Slow Dancing on Price's Pier (27 page)

The trend didn't stop when he started dating Thea.

You banging her yet?
his friends wanted to know.

Garret had tossed his soccer uniform into his duffel bag, buying time. He knew it was inevitable—that it would come to this, as it always did. If Thea were any other woman he might have given them details—insinuations about skill or assets, kinks or trysts. But she wasn't any other woman. He wanted to clam up and say
butt out
. The trouble was, if the guy who had spent years going into detail about his sex life suddenly wouldn't tell them a thing, he would give away too much.

So he did the only thing he could do. The thing they expected him to do. He gave them a few details. He let them read between the lines.

And though he didn't know it at the time, the kind of pain he was in training for had nothing to do with wrists or knees—nothing to do with soccer. He would learn soon enough that he couldn't ice down heartbreak. And he couldn't heal injuries that weren't his own.

 

 

Thea leaned against the refrigerator door, cool air and soft light falling on her bare feet. The window over the kitchen sink was beginning to go dark, and she had no idea how long she'd been standing there with the notion of getting something to drink. From the kitchen, she could hear the television set playing softly in the next room, where Irina was settled into the couch, a sprained and bandaged ankle propped up on the armrest and a bowl of three-color ice cream on her lap.

“Need something?”

Garret was behind her, and she wondered when he'd come back from the bathroom and how long he'd been standing there. Discomposed, she reached into the fridge to grab herself a bottle of water, then thought better of it and reached for white wine. “I'm guessing you're a beer drinker,” she said. “But all I can offer is chardonnay.”

“Anything's fine.”

She took two glasses down from the cabinet, poured, and handed him a glass. In her favorite pair of worn-out jeans and her fleece pullover, with the day's stress no doubt showing on her face, she was sure she looked terrible.

They'd spent the entire evening together in the emergency room—talking to doctors, talking to each other about Irina, talking to Jonathan on the phone—and yet in spite of all they'd been through in the course of a few hours, being alone with him in her kitchen was making her feel edgy and self-conscious. Everything familiar about him standing in her kitchen was butting up against everything unfamiliar, and it made her feel a little like she'd gotten mixed up in layers of time.

“It looks like I have to thank you again,” she said.

“Don't think I'm not going to call in a favor,” he said, smiling. “It's part of my job description.”

She handed him a glass of wine. Something in the motion, the transferring of weight from her fingertips to his, felt too intimate to bear. “Do you always do that?”

“Do what?”

“That smooth, joking around, small talk thing? Do you do it all the time or only when you're uncomfortable?”

He laughed heartily; she thought that it, too, was fake. “I live to entertain.”

She couldn't help looking at him a moment, his face that had always been so handsome. His soft blond hair and slightly oversized lips. She nearly laughed to think of how many times she had kissed him, promised her future to him. And yet, all of that seemed a dream now.

“Did you come to the coffee shop last week?” she asked. To her surprise, she thought she saw some color touch his cheeks. She'd embarrassed him.

“Who told you that?”

“My baristas are my front line. Nothing gets by them.” She watched him carefully, not hiding the fact that she was watching. Garret seemed uneven to her—sometimes his words sounded so false and overly cheerful, and other times she felt as if he wore his heart on his sleeve. She found herself watching for those moments of honesty, for the real Garret, like sun shining between clouds. “Why didn't you mention that you'd stopped in?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Ever since you gave me that double shot of espresso, I can't go back to the old stuff. I stopped in for another round.”

“So I ruined you for other baristas.”

“Don't be so modest,” he said.

She laughed, and then they both were laughing, more than the joke deserved.

“You like running the coffee shop?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Jonathan said you're there all the time.”

“I like to work.”

“Do you?” he asked. “Because I could never tell if running the coffee shop was something you really loved doing, or whether you just sort of fell into it.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

He looked at her for a long moment over the rim of his wineglass. Thea held herself perfectly still. She supposed she knew what was coming.

“Why did you marry him?”

She turned away on the pretense of loading a few dishes into the dishwasher. “It wasn't revenge, if that's what you're thinking.”

“Telling me why you
didn't
marry him doesn't answer the question.”

She rolled her eyes. Talking with Garret had always been interesting when they were kids; now that he was trained in the art, it was nothing shy of thrilling. She liked that he pushed her, that she didn't know what he was going to say next. “I love him,” she said. “He asked me to marry him, and I couldn't think of a better way to spend my life.”

“You mean a
safer
way.”

She said nothing.

“Everyone knew you weren't right for each other,” he said. She bristled at the confident tone of his voice. “You had no chemistry.”

“What was I supposed to do?” she asked, angry now. “Wait around for you?”

His pretty smile fell clear off his face, and she felt instantly gratified.

“You're a lot different now than I thought you'd be,” she said. She finished loading a few of Irina's plastic cups into the dishwasher. She wished there were more. She dried her hands and picked up her wine.

“How so?”

“I figured you would have gotten married. Started a family. You'd always talked about it.”

“Momentary insanity.” He flashed his blockbuster smile. “We were kids. Neither one of us knew what we wanted.”

Yes we did,
she thought.

“You, on the other hand, are living exactly the life I thought you'd live. Settled down. Married. In your parents' house. Running the shop. Having a kid . . . Thea, your life could have been a paint by numbers from those days to this.”

“You're wrong,” she said.

“How do you figure?”

She held his eye. “I've been trying new things. Taking risks. Meeting people.”

“Oh really.”

“And anyway, I'm not settled down. I'm divorced.”

“Right. From my brother,” he said.

For a moment, the seconds stretched long between them. The window to the street had darkened, so only the faintest glow from the streetlight came in. The clock above the table ticked loudly. The blue of Garret's eyes was flecked with nickel and a question Thea didn't quite know how to read.

For years she had been telling herself that there was nothing left of him inside her—that he'd become irrelevant to her present life. But she saw now that she was wrong, that there was still some part of him that was important to her. Some part of what had passed between them had shaped her, continued to shape her, even while she was married to Jonathan, and even now.

“I should go,” he said.

She put down her wine. He did the same. “You were great today. I don't know what I would have done without you.”

He crossed the room, silent, and she summoned up all her cordiality, her good feelings toward him. She wanted to treat him like she would treat any old friend.

“Thanks again for everything,” she said. “Get home safe.”

He frowned at her from where he stood near the door. “You should know something.”

She waited.

“We may have found some sort of . . . I don't know . . . balance, or whatever you want to call it. But what you did to me . . . I don't think we can be friends.”

“Suit yourself,” she said as lightly as she could. And she opened the door.

 

 

Beneath the last of the light fading in the sky, Garret walked to his car. And then he walked past it, the sidewalk leading him on. Her street had changed little in the last fifteen years, owners wishing to preserve the historic character of the city—shutters and sash windows, steep gables and wrought-iron lamps. It was as if the neighborhood was a time capsule, a place that had been preserved until his return.

He'd learned something today—a thing that made him want to leap for joy and cry into his hands all at the same time. He still knew her. All this time, and he still knew her. She hadn't changed so much that he could no longer recognize that which was fundamentally
her
.

At the hospital today, he'd seen that she was still generous, still caring. Everyone near her was drawn in by her, children especially. In the waiting room she'd temporarily adopted a scrawny five-year-old with a stick-on tattoo, but she didn't skimp on paying attention to her own child. Her calm and assurance when the doctors shined a bright light into Irina's eyes made her daughter—and even him—feel like she had everything under control.

It dazzled him that so much of her was still in place. Little things had changed, like the way she did her hair or the way she took her coffee or what she liked on her pizza—but he knew her, still. And somehow, the thought made him feel like he could still mean something to her, which in turn made him feel gratified and hopeful and happy—and just plain terrible too.

For years he'd built Thea into something she wasn't. He'd determined that everything good he saw in her must have been the result of self-delusion, and everything bad about her was fact. He'd begun to wonder if he'd imagined her.

But tonight he knew he had not. Though friendship was probably impossible between them, she was real flesh and blood. Real enough, he knew, to be missed.

Thea was sitting at her desk paying bills when her computer made the noise that meant she had a new e-mail.