RICHARD TENSED and rigidly pulled his hand free. He took several steps back. A strangled sound in his throat was his only reply.
“Then tell me why,” Barbara demanded. “Just tell me what all these mysterious reasons you can’t touch me are. It’s what you came for, isn’t it? To explain? Well, I’m listening.”
“I can’t risk...I’m not going to screw up your life, too.”
“Too?”
His bitter chortle was ugly. “Haven’t you heard? All I have to do is unzip my pants and lives go toppling like bowling pins. Just stand in line and take a number.”
“Richard,” she said, too taken aback by his virulent self-derision to think of anything more coherent. She had sensed that he was under pressure—understandable for a single father with a pregnant teenage daughter. But this was more. He was tormented. She must have been blind not to see how tormented he was.
She reached out to him, instinctively offering a woman’s comfort, but he recoiled from her, holding his hands up in front of him as if defending himself from attack. “You can’t have a number, Barbara. I’m not adding anyone else to my list of casualties. Especially not you.”
An awkward silence followed. Finally, Barbara picked up her cocoa. “It’s silly for us to be standing in here when there are comfortable chairs in the living room.” She squeezed past him on her way out of the narrow room. “If you feel like talking, I’m a pretty good listener. We were friends once, you know.”
Friends, but never lovers. The old pain haunted her. Obviously he didn’t want a lover; just as obviously, he needed a friend.
Richard was slow joining her—so slow that she half expected him to walk straight to the door for a clean getaway. But he came in and sat down in the same chair he’d sat in on his last visit. Perched on the edge, he leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees, cradling the mug of cocoa between his hands.
An awful silence ensued. Curled up on the end of the couch, as she had been earlier, Barbara thought that it would be much easier if he left. The emotional turmoil of having run into him had exacted its toll. She was tired, physically and emotionally. She still ached from wanting him, and his rejection was still wedged in her heart like a dagger.
But he needed a friend. He was tormented and alone, more isolated, in his own way, than his daughter Missy was, and there was no way she could have denied him the offer of friendship. The silence engulfing them was thick with his need to unload the demons of guilt and self-loathing, and Barbara was too tired for subtlety.
“It’s not a magic cup of cocoa,” she said flatly. “You’re not going to find the solutions to any of your problems by studying the foam on top.”
Richard looked at her and shrugged.
“Tell me why you feel so responsible for Missy’s pregnancy,” she said.
Richard hesitated. At length, he released a chortle of bitter laughter. “‘Of all the gin joints in all the world.’”
“Of all the guidance offices in all the schools,” Barbara paraphrased drolly. “Exactly.” Richard forced himself to meet Barbara’s gaze. “You’re probably the last person I ever expected to be talking to about my daughter’s problems.”
Barbara shrugged. “You’re not talking about your daughter’s problems yet. Right now, you’re avoiding my question.”
Scowling, Richard set his cocoa on the coffee table and turned his full attention on Barbara. “Of course I feel responsible for Missy. I’m her father.”
“You’re responsible for her well-being,” Barbara said. “But even the most conscientious parents can’t assume the responsibility—or the guilt—for every action a teenager takes.”
“I have every right to feel responsible for this one.”
“It’s natural to feel that way. It’s not easy to accept the idea of children growing up and becoming more independent, but they do, and very quickly. It probably hurts to think of Missy being independent enough to—”
“You can spare me the guidance counselor gibberish,” Richard snapped. “You don’t know—” Shaking his head, he laughed bitterly. “Of course you don’t know. But you’re going to. I came back tonight to tell you all about it. I didn’t want you to think that my leaving—that I didn’t want to stay. I just...I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it to you.”
He rose and restlessly paced the small area between the entertainment center and the coffee table. Eventually he stopped in front of the stereo, opened the cassette holder and took out the tape and read sarcastically, “‘Sizzlin’ Seventies.’”
He turned to face her then, but Barbara wasn’t sure he was actually seeing her. “When that song came on and you were right there in front of me, it was like the years just fell away. And then you were in my arms and I forgot everything except what it felt like to hold you.”
Abruptly he put the tape back in the cassette holder. “It was like tasting innocence again.” He laughed a laughter that was ugly and bitter. “You want to know why I feel responsible for Missy’s pregnancy? Because my daughter came to me and asked if I thought girls should have sex with their boyfriends. She trusted me enough to come and ask, and I wasn’t sharp enough to realize that it was more than a rhetorical question. So I gave her rhetoric.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “Parental rhetoric. The old party line about how sex should be an expression of love between two people who care about each other.”
“That’s a very healthy ‘party line.’”
“Yeah,” he agreed bitterly. “And Missy listened very politely. Then she wanted to know if it was true that guys need sex more than girls. What was I supposed to say to that? I told her that it doesn’t mean the same thing to guys that it means to girls, that to them it’s just a physical thing, but that girls get more emotionally involved. I impressed on her that she should never feel obligated to have sex just because a boy wanted her to, that she shouldn’t let anyone pressure her into doing something she wasn’t ready to do.”
Again he laughed that bitter, self-deprecating laugh. “Did you have some strange sensation that someone was thinking about you? It wasn’t easy for me to look at my daughter and remember my performance as a horny teenager.”
Barbara grinned. “You’re not the first father to do a little squirming when his daughter started to blossom.”
“She asked me how long I had to know a woman before I expected her to have sex with me.”
“That’s a tough one.”
“Tough? This is my baby girl. She’s not supposed to know what sex is, much less question me on my personal sexual policies. I was in shock.”
“What did you tell her?”
“What do you suppose I told her? I’d just given her the ‘meaningful expression between people who care’ speech. I told her that I had to know a woman well enough to have developed a special affection for her.”
He dropped wearily into the chair, sucked in a deep breath, then released it very slowly. “It wasn’t just rhetoric, you know,” he said defensively. “Playboy isn’t exactly sending out reporters to cover my social life. I was faithful to Christine when we were married, although, God knows, she had no clue what being faithful meant.”
Barbara nodded. Despite how their relationship had ended, Richard—the Richard she’d known—was a decent man. It was not surprising in the least to hear that he would take marriage vows seriously, even if the woman he was married to didn’t.
“After we separated,” he continued, “I was too busy trying to make a living to get involved with women. Even if I’d had the time, I wouldn’t have had the energy. There were a couple of relationships that didn’t go anywhere, and then, two years ago, there was one I thought might.”
He paused pensively, and frowned. “That was another disaster. Neither Missy nor my mother could stand her. But the point is, I didn’t lie to Missy when I told her that I had to know a woman before I got involved.”
There was a troubling note of defensiveness in his voice. “Did she accuse you of lying?” Barbara asked.
“Accuse?” He pondered the question before replying bitterly, “No. She never...accused me.”
“But you don’t think she believed you?”
“Oh, she believed me,” he said grimly. “Why wouldn’t she, until—” Abruptly he stood and paced again, finally stopping in front of a large framed print on the side wall. As he studied the colorful depiction of a Sunday afternoon park scene, he absently slid his hands into the front pockets of his pants.
Barbara’s heart swelled with tenderness. She’d seen him stand just that way so many times when he was thoughtful or troubled. The shape and subtle slope of his shoulders was suddenly painfully familiar. She longed to slide her arms around his waist, nestle her cheek against his hard, smooth back and whisper reassurances to him that everything was all right. But that wasn’t the kind of reassurance he wanted from her, so she sat perfectly still, waiting, with an air of patience that she did not actually possess, for him to continue confiding in her.
Several minutes passed before he asked, “Do you remember that ticket I got on the way home from the prom?”
“The one for running a red light?”
“It was a yellow light. I sped up to make it through a yellow light. Everybody speeds up to make it through yellow lights, but the one time I tried it, I got a ticket.”
“There was a cop sitting at the corner,” Barbara said, wondering why he’d brought up such an innocuous event from so long ago.
“Exactly,” he said sarcastically, nodding his head. “There was a cop at the corner. The one time I decided to speed up for a yellow light, there was a cop at the corner. It’s a pattern in my life—when I take a chance, I get caught. I make the same mistakes other people make, and I end up paying for them forever.”
“Mistakes like Christine?”
He spun to face her. “Most guys have a Christine in their background. But they don’t end up married to her. I wasn’t the first boy Christine was with by a long count. But I was with her twice, in one weekend—twice, and bingo! Forget college, forget the girl you’re really crazy about, you’re going to be a daddy.”
“That was a long time ago, Richard.”
“Yeah, well, I’m good at mistakes. My mistakes usually have long-reaching repercussions.”
He dropped into the chair again. “I’m still damned good at mistakes.”
“What mistake did Missy catch you making?”
Richard froze. Then, slowly, an eerie smile crept over his features. “The same old one,” he said. “History repeating itself. I unzipped my pants again.” He laughed bitterly. “As usual, it resulted in disaster.”
Barbara encountered a lot of self-loathing in her work with troubled students and parents, but she’d seldom witnessed the degree of torment she sensed in him. His misery was almost palpable.
“It was an agent from another Realtor’s office. She sold a house I’d listed, so we met during the negotiations. After the closing, she suggested we go to dinner and celebrate. I—” He shook his head. “I wasn’t even that interested in her. I guess I developed a habit of tuning out that possibility with women. But Missy was at a football game, and one of her friends was having a slumber party after the game, and Mother had just left for Aunt Sharon’s, so—”
He shifted in the chair. “It was a strange feeling when I realized I didn’t have to answer to anybody if I decided to go out to dinner. I was thirty-seven years old, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to answer to anyone if I decided to go out to dinner with a woman.”
“So you went to dinner.”
He shrugged. “So I went to dinner. And afterward, she asked to see my atrium.”
“Is that anything like wanting to see your art prints?” Barbara asked drolly.
Richard scowled at her. “Don’t mock me, Barbara. This is hard enough without trying to be cute. We had talked about atria at dinner and I had told her about the tropical garden my mother had put in.”
“Sorry,” Barbara said.
Richard accepted the apology with a frown. “It doesn’t take Einstein to figure out what happened. I just wish to God I’d had the sense to take her into the bedroom instead of staying in the living room.” He ran his hand through his hair and exhaled a shuddering sigh. “Missy came home to get something she’d forgotten—”
“Oh, Richard,” Barbara said, struggling for objectivity she didn’t feel. “How horrible for you.”
“Horrible?” he asked with an ugly chortle. “My baby girl finds me with my pants down on the living room sofa with a casual acquaintance two weeks after I told her that I like to get to know a woman before I have sex with her? Yeah, I guess that qualifies as horrible.”
Barbara forced herself to sit perfectly still during the silence that followed. Oh, Richard, why do I have to be your friend and listener? When I see you so bitter, hurting so badly and looking so alone, I just want to hold you.
“How did Missy react?” she asked tenderly when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to continue without prompting.
Richard stared at the far wall, unseeing. “She said one word. ‘Daddy.’ And then she ran out of the house.” He paused again. His eyes were bright—too bright and wet—and his voice was hoarse with emotion. “To the day I die, I’ll never forget that horrible night.”
“What about since then, since you’ve both had a chance to recover from the initial shock?”
“She’s never mentioned it.”
“And you’ve never brought it up?” Barbara asked, appalled.
Richard’s dismal sigh was almost a groan. “What good would it do? It would have been embarrassing for both of us, and it wouldn’t change anything.”
“Not change anything? Richard, it must have been just as traumatic for her as it was for you. She probably needs to talk about it as much as you do.”
He gave her an incredulous stare. “Need to talk about it? My daughter—and quite possibly one or more of her friends—caught me buck naked with a woman on the living room sofa. The less said, the better. The last thing I want to do is talk about it.”
“Well, Missy might be dying to talk about it, but too embarrassed to bring it up. You should find out. She could be confused, or she may be carrying around some heavy-duty unresolved anger.”
“Two months later Missy came in and announced she was pregnant. I think that pretty much sums up what she thought of the whole thing.”
“You think that Missy got pregnant because she interrupted you with a woman?”
“She emulated me!” he said bitterly. “I became her casual sex role model! She thought I’d lied to her. She thought I told her one thing and did another.” He faced her evenly. “I swear to God, Barbara, I didn’t lie to her. It was an isolated incident. I just...got caught.”
“I believe you,” Barbara said. After a long hesitation, she added softly, “Missy would believe you, too, if you explained what happened to her the way you’ve explained it to me.”
“It’s a little late for explanations now,” Richard said. “But you see why I can’t take a chance on getting caught with my pants down again.”
He’d dropped the last piece into a complicated puzzle, but Barbara couldn’t quite believe the picture that emerged.
“I can’t afford another mistake, Barbara. Not with this situation with Missy.”
“I see,” Barbara said, thinking she should have felt relief that his rejection of her had not been personal, instead of being so outraged about the poor timing that had brought Richard Blake back into her life just when he’d decided he didn’t want to risk an involvement. “You took one chance and had a bad experience and now you’ve taken a vow of celibacy?”
“Do you blame me?”
Barbara bristled. “I don’t have to. You’re too busy blaming yourself to need anyone else’s disapproval.”
“I don’t exactly have a lot to be proud of lately.”
“You’re beating yourself up over some very human mistakes. You’re a grown man. You took a woman to dinner and...got friendly. It’s not as though you were married and cheating on a wife, or as if you knew Missy might come home, and deliberately took a chance on her finding you.”
Leaning forward, she rested her hand lightly on his forearm. “Lighten up on yourself, Richard. Please. For Missy’s sake, as well as your own. You’re using up all your energy regretting things you can’t do anything about, and you need that energy to help Missy.”
Richard looked down at her hand, wishing the weight and warmth of it didn’t feel so natural there, so familiar and comforting. Then he lifted his gaze to her face, and the expression in her eyes turned what had been a simple touch of comfort into something much more complex. Torn, he searched inside himself for the strength to pull away from everything that touch offered, while everything in him yearned to cover her hand with his own and invite her closer to him in every way a woman could get close to a man.
He found the strength—barely—and eased his arm just out of her reach, saying her name firmly.
Barbara jerked her hand back as though she’d been shocked.
After an interval of dreadful silence, she spoke, her voice soft but her words intense. “You’re not the only one living with mistakes, Richard.”
Richard waited with a sense of impending doom for her to continue. He didn’t want to hear that her life had been anything less than wonderful. He would have preferred to hang on to the image of her as the wide-eyed teenager he’d known.
“After we broke up—the way we broke up—I was bound and determined not to let anyone hurt me the way you’d hurt me,” she said.
Guilt knotted Richard’s gut as he listened. Whatever mistake she was talking about, it bounced back to him. To the way he’d treated her. To his own stupid mistake. The last thing in the world he needed was more guilt piled on his shoulders. He’d known he’d hurt her, but that didn’t make coming face-to-face with the demons his actions had spawned any easier.
“I wasn’t just careful,” Barbara continued, “I was...almost compulsive. I wouldn’t let anyone get close enough to hurt me, and I wouldn’t get close to anyone who threw me off balance. Guys came on to me, but if I felt the least bit out of control, I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t going to be vulnerable again. And then I met Dennis. Dennis was—”
She paused to gather her thoughts. “Dennis was perfect. He was polite, respectful and mature. I didn’t have to worry about losing control with Dennis, because he had enough for the both of us. We didn’t make love until our wedding night. We agreed on that early on, and waiting was never a problem, the way it had been when I was dating you.”
She allowed herself a bittersweet smile that made Richard want to lunge from his chair and devour her, every inch of her, slowly, appreciating every curve and texture and taste along the way. He wanted inside her as acutely as he had when he was a randy buck who’d never been inside anyone outside of his hormone-driven dreams.
The smile that unintentionally taunted him grew into a gentle burst of self-mocking laughter. “I thought I had it all figured out. We weren’t thinking below the waist. Not Dennis and I. We had a mature relationship. What we had was more important than some fleeting chemical interaction. We shared mutual goals and we respected each other.”
She looked at him as she smiled this time, with the cunning expression of chums sharing a private joke. “It took me a long time to realize just how empty life can be without passion. I’d assumed that once we were alone and touching that it would be...that, well, nature would take over and it would be...the way it had been when you and I used to—”
“I’m the last person in the world you should be saying this to,” he said, desperate to stop her. But she was strong, and he realized suddenly that she always had been.
“No,” she said. “In some funny kind of way, you’re the only person I could ever say it to. I’ve never told anyone else how it was. I guess I was afraid they’d think the problem was in me, that I was incapable of passion. I’m not afraid of that with you—not since you kissed me again.”
Her eyes met his. “Do you know what a relief it is to find out that I can be passionate beyond reason? That I didn’t imagine the magic? That I’m still capable of letting myself feel it?”
She averted her gaze. “I used to lie awake at night wondering if I’d ever really felt it, or if I had just embellished it in my mind, the way children remember things as bigger and brighter and more wonderful than they really were.”
“You weren’t just imagining,” Richard assured her.
A deep sadness haunted her eyes as she smiled. “I knew that the moment you came into my office. And when you looked at me the way you used to look at me, and then you said you had to see me, I was hoping—” She vented her frustration in a sigh. “God, Richard, just once, I wanted to find out what it would be like.”
Richard bolted from the chair. How much was a man expected to endure? He was trying to do what was right, what was decent. “You want to know what it would be like?” he said. “I’ll tell you. It would be everything we’ve missed, everything we lost when I gave in to stupidity. It would be there, a part of us, a part of our lives, a pivotal point that divides our lives into before and after. It would be like piecing all those shattered dreams back together. We wouldn’t just walk away from it. We...couldn’t just walk away unaffected.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Barbara said. “Do you think I didn’t know that when I went to the drugstore?”
Richard felt as though he’d been poleaxed in the chest. “God, Barbara! You went to the drugstore? Why would you tell me something like that?”
“I was willing to take the chance,” she said.
She wasn’t referring to telling him about the drugstore, Richard knew. “Well, I’m not!” he said. “My casualty list is long enough.”
She rose and collected the cocoa mugs, then turned to him as though he were an afterthought. “Goodbye, Richard.”
“I can’t risk hurting you again.” The argument sounded as futile as a defense attorney’s closing statements after the presentation of condemning physical evidence.
“You’ve told me what you came here to tell me,” she said. “Now leave.”
Richard wanted to go, but his feet and legs wouldn’t cooperate. “I hurt you once. Look what it led to.”
“No one’s arguing with you, Richard.” She brushed past him, carrying the mugs, the way she would have sidestepped a piece of furniture. “There’s nothing else to be said. Just...go.”
She stopped, but didn’t turn around. Richard studied her—her hair hanging free, the drape of knit across her narrow shoulders, the fullness of female buttocks outlined by her pants, her bare feet. The desire he felt for her was as familiar as an old love song and as compelling as ageless lust. He saw her beauty and her trust, her strength and her vulnerability, and he wanted her with a yearning that cut through him with the sharpness of an executioner’s ax. The knowledge that she was his for the asking only fanned the flames of that desire.
“It’s best,” he said.
“Probably.” The word sounded choked.
If he hadn’t been watching her so intently, he might have missed the way she winced, a subtle recoil of her entire body.
He was hurting her by leaving—who could say with absolute certainty that he would hurt her any worse by staying? In desperation, he searched his mind and his conscience for the reasons he felt compelled to walk away from her.
He couldn’t remember a single one of them. “Like hell it’s best!” he snarled.