Magdalene (13 page)

I took a deep breath and sighed, then
shifted to make myself more comfortable. I knew what he was asking
and I didn’t pretend otherwise. “Gordon was twenty-five. I was
fifteen and madly in love with this dashing older man. He saw me as
a well-behaved little girl...a pretty life-sized doll who could
walk and talk. He didn’t object when his father and my father set
up the deal. I sure as hell wasn’t going to object.” I stopped,
thought back. It was humiliating, thinking how I’d doodled Gordon’s
name on my notebooks, being so very...
fifteen
about it. But
fifteen was fifteen and not forty-six, and was to be expected. I
was far more forgiving of, say, my twenty-four-year-old assistant’s
crush on the kid in Payroll than I was of my fifteen-year-old
self.

“We had three years of an entirely chaste
and fairy princess courtship. I thought Gordon refused to kiss me
because I was underage, which only proved to me that he was
honorable. We got married a week after I turned eighteen. My father
didn’t figure out until my wedding day why Gordon’s father was so
eager to get us married off.” I laughed. “Hell,
Gordon
didn’t even know.”

“When’d he come out?”

The warmth of Mitch’s big hand seeped into
my cold ones. “When he got out of prison. Before he went into
treatment.”

“And your father put you in that position,
even though he knew.”

“He didn’t
know
,” I said. “He
suspected. Didn’t know what to do because if he were wrong, it
would’ve blown back on all of us very badly... I try to give him
the benefit of the doubt.”

“I see. You were the one hit with all the
aftershocks.”

I shrugged. “I was a good girl. I did what I
was told.”

“Until you couldn’t anymore,” Mitch
muttered, his head bowed and his voice far away. I leaned forward a
little to look up into his face.

“Mitch?”

He glanced up at me, then chuckled wryly.
“You and Mina. Good girls backed into a corner, then came out
fighting.”

“Your wife?” I asked, not in the least bit
jealous. I’d be suspicious of any man who didn’t want to talk about
the woman he had loved so long, the mother of his children. After
years of studying men, fucking a good many of them, and acting as
overpaid therapist to more than a few, I had come to the conclusion
that ones who’d lost beloved wives after long marriages made
excellent relationship material, and I wasn’t threatened by a
ghost.

“She was seventeen when we met,” he said
slowly. “Very shy, soft-spoken, eager to please. Physically
delicate. She was sick even then, but nobody knew it. She had never
rebelled, not even so much as smarting off. I was...without
prospects, so her father— He was—is—a CPA with his own successful
firm, very upper middle class. He disapproved of me.”

“Putting it lightly?” I asked, hearing the
edge in his voice.

A corner of his mouth turned up. “I think
you read me too well.”

“I think you let me.”

He tilted his head in acknowledgment of
that.

“And?”

“And I...stole her.”

“
Stole
her? From whom?”

“Her father. The man he wanted her to marry.
They had it all arranged for her to marry him the week after she
graduated from high school.”

“So you eloped? How’d that work out with her
family?”

“Disowned her. Never spoke to her again. I
got into S&T, so after she graduated from high school, we moved
to Missouri and stayed there for eight years. It was easier for her
that way, anyway. She could use distance to excuse them.”

Well. Mina Monroe and Cassie St. James, two
sides of the same coin.

“Now?”

Mitch waved a hand. “Her mother died before
she did. Her father never had anything to do with me or the
kids.”

“Still?”

“Still. My son is having a hard time with it
right now, same way my daughters did. Do.”

I sighed.

“And...what’s
your
ex-father-in-law
doing these days?”

That startled a delighted laugh out of me,
as he had surely intended. “
My
ex-father-in-law is working
at a convenience store somewhere on the Tex-Mex border.”

“How much of a hand did you have in
that?”

“Both hands, both feet. And I make sure to
keep my stiletto heel in his jugular at all times. Revenge is best
served in a Slurpee cup, you see.”

He and I laughed, and we were still laughing
when our car pulled up to Bryant Park. “Mitch,” I drawled, not in
the least surprised. “Ice skating? What a chick-flick cliché.”

“Well,” he said as he got out and pulled me
out after him, “it’s free and I didn’t have much money left after
that ridiculously expensive basket I sent you.”

“Don’t tell anybody I’m such a cheap date.
Did you make those cookies?”

“Uh, no. The young ladies in my
ward—parish—”

“I’ve got the lingo now, Mitch. Ward, not
parish.”

He grinned. “—were making them as a service
project, so I asked my Relief Society president—my female
counterpart in the ward—to swipe a few, write the words, and wrap
it up.”

“Service project?”

“Yeah. It’s where somebody in the ward is
identified as being in need of having something done. Sometimes
it’s a job the teenagers can handle with little or no supervision.
They get together and work on it, get it done. Project. Service.
Service project.”

“I’m not in your ward-slash-parish.”

“No, but
I
am. And I was in great
need, let me tell you.”

We laughed.

And continued to all evening as we attempted
to skate, neither of us very good, leaning against each other,
propping each other up, occasionally pulling the other one down. We
may have spent more time upright than on our asses, but I wouldn’t
have bet on it.

Breathless, we retired to a bench a couple
of hours later to watch others who were far better than we were.
Mitch draped his arm around my shoulder and I snuggled in for
warmth. He curled his free hand around mine, and I felt his
strength even through several layers of wool.

“Where are you staying?” I asked. “Did you
drive?”

“I drove. Staying at The Mark.”

I glanced up at him, surprised. “Just around
the corner from me!”

He simply smiled, which carved concentric
laugh lines into his cheeks.

“You’re ornery.”

“That I am,” he murmured.

“What would God say about that?”

“God made mosquitoes.”

I burst out laughing then. “Point taken.
Then I will assume you have something planned?”

“My only plan was to spend the day with you,
if you were free.”

I was supposed to go shopping with Clarissa,
during which she would attempt—and fail—to wheedle a
five-thousand-dollar dress out of me. Boy, would she be pissed when
I canceled. “I’d like that,” I said, more softly than I’d intended
to. “But not in my house?”

“Not alone, no.”

I tried to be angry, but I couldn’t. It was
simply too funny.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Ha ha ha.”

“Oh, don’t be mad. I haven’t laughed this
much with a ma—” Well. He didn’t need to know that.

“I think,” he said slowly, looking off into
the distance, “that it’s time for hot chocolate and brownies.
Jacques Torres.”

“What are you talking about? They close at
nine on Friday and maybe earlier today.”

“You sure about that?”

My breath caught. “You evil man.”

“The epitome.”

•

We had the chocolaterie to ourselves, and we
were seated with much ado—New Year’s Eve, almost three hours past
their closing time and coming up on midnight. People were knocking
on the door to get in, but were ignored.

Midnight.

I was getting jittery, wondering how Mitch
kissed, unable to wait for the new year when I would feel his mouth
on mine.

Happy birthday to you...

I gasped and turned in my seat when the
singing began.

A cake.

With sparkler candles.

Fuckers wouldn’t go out when I blew at them,
either. There were only four, but they kept sparking and sparkling.
I kept blowing and blowing.

“Dammit!” I plucked them out of the cake and
dunked them in my water glass.

Mitch roared with laughter. I tried not to,
but failed.

“That was a nasty little trick,” I grumbled.
He opened his mouth, but I held up a hand. “I know, I know. God
made mosquitoes.”

The cake was cut and we each had a piece.
There were chocolates and hot chocolate and ice cream and fruit and
by the time we left at two, we were buzzed on sugar. We bounced
nonsense off each other, in hysterics over things that, in
daylight, would be simple stupidity, not even worthy of
eyerolling.

The hour, the laughter, the sugar, the dark,
the cold kept at bay in the back of a warm car with a warm and
attractive man— It made me say and do things I knew I would find
humiliating in the morning because they were so
very...
fifteen
.

“I didn’t get my midnight kiss,” I whined,
but it had taken me almost the entire distance home to cut through
our silliness enough to remember it.

“You were otherwise occupied blowing out
candles, and now it’s too late.”

“It’s never too late for a kiss.”

He cocked one eyebrow at me. “You think?” He
shifted and leaned toward me and, with a sigh, I closed my
eyes.

And he kissed me.

My eyes popped open. “What the hell was
that?” I demanded.

He spread his arms, all wide-eyed innocence,
and said, “I kissed you.”

“On the tip of my nose! I barely felt
it!”

I was squeaking. Oh, God, I was fucking
squeaking
!

“You weren’t very specific.”

I screeched. He laughed. I screeched louder,
but it turned into a fit of giggles. I fell over and lay across the
car seat with my head in his lap, simply looking up at him. He
smiled and smoothed my hair, picked up a strand only to let it slip
through his fingers.

“I’m drunk,” I said.

“I know. You’re worse than a toddler. Can’t
hold your sugar worth a darn.”

I blinked. “Darn?”

“That’s right.”

I sat up. “You don’t swear?”

He shook his head slowly. “Never.”

“You better write me a list of things you
can’t do.”

“Tomorrow. It’s a long list.”

“And then I will attempt to get you to do
them.”

“I would expect nothing less.”

I sobered a bit. “Mitch, I— I wanted to tell
you. Tonight was...” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and
dabbed my face. Benadryl. I needed Benadryl. “This was the best
birthday I’ve had in a long time,” I murmured. “Maybe ever.”

He looked at me, no longer amused, and said,
“I’m sorry.”

* * * * *

Long
Nights, Impossible Odds

Mitch unlocked his hotel room door wearily,
closed it, and sagged back against it.

“What am I doing?” he whispered to no
one.

That was a stupid question. He knew exactly
what he was doing and he wanted to continue doing it.

Mitch, you have a taste for bad girls. You
always have.

Now,
there
was a voice from the past.
Inez, his first crush, a sultry Latina five years his senior. She
had been in desperate search of a dance partner so she could enter
a competition, and had conscripted him. At fourteen, the only
things he had to offer her were his size, strength, and
malleability.

He wasn’t going to lie to himself and deny
that Cassandra’s history was part of his attraction to her, but
there was so much more to her, other things that were just as
attractive.

But...

Inez again.

We don’t usually make such good wives, or at
least, not the kind of wife the Church expects us to be...

That had been relevant when, at twenty and
fresh home from his aborted mission, he’d attempted to persuade
Inez to marry him—two misfits banding together against the
world—but it was irrelevant now.

Look, figuring out how to get what you want
is the easy part. Figuring out what you want is the hard part.

It was one of Sebastian’s first lectures to
him as they sat in the cool, dark peace of the Notre Dame cathedral
to hide, rest from their labors, and talk about theology and
philosophy. Once Mitch and Mina had settled in together, he’d
figured out what he wanted easily enough and gotten it. He’d never
had a need to revisit the issue until, just before Mina slipped
away from him completely, she used the last of her strength to give
him a speech that sounded rehearsed.

Mitch, you rescued me from a fate worse than
death, then turned around and gave me everything I ever wanted. You
made my dreams come true. Promise me— When I leave here... Find
someone. Someone who can match you the way I never could, someone
who’ll take care of you the way you deserve.

Mina...

No, Mitch. Trevor will be gone soon to make
his own life. It’s your time now. Take it. Enjoy it. You haven’t
had a minute to yourself in twenty years.

He turned on his phone and checked for
messages: five, all from his counselors and various ward members.
He slowly undressed and got in a hot shower, hoping it would help
him remember the right question, so he could try to answer it.

What do you really want?

Mitch knew that voice, still and small, but
deep like his father’s. It seeped through his brain whenever he
needed more guidance than his common sense and life experience
could supply, asking the question he hadn’t had the courage to ask
himself.

“Cassandra St. James,” he murmured.

His evening with her had only pulled
something within his reach he’d been trying to grasp—and
missing—for months.

“I want a life.”

A life that wasn’t so filled with everyone
else’s problems that he had no room for any of his own.