Love Kinection (6 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why? Why let me be humiliated like that?”

“I thought they would do the right thing and come clean.”

“I can’t believe you were going to let me marry him anyway. You let me get ready for a wedding to a man who was cheating on me with my younger sister.” The urge to punch my mother tightened my hands around the shopping cart handle until my knuckles turned white.

She met my glare for a second before looking away and pointing to the sales flag about ground beef. “Wouldn’t it be nice to make some beef barley?”

“Don’t try to change the subject,” I hissed.

“Abby, I’m sorry. I love you both. I didn’t know what to do.”

This conversation felt like something straight off
The Jerry Springer Show
, but I couldn’t let it go. “What else aren’t you saying? You can’t be happy she married him, can you? He’s probably already cheating on her with someone else.”

“Well, perhaps, but you know your sister. The more we tell her not to do something, the more she digs her heels in.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter. I had a date last night. And it was nice. Really nice, actually. I think I’m going to go and buy an Xbox.”
So I can shoot monsters and pretend they’re my sister and ex
.

She perked up at the news and smiled but she still had a secret. I could smell it on her. Then a young woman with her belly swollen in late pregnancy walked by, and I knew from the way my mom’s head turned and she watched the other woman. A mixture of concern and tentative happiness crossed her face.

“When’s the baby due?”

“August.” She slapped her hand over her mouth and stared at me in horror. Maybe she expected some kind of huge explosive reaction. Tears, screaming, I don’t know. And a few months ago that might have happened. I sighed and gave my head a shake. I wanted babies. A family. Thirty-four isn’t old, but not exactly young either. The thought of having a baby with Tom surfaced. I didn’t squash the thought, didn’t even think too hard about why it occurred. Tiny replicas of Tom in my head were preferable to contemplating aunthood.

“I guess she wanted to beat me to it.” I picked up a package of ground beef and one of those extra baggies on the roll they keep by the meat and slid it inside. Then I got another and put the chicken in one, too. Chopping and cleaning veggies for soup would be constructive. And also vaguely violent. Be a good outlet for aggression.

“Oh, Abby. Please don’t be sad. You’ve always been my strong girl. I’ve always known you would land on your feet. But your sister. Well, she’s going to have a hard road.”

“Not all that hard, Mom, with you and Dad to indulge her every whim and keep picking her up like she’s still two years old.”

She looked at the floor with a sigh, and I frowned harder. A giant permanent line in my forehead loomed on the horizon if this kept up. And why the hell were we talking about this in the grocery store anyway?

“Your father is furious with her. He has been since the whole…incident.”

“Really? I had no idea.” Everything seemed pretty normal. My dad and I never had a conversation about it. He’d hugged me too tightly and conned me in to watching NASCAR.

“He’s barely spoken to her. And he told me if I give her any money, he’s leaving me. He says I’m to blame, too. He didn’t want you to marry Charlie, but when everything happened…. He’s right. It’s hard to say no when your child asks for help.”

“She’s twenty-eight. She has an advanced graduate degree. I think she’d be fine if she took care of her own bills.” I turned around to head back to the produce department. The woman at the deli counter relaxed visibly when we didn’t come over to her. I sped up and down the aisles grabbing soup veggies. Well, as fast as I could, given the other people who shopped.

“That’s what your father says, too. Can’t you try to forgive her?”

“Mom. She sent me a text yesterday about her wedding to the man I was supposed to marry a year ago. She’s pregnant with his baby. How can I ever be around someone awful enough to do that?”

“Can’t you try to let go of him?”

“I have. But she’s determined to be horrible to me. I don’t care about Charlie. This isn’t about a stolen lover anymore.” The words rang true and released a knot of tension in my chest. “But for her to be cruel? Sister or not, Courtney isn’t someone I want in my life. I’m sorry.”

I left my mother next to the bags of potatoes. I loved her. But I didn’t understand how her brain worked. Just because someone is family, they don’t have the right to treat you like garbage.

Chapter Six

It took forty minutes and three operators, but I finally got someone to change my number. I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon unable to make a decision about calling Tom. Too soon and I’d look desperate, wait too long and look like a bigger bitch than I am. The right thing to do would be to thank him for the date and apologize for being an ass. My cowardice won out, so I focused on making soup instead.

Cooking and stripping the meat from the chicken took tons of time. And I didn’t bother to get the food processor out to chop the vegetables. Instead I did everything by hand. The mindless repetition gave me time to think about a lot of things I’d been avoiding in the last year. What did I really want to do with the rest of my life? How would I handle being Aunt Abby to some little baby with complete jerks for parents? I couldn’t avoid them all the time.

The sadness still hunched in a corner of my heart and I realized the ability to trust a man might take time to reappear. Especially a gorgeous one, but I thought maybe I could try.

Tom was so different from Charlie. The sides of a coin, all similarity ending at the looks department. Tall, nicely built, and great lips turned my head every time. But Charlie made fun of my “nerd gear,” as he called it. Tom teased me to come see his own collection. Charlie would be chubby around the middle in ten years; already going soft in the belly. It didn’t bother me all that much; I’m not a workout fanatic. But it seemed to imply deeper insight to their personalities. Tom would work whereas Charlie would take the path of least resistance.

When everything on the stove simmered lightly, I changed into my workout clothes and got on the treadmill in the spare bedroom. A long walk to keep me from calling Tom and babbling like a fool. The exertion felt good, positive movement forward. I wondered what he would say when he saw my collection of geek paraphernalia wasn’t isolated to the shelves in the living room and smiled.

Every wall held posters and shelves crammed with scale models, books, ceramics, themed board games…. The spare bedroom—regardless of my thigh torture device—is my favorite room in the house. One corner held an overstuffed arm chair with a reading lamp next to it and my favorite blanket hung half on the floor, half off the chair. My friend Stephanie had given it to me for Christmas a few years ago. No idea where she found a blanket with a cartoon zombie on it, but I love it.

The delicious man candy posters on the walls around me as I walked didn’t keep my mind from examining the way I’d been living my life. Why had I gotten so derailed by grief over a failed relationship? The reasons for being madly in love with Charlie seemed stupid now.

I’d been so upset yesterday I’d broken a phone worth several hundred dollars over the behavior of two total assholes. Time to drag my butt out of this rut.

After a good forty minutes of torture, I hopped in the shower. My clothes peeled off and wadded into a ball from the sweat. Gross but strangely gratifying.

When I got out, I heard the sound of someone knocking on my door. I went to answer in my towel, recalled how it had fallen off the night before, and ran into my bedroom to put on my robe instead. I found it in a heap on the closet floor.

“Hang on. Just a minute please.” The knocks stopped, and I tied my robe closed with a tight knot to make sure my girl parts stayed covered. Unannounced visitors are unusual for me. All my girlfriends were married, and a good chunk had kids. If one of them stood outside, a crisis was in process.

I opened the door and smiled. Tom stood on the stoop. He wore a black button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal muscled forearms and a pair of jeans that rode his hips in exactly the right spot. He looked down my body to my toes, back up again, and grinned. The robe is one of those mid-thigh length silky numbers.

“Red is definitely your color.” We stared at each other for a minute, and I fantasized about dragging him into my cave like a crazed nymphomaniac. A hunch told me his thoughts ran along the same lines.

“Thanks. So, what’s up?”

Point to me for not stuttering
.

“I forgot one of the cables to my Xbox. And I never fixed your phone.” He held up a plastic bag. “Wanna let me in so I can fix it?”

“Oh, sure.” I stood to the side and watched him walk by, remembering the way his butt felt.

He rooted around over by the television until he found a cord and stood up with it dangling from one hand. “So where’s your phone?”

“Oh. Right.” I dug it out of my purse and crossed the floor to give it to him. “I don’t have any cash on me. I’ll write you a check or hit an ATM later.”

“No worries.” Broad shoulders pulled at his shirt when he shrugged and looked over my robe again. “Do you always shower in the afternoon?”

“No. But I got up late today and after I got dinner started I got on the treadmill, so I needed to shower. Normally, I work out in the morning.”

“Oh. And here I am again just as you’re getting out. I think my karma is on the upswing.” An infectious, lecherous grin flashed across his face.

“Maybe.” I pushed my hair back and tried to think of what else to say. “I wanted to call you and tell you yesterday was my best Valentine’s Day ever. But I didn’t want you to think I was being clingy or stalkery or whatever. Plus after how stuff ended…. Anyway.”

The words were spoken mostly to the floor, my cheeks on fire with embarrassment. His finger pressed into the bottom of my chin and lifted my face until he came into view. His expression very serious.

“I had fun, too. I haven’t eaten yet.”

I stared at him with my mouth half open until I realized he might want me to ask him to stay for dinner.

“Stay for dinner?”

“Love to.” He looked down at my breasts for a second before he headed to the kitchen. “What are you making?”

“Beef barley and some chicken soup with homemade dumplings. But I don’t put the dumplings in until right before serving. They tend to blow up and suck up all the broth.”

I lifted the lid on the beef soup and released the aroma of simmering vegetables and beef in a hot steamy cloud. He inhaled deeply and smiled.

“Do I get my pick?” He pulled the lid on the chicken soup and looked inside. “Lots of veggies in this one. Hmmm. I don’t know. What does the chef recommend?”

“Either is good. I’m going to make some rolls, too, if that has any influence.”

“Then I gotta go beef.” He stuck the lid back on the chicken. “What other movies you got?”

“Go see. I’m going to get dressed.”

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t dream of it. Hang around like that for the rest of the night. If you get cold, I’ll get you warm.”

“I bet you will.” With the black shirt against his slightly tan complexion and dark hair, I felt as if temptation itself wandered around my condo. He winked at me, and I backed away a step, flustered by the flirting and my response to him. I went down the hall to my bedroom more quickly than I needed to.

My hand rested on the doorknob when I glanced back at him. “You better fix my phone this time.”

“But it’s such a good excuse to come over.” The heated, pointed look he directed at me sent me through the doorway as fast as I could manage.

“Chicken.” His voice reached me even though he hadn’t said it loud.

“Cluck, cluck, baby.” I giggled at his answering laugh as I pulled out a pair of old jeans and V-neck shirt to put on. His clothing drove me to distraction. I decided to join the game. He had looked at my breasts more than once in the few minutes he’d been here. I could capitalize on the weakness.

Wait till he gets a load of this
.

The Blu-ray machine tray closed as I walked back in.

“What did you decide on?”

“It’s a surprise. Nice shirt.” He grinned with a flash of white teeth.

“Thanks. Monty Python’s one of my favorites.”

“‘Huge tracts of land,’” he said, reading the script across my chest. “I tend to enjoy those myself.”

“Really? I had no idea.” I headed into the kitchen to start the rolls. He chuckled at the droll comment.

The little red light on the oven lit up when I turned the dial to preheat. I pulled a cylinder of crescent rolls out of the fridge. My soup I made from scratch, but it looked like a bomb had gone off in the kitchen. Carrot and potato peels, bits of celery, and maybe even some discarded chicken skin lay on the floor. Flour spilled all over the counter, dusted the front of my wall cabinets, and the white dots of stray egg shell shards appeared to be mixed in everywhere. All the large mixing bowls I owned had been used. Homemade rolls were out of the question. I got the little dough triangles situated on a cookie sheet in short order. The dishwasher was full from dishes I’d dirtied making soup so I got it started.

“Can I help do anything?” He stood in the doorway, and I got the distinct impression he’d been staring at my ass when I bent over to put soap in the dishwasher.

Yeah, bend me over the counter and have your way with me, big boy
.

I bit my cheek to keep from saying it out loud and my face spasmed with the force of the giggles that tried to escape.

“No. Just waiting for things to get hot enough.”

“I don’t know. I think they’re pretty hot already.” His shoulder rested against the inside of the door, and one thumb hooked the edge of his pocket. I’d read somewhere when men played with their belt buckles or pockets their thoughts had turned to sex.

Oh look, he wants to have sex with me. That’s pretty cool.