Miracle (The Pagano Family Book 6) (8 page)

He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it. “If you promise to be careful, I promise to be nice.”

“I promise, Daddy.”

~oOo~

At seven-thirty, Joey texted her.
Is it safe?

LOL. Yes
, she sent back. Then she checked the ensemble once more in the full-length mirror on her closet door and grabbed her coat.

She’d meant to be at the door and ready to answer his ring, but he must have texted her from the front walk, because the doorbell rang just as she walked out of her room, and by the time she got to the stairs, Joey was in the front hall with her father.

They were shaking hands as she came down the stairs. Joey looked up and froze, staring, still holding her father’s hand. As her father freed his hand, Joey smiled.

It was kind of like a movie. Tina liked it.

“You look… …”

“Good,” her father supplied, smiling up at her himself.

“No, sir,” Joey said, surprising Tina and her father both. He hadn’t turned from her, and now she was at the foot of the staircase. He took her hand. “…Stunning.”

She’d definitely dressed for a date this time, and a pretty nice one. Nothing extravagant—but she knew she looked good in it: a dark red dress with a snug tank-style top and a flippy knee-length skirt, fishnet tights and heeled lace-up booties, both in black. And her leather motorcycle jacket, which was sort of the focus item for almost every outfit in cold weather, unless it was parka cold, at which point fashion was out the window anyway.

For his part, Joey had dressed up a little, too, in dark jeans and a white button-down shirt with a tweedy kind of blazer and Timberland boots. He’d shaved again, and his shirt was unbuttoned like the night before, showing the notch at the base of his throat and a bit of hair just under it. If he was natural, he was definitely not as hairy as the men in her family.

The best part of his appearance had nothing to do with his clothes or his hair. He looked relaxed and happy. It wasn’t the old Joey, who had been cocky and ‘on,’ and, under all that performance, had also been a little bit wary. This Joey just seemed comfortable.

“You look great,” she said and slid her fingers between his.

Her father’s considered them both, his eyes moving back and forth. Then he gave Joey a parental frown. “You’re up to something like this?”

Tina felt a shimmer of tension move through Joey’s hand, but his voice was calm when he answered, “Yes…sir.”

“Gotta go, Daddy. See you in the morning.”

“Okay.” He looked like he wanted to say more, and Tina cued up a protest about being an adult and this whole letting him see them off thing being a courtesy. But then he nodded and said, “Okay. Have a good time.”

She kissed his cheek and pulled Joey out of the house. Not until they got to his Wrangler did she speak again. “Sorry. That was so high school. I guess it seems pretty pathetic that I still live at home at my age, but—”

He’d opened the passenger door as she’d spoken. Now, before she could get in, he turned and put a finger over her mouth, so she stopped.

“Me too.”

“You live at home?”

He nodded.

“Oh. I thought you had an apartment by the boardwalk.” Saying that out loud embarrassed her; she sounded like a stalker. “I think I heard that somewhere,” she added—a lame assertion, although it was true.

“Did. Not…anymore.”

“Oh. Okay.” She remembered that his father was quite ill. “Are you helping your dad?”

He nodded, but it came with a strange little laugh. Then he ushered her to sit.

In the few seconds she was alone in his car, she looked around. His tank, in its red backpack, sat in the middle of the back seat, arranged so that he could grab it easily from the front. Otherwise, everything was nearly showroom clean and empty. She liked that; she took good care of her car, too.

He got in and turned to her. “Long time since…met a…girl’s…father.”

Joey rarely spoke in complete sentences. He tended to use only the words that conveyed his meaning, without bothering with conventions. Tina knew that strategy; it was commonly suggested by speech pathologists and therapists, and therefore commonly used by people with most types of long-term aphasia. In Joey’s case, he dropped the ‘I’ from almost every sentence Tina heard him utter. There was something sad about that—like he wasn’t present in his own words.

She refrained from remarking on that, however, and instead offered a smile and a laugh. “You’ve known my dad all your life.”

He caught her laugh. “Different.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s dumb, but I liked all that—you waiting with my father at the foot of the stairs, me coming down and you looking up, Daddy being overprotective and kind of a jerk. It felt like prom night.”

“Yeah. You do look…beautiful. Take…my breath.”

Using the console between them to push herself up, Tina leaned over and kissed the corner of his mouth. “Thank you. Good thing you have your tank handy.” She sat back in her seat and buckled the seatbelt. Joey watched her, a bemused, amused lift to the corner of his mouth that she’d kissed.

He fastened his own seatbelt and started his Jeep.

~oOo~

A movie was a bloody brilliant date for them. She generally disliked movie dates, because it was impossible to get to know someone while you sat side by each in the dark and stared silently ahead for two hours, and then you had to sit facing each other at dinner after, and if you didn’t have the same feeling about the film, the meal could get awkward fast.

But for Tina and Joey, it meant a chance to be quiet and close without pressure for conversation. He brought his tank in and kept the straps hooked over his knee. They bought bottled water at the concession stand and took seats not too far up the steps. That was Tina’s idea, although she’d noticed that Joey’s lungs were definitely getting stronger.

During their text conversation earlier in the day, he’d asked her to pick the movie, and she’d picked one she was interested in: the new James Bond. So it was loud and boomy, and he’d put his arm around her, and the perfect dream date continued.

Over sushi, they fell into the pattern they’d developed: she talked, and he listened. It would help him strengthen his word access if they switched that up, but she didn’t suggest it. The suggestion was too much like therapy, and that wasn’t what they were about. The idea would have to come from him.

In the meantime, he was an avid texter, so she’d pick his brain that way.

And it was nice to talk with somebody who listened so well. Tina spent her whole life listening. Being heard felt good, too.

Afterward, when they got to his car, Joey didn’t unlock her door right away. He took her hand and urged her to turn and face him.

He was so handsome. His dark hazel eyes sparkled in the shine from the parking lot lights. Leaning back against his car, Tina prepared to be kissed.

“D-don’t…want to…kiss you…”

Oh. Ouch.

“…on cars… …all the time.”

Oh! Oh! Well, that was better.

Tina grinned and grabbed his blazer. “I don’t care where we are. I just want you to kiss me.” As she pulled him to her, she added, “But kiss me slow. I want to breathe with you.”

“Jesus,” he muttered, and then his mouth was on hers.

She meant what she’d said—she wanted to go slow. All this—getting picked up and facing her father, dates that ended when the meal was over, kisses being where they stopped—it was what she needed after a long string of miserable experiences. Cripes, even in high school, guys had expected more right away, and now that the men interested in her were in their thirties, they wanted
everything
right away, and they were complete assholes when they didn’t get it.

So when Joey covered her mouth with his and traced his tongue over her lips, she didn’t open her mouth. It had been the opposite the night before—she’d gone in wide open, excited at the thought of their first kiss, and conditioned to other men’s expectations, and she’d overwhelmed him. Tonight, she simply moved her head, just a little, prolonging the touch of his tongue as it slid like satin over her lips.

He groaned and came at her with more force, but she pulled back the same fraction, keeping their contact light, a dazzling, feathery sensuality that Tina wasn’t sure she’d ever experienced before. The butterflies that fluttered whenever she was around him dipped low and made her hot and wet, and she could feel that he was hard, too. It was all she could do to resist the impulse, the imperative, to cling to him, to thrust against him, to suck his tongue deep into her mouth. But she resisted.

With a stilted cough, he broke away but only turned his head so that they were cheek to cheek. Tina could hear and feel him struggle to keep his breath.

She nuzzled his cheek. “Do you need your tank?”

“No…just…minute.”

“Okay.”

They stood like that, cheek to cheek, Joey’s hands under her jacket, clasping her waist, her arms on his chest, over his shoulders, her fingers at his nape. Absently, with no other urge than to feel him, she drew tiny circles on his neck with her fingertips, drawing forward inside his shirt, around his neck, until her fingers met at the open V at his chest.

“Tina,” he murmured. He sounded both more and less in control of his needs.

“Joey.” She kissed the corner of his mouth.

Again, his mouth took hers, and again, they kept the contact light, this time in concert, as if they’d both tacitly agreed that they needed nothing just now but this feathery touch—which, for Tina, was more intimate than many of her naked encounters.

Again, he turned away and waited for his breath to settle, and they stood in that quiet embrace.

“Take you…home,” he finally murmured.

“Okay.”

Joey unlocked the door. When he stepped back, Tina saw that the car that had been parked nearest his had left while they were wrapped up in each other. Somebody had gotten into their car, started it up, backed out of the space, and driven away, mere feet from where they’d stood, and she hadn’t even noticed.

Yeah, she liked dating like this.

~oOo~

When Joey parked in the driveway and stopped the car, he set his hand on her thigh before she could open the door.

“Sorry…so slow. …Long time…don’t—don’t know…what…” He stopped and seemed to be searching, but in a different way—less like he was trying to catch the word he wanted and more like he was trying to figure out if he should say it at all. He shook his head and gave up, and Tina could see the frustration written in bold type all over his body.

On their very first date, Tina had made a commitment to herself that she would never interrupt him or fill in his sentences. That was good practice as a therapist, but more than that, she wanted him to know that he could trust her to be patient and give him time to say things his way.

Now, though, he’d stopped and didn’t seem inclined to continue. So Tina thought about what he’d been trying to tell her. Her best guess was that he was apologizing for those perfect, gentle kisses and for how they weren’t leading to more yet.

“Joey, have you ever used a dating app?”

He frowned and shook his head. “Why?”

“I use a couple. I haven’t had an actual boyfriend since my mom got sick, and I haven’t had that many altogether. I’ve been busy with school and work, and I’m in Boston so much that most of the people I meet are there, but that’s too far to have anything serious, and…anyway, I wasn’t meeting anybody in the old-fashioned ways. So I did the website thing, and then the app thing, and I’ve had a fair number of dates that way. Every. Single. One. Sucked. I don’t know if I’m just a terrible judge of profiles or what, but either they were weirdos right off, or they were decent dates but when I didn’t want to bang their brains out right on the spot, I got horrible texts from them after, calling me names or wanting me to reimburse them for the date, and all kinds of creepy shit. And that’s not even considering all the creeps who hit me up that I tell no—a lot of those guys get vicious.”