Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows) (26 page)

He took a bite of his pretzel, chewed and swallowed. "What?"
Erika goaded him.

He glanced at her and laughed. "What? What? Remember
when I proved how wrong you were about saying `What?"'

She laughed, too. "Oh, yes." They'd been in high school then,
and she'd explained her theory about why girls always said,
"What?" when someone told them something they wanted to
hear. If a guy said, "You're looking good," a girl would say,
"What?" If he said, "I love you," she'd say, "What?" The reason,
Erika had explained, was that the girl wanted to hear the guy say
it again. Ted had contemplated her theory for a few minutes, then
abruptly called her the foulest, most obscene word a guy could
ever call a girl. "What!" she'd erupted, shocked that he could say
such a thing. "There goes your theory," he'd said.

"You didn't say anything," she pointed out now. "That's why I
said `what.' I feel like there's something you want to say, but you
aren't saying it."

"Hmm." He ate some more of his pretzel. Erika tried not to
stare at his beautifully chiseled profile, the angles of his jaw as he
chewed, the sexy glint in his eyes, half closed against the glaring
sun.

She shouldn't push him. She had no right to know his secrets,
no right to ask him more than he wanted to volunteer. But she
couldn't help herself. "So? Are you going to say it?"

"I'm single."

"Single what?"

"Single, as in unattached."

Erika's heart gave a little stutter. She shouldn't have been happy
to hear this, but she was. More than happy. She was delirious.

She tried to tamp down her joy. Just because Ted was unattached didn't mean he had any intention of attaching himself to
her. He'd told her he would never love her again, and she believed
him.

She shunted aside all thoughts of herself and focused on him.
"Are you okay?"

"Now that I'm eating this pretzel, yeah," he said. "I was starving."

"No-I mean about the breakup."

"Oh." He shifted on the hard slats of the bench and broke off
a curved loop of his pretzel. "Yeah."

"You were with her for a long time."

He shrugged. "It wasn't going where she wanted it to go, so I
felt breaking up was the only fair thing to do."

"Is she all right?"

"She's probably better off now than she was when we were
together."

Erika refrained from arguing that he was a damned good catch
and that no sane woman would feel she was better off without
him than with him. "Did you have to move out?"

"Yeah. I found a place in Hoboken. Most of our stuff was hers,
so the move wasn't too hard."

"When did all this happen?"

He shot her a glance, then turned his gaze back to the horizon.
"Before we went dancing the other night."

She wondered why he hadn't told her then. Maybe he had told
her, sort of. He'd told her she was etched into his mind. And he'd
hugged her on the dance floor, and she'd felt so connected to him,
as if a circuit had been closed, sending an electric current through
her. She hadn't dared to ask then if the current had spun through
him, too-because she'd thought he was still with his girlfriend.

But he hadn't been.

Where from here?

She counseled herself not to ask any more questions. She'd
asked more than she should have, and he'd been generous enough
to answer. To press him for more would be unfair. She should be satisfied with the knowledge that he was now available, that if
there was any chance that he would change his mind about never
being with her again, the odds had just risen a percentage or two.
And that was good enough for now.

"I need to have the shit scared out of me," she announced,
slurping her rapidly melting Italian ice. "As soon as we finish our
snack, we should go on the Cyclone. Or the Tilt-A-Whirl. Which
do you want to go on?"

"Which one will we be less likely to puke from?"

"Don't be a wuss. The Tilt-A-Whirl it is."

From: Erika Fredell

To: Ted Skala

Who knows why this is happening now? I can't answer that
question for you, and I can't tell you what's going to happen next.
I can only tell you how I feel when I'm with you, which is really nice
and comfortable, peaceful and secure.

We need to be clearheaded and honest, and the right things will
happen.

I'd love to be lying down under a tree. I'm still dizzy from that
flippin' tilt-a-whirl.

Ted reread the email she'd sent him the day after their Coney
Island outing, and then read it a third time. He was dizzy, too, and
the Tilt-A-Whirl had nothing to do with it.

He hadn't meant to tell her he was a single man.

He hadn't meant to want her so much.

He slouched on the sofa, his BlackBerry in one hand and a cold
Budweiser and the remote control in the other. He pressed the
channel button and the screen flipped through a sequence of
shows: a blast of sitcom laughter, a cloying advertising jingle, a ranting pundit, two eerily good-looking people running down a
dark alley, a Yankees game. He stopped channel-surfing and let
the Yankees invade his living room. They were playing the Red
Sox, which meant it would be an intense, meaningful game. But
he couldn't bring himself to care about the outcome.

You're setting yourself up for disaster, Skala. This is Erika we're
talking about. Erika Fredell, who tore your heart out of your chest and
crushed it beneath the cold, hard heels of her knee-high riding boots.
Erika, whose friends laughed at you when you flew like a lovesick
headcase to Denver and gave her a stuffed teddy bear. Erika, who you
knocked yourself out trying to impress, and who was never impressed.

Erika, who said no when you asked her to marry you.

Erika, who wounded you so badly, you swore you'd never trust a
woman that way again.

Across the room, Derek Jeter hit an RBI double and Ted
couldn't even rouse himself to cheer along with the crowds at
Yankee Stadium. He angled the beer bottle against his mouth and
let a few long swallows of beer slide down his throat, then sighed.
How was he going to protect himself from Erika?

For years, he'd done fine. He'd lived here and there, wound up
back in New Jersey, built a career for himself in New York, brick
by brick. He'd been with women. He'd had relationships. And he
hadn't let anyone hurt him.

He'd decided to contact Erika last month only because Marissa
had deserved something and he needed to figure out if he was the
one to provide it. Not just a baby but a commitment. An acceptance
that the past was over and he was fully healed, and the time had
come to shed at least one layer of his protective armor.

Not just for Marissa but for himself, he'd had to ascertain that
he was truly over Erika. So he'd gotten in touch and agreed to
meet her at that SoHo bar.

And damn it, he'd discovered that he wasn't over her.

How long could a love hang on? Wasn't love like a flower that
shriveled and died if you didn't water it? Wasn't it like a fire that
burned itself out if you didn't add more fuel?

He would run out of bad metaphors for love before his love for
Erika died.

The inning ended with Jeter stranded at third base, and Ted
closed his eyes. The television screen was replaced by the screen
of his imagination, his memory-and Erika was the star of the
show being broadcast there. Erika on the boardwalk at Coney
Island, with the wind rolling off the ocean and lifting her hair.
Her long, beautiful hair, not that ghastly short hair she'd had at
the airport in Denver. She'd looked fine in short hair-she was so
beautiful, she'd look fine bald-but he'd hated that haircut
because it had represented the new person she'd become, her
rejection of who she'd been.

Who she'd been was Ted's girl. When she'd hacked off her hair,
she might as well have been hacking him out of her life.

But her hair was long again, long the way it had been during
that magical summer so many years ago. The Coney Island sun
had lifted the golden highlights to the surface as it had darkened
her skin.

You swore off Latina women, Skala. Don't you remember?

He laughed, even though he felt more miserable than amused.
Yeah, he'd sworn off Latina women, and now the prima Latina
was back in his life.

He tossed the remote control onto the scuffed coffee table in
front of him and lifted his BlackBerry. A few clicks brought up his
saved emails and he read what she'd written to him: We need to be
clearheaded and honest, and the right things will happen.

How could she be so sure of that? The right things hadn't
happened the last time they were together.

But he hadn't been clearheaded then. Honest, yes-and damn
it, she'd been as honest as he was. But his head had been about as
clear as gouache, a paint he particularly liked working with
because it was so opaque. Beautiful stuff, dense with color. But
not the least bit clear.

He'd been dense. Intense. He'd loved her obsessively, and then
when she'd left him, he'd cleared his head by smoking his way
through Tempe, Seattle, and Costa Rica, where Bob, that crazy old
surfer dude, had kept him happily stoned when they weren't riding the waves, and sometimes when they were.

Clearheaded then, no. Now? Now a voice inside him warned
that he was being too clearheaded. He didn't trust that voice. It
was the voice that lured him into taking risks, some of which
turned out pretty damned good, some not so good.

He drained his bottle, the cold, bitter beverage cleansing him.
Okay, he was going to be clearheaded. Not in spite of having just
chugged a bottle of beer but because of it, he thought with a grin.

Clear thoughts: He wanted Erika. Wanted her as much as he'd
wanted her in high school. No, he wanted her more now than
he'd wanted her then. Now she was a woman. She'd always been
cool and confident, but now she was seasoned. She'd seen the
world. All those adventures she'd dreamed of, she'd lived, and
experience was like a unique element in her blood. She radiated
strength and self-knowledge.

She was just ... amazing.

Clear thoughts, he reminded himself.

He wanted her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to lie with
her, on top of her, underneath her. He wanted to envelop her. He
wanted to feel her skin against his skin. He wanted to feel her hair raining down onto his face. He wanted to come inside her and
feel her coming around him.

Christ. Think about Erika for more than a minute and his
brain zoomed south to take up residence in his groin.

Clear thoughts. He wanted her. He wanted hot sex with her.
Surely he could have hot sex with her while keeping a cool head,
couldn't he? He could give her his body while protecting his heart.

He read her email one more time. Neither of them knew why
this was happening now, or what would happen next. But whatever it was, she was up for it. He sure as hell wasn't going to let
her be more daring than he was.

He clicked her number and listened to the purr of her phone
ringing on the other end. "Hello?"

"Let's go on a date," he said.

TED HAD ASKED HER TO PICK A TIME and day for their date.
Easier said than done. Her schedule was so insane. Work made
impossible demands on her, and she was departing tomorrow on
a long-planned trip to Sun Valley. But she'd planned to leave
work a little early the day before her trip, so that seemed like a
good evening to get together. He'd agreed to pick her up at her
apartment at six.

That he'd offered to come to her home was important to her.
It meant this was really, truly a date, not just a casual after-work
get-together. Meeting him someplace straight from work might
have been easier-she wouldn't have had the time to fuss with
her hair and her lipstick, and she wouldn't have had to fret over
what to do if he asked to come upstairs. Her apartment was so
small-just one room, a glorified bedroom that also served as a
living room, dining room, den, and office.