CHAPTER 31

They spent the rest of the day together. Sean signed up for a free e-mail account and persuaded Rebecca to move the desk and the bed out of the room, leaving it empty of everything but the massage table. They also cleared off a small bookshelf in the basement and brought it up so she would have somewhere to keep massage oil and the CD player.

“Next time, we pull down the wallpaper.”

“Ha! Right,” she said. “Sol and Betty would have a cow.”

Sean made a show of looking around. “No Sol and Betty,” he said. “No cow.”

“You are really pushing it.”

“Yeah, I am really pushing it. Because you deserve to work somewhere that’s actually conducive to your business and your general mental health. You could make a go of it on your own, you know. Think how great it would be to leave Eden and the Tree of Life in the dust of your highly stable energy.”

She sighed. “Pretty darn great.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Ugh!” she groaned suddenly.

“What?”

“It’s so easy for you! You’re an on-your-own kind of person. You just get on a plane and go to the next place and meet a whole bunch of new people—and you don’t worry! It’s not like that for me. Change is hard. People are hard. You never know what they’re thinking, or who’s going to turn out to be a jerk.”

“Everybody’s got stuff that’s hard, Beck.”

“Yeah, I know—of course I know. But you having stuff that’s hard doesn’t make my stuff any easier. It actually makes it harder.” She shook her head, as if it might help her thoughts sift into a more comprehensible order. “Look,” she said. “I hate that you have all this crap to deal with. Why can’t life just be easy sometimes? If not for me, for somebody I care about!”

Her exasperation had put color in her cheeks and passion in her voice, and he felt an almost undeniable urge to wrap his arms around her and feel all that energy up against him. He wanted to be in her stratosphere, held there by the gravity of her warmth and generosity. It scared him how much he wanted it, and the fear helped him curb the wanting.

He only put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, somewhere out there is somebody with no problems at all,” he said. “And he’s probably annoying as hell.”

* * *

She kicked him out before dinner, though. She had plans. With “a friend.” No further details were offered. Sean didn’t like that at all. But even more, he didn’t like that he didn’t like it. Why should he care? But still he found himself saying in a teasing way, “Sounds like a date.”

She looked mildly startled. “Not really,” she said.

Not really? Not really?

He drove home vaguely annoyed. It was sort of like when a new volunteer came to the hospital or clinic and, through no fault of their own, they just didn’t do things the way you wanted them to. But you couldn’t be angry because they were thousands of miles from home, enduring the heat or the rain, the flies and the bad food, the cot or the lumpy ancient mattress, doing their best for nothing. Just to help out. You had no right to be annoyed. And yet you were.

Wanting to think about anything other than his own baseless irritability, his mind landed on Chrissy, and he realized he hadn’t seen her in a few days. Now that Kevin was at camp, he supposed she had no dog-training-related excuse to pop over. She’d always been the one to initiate getting together. Maybe she was waiting for him to call now? Because he was pretty sure women did that—waited for the guy to call. Or was that considered old-fashioned these days?

He dialed her up when he got home, relieved that neither of her daughters answered. What would he have said—“Please tell her Sean called”?

Sean who? And what business do you have with my mother? Oh, I’ve heard about you—the guy in the bleachers trying to move in on my mom while my dad was busy scoring touchdowns. He decked you, didn’t he?

Yes. Yes, he certainly did.

But Chrissy answered, and though he’d only had a fuzzy idea of maybe getting coffee or taking a walk, their plan soon grew like fast-multiplying cells into dinner and a movie and possibly a nightcap at her house afterward. The girls were staying with their father.

Sean’s visceral reaction to this last little firecracker of a revelation was a combination of Yippee! and Yikes! But he’d worry about that later.

The night seemed to buzz by, except during the movie, The Bouquet Catcher, a romantic comedy so cloyingly sweet that Sean thought he might need insulin injections by the time the credits rolled. He focused on consuming his extra large popcorn fast enough to qualify for the free refill before the movie was over. After this personal success, he fell into a drooling, head-bobbing doze. He woke up as the violins were cued, feeling like he’d eaten a bag of rock salt.

“I need water,” he told her.

“Great! Let’s have a drink at my house.”

As they exited the theater, her hand slid once again into his, and pleasant as the physical sensation was, alarm bells began to ring in his mind as he imagined the WE ARE TOGETHER sign flashing garishly over their heads.

Are we together?

Together with Chrissy Stillman, he tried to tell himself. Way to go! But somehow it didn’t feel the way he’d fantasized it would. Actually, it felt a little like handcuffs. He’d been handcuffed once in India, mistakenly identified as having run out on his bill at a teahouse. It was sorted out fairly quickly. He suspected this situation would definitely take more sorting than that.

At her house, they were soon snuggled on the enormous burgundy leather couch with the beaten metal tacks, glasses of Cabernet cradled between their fingers. He liked the smell of the leather and the wine and her perfume, the feel of her closeness, and the way her perfectly symmetrical eyes sparkled at him.

Symmetrical?

He realized that at the back of his brain was the image of Rebecca’s eyes, perfectly unsymmetrical, as if God’s level had been a bit off plumb as he’d made her. She was out with “a friend” tonight, he reminded himself.

Well, so am I.

He kissed Chrissy, and the kissing soon turned passionate, hands passing over backs and then over fronts, Chrissy’s lovely half-­cantaloupe-shaped breasts rising to the occasion, her nipples erect through her shirt. They went on like this for a bit, and he definitely wanted to have sex with her. But something kept stopping him from pressing forward. It was the hand-holding. He just wasn’t sure if he was ready for that.

She didn’t ask him to stay, but he got the feeling she would have liked him to. He could always stay another time, he figured. He wasn’t burning any bridges. He was just . . . balking was the first word that came to mind, but that wasn’t right. He was being considerate, waiting until he’d sorted out that hand-holding/handcuff thing. It seemed like the right thing to do.

* * *

When he got home that night, there was a glow coming from the den. Since Dee’s computer had been left on, he decided to check his e-mail account. There was one e-mail waiting for him from Rebecca Feingold. She had forwarded the links to the sensory integration sites she’d found. Then she’d written a couple of lines.

I’m glad you crumbled so quickly to my e-mail ultimatum. I’ll miss you when you’re gone, and it’s nice to know that now I’ll be able to find you from time to time. You never know when another interior decorating emergency might pop up out of nowhere. :)

R

He smiled at this, thinking of receiving news of her ongoing furniture crises at an Internet café in some decrepit third world city. He wouldn’t be around to do the actual moving, of course, but he could badger her until she found someone else to help. Someone with a strong back . . . maybe whoever she was with tonight . . .

Don’t be an idiot, he told himself, and responded:

Doran Furniture Removal, always at your service, ma’am.

S