Yours to Keep (25 page)

He shouldn’t get ahead of himself. He shouldn’t speculate. He’d give her what information he had. If he was lucky, she wouldn’t ask too many questions.

He picked up the phone.

He could picture Nicole Freyer, puttering around her house, picking up Mary’s toys. Her thoughts on something innocuous, like what she was going to cook for dinner. Whether any of their library books were overdue. The phone ringing, Mary running in from another room, calling, “Mommy, phone!” And no matter how reassuring he was, no matter how much he skirted the edge of all the terrifying possibilities, her brain would instantly go to the worst.

“Hello?”

“This is Dr. Hansen.”

“Oh, no.”

“Hang on, hang on.”

Her voice was tiny. “I know it’s bad, because you called and didn’t have one of the nurses do it.”

“It could be many, many things, and not all of them are so bad. Let me tell you what I’m looking at before you jump to conclusions. She has an elevated sed rate and a high white-blood-cell count, meaning she probably has an infection somewhere in her body. Those are the only things that are bothering me, and, really, neither of those things is surprising given the fever. So we need to find out what’s causing all that. And it could be a pretty minor illness causing the infection. I had a kid with all the same symptoms who turned out to have cat-scratch
fever.”

“But it could be a lot worse, right?”

“There are some other more serious things it could be, but we’re not going to go there right now. I’ve ordered a bunch more tests for her, and I need you to bring her to the lab as soon as you can. She’s still feverish, right?”

“Still on and off.”

“Okay. In the meantime, I’m going to have you schedule an appointment with an infectious-disease specialist.”

She took a deep breath. “I was telling someone about Mary’s symptoms, and she said her cousin’s daughter had those symptoms and it was leukemia.”

“Until proven otherwise, this is not leukemia. I’m sending the test orders to the lab right now, so you can bring her any time that’s convenient for you guys. Call Dr. Ryan Pinkian’s office. Tell them I sent you and you need an appointment as soon as possible. We’re going to get this resolved quickly so you don’t lose too much sleep.” He gave her the number.

He was shaking when he got off the phone. For the first time in his life, he was genuinely afraid that he was going to pass out. He couldn’t have explained why this call, this patient, this situation had affected him like this. He’d made hundreds of other phone calls like this one; the vast majority had turned out to be nothing at all. And yet …

He felt too lucky, that’s what it was. For once, for the first time in eight years, he had everything he wanted. He was happy. It scared the crap out of him.

He pulled up alongside Duarte’s curb and waited for her to come out. She emerged flanked by her students, talking and laughing with them, tossing her hair back in a carefree way that he’d never seen before. She looked so happy. She was happy because of him. He felt a surge of joy.

She waved goodbye to them and got into the car. “Hi.” He could hear the lightness in her voice, too. The relief.

“Come here,” he commanded.

She nearly hurled herself into his arms, and they laughed and kissed, her mouth sliding across his until they found their angle and opened to each other, their hands in each other’s hair, their breath and sighs and groans mingling.

She broke away. “Drive fast.”

“We’re going on a date.”

“I don’t want to go on a date. I want you to kiss me like that for hours. And you can do other stuff at the same time if you want, but I don’t want you to stop kissing me.”

“You seriously mess with me. Do you know that?” He kissed her again, licking her mouth to make the kiss even wetter and silkier. She took revenge by bringing her fingers up to their mouths and insinuating them. He nipped one finger, sucked it, and she yelped.

He took her by both shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “I want to take you out tonight.”

She was panting and laughing. “You’re upending the stereotype. Men are never, ever, ever supposed to turn down sex.”

“I’m not turning it down. I’m upping the anticipation. I want you to have more time to think about how good it’s going to be.”

“Oh,” she said, still laughing. “That’s different. I can live with that.”

He took them to the Beacon Bowladrome. He’d wanted to take her somewhere fun, somewhere
out,
somewhere that wouldn’t ask to see her ID.

“We’re bowling?” she asked, as they pulled into the parking lot. She beamed at him. “I love bowling.”

“I’m only sorry Theo’s not here. He’s loved bowling since he was a little boy.”

“We can take him on our next date.” She threw open her door and got out.

“He still won’t play guitar for me.” He put his arm around her and drew her to his side. She fit perfectly there, bumping her hip easily against him as they walked. He felt each bump as a separate jolt of her alluring electricity.

“He’ll come around. He loves you.”

“I know. It’s just that he also hates me.” He opened the door, and they went into the pulsing, dark electronic center of the bowling alley.

“I love the shoes.” She jumped up and down like a little girl as the heavyset adolescent behind the counter passed them over. They sat on the bench together and Velcroed their shoes on, then went down to Lane 7 and waited for the scoring computer to zero out.

They were evenly matched, birthday-party bowlers who’d never made any effort to get good at it. They bowled a lot of gutter balls and laughed at each other. After a while, his face
hurt from smiling at her. Her face was so mobile in happiness, eyes always sparkling, nose wrinkling and unwrinkling, mouth beautifully expressive, something new every moment: teasing, coaxing, celebrating, registering surprise.

They each won two games. Then they sat at the counter and ate pizza and drank Coke. “This is a lot of caffeine for me this late at night,” she said.

He leaned close so that she could feel his breath on her ear, a tickle that slid down her neck and wound its way into her. “You might not be able to sleep,” he whispered.

Her grin slowly stretched over her face. “Time to go?”

“Time to go,” he agreed.

“I didn’t like sex much when I had it before,” Ana said as he closed the bedroom door.

“Why not?” He came up behind her and nuzzled into her hair, the side of her neck. Shivers spiraled through her.

“I don’t know. Everything about it was so different from how it is with you. I don’t think I really liked him that much to begin with. And, honestly, if you don’t like someone that much things don’t usually improve when you see him naked. And he always wanted to do it from behind, which I hated.”

He nudged his erection against her. “Hated, huh?”

“It hurt.”

“Then he wasn’t doing it right.” He began undressing her, his hands warm and sure. “Put your hands on the bed,” he instructed.

She hesitated.

“I promise I’ll stop the second you don’t like something.” He leaned over her and began kissing her shoulders and back—light, fluttery kisses that seemed to draw a map of all the nerves in her body. But she couldn’t relax. She stayed stiff under his ministrations.

“Shh. Shh. Trust me.”

She did. But if he was bigger than Walt, and Walt had hurt her—?

She heard the zipper of his jeans and saw him toss his shirt aside. Then he covered her with his body, burning hot all over.

She was still wearing her jeans and underpants. He reached around her waist and rubbed between her legs, perfect friction she had to rub back against. Then he unzipped her
jeans and tugged them and her underpants down. His hands came back, and he parted her, slipping one long finger into her wetness, easing higher to draw slick, ever-tightening circles until she bucked back against him.

“That’s it,” he murmured.

He moved away from her, the curly hair on his leg scraping over the bare back of her thigh as he tugged open the dresser drawer and extracted the condoms. She closed her eyes and tried to picture what she couldn’t see: She heard the packet tearing and the liquid sound of the latex unrolling over him. The image of his hand on his cock, even in her mind’s eye, set off tingling waves at her core.

Then he nudged into her, just the tip, and she tensed again, but he said, “You tell me if I hurt you,” and she knew that he meant it.

He eased forward, not even an inch, and suddenly, out of nowhere, she was ravenous for more of him. “You can come all the way in.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” Now he was teasing.

“More,” she begged, and then, when he inched forward again. “More, Ethan,
please.
”

“How
much
more?”

“All of you.”

She was so wet that he moved easily, no friction, but even so, he held back, filling her a little bit at a time, circling her clit with his fingers, easing into her until he filled her, snugly. She arched her back and felt the angle change, and he moved slowly in and out, gliding on her silkiness, reaching for her breasts, then releasing them to grab her hips, moving faster now. Short huffs of breath burst out of her, became moans, and she heard her voice, begging him to
do it harder, more, now!

Behind her he went rigid, shaking with release. She felt him let go, hot, fluid, and he collapsed on her, driving her hips against the bed, pinning his hand under her, and she rocked herself against it once, twice, again, and came, yelling his name.

She had no name for the emotion that arrived in the wake of her climax, something at the intersection of joy and fear, so big it filled her and drowned out everything else.

“I can’t keep this up,” she groaned, when the alarm woke her up. He got up with her and cooked for her again, scrambled eggs and breakfast sausages. The kitchen was dark and cold,
and they huddled together at the stove to keep warm while the furnace kicked up to full throttle.

“Would you consider cutting back on work?” he asked. He scrambled the eggs, the motion cording the muscles in his forearm.

She tilted her head to one side, resting it on his other shoulder. He turned his head and kissed her nose. “Become a kept woman?” The thought was simultaneously delectable and terrifying.

“Not completely, not if you don’t want to. I’m just saying that after we’re married, if you want to revisit what you want to be doing, jobwise—”

Everything was backward and muddled up and accelerated. First he’d proposed, and then he’d kind-of-sort-of brought up the possibility of their moving in together. And now he was talking about the fact that she didn’t have to keep working if she didn’t want to.

It was tantalizing, all of it, but also scary. Ricky was going to go crazy with rage as it was, without her moving out of the apartment.

She couldn’t even imagine having to tell him she was going to do that.

There was also the idea of not working, or working less. She had labored so hard to get where she was. Dragged herself hand over hand. The idea of turning the care and keeping of herself over to someone else—it didn’t appeal. On the other hand, the idea of not having to teach every night and every morning—that was tempting. He could be the backstop she hadn’t quite known she needed, the person who made it so that getting sick didn’t feel so much like the end of the world. But she wasn’t sure she was ready yet for him to keep her.

And, more to the point, she was pretty sure
he
wasn’t ready for the idea yet. He looked downright green, as he had after he’d inadvertently mentioned her sleeping at the house more. They were both suffering from romantic jet lag, having traveled across too many lines of dating longitude in too short a time. Their feelings needed time to catch up to their reality.

She shook her head. “For now, I’ll take care of me.”

They were about to go downstairs to the garage when Theo came into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. “Hi.”

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Ana asked him.

“Sure.”

“In private?”

Ethan eyed them suspiciously but said nothing.

She led Theo into the front hallway. “Your dad took me on a really nice date last night.” She told him about the Bowladrome, editing for the family channel. “I want to do something nice for him. And I need your help.”

He gave her a long suspicious glare that was the twin of Ethan’s.

She explained her plan.

His glare didn’t soften.

“Look. Could you just do this? For me? I want to do something nice for him.”

“How would I get there?”

“Could James give you a ride?”

He thought about that, then nodded. “I could ask him, at least.”

“I don’t know how much control you’d have, but if you aim for about ten forty-five? I’ll get him there.”

“That’s past my bedtime.”

“I think he’ll make an exception, don’t you?”

He nodded again. His expression had softened. She couldn’t help herself—she reached out and touched his cheek.

He didn’t pull away. He ducked his head, inviting her to tousle his hair. He grinned at her and said, “Stepmaaaaa.”

“I haven’t said yes yet.” But she grinned back.

Harold Abrams’s office was in a large white Victorian near the old town center of Hawthorne, a little more than a mile from Ana’s family’s apartment. It was a good place to practice, Ana reflected. Many immigrants could walk to that location, and Abrams probably even got some walk-ins off the street. The house was one of the few well-maintained buildings here now, with intact trim and a small, well-manicured front lawn. There were other old houses that had been turned into businesses, but none of them were in particularly good shape. They had peeling paint and broken trim and staircases that deserved to be condemned.

The lawyer himself was short and round and bald, with a fringe of dark hair over each ear and a solid handshake. He ushered them into his office and sat with them for a long time,
asking questions and fielding theirs. Yes, a big wedding would be preferable. The interview they’d undergo would be just like in the movies. Yes, he recommended that afterward they hire an accountant, file late returns, and pay back taxes. It was unlikely that anything would go wrong, because although there were some discretionary ways for USCIS to deny applications, she had none of those black marks against her. She was a stand-up contributor with good character. It was even less likely that the proceedings would somehow trigger action against her siblings, simply because no one would bother to pursue it.