The Man You Need (Love on Tour #4) (18 page)

“What?! That’s great!” Without thinking, I reach up and throw my arms around Jack’s neck.

He pulls me to him. And he feels so good against my body. He smells great, too, just like I remember. I want to hang to on to him like this forever, but I force myself to pull back.

“Wow. I guess I can buy Mike’s condo now.”

“You’re buying Mike’s condo?”

So I guess Sam doesn’t talk to Jack about me. “Yep. Time to be a big girl and get my own place.”

“I’ve been thinking about doing that, too. I really should stop crashing at my grandparents’ house. It’s getting a little embarrassing.”

“How are Bud and Emma?”

“Good. They like California, especially the weather.” He looks out the sliding glass door at the warm, sunny, November day. “Hey, can we talk, alone?”

“Sure.”

I walk to the door and slide it open. The party is just getting starting, so no one is out on the deck yet. I keep my back to the door and listen as Jack slides it closed. I wonder if he’s looking at my new tattoo. Maybe he is, because he takes his time before walking around to stand in front of me.

“Stacey, I miss you.”

My heart, which has been shattered for the past four months, leaps. “I’ve missed you, too, Jack.”

“I kind of can’t believe that we’ve managed to make it this long without seeing each other. And I’m starting to feel bad for your family.”

“Yeah, I think they’ve probably had to resort to some drastic measures to make that happen,” I tell him. I want to jump into his arms, but I’m trying to play it cool, take it slowly.

“We were good friends, Stac. And I think we can be again.”

I nearly fall flat on my ass. Jack wants to be friends? Before my knees completely fail me, I step back and lower myself onto a wicker chair nearby.

Jack takes a couple steps and stands directly in front of me. “We can do that, can’t we? Be friends again.”

This is not want what I want. I want Jack, all of him. I don’t want to be his goddamn friend.

“Of course. That would be nice.”

He smiles. “I was thinking, this party will probably go late, and we’ll both probably want to sleep in. But maybe we could meet for coffee in the morning, say ten o’clock at Buck’s?”

I nod. “Sounds good.”

Jack stares at me for a long moment. I can feel tears pricking at my eyes, and I know I have to get rid of him. Now.

“We should probably go back in. Your date will wonder where you are.”

“She’s not my date. Not really,” Jack says quietly.

I realize he’s not going to go in without me. So I pull myself out of the chair and walk through the door. Once Jack has been distracted by one of his clients, I make a beeline for Sam.

Sam excuses himself from the people he’s talking to and pulls me into the kitchen. “You okay, Stac?”

“Yeah, but, um, Sam, I don’t want to be here.”

He pulls me into a hard hug. “God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have even asked.” Sam pulls back and examines my face. “You wanna go to the hospital?”

I nod.

“Yeah, you should. Take Lisa, I know that’s where she’d rather be, too.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I got Mike and Tak.”

He also has Jack, but he avoids saying his name. I kiss Sam on the cheek and collect Lisa.

I am driving to the hospital with Lisa beside me. It isn’t until we’re almost there that she finally stops scrutinizing me out of the corner of her eye and asks, “Stacey, what happened with Jack out on the deck?”

“Nothing. We just talked.” I take a deep breath. “He wants to be friends.”

Lisa squeezes my knee. “That’s tough.”

“I guess.” I shrug. “I don’t know. We were friends once. We could do it again. And there’s no way we can continue to avoid each other like this.”

“I don’t know, Stac. I think that’s gonna be hard. I mean, you love him.”

“People do it all the time.”

“I couldn’t,” she says.

“If you and Sam hadn’t gotten back together, and you hadn’t had the babies, don’t you think you’d want to be friends with him?”

“No. No way. Every time I saw him I’d just want to jump his bones.”

“Gross.”

“And if he started dating… Fuck… No way.”

I thought about Jack and Sharyl. I wondered if they would go out for a drink after the party. Would she invite him back to her place? Would he go?

I try to shake these dark thoughts out of my head as I pull into a parking space in the hospital’s visitor lot.

“I’ll figure something out,” I tell Lisa. “Let’s go see if Bell’s popped this baby out yet.”

When we walk into the waiting room, we find Sean alone, on the phone with Bell’s parents. He lets them go since they are about to catch a flight anyway, and embraces us both.

“Any news?” Lisa asks.

“Not yet. Baby and Hank are in there. I’ve been sitting out here alone forever. But, uh, the nurse seems to like me.” He gestures with his head to the desk at the front of the department. The woman sitting there gives him a coy smile. “And she’s been keeping me updated. Last I heard it was just about over.”

We’ve barely gotten settled into the uncomfortable chairs in the waiting room when Baby comes barreling in.

“He’s here!”

We all hug and jump up and down. It is so hard to be out of sorts in this joyful environment, but I still am.

We wait a little longer before we’re all allowed to go back to the room. While we are waiting, we talk about the party. Lisa and I can only stave off the inevitable for so long with talk of the guest list. Eventually, Sean and Baby want to know if I talked to Jack.

I think about lying, but I just can’t. “We talked for a minute.”

“And?” Baby asks.

I shrug. “He wants to be friends again.”

They all give me a pitying look. We sit in silence for a minute. Then, thank God, the nurse with a major crush on Sean comes to tell us we can go back to see Bell now.

When we walk in, I see Bell lying on the bed in the center of the room, looking exhausted. Hank is standing beside her, holding a little bundle in a blue blanket in his massive arms.

“Hey, guys. Come meet Sean Daniel Tolk,” he says, a giant grin eating up his face.

Hank slips the baby into Sean’s arms. “Damn, he is something,” Sean says.

“Does he have a nickname yet?” I ask.

Bell rolls her eyes. “Yes, it happened about ten minutes ago.”

“Well?” Baby asks.

“I’m gonna call him Danny,” Hank tells her.

“Wait,” Baby says, crossing her arms defiantly over her chest. “You saddle me with the name Baby, so much so that absolutely everyone calls me that. Then you give your son
my name
as his nickname!”

“Yep. Except written it will have a n-n-y instead of the girly n-i version.”

“Henry, you are such a pain in the ass.”

“Baby, here,” Sean says, handing the little bundle to her.

She calms down immediately. “Oh, he’s so precious.” She coos.

I watch them all for a few minutes. I ask Bell how she’s feeling. Hank and Sean talk about the various horrible things their wives called them during labor.

Then Baby turns to me. “Your turn, Stac.”

I don’t have time to react. And before I know it, Sean Daniel is in my arms. I remember holding my nephew and both my nieces for the first time. I felt completely overwhelmed with love and joy. I wanted to be there for them their whole lives, as their loving aunt.

But when I hold this baby, I feel something different. Now, I want this. I want to be the one lying in the bed looking like I just got hit by a train, Jack standing beside me, smiling until his face hurts.

A tear slips down my cheek and onto the blanket baby Danny is wrapped in. Sean puts an arm around my shoulders. And, now, I know what I have to do.

22

Jack greets me with a kiss on the cheek. I sit across from him at the little round table. He’s already ordered me a caramel macchiato, my favorite, and I take a sip.

“So you guys were at the hospital pretty late last night, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I stopped by this morning to see for myself. Hank Tolk with a baby – a
legitimate
baby – who’d have thought?”

“He sure is a different man than when I first met him.”

He was. Hank had changed when Sean dragged him to rehab and straightened him out. And he’d changed again when he’d fallen in love with Bell. He was a completely different person now.

I understood the transformation all too well. I wasn’t the person Jack met in Sean’s kitchen six months ago. I was a lot like the person he’d fallen in love with. But since he left me, I’d changed even more. For the first time in my life I had a plan for myself. I was going to do the TV show for a few years, travel, hang out with my family, and just be myself all the time, except when I was in front of the camera, of course. And I wanted Jack to be a part of this new life I’d made for myself.

But I can’t do it like this. I realized that as I gazed into that baby’s face last night. And I was solid on this when I woke up this morning. But right now, it’s so hard not to just sit here with him, to hold on to ‘us’ for just a few moments longer.

“Little Sean is so stinking cute.”

“And huge,” I say.

“Well, he has Hank’s size, but fortunately he has Bell’s cute little face.”

I smiled. “He does.”

“The name thing is getting confusing.”

“Ugh. Tell me about it. It was bad enough when Sean and Baby named their kid Henry. I mean, if we all just stuck with calling Hank, ‘Hank,’ it wouldn’t even be a thing. But Baby and Lisa both insist on calling Hank, ‘Henry,’ so now they both have two people they call by the same name.”

“Why do they call him that, anyway? And why does he let them? I know he doesn’t let anyone else call him Henry, even his own wife.”

I shrugged. “Who knows? Those three have a weird relationship.” I took a sip of my coffee and continued my rant about names. “And then Lisa and Sam named the twins Stacey Ann and Danielle Sue. Thank God they both got nicknames right away. I can live with Anna and Ella. And now, there’s baby Sean.”

“But he’ll be called Danny.”

“Yeah, but Lisa is like the last person on the planet who calls Baby, ‘Dani.’ So damn. Lisa has two Henrys and two Dannys. Unless she refuses to call the kid that and insists on calling him Sean, of course. Then there will be two Seans.”

“Maybe Lisa’s the one who needs to change.”

“Fat chance. Have you met Lisa?”

He laughed. “I think it’s kind of cute that you all are so close that you name your kids after each other.”

“I’m not going to. I’m going to give my kids old fashioned names that no one has had in over a century, like Esther and Herbert.”

Jack looks at me quizzically. And I realize that he doesn’t know about the transformation that’s been taking place inside me over the last four months, or the way it blossomed into an unexpected maternal instinct last night. I want him to know. I want to bare my soul to him. But I can’t risk the hurt if he doesn’t feel the same way about me anymore. So I decide to do a little digging.

“I was surprised to see you with Sharyl last night.” I’m trying to sound casual. But I’m not sure I’m pulling it off.

“Yeah. I hadn’t seen her since the tour ended. Just bumped into her accidentally the other day.”

I’d known this from my eavesdropping. But I wanted to know about last night. I wanted to know if he was interested. At the same time, it was killing me inside.

“Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m going to ask her out?” he says with a wink.

He wants to default to our playful friendship banter. But as I look across the table into his smiling eyes, I know for sure that I can’t have him this way. I can’t be his friend, talking about our lives, my family, his dates. It won’t work, because I want all of Jack, or nothing at all.

“Jack, I can’t do this,” I say, standing up.

“What? Stac–”

“I can’t be your friend, Jack. I want more, much more. And I understand why you don’t want to give that to me. I’m not right for you. Someone like Sharyl probably is. But,” my voice breaks, and I know I have to get out of here. “I can’t watch.” I start to move away from the table.

“Stacey, wait.”

“I really do hope you have a nice life, Jack.” I echo his words from that awful night in Seattle. But I’m not saying them with a sneer like he did. I really mean them. “I hope you’re happy. I want that for you.”

Then I walk out.

****

Here we are on the couch again. I’m sandwiched between Sean and Baby. We’re drinking some strange concoction Baby came up with that is green and smells like floor cleaner. It’s pretty good, though, and I figure if I drink enough of it I won’t be so miserable.

It’s late, and I spent most of the day trying to ignore the dark black feeling in the pit of my stomach. But about an hour ago, I just gave up. That’s when Baby got out the liquor.

“You know what I think?”

“What’s that, big brother?”

“I think you are going to be a super star. You’ll be like this insanely famous and glamorous actress and when you go to Henry’s recitals or plays or games – or whatever he ends up doing – all his friends will freak out. And he’ll be the most popular kid in school.”

I roll my eyes. “I’m pretty sure the rock-star-dad will be a bigger thing.”

Baby frowns. “I don’t want him to be popular.”

“What? Why not?” I ask her, taking a drink of the ‘Baby special,’ as Sean calls it.

“Trust me, you don’t want him to be a band geek either, I’ve been there.”

“It’s true. Sean was truly dorky until he hit puberty,” I tell her.

Baby laughs. “That is so hard to picture. No. I just want Henry to be normal.”

“Too late, sweetheart. But it’s like Jack told me once.” I winch a little at his name, and Sean pets my head lightly. “He said that he may not have a normal childhood, but he’ll have parents that love him like crazy.”

“Hmmm,” Sean mumbles.

There is a knock at the door.

“Who the hell could that be?” Sean says, getting up.

“Hank or Mike?”

“No, they both have a key.”

Sean walks to the door.

“It could be the press or something,” Baby says, looking nervous.

Sean opens the door a crack and sticks his head out. Then he swings it open to reveal Jack. Sean steps back without a word and Jack steps in.

He looks like hell. He’s wearing the same T-shirt and shorts he had on this morning. The shirt has a big sweat stain at the top seam and a spot of mustard near his right hip. He’s wearing running shoes, like always, but they are dotted with mud. His eyes have dark rings under them. What the hell happened to him?

“Hey Sean, hey Baby. Stacey, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Yeah.” I get up and walk to the door that leads to the backyard.

I don’t look back to see if Jack is following me. I just leave the door open and flick on the pool light. The backyard is bathed in a muted blue glow. I walk over to the edge of the porch and stare out at the pool.

I hear the door close and the soft sound of Jack’s running shoes on the concrete. Then I feel his hands on my upper arms. One thumb gently traces over the tattoo on my shoulder. I am shivering. It’s as if my whole body is anticipating what he’s going to say.

“Stacey, I miss you every day.”

I can’t help myself. I fall back into his chest and his arms come around and envelope me. He nestles his face in my neck for a minute and takes several deep breaths.

“I’m so fucking miserable,” he says softly. “All I do is work so I don’t have to think about it. Then I go home and sit with my grandparents so I don’t have to be alone. But every night I wind up in bed by myself and I’m a giant mess. I’m a giant fucking mess without you. The only reason I wanted to be friends again was because I wanted to be near you again.”

I am feeling so many things at once that speech is impossible. Jack waits a moment, and when I stay silent he turns me around to face him.

“I’m so sorry about how I ended things. I really fucked up. I should have… Shit, I don’t know what I should have done. But leaving you was stupid.”

I’m looking into his eyes in the dim light, and I want to tell him that I want all the things I rejected before. I want to tell him that I want
him
. But I can’t seem to get anything out.

When I don’t say anything, Jack continues. “I was so determined to get what I wanted out of life, out of our relationship. And I was so sure that it was the right thing to do. But I don’t care about any of it anymore. I can’t have someone to go home to if it’s not you. So forget everything I said, okay? We can live our lives however you want. I just want you.”

A little sound escapes my throat and a tear trickles down my cheek. Jack wipes it away with his thumb.

“Please, Princess. Say something.”

“You already said everything I was going to say,” I manage to squeeze out.

“I did?”

I nod.

“So, not friends?”

“Definitely not.” I reach my hands up and put them on either side of his face, then I pull him to me.

Jack kisses me long and slow and deep. My knees give out and he holds me up and kisses me some more.

“I don’t suppose there’s somewhere private we can go,” he breathes.

I look past him through the glass door and into the living room. Baby and Sean have completely disappeared.

“Oh, yeah,” I say, pulling him back to me.