Something About You (Just Me & You) (41 page)

At some point while everyone at the party was conversing,
Sabrina remembered that Ike Fontaine had quietly reached over the table with a shaking
hand and placed it over his wife’s protectively. Then the couple, white-haired,
spectacled and weathered by time, had smiled and looked into each other’s eyes,
still besotted.

Just like newlyweds.

Sabrina swallowed the lump that was lodged in her throat.
Unless she planned to live to a healthy hundred, there would be no diamond
anniversary for her. No husband to take her hand, gaze into her eyes and
appreciate her shiniest facets, as well as her flaws.

She realized she’d been standing in front of a monument of a
Texas Ranger for several minutes with the top of her head collecting snow. A
trio of passing legislative staffers turned to look at her curiously, but she
didn’t care. She fastened the top button of her coat to ward away the chill and
walked toward the parking garage.

There were far better places to be on days like this.

She had to find just one.

The old house felt lonely.

Lonely, dark and cold.

Gage turned on a lamp and looked around him. For once, the
place actually looked lived-in but not necessarily in a good way. Several empty
cups with spent tea bags had collected on the coffee table, and Sabrina’s
sweatshirts and running pants had been haphazardly flung over various pieces of
furniture. The trash bin in the kitchen overflowed with takeout containers, and
a few weeks’ worth of unopened mail had cascaded over the coffee table and onto
the floor. The sheets and comforter on his bed were rumpled. A mascara-streaked
pillowcase testified to many tearful nights.

Gage went back into the living room and began tidying up. As
he picked up Sabrina’s gym clothes, he had a sudden vision of her sitting on
the sofa cross-legged, meticulously opening her mail with that silly letter
opener. He had ribbed and baited her, seduced her to the point where she
seduced him. He never expected that a woman like Sabrina could dissolve; there
had been a desolate tone in her voice when she called up the station. He hadn’t
imagined it. Everything she’d said on air pointed to a single conclusion: she
was lost without him.

It can’t be over.

But nothing explained why her behavior contradicted
everything she’d told him. Or how she could share his bed, gaze at him with
unmasked adoration, tell him she loved him, and then …

Vanish from his life like a practiced escape artist.

Gage took the dirty clothes to the laundry room and cleared
the tables of mugs and cups. The sound of the dishwasher swooshing around broke
the silence as he sifted through the mail to sort out the junk. When he came
back inside from taking out the trash, he still felt chilly. He nudged the dial
on the thermostat until the heat clicked on. He found it amusing that
businesses and government agencies in Texas battened down the hatches at the
first sight of snow flurries. Sabrina definitely wouldn’t still be at work, he
reasoned; he’d heard the radio jock on the afternoon shift announcing various
closings, including the entire Capitol complex.

He got out his cell phone and started to call Sebastian.
Then he looked around him at the bleak, empty house. His nose detected the
faint smell of lilies and incense, Sabrina’s perfume. Or maybe he was only
imagining it.
Screw it
, he thought, putting the phone back in his
pocket. If he were going to be confined to the house because of the crappy
weather, he’d rather it be someone else’s house.

Anyplace but here.

**

Gage lifted his hand to knock on the front door and then
hesitated. What the hell had he been thinking, showing up at the Parker-Cole
house in the middle of a snowstorm without calling first? The large picture
window was framed with multicolored outdoor lights. The twin strands blinked in
tandem, a bright, cheerful counterpoint to his low, sustained gloom.

Only Molly and Sebastian would keep their Christmas lights
up in February.

Nothing his friends could say or do could possibly cheer him
up. Not now. He’d just have to work through it himself, like he always did.
Gage retrieved his car keys from his coat pocket. He was halfway down the front
steps when the front door flew open behind him.

“Good lord, Gage,” Molly said, her eyes wide with concern.
“Come on in before you catch your death from the cold.”

“I thought maybe Sebastian would be home by now.” He glanced
at the empty driveway. “Because he’s not, I’ll just be on my way. Just tell him
I’ll call him—”

“—Oh, shush,” she interrupted staunchly, ushering him in by
the arm. “You’ll do nothing of the sort. Not in this weather. Sebastian had to
give his teaching assistants a ride home, so it might be a while before he gets
here.”

Gage stomped the crust of snow from his boots on the front
mat and looked around him. The house had changed very little since he’d last
been by. The huge juniper Christmas tree had been taken down, but there were
still rolls of wrapping paper in the corner, and empty gift boxes were still
strewn about. The coffee table was littered with numerous glass bowls filled
with ribbon candy, chocolate kisses and mints. Molly wore jeans, her fluffy pink
slippers and a terrible red sweater with Scottish Terriers on the front. It
practically had
gift-from-my-in-laws
appliqued all over it.

“You need a good feeding up,” she said, giving the gap
between his belt buckle and his jeans a critical look. “You could have told us
you were back in town, you know.” Her tone was gently chiding, but he could
hear the genuine worry in her voice.

“Don’t take it personally, Molly,” he told her, following
her toward the kitchen. “Trust me, I’m not good company for anyone right now.”

“That’s because you’ve been starving yourself at … wherever
you’ve been hiding out. Now indulge me and sit.” Molly jerked her head at the
table. “I’ll bring out a plate. We won’t say a word until after you’ve eaten.
Agreed?”

Gage did as he was told and sat. A few minutes later, Molly
came back in with the biggest platter of food he had ever seen. He hadn’t even
thought about food until the savory smell of chicken and cornmeal dumplings
wafted his way. Accompanying the main dish was a side of spiced baby carrots
and some kind of complex green salad that involved goat cheese, walnuts and
dried cranberries. He was definitely hungry. Ravenous, in fact. On first bite,
his taste buds went into sensory overload.
Damn.
Food had never tasted
so good.

Molly sat across from him, drinking her tea and watching him
quietly. When he was finally finished, she cleared the table without a word and
brought out two pieces of chocolate icebox pie.

“
Now
we can talk,” she told him, picking up her fork.
“How come you didn’t call us when you got back in town?” 

“I didn’t want to come around when I still felt like
venting,” Gage told her. “I needed some time to get my thoughts under control.”

“Hmm. I don’t suppose some of those thoughts are of a
certain mutual acquaintance of ours,” she responded dryly. He noticed that
Molly didn’t mention Sabrina by name.

“Are we talking about the mutual acquaintance who can be a
pain in the ass?” he asked.

“Yup, that would be the one,” Molly sighed. “Well, if it
makes you feel any better, said acquaintance has wrapped herself in a hair
shirt and disappeared deep into a cave of self-loathing. Where have you been
staying, Gage?”

“Around,” Gage hedged, taking a bite of the pie. Like all of
Molly’s confections, it was delicious. He didn’t want to think of the dismal
South Congress motel room with dark carpeting so old and dirty he couldn’t
ascertain its original color. “Did our, ah, mutual acquaintance happen to come
by today?”

Molly sighed. “No, Gage. Sabrina’s been MIA for the past month
too. And Sebastian’s right. I should stop meddling before both of you decide to
stop speaking to us for good.” She laughed dryly. “I really thought that if I
could get you and Sabrina under the same roof, you’d realize how wonderful you
are together. How ridiculous was that?”

“It wasn’t ridiculous,” Gage told her kindly but firmly. “At
least one of us came around to the same realization.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Sabrina said some very telling
things on your show today. Yes, Gage, I listen to ‘Fitz and Giggles,’ too.”

“I heard her all right,” he grumbled. “I just didn’t
understand a damned thing she said.”

“There’s a lot more to her story than what she told you,
Gage,” Molly said reflectively. “For example, I’m pretty sure she didn’t tell
you that Jackson demanded that she give up her career and be a stay-at-home
wife.”

“You’re kidding me.” Gage paused with his fork en route to
his mouth. It hadn’t occurred to him that men like Sabrina’s ex still existed
in the twenty-first century. 

“I only wish I were,” Molly said glumly. “For some insane
and very unhealthy reason, she’s always been attracted to the type of men who
are all wrong for her. Then you moved to town, and I thought that the two of
you would get to know each other, Sabrina would see the light and—” Molly
paused to nibble on her lower lip. “Never mind the rest. Sebastian’s right.
I’ve already meddled enough.”

“It’s not your fault, Molly,” Gage said quietly, putting
down his fork. “I fell in love with Sabrina, and I know she fell in love with
me. I want the whole truth, and I want it to come from her lips. After that,
I’ll leave her alone. I think I deserve that much at the very least.”

Never again would he put himself in such a humiliating
situation, Gage swore to himself. Here he was, complaining to his best friend’s
wife about his broken heart like some lovesick teenager. There was a lull in
the conversation as Molly scratched at a place mat with her thumbnail, frowning
contemplatively.

“I think so too, Gage” she finally said, resigned. “If
Sabrina’s not here, at home or at the office, there’s only one other place she
could be…”

Sabrina had never seen Grandma Ella’s old house look as
lovely as it did in the snow. The large flakes continued to spiral down from a
darkening sky and showed no signs of letting up anytime soon. Now the eaves
were blanketed by a lush coat of white, and it looked like a down comforter had
exploded in the flower beds.

The café was closed up tight, and her mother’s car was gone —
she was probably spending the night with Rex. She could hear the sound of
children’s shouts coming from a snowball fight somewhere down the block and the
strained rumble of the engines of slow-moving cars. One of them came to a stop
across the street from the café, and the driver got out. She could hear boots
crunching in the snow somewhere behind her.

The sights and sounds reminded her of Walden, Iowa.

And Gage.

Where was he right now? Kicking back at one of the few pubs
that was still open, enjoying a beer with his work buddies? At one of their
homes, sitting at a table enjoying spirited dinner conversation?

Her cell phone pinged, and she glanced at the text
notification: Molly. Sabrina tucked the phone back into her coat pocket without
bothering to read the message. Her best friend was probably inviting her over
for another misery session. Sabrina rose from her seat on the top step with a
heavy sigh. It had been a mistake to call the radio station that morning. The
sound of Gage’s voice reminded her that she was, as Molly so aptly put it, a
coward.

Moping in solitary — in the snow — was her
prerogative.

Sabrina paused by one of the rose beds that flanked the
walkway. Gnarled, gray branches twisted around each other like arthritic
fingers. A flash of color caught her eye. There in the center of one bed was a
daub of pure red framed by brilliant green, like smears of fresh paint on a
dingy canvas. The tiny rosebud seemed to be straining to reach the sky.
Something about its tenacity moved her. A lump formed in her throat.

Get it together.
Sabrina tried to draw her eyes away
from the rose, but all she could do was stand there and admire its beauty while
her vision went watery from emotion and the cold.

A sharp whistle cut through the air. “Hey, you! Ms. Chief of
Staff! ‘Go-Go Green’!”

She spun around. She blinked to make sure that her eyes
weren’t playing tricks on her. But they weren’t. Gage stood at the end of the
walkway, hands stuffed in the pockets of his black peacoat. His hair had grown
out, and he was in dire need of a shave. He looked thinner. Even from a
distance she could see that his eyes had a tired, bluish tinge.

She’d never seen him looking finer.

“I have the answer to your question,” he said. “Eight months
and twenty-two days.” His voice easily carried across the short distance
between them.

“What are you talking about?” she yelled back, her husky
voice punctuated by a chirp.

“The length of my self-imposed abstinence before I met you.
Believe me, honey, I was counting.”

“It doesn’t matter, Gage. It never mattered.”

“It must matter, because you love me, right?” he called
mockingly. “In fact, you love me so much, you burned jet fuel as fast as you
could to get back to Austin. That’s love, all right. True love.” His smile and
voice were bitter.

“Have you been drinking?” She took a few steps in his
direction.

“No. But I am still pretty pissed off.”

“You have every right to be,” Sabrina conceded. “I’ve been
truthful about everything but the one thing that matters.”

“Tell Noah about the flood.” He waited for her to take
several more steps forward before he said, “I’m pissed off because I’ve always
been on the receiving end of your inner monologues, Sabrina. Yes, I read your
letter. I feel like I missed most of the plot.”

“There’s no plot, Gage. I don’t … plot.” She walked
closer until she could have reached out and touched his face with her hand. But
she felt as though she were standing on the edge of a great precipice and the
divide that separated them was filled with the most irreconcilable of differences.

“What is it, then?” he demanded in frustration. “What scared
you so much that you called it quits without talking it over with me first?”

“I want to make the world a better place.” She blurted out
the first thing that came to mind. “I want to give something back that’s far
bigger than myself. So I’ve decided to run for public office in the next state
elections.”

“You just told me something I could have easily guessed,
Sabrina,” he said wearily. “Now tell me something I can’t.” He shifted from one
foot to the other while he waited for her response.

“I could have lied to you and told you that going after such
a big dream doesn’t come with even bigger trade-offs.” She shook her head with
a rueful smile. “But it wouldn’t have been true. There’s a lot about me you
still don’t know.”

“Then clue me in.” His voice was more patient now.

There wasn’t any easy way to say it. There never would be.
Sabrina took a deep breath and dove into the divide.

“I’ve always wanted to be the cool auntie,” she told him. “I’ve
always wanted to play dress-up and catch with Molly’s kids. I want to take them
to museums and rock concerts and do all the stuff cool aunties do. Having my
own children has never been in the cards. But it’s definitely in Molly’s cards.
It’s in your cards, too.”

“You know this for a fact,” he stated unhappily.

“Yes. Yes, I do!” she insisted.

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “How? Because I sure as
hell didn’t, and I’m the one holding the hand. Something else is spinning
around in that pretty head of yours. Tell me what it is.”

Then he reached over and tenderly brushed the snow from her
hair. At his touch, Sabrina closed her eyes. She wished she could go back in
time and do everything over again differently. Start from scratch, like Nola
always said. 

“Whenever I picture you ten years from now, I see a
wonderful future.” She didn’t bother to hide the wistful note in her voice. “I
see you with a beautiful wife. She loves you so very much, Gage. I see you with
your children, putting toys together on Christmas morning. Teaching your son
how to fly a kite. Taking a picture of your daughter before the prom—”

“—I got it. Lifetime Television stuff,” Gage filled in.

“Yeah.” She nodded. “But the woman by your side—” Her voice
cracked with emotion. “—she’s not me.”

“So you thought by cutting bait you were sparing me the
disappointment of spending my life with the single most important person in
it?”

“I know it’s hard to believe,” she said. “But I left
for
you, not because of you. J-just because I c-can’t have it all doesn’t mean that
y-you shouldn’t.” Now she was sniffling and stammering like a little girl who’d
just taken a fall on the school blacktop. “I want you to be h-happy, Gage.
Always.
”

“So that’s it?” Gage asked after a pause. “That’s why you
ran.”

“Yes.”

“No other reason, pinkie swear?”

“Pinkie swear,” Sabrina whispered. “See? There’s no way you
can want me.”

He shook his head with a wry smile as though she were a
hopeless cause he wished he could give up on.

“Sabrina, I’m pounding on the door of forty.” Now his face
was sober. “If I’d wanted the whole two-point-five-kids-life-in-the-suburbs
arrangement bad enough, I could have had it by now. God knows there were enough
women queuing up. Sure, I could have been content with any of them—” He shrugged.
“—
if
I wanted a life right out of a home insurance commercial. I don’t.
I wanted more. I wanted you.”

“But that night in your room, you said all those things—”

“—I said things that I shouldn’t have when I was out of my
mind with grief,” Gage concurred. “But you also twisted what I said into the
most predictable outcome imaginable and blew everything out of proportion.”

“Most men want children,” Sabrina reminded him.

“I’m not ‘most men’ any more than you are ‘most women.’
We’re not ‘most people.’ Like Molly said, we buck the trend.”

“So what are you saying, Gage?” She had to be cautious this
time. Really cautious.

“You are my family.
You.
” He cupped her face with his
hands. “Not the people in a slide show you made up in your head. I don’t care
if we have ten kids or none. Don’t you get that? See, Sabrina, while you were
communing with Valerie Bertinelli or who the hell ever, I had a lot of time to
think, too. I was wondering, ‘How does the class clown get the girl most likely
to succeed?’ I realized the answer was simple: Life is too short to try. Either
you want me as is or you don’t want me ever. Which is it?”

His cheeks flushed in the cold, she noticed. And when his
hair was at an in-between length like this, the twin cowlicks on either side of
his head were more pronounced. She wanted to notice everything about him.

And she wanted to take her sweet time. 

“Yes, I want—” was all she managed to squeak before her
throat clenched with joy, so she nodded her head vigorously instead.

“Damn it. Come here,” he said, exasperated, and held out his
arms. She fell into them gratefully.

His lips pressed against hers intently, hungrily, sweetly.
So
this
was alchemy — the way every kiss between them felt like the
first. She breathed in his familiar smell — wood, soap and a warm note
she’d never noticed before. Something that smelled like new wool. After he
finished kissing her thoroughly, they rocked together and listened to the tiny
crackle of snow hitting the ground.

Then a thought struck her.

“How did you know I’d be here?” she asked him.

“Your homegirl pointed me in the right direction,” Gage told
her.

“Thank god for Molly,” Sabrina sighed.

“I’ll second that. Don’t you have something else you want to
tell me?” he murmured against her hair.

“Hmm, what?” She stuck her hands in his pockets to keep them
warm.

“I’ll give you a hint. It’s usually not something you say to
someone when you only think they’re asleep.”

Of course. How could she forget? Sabrina looked up at him
and grinned like a fool. “I love you, Gage Fitzgerald, and I always will.”

“So if it’s going to be just you and me, we should probably
discuss what’s going to happen next.”

What did he mean by that? She pulled away slightly to get a
read of his face.

“What I mean to say — or I suppose — I should really
ask you—” He heaved a sigh. “Damn it, Sabrina. You know where I’m going with
this.”

A smile teased her lips. Was the notoriously verbose Fitz
actually stumbling over his own words?

“Spit it out, Fitzgerald,” she said in a husky voice. The
warmth of his body was distracting her, and it was time to move onto better
things. She could hardly wait for him to take her home and drag her into his
bed.
Correction.

Their
home.

Their
bed.

“Do you intend to make an honest man out of me?” A
mischievous light was in his eyes.

“It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it,” she teased
back. “You’ll have to meet Nola, you know. She’s an even bigger meddler than
Molly—”

“No worries,” he assured her. “I’m astoundingly good with
moms.”

“—and you’ll have to deal with seeing your wife’s name in
the newspaper a lot,” she warned. “It could be a wilder ride than you thought.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, darlin’. I
suppose I’ll have to tone down Fitz’s rhetoric, being that he’ll be in the
public eye,” he mused.

“I’m sure he’ll weather it just fine. He might discover
talking points he never knew he had.”

“Oh, hell. D’you mean public policy?” Gage pretended to look
aggrieved.

“Policy for the people,” Sabrina clarified. “I’m going to
help people, Gage, like you do when you joke around on air and make people
laugh. I want to leave behind a legacy, just like Grandma Ella.”

“Grandma Ella?” He looked confused. “Who’s she?”

“I’ll tell you all about her sometime,” Sabrina said with a
mysterious smile. She stole a loving look at the house behind her. Maybe she’d
been wrong.

Some things do endure.

“I think Fitz can get behind all this.” A grin tugged at the
corner of Gage’s mouth. “You know, I think I’m going to like being married to
Representative Sabrina March. It should be one wild, crazy ride.”

She pressed her cheek against the lapel of his coat with a
blissful smile.

“I think you mean Representative Sabrina
Fitzgerald
,”
she corrected him lovingly.

He gave her a brief, tight hug that assured her he would
always be there for her.

“You took the words right out of my mouth.”