Asking for Trouble (16 page)

“Oh, no,” she cried, throwing off the afghan, bolting to her feet and scrambling over the back of the couch in one movement. “I’m late.”

“Sydney!”

She screamed and turned at the sound of her name. Dusk had shrouded most of the room in darkness. Solid objects were like shadows in the evening’s light. Her heart raced while something wild and frenzied surged through her veins.

“Sydney. It’s me, Tom.”

His solid form moved away from the others to distinguish itself in the half-light, and she went limp with relief.

“You scared the life out of me,” she said accusingly, short of breath, patting her chest to calm her heart. “Jeeze, I just hate it when people do that to me.”

She walked to the couch and braced her arms against the back of it.

“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t sound overly penitent. “Do you always shoot straight up out of a sound sleep like that?”

“No. I was ... what are you doing here? Where’s Judy?” she asked, fully awake at last. She walked around the end of the couch, turned on a low, glowing lamp, and sat down, still feeling a little weak-kneed.

“We had a date, remember?” He sat down beside her.

“Of course, I remember. I ... what were you doing all this time? Just sitting there?”

“Watching you sleep,” he said with a nod of his head. He grinned at her. “Last night I lay awake listening to see if you were going to snore, but I kept falling asleep first.”

She’d never known anyone to sit quietly and watch her sleep before. It was disconcerting to say the least. She passed her hand across her mouth and cheek, feeling for dried drool or a woven imprint of the couch covering. She grimaced at the sight of the rumpled sundress she’d been wearing for nearly twenty-four hours and automatically ran her fingers through her hair.

“Judy let you in?” she asked, wondering what she’d done to Judy to deserve this sort of treatment.

He nodded as he watched the play of her emotions in her face. He’d seen everything from happiness to hysteria to pain and pity, but his personal favorite was flustered. Lord, she was cute when she was flustered, he thought, amused.

“And then she left?” She found it hard to believe of a loyal friend.

“I gave her ten bucks and sent her off to the movies.”

“And she went?”

“Are you mad?” he asked, hoping he hadn’t caused a rift between the two women. Judy had been a fountain of information about her roommate, and he felt indebted to her.

“No. I just ... Have I ruined our date?”

“No.”

“We’ll still have time? After I shower?” she asked, eager to make herself presentable, but not necessarily for the general public. Wanting to be with Tom, but not in a crowd.

“Sure.”

“Casual?” she asked, eyeing the sweater and jeans he was wearing and the way they defined the hardy musculature of the body she’d come to know so well. Her insides twisted with desire. She wanted to touch him and to feel his hands on her body again.

“Very casual.” Hardly worth dressing for at all, he added mentally, recognizing the smoky look in her eyes.

“Ah ... well, all right, then,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ll only be a few minutes. Can I ... get you anything?”

“Not right now, thanks,” he answered, wanting her to feel comfortable and relaxed before he attacked her and drove her to distraction with his love. Need stirred in his loins as he recalled her metamorphosis from a refined, self-contained young accountant to an untamed, unfettered, and totally unselfish woman the night before.

She turned to leave, then stopped. “Do I? Snore?”

He looked at her and smiled a gentle smile. “No,” he said with a shake of his head. “But do you have any idea of what you look like when you’re sleeping?”

She was afraid to ask.

“No. What?”

“You look like an angel. Sort of pure and innocent. Untouched and untouchable,” he said, a tenderness in his eyes. He hesitated briefly and then added, “I kept thinking that if I’d wanted to, I could have made enough noise to wake you up. But I just sat there ... watching over you ... guarding you.”

Sydney was too moved to speak. She hadn’t really thought about it until that moment, but no man had ever expressed a desire to protect her from anything before—except for her father, of course. Maybe being a smart and self-sufficient career woman led men to believe that she was invulnerable. And to be truthful, she wasn’t defenseless. She’d taken care of herself for quite some time and was very capable of continuing to do so. But she felt a warm, secure feeling in her chest, knowing that Tom wanted to protect her.

She smiled at him, and a moment of silent communication passed between them. He seemed to understand that although she didn’t need or want him to shelter her from the world, she was glad he wanted to. And he expressed to her that he was someone she could count on if she ever changed her mind.

Lord, the man was getting easier to love all the time. Impulsively she reached out and pressed her palm to his cheek. Where did men as dear and sweet as Tom Ghorman come from? she wondered as she engraved the fine angles and lines of his handsome face and the precise blue of his eyes in her heart.

He covered her hand with his and kissed it. Raw sexual need gripped her low in her abdomen, and her heart fluttered with yearning.

“We could skip the date and go straight to bed,” he said, leaving no question as to his frame of mind.

She nodded, but said, “It won’t take me long to get ready to go.”

Great sex was nothing to base a relationship on, she reminded herself as she finished her toilette with a light coat of lipstick. It wasn’t something to spit at, but it wasn’t everything. Of course, sex with Tom wouldn’t be great if Tom weren’t Tom.
He
was everything. She smiled wistfully.

Then her smile drooped. He was everything, including a mortician.

Everyone had faults and flaws. Why couldn’t Tom’s flaw have been golf? Or laziness? Or a tendency to leave caps off bottles and toothpaste tubes? Why couldn’t he have been a plumber or a hair stylist, or worse yet, another accountant? Why a mortician, of all things? she wondered, opening the bedroom door.

There was a low, glowing light in the middle of the floor, the rest of the room looked dark and empty. She heard music and could smell ... bread?

“Tom?”

“Turn out the light and come over here,” she heard him say from somewhere near the glowing light. She obeyed automatically, her curiosity piqued. “Careful. Watch those bushes there.”

“What bushes?” She tripped over a footstool and fell against a chair that wasn’t where she had left it.

“Those bushes. Are you all right?”

She laughed. “Where am I?”

“On a grassy bluff overlooking the beach a few miles from my house. It’s very romantic here, and you’re in the mood to be seduced.”

When her eyes adjusted to the light, she could see him on the floor, lying on his side next to what appeared to be one of her lamp shades with a flashlight burning inside of it. Stretching her imagination, she could envision it as a small campfire.

“Do you seduce all your women here?” she asked, sitting Indian style on the floor across from him.

“No. I come here a lot, to think usually. But I’ve never brought a woman with me before.”

“Is that a picnic basket?” she asked.

“Yep. Are you hungry?” He sat up and lifted the lid of the basket. “I brought fresh bread and cheese and fruit and my favorite wine. What would you like?”

“Some bread and cheese and fruit and wine, please.”

“Coming right up.”

What ensued wasn’t like any picnic Sydney had ever been on before. It was more of a covenant ceremony as they relaxed beside the fire, talking and feeding each other small pieces of food. Head to head, they stretched out on the floor in opposite directions and discussed everything that fluttered through their minds. They wooed each other with the soft tones of their voices, enticed with their eyes, and tempted with gentle touches.

When they made love, it was slow and rapturous. Every caress had a meaning. Every look was significant. They culminated their lovemaking with a silent solemn vow of devotion.

“Sydney?” Tom spoke softly into the near darkness.

“Mm?” she answered, nearly asleep in the warmth and comfort of his arms, wrapped close to him in the afghan he’d taken from the couch.

“I love you.”

Her hesitation was marginal, a split-second search of her soul.

“I love you too,” she said without a doubt.

There were no further words necessary. And for the next week, no challenge arose to test them. They were inseparable except for their work hours during which they made frequent calls simply to hear the other’s voice.

“We had swings and chinning bars when I was a kid,” Tom said, his voice ringing and echoing as if they were in a cathedral. They were facing each other with their legs braced against the opposite wall of a large concrete tube centrally located in the park a few blocks from Sydney’s apartment building. “We never had anything like this.”

“I wonder why we didn’t,” she mused aloud “This isn’t high-tech or complicated. It’s a sewer pipe, isn’t it? How come we didn’t have these?”

“TV was fairly new back then, and they didn’t know all the harm it could do, I guess. Now parents have to use their imaginations to figure out ways to keep kids occupied.”

“Aren’t these the same imaginations that were destroyed in a whole generation of children who sat in front of the television watching
The Mickey Mouse Club
and
American Bandstand
?”

“Yep. The very same.”

She crawled out of the tube, saying, “Extremists make me really nervous. Moderation is what I’m going to teach my children. TV is okay if they can read and ride their bike and roller skate and swim too.”

“Moderation is good,” he agreed, getting to his feet. “But how about supervised moderation?”

“Well, sure. Kids don’t know what’s good or bad for them until they’re taught.” Curious, she asked, “Do you want a large or small family?”

“Large.”

“How large?”

“Six or eight?”

“Children?” she asked, agog.

“Too many?” he asked, a bit concerned.

Sydney sat in a swing and replayed the vision of her dream family in the back of her mind. She and Tom stood on the deck of the beach house watching the two children playing in the surf. Suddenly a third child in white swimming trunks joined the other two in the sand, and a fourth child, dressed in a white pinafore, came to stand in the billowing folds of her white sundress. Her arm slipped around the little girl’s shoulders. She held her close and sighed.

“That’s more than I’d planned on,” she said to Tom, still basking in the tranquility of her dream. “But I think I can see my way to managing a couple more.”

“Soon?” He pulled the swing back and pushed her high into the air. He smiled when it occurred to him that she’d accepted being the mother of his children without qualm or question.

“How soon?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder at him.

“I could start tonight.” He gave her another push and a suggestive grin. “Right now as a matter of fact.”

She laughed. “You’re that anxious to be a daddy?”

“I’m ready. Now all I have to ...” His words trailed off as a police car rounded the corner and came to a slow stop in the middle of the street. The men inside eyed the overgrown children in the park suspiciously and pulled the car over to the curb.

“You folks got business here?” one of the officers asked. “There’s a curfew posted on this park, you know.”

“Ah, no, we didn’t know,” Tom called back, helping Sydney to stop her swing. “We were just out walking around.”

“We’ll leave,” Sydney added, her last encounter with the police department still fresh in her mind.

“They didn’t have curfews on parks either, when we were kids,” Tom muttered as they walked away.

“Things are different now,” she said, contemplating all the evils that befell children now, that she had never dreamed existed when she was a child. “I want our children to know they’re loved and to feel secure.”

“They will,” he said, pulling her close to his side. “They’ll feel it in us and grow strong in knowing that they’re part of us.”

She looked at him, and under the streetlights she could see the promise in his eyes. Tom made everything seem right and certain. He had a way of changing the appearance of things. Events that had once looked huge and ominous became simple and as uncomplicated as a walk in the park. He did the most ordinary things in the most romantic of fashions, and what was truly romantic took on a sanctity that was almost spiritual.

“Oh, barf,” Judy said a few nights later, groaning in mock disgust. “Watching the two of you make goo-goo eyes over linguini is enough to make a body want to throw up.”

Sydney tried to look insulted.

“Goo-goo eyes indeed,” she said, glancing at Tom. “Were we making goo-goo eyes at each other?”

“Well, actually,
you
were making goo-goo eyes at me. I was just sitting here, eating my linguini and trying to ignore you.”

She sputtered indignantly, giggled, and then sputtered again. He winked at Judy.

“I love it when she’s flustered,” he said, the loving look in his eyes as he gazed at Sydney bearing a strong resemblance to the aforementioned goo-goo eyes.

“I suppose
men
don’t make goo-goo eyes?” Judy said. “And of course, they never get flustered.”

“Not real men,” he told her, his eyes twinkling as he watched Sydney pick up several dishes from the table and remove them to the kitchen.

“I told you he was impossible,” she said over her shoulder to Judy.

Her friend made a remark at which Tom laughed, but Sydney didn’t hear it. She was too busy taking note of the warm feelings in her chest. Happy feelings. Contentment. And she was glad she could share some of them with Judy.

So often, female friends were split apart when one or the other fell in love. When one’s attention was suddenly diverted elsewhere, the other often felt abandoned and left out—no matter how glad they were that their friend had found happiness. Not so with Judy.