One of These Nights (22 page)

“What's the matter?” she asked, frowning up at him. “You've got that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“Like you want to bite somebody,” she said. “Were you always mad at the world, or is it just me that puts you in a mood?”

“I'm not mad at the world,” he replied. “Well, maybe a little since my adventure in the woods with Rosie the wonder dog. But it's just the way I look when I'm thinking.”

“You must think a lot, then,” Zoe said, and he chuckled. He couldn't help it. She was the only woman he knew who would fight with him, and the only one unafraid to tease him. He knew he was intimidating. It kept people from bothering him unless he wanted to be bothered. The thing with Zoe was that she didn't seem to care—she bothered him whether he was ready or not.

“That's better,” she said, and stepped back. “You should try smiling more often. It's a good one.”

“We'll see,” he said, and she heaved an exaggerated sigh. “You really want to do this, you're going to be making that noise a lot,” he warned her.

“I already do,” she said. “Okay, I've got to get going. You need anything, call me.” She leveled a look at him. “I mean it. It's easier for me to get away than it is for Jake.”

He bristled despite himself. “I think I can handle it, Zo.”

“Well, your mother is MIA and she has your car,” Zoe replied evenly. “So how about you consider me your backup plan in case things go awry.”

He snorted despite his determination to thwart her. Wanting her and needing her were not the same thing, and he wasn't about to blend them together so quickly. “Things tend not to go awry around here, Dr. Watson.”

She made a face. “Funny.”

“Do you also use the words ‘hullaballoo' and ‘squiffy'?”

“I'll be using a number of things in conjunction with your posterior, most of them sharp objects, if you aren't nice. There's nothing wrong with having an extensive vocabulary,
Treebeard
.”

“No,” he replied. “You just sounds very . . . proper. Dr. Watson.” He gave himself a nice, mental pat on the back for having found an irritating nickname for her. If she was going to keep calling him a talking tree, turnabout was fair play. Especially because he was almost positive that all of their mutual friends knew exactly what she called him.

“I double majored in art history and English literature at Emory. I thought I owed it to my parents to load up on the fifty-cent words, considering they thought that was all I'd be getting out of my education.”

That gave him pause. She noticed, and her smirk had an air of victory. “Told you that you didn't know much about me.” She cocked her head. “What about you? Where'd you go? University of Isengard?”

“Hey.”

“You started it.”

Yes, he had, and now he regretted teasing her for her vocabulary. A double major at Emory.
Jesus.
“You probably had a full ride, right? Academic scholarships?”

“You say that like it's a bad thing.”

“No,” he replied. “I just think it's a very Zoe thing. I can't believe you were less driven then than you are now.”

She made a sound that was a lot like an elderly man's harrumph. “I did have scholarships, yes. Ones I worked my butt off for. There were six of us, and I'm the baby. The money wasn't there, though Mama and Daddy helped with what they could. And you didn't answer my question.”

“UMass,” he said. “Environmental science.”

Her eyebrow arched. “And?”

“And what?”

“I don't know . . . you made a face. The grumpy face. I'm used to it, but I don't know why you're wearing it to tell me where you want to college. I just wondered. I don't know how you get to be a park ranger. For all I know you could have to run one of those crazy obstacle courses, like on the Japanese game shows, to graduate.”

“I . . . really?” He tried to picture that. “I would have
loved
to do that instead of Geology 101. We used to take bets on which puffy vest the professor would wear. He had three. I was a pretty good guesser . . . I had a lot of extra money for the vending machines that semester.”

She leaned against the island, and Jason found he wanted her to stay. Staring at these four walls all day—again—was even less appealing than it already had been. Zoe made him forget where he was. Or at least that where he was currently kind of sucked. Maybe if he was entertaining enough she'd blow off work.

Since that was an impossibility, he aimed for just sending her off later than she'd planned.

“Well, even if it wasn't as interesting as my game-show idea, did you like it?”

He shrugged. “Sure. UMass is a good school, but up here it gets a lot of crap for not being Harvard, Wellesley, a pricey private. It has a good program for what I wanted, though, and it was affordable. I actually did community college for two years. Good grades, but not scholarship-level grades. I worked to pay for the first two. Parents paid for the last two. So that was helpful.”

“That
was
helpful,” she agreed. “Sounds like we both got lucky. Even though I got an earful about not going into medicine.”

“Oh yeah?” He had a hard time picturing anyone giving Zoe a rough time about anything she was determined to do. Her laugh, though, was rueful enough that he had to believe her.

“Oh yeah,” she echoed him. “The fact that I pass out at both blood and big needles didn't seem to register. I was the flighty one in my family, according to everyone. Never mind that I didn't even have a social life all four years so I could keep those scholarships and . . . hmm . . . you don't need to hear me complain about that.” She looked slightly embarrassed. “It worked out.”

“Because you're stubborn,” Jason said. “See? I know a few things about you.”

Zoe looked amused. “I don't think either of us gets points for noticing the other one is stubborn.”

“Okay, how about this? Your favorite color,” he announced, “is purple.”

That startled her, and Jason felt like kind of an ass for throwing that out there. He hadn't even been positive he was right until just now. But some part of him, frustrated by her perception that he didn't know her, had dug up and tossed out the information before he could help himself.

“How did you know that?” she asked.

“I hide in your closet,” he said, and when she balled up a fist, he added, “or I might just have noticed that you have a lot of pieces of clothing that are shades of purple and guessed.”

“You look at my clothes?” she asked, clearly pleased.

“I look at what's in the clothes. The color registers eventually.” And the fact that the color was beautiful against her skin helped, he thought. Then she was moving toward him as though she might let him get a taste of her again . . . until the doorbell rang, cracking his cozy morning right down the middle. Zoe froze. Rosie began barking furiously in the bedroom, and he heard her paws hit the floor just before she scrambled out and went flying toward the front door.

He cursed softly. They both knew who it was. He'd just been hoping to postpone this discussion for another few hours. Days. Months, if possible.

“Great,” he said.

“I think that's my cue,” Zoe said. She walked into the dining room, picked up her purse, and headed for the front door. Jason followed, impressed with how she carried herself knowing who was on the other side of the door. He didn't get there quickly enough to open it, instead watching as Zoe very cordially addressed the woman staring at her from the porch.

“Good morning, Molly. He's right in here.” She turned her head and gave him a sweet smile, though he recognized the wicked edge to it and had to bite back a smile of his own. Jake had been right. Zoe could handle his mother. “Give me a call later . . . sugar.” She drawled the last word, and he couldn't help the laughter, which he had to cough to cover. Zoe held the door open for Molly and walked right on by, and he gave himself just a moment to admire the view before returning his attention to the matter at hand.

It was the strangest thing. He'd started to tense up, but watching Zoe glide through what could have been a very awkward greeting calmed him. Especially because he knew it was an act . . . She'd felt badly about making things harder for him. Not that she actually had. She couldn't know, but his threshold for tense and unpleasant when it came to his family was pretty high to start with.

The door shut, and Molly marched in, ready to do battle. He recognized the stance, the set of her jaw, the look in her eyes. And he discovered he just really wasn't in the mood to indulge her. In fact, he had a sudden urge to find some decent clothes and maybe go get a haircut. He felt cooped up and grubby, two things that weren't like him but which had become a way of life in the three weeks since he'd been in the cast and out of work.

As much as he loved his house, he felt claustrophobic. He missed his park, his woods. The Cove.

“You know what I'm going to say.”

“It's going to be either that you hate my girlfriend, that you're disappointed in me and are going home, or that you think I should put Rosie out,” he replied, and saw that he'd hit closer to the truth than she appreciated.

“That's a nice way to talk to me,” she said. “Jason, she ruined the bonfire. You
let
her.”

“She gets migraines. She needed me. I wasn't going to throw a party while she was like that. Actually, I wasn't going to throw a party anyway.”

“She was completely disrespectful to me. She made it sound like I don't pay attention to you, even though I'm not sure how that can possibly be since I'm right here.” She gave an angry, incredulous laugh. “Like I don't know my own son.”

He gave her a long look, debating about whether he wanted to do this now or put it off again, and decided that as long as he'd started the day making changes he might as well make this one. It wasn't a new conversation, but maybe this time it would sink in. He told himself that every time, and probably always would. But it was the kind of gentle denial that wasn't hurting anyone, and a lot better than anger. His mother thrived on anger. He wouldn't ever understand it . . . all he could do was keep it in mind and stand clear when the situation arose.

“You do,” he said, “and you don't.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” There was hurt mixed in with the anger, but he'd seen it often enough that he'd gotten a little hardened about it. It was her defense mechanism—she was always the injured party, always the victim. He considered his words, careful not to get worked up enough to give her the satisfaction of correcting him:
Now, Jason, slow down and try again.

“Mom, you came up here as much to see your friends as you did to see me. That's not exactly a problem, except that you treat my house like your own and conveniently forget that I have to live here, too. You never ask; you just
do
.”

“I asked—”

“No,” he said firmly. “You didn't. On top of that, you never tried to make friends with Zoe. You just tried to compete with her. It makes everything that much harder.”

“I did not! If anybody was competitive, it was her. Honestly, Jason, she's an out-of-towner gallery owner with delusions of grandeur.” She threw up her arms. “It's Sara all over again! You defend her, you change yourself for her . . . I mean, an art collection? Really? I knew what was going on the second she said it. That's not you, Jason. That's you trying to be what she wants. In six months you'll be living together in some museum of a house and you'll be wearing a smoking jacket and growing a mustache.”

He might have gotten a chuckle out of that, except her words had gotten just where she'd intended—under his skin. She hadn't liked his ex-wife, and he'd known it. Not everything she'd flung at him had been off the mark, either, though it wasn't as stark as she'd painted it. Things never were.

“Enough,” Jason said flatly. “I'm sorry you don't like her. I do. And the art collection, for your information, is mine. If you took an actual look around here, you'd notice I've been picking up things for a while.”

Her eyes darted to several points in the room, though she didn't appear to actually be looking. “I'm sorry, but that just doesn't sound like you, Jason.”

“And that's what I mean about you knowing and not knowing me. I'm not a ten-year-old kid anymore, Mom. Do you remember when I brought you out to see the park I work at? Couple years ago?”

She seemed flustered, restless. Being confronted head-on never settled well with her. For all that she could be loud and demanding, she tended to be more insidious when she wanted things. It was why he pressed on. The only way he got through, even if it was only for a brief period of time, was to push her outside of her comfort zone.

“I don't really remember, Jason; that was a while ago.”

“Exactly,” he replied, and the dismissal stung despite the thick armor he'd developed over the years. “Well, you spent the whole time complaining about bugs, Dad was so busy trying to refocus you that he missed everything, and Tommy kept looking at his watch. It was great.”

“Why are you doing this? To try to make me feel bad? Well, I do, Jason. I feel bad that I came up here when you so obviously don't want me.”

Her eyes filled with angry tears, and he bit back a sigh. It was all about her. It would always be all about her. She was wrong . . . he did want her. She just wasn't capable of giving him the part of herself he needed. He'd repeated that pattern once.

This ought to serve as a reminder to be very careful not to do it again.

“I do want you here, Mom. But I think we both need a break. Small house, limited mobility on my part, lots of stress. And I know you don't like my dog.”