Seth shrugged, apparently not at all fazed by Susan's anger. “Of course I did.”
“I'm glad he did,” Michael said, sitting gently beside her. She lay on the couch, propped up by pillows. She was wearing one of the summer shifts she'd bought when he'd still been living there, but she filled it out a hell of a lot more now than she had then.
“There was no reason,” Susan said, her eyes imploring him not to overreact. “I'm just fine.”
“You've been to the doctor?” he asked, certain she had, but needing that reassurance anyway. He wanted
to run his fingers through the layers of her hair, tooâand to kiss the pout off those lips.
Susan nodded. “She says I'm fine. I just overheated walking on
your
treadmill.”
Understanding dawned. “You went for longer than half an hour, didn't you?”
“Um, a bit.” She looked down, picking some imaginary lint off her dress.
“And you were probably walking on an incline at a faster speed than you should have been.”
“Just trying to make the delivery as easy as possible,” she said. “Dr. Goodman told me to do as much as my body would allow.”
He couldn't believe she'd just said that, as if the doctor's words were a strong defense on her behalf. “Then, why didn't you?”
“Because there's no meter that tells you what it will allow,” she said crankily, sitting up beside him. “Your body only tells you when it doesn't allow something.”
“Laura's on her way over.” Seth jumped into the conversation. He sat relaxed in his chair, with a huge grin on his face. “She had to drop the kids off at a swim party, and then she's going to help Susan bake cookies.”
Michael looked at Susan, his expression serious. “You aren't baking today.”
“It's no big deal, Michael,” she said, brushing him off with a wave of her hand. “I can sit at the table the whole time. Besides, there's nothing wrong with me that a good dose of air-conditioning can't fix.”
Alarm returned, cramping his stomach. “What exactly did Dr. Goodman say?”
“Just that I overheated. Nothing more.”
“She also said Susan shouldn't try to do quite as much now as she did before she was pregnant.”
“Believe me, baking a few cookies isn't nearly what I had on the agenda for today,” Susan quipped dryly.
Standing, Michael went for the phone. “Would you mind if I called her myself?” he asked Susan, waiting for the number.
“Yes, I'd mind!” Susan stood, tooâbut very slowly, Michael noticed. “I'm not a child who needs looking after,” she muttered.
“She really did say there's nothing to worry about,” Seth added, resting his head against the back of the chair. “The babies are fine. Susan's fine.”
Still uncomfortable, Michael turned to Seth. “Did you ask if there's any reason Susan shouldn't stay here alone?”
“I asked,” Susan snapped. Fainting certainly did nothing for her disposition.
“And?”
“None.”
“She said there's no reason at all,” Seth elaborated.
Michael wished his friend's words had reassured him. But they hadn't. The pressure in his chest grew until he knew his time was up. Susan could have been in serious trouble that morning, and she'd been there all alone. He couldn't take a chance that something like this would happen again.
Which meant that whether he chose to or not, he was going to have to come to terms with living a life
he'd never wanted. Being a man he'd never needed to be.
He just didn't know how in hell he was going to pull it off.
Â
“You AND LAURA set a date yet?” Michael asked later that afternoon. He and Seth were in the nursery, assembling the furniture Susan had purchased sometime since Michael's last visit.
“She wants to wait until after Susan has the babies,” Seth said easily. “She wants Susan to stand up with us.”
Michael froze, crib directions in hand. “You've actually asked her to marry you?” He'd been ribbing Seth, not expecting a serious answer.
“Yep.” Seth pushed his way under the crib, clutching a screwdriver.
Grabbing a wrench, Michael held the bolt Seth was twisting a screw into. “I'm happy for you, man,” he finally said. And shocked. He knew Seth and Laura were seeing each other again, but the last he'd heard, Seth was still holding out on tying her kids to an absentee dad.
Seth looked up, wearing the stupidest grin Michael had ever seen. “Yeah, me, too,” he said sheepishly.
The bolts on the first crib finished, Michael went back and double-checked every one of them. A tiny life was at stake here.
“My work satisfactory?” Seth asked, laughing at him. He was standing across the room, the pieces of the other crib spread at his feet.
“Smart-ass,” Michael said, wishing he felt a little more like laughing himself.
Without directions this time, they silently set to work on the second crib.
“So, what made you change your mind?” Michael asked about halfway through.
“The kids,” Seth grunted, twisting a bolt so tight Michael was surprised the screw didn't break right off. Seth was making damn sure Michael didn't have to check his work a second time.
“I thought the kids were the reason you
weren't
asking her to marry you.”
“They were until a couple weeks ago, when Jeremy broke down one day on the soccer field. He thought I wasn't marrying his mom because I didn't love him and Jenny, didn't want to be their dad. He thought they were keeping her from being happy. It suddenly became clear to me that while having a man at home every night might be good for them, having a father who loved them was more important.”
Michael wished he could believe it was that easy.
“Besides,” Seth said from beneath the second crib. “I'm home every weekend. I can still coach, help them with their homework, take them to the zoo, keep tabs on their friends.”
Michael wasn't home on weekends. He was lucky if he made it home long enough to turn on some lights.
“And if they act up during the week, I can yell real good by telephone.”
“Sounds like you've got it all worked out.” Michael removed plastic wrap from the second mattress and dropped it in the crib.
“You know,” Seth said conversationally as he laid
out the pieces for the changing table. “You might give marriage some thought yourself.”
“Lay off.”
“I see you're as open-minded as usual.”
Studying the directions in his hand, Michael concentrated on leaving Seth with his head intact. “You have no room to talk, little brother,” he reminded the other man.
Seth got the hint. Setting to work on the changing table, neither of them spoke for quite some time.
“Tell me why you work every hour of every day,” Seth finally said.
“Because I love what I do.”
“More than you love being with Susan?”
“Of course not,” Michael snapped. And then wished he hadn't. Seth's eyes took on an I-told-you-so-light, even if he didn't say the words. But he had it all wrong.
“Look, man, I know how you grew up.” Seth had started in again, and Michael wondered what it would take to shut him up. “Susan says you were working odd jobs by the time you were ten just to help out. That you were buying all your own clothes by the time you were in junior high. And all through high school you held down a full-time job at the local grocery.”
Michael tried to tune Seth out. Everything he was saying was old news. Irrelevant news.
“You put yourself through college on loans and two part-time jobs, and then had to pay off the debt as soon as you graduated.”
“You can stop anytime,” Michael said. Silence
was less boring. “This bar goes across there.” He handed Seth the piece he'd been looking for.
“I understand why the career choices you made seven years ago were necessary. Why supporting yourself while getting far enough ahead to send money to your family was utterly important.”
Though he still wished Seth would simply be quiet, Michael was a tiny bit gratified to know that he had his friend's endorsement on what hadâuntil todayâbeen the most difficult decision of his life.
“But why now?” Seth went on. “You've got to be loaded.”
“I do okay,” Michael acknowledged. It was one of the few things he had to feel proud about.
Seth studied the diagram for assembling the drawers that were supposedly going to line up on one side of the table. “It seems to meâ” he dropped the page and took the pieces Michael had assembled and was already handing to him “âthat your life has changed drastically in the past three or four years, but you've never reassessed your goals accordingly.”
“I am what I am,” Michael said. He wouldn't kid himself, or try to pretend that things were better than they were. If he was going to commit himself to a life of regret, he was at least going to do so with his eyes wide-open.
He could just hear Coppel's voice when he handed in his resignation. They'd probably be able to hear him from Atlanta to Ohio. And Michael could hardly blame him. Only an immature idiot took a job like Michael's and quit a few months later.
Seth stopped what he was doing and stood, hands on his hips, while he looked straight at Michael. “All
I'm saying is that maybe you should give some honest, open-minded thought to your life,” he said, his eyes unusually serious. “You've been pushing yourself at a frantic pace your entire lifeâsince childhood, for God's sake. Isn't it just possible that this need to give everything you are to your career comes more from a lifetime of pushing, of habit?”
“You don't understand,” Michael said automatically. No one ever had.
“Maybe not.” Seth went back to putting the gliders on one drawer while Michael worked on another.
“My career isn't work to me.” Michael needed to explain it for himself, if not for Seth. “It's who I am. I'm very good at what I do.” Michael felt bound to make Seth understand.
“I know you are,” Seth said, sliding his drawer successfully home. “But with nothing else in your life, what's the point?”
Â
WITH LAURA'S HELP, Susan turned out eight-dozen chocolate chip cookies. Seven dozen of them were packed and ready to go by the time Michael and Seth finished the nursery. They were allowed to consume the remaining twelve, along with a couple of glasses of milk.
And then Laura and Seth had to head out. It was getting dark, and Laura's kids would need to be picked up soon.
“Don't they look great together?” Susan asked Michael as they stood together in the doorway watching Seth walk Laura to her car. He was carrying the boxes of cookies, which he was going to deliver for Susan before meeting Laura at her house.
It made Michael uncomfortable to watch them. They weren't really even touching, unless you counted the number of times they rubbed elbows as they walked, but he could feel their closeness.
“Laura was telling me they're looking for a house not far from here,” Susan said.
“They are?” Seth hadn't mentioned anything about a house.
“Yeah.” She waved as the other two pulled away and then shut the front door. “Then whenever Seth's out of town, Laura and I will be nearby.”
And that would make it easier for Seth to play surrogate father to Susan's children as well, Michael surmised. But he needn't have worried. Michael intended to do his duty.
“We need to talk.” Grabbing Susan's arm, he pulled her to a halt.
“Here?” They were still in the hallway.
“The kitchen's fine, I guess,” Michael said, leading the way.
When she got to the kitchen, Susan immediately busied herself drying the dishes and utensils she'd left in the drainer. Suspecting it wasn't good for her to be on her feet for long, considering the day she'd had, Michael found a towel and helped her.
“What's up?” she asked after they'd worked silently for several minutes. She knew something was wrong. She could tell by the way he wouldn't meet her eyes.
“I'm going to quit my job and move back home.”
The bowl in Susan's hands slid to the floor, shattering into tiny pieces.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
B
LOOD RAN down her leg. Susan saw it there. But she didn't feel a cut. Didn't feel anything at all except disbelief. And a crazy sense of unreality, as if she'd stepped out of her life and was watching from the sidelines.
“Watch where you walk.” She heard Michael behind her as she bent to pick up the bigger pieces. She had to get a paper towel before her blood dripped on the floor, too.
Michael appeared in front of her, trash can in hand as he reached for a piece of glass. “You're hurt!” he cried when he caught sight of her leg.
Hauling her upâall 160 pounds of herâhe set her on the counter and examined her laceration more closely.
“It's nothing,” she heard herself say. Glancing down as Michael cleared away the worst of the blood, she wasn't so sure. The soiled washcloth looked kind of scary.
“You were lucky,” he said, probing around the cut.
Susan winced, but was almost glad of the pain. Glad to feel something more than cold.
“It's just a small cut and there's no glass embedded.
Are the bandages and antiseptic still in the same place?”
Nodding, Susan sat dutifully still while he collected supplies, patched her up and then cleaned up the rest of the glass. All the while, she was thinking that if Michael was really coming home for good, she should be ecstatically happy. So why wasn't she?
And then it hit her.
Michael
was why she wasn't happy. He wasn't happy. There'd been no joy in his resolute statement. Come to think of it, she hadn't seen him smile since he'd arrived.
“Were you planning to ask first or just move right in?” She blurted the thought aloud when he was down to the last slivers of glass.
He stopped sweeping and looked up at her. “You'd tell me no?” It had obviously never occurred to him.
“I might.”
“I don't believe that.”
“Believe it, Michael,” she said, her heart splintering into as many shreds as the glass in the trash can.
Finishing with the broom, he put it away, then came to stand in front of her, arms across his chest. “You can honestly tell me you don't want me living here with you?”
No. She couldn't tell him that.
“I won't have you here out of a sense of duty,” she said instead. “And I know that's what this is about.”
“You can't know that,” he argued, strengthening her belief. “Only I can know what's going on inside me.”
She noticed he hadn't denied her accusation. “I know
you
, Michael.” She made to slide down from
the cupboard and he was there, assisting her to a kitchen chair as though she were some kind of invalid.
His courtesy, coming as it did out of a sense of duty, not shared love, hurt her more than she'd have thought possible.
“I can do it myself,” she said, shaking him off.
“Fine.” He sat, as well.
“So you're suggesting this because it's what
you
want above all else.”
“I know that it's right for me to be here where I'm needed.”
“I don't need you here,” she told him truthfully. Not in the way he thought. Not for practical or financial maintenance. She could take care of herselfâand her babiesâjust fine. She was beginning to suspect he didn't even understand
how
she needed him, and if that was the case, he'd never be able to provide for that need. She needed him emotionally, elementally, more deeply than anything physical. She needed him in a way that was stronger than any other connection in her life. She needed him to need her, too. Needed to be a priority to him, not a pasttime.
He watched her silently for several minutes, his jaw twitching slightly from tension.
“I can't believe you said that.” He broke the silence that had fallen, speaking stiffly. “We both know it isn't true.”
“I know no such thing.” She adopted his tone. “Dr. Goodman said just this afternoon that I'm fine here aloneâ”
“But after the babies comeâ”
“I can afford a nanny,” she finished before he had
a chance to. She couldn't allow him to convince her, even a little bit, that his being there was necessary. Because his being there wasn't right.
“A nanny doesn't take the place of a father.”
“And neither does a man whose heart isn't in it.”
He sighed heavily, leaning his forearms on the table. “I'm trying here, Sus.”
“I know.” She put every ounce of love she had for him into those two words.
“I want you to marry me again, soon.”
She'd heard that in her dreams a million times. And in her dreams, the answer was always yes.
“Before the babies are born, you mean?” she asked now.
“Of course.”
“So they're legitimate.”
“Exactly,” he said, obviously breathing a little easier with what he saw as her capitulation.
“No.” Never had a word hurt so much. Never had she been more sure of anything in her life.
“No?”
“No.” He'd better get it soon. She didn't know how much longer she could hold out.
She'd created this mess and it was up to her to fix it. She'd made his life hell, and now she had to put things right for him.
His face a study in disbelief, he said, “You won't marry me.”
“No, I won't marry you.”
Falling back hard in his chair, Michael stared at her. “You're doing this for my benefit, aren't you?”
“Not really.” Cradling her belly with her arms, she shook her head, surprised to find that the words were
completely true. “I'm thinking of all of us, and maybe me most of all.”
“How's that?”
“I had a proposal of passion once, Michael. I know how that feels, to want something with such intensity. To be wanted that much. I can't settle for less.”
She was getting through to him. His eyes were no longer disbelieving. Questioning.
“You're still the only woman for me,” he said. She knew he was remembering back, as she was, to that first proposal so many years ago.
“But we're different now, smarter,” she whispered. “And I can't make the same mistake twice.”
Michael bowed his head, but not before she'd seen the relief flash across his features. That look cut her to the quick, hurting her so badly she couldn't even breathe at first. And when she could breathe again, she couldn't stop the burning behind her eyelids. She bowed her head, tooâuntil she could swallow the telltale tears, sweep them away. Pretend none of this mattered.
For the sake of her babies, she had to be strong.
“And you're okay with this?” Michael asked. “Honestly?”
If she had any hope of convincing him, she was going to have to look him in the face. And not cry.
And try to lie.
“I'm completely certain it's for the best.”
Which was about as much of an answer as he'd given her earlier when she'd asked him what he wanted above all else. They'd be better off if they'd learned to lie to each other somewhere along the way, she told herself wearily.
Leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, Michael reached for her hand, holding it securely between both of his. “And you're okay with my coming and going as I have been?”
No! Susan froze before she voiced the thought. After all, what was her alternative? Never to see him again.
“As you have been lately, where you stayed for a while at a time, or as you have been over the past three years, stopping in for a day or two whenever you could?”
What did it matter? Either one would break her heart.
“In my current position, the most I'd be able to spare is a day or two now and then. Unless I find another company in Cincinnati that I'm interested in buying out.”
Pulling her hand from his, Susan retreated further into herself, talking silently to her babies.
We'll be just fine, guys, we'll be just fine.
She repeated the litany over and over.
“No, Michael, I'm not okay with that.” The words came straight from her heart. She'd had no intention of saying them. “Every time you leaveâ” she looked down at her belly “âI miss you more.”
She had to stop. To take a deep breath. “I think I've used up my strength fighting that loneliness, Michael. I'm tired of missing you.” Meeting his eyes, she begged him to understand. To forgive her for not being able to be everything he needed her to be. “If I can't have you here full-time, I think I'd rather not have you here at all.” She took another deep breath,
and then, like a runaway train, just kept on talking. “I think it would be best for the babies, too.”
Frowning, Michael folded his arms over his chest. “So we're right back where we started,” he said with frustration. “I need to quit my job and come home.”
With the pain so intense, Susan couldn't help considering, just for a moment, if maybe that wouldn't be better. To have part of Michael instead of none.
She couldn't fight the tears any longer as she saw the haunted look in his eyes. “Did you feel completely trapped the whole time you were staying with me this spring and summer?”
“No.” His answer shocked her. Gave her hope. Until he smashed it again. “But I always knew I could leave, that I hadn't committed myself to anything. I always had the safety net of knowing I only had to stay as long as the job kept me here.”
“Get out, Michael.” Susan was through. Couldn't take any more of his honesty. “Just get out.”
“I can't leave you like this, Susan.”
“I want you to,” she said unemotionally. “Really.” And she did. She just couldn't hurt anymore.
“Maybe you and the kids could come on the road with me.”
Her foolish heart jumped at this last hope for happily-ever-after. Only to fall flat once more.
“What and enroll them in a different school every three weeks when we had to move on?”
“They wouldn't be in school for years.”
“What about a pediatrician? We'd just have floating medical records? Three-month check in Denver, ear infection in Albuquerque, croup in Atlanta and six-month check in Washington State?”
“I've never been to Washington State.”
“Not yet, anyway,” she said, ashamed of the bitterness rolling from her tongue.
“It was only a suggestion, Susan.”
“An impossible suggestion.”
“Maybe I'm not the only one with a problem here.”
“What's
that
supposed to mean?”
“Your entire life, you've been fighting for your own freedom, your right to have complete say over your own life.”
Eyes burning, she met his gaze. “You know why.”
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “I even understand.” Leaning forward, Michael continued to hold her gaze. “But did you ever stop to think that maybe part of our problem, from the very beginning, has been your need to go it alone? You're so afraid of being like your mother was, of
becoming
your mother, that you take your ability to handle everything to extremes.”
“That's not a very nice thing to say.”
“But it may be the truth.” She didn't like the compassion she saw in his eyes. Not when it was directed at her. “Look at how you reacted the minute I suggested you quit your job here to follow me. You didn't give the idea a second's consideration before you were shooting it down.”
“You can't raise children on the road, Michael.”
“Maybe not, but did you even consider it? Try to picture it for a second? See if the idea had any merit at all?”
He knew she hadn't.
“Maybe this control thing is why you gave in to the divorce with so little fight.” He paused, as if waiting
for her to reply. Susan didn't have anything more to say.
“It could explain why you've been contented with our arrangement all these years,” he said, speaking more quickly now. “In a sense, you had it allâa lover who adored you, and your freedom, too.”
“Thank you, Dr. Kennedy.” She didn't want to hear what he was saying.
“Right to getting pregnant, this could apply,” he went on, ignoring her sarcasm. “You didn't
ask
me what I thought about our having a baby. You'd already made all the decisions on your own and only came to me for stud service.”