Necessary Restorations (The Walsh Series) (A) (32 page)

His mother, Beth, even texted me this morning to say she’d overheard him playing ‘Jingle Bells’ before she got out of bed.

I was meeting Sam for dinner tonight at a tiny organic bistro near Porter Square, and I was determined to end all complaining. It was the first time we’d managed to connect in several days. He’d been tied up with unexpected issues on some of his projects, and I missed him.

We still talked and texted, and when I’d asked one too many times whether he was actually working and not blowing me off for a swanky club, he sent me a picture of himself in a hard hat with a dozen contractors poring over blueprints behind him. He’d been sending selfies with his texts ever since. Some were funny: his annoyed expressions when things weren’t going the way he wanted at jobsites, Riley’s coffee-stained pants, vague images from the Turlan project captioned “top secret.” Others made me want to run across town and throw my arms around him: his groggy, adorable face when he first woke up, his reflection in the mirror with a question about whether he was adequately spiffy for my tastes, his frown when he had to report he’d be needed for another late night.

He knew I was going home for the holiday, and he knew I wasn’t thrilled about it. We hadn’t gotten much beyond those points.

Sam was running late again, and I sat alone in the bistro, waiting with my glass of wine. It felt oddly sophisticated to be sitting in a
bistro
and drinking
wine,
but I wasn’t about to fight Sam on restaurants. He was particular about food, and I’d eat just about anything put in front of me.

He waved from the door, quickly shaking out of his coat and scarf before heading toward our table. Bending, he placed a kiss on my lips and sighed, his forehead leaning against mine. “Hi, Tiel.”

“Hi, Sam,” I whispered, edging forward for another kiss.

His finger traced the neck of my sweater dress, and I felt him smile against my lips. “You are so fucking gorgeous. What are you wearing under this?”

“Not much,” I murmured. He growled, his fingers pressing against me in a sharp, urgent manner. My hands on his chest, I pushed him toward his seat. “So which crisis were you solving tonight?”

He sat across from me but made a small production of adjusting himself in the process. “No crises tonight, actually,” he said. “I was at Lauren’s board meeting, and it ran a couple minutes over.”

“You were
where?
”

The words flew out and I watched as they cracked over him, the unintended anger and betrayal in my voice obvious as his eyes turned from playfully aroused to confused. “I’m on the board of directors for Lauren’s school,” he said. “I think I’ve told you about that.”

“You have
not,
” I said, powerless to rein in my tone. I looked away, desperate to find some of the affection I had for Sam under the irrational jealousy I was feeling right now.

“I
have
mentioned that she’s very happily married to my brother.” He shook out his napkin and draped it over his lap, focused on the place setting in front of him. “To me, she is a friend. Her, Andy . . . they’re the women in my brothers’ lives.”

“I understand that,” I said. “I do. I really do. But . . . it’s hard for me to figure out this whole family thing for you.”

We ordered and Sam gazed at me after the waitress left our table. He was quiet and cool, and I could almost hear him drawing down his words and placing them in a strategic order. “This isn’t about me, and I don’t think it’s about my family either. It’s just a convenient argument because the other explanation is a tad more complex.”

He reached across the table, his fingers circling my wrist. Our freckles lined up when his thumb stroked my palm, those big brown splotches, and I smiled.

“You might be right,” I said.

“You’re pretty cute when you’re feverishly jealous,” he said. “You’re all ‘I’ll cut a bitch’ and I just want to get you naked and lick your nipples and fuck you for five or six hours.”

I snorted, choking on my wine and laughing until tears streamed down my face. Sam shifted his seat closer, his hand moving up and down my back in large, serene circles while I recovered.

“Are we pretending that isn’t what’s happening right now?” he asked as I dried my eyes with his handkerchief. “Is that who we are tonight?”

I shook my head and tapped a fast, frantic segment of Paganini’s Caprice Number Twenty-Four on the table. “I didn’t mean to snap like that,” I said.

Our entrees arrived but Sam stayed beside me with his arm over the back of my chair. “You know I won’t do that, right?”

I nodded, but I didn’t know what to think. There was always this lingering doubt, the suspicion that he’d quickly discover I wasn’t as amusing or sexy or adorable as he once thought, and this would end. He’d be the next in a terribly long line of people who cut me loose over the years, and I’d survive like I always did.

He shared his recent construction woes while we ate, offhandedly mentioning a small, methodological difference of opinion that catalyzed a debate between him and his brothers. Then he rattled off a list of restaurants he wanted us to try when we visited Arizona next month, and it was quite possible I’d never seen him so excited about food before.

“So when do you leave?” he asked, edging the assortment of French macarons the waitress delivered with his coffee toward me.

I lifted the mint green cookie and ran my tongue along the middle where chocolaty cream peeked out. “Friday morning. Christmas Eve trains will either be packed tight or totally empty, but it will give me a chance to clean up my syllabus for the spring semester.”

“And you’re good with spending the holiday there?”

I wasn’t—not even close—but I needed to see my grandmother. “It’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s just . . . ugh, I don’t know how to talk about this.”

“Start small. Explain why you don’t want to visit,” he said.

“I’ve told you—my family doesn’t like me,” I said. “And before you interrupt because I see you trying, please know that I’m not exaggerating. They refuse to accept that life exists beyond the family industrial complex.”

Sam chuckled and stirred his coffee. “I don’t know that I’m supposed to laugh at that, but you have me envisioning some kind of gyro factory run by children.”

“And that wouldn’t be inaccurate,” I said. “When my sister got married, she had fourteen bridesmaids, but I wasn’t one of them.”

“Shannon and Erin haven’t talked in—hmm.” He glanced at the ceiling. “I want to say six or seven years. Erin did some . . . some terrible things, and Shannon retaliated, and I often wonder whether there’s enough salt in the world to thaw that ice. But I know for a fact that Shannon would drop everything if Erin ever truly needed her, and Erin would do the same.”

“Yeah, no,” I laughed. “That isn’t even close to the case with my family. Sam, they’re
embarrassed
by me, and not just the stupid teenage marriage thing. I’m convinced they believe I play on subway platforms and survive on the loose change I earn there.”

“And you know that’s bullshit, right?” he asked. “Families don’t make for the most objective witnesses.”

“I just have to survive a few days,” I said. Sam folded the napkin in half, then folded it again, leaving it in a smooth rectangle on his thigh.

He gestured toward me, confused. “I still don’t understand why you don’t call it out. Put it all on the table.”

“Because it won’t solve anything, Sam. It’s just standard family dysfunction, and there’s no sense stirring up drama.”

“I’m all for conflict avoidance,” he said. “But I really believe you should try to work it out. You have two living parents, and it might not seem like a blessing when they’re openly intolerant of your choices, but I know there are a lot of things I’d say to mine if I could spend the holiday with them.”

The crumbs wiped from my fingers, I reached for another macaron. “I understand that. Really. But their passive rejection is easier to handle.”

He watched as I tasted the cookie. “I’m not trying to make it worse.”

“You know that saying, ‘you can never go home again’? There are times when I realize how frighteningly accurate it is. Whatever home once was, it can’t be that anymore, and it makes me wonder if it was ever there to start with.”

Sam nodded, his gaze still trained on my mouth. “There’s a Welsh word for that,” he said. He reached for his coffee, his expression moving between pain and pleasure with each sip. “You know, I’m trying to be mature and have a fucking conversation with you but you’re sitting there, licking that thing like it’s the head of my cock. I swear to you, I’m going blow in the next minute if you don’t stop.”

I glanced at the cookie and smiled. Sam and I enjoyed a lot of sex, but he stopped me every time I moved to taste his cock. There was always a mediocre excuse—he wanted to be inside me, he wanted to come on my breasts, he wanted to lick me—and he’d gone so far as to bind my wrists to the headboard after I tried to wake him up that way.

I had to wonder whether there was a bigger reason for the oral lockout. Maybe he only liked blowjobs when they came from random girls in semi-private settings. Or, despite his commentary, he wasn’t excited about getting head from me. I wanted to know, and if eating these cookies forced his hand on the topic, I was going to keep on licking.

“A Welsh word? I thought you only tossed around archaic English.”

“
Hiraeth,
” he said. “It’s the homesickness you feel for places of the past.”

“Yeah. That,” I said, and reached for the last cookie. “So now you just know random Welsh words?”

“I saw it a few years ago, one of those paintings with typography overlaid. It just summed up everything I was going through, and I contemplated getting it inked somewhere.”

I thought about all his other tattoos. The assortment of Celtic knots. The doves. Those shapes that related to some equation. The cluster of trees just below his waist. The Iron Man helmet under his watchband. “Really? You don’t have any other words.”

“Hmmm, yeah.” He handed his credit card to the waitress without looking at the bill. I’d stopped offering since he got so pissy whenever I reached for my wallet, but it niggled at all my righteous values. He’d also told me he appreciated my values, but he’d still be paying. “I haven’t found any I like better than shapes.”

Dragging my lip between my teeth, I nodded. I didn’t want him tattooing any homesickness. I didn’t care that it was a cool word. He was already carrying enough reminders of the things he’d lost. “Like I was saying. I’ve changed, I know that, and it makes sense that I can’t experience home the same way I did when I was younger, but it doesn’t make it any less sad.”

“You want me to go with you?” I sent him an aggravated glare. “What?”

“I don’t think bringing an Irish boy home with me is going to solve any of my family problems,” I said. Sam being successful and sexy and generally perfect wasn’t changing anything; my family’s issues were with me.

“I’ll be here when you get back.”

“I know,” I said, sighing. “And I’ll probably text you the entire time I’m gone and you’ll be trying to get rid of me again.”

Sam blew a breath out and the sound transitioned into a groan and then a growl, and his expression was dark, thunderous.

“All right, Tiel. This has been more than enough. Keep doing that,” he rumbled, gesturing toward the macaron I was licking. “But don’t be surprised if you find my cock in your mouth very soon.”

I winked, and licked the rest of the filling.

HOW I KNEW I’d officially lost it: I was moping at a party.

Perhaps moping wasn’t the right word, but I was staring into my gin and tonic, too disinterested to bother drinking it. Riley, in his professional capacity as bartender for this event, also managed to pour a blindingly strong drink. This thing had the capacity to knock me into next year.

There was a great crowd at Patrick and Andy’s apartment for their Chrismukkah shindig, and it really should have been amusing. But I hadn’t been in a social situation without Tiel since the summer, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. The temptation to text her was high, but I didn’t want to interfere with her family’s plans.