Mr. Personality (31 page)

Impulsively, he reached for the phone. It was…what time in Chicago? Nicole had to know! He had to tell her.

He didn’t need her for his typing because
he’d
done his own typing. For the first time in years, he didn’t need someone else…no one but her, and not even her to get his work ready for Cynthia.

He needed Nicole for something else entirely. He needed her in order to breathe. Somehow his heart couldn’t keep beating on its own.

Looking again at his watch, he did a rapid calculation in his head. New York was an hour ahead of Chicago, time-wise. If it was four-thirty in the morning here, then it was five-thirty where Nicole slumbered.

Surely, it wasn’t too early to call her. She was a teacher. They had to get to school on time.

Max swallowed, his hand trembling as he picked up the phone. She need to know, to understand, that he wanted her for herself, not for the job he’d first coerced her into…so long ago.

Punching in her phone number, he waited as the line connected and began ringing. His stomach felt faintly nauseous, anxiety jittering there.

On the third ring, Nicole answered, obviously only half-awake. “Hello?”

“Nicole,” Max said, his voice sounding strained to his own ears. “I need to talk to you—“

His words stopped as he imagined her groggy and sleep-warm in her bed. In that instant, it seared him not to be there with her. He wanted so badly to crawl into her bed, into her arms and just hold her.

Startled, Max sat with the receiver pressed to his ear for several seconds, as though she might come back on the line. Finally putting it down, he frowned, the pit of his stomach now awash in acid.

She wasn’t letting him in, wasn’t letting him close to her. Like a door slammed shut, he could almost hear her flipping the deadbolts around her heart.

Fury swept over him at his own helplessness. No matter how much he knew he was changing, he couldn’t seem to get through to her to tell her. She was so fucking far away, no longer just down the hall.

Damn! What an idiot he’d been, not to have seen her value earlier and tell her how precious she was, how necessary to his very existence. Longing swept over him for the months he’d spent with her so close. The remembered scent of her, the sound of her laughter mingled with the television as she watched
Johnna!

* * *

“Any possible lawsuit is my problem,” Alton insisted, his gnarled hand warm over hers as it rested on the porch railing.

Nicole regarded him with a troubled gaze. Going back to New York was out of the question, no matter how furious and demandingly distressed Max was, but she’d been worried lately about her father. Shirley seemed like a great person, but it wasn’t her job to pull Alton out of trouble.

Was it even Nicole’s job?

Max had thought she needed to let her father solve his own problems. Blinking suddenly to clear her vision, she tried to believe that Max could solve his problems. It did her no good to think about him raging around his apartment. No good to worry about him.

Thank God, he hadn’t called again. She knew enough not to accept a dead-end relationship, but hearing his voice hurt her. He’d made it very clear that she meant nothing to him. The pain of that thought still made it hard to breathe, no matter how many times she’d tried to force herself deal with it.

“Sweetheart, you’re got to stop worrying about all this,” her father insisted, his beloved face gathered into a concerned frown.

She shouldn’t have finally talked to him about how she’d left things in New York. Only, she kept thinking about Max and remembering his fury. His rage and his coldness. And the slow, sweet kisses that last time they’d made love….

Alton patted her hand. “I never wanted you to go to New York, even though I did let you go. I didn’t want you to.”

“It’s all right, Dad,” she murmured, conscious of the leaden weight of her heart in her chest. Breathing never seemed to get any easier. Would she ever get beyond this?

She put her other hand on top of her father’s. “It’s all right.”

“No,” her father shook his head, “I think I’ve let you do too much sometimes. Even when you were a little girl, you were a serious child. So responsible all the time.”

He reached out and wrapped his arms around her. Nicole let her head fall against his shoulder. He felt smaller now than when she was a child or perhaps she’d just grown. As a child, even when he forgot to pay the bills, he could always dry her tears. Now, with a chunk of herself torn away and the rest of her still struggling not to love Max, she cherished the Band-Aid of his concern.

“I love you, Dad.”

“I know,” he said, shaking her a little. “And I love you bushels. But you’ve got to quit worrying about this guy in New York suing me. I’ll be fine.”

“You don’t understand him, Dad.” Staring ahead, she saw again Max’s rigid face, flushed with anger and denial. He didn’t love her, he’d said, and even if he did, it didn’t matter. Few people were as insulated against their own feelings as Max Tucker.

And now that she was refusing to return and help him pull his butt out of the fire, she knew he’d be insanely angry. Mentally, she braced herself against the image. He’d be more inclined to sue her father now.

Nicole smiled at her father, the effort feeling tight. “I left him without a typist for his book and he was already behind schedule. He was…very angry. I shouldn’t have left.”

But she’d had to leave, she knew that.

“I figure you had your reasons for coming home when you did,” Alton commented with a surprisingly shrewd glance in her direction. “It’s really not your problem, honey. It may not be anyone’s problem. He’s probably just a rich man having a bad week.”

“You don’t know Max. If he doesn’t finish that book, he’ll….” She let her voice trail off, not knowing what to say. How could she be so concerned about him when he’d hurt her so badly? Had he ever given a damn about anyone or anything but himself?

Nicole forced her smile to widen as she looked at her dad. “Anyway, your problems are mine, same as mine are yours.”

The phrase came out naturally like the unfolding of a well-worn garment. How often had her father said that to her when she’d come home with childish troubles?

Her dad shook his head now. “I think I was wrong about that. Back when you were little your problems were mine, but my problems were my own. I never meant that you were responsible for my troubles. But this lawsuit thing has gotten me to thinking about how you’ve always jumped in to help your old man. Too much maybe.”

“No,” she said in half-hearted denial. Didn’t people need to help their parents? Nicole glanced at her father, trying to examine him objectively rather than with the eyes of a daughter.

“I’m a grown man, honey.” Alton hugged her tightly before letting her go. “I really can take care of myself. Heck, this lawyer of Shirley’s is a good guy. Now that I’m working for him, I figure he won’t mind giving me a little legal help now and again.”

Nicole was silent. What sort of attention would a lawyer give the legal troubles of the caretaker who looked after his summer cottage? The guy owed her dad nothing but his meager salary.

“Look at it this way,” her father said, “have I ever not gotten myself out of fixes? Well? I always manage something.”

Staring up at him, she had a flash of memory from before her mother’s death. Just a few words between her parents. Her mother chiding him, “Alton, you can’t always rely on your good looks and your luck.”

He had always had good luck. Ever smiling and over-flowing with generosity, people couldn’t help but like Alton. But sometimes his form of luck involved just shrugging off difficulties and moving on.

Her dad hugged her again. “Remember how I handled that big debt we had when the store closed? Jim, down at the bank wanted to take the house and even then I’d have still owed fifty thousand. But we made it work. Remember?”

They had lost the house, Nicole remembered with a tiny pang. She’d cried when she said goodbye to the old pear tree in the back yard, but even back then, she’d sucked it up and made the best of things.

“We moved out of that big old house. I found the cute little one on Pecan Street and eventually Jim wrote off the rest of the debt. We came out of it okay, just like we’ll do this time.”

“Yes,” Nicole murmured, seeing the comfortable sense of success on his face. She’d hated losing the old house. It wasn’t so much the failure of the store, but the sense of having lost her home so soon after losing her mother. Looking at her dad now, she realized he’d had less distress in moving from their home than she had. Maybe the same was true about Max’s potential lawsuit.

Her father’s style seemed to work for him, even if it wasn’t her style. They’d lost the store and the house when she was a child…and they’d gone on and made a new home. It was as simple as that for Alton. From when she’d first learned of Max suing her dad, she’d wanted to protect his peaceful old age. But hadn’t her dad always protected his own peace? He rolled with life’s ups and downs, she saw now.

Slippery, evasive and ever-charming that was Alton. Some people lived a life of cut-corners and shrugged-off losses. On some level, she’d always known he was irresponsible, but that didn’t stop her loving him.

“You’re my sweetheart girl,” Alton said. “I hate seeing you sad. Don’t you worry about anything. I’ll take care of it all now.”

“Yes,” she said softly, as much to herself as to him. He did take care of things…in his own way.

* * *

“Are you comfortable, Mr. Tucker?” asked a young woman wearing a headset with a microphone. With her cat-eye frame glasses and her harried air of efficiency, she exuded business chic.

It was a chilly Tuesday in September in the city of Chicago, but the lights around the
Johnna!
set had the temperature up like a furnace blast.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Max responded, trying to ignore the damned butterflies in his gut. He’d known this wouldn’t be easy when he’d had Ruth phone the production company, but all the best things in his life were now inextricably linked with Nicole. Sitting at the computer, his hands over her keyboard, he’d realized that. He needed her, loved her. If he had to walk over the fucking hot coals to get her back, he would.

Unfortunately, dealing with the press felt just about that searing.

“You’re good? Great!” the production assistant said with a quick smile. “We’ll be getting started in just a few minutes. I’ll get you miked soon and they’ll want to check the lighting.”

“Fine.” Sternly, Max quelled the desire to throw up. With a few simple phone calls he’d launched himself into the very media frenzy he detested. Voluntarily invited the insanity he’d so long evaded. But Nicole watched
Johnna!
Every weekday for the entirety of her time with him, she’d watched this show. He knew for a fact that she taped it during the school year.

Coming here was his best hope of reaching her.

From the chair next to him, Ruth said, “So I’ve briefed the producer about the subjects you especially want to cover. You know they’re going to ask about Pete…is there anything else?”

A thin smile eased on to Max’s face despite the tightness of every muscle in his body. Good friends. Cynthia didn’t have to be here, but she’d insisted.

Max wondered how long his friends had seen him as a social incompetent. They were responding now as if some vital, stunted part of himself were on the psychic operating table, bless them.

Writing about the convoluted interplay of human relationships had long been second nature to him. Writers had to be observers, had to notice people and their interactions. He wrote human drama in his works with a ruthless efficiency belied by his habitual avoidance of any emotion other than anger.

Until Nicole.

He had been socially incompetent and it wasn’t good enough anymore.

Nicole had changed everything for him. Changed something inexplicable in him. So, here he was entering a prickly, jostling, unsettling world like a fearful child, clinging to his comfy toys—Ruth and Cynthia.

Taking a deep breath, Max deliberately relaxed his body. Not only had he entered the world, he’d committed himself to a revealing interview. Hell, he was going to talk to the media about his personal life.

Getting naked on national television would be easier for him.

But his movement toward Nicole had to be decisive. If he’d called her again, or even shown up at her door, protesting his love, she’d never have believed him. Not with the thoroughness he needed her to feel.

He needed her to wrap her soul around him and make him real again, as he had been those weeks with her. If being here in this chaotic, shallow, parasitic, lunatic environment helped convince her of how completely she’d altered him, then he’d do it willingly.

He just wished to hell they’d get on with it.

* * *

The phone was ringing when Nicole let herself into her apartment. Juggling her bag of school papers to grade, as well as, her purse and a container of Chinese take-out, she said irritably to the phone, “Okay, okay. Keep your shirt on.”