The One That Got Away (17 page)

“Thanks, Jamie, I appreciate that,” I say sincerely. “Listen, I should get going, but thank you again for the opportunity—and I'll see you tomorrow at the meeting at the site.”

She signs off, audibly relieved to have the discussion over. I slump back on the grass, simmering with frustration and disappointment. Gradually, the late-afternoon sun shifts downward in the sky, and the families in the pool begin to pack up and head home for dinner. I should do the same, but I'm waiting to give Danny time to leave for work; I hate that he was right about the expense of my proposal, and I don't want to deal with talking to him about it. Just as I am thinking about making a move, my phone rings—Noah.

“It's good to hear your voice,” I tell him.

“I know. You too, kitten. Wish I weren't so slammed lately. But what's up with you, why do you sound so down?” He always pays such good attention to my mood on the phone—sort of a necessary survival skill when dealing with a long-distance relationship, I suppose.

I fill him in on Jamie's news. “And Danny was right about the cost of it,” I admit. “I am kicking myself so fucking hard for blowing off his advice. He owns two businesses in the hospitality industry, but I figured that I knew better than him what the investors' priorities would be. And now…all those late nights, all that effort, all that time…for nothing.”

“Ah, honey, that
sucks
,” Noah says. “I know how much you wanted this. But who knows, maybe this retail job that Jamie mentioned will turn into something.”

“Yeah, well, Jamie swore up and down that I had the spa job in the bag, but it didn't exactly turn out that way, did it? Ugh, whatever. It's not even that,” I say. “Even if this guy calls about his store, and even if he hires me, she already said there's no budget.
I'm never going to get anywhere if I keep doing jobs with no budget.” Viciously, I rip a handful of grass and toss it away from me down the hill.

“I thought your house reno had a pretty decent budget on it.”

“Eamon's? It does, for residential. And if I can get press from it, maybe I'll get some hits. We'll see. I just wanted this Balm job so
badly
because it would have boosted me into real business territory. Enough work to hire some staff, and a solid flow of money for the next couple of years—I wouldn't still be bouncing from one no-budget project to the next.”

“But that's not a big deal, though,” he says reassuringly. “It's not like we'll need your income when we're married. And I know you're disappointed to lose this job, but maybe it's just as well if you stick to smaller jobs for now. I don't think you'll want to be working this much while we're trying to raise young kids, you know?”

I blink a couple of times, literally shocked into silence. I watch a little gray swallow flutter out of the tree branch above my head, into the sky. And then I do something I haven't done since my penultimate breakup with the philandering guitarist, and had never dreamed I would ever do again. I hang up on him.

The next morning, I spend the two-hour site meeting for the Balm expansion smiling into Jamie's guilty, anxious face and pretending that I'm not still seething with bitterness. Throughout the meeting, she makes such an obvious point of praising my work on both the original space and the expansion that I am embarrassed for both of us. As we are packing up to leave, I sense her hovering, building up steam to apologize yet again, which isn't going to be anything other than awkward; so I make good on the only acceptable option, and bolt.

On my way home, I decide to check on Eamon. The phone rings through to voice mail, so I figure he's sleeping, but a few minutes later he calls me back.

“How's the invalid?” I ask, trying not to sound concerned.

“Still feel like hell. Whatever this is, it's persistent.” He sounds like someone left him in the washer overnight.

I am overwhelmed by a rare attack of nurturing instinct. “I'm right down the road from that Whole Foods on Lamar—want me to pick up some soup for you and bring it by?”

“Ah, really? I'd love some soup…. I don't think I've eaten anything since yesterday morning.”

“Then you must be mostly dead. I'll be there in half an hour.”

When he answers the door, his skin is the same tentative off-white as the walls of his rental house, except for the peppery stubble shadowing his cheeks. My pathetic heart goes
squish
like a wet sponge.

“Free delivery with purchase!” I announce, brandishing my grocery bag. I breeze past him and begin unloading the bag on his kitchen counter. “I brought you chicken noodle and some sort of curried potato stuff…I thought the spice might help fumigate the virus,” I explain with a sideways smile. “And ice cream, just in case.”

“This is awesome,” he says, surveying the feast. “Thanks, bud.” My nostrils flare as I realize he has just addressed me with a term usually reserved for young boys and puppies.
Yes, Nicole, this man is quite simply quivering with lust
.

We load up our bowls and sit down at the kitchen table to eat. But between his flu and my bad mood, neither of us seems to feel much like talking.

“Hey,” he says after a few minutes of unaccustomed silence, “everything okay? You seem down.”

I haven't wanted to talk about it with my stepdad or Nicole, because they are both too loyal to be impartial; and I haven't talked about it with Danny because I haven't yet forgiven him for being right. But unexpectedly, Eamon is exactly the right person. I tell him all of it. And he listens. He even makes me go out to my car to get my laptop so I can show him the renderings.

“The worst part is,” I say, staring glumly at the gray water diagram I'd labored over, “I'm just so pissed at myself. I was so far up my own ass with this stupid green wall design—I was so convinced it was the right thing. And Danny
warned
me that they might think it was too expensive to build, and he was right, and it cost me the whole fucking project.” I snap the laptop closed with unnecessary force.

“It's a great design, Ree,” he says. “You weren't wrong about that.”

“No, but I should have showed them an alternate. I remember thinking,
What, am I just going to throw a couple planters in there?
But you know what, if I'd just pursued that idea, I could have come up with some other way to use the plantings architecturally, just on a smaller scale.”

He doesn't have any reassurances in response to this, which I appreciate. There's nothing grosser than the feeling of somebody telling you you didn't do anything wrong when you know perfectly well that you did.

“So what happens now?” he asks, crossing his arms over his chest.

“What do you mean? It's over.”

He leans back in his chair and stretches his legs alongside the table. “Can you resubmit another version?”

“They gave the job to somebody else.”

“Have they actually paid a retainer?”

“Probably. I don't know.”

“So email your client and tell her you're working on another version of your concept that will be more in line with their budget.”

“Ame, I don't want to look desperate!”

“One man's desperate is another man's persistent, Sarina,” he says, smiling. “And persistence pays off.”

I stab at the coagulated soup with my spoon. “Believe me, if there were a point to persisting, I would persist. I would persist till every last cow came home. But they have a schedule to stick to, so unfortunately, I think I just fucked this one up.

“Oh. And you wanna know what Noah said?” I add, barreling onward, although I am fairly certain this is where the conversation should stop. But I am angry, and hurt, and both of those things make me a little bit reckless. “
Noah
said it didn't really matter that I lost the job. 'Cause when we get married, we're not going to need my income. Especially since I'm ultimately going to
be a stay-at-home mom anyway…it doesn't matter whether I grow my business or not.”

There is a long pause. “He
said
that to you?” Eamon says finally, and I can only describe the expression on his face as a sneer. And suddenly I am ashamed of myself. I shared Noah's condescending remarks because I was craving validation for my response to them; and now that I have it, I just feel petty for having aired our dirty laundry with someone who has no business knowing about it.

So I backpedal. “It came out worse than he meant it. I mean, what he said was true. About the money.”

But Eamon doesn't respond. Jaw knotted, he grabs the half-eaten bowls of soup and dumps them into the sink with a crash. I gnaw nervously at a hangnail while various crashes and bangs issue from behind me. When he returns a few moments later, his face is clear and he is carrying the two pints of ice cream and a pair of spoons.

“Screw the soup,” he says. “Let's get to business.”

We tuck into the ice cream for a few minutes, until I notice him shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Ame, do you want to get back in bed?”

His grin would offend every saint in Christendom. “I'm sorry, did you just invite yourself into bed with me?”

“Ass. I was only talking about you—you look achy. Have you taken any ibuprofen lately?”

He shakes his head, still smiling. “No, I'm probably due for a couple. But I do kind of want to lie down…. Come keep me company?”

We retreat to his bedroom, where the still life of medicine bottles, half-drunk water glasses, and abandoned tissues on the night table and floor attests to the fact that he's spent the past couple of days in bed. “Sick bay,” he says with a sweeping gesture.

Covertly, I study the room, taking illicit pleasure in being
there even though it's on strictly innocent terms. The space is airy and bright, dominated by a huge, low bed dressed in invitingly rumpled white linens. Framed vintage concert posters he's never bothered to hang up—Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers—lean against the wall. A David Sedaris book is splayed facedown on the night table, just a few chapters in.

He flops onto the bed with a tired sigh, shakes a couple Advil into his palm, and tosses them back with a glug of water. “You coming?” he asks, shucking his hoodie and patting the space next to him.

I hesitate for an instant—sure, he is sick, but this is still not especially appropriate. Then, with a mental shrug, I climb in next to him.

We spend all afternoon in bed, watching one movie after another and eating ice cream straight out of the carton. He insists that everything we watch be something he's seen before, so I won't feel obligated to pause it when he intermittently falls asleep. But it doesn't matter, because when he does drift off, the last thing I pay attention to is the movie; my fingers ache to touch his hair, his face, the sleek curve of his biceps just below the sleeve of his T-shirt. I'm fascinated by the structure of his masculine hands, the beauty of his profile against the white pillow. I would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of the weekend like this—the chance to spend so much time with him alone and the piercing sweetness of lying next to him while he sleeps are unexpected pleasures that I never want to relinquish. But the sun tracks relentlessly across the sky, and eventually the room grows dark.

Around nine o'clock, I return from a stealthy trip to the bathroom to find him awake, groggy and blinking in the light from his bedside lamp. “I woke up and you were gone—I thought you'd left without saying goodbye,” he says accusatorily.

“Nope, just a pee break,” I say, circling the bed and perching
on the edge beside him. “But I should get going and let you get a good long sleep.”

His eyes are fathomless in the dim light. “Do you have somewhere to be?”

I should lie. I should lie. “Not really.”

“Then why don't you stay over? It's nice to have your company.”

I summon the feeblest of excuses. “But I don't have anything with me…”

He jerks his chin to my left. “My T-shirts and stuff are in that dresser…help yourself. And there's a clean toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.”

And suddenly I think of Noah and how much he hurt me, and the fact that, even after he promised me we'd work together to sort out the issue of kids, he still just assumed I'd do what he wants. And then through a convoluted and self-serving mathematical equation inside my head, Noah hurting me somehow equates to me being entitled to spend the night sleeping in a bed next to the only man I've ever wanted more than him.

In for a penny
, I think, as I select a T-shirt and a pair of boxers and pad across to the bathroom. For some reason it feels more intimate to be in Eamon's bathroom, hunting for the spare toothbrush between bottles of his shaving cream and antichlorine shampoo, than it did to be actually lying in his bed. I find myself searching for signs of female presence, but there's not so much as a stray tampon. Sternly I remind myself that I have no legitimate reason to feel pleased.

He scrolls through the on-demand listings as I climb in beside him and fluff the pillows behind me. “Well, what do you feel like watching? I'm sure there's something else in here I won't be disappointed if I pass out in the middle of. Oh! Here we go!
Snakes on a Plane
. You will laugh your ass off.
This
I will stay awake for.”

It turns out to be every bit as deliciously bad as he's promised. After twenty minutes, we are literally crying with laughter as we vie to outdo each other with jokes at the movie's expense. By the time the credits roll, I am exhausted from laughing so hard.

“I can barely keep my eyes open, but that was worth it,” says Eamon as he reaches for the bedside lamp.

My shoulders vibrate as a residual giggle escapes me. “I don't know how I lived for so long without seeing that.”

A sharp click from the lamp, and the room is plunged into darkness. I feel him shifting next to me as he mashes his pillow into a tight ball. “G'night, Ree. I'm really glad you came over.”

“Me too.” Moving as little as possible, I stretch out on my side, facing him. Carefully I position myself at what I judge to be platonic-sleepover distance, but not so far that I can't still feel the warmth emanating from his body. I tuck one arm under my pillow, bend the other in front of me, and close my eyes, listening to him breathe in the darkness.

The first thing I notice when I wake is the neat slices of sunlight, marching across the blank wall opposite the bed in the pattern of the half-drawn blinds. The second thing I notice is that I am wrapped around Eamon like a favorite blanket. Though I don't remember moving, we have curled together during the night; my cheek is cradled on his chest, and one of my arms stretches across him, fingers tucked under his ribs. My legs are nestled between and against his. He appears not to have found this objectionable, because both heavy arms are wrapped around me, holding me in place. It is utterly inappropriate, and absolutely delicious.

I lie still for a long minute, barely breathing. I have to move, I
will
move, just as soon as I memorize everything about this. The scent of his skin, the texture of his stubbled neck from an inch
away, the solid warmth of his chest beneath me, the weight of his arms around me, the delicious roughness of his legs against my smooth ones. I remind myself that he's sick, and he's sound asleep. I have no idea how we got like this, but when he wakes up he's going to be as embarrassed as I bloody well ought to be. Until then, though, I am going to enjoy just a couple more seconds of this.

And then, as I cautiously release the breath I have been holding, his voice rumbles richly under my ear. “Morning.”

Reluctantly, I raise my head. His eyes are melted chocolate, with no trace of fever in sight, and the intimacy of his sleepy smile makes warmth puddle in every corner of my body.

“Morning,” I whisper back. I start to pull away from him, mortified by the liberties I've taken in my sleep, but he tightens his arms to keep me in place.

“This is ever so nice,” he observes, skimming one hand lazily up my back.

“How are you feeling?” I ask, skin tingling from his touch. Why isn't he letting go of me?

“Much better,” he says softly. “You cured me.”

“Are you sure it was me?” I manage. “I think it was the curried potato soup.”

“Nope…it was definitely you.” His hand slips up to cup the back of my neck, and suddenly my heart is banging so hard against my ribs that I'm sure he can feel it.

Before I can say anything else, he gently tugs my head downward, and kisses me. It's a sweet, undemanding kiss, but it's the tenderness that shatters me. Dimly I think it must be a friend kiss, a thank-you-for-nursing-me-back-from-the-flu kiss, 'cause it's impossible for it to be a
real
kiss—but then it goes on, too long to be a thank-you. Too long to be friend-ish.