Unsuitable Men (21 page)

Whoa. So clearly Shawn was not the only one who was more than a little pissed with her.

“Well, he’ll be back in New York next week, and I still have a key, so . . .”

Riley stepped off the elevator and Tracy followed.

“Walking or driving?” Riley asked.

“Walking.”

They stepped out into the street and headed south.

“It’s too late,” Riley said.

“What’s too late?” Tracy asked.

“With Brendan. It’s too late,” Riley said. “I overheard Shawn on the phone. I’m not certain but I think Meghan went out there.”

Tracy stopped walking and turned to face Riley, her heart in her mouth. “No. I don’t believe that. He’s not interested in her anymore.”

Riley shrugged and touched Tracy’s arm. “Well maybe I heard wrong.” But it was obvious from her face that she didn’t think so and was only trying to make Tracy feel better.

“Tell me
exactly
what you think you heard,” Tracy demanded.

“Sure. But could we do that while walking? Because I’m starving.”

Tracy could barely contain herself until they were in the Tea and Crumpets Café and Riley had ordered her breakfast. The idea of Brendan with Meghan had her stomach in a painful, tight knot.

“So what did you hear?” she asked again as soon as the waiter left.

“Not much, honestly. I heard Shawn say her name and then it was a couple moments later, I heard him ask something like,
‘when
did she get there?’ or something along those lines. That was all.”

“But it was enough to make you think she was there with him in California.”

“Yes.”

The waiter returned with water. Tracy took a sip of hers right away.

“I’ll just call him when he’s back in town. He’ll . . .”

“Why?” Riley asked baldly.

“What?” Tracy looked at her.

“Why’re you calling him?”
Riley asked, looking at her. There was
a tightness
about her mouth, more than a hint of disapproval, Tracy thought.

“I want to see him, Riley!”

“Yes, I get that. But where are you going with that, is what I mean. You want to see him, but do you want to be with him? Or do you want to be with Dotcom Man?”

“You know I don’t want to be with Jason Miller,” Tracy said.

“And yet you’re dating him. So I guess I don’t get it,” Riley said, barely keeping the irritation out of her voice.

“I’m not sure where things can go with someone like Brendan, that’s all. His lifestyle . . .”

“What lifestyle? You mean the lifestyle where he comes home to you every
night,
treats you like a queen and indulges all your crazy behavior as though it’s cute.
That
lifestyle?”

Tracy swallowed. Nothing about what Riley said was untrue.

“Tracy, you know I love you, but maybe you should just leave him be. If you’re so concerned about this lifestyle thing, whatever the hell that means, and Meghan really cares about him . . . I mean, she told me . . .”

“Wait. You’ve been talking to
her
about Brendan?” Tracy demanded.

“No,” Riley said slowly. “Awhile back,
she
called
me
about Brendan. Seems he pretty much cooled things off for no reason and she was confused.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“As far as I knew, it had nothing to
do
with you. I didn’t even know then that you and Brendan were involved.”

“But you knew
I
. . .”

“Knew you
what
Tracy? Liked to have him on a string in case one day you decided to give him a shot? Yes, you’re right. That I did know. I guess I just didn’t think it was relevant to him having an actual relationship with a really nice woman who genuinely cares about him.”

Tracy felt as though she’d been slapped. She leaned back in her seat and opened her mouth to respond when the waiter returned, this time with their coffees. She watched as Riley prepared her espresso, adding milk and sweetener.

“
I
genuinely care about him,” Tracy finally said, her voice quiet. And when Riley said nothing she shook her head. “You don’t think I’m good enough for him.”

“No,” Riley said looking up right away. “I don’t think that Tracy.”

“I can hear a ‘but’ in there.”

“It’s just that, on the one hand you’re spouting off all this nonsense about which men are and aren’t suitable partners, and then on the other, you let yourself get used by a parade of men who think of you
as
. . . less than nothing.”

Tracy looked away. She had never gotten around to telling Riley about the night of the Lounge Two-Twelve opening, but knew that her friend was speaking more generally, more historically. She
had
let herself get used by men who made her feel like nothing. And the one man who hadn’t made her feel that way was the one she’d pushed away.

“You know I don’t know how to do this,” Tracy said. “I’m just trying to figure it out, Riley. Same as everyone else.”

“Brendan’s not the guy you use to figure your shit out. Brendan’s the guy you hope you get once you
have
figured your shit out.”

“It didn’t take you very long, did it?”

Brendan rolled over and flipped on the lamp next to his bed, fumbling in the dark for a moment because of the unfamiliarity of his surroundings. He hated hotels; particularly hotels that he checked into late at night while exhausted. He always woke up sometime around three a.m. looking to use the bathroom and stubbed his toe on something.

This time, it was his phone that had awoken him, and he grabbed it more to stop the annoying ringtone than because he was interested in speaking to anyone at—he checked the clock—four-ten in the morning.

“Hello?” he croaked.

“You’ve been gone three weeks.
Three
weeks. And already Meghan’s back on the scene. But of course, you never did say she was
off
the scene, so I guess . . .”

“Tracy?”

“Yes!” she hissed at him.

“What time is it there, Tracy?”

“It’s a little past seven, why?”

“So what time does that make it here in California?” Brendan asked.

There was a moment’s pause while she absorbed what he was saying. “Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh’.”

“I’m sorry.”

Brendan settled back against the pillow, rubbing his eyes and yawning. Anyone else and he would have hung up on them already.

“Now what was it you wanted to say?” he asked after a moment.

“Riley told me that Meghan was out there with you.”

“Riley’s mistaken.”

“So she isn’t there?”

“No.”

“
Was
she there?”

“Hold up. I’m still stuck on trying to figure out why you think I should have to answer any of these questions at all, let alone answer them at dawn.”

“You’re right,” she said after a moment. “But you were the one who got angry with me, remember? Just because I was honest about being asked out by someone . . .”

“No. Not about you being asked out,” Brendan corrected her. “About you wanting to say ‘yes’. That’s the goddamned difference.”

“You never said you didn’t want me to go out with other men.”

Brendan looked at the phone incredulously. “Oh, that’s something I have to
say?
”

“I’d like it if you did,” Tracy said, her voice barely audible.

“And if I did, you wouldn’t go out on the date?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Tracy,” Brendan sighed. “I’m exhausted . . .”

“You didn’t answer me. Was Meghan there?”

“Yes.”

Brendan listened to the silence for awhile. He didn’t need to see her face or even hear her voice to know she was pissed. It made him feel good to know she was angry and jealous about Meghan. In fact, it just might make his whole fucking day.

“How about you?” he asked. “You go on your date with ol’ boy?”

“Yes.”

“Well then I guess I’m even more confused about why you’re making this crazy phone call,” Brendan said.

“Because it was very hurtful to hear that you saw Meghan, that’s why. And for the record, it was also hurtful the way you treated me that night when I told you about being asked out.”

Hurtful
. For Tracy to admit that something had
hurt
her was nothing less than a breakthrough. Sure she was jealous and irrational, but “hurt” was a new introduction to their relationship lexicon. It gave him hope in a strange way.

“I was hurt too,” he said. “So I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . .” The image of himself wrenching out of her, denying her pleasure because he was in pain, flashed across his mind, and not for the first time he felt a stab of remorse. “I shouldn’t have treated you that way.”

“
Are
you
back
together with Meghan?” Tracy asked, ignoring his apology.

“No. And I was never with Meghan. Not in the way you mean it.”

“I need . . .” she stopped abruptly.

“What do you need?”

She said nothing for a long time. Brendan had no doubt that the answer to that question eluded her. Tracy didn’t know what she needed. She
thought
she knew that he was bad for her, that much he was aware of. But he was also aware that she couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. Tracy was the kind of woman who had to come to her own realizations, no matter how long and arduous a process that might be. The question was how long he was willing to hang in there and wait for her to do that.

One thing he did know was that it had been a shitty three weeks. Being away from her was one thing; being away from her and having to entertain the likelihood that she was with someone else was a whole new level of discomfort altogether, and one that he would be more than happy to put an end to right now. But this was not his move to
make,
it would have to be all hers.

“Tracy, what do you need?” he asked again. “I’m about to go back to sleep.”

“I need for you to not to see her anymore,” she said finally.

Brendan couldn’t help himself. He smiled.

“While you get to run around town with anybody the hell you want? Not a chance, Tracy.”

“Okay then, ‘bye.”

And that quickly, she hung up. The entire conversation had taken less than fifteen minutes but Brendan marveled at how much if changed the texture of his upcoming day, hell, his upcoming
week
. The ups and downs of being with Tracy were a little tough to get accustomed to and sometimes it seemed nothing short of insane, but there was no denying that for whatever reason, he wasn’t exactly clamoring to get off the ride.

“If you go, I’m not sure there’s any way for us to move forward.”

If he lived to be a hundred, Brendan would never understand women who issued ultimatums. There was no surer way to get a man looking at the front door than to give him a false choice, meant to blackmail him into choosing you. Had that strategy ever worked for anyone? He seriously doubted it.

“It’s a funeral, Meghan.”

“For a man who you just admitted you’d never met.”

“For the father of a very good friend.”

“Is that what she is now? A very good friend?”

Brendan tried to contain his impatience, wondering why he was even entertaining her questions. It wasn’t like him to go back to a relationship that had played out already. And he hadn’t. Not really. When he was in California Meghan had called him because she was doing an audit near L.A. and wanted to know whether he was interested in getting together for dinner. And he agreed because he couldn’t think of a good reason not to. But he’d been puzzled, wondering how she even knew he was on the West Coast. Turned out she’d gotten Shawn at the club and he told her.

His first mistake was accepting the invitation to drinks, but the bigger mistake was accepting an invitation to go back to her room with her. Maybe he’d been thinking that it would be a definite step in getting Tracy out of his system, or maybe he was just horny. He couldn’t even remember now what dumb rationale he’d come up with. But he’d gone back to the room with her, and from there, things had progressed: more dinners and drinks when he came back to New York, a couple nights at her place.

And now she thought she owned him. Where before she had been relaxed and permissive, Meghan had become suspicious and clingy, even though the only understanding they had at this point was a series of dates that—at least as far as Brendan was concerned—amounted to no more than that.

“Maybe it’s time we talked about this ‘moving forward’ stuff, Meghan,” Brendan said, massaging his temple while holding the phone in the crook of his neck.

“Yes?”

“I’m not sure I can give you what you seem to need,” he said.

“Which would be what, in your estimation?”

That was another thing. She’d turned sarcastic on him as well.

At first, all these changes seemed like what he deserved under the circumstances. From her perspective, one minute they were going hot and heavy and the next he’d fallen off the face of the earth and was seeing someone else; someone who had tried to humiliate her at a party, no less. So Brendan felt like he owed her something for that, and had patiently absorbed her obvious frustration with him for the past month.

But now this was going too far. When Riley told him Tracy’s father had died, there was no question that he had to go to the funeral. He’d been in her family’s home, sat down to dinner with her mother. He could send a wreath, sure, but it didn’t seem like enough, not after what he and Tracy had been to each other, however ill-defined.

And it didn’t hurt that he would get to see her either, he admitted to himself.

When he got back from the West Coast a part of him had fantasized that he would open the door to his apartment and she would be there. Like some kind of stupid-ass romantic comedy like the ones she used to force him to watch with her on Sunday mornings. But she wasn’t there, and what’s more, there was food in his refrigerator going bad that he had to toss out, which only reminded him of her more.

Turning his thoughts back to the conversation at hand, he took a deep breath.

“Meghan,” he said now. “I’m pretty sure you know what’s going on . . .”

“But maybe I need the benefit of hearing you say it,” she told him, her voice bitter. “Unlike last time, I want things to be crystal clear.”

He’d never said it. Not to anyone.

“I love Tracy,” Brendan told her matter-of-factly.

The words, said aloud, felt like a weight off his shoulders. The only thing that could possibly feel better right now would be saying the words to her. But regardless of whether or not he went to her father’s funeral, Brendan knew Tracy wasn’t ready to hear them. So for now, they would have to be his burden alone.

But still, he would find a flight and go to Atlanta this weekend for her father’s funeral. Just because they hadn’t been in contact in six weeks didn’t mean he wasn’t concerned about her. And though she hadn’t come out and told him as much, he sensed that Tracy’s relationship with her mother was strained so as many friendly faces as possible couldn’t hurt. Riley was flying down and leaving Cullen with Shawn so there would be someone to act as a buffer if it came to that.

“Well, there’s no arguing with love, is there?” Meghan said on the other end of the line.

Brendan gave a short laugh. Who was
she
telling? No matter how you looked at it, Tracy didn’t make sense for him. But that didn’t matter: the heart wanted what the heart wanted.

“Meghan, I’m sorry I couldn’t . . .”

“You were always a gentleman, Brendan,” she said sounding weary all of a sudden. “You have nothing to be sorry for . . .”

And just when he was starting to think how cool she was being about this, she had to go and add something more.

“. . . but I can guarantee you, if you get together with that woman, she’ll give you
plenty
to be sorry for.”

And then she hung up. In a way, that last comment was a gift, because it gave him license to stop feeling guilty. He had been a little less than a gentleman in the way he’d treated her before, but the piece of mean-spirited advice there at the end had pretty much evened out the scorecard as far as he was concerned.

“Good to see you again, Jocelyn.”

Brendan leaned in to kiss Tracy’s cousin briefly on the cheek.

“Nice of you to come,” Jocelyn said.

She was wearing a black dress that was marginally too close-fitting to be appropriate. Brendan remembered what Tracy told him about her acting like “the Black Marilyn Monroe” and tried not to smile.

“Does Tracy know you’re here?”
she
asked.

He nodded slowly. She’d spotted him at the graveside standing next to Riley and her eyebrows had shot up for a split second before she resumed her somber expression. As Brendan scanned the mourners, he noted that besides Tracy, her mother and her mother’s sisters, nearby, but on the other side of the casket were two young women who bore passing resemblances to Tracy. But while they clung to each other while they cried, they didn’t look at or speak to Tracy or her mother.

Curious, Brendan leaned in and whispered in Riley’s ear, asking who they were.

“Tracy’s sisters,” she responded.

Sisters?
Tracy never mentioned siblings. In fact, he was pretty sure that when he was talking about being an only child, she had commiserated as though her experience had been precisely the same.

“Will we see you back at the house?” Jocelyn
asked,
her expression calculating.

“I’ll be there,” Brendan nodded. He looked around for Riley who was chatting with a group of women, wishing she would come rescue him.

“I have to admit, I didn’t believe Tracy the last time you were here and she told me you two weren’t involved,” Jocelyn said taking a step closer to him. “But this time since she brought along her boyfriend, I guess I have to . . .”

“Excuse me, what?” Brendan gave Jocelyn his full attention for the first time.

“Jason,” Jocelyn said. “You know him, I assume. He’s from New York as well.”

“No,” Brendan said, his voice wooden. “I don’t know Jason.”

“Flew in at the last minute is my understanding,” Jocelyn said. “Anyway, I’m riding with the family, so I’ll see you over there?”

“Sure,” Brendan nodded.

So Tracy had a boyfriend. Well, he shouldn’t be surprised. Once you cracked the surface, there was a lot to Tracy that would make a man want to lay his claim on her. Except now he was preoccupied with just how much cracking dude had managed in the last six weeks.
Was she sleeping with him?

“Brendan. You ready to head over?”

Riley’s hand was on his arm and he turned to look at her. 

“Why didn’t you tell me Tracy had a boyfriend?” he said.

Riley looked confused for a moment. “She doesn’t.”

“Her cousin Jocelyn seems to think she does. Some guy named Jason?”

Recognition entered Riley’s eyes but it took a moment for her to shake her head. “He’s not her boyfriend, Brendan.”

“But she’s with him.”

Riley sighed and looked exhausted. “I don’t know what to call it. I’m not sure she does either.”

“Yeah, I’m familiar with that set-up,” Brendan said nodding.

“It’s not . . . it’s . . .”

“None of my business,” he said holding up a hand. “Let’s just go to the house and pay our respects. I might be able to get back home on the red-eye and get some work done tomorrow.”

No point pretending he wasn’t pissed. But mostly, he was pissed at himself. He’d been hoping for more than a chance to say he was sorry about her father’s death, and that was the truth. So he played himself. Wouldn’t be the first time.

All along both sides of the street outside Tracy’s mother’s home, cars were lined up, and it took Brendan and Riley some time to find a place to park, which wound up being three blocks over. As they walked back to the house, they joined dozens of other mourners making their way toward the classic colonial. Mrs. Emerson, Tracy’s mother, was greeting them at the front door. As he and Riley drew closer, Brendan saw that Tracy was standing next to her, and behind Tracy, a man he didn’t know.

Beside him, Brendan could feel Riley’s apprehension but she had no cause for it. It wasn’t as though he was Shawn after all. In his day, Shawn would have had no compunction about starting an out and out brawl if he felt someone was moving in on Riley, but that had never been his style. As shitty as this might feel, he could only assume that at least for this moment in time, Tracy was precisely where she wanted to be, and with the man she’d chosen to be with.

“Mrs. Emerson,” Brendan took her hand as he entered the house. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” She blinked, looking surprised to see him, and then—Brendan was sure he hadn’t imagined it—she cast a worried look behind her in the direction of Tracy’s companion.

He was wearing a dark grey suit, which Brendan recognized as expensively-tailored, and his shoes were a pair Brendan himself had. Also very pricey. He had a serious, almost stern face, clean-shaven and was a little on the thin side. It was hard not to try to get the measure of this man, his competition. He would have spent more time sizing dude up if he didn’t have to keep the line moving.

Then he was standing in front of Tracy and if he didn’t know better he would say she looked relieved, and maybe even a little elated to see him. When he held out a hand, she hugged him instead. He wanted to hug her back, but now that he was standing in front of her, he was too angry and felt a revival of the same hurt he felt the night she told him she’d about this guy in the first place. So instead he awkwardly patted her back and stepped away from her, mumbling something about condolences and moving on. Briefly in the back of his mind he wondered where her sisters were, but foremost in his consciousness was how quickly he could get the hell out of there.

Three hours it turned out.

Although he was pretty much ready to go the minute after he’d made himself known to the family, Riley was not. She’d known many of Tracy’s family members for years, and hadn’t seen them in
awhile, so she spent long minutes talking with each one, catching them up on her life, getting them caught up on hers and showing off pictures of Cullen. Brendan hung on the outskirts of these conversations, gauging from each one just how much longer she was likely to be.

Once or twice, he considered leaving her, but knew he wouldn’t. Even though she was among people she knew well, Shawn would not take kindly to his wife being ‘left’ behind anywhere. The entire afternoon, apart from following Riley around, his remaining focus was directed at avoiding Tracy. She had a shadow of her own. Wherever she was, Jason was there as well, a supportive hand on her back. Rather than break the hand off, Brendan decided it might be better to just not look at them.

Finally, at dusk, Riley was ready to go, and only because she needed to go back to the hotel and relieve herself with her breast pump. Just when he thought they were home-free, she turned in the foyer remembering “just one more person” she needed to speak to. Brendan stood waiting, juggling the keys to the rental car, looking eagerly out at the street.

“We never got a chance to talk,” a voice said behind him said.

He turned and looked at Tracy, taking her in fully for the first time. She was wearing a conservative black suit and low-heeled black pumps with dark pantyhose. In her ears were simple pearl earrings and around her neck the matching necklace. She had pulled her hair back into a bun and wore only minimal make-up. It was hard to look her in the eye.

Brendan could feel her wanting something from him, a response that he was obviously failing to produce. She kept trying to hold his gaze even as he looked over her head, searching for Riley, wishing she would hurry the hell up.