Extreme Bachelor (10 page)

“Are you free for lunch?” he asked, looking
at Leah, oblivious to Jamie’s drooling and Michele’s unbridled
jealousy. “They have a pretty decent commissary here. I thought
maybe we could get caught up.”

“Caught
up
?” Michele echoed, and
Jamie instantly elbowed her. “
Ow
,” Michele yelped.

Leah wanted to politely
thank him and say no, that she had some errands to run, and then
wish him a good day. But what came out of her mouth was, “Ah . .
.
ahem
. . . I’m
really busy today. I don’t have time for lunch.”

Michael cheated by flashing a smile that
could melt a polar ice cap. And apparently two other women standing
by her, because they were suddenly gazing at him as if he was the
Adonis King of Stuntmen. What Leah wouldn’t give to be able to roll
up Jamie’s tongue and stick it back in her mouth.

“Busy doing what?” Michael asked Leah, the
look in his eyes indicating that he didn’t believe a word of
it.

“Errands,” she said, nodding affirmatively,
and puffed out her cheeks, looked up at the sky for a minute. “Lots
and lots of errands.”

“What if I just ride along?”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea at all.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” she
repeated.
Why not!? Because I don’t want
to be anywhere near you in a confined area, you stupid,
heartbreaking moron
! Leah glanced at her
sorry excuse for a car. So did Michele, Jamie, and Michael.
“Because . . .” Well, obviously, to at least two of the four people
standing here, she was the biggest wimp to ever walk the earth. But
what exactly she was afraid of, she wasn’t certain.

Unless it was something really pathetic like
falling in love with him again.

Oh
nononononoo
, that was definitely not
going to happen. It was dumb to even think it. Like she could ever
fall in love with him again. Ha! Like she could ever fall in
love
again. And even if
she could, like she could ever get over what he did to her the
first time. It was such a sad and stupid notion that—

“Hello?” Michael said, his smile going wider
as he looked at her.

Michele’s gaze narrowed—she saw right
through Leah. And Jamie still had that goofy look on her face as
she subtly tried to make her hair look less messed up.

With a sigh of defeat, Leah pushed her hair
behind her ears. “Okay, I guess I’ll . . . get caught up,” she
said. “But no more than half an hour,” she added, pointing a finger
at Michael. “I really have stuff to do.”

“A half hour, that’s it,” Michael said,
hands up.

“Bye, Michael,” Jamie said longingly.

“Bye, Jamie,” he said with a smile.

Leah started walking toward the commissary,
not even bothering to look at Michael. She didn’t have to—he was
right beside her. “Thanks,” he said, as they walked out of earshot
of the others. “Thanks for hearing me out.”

“I am not hearing you out,” she said firmly,
and stopped so suddenly that he almost tripped over her. She looked
up at his gorgeous face and groaned, put her hands to her hips.
Then down. Then folded them across her middle and said, “Okay,
Michael, the truth is I don’t want to relive anything, or take any
excruciating trips down memory lane. As long as we’re clear on
that, I’m cool.”

“Relive,” he repeated thoughtfully.

“Right. Relive,” she said,
making a fanning motion with her hand. “I mean, you know, we tried
it once, and it didn’t work out for whatever reason,” she said,
making a fast circular motion with one hand, “and it’s just a lot
of water under the bridge, and it’s probably just better that we
stay friends. Well, not that we’re really
friends
,” she said, her hand
starting to wave, “I mean, since, you know, you dumped me in a
pretty spectacular way, and it was sort of a bad scene, and then,
of course, we haven’t even seen each other in ages and ages, I
don’t think we can pretend we’re anywhere near friends. But yeah,
you know . . .
civil
. Right. Civil. That’s it. That’s the word I’m searching
for.”

For some reason, his smile just went deeper
and his eyes crinkled at the corners, and a little shiver shot down
Leah’s spine. “You lost me at ‘bad scene,’” he said. “But Leah . .
. it’s just lunch. At a commissary, for Chrissakes. It’s not
reliving. It’s not tripping down memory lane. It’s not anything but
two people catching up with time.”

“Just civil, right?” she demanded
suspiciously.

He held up his right hand, Boy Scout
fashion. “Just civil.”

“Okay. If you put it that way.” She looked
at her watch. Then at her new aqua trail shoes, which, for some
reason, made the price of $89.99 pop into her head, a price that
she really couldn’t afford. He probably had tons of shoes like this
in all different colors. “Okay,” she said quietly, nodding.

“Great,” he said, “I appreciate it.” And he
smiled. That smile ran down Leah’s spine and kicked her square in
the butt and took her back what seemed like a lifetime.

She started walking. Michael was right
beside her, his hands in his pockets. “You did good today,” he said
as they walked toward the commissary, “I had forgotten how athletic
you are.”

Ridiculous. He was complimenting her on the
tuck and roll. He had obviously forgotten that he once told her
that when she jogged, she looked like she was bouncing up and down
on a pogo stick. “You’re just saying that because I did it right,
and half of them can’t.”

“You’re right,” he said with a laugh. “After
yesterday, I was worried about you. That was a pretty spectacular
fall.”

It had been a spectacular fall, and Leah
couldn’t help but smile a little. “Pretty flashy, huh?”

“Very.”

She smiled a little more.

“It’s great to see you smile. Have I told
you how great you look?” he asked, touching the small of her
back.

He might as well have burned her—it was an
old, familiar gesture, one that used to make her feel so safe and
wanted. She had a memory of it raining in New York one night, and
Michael hailing a cab. When one pulled up, he put his hand on the
small of her back, firmly but gently ushering her into the cab so
that she wouldn’t get wet, and him getting soaked in the
process.

Now, she moved a little to her right, so
that there was some distance between them and looked straight
ahead. “I hope they have tuna.”

I hope they have
tuna
. Sometimes, Leah wondered what
alternate universe she was passing through. God, this was a dumb
idea. She was already reliving everything in her mind, and they
hadn’t even begun to talk. He seemed to sense her reluctance—he had
always had a strange way of being able to read what was going on
with her—because he said, “I just wanted the chance to explain a
couple of things.”

“There’s nothing to explain,” she said
instantly. “It was a long time ago. Like I said, water under the
bridge. We’ve both moved on, and there really isn’t any point in
going back to it now, is there?”

“But there is a point,” he said. “The point
is, for better or worse, you don’t know the whole truth about me.
You never have.”

Oh, great, here came the
grand confession.
I was doing an Austrian
woman while I was doing you
, or, a real
gut-kicker,
I was going to leave my wife,
but she got pregnant
. Right, like she
hadn’t thought of those possibilities a million times over. Why
were men so dumb? “Really, Michael, I don’t need to know the
truth,” she said as they reached the commissary.

“But I need to tell you.”

“Okay,” Leah said, sighing. “But I’ve
probably surmised more than you think, and I already know the
truth, but I really don’t feel the need to know any more,” she
said, as Michael got them trays and put one in front of her. She
could feel his body at her back. It felt familiar. And so good. And
she hated him for it.

He leaned into her, close
enough she could smell his cologne and said, “But you
don’t
know the truth.
You couldn’t possibly know the truth.” They moved in line behind an
actor dressed like a street bum, and Michael straightened up. “What
are you having?”

Oh, right, like she could eat now. She chose
a tuna sandwich, but had no appetite for it. What did he think she
could possibly not know? She’d known where he worked, what he did
for a living. What else was there?

“There’s a table over there,” Michael said,
nodding toward the back of the tent. He led the way, as far away
from the other soccer moms and actors and everyone else as he could
get. He put his tray down and held out a chair for her. “You don’t
have to do that,” she said, but put her tray down, taking the seat
he offered, sliding past him, her body brushing against his clothes
and feeling that odd jolt of awareness.

He sat across from her, poured some salad
dressing on the salad he’d picked up, and forked a mouthful.

Leah, on the other hand, could only sit
there looking at him, gripping her sandwich in two hands. After a
moment of watching him eat, she put the sandwich down. “Okay, the
suspense is killing me,” she said, trying to make light of it.
“Tell me what I don’t know. No, wait,” she said, holding up a hand.
“Let me start. What I know is that you were not ready to commit. So
I guess the only question is why you didn’t want to commit to me,
and I think we both know it was another woman, but hey, whatever.
It’s over and done with.”

He looked up from his plate, his brown eyes
wide. “What?” he asked, incredulous. “You think there was another
woman?”

Leah snorted. “Well, it’s
better than another man,” she said, and picked up her tuna and took
an enormous bite of it. “
That
would have really bugged me.”

That gave him a moment’s pause, but then he
frowned and asked, “How in the hell did you get another woman out
of . . . what happened?”

“Are you kidding? How could I not?” she
mumbled through the tuna. “Suddenly we’re through, and you’re gone.
No warning, no sign there was anything wrong. Quite the contrary,
in fact. I thought things were pretty damn good. So what else could
it be?”

“Leah,” he said, putting
his fork down, “there was not another woman.
Ever.
I couldn’t have done it—I had
no desire to be with another woman when I was with you . . . which
apparently is another thing you never knew.” He picked up his fork
again.

If it wasn’t another
woman, then it didn’t leave too many explanations, did it? Other
than perhaps that she’d been so pathetic in her desire to marry him
and be with him forever that he’d balked, and as
that
was not something
she really wanted to hear him say out loud, she blurted, “Whatever
it was, it’s fine. I mean, I didn’t think that then, but look, if I
had settled down back then, I wouldn’t have come to L.A., and look
at me now,” she said, lifting her hands, one half a sandwich
included.

He looked at her like she wasn’t making
sense.

Okay, maybe she didn’t
look entirely liberated, but she was. “You know what, Michael? You
did me a huge favor,” she said with false levity. “I never would
have followed my dreams if you hadn’t . . . you know.
Dumped
me.”

“Could you please stop saying that?”

“Why? It’s what you did.”

He frowned at his salad. “Well, it’s a
relief to know you feel okay about it now, because I don’t. I’ve
thought a lot about it over the years.” He stabbed at some lettuce.
“Actually. I’ve agonized about the way I left things with you.”

Don’t. Please
don’t
. “Hey, it’s all good,” she said,
flicking her wrist dismissively before taking another bite of her
sandwich. Was she kidding herself, or did his eyes sincerely look
full of regret? “This is pretty good tuna,” she said through a
mouthful. “How’s your salad?”

He glanced at the salad as if he just
realized he had it, but quickly looked at her again, his gaze
piercing hers. “You’re right about one thing. I . . . I really was
afraid of commitment. Deathly afraid of it.” He looked away for a
moment and pushed a hand through his hair. “It was almost like a
mountain I couldn’t climb. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I guess
it has something to do with the fact that I grew up in foster homes
and never really learned what commitment was.”

Leah almost spewed her tuna. “Whoa, wait,”
she said hoarsely. “Foster homes? Since when? Now you are being an
ass, Michael, if you think I’m going to fall for some
woe-is-me-I-was-raised-in-a-foster-home schtick.”

He sighed heavily. “It’s no schtick. I’m
serious.”

“Oh please!” she exclaimed with an
incredulous laugh. “Your parents live in Ohio. Your mom is a
homemaker, and your dad has a hardware business, and he called you
every Sunday. Don’t you remember? You always had to be home by
seven so you could take your dad’s call.”

“No,” he said firmly, shaking his head. “I
don’t have any parents. The man who used to call me every Sunday
was my boss.”

“Get out,” Leah said with a sardonic laugh.
She had to hand it to him; whatever he was trying to pull was at
least inventive.

“I wouldn’t lie about this.”

She snorted at that.
“Okay,
love
that
we’re going in a new direction here,” she said, wiggling her
fingers at the new direction. “But you’re missing a couple of
important details. For example, why would your boss call you every
Sunday? Why would your boss be asking questions about your
brother’s soccer game? And even if it was your boss, which it
wasn’t, because it was your dad, why wouldn’t you just tell
me?”