Summer Kisses (313 page)

“Fine. Apologize if you want. But accept mine first. You’re the most important thing in Emma and TJ’s life, Lou. You’re their mom in every way that matters. I should never have tried to cut you out of the decisions about the show.”

“I should have trusted that you wouldn’t let the producers exploit them,” she whispered.

“Hey. Stop trying to horn in on my apology. This is my turn.”

Lou smiled, relieved he’d managed to bring it back to their usual comfortable level. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

“I was mostly done,” he admitted. “I’m a dickhead, you’re amazing, and I didn’t mean a word of it. Forgive me?”

“Always. Even when you’re a dickhead.” Lou smiled against the phone, ignoring the tears of relief gathering in the corners of her eyes. God, she hated fighting with him. It felt like she’d ripped out a piece of her soul.

“You’re better to me than I deserve,” he said.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she soothed, trying to keep things light. “It’s tough being Mister Perfect all the time.”

“We both know I’m not.”

Lou hesitated. It was the perfect opening. All she had to do was tell him he’d always be Mister Perfect to her. Finally tell him she loved him with more than just friendship. There it was. Opportunity knocking.

But she couldn’t tell him on the heels of a fight. She didn’t want that to be how he remembered this moment. Nor how
she
remembered it. She wanted it to be perfect. Like a set-up on that damn show.

Lou felt her shoulders tense. They never used to fight before the show. Not like this.

Then a second realization hit and her stomach plummeted to her toes.

They never used to fight before she started pushing to change their relationship. Before she became convinced she had to tell him she loved him. When they were just friends, they were fine.

What if they couldn’t be lovers without ripping one another to shreds? What if
that
was the cause of all this tension and anger? They’d been happy before, hadn’t they?

Kelly was sure of her game plan, but playing games with Jack’s heart didn’t sit right with Lou. Maybe they
should
just be friends.

She couldn’t stop thinking about that girl in the interview this morning. Missy. So desperately looking for love. What if Missy was right for Jack and Lou was standing in the way of their happiness? What if she was wrong to try to make him love her instead? It seemed horribly selfish, all of a sudden.

Had she even considered what would be best for him? Had she thought for a moment about what he might want in all this? She’d been so wrapped up in her own stupid fantasies, just like the girls on the show, the ones who wanted him without knowing him. Lou wanted him without knowing what
he
wanted. Was that just as bad?

“Lou?”

“I’m here.” Here and confused out of her mind. Where had her simple chaos-control life gone? When had it all become tangled feelings and unanswerable questions?

Normally the person she would talk to about a problem was Jack, but they never talked about problems like this—even if he wasn’t right at the center of it all. Their usual problems were kitchen remodels and whether to confront the lawn boy about snitching a beer out of the fridge. This was a whole different category.

“I should let you get some sleep,” Jack said, misinterpreting her long silence as exhaustion. “Will you come back next weekend?”

“I don’t know, Jack,” she hedged. “Maybe I should stay home.”

A long silence met that comment. Then, “Whatever you want.”

Whatever she wanted.

That was the trouble. She didn’t know what she wanted anymore. She’d been so certain she wanted him, but at what price? Their friendship? His happiness? What was the cost of what she wanted? Was she willing to pay it?

“What do you want, Jack?” she asked softly. “Not about whether I should come or not, but from the show. I feel like we talk in these vague terms about you moving on and finding someone new and I’ve never really asked you what you’re looking for.”

Miranda had asked him and she’d eavesdropped, but that wasn’t quite the same.

“I’m not sure I know,” he admitted. “It was easy to talk about moving on in theory, but the reality—” He broke off with a laugh. “The reality is reality TV. But I have to wonder if Miranda has a point. About me not letting anyone in. Losing Gillian… you saw how it wrecked me. I threw myself into work and I might have even shut out the kids if not for the fact that you wouldn’t let me. So maybe I do have walls up so I never have to go through that again, but I’ll be damned if I know how to let them down. So I guess the short answer is I had no idea what I was looking for when I came here.”

Lou held her breath. The show was certainly changing him in one way at least. She’d never heard him be so upfront about what he was thinking and feeling before.

“Just another grandiose idea, I guess,” he went on. “And now… hell, I don’t know. I get the compatibility test results tomorrow. Maybe that will tell me something.”

Lou couldn’t help wondering what the show’s team of fancy psychologists would say about her compatibility with Jack.

“Kelly says the next big thing after the compatibility test is the lie detector in episode six,” Lou said. “She says when Josh Pendleton gives you the choice between looking at the results and making a gesture of trust by tearing them up, you should definitely look.”

Jack hesitated for so long Lou looked at the phone to make sure she hadn’t lost the connection. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about the girls anymore,” he murmured. “It kind of feels like when I used to come home from those online dates and talk to you about them. And we both saw how that went. Maybe Miranda is right and I’m using you as a crutch, keeping the girls at a distance.”

“Yeah.”
And maybe I’m using my feelings for you as a security blanket so I don’t have to go out and risk my heart in a real relationship
. “Maybe I should stay home next week. It could be a good thing. Give me a chance to figure out who I’ll be without you guys.”

Jack made an agreeable noise and they hung up moments later with those last words swirling in her brain.

Who was she without him?

Lou’s delight at having an entire weekend with no kids and no Jack lasted about fifteen seconds. Then it took all of her willpower not to run after Emma, TJ, and the chaperone the show had sent through airport security and jump on the plane with them.

If this was her test run, to see how she’d do after the show was over and she was alone, so far she was failing.

She called Kelly as she wandered back to the parking garage, but the twins had a soccer game, so a girls’ day was out. She scrolled through the numbers on her cell, jarred by the realization that every other number in there was a PTA pal or car-pool contact. They were friends through their kids. And all of them would be spending the weekends with their families. Which was exactly what Lou always did. Which was why she didn’t know a single, solitary person who had their Saturdays free.

She couldn’t just wave her magic wand and go back to being a single girl with a single girl’s social life. Not that she’d ever thought it would be like that. She just hadn’t considered that this would involve building an entirely new social circle from the ground up.

Lou climbed into the Focus and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. What to do?

Her first instinct was to get the laundry done without the assistance of her two pyrotechnicians, and then go to the grocery without extra hands helping her fill the cart. Just another wild and fabulous weekend for the newly single girl. Or rather, the always single girl who suddenly had to act single.

Maybe she’d go out tonight. She’d never been the pick-up bar kind of girl, but where else was she supposed to meet someone who could make her forget about Jack? As if anyone could.

Just the thought of sitting in a dark bar by herself, awkwardly trying to come up with witty conversation with some stranger made her shudder.

Okay, maybe not a bar. A movie. She could go to the movies by herself. She could see something that wasn’t animated. Something with lots of swearing and violence and sex, and she wouldn’t even have to wait until after the kids were in bed and keep the sound down low. Heck, she could go to an R rated matinee.

Lou drove to the movie theatre by their house, feeling like a complete loser for being so excited by the idea of going to the movies. By herself. In the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

Especially when she could be in California, lazing by a pool with a man objectively declared to be perfect and the two children she already missed.

Lou stood in the lobby and stared up at the marquis, but it seemed like beside every title there was a reason not to go.
Wouldn’t it be great to take the kids to that one?
Or
that is so Jack’s kind of movie
. And
sitting next to Kelly would make that one so much funnier
.

None of the shows were starting in the next hour, which could have been a sign or a convenient excuse, but either way Lou found herself back out in the parking lot, leaning against the Focus in the October drizzle, wondering how she was ever going to do this.

Why hadn’t she ever felt this crushing loneliness four years ago? Had she just been too busy with working two jobs to ever feel isolated?

A job
. This was the perfect opportunity to look for work. She could actually print out resumes without getting grape jelly on them. But what did she even want to do?

Lou climbed into her car.

The thought of running away to Amsterdam or Brussels just made her wonder how many time zones away from Jack and the kids she would be. She wasn’t even sure she wanted the life of an interpreter anymore. She’d miss the mommy routine. But the idea of starting over, building a family with someone other than Jack, without Emma and TJ…

She pulled out her cell phone and thumbed through her contacts, tapping the screen to connect the call. Voicemail picked up on the first ring—but then she’d known it would. The producers kept Jack’s cell phone for him, to control his access to the outside world. She’d known she wouldn’t get him and the kids, but she’d wanted to hear the sound of his voice on the recording and the abnormally long pause before the beep as he fumbled with the phone. The man could repair microscopic damage to hearts, his hands never wavering for a beat, but he was all thumbs when it came to his cell phone.

When the beep finally squealed in her ear she left a quick message saying she just wanted to make sure the kids had arrived all right and check on their return flight time. Then she forced herself to hang up without saying
Love you
at the end.

Little victories.

“I am officially pathetic,” she told the dashboard.

She could either mope about the life she was about to lose or she could get on with her freaking life.

She started the car and pulled onto the freeway, headed toward the city.

Forty minutes later, she walked up the steps past the sculpted lions that flanked the Art Institute, wondering how it was they lived less than an hour from the city and she’d never brought Emma and TJ down here. Saturday crowds filled the foyer as she bought her ticket.

Shoulder to shoulder with art lovers and tourists, Lou walked past the Grand Staircase and through the gallery of Southeast Asian artifacts. She wove through the Asian shop, moving quickly now, guided by a five year old memory of where her favorite painting lived on these walls. She rounded a corner and there it was.

Gustave Caillebotte. A rainy Parisian street scene.

Lou’s feet stilled and she could feel her heart beating. The cobblestones glistened. The umbrellas shone wetly. It was grey and gloomy, but the European
joie de vivre
leapt from the canvas and dug into her soul.

Romantic and lovely, the painting had always made her long to see the Parisian rain and it didn’t fail her now.

She gazed at the vivid canvas and couldn’t escape the feeling that she had let herself down by distilling her entire life down to one word: caregiver. But that was her identity now and no matter how much she might have once longed for this, the passion and adventure of the wide world, she didn’t want to lose that piece of herself that she’d built over the last four years.

She didn’t want to lose Emma and TJ and Jack.

But that wasn’t a choice that was hers to make. That part of her life was already gone. It was only a matter of time.

And it was time for her to start anew.

~~~

Jack threw Emma high into the air, catching her squealing, flailing form before she could splash down into the pool. She giggled and thumped him on the arm. “Again, Daddy! Again!” she demanded imperiously. She waved her water-wing covered arms, as if the wings could actually help her take flight.

Jack grinned and flung her up again, enjoying that moment more than he had the entire last week combined.

“Watch me, Dad!” TJ stood on the edge of the deep-end and bellowed, “Bombs away!” before cannon-balling into the pool. Jack watched alertly until TJ surfaced and began paddling toward where he stood in shallower water holding Emma. Lou was right—those swim lessons at the Y had been a stroke of genius.

At the thought of Lou, some of Jack’s pleasure faded. Things were still off between them. Their conversations this last week had been brief and stilted, frustratingly polite. He missed her. And then he felt guilty for missing her. Like he wasn’t
investing in the experience
the way the producers all wanted.

TJ hung from his shoulders, his teeth chattering. It was a brisk seventy-two today and the pool was unheated, but try telling two kids from northern Illinois that any sunny California day is too cold for swimming.

“Can I go in the hot tub?” TJ asked.

Jack shivered. “Absolutely.” Emma was looking a little blue around the lips too, so they all clambered out of the chilly pool and dripped their way over to the hot tub where it sat, recessed beneath a gazebo. At night, little twinkling lights built into the gazebo ceiling gave the illusion that you could actually see the stars from the heart of smoggy, light-polluted LA, but during the day, the gaps in the lattice roof let in checkerboard streams of sunlight.