Kiss the Girl (57 page)

“She’s not home.”

He turned, found his mother in her blue bathrobe in the open door of her apartment across the hall.  “What are you doing up?” he asked.  “It’s
--”
  He consulted his watch, winced.  “Late.”

She dismissed this as the diversionary tactic it was.  “You’ve screwed it up, haven’t you?  With Nixie.”

He scowled.  “I haven’t screwed anything up.  There was nothing to screw up.”

“No?  Then why are you wearing out her doorbell at 2 a.m.?
  In your gala tuxedo still?
”  Her gaze was sharp on his face, and he resisted the urge to scuff his feet.  What was he, ten?

“What have you done, Erik?” the Senator asked.

“Nothing, Mom.  Jeez.”

She rolled her eyes, stepped back from the door and pointed an imperious finger inside.  He ducked his head--he
was
ten, powerless against that finger--and walked inside.  He plunked himself at her kitchen table while she moved around the room,
gathering the makings for
a pot of coffee. 

“
If you want to lie to the press or your friends or yourself, that’s one thing.  But I’m your mother.  I knew you before you knew yourself.  You can’t lie to me, so stop trying.  What did you do?”

“She wanted more from me than I could give, okay?
”
 
Something dark and awful inside him strained toward the surface but he strapped it down.  “
I dented her ego a little, that’s all.  She’ll recover.”

She
dumped enough grounds in the filter to make a pot of rocket fuel and gave him
a look that mixed pity with incredulity.  “Nixie Leighton-Brace wanted to date you and you turned her down.”

“It was a little more
complicated
than that.”

“Complicated how
?”

“I asked Mary Jane to marry me.”

“What?”  She nearly bobbled the pot of water she was fee
ding into the machine.  She
pressed
brew
and turned the full force of her stare upon him. 
“When?
When did you do this remarkably
foolish
thing?
”

He stared at his
hands
, pushed back against the anger and the fear that had knotted his gut.  “Right after I, um, turned Nixie down.”

“Did you both have your clothes on when you
turned her down
?”

“Not exactly.
”

“Oh, Erik.”

He hunched his shoulders.  “It gets worse.  She
found out
about the engagement
at the
gala tonight.  In front of a
lot of people.
”

“How many people?”

“In person?  Couple hundred.
”  He paused, miserable.  “
I don’t know how many people will watch it on TV.”

The Senator
closed her eyes. 
“You’re my son and I love you, but you’re a fool.”

The grinding fear that she was right
ate at him, had temper snapping up
.  “I’m a fool? 
I’m
a fool?  Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life moldering away on the farm while the woman I love loves everybody else in the world first?  Sorry, Mom.  I saw that one already.  I didn’t like the ending.”

“You’re in love with Nixie?”

Erik rubbed his forehead and shut his mouth.  Trust his mother to sort through all the really big ammunition and latch onto the tiny, revealing side note.  More evidence that Nixie was killing him.  Before she’d come along, he’d never have made that kind of tactical error.  “I was talking about Dad.”

“Don’t you dare blame your father for this.
  He’s been gone these
ten
years
and
more, and I will not have you
--”
 

The hard, ugly thing inside him snarled and tore free and he said, “I’m not blaming Dad.  I’m blaming you.”

“Me.”  She folded her
arms and glared at him,
more
daunting
in a
bright blue robe
than most women were in a power suit.  

“Yes, you.  What, I’m supposed to blame Dad because you were always leaving?  It’s somehow Dad’s fault that you wanted to be famous more than you wanted to be his wife?  That you wanted to take care of everybody else’s kids instead of the one you had?
  That you weren’t there for him when he was alive any more than you were there for him when he died?
”

She looked at him coolly but her eyes
crackled
with temper.  “I have never spoken a harsh word to you about your father, Erik.  I loved you--and him--too much to make that mistake, and I’m not going to make it now.  But before you start handing down judgment on me, you might want to ask yourself why you’re not passing judgment on him, too.”

“On him?”  Erik stared at her in disbelief.  “For what?”

“For doing exactly what I did--choosing his career over his marriage,” she said.  “He could have moved to Washington, you know.  Kept the family together.  But incredibly, he wanted to farm.  He didn’t care to sacrifice himself on the altar of my ambition any more than I cared to sacrifice myself on the altar of his.  In the end, we decided it was better for our marriage--and our son--to live separately.”  She shrugged.  “Is politics really so much worse than farming?  Was my dragging you on the campaign trail really more awful than your father making you work the farm?”

“Dad didn’t make me do anything.  He put my hands in the dirt and taught me to respect life and nurture growth.  All you did was put me in front of the cameras every time you needed voters to think you were a good mother.”

“I see,” she said, her voic
e jagged and cold as a glacier.  She placed a cup of coffee at his elbow with a very precise click.
“I’m sorry you feel that way.  It wasn’t my intention.”

“Then what was your intention, Mom?  Why else would you put a little kid through the meat grinder of national politics?”

“Maybe I wanted to expose you to the brightest political minds in America.  Maybe I also wanted to expose you to the people who most needed those minds working on their behalf.  Maybe I wanted you to know what it looks like when you love what you do, when you use what you’ve been given in service of others.  Maybe I wanted passion and fulfillment and ambition to be more than SAT vocabulary words to you, Erik.”

Erik
stared at the steaming coffee.  It looked like tar,
and
he
desperately
wished he’d actually dru
nk some of it.  Anything
to explain away the sudden twist in his stomach
. 
But no.  It wasn’t the coffee; it was the truth. 
The Senator had just eviscerated a life-long grudge with a blast of simple perspective, and the hurt of an abandoned child came oozing out.

“I didn’t want any of that, Mom,” he forced himself to say.  He’d started this thing, he might as well finish it.  “I just wanted you.”

She shook her head.  “No, not me.  You wanted a milk and cookies mom, and I wasn’t one.  I never will be, either, so if that’s going to break your heart, you’ll have to get over it.”

“Mom
--”

She cut him off.  “I know you resent me for leaving.  For leaving your father.  For leaving you. 
For not being there when he
--and you--
needed me. 
But staying is as much a
choice as leaving
. 
There’s no less risk in it, so if you think rejecting a woman like Nixie is going to keep you safe, think again.” 

She
sat down across from him, nudged the sugar bowl his way. 
“But
if that’s your choice, make damn sure it
is
your choice.  I’ve watched you turn away from everything I’ve ever offered you, from girlfriends to law school to political office.  If you want to turn away from Nixie too, fine.  But don’t you dare blame me for your cowardice.” 

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Cowardice
.  Erik
dumped a spoonful of sugar into his coffee and stirred
, his head spinning with a sudden, sickening onslaught of self-knowledge.  She was right, of course.  He
was
a coward.  He’d taken a childhood fear, dressed it up in sensible clothing and passed it off as pragmatism.  And it had nearly cost him the one woman who’d ever found her way through the layers of bullshit to his heart.   

He set down the spoon and frowned.  He didn’t take sugar in his coffee.  He put aside the mug and scrubbed both hands down his face.  “Jesus, Mom.  I don’t know what I’m doing.
”

“Do you love her?”

He thought of the fear, the
loss
, the pa
in that had defined love
his entire life.  The exhausting burden and the monstrous cost of it.  Then he thought of Nixie and the unimaginable generosity of her heart and he let it all go.
 
The past and all its baggage
tumbled away, leaving his heart fresh and clean
and whole inside him.  And full of Nixie.

“Yes,” he said.  “I do.”

“Then the rest doesn’t matter.”

A wave of shame broke over him as he remembered the casual brutality with which he’d rejected Nixie’s love.  The cruelty he’d tried to disguise as honesty. 
H
er cheeks had still been pink from their love-making
when he’d deliberately shattered her heart and he would never forget the way she’d
summoned up that
fragile dignity and asked him to leave, the air around her shimmering with hurt and rage. 

He couldn’t undo that.  He couldn’t take it back.  He’d dealt out a vicious, indelible blow to the purest, more generous heart he’d ever known, and why?  Because he was a coward.  Because he was in love with Nixie Leighton-Brace and it scared the shit out of him.

He’d tried to save himself, pledging himself to Mary Jane in a vain attempt to undo
that
ill-advised leap into love.  And Mary Jane,
God
bless her, had given him that protection when he’d needed it.  The space and the time to figure out that he not only couldn’t reverse that fateful leap, but he didn’t want to.  That he would give anything, everything, to undo the damage he’d done.  To put Nixie’s beautiful heart back together and cherish the gift of it for the rest of his life.

But what if everything he had wasn’t enough?  A cold shock settled into his stomach and h
e shook his head. 

“
I messed up.  Mom, I really messed up
.”

“Then fix it.”