Fix You (42 page)

             
At forty-five, Ben still had a headful of mostly dark hair and a perma-scowl that ruined the effect of his looks: most women were skittish around him. He smoothed his tie and passed a flat look across the diner; Chris ducked his head, stared at his plate, and wished like hell he’d kept his damn mouth shut the night before.

             
Three beers into his self-pity, Ben had turned up looking to borrow a power drill. Chris had been too strung-out to deflect the guy’s cop interrogation routine, and before he’d grabbed hold of himself, had spilled the regrettable details of his affair with a still-married inn owner.

             
Ben looked every inch the businessman, save the black motorcycle boots he opted for instead of dress shoes.
“You ever try to chase down a meth addict in wingtips
?” he’d asked once. Over the side of the plate, Chris recognized those black boots standing beside his table, and heaved a sigh.

             
“Two days in a row. How’d I get so lucky?”

             
Ben flashed a tight, humorless smile as he slid into the booth across from him. “I figured I’d find you here pouring grease over your rotting liver.”

             
“Don’t you have a dead body to find?” Chris asked, shoveling in eggs. “A crackhead to run down?”

             
“In a minute.” Ben pulled a napkin from the dispenser, wiped a patch of table, then folded his arms over it. “I went to see Jessica,” he said, and Chris’s eggs got stuck in his throat.

             
“Don’t call her that,” he said before he could catch himself. “She hates it.” Then he studied his plate to hide the embarrassment in his eyes; he’d thought he’d hate her this morning. As it turned out, he couldn’t keep from defending her. From responding as if she really was his.

             
His brother snorted. “I think she hates a lot of things – especially me. I gotta tell you, I didn’t figure you for
that
type.”

             
Chris shot him a glare. “What were you doing?” Anger coiled tight in his rolling gut. “What the hell did you say to her?”

             
Ben spread his hands in a pose that was an innocent as he was capable of looking. “The way you carried on last night, I wanted to see just what kinda bitch we were dealing with.”

             
He came half out of his seat and Ben shoved him back with a rough hand on his shoulder.

             
“Calm down, Romeo.” His face locked down, became so harsh, that for a moment, Chris was the stupid little brother again, shrinking away from the force of nature that had always been Benjamin Haley. “You were crying into your goddamn beer –  ”

             
“I wasn’t crying.”

             
“ – and I was watching you make the same mistake I made three years ago; I wanted to go see her, so I did.”

             
The thought of Ben – his tie and biker boots and that vicious scowl of his – in Jess’s sunny kitchen, with her sister and her kid, was almost more than he could stand. So he kept silent and waited, fork suspended over his plate.

             
In typical Ben fashion, he let the tension build. Then he said, “She threw her coffee at me.”

             
Chris blinked. “What?”

             
“It might have been tea, actually, going on the color.”

             
“
Ben
–  ”

             
“She’s also definitely pregnant with your kid. You can’t fake that kind of anger.”

             
His breakfast pickled in his stomach. Was he really so much like his brother? Had he really knocked his girl up, then accused her of infidelity and shoved himself out of her life? That’s what Ben had done; it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ever imagined doing. In the aftermath of such blind anger, there was only shame. She’d told Beaumont, and in the moment, that was all he’d been able to comprehend: her lack of trust in him. But now…

             
“What are you gonna do?” Ben asked.

             
Which was a stupid question.

30

             
S
he wanted to meet on his turf: not in one of the broken-down diners holding down the ends of abandoned shopping centers by the lake, but at a fruity bakery in Kennesaw. She’d answered his call with a stiff “hello” and told him to be at Wildflour at the juncture of the Due Wests in two hours. He realized why she’d picked this place the moment he passed through the front door: he hated it. Soft yellow light; jazz playing overhead; the smells of coffee and bread; two dozen hipsters littering the overstuffed arm chairs that circled tiny café tables. In his flannel and work boots, his old paint-stained Carhartt jacket, he felt out of place; he half expected a poetry reading to bust out at any moment while he nursed his over-sugared coffee and waited for his…baby mama…to make an appearance.

             
He’d slept like hell the night before, plagued with the crushing knowledge that he’d turned into his brother. He didn’t want what Ben had: a tangle of stupid pride that kept him at arm’s length from the family that would never be his. He didn’t want to be the shithead dad who saw his kid at Christmas and its birthday. He didn’t want to lose Jess.

             
Through the fogged-up plate glass windows, he saw her Tahoe nose up to the curb and it was all he could do to hold his ground and not go running out to meet her like an abandoned puppy.
I’m sorry
, he thought, as he watched her long legs land on the pavement. He’d pulled the oldest stupid-male trick in the book:
Is it mine?
How had he asked her that? How, after he’d watched the doubt and fear sparkling in her eyes for so long – had felt her melt against him so many times and been too caught up to bother with condoms – could he have accused her of such a thing? He’d never been any good at apologies – he wasn’t good at much anything when it came to dealing with women vertically – but he had to make her understand that it had been pride talking, and that he had no intentions of running away.

             
It was a gray, windswept afternoon – leaves tumbling; trees bending double – but she’d dressed to the nines. Before she pulled the halves of her long red coat shut, he caught a glimpse of a clinging black dress. Her showgirl legs were in black tights; her pumps were blood red leather. A lock of honey-gold hair snatched free of her loose braid and plastered itself across her lipstick; she peeled it away, gave her head a toss, and entered the bakery with the stateliness of a queen. She’d been in jeans and sweats lately, sleepy and casual – because she was pregnant, he now knew – but she looked hot off a plane from Monaco now: not pregnant, not tearful, just beautiful. And way, way out of his league.

             
Without making eye contact – but pulling the eyes of every patron – she stalked to his table and shrugged out of her coat, draped it across the back of the chair opposite him. She settled and plucked at her dress, tucked stray hairs behind her ears, pulled her long braid over one shoulder. Her eyes were downcast and not in a display of shame; she was a self-contained blizzard this afternoon: cold enough to crack.

             
Chris watched the flutter of her pulse in the soft hollow of her throat, the flicker of her long, dark lashes, the way her eye shadow and blush blended seamlessly into her fine china face and seemed almost natural. “You look pretty,” he told her, and her eyelids lifted, eyes so green beneath her lashes. He couldn’t read them. “You want me to get you some coffee?”

             
“I can’t.”

             
“Oh.” And just like that, the baby swelled up between them and he wanted to touch it, to touch her, to grab hold of both of them and keep them with him. “I forgot you can’t have caffeine.”

             
“It’s not that. I just can’t stay.”

             
His pulse thumped loud in his ears. “Why not?” He made a lame attempt at a smile. “You got me into this hippy nightmare place; you can at least have lunch with me.”

             
She didn’t blink, her expression impassive. Her purse was on her lap and she reached inside, withdrawing a check between manicured fingers. “I needed to give you this.” She slid it across the table toward him and Chris saw a long row of zeroes. “Your brother reminded me that I hadn’t finished paying you.”

             
“No.”

             
“Yes. This should cover all your labor for the second half of the project.” She reached into her purse again, this time coming out with a blurry black and white photo. “I went to the doctor this morning,” she said, setting it beside the check. Her voice was emotionless. “It’s only the size of a lima bean right now, but the baby’s there. I really am pregnant.”

             
“No,” he repeated, because now he knew why she’d wanted to meet. He knew what she was trying to do. “Jess,” he heard the harsh catch to his voice, “I don’t want it to be like this.”

             
“Well.” She heaved a little sigh. “Neither do I, but that’s how it is. I’m pregnant, so –  ”

             
“I don’t mean
that
.” He suppressed a growl. “I don’t want you to sit here and act like we’re strangers and this is just some business arrangement.”

             
She was silent a moment; her chin quivered and he thought, for a heartbeat, that her composure would break. But she met his gaze and kicked her head back, watching him down the narrow, refined slip of her nose. “It is a business arrangement. At least, that’s all it was ever supposed to be.”

             
Chris curled his hands into fists on top of the table. The happy patrons around them were oblivious to his still-new and tender hopes crumbling. Something like desperation tightened his chest. “I know what you’re doing.” He leaned toward her and she leaned back. “Damn it, Jess, you’re just scared and you’re trying to punish me. I shouldn’t have said what I did, okay? I know that. It was stupid and I was an ass.
Don’t run away
.”

             
Her green eyes blazed; her delicate jaw tightened. She was as breathtaking as a martial goddess. “I have
never
run away. Not from anything. I have always done what’s best for my family.” Fine tremors went through her hands. “And that family doesn’t have room for a paranoid bachelor’s accusations.”

             
“
Jess
–  ”

             
“Don’t make a scene in a restaurant.” She shoved the check and the ultrasound closer. “Take the check. You can keep the other if you want. I don’t want or need any money from you, but you can stay involved if you want when he or she is born.”

             
“Stop being a bitch,” he said through his teeth. “I’m not Dylan. You can’t just run me off.”

             
She twitched what might have been a smile. “Good. Then I can explain to both my children what it means to have different fathers.” She moved to rise. “Excuse me, I have to –  ”

             
It was a small comfort to watch her eyes get wide and startled when he clamped a hand around her wrist. Her gaze came to his face and for a long moment, Chris held it, scrambling for something short of ordering her not to leave that would keep her here with him. His chest was too tight and anger clouded his brain. He’d never imagined a woman capable of such coldness; women
tried
to get pregnant and then used the babies to attach themselves to a man forever. They didn’t do this; they didn’t run. The knot at the base of his throat had sharp edges, and as he swallowed it down, Chris knew there was nothing he could say to her. She wouldn’t believe a damn thing that came out of his mouth.

             
So he let his mounting anger do the talking.

             
“You’re being a bitch,” he repeated, and she tried to slip loose. His hand tightened. “And guess what: I’m not Dylan. You can’t intimidate me, sweetheart.  You can run if you want to, but I’m not. And you’re gonna figure out what I already did: we need to be together.”

             
“Need? Why in the hell would we need that?”

             
“Because you love me,” he said in a quiet voice that carried. She went still, her wrist limp in his grasp. “I know you do, and you’re gonna admit it, at some point.” He gave her a squeeze. “I want the chance to love you back. I deserve that.”

             
Then, because he could do nothing else after he’d poured his sappy heart out, he opened his hand.

             
Her eyes glazed liquid; she wet her lips and he thought she would…

             
But then she blinked and pulled away. She stood and pulled on her coat. “Please don’t cash the check until Monday,” she said, and left him, desperate and hurting, in her glacial wake.               He watched the red swirl of her coat disappear into the Tahoe through the window. Then he picked up the ultrasound by the edges and stared at his lima bean.