Going Back (13 page)

“And you had too much to
drink.”

“I had too much to drink.
But—”

“Why me?” he repeated. “The party
was loaded with guys. Why did you pick me?”

“Because you were there?” she
half-asked, then shook her head. “I knew you, Brad. I knew who you
were.” That was hardly a sufficient reason, and as soon as Daphne
saw his disgruntled look she shook her head again. “I honestly
don’t know. Maybe I sensed on some subconscious level that you were
the sort of guy who wouldn’t make my life hell afterward. You
wouldn’t be indiscreet. You wouldn’t…you wouldn’t laugh at
me.”

He was moved by her statement. He’d
been afraid that Daphne would justify her having selected him by
saying something like, “You were cute,” or “I thought you’d perform
well.” She hadn’t, though. He didn’t believe he was as decent as
she seemed to think he was, but he wanted to believe it. Hearing
her describe him so kindly filled him with a tender
warmth.

Her eyes met his. “When I went to
your room…” She glanced away, as if she couldn’t bear to look
directly at him. “When I went to your room, Brad, it was only
because I wanted to forget about Dennis. And that’s about as rotten
as you can get. I was the one taking advantage of you. So please
don’t tell me it was your fault.”

Daphne Stoltz taking advantage of
him? No, it hadn’t been like that at all. Brad had never viewed it
that way, and he wasn’t about to view it that way now. “Why don’t
you drink liquor anymore?” he asked.

“Because I don’t want to do
anything that stupid, ever again,” she said simply. “The liquor
doesn’t explain what I did, Brad, but I’m not going to run the risk
of getting drunk and doing something so stupid again. I just don’t
think it’s worth taking that kind of chance.”

Brad tightened his grip on her. He
felt the slender bones in her fingers, the tapering of her wrist.
“It seems kind of ridiculous that I’ve spent all these years
thinking I was to blame for the whole damned thing, and you’ve been
busy thinking you were to blame.”

“Maybe we were both to blame,”
Daphne said. “I’ll tell you this—if I ever get my hands on a time
machine, one thing I’m going to do is turn it back eight years and
live that one night over again. I’d live it very
differently.”

“Amen,” Brad agreed. Then he
loosened his hold on her and grinned. “You’d refuse to go upstairs
with me?”

Daphne appeared bemused. “Can you
think of another way to make that night right?”

“Assuming you did come
upstairs...I’d make love to you, instead of whatever the hell it
was we did. I’d romance you, Daff. I’d make it as good as I could
for you, so if you did make the mistake of coming to my room, you
wouldn’t regret it for eight years afterwards.”

She laughed. “Such altruism,” she
teased. “If you made it that good for me, it would be that much
better for you.”

“That’s the way these things work,”
he confirmed, mirroring her grin. “Of course, I’d expect you to
pitch in and do your part, too.”

“Of course.”

His smile faded as he regarded her.
“Do you know what else I’d do if we were able to get hold of a time
machine?” he continued, no longer joking. “I’d take it back to our
senior year of school and spend more time talking to you. You’re
wonderful to talk to, Daff.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. Last night, when I
started ranting about my parents—”

“If that’s your idea of ranting,
Brad, you’re too suppressed. I thought we were having a pleasant
chat.”

“Okay. I’m a pleasant ranter,” he
allowed. “I didn’t even tell Eric about the lunch I’d had with my
mother. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. But then you found me, and
it seemed so easy to talk to you.... I wasn’t kidding when I told
you that was the highlight of the party for me.”

“I think it was the highlight for
me, too,” Daphne said. “I like talking to you, too,
Brad.”

He lifted his half-consumed glass
of iced tea in a toast to Daphne, then drained it. He was feeling a
lot better now than he’d felt when he left the city an hour ago.
The fact was, he was feeling a lot better now than he’d felt in the
past eight years. “When Andrea suggested that I use you as my
realtor,” he confessed, “I wanted to run the other way. I thought
it was going to be so awkward.”

“It was,” Daphne reminded
him.

“At first. But
now I’m glad she pushed me into it.” It elated him to realize that
Daphne could be his friend—that she already
was
his friend.

He supposed it was sometimes
possible for a lover to evolve into a friend, but such a transition
had never happened in his own life. He tended to choose his lovers
for romance, not for friendship. He picked women who were beautiful
and witty, who supplied one half of an ideal couple for which he
was the other half. He selected women who had the potential to be
for him what his mother was for his father—at least, what she had
been for his father before their marriage began to falter: someone
whose talents complemented his, whose background matched his, whose
taste paralleled his.

He tended to choose friends, on the
other hand, by his ability to talk comfortably with them. By that
standard, Daphne Stoltz was without a doubt an excellent
friend.

Perhaps it wasn’t so terribly
surprising that she would be. He couldn’t really consider her a
former lover, at least not by any legitimate definition of the
term. What had occurred between them so long ago had nothing to do
with love.

What was occurring between them
right now had everything to do with friendship. And Brad would
gladly drink many, many iced- tea toasts to that.

***

I BET he thinks
of me as a sister,
Daphne contemplated as
she pulled on an attractive short-sleeve sweater. When her head
popped through the neck-hole her curls burst out around her head
like little yellow springs. She shook them loose, then tucked the
hem of the sweater into the waistband of her slacks and fastened
the fly. Fully clothed at last, she peeked out of her bedroom
window, which overlooked the back yard.

Brad was standing next to the apple
tree, shielding his eyes from the sun as he gazed up at the
pinkish-white blossoms dotting the branches. If Daphne were more
diligent about spraying insecticide on her trees, she’d probably be
able to harvest a bumper crop of fruit in late September. While she
wasn’t a devoted fan of insects, she had enough concern about the
environment to avoid chemical warfare and instead share her tree’s
fruit with some of Mother Nature’s lesser creatures.

She didn’t want to think about
insects, though. She wanted to think about the tall, dark man with
the spring-sky blue eyes who had felt compelled to drive all the
way to Verona to tell her he understood why she’d taken a powder
last night. She wanted to think about how honest he’d been, how
noble in claiming responsibility for something that wasn’t his
fault, how attuned he’d been to her feelings then and how sensitive
he still was now.

She wanted to think about how much
she enjoyed his company. Obviously, he enjoyed her company, too. He
wouldn’t have insisted that she change her clothes and spend the
rest of the afternoon with him if he didn’t want to be with her. He
could have slapped himself on the back for having done his good
deed, and then returned to the haven of Andrea’s and Eric’s
apartment until his next house-hunting trip, which was scheduled
for Wednesday afternoon.

But he’d been firm about her
abandoning her garden for the day: “Your flowers looks great, Daff,
so don’t waste the rest of the afternoon on them. Go put on some
clean clothes, and we’ll check out that park downtown.”

It wasn’t a date. Brad had
absolutely no interest in Daphne as anything other than a pal. One
more luscious, sexy man treating her like a sister, she thought
with a sigh.

In truth, she wasn’t bothered by
the thought of having a brother/sister relationship with Brad,
because she’d never been in love with him. She had loved Dennis,
and she had come dangerously close to falling in love with Paul
Costello, but she’d never even considered Brad as someone she could
love. He was too desirable: too good looking, too wealthy, too
polished. Too decent. Who else but an immeasurably decent man would
have done what Brad had done today?

Turning from the window, she ran
her brush through her hair a few times, grabbed her purse, and left
the bedroom. Brad was waiting for her by the back door. She locked
up, then spun her key ring in search of her car key.

“I’ll drive,” he said.

“You don’t know your way around
here,” she argued. “You’ll get lost.”

“You can keep me on course,” he
suggested. “If I’m going to be moving here, I wouldn’t mind getting
a feel for the community.”

“Suit yourself,” she said,
accompanying him around the house to the rented car parked at the
curb.

Once they were both settled in the
car, she gave him perfunctory directions to the park. He pulled
away from the curb, shifted gears and tapped his fingers against
the steering wheel. “Whose shirt were you wearing?” he
asked.

Startled, Daphne glanced down at
her sweater. “I’m pretty sure it’s mine,” she said,
bewildered.

He glanced toward the becoming
peach-colored sweater, then grinned and returned his gaze to the
road. “I mean before, when you were gardening. That man’s
shirt.”

He seemed to be fishing for
personal information. Given the personal nature of their
conversation on her back porch, and the fact that he wouldn’t learn
anything particularly scintillating from the line of questioning
he’d taken, she didn’t object. “It was my father’s,” she answered.
“He passes his shirts along to me once they start fraying at the
cuffs. I spend a lot of time doing house repairs and gardening, and
the shirts come in handy.”

Brad digested her answer, deep in
thought. She hoped he wasn’t viewing her as her father did whenever
he presented her with his old shirts: as a pitiful single lady who
didn’t have a husband do grout the bathtub for her, or prune the
shrubs, or change the screens in the storm doors.

“Is it strange,
living in a big house all by yourself?” Brad asked, hinting that
perhaps he
had
been viewing her as a pitiful single lady.

“First of all, it’s not such a big
house,” she answered, keeping her voice level. “Second, you’ve
lived all by yourself too. You should know just how strange it
is.”

“I’ve been living in an attached
townhouse condominium,” he corrected her. “That’s different from a
whole house, with your own four walls and your own grass to mow.”
He shot another glance at her, then grinned. “Frankly, whenever I
think about moving into that expanded cape you showed me, it
strikes me as weird. Me, all alone, with three different toilets to
choose from?”

“I admit that house is bigger than
you need,” she agreed. “But a larger house is a usually better
investment than a smaller one. Better resale value.”

“Besides, those two-and-a-half
bathrooms will come in handy when I do business
entertaining.”

“Good point,” Daphne agreed. “And
maybe someday you’ll get married and put a diaper pail in one of
them.”

Brad guffawed.

“Why did you ask me about the
shirt?” Daphne asked, figuring that if he could be nosy, so could
she.

His grin vanished, taking his
dimples with it. “The truth?” he asked. “I was wondering whether
you’d inherited the shirt from a boyfriend.”

Brad’s comment should have
surprised her. That it didn’t was itself surprising. “Why?” she
asked, wondering why he was so interested in learning about the
possibile existence of a man in her life.

He mulled over his reply. “Andrea
and Eric are married, Melanie and Steve Persky are married, Phyllis
has that he-man plumber she’s living with...and you go to parties
with a guy who’s just a friend of yours. Is it that you’re just
between lovers?”

Sure, she was between lovers. So
what if the gap between one lover and the next spread across years?
She wished she could come up with a sassy, light-hearted response
to Brad’s probing, but she couldn’t. Not after she and he had been
so honest with each other at her house. “I don’t date much,” she
said blandly.

“Why not?”

“Why not you?” she challenged. “How
come you’re still single?”

Brad accepted her nosiness as she
had accepted his—without complaint. “I came mighty close to getting
married in Seattle,” he told her.

“Oh? How close?”

“Close enough for me to ask her
what size ring she wore.” Brad lapsed into thought for a moment,
then smiled wistfully. “Nancy and I were together for a long time,
and we talked about marriage pretty frequently. She was a terrific
woman. Beautiful, cultured, well-educated…”

“And…?”

“And it just didn’t work out,” Brad
said laconically.

Daphne gazed across the seat at
him. He was remarkably handsome in profile, his nose creating a
sharp angle that balanced the rugged line of his jaw. She couldn’t
imagine why a woman wouldn’t want to marry Brad.