Moonlight on Butternut Lake (14 page)

It was exciting, at first, not to mention flattering, to be wooed the way Brandon wooed her. There were the love notes he wrote to her and tucked into the pages of her college textbooks so that she would find them later while she was studying. And there were the presents he surprised her with, including the beautiful bracelet he slipped into the pocket of her waitressing uniform that she discovered when she reached for her check pad and pencil. And there were the grander gestures, too, gestures that reminded Mila of scenes from some impossibly romantic movie, like the time he drove her out to the country and surprised her
there with a picnic that included champagne, strawberries, and several kinds of unpronounceable French cheeses.

Even in those early, heady days, though, there were signs of trouble. For one thing, Brandon needed to know where she was every second of every day. And if she wasn't in class or at work, he expected her to be with him. And only with him. She'd introduced him to a few of her friends, but she quickly realized that he had no interest in spending time with them. And what was more, he had no interest in
her
spending time with them either. In fact, he seemed to resent it when she did. So, gradually, Mila saw less and less of them, until her already limited circle of friends shrank to just one friend: Brandon.

But Brandon's possessiveness wasn't the worst thing about him. His jealousy was. It had started with him being suspicious of her male friends, no matter how innocent her relationships with them were. He was convinced, for instance, that Ted, her study partner in her anatomy class, had a thing for her. And nothing Mila said could convince him otherwise. Finally, she told Ted she couldn't study with him anymore. She was sorry, too. They worked well together. But she was tired of arguing with Brandon about him.

Even after she stopped seeing Ted, though, Brandon found men in her life to be jealous of. An old friend from high school she and Brandon ran into at a movie theater once. Or a man from down the block whose dog Mila stopped to pet. It was worrying to Mila that Brandon could make even her most innocent social interactions seem fraught with intrigue. And lately, it had driven a wedge between the two of them that had Mila wondering if she could stay in this relationship any longer.

But here she'd been torn. There were good things about Brandon, too. He could be charming, and sweet, and, for all his seriousness,
he could be funny, too. He always knew how to make her laugh, and not only that, but he always knew how to make her feel needed and loved, too.

But tonight, tonight had changed everything. Brandon was waiting for her when she came out of the coffee shop, and, at first, she was happy to see him. She'd gotten a biology exam back that day that she'd done well on, and she was in a celebratory mood. She told him, in fact, in his arms outside the coffee shop, exactly how she wanted to celebrate. But Brandon, she quickly realized, was preoccupied, and while she chattered all the way back to her apartment, he remained silent. Finally, when they got back, he spoke.

“Who was that man at the counter tonight?” he asked, sitting down on her living room couch. “The one with the Minnesota Twins baseball cap on.”

And Mila groaned inwardly as she sat down on the couch beside him. They'd had this conversation before. Not about this customer. But about other customers. “Brandon, I don't know who he was,” she said honestly. “Some guy who wanted a cup of coffee. He was probably getting off a late shift or something.”

“So you think he was just there for the coffee?” he asked her, in a tone that implied she was naive.

She sighed, but then decided to use humor to try to diffuse the situation. Humor because logic, apparently, didn't work with Brandon.

“Actually, Brandon, he wasn't just there for a cup of coffee,” she said conspiratorially. “He's FBI. He was there to meet a high-level informant. And our fry cook, Javier? That job is a cover. He's actually—”

“Okay. Very funny. I get it,” he snapped. “You think I'm paranoid. But I saw the way that man was looking at you, Mila. And
that's not the way you look at someone when all you want from her is a refill on your coffee.”

“Brandon, he wasn't looking at me. He was reading a newspaper.”

“Mila, I saw him looking at you. And I saw him talking to you, too.”

“I took his order, Brandon. That's my job.”

“No, you did more than take his order. You had a conversation with him. I saw you, Mila. I was watching you.”

She paused. She had spoken to that man, briefly. But she'd spoken to him long before the end of her shift, long before Brandon was supposed to pick her up. “How long were you watching me, Brandon?” she asked then, not really wanting to know the answer.

He shrugged. “A while.”

“How long is ‘a while.'”

“A couple of hours.”

“
A couple of hours?
Are you serious, Brandon? Why would you do that?”

“Because I wanted to know what you do at work when I'm not around, Mila.”

“I wait tables, Brandon,” she said, exasperated. “I think that's pretty obvious. And I don't like the fact that you were watching me do it without my knowing it. It's . . . it's kind of creepy.”

“Creepy?” he repeated, tensing. “You think I'm creepy?” There was an air of menace in his voice that she'd never heard before. It frightened her a little.

“No, I don't think
you're
creepy,” she said carefully. “I think what you
did
was creepy. There's a difference.”

And then it happened, so fast that she didn't even see it
coming. One minute they were sitting next to each other on the couch, and the next, the back of his hand was connecting with her face. She screamed, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God, Brandon,” she said through her fingers. “Why did you do that?” And before he could answer her, she ran to the bathroom and locked herself in. That was an hour ago, and their uneasy standoff had continued since then.

“Mila, please, let me in,” Brandon was saying now. “Please. I am
so
sorry. I don't even know what happened. Really, I'm as shocked as you are. I've never done anything like that before.
Ever.
I swear.”

“Brandon, just go home,” she said finally. Wearily. “I'm tired, and I need to get some sleep. If I can get the swelling in my lip to go down, I'll have to go to class and work tomorrow.”

“Your lip . . . your lip is swollen?” he asked. He sounded horrified.

“Yes, Brandon. It's very swollen.”

“Oh, Mila,” she heard him say softly. And then a moment later she heard something else. At first she thought she was imagining it. But when she got up from sitting on the floor and pressed her ear against the bathroom door, she realized she wasn't imagining it. It was actually happening. Brandon was crying.

She was so astonished that she forgot, momentarily, how angry she was. “Brandon,” she said, unlocking the door and cracking it open. He was sitting on the floor of the hallway, his face buried in his hands. She came hesitantly out of the bathroom and knelt down beside him. Then she touched his face. It was wet. He gave another ragged sob and wiped impatiently at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Brandon, you're crying,” she said wonderingly. She'd never seen a man cry before, though admittedly, her experience with
men was limited. She'd never known her father. And she'd only dated a few guys in high school and college. Those relationships, though, had been pretty uncomplicated. There hadn't been any crying in them, hers or theirs.

“Brandon, why are you crying,” she asked now, feeling an unexpected tug of sympathy for him.

“I'm crying because I hurt you,” he said miserably. “Why would I hurt you, Mila, when I love you so much?”

“I don't know,” Mila said truthfully.

He looked up at her now, for the first time, and saw her lip. Another sob, low and hoarse, escaped from him. “Jesus, Mila, what have I done to you?”

“You gave me a fat lip,” she said, her fingers moving to touch it gingerly. “And judging from the feel of it, it's getting fatter by the minute.”

He went and got her a bag of ice then and coaxed her back onto the couch in the living room. Then he held the ice carefully against her lip. The pressure hurt, but the cold felt good. And when her lip got a little numb, it took the edge off the pain.

He talked to her then about everything that was happening in his life. The stress, he said, had been building up for a while. There was his new construction crew boss, who, for some reason, didn't like Brandon and would always make him do the hardest jobs, and then always complained about how he did them. There was his family, too. He didn't get along with his parents, especially his dad, who, he explained, was a real hothead who'd thrown him out of the house when Brandon was still practically a teenager. But mostly, he said, the pressure in his life had to do with Mila.

“With
me
?” she said when he told her this. “How am I making you feel pressured?”

“You're not doing it on purpose,” he said. “It's just that . . . it's just that I love you so much, Mila. And I'm afraid you don't love me the same way. Or, worse”—his brown eyes searched hers—“I'm afraid there's someone else you love instead of me.”

“Brandon, there's no one else,” she said automatically. But she didn't say anything about loving him the same way he loved her, because she didn't know if she did. He seemed to love her so intensely. So . . .
so crazily,
almost. Much later, of course, Mila realized that what Brandon had felt for her wasn't necessarily love. It was instead a feeling born of a need to possess her, to control her. To
own
her, really. But in her naïveté, she believed he loved her, though not necessarily in a way she
wanted
to be loved. She tried to tell him that now.

“Brandon, I do care about you. Very much. But the way you care about me—”

“
Love
you,” he interrupted.

“The way you love me,” she continued, “it makes me feel uncomfortable sometimes. Like you're . . . like you're suffocating me. A little bit, anyway. And I can't understand why you feel so jealous all the time. Why, when I tell you I'm not attracted to other men, you don't believe me.”

“It's probably because you're so beautiful,” he said, almost reverently. “And so amazing. What man wouldn't want you, Mila? And knowing that, I just don't have any peace of mind, I guess. And I won't, either. Until I make you mine.”

“Make me yours?” she echoed, with a slight frown.

Brandon nodded seriously. “Yes, Mila. I want to marry you.”

She stared back at him uncomprehendingly.

“Well, you don't have to look so shocked,” Brandon said, obviously hurt by her response.

“Brandon, I
am
shocked. We've never talked about this before.”

“Well, maybe we should, Mila. I love you. I want us to get married. I want us to spend the rest of our lives together.”

But Mila could only shake her head. “Brandon, you can't be serious.”

“I'm completely serious,” he said. “In fact, I've been thinking about it since the night I met you. Will you marry me, Mila? Will you be my wife?”

“Brandon,” she said softly. “I can't marry you.”

“Give me one reason why not.”

“I'll give you a hundred.”

“Okay, then, forget it. Don't give me a reason why not. Just answer a question for me, Mila. And answer it honestly.”

She hesitated. “All right.”

He took the ice pack off her lip and looked into her eyes. “Has anyone ever loved you the way I love you, Mila?”

“Brandon—”

“No, seriously. Think about it.
Really
think about it. And be honest with yourself about it, too. Has anyone ever loved you the way I have?”

Have they?
she wondered. Her mother loved her, she supposed, in her own way. Her own ineffectual way. But when Mila was growing up, she'd made no secret of the fact that mothering Mila was, at best, inconvenient, and, at worse, burdensome. Not surprisingly, they'd never been close, and now that her mother had moved away, they'd drifted even further apart. And then there was Heather. Heather cared about her. Mila knew she did, and when she needed to be reminded of it, she reread Heather's letters to her. But while Heather was a big part of Mila's life, she thought now, Mila was a smaller part of Heather's life. After all, Heather had a husband, and two sons now, with a third son on
the way. Add to that her part-time nursing job at a community clinic, and her full-time job working on a family farm, and it was easy to wonder how Heather even had time to
think
about her, let alone
write
to her.

Mila sighed. Her lip was still throbbing, but there was a new pain now, a dull, hollow ache that seemed to reside somewhere deep in her chest. It was loneliness, she knew, and it had been there all her life. Well, most of her life. Except for the times she'd spent in Heather's office. And except for these last few months with Brandon. Because when things had been good between them, when Brandon was at his best, that ache had receded. That ache had almost disappeared completely. Was that what it meant to be loved? Really loved? Did it make the loneliness go away? Or at least far enough away that you could forget, for a little while at least, that it was even there?

“Mila, has anyone ever loved you the way I have?” Brandon asked again.

“No,” she said suddenly. “No, Brandon. They haven't.”

“I didn't think so,” he said, reaching out and stroking her hair. “And, Mila? I promise that what happened tonight will never happen again.”

“It can't happen again, Brandon. I mean it. If it does . . .”
If it does, it's over,
she almost said, but she didn't want to spoil the moment.