At Last (4 page)

“Point taken.”

She shook her head.
Sure, he can make wisecracks
, she thought,
but I have to be good
.

“So she’s just lying in bed, staring at the wall?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. I remember her getting that way for about three hours after Nate Jordan dumped her sophomore year--”

“Nate Jordan?”

“That was a year before she met you. And she just curled up in a ball for three or four hours, and
then
she started crying. Ten minutes after the waterworks started, she snapped right out of it and we went for pizza at Pete’s.”

Kevin sighed on the other end of the connection. “She cried for a couple of hours last night, and she’s still catatonic.”

“Well, she and Nate had only dated for a week, and they never slept together. He came out the next semester and became the president of Lambda Lambda.”

“Oh.”

“So, since she was in love with and slept with shit-head for close to two years, I think it might take a little longer for her to snap out of it.”

“So I should just wait?”

“What, are you just dying to hit the beach or something? What else do you have that’s pressing?”

“Funny,” he said, his voice turning serious. “But what should I do if she does snap out of it?”

Liz gave up on trying to figure out what the second painting was. She turned to her assistant, Lance, as she covered the mouthpiece of her cellphone. “Hang the damn thing in the back by the bathroom. Maybe some bulimic supermodel will fall in love with it when she goes to barf up all the refreshments she’s inhaled.” Supermodels were known to hit parties hard for food, trot off to the ladies room and purge. After that, they usually got toasted on champagne...then they would throw that up too.

“Liz?” Kevin’s voice spoke into her ear.

“For Christ’s sake, Kevin, you’ve known her for seven goddamn years! You’re telling me you won’t have anything to say to her?” Liz breezed back to her office and started flipping through her Rolodex. “Use that melon-sized head for something and think. What does Susan like? What used to cheer her up back in college?”

“What used to cheer her up?” Kevin murmured. “In college?”

“There you go! I can practically hear the gears moving around in that mammoth skull of yours already. Now leave me alone, mommy’s got work to do!” Liz hung up on Kevin, her eyes honed on the business card she’d plucked from her Rolodex.

Denton Crane: Private Investigator.

Liz remembered that Denton had been crude and lecherous, hitting on her with a dogged perversity that only made her want to slap the hell out of him. Who better to find Mark than one of his own kind?

Chapter 3

STANDING IN THAT CROWDED vestibule again, Susan’s dress felt so heavy, but that goddamn cocktail napkin was heavier by far. How many times had she been there? This moment always seemed to take forever, as if she’d stood there for hours before her life had dissolved around her and evaporated.

Things finally moved forward to her crying in Liz’s arms, but only for a moment, before everything crashed around her, shattering like crystal on concrete. The scene shuffled, flipping swiftly through disjointed moments, some from childhood, like when she’d fallen out of the neighbor’s tree house and broken her leg.

The next moment she was standing in the library at Dartmouth, and Liz was chewing gum and checking her makeup, bitching about the B she’d gotten on her Art History paper. “I even blew the little bastard too!”

There was a flash of Kevin smiling at her for the first time. She could still remember how she had pitied him, and yet couldn’t bear to send him away, like a cute, though geeky, puppy.

She was dancing like a fool in her dorm room with Kevin--couldn’t remember the song, just how happy it made her.

And then there was Mark, handsome and sexy as all hell, his dark brown eyes like melted chocolate as he asked her out for the first time. She couldn’t remember how they had met that day, only that he both irritated and turned her on.

She flickered through the romantic things, through the sex, stopping and holding on for dear life to a panel of memory where she remembered how his body fit against hers, and how she always lost herself in his scent. This she grabbed hold of with all her strength, until it faded away in her desperate embrace.

She was back in that dress, in the vestibule, and that goddamn napkin was burning a hole in her hand again.

And that was when something outside the dream started to bleed through. The song. The song she couldn’t remember, the one she’d been dancing so happily with Kevin to. It was playing, the final chords of it.

Susan’s eyes shot open just as the last of it faded into nothingness.

The room was unfamiliar and dark, the shades drawn, the only light coming from the door at her back. The song started again--Sheryl Crow’s
All I Wanna Do
. When Susan moved, her body was stiff with entropy, her head cloudy, as was her vision. She stumbled as she stood, the room turning slowly around her. She grabbed the nightstand and closed her eyes, willing everything to stop moving.

When, blessedly, the room did stop turning, Susan moved toward the open door, toward the music. But the urge to pee hit her so hard she turned tail and bolted for the bathroom, groaning with anguished satisfaction as she voided the contents of her bladder for almost a full minute.

Standing back up, she groaned again at the stiffness in her legs and back. Susan caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror and gasped. Hair was frizzed out and tangled on one side, the other side matted down almost perfectly flat. But the sallow flesh of her face, and the violently black circles under her eyes, those made her clamp her eyes shut hard, made her turn and walk fast for the bathroom door.

Sheryl Crow was still singing about car washes and bars and Billy. Adding to the music was an aroma that made Susan’s mouth water and her empty stomach growl in protest like a Bengal tiger. The scent was so familiar, yet she couldn’t quite place it. As she moved cautiously through the foreign hallway, out into the rather glaring light of day, she was struck by the gorgeous view--the white sand beach, the palm trees swaying in the breeze, the deep, clear blue waters making the sky pale in comparison.

“Oh shit,” Susan mumbled. “I’m in Cancun.” She wondered who was with her. Had the dream about the cocktail napkin been just that? Was she on her honeymoon?

A man walked out from the kitchen area of the suite with a pizza box in his hand. She didn’t recognize him at first. Not until he shot Susan with a million-watt smile.

“Kevin?”

His smile turned into a grimace, but he laughed good-naturedly.

The last time Susan had seen Kevin was in college. Skinny and nerdy, yet cute, in a younger brother kind of way. But the guy in front of Susan wasn’t only built like an underwear model, his boyish face had turned handsome. Had he grown a few inches too?

He seemed more like a man now.

But something else flooded her mind. The dream about the napkin hadn’t been just a dream. Mark wasn’t there. He had really stood her up at the altar. And Kevin...

“You’ve been taking care of me,” she said, not a question but a realization. “You’ve been with me the entire time.”

Susan thought she saw a hurt look flash in his eyes, but he closed them so fast that she couldn’t be sure.

“Where else would I be?” When he opened his eyes again they were happy, if not downright smart assed. He shook the pizza box just as Sheryl started singing again. “I’ve got your favorite. Pete’s Pizza.”

Susan made a humph sound in her throat and gave him an incredulous look. “Pete’s back in Hanover...New Hampshire?”

“The same.” Kevin walked over and set the box on the coffee table, plopping down in the overstuffed couch cushions--just like he used to back in college.

Susan moved closer. It certainly smelled like Pete’s Pizza, her absolute favorite pizza in the world. “But how?”

“Had it shipped frozen FedEx.” He wriggled his eyebrows. “Had them cook it when I was ready to wake you up.”

“You thought Pete’s Pizza and Sheryl Crow would wake me up?”

His smile was devilish. “It was that or the Anne Rice way.”

“The Anne Rice way?” Susan sat down on the couch gingerly, her body still stiff.

“Remember those Sleeping Beauty books Liz had you two reading? The ones she wrote as A.N.Roquelaure?”

Susan’s expression dropped and her cheeks flushed.
The Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty.
“So you...”

“Read ’em too. Yeah. You girls had some kinky reading habits back then.”

She shook her head. “What does that have to do with waking me up?”

Kevin’s smile was downright naughty. “How did the prince wake Beauty?”

Susan looked away trying to remember, and then it hit her. “Oh!” The prince had screwed Beauty out of her coma.

“Aren’t you glad I came up with another way?”

Susan’s mouth hung open, so she shut it abruptly, making a clinking sound with her teeth. “You have pizza?” She changed the subject. Kevin had never made her feel like that before--all warm and tingly. Maybe it was just the memory of those super hot Anne Rice fairy tales.

Kevin held out some napkins. “I remember you need lots of these.”

“Are you saying I’m a slob?” she said, a warning in her voice, though a smile spread its way across her face. It was the first smile she’d had since the wedding that wasn’t, and she felt it evaporated a moment later.

“I’m not saying you’re a slob.”

“Good,” Susan said.

“I’m saying we’ll need these to cover the furniture. ’Cause I remember how fast you eat pizza. How you could devour almost the whole thing while I was getting us something to drink from the fridge.”

Susan gasped. “I seem to remember Mr. Skin and Bones here eating enough food to feed half of Ethiopia!” She glared at him. “And yet never gained a pound.”

She poked a finger into Kevin’s gut, expecting the old way-too-thin stick under his t-shirt. But what she felt was lean and hard, and only made her face burn all the more.
God, he’s changed
, she thought as she turned rigidly toward the pizza and opened the lid.

Frozen and air shipped or not, Pete’s Pizza was still the most intoxicating food on the planet, instantly blotting out her prior inappropriate thoughts about Kevin’s new body, and about her wedding fiasco, and even the soreness in all her muscles. All there was were the scent and the taste as Susan scooped up a piece and bit greedily into the sauce and cheese and crispy crust. The pepperoni was still a few degrees hotter than the usual pizza pepperoni. She fell back in bliss against the overstuffed couch cushions, chewing with rapture coursing through her.

“Can I have another?” Susan said before Kevin had taken a second bite of his piece. Kevin scooped up another piece and slapped it on the napkin in her hand. She inhaled that piece too, licking her lips, ready for another slice--but she looked too long at the napkin in her hand. Though it had pizza grease on it, and it was wrinkled, its generic whiteness reminded her too much of “the napkin,” and she sat there staring down at it, tears forming in her eyes.

The Sheryl Crow song started again.

This made her look up and sniffle back her tears, her lips spreading into a grin. “What’s with that song? You got it on replay or something?”

“Just like in college, remember?”

And she did. She remembered how he’d put it on repeat and they would dance around her dorm room like a couple of fools. She felt her own grin start to fade, remembering how happy she had been.

Suddenly Kevin was on his feet, pulling her up under her arms until she was on hers too. He twirled her around a couple times, twisting her so she was inadvertently dancing along with him. Before she knew it, Susan was dancing, swaying her hips, moving her feet, and as her fingers started snapping along with the music, her lips spread into a grin, and then an honest-to-goodness smile.

He twirled her again, and a husky laugh erupted from her lips.

~*~

Kevin had forgotten the sound of Susan’s laugh. Even with their weekly phone calls, hearing that wonderful belly laugh in person was a completely different thing. It made all his misgivings, all the pull and tug of his dormant feelings, worth it.

As they bumped hips and Susan jumped up on the couch and shook her ass to the music, he could see how her emotional turmoil was finally fading away. It didn’t matter that the happiness she was feeling was simply nostalgia. As long as it was a taste of happiness, that was the important thing.

Susan jumped off the couch and into Kevin’s arms, wrapping her arms around his neck as her legs wound around his hips. She leaned back and howled like an animal--maybe it was just her singing voice? Or maybe just a feral howl. Either way, at least she couldn’t see Kevin’s face, and he was grateful for that. The feel of her body wrapped around his and the smell of her, even after two days of not showering, took his breath away.