What I Love About You (12 page)

He easily stood with Charlotte like he had indeed carried a lot heavier. Natalie couldn’t recall a man ever carrying her child. Maybe Charlotte’s grandfather Cooper, but not since she’d been a baby.

Natalie walked beside the two of them, holding Sparky’s leash. Thoughts raced around in her head and she couldn’t control any of them. Any more than she could control her out-of-control heart.

At the edge of the park, Charlotte’s grasp around Blake’s neck nearly cut off his oxygen. He “tapped out” and they stopped for Blake to lift Charlotte onto his shoulders.

“Look, Mom. I’m weally weally high!”

Natalie gazed up at Charlotte, and her laugh mixed with Blake’s. “That’s music to my ears.”

He wrapped his big hands around the ankles of Charlotte’s Ugg boots. “Your mom’s right. You’re heavy. What does she feed you? Lead?”

“No!” Charlotte laughed. “Mama feeds me spaghetti.”

Natalie paused to untangle Sparky’s feet from the leash and Blake waited for her to catch back up. Anyone who didn’t know better might mistake them for a family, but they weren’t. Their closest connection was an unruly puppy. Other than Sparky, there was nothing between them.

As if he read her mind, he turned his head and proved her wrong. He looked down at her lips and cheeks and finally her eyes. Her skin got hot and tingly, reminding her that there was a whole lot of lust between them. But sometimes lust had nothing to do with love. Sometimes lust was just lust.

Blake chuckled at something Charlotte said, then turned his smile on Natalie. A charming flash of white teeth and curve of his sexy lips. A warm spark in his eyes that could be misinterpreted for stronger feelings.

Natalie looked down at the toes of her sneakers. Falling for Blake would be a mistake. A huge one. Perhaps even bigger than believing Michael’s bullshit for so many years. At least with her former husband, she could tell herself that he’d changed from the man she’d married and it wasn’t her fault. With Blake, he’d been unapologetically upfront from the beginning. He was emotionally unavailable, had commitment issues, and didn’t believe either was a problem. She’d known it all along but was falling in love with him anyway.

No, Blake didn’t have a problem. She had the problem. She was falling for an emotionally stunted, hot, hunky man, and her problem was that she had to figure out how to fall right back out of love.

Chapter Nine

His brown eyes melted her heart in middle school. The first time Michael Cooper kissed her, she’d fallen in ooey-gooey love. From her head to her toes, Natalie had loved Michael. She’d loved his hair and the color of his skin and how tan he got in the summer. She’d loved his chest and long legs and that his middle toe was shorter than the others. She’d even loved to watch him breathe in his sleep. Then he’d broken her heart and ruined her life. It had taken years to heal, and now he was back, standing in front of her. His brown eyes watching her and their child, and she felt nothing. No heart-cramping love. No gush of joy, and most surprising, no urge to punch him in the forehead. Not yet.

“She looks like you.”

She stood in his parents’ living room with Charlotte by her side. “Yes.” Natalie helped Charlotte off with her purple coat. “She has your weird toe.”

“Oh yeah?”

Carla took Natalie and Charlotte’s coats and laid them across the arm of the couch. “And she’s smart as a whip. Just like you when you were at that age.”

Natalie felt a subtle shift in the Coopers’ support of her. It wasn’t anything she could pinpoint. Nothing specific, it was just a feeling.

“And she loves macaroni and cheese just like you did.” The joy of having her son home lit up Carla’s whole face, and Natalie could appreciate that joy, even if she didn’t share in it.

Most kids loved macaroni and cheese, Natalie thought as she and Charlotte sat on the old floral sofa that had been in the Coopers’ living room since 1999.

“Only in the blue box,” Charlotte said, and she practically sat on top of Natalie. “I don’t like the yellow box.”

Michael took a seat in his father’s leather La-Z-Boy a few feet away. As teenagers, they’d made out in that chair. “Do you like hot dogs cut up in it?”

“We never had that.” Charlotte looked up at her mom, color high on her pale cheeks. “I don’t like wrinkly hot dogs.”

Natalie smiled and took her daughter’s hand in hers. She rubbed Charlotte’s back and felt her relax a fraction. “Overcooked hot dogs get wrinkled,” she explained.

“And ice cream.” Carla sat on the end of the couch beside Charlotte. She had short brown curls and a round face, and Natalie could almost see her bubble over with happiness. Michael was her boy. Her only child. “She loves to have ice cream with her papa.”

Natalie thought Carla might be selling things a little hard. Charlotte was a good girl. She was kindhearted and loved animals and people. She could be overly dramatic, get struck deaf with convenient hearing, and had a freaky little fear of robots, but she was wonderful and irresistible all on her own. Natalie knew all mothers thought their children were beautiful, funny, and gifted. That couldn’t be true of every child, but it was, of course, true of hers.

“What did you do in school today?” Michael asked, his attention on his child, and Natalie had to wonder what he thought. Could he love Charlotte or would he leave her again?

“Computer lab and I sang a song about tu-keys.”

Michael raised his gaze to Nicole’s. “Turkeys?”

“Yes. Charlotte sometimes forgets to pronounce her R’s, but she’s working on it.”

“Tu
rrrrr
key.”

“Michael couldn’t pronounce his L’s.” Carla chuckled. “He told everyone his name was Mich-o.”

“You told me that already, Nana.” Charlotte sighed and rolled her eyes. “About five hundred times.”

Michael laughed. “That’s a lot of times.”

“Well, maybe not that many.” Charlotte crossed her ankles and swung her feet. “Maybe only seven hundred.”

“Seven hundred is more than five hundred,” Natalie told her. “Like seven is more than five.”

“Oh.” Charlotte nodded and her little ponytail bobbed. “That’s right.”

“Perhaps you and I should go in the kitchen.” Carla looked at Natalie while she rose. “Michael and Charlotte need a few minutes to get to know each other.”

Beneath her hand, she felt Charlotte’s back stiffen. “That’s okay. They can get to know each other with me here.”

Carla’s lips tightened. Natalie rarely countered Carla’s wishes because there was really no need. She felt her former mother-in-law’s disproval as she retook her seat. The last time Carla had looked at her like that was the day Charlotte was born and Natalie had named her after her great-grandmother and not Michael’s grandmother Patricia. She and Carla rarely butted heads these days, but she suspected that might change.

For the next half hour, the four of them talked about little things like Charlotte’s dog and her swimming lessons last summer. She was signed up for ski lessons after Christmas and her favorite color was purple. It was all extremely surreal. The Coopers’ house hadn’t changed since the nineties. It was a time warp of Carla’s Precious Moments collection, the huge entertainment center filled with the big-screen TV, and photos, mostly of Charlotte and Michael in his glory days.

Strange. Definitely strange sitting in this room with Michael. Everything looked the same, yet everything was different. Physically, five years hadn’t changed Michael much. He looked the same and his voice sounded the same. She’d spoken with him on the telephone from time to time, but it was odd to see and hear him at the same time.

When it was time to go, Natalie helped Charlotte on with her coat and waited while she gave Carla a hug good-bye.

“I’ll walk you girls out,” Michael said, and grabbed a blue coat from a closet by the front room. He held the door open, then closed it behind them. They moved across the wide porch and down the steps of the home where Michael and Natalie had married fourteen years ago.

“I’d forgotten how good the air in Truly smells,” he said.

Natalie buttoned her coat and wrapped her red scarf around her neck. She imagined any air outside of the prison smelled good.

“I’d like to take you two girls to dinner one night this week.”

“I don’t know about that.” She opened the door to her Subaru and Charlotte climbed inside. “Do you want to say good-bye to your dad?”

Charlotte raised one hand. “Bye.”

Natalie leaned into the car and buckled the seat belt. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, Mama.” She looked beyond the window to Michael. Charlotte was usually an open book, but Natalie couldn’t read her expression. That concerned her. She straightened and closed the car door. She turned, and Michael stood right in front of her. Close. Too close. His cocoa brown eyes had a little crease at the corners that hadn’t been there before. He didn’t seem as big as she remembered and he was shorter. She was fairly sure he was shorter. She had on flats, so it wasn’t her shoes.

“You are as beautiful as always, Natalie.”

“Don’t, Michael.” Warning bells went off in her head. What did he want? “I’m the mother of your child. Nothing more.”

A cool breeze brushed across his short, spiky hair. “You are the first girl I ever loved.”

“You left me when I was pregnant. You ran off . . .” She shook her head and moved to the other side of her Subaru. “I’m not going to do this, not with my child in the car. I’m not going to rehash the past with you. Ever.”

“You can let me apologize.”

She glanced at him across the roof. “It doesn’t matter now. I’ve moved on. I don’t need you to apologize to me.”

“Maybe,” he said on the breeze, “I need to apologize for me.”

She got in the car and turned the key. He needed to apologize for him. She backed out of the driveway and headed home. She knew what Michael meant. In order for him to forgive himself, she had to forgive him. That surprised her. Never in a million years did she suspect that he needed to forgive himself.

But there was just one problem. She didn’t know if she could. Yes, she’d moved on, but she’d never forgotten the past. She’d never forgotten sitting in their home alone, thinking the man she loved was missing. Hurt or dead or any number of things. But none of those things had involved fleeing with a new girlfriend to start a new life without her and the baby they’d worked so hard to conceive. At least she’d worked hard to conceive. He’d just shown up.

“Mom?”

Natalie glanced in the rearview mirror. She held her breath waiting for Charlotte to say something about her father. Her daughter had sat so quiet on the couch. Well, quiet for a little girl who usually talked nonstop. There had to be something important brewing in that little brain.

“Can we have corndogs for dinner tonight?”

That was it? “I don’t have corndogs.”

“What do we got?”

“I’ll look when we get home.” She glanced back at the road lined with pine and ponderosa. “What did you think of your dad?”

“I don’t know. Okay, I guess.”

“Do you want to see him again?”

Natalie would be okay with the answer no.

“Yeah. When I go to Nana’s house.” Charlotte paused, then said, “I got a book about a lost dog from the library at school. It’s called
A Lost Dog
book.”

Conversation about Michael was obviously over and she didn’t push. “We’ll read it in bed tonight.” She turned onto Red Fox Road.

When she got home, she called Lilah, and her friend showed up half an hour later with a pizza—half pepperoni, half cheese—and a bottle of wine. She’d dyed the tips of her spiked hair white and was dressed almost conservatively in a color-block blouse and pencil skirt. Almost conservative except for her furry knee-high boots.

“Your hair’s going to fall out one of these days,” Natalie told her as she set the table.

“I never overprocess anyone’s hair. Including my own.”

“I like it.” Charlotte took a bite of pizza. “It looks like Buddy, our school iguana.”

Natalie laughed and Lilah chuckled. They ate dinner, and afterward, Charlotte had a small bowl of ice cream for dessert while they waited for Charlotte to bring up the subject of Michael. They waited while they helped her with homework and while they all played “Bow Tie on Parade.” Bow Tie, of course, was always the fanciest and fastest horse in the show. They waited for her to mention her first meeting with Michael while she took a bath and while Lilah read her a bedtime story, but she never mentioned her father.

“That was weird,” Lilah said as she walked down the hall and joined Natalie in the laundry room. “I thought she’d be excited to meet her father for the first time.”

“I know.” Natalie reached beneath the pink “Makin’ Bacon” T-shirt Lilah had bought her last year. The shirt had two pigs kissing on the front and was only suitable for wearing to bed. She unhooked her bra, pulled the straps down her arms, and tossed it on the pile of white underwear in a laundry basket. “I tried to talk to her about him, but she just kind of clammed up.”

“How did Michael look?”

Natalie changed into a pair of red polka-dot pajama pants and didn’t bother to tuck in the bottom of her T-shirt hugging her waist and hips. “Good.” She tossed her black pants in the washing machine, and measured out soap and fabric softener. “Kind of pale now that I think about it.” Changing in the laundry room was a convenient habit that she’d developed when Charlotte had been a baby and thrown up on everything Natalie owned.

She turned on the washer and flipped off the laundry room light. She grabbed her glass of wine off the kitchen counter and moved to the living room. “Michael’s shorter, maybe.” She sat on the blue sectional made of microfiber for easy cleaning. “Either he’s shorter or I’m taller.”

“Shorter?” Lilah sat down the couch from her. “Do men get shorter in the joint?”

Natalie pulled one bare foot beneath her and took a sip of her chardonnay. “I wouldn’t think so. Maybe I just forgot how tall he was.” Maybe she’d subconsciously compared him to Blake. Which wasn’t fair to any man. Blake was taller and hotter. Bigger than life.

“Hmm. Does Michael have a prison tat?” Lilah pointed to the corner of his eye. “Maybe a teardrop?”

“A teardrop for his dead homies?” Natalie made a pistol out of her fingers. “Or do you get a tear when you bust a cap in a homie?”

“Listen to you talkin’ all gangsta.” Lilah chuckled and shook her head. “Have you seen Elliot Perry’s tattoo?”

“No.” They’d gone to school with Elliot and about five other Perrys.

“It’s a big skull that takes up the back of his head. It’s kind of disturbing when you see it from behind.”

“Does it have bloody eyes?”

Lilah nodded and took a drink.

“Last week, Kim came in and picked up some prints,” Natalie said, mentioning Elliot’s third wife. “A picture of that skull on someone’s bony head was in the order. I should have known it was Elliot.” She swirled her wine in her glass. “Kim took a picture of
her
new tattoo.”

“What is it? Some cheesy saying like: ‘Believe in Love’ or ‘Never Stop Dreamin’ ’ ? ‘Keep It Reel’ misspelled with two E’s.”

Natalie smiled and raised the glass to her lips. “A kitty right next to her kitty.”

Lilah’s nose wrinkled. “Yuck.”

“Guess what she named her kitty?”

“Stinky?”

Natalie laughed. “No, but that fits Kim. She named it Pussy Galore.”

“That’s so stupid. No one can ever accuse those two of having any class.” She turned to the side and stretched her furry black boots out on Natalie’s sofa.

Speaking of class, Lilah looked like she had goat legs. Not that Natalie would tell her. Or if she did, not that Lilah would care.

“Is Michael still as good-looking as ever?”

Natalie thought for a moment and nodded. “He’s still a very handsome guy. I’m sure he won’t have any problem finding some desperate female to bone.”

“Are you sure there isn’t any part of you that wants to get back together with him and bone?”

Now it was Natalie’s turn to wrinkle her nose in disgust. “No.”

“Good. I read that some people keep boning after a breakup because it’s easier than finding someone new to bone.”

“Relax, Dr. Cosmo. Seeing him today didn’t make me want to do anything with him. Let alone have sex.” Actually, when she thought about sex these days, the neighbor popped into her head. His bare chest and arms and mouth that sucked out her pitiful resistance. She adjusted the striped pillow behind her. She liked blond guys with gray eyes and square jaws. Guys who kicked down doors to rescue hostages, and who carried little girls on their shoulders, both with equal ease. “He wants to take me and Charlotte to dinner, though.”