. I think he was trying
to find a mom for us, but nothing really worked out. After a while, he just
stopped dating completely. I…I wasn’t always happy with him, but I think I
would have been happy for him to date, if it was someone like you.”
“Thank you,” Lynn said, genuinely touched. Her mind whirled,
trying desperately to find a way to sustain the conversation and find out what
she needed to know. “He was probably trying to do what was best for you—by not
dating, I mean.”
“Maybe. I think, though, he was just too busy to bother. He
was always too busy.”
The conversation lagged, as Beth didn’t seem to want to talk
any further about her father and Lynn had trouble thinking of anything else.
Finally, Lynn said, apparently random, “I’ve always like the
name Beth. It reminds me of
Little Women
.”
Beth perked up, clearly pleased with what she assumed was an
entirely new and safe topic. “That’s always been my favorite book! And Beth is
my favorite character.”
“Mine too.” Jo had actually been Lynn’s favorite character,
but that fact didn’t serve this particular conversation. “I just wish she
hadn’t died in the end.”
“Yeah. You know, this is kind of embarrassing, but I used to
write stories, new endings of the novel where she wouldn’t die, but would marry
Laurie instead. I had a whole collection of them.”
Lynn’s heart lurched, and she stared at the girl in front of
her—the girl who looked back at her with Nathan’s blue-gray eyes.
She had no proof at all and no explanation for how it had
happened.
But she knew. She
knew
.
Nathan hated lying to Lynn, but he
was doing it anyway.
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“Okay,” Lynn said, her voice sounding different on the other
end of the call, like she felt rebuffed by his non-response.
“I really
don’t
know,” he repeated, feeling like an
ass. Not only had he lied to her—again—but he’d hurt her feelings by acting
cagey about something she would think he had no reason to keep private.
“Elizabeth doesn’t visit very often,” he explained, closing his eyes and
choosing his words carefully. “She likes her own space.”
“That’s fine. No big deal. I was just wondering.”
He’d really hurt her feelings. He could hear it in her
forced-casual tone. He impatiently waved away the server who’d been hovering to
refill his coffee cup and tried to think of some way to fix it.
He wanted to tell Lynn about Elizabeth’s disappearance. He
desperately wanted to tell her, to share a little of this huge gaping wound in
his life.
But telling her would mean something significant. It would
mean their relationship wasn’t what they’d always claimed it was. Wasn’t
casual, physical, no-strings-attached. Making himself so vulnerable—with his
secrets, with his feelings, with his family—just wasn’t something Nathan Livingston
did.
It was just hard to keep from loosening his grip. Plus, for
some reason, Elizabeth had kept coming up in conversation over the last week,
as if fate was trying to tell him it was time this secret was shared.
“Nathan?” Lynn prompted, her voice clear and dry. “You still
there?”
“Yes. I’m here.” He picked up his coffee mug to take a sip,
mostly for something to do. It was empty, of course. He caught the server’s eye
and waved him back.
“You all right?”
He swallowed, so torn he was almost paralyzed by it.
When he didn’t answer, Lynn asked, very softly, “Is there…is
there anything you wanted to tell me?”
He didn’t know how she could know him so well. He’d always
thought he was a master at hiding, at playing roles, at keeping himself locked
tightly away where it was safe.
The knowledge that she wasn’t fooled was absolutely
terrifying.
One woman shouldn’t be able to rip down the walls, the
towers, the foundation, the entire fortress that had protected him for years.
“No,” he said at last, after a pause that was far too long
for normal conversation. His voice sounded too gravelly to his own ears. “Of
course not. Sorry if I sounded distracted. I was looking at an email.”
This time, Lynn didn’t answer right away. She finally said,
too quickly, “Okay. No worries. I’ll let you work. Talk to you later.”
She’d hung up before Nathan could respond.
He stared at his phone blankly.
It was probably for the best. She needed to be reminded
about the nature of their relationship. Just like he did. This would help put
things back to the way they were supposed to be.
Casual. Physical. No strings attached.
He hit the button to call her back.
“Lynn, I’m sorry,” he said when she answered. “I wasn’t
really reading email while I was talking to you. I just…I can’t…” He was
paralyzed by indecision again.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me everything. I didn’t
mean to push. Just don’t lie to me, okay?”
“Okay.” He rubbed his forehead between his fingers and
thumb. He had no idea how they could be having this conversation—when neither
of them was really saying
anything
—and still understand each other. But
they did. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
There was a long moment of silence on the line before she
continued, “So are we still getting together tonight?”
It had been almost a week since they’d gotten together,
since they’d both been busy for the last several days. “I think so. Let me
double-check.” When he checked his appointments, he muttered, “Damn it! They
scheduled me for a teleconference at eight this evening. It will last at least
a couple of hours.”
“No big deal. We can get together afterwards if it wraps up
early enough. If not, maybe this weekend.”
“Tomorrow for sure,” he said. He felt restless and
frustrated, and he knew it was partly because he was used to regular sex with her,
and it had been too long since he’d seen her.
He was tempted to just cancel the teleconference.
“I can’t tomorrow. There’s this press association annual
dinner, and we always go.”
“We?” he asked, his shoulders stiffening.
“Matt and I.”
He didn’t respond immediately, but the image of Lynn and her
ex-husband dressing up and going to a dinner together—what would look to the
world like a date—made him bristle.
“I have to go with him,” she continued, evidently reading
disapproval in his silence. “We’ve gone every year for eight years. It would
hurt his feelings.”
“So you go,” Nathan said, forcing himself to be reasonable
when he felt anything but.
“It’s not a problem, is it? I mean, it’s not a date or
anything.”
“And
he
knows that?”
“Of course he knows that. We’re just friends.”
Friends who knew each other intimately. Friends who had
fucked a lot, even after their marriage was over.
Nathan didn’t like it at all.
“Nathan?” Lynn prompted.
“What am I going to say?” he said at last. “That you can’t go?”
“That would probably be a mistake,” she replied very slowly.
“I’m not going to say it. We can get together later in the
weekend.”
They said goodbye and hung-up, but it had been a very
unsettling conversation—in more than one way—and Nathan was annoyed and rattled
when he put his phone down.
“Did you have a fight with Lynn?” Victoria asked, sitting
down at the table across from him.
He jerked in surprised and picked his head up off his hand.
She’d been running late for their normal breakfast, and he hadn’t seen her come
into the restaurant. “No. Of course not.”
She gave him a suspicious look. She looked very young in her
school uniform, and she had no right to also look so knowing.
“Just a little argument,” he admitted. “Nothing serious.”
“Don’t blow it. You’re not going to find someone better.”
“Thanks for your vote of confidence.” His voice was ironic,
but he knew very well she was speaking the truth.
***
“Just park here somewhere,” Nathan
told his driver, when they reached Lynn’s street.
The driver pulled to the curb in a loading zone, and Nathan
looked out of the tinted back window of his car at Lynn’s apartment building
across the street.
He probably shouldn’t be here.
He knew the press association dinner had ended just a few
minutes ago, though, and he wanted to see Lynn.
So he waited.
It wasn’t too long before a cab pulled in front of her
building, and Lynn got out. She looked gorgeous, in a slinky evening gown and
hair that was slipping out of her updo.
He sucked in his breath when Matt Gorman got out of the cab
too. They talked for a minute and then hugged.
Nathan had only met Matt once, several years ago, but he heartily
disliked the man and his too-long hair and his laidback attitude, as if he
didn’t take anything seriously.
And he definitely didn’t like his hands all over Lynn.
But she pulled away and waved as Matt got back into the cab.
She stood on the sidewalk until the cab drove away, and then her eyes moved
unerringly over to Nathan’s car.
She looked towards him for a minute without moving. Then she
walked across the street to stand next to the car.
Nathan got out.
“Checking on me?” she asked coolly, her eyebrows raised.
He shook his head. “I just wanted to see you.”
It was almost entirely the truth.
She gave him an assessing look, as if she didn’t quite
believe him. Then she sighed. “Come on up if you want.”
Nathan gave instructions to his driver and followed Lynn up
to her apartment.
He figured she probably wanted to have a conversation—and he
could hardly blame her—but it had been a week since they’d had sex and his body
responded quickly to the lush curve of her ass in her clingy dress and the way
the hair was slipping out of her clip and brushing against the smooth skin of
her neck.
He’d never been to her apartment before, just as she’d never
been to his. The place looked like her—pleasant, eclectic, a little messy.