Practice Makes Perfect (9 page)

H
enry was coming over again tonight, and Helen was nervous. There were so many levels to her nervousness that she couldn't even focus on one, to try to breathe through it. It was Grace's fault. Helen wouldn't be thinking about feelings if Grace hadn't brought them up earlier today. But there they were, tiny little seeds of feelings spreading on the soil of her overactive imagination. Were they real feelings or just sex-feelings? And if they were real feelings, were they mutual? And if they were mutual, was it worth risking their friendship to see if they went anywhere? And if they were just sex-feelings, would continuing to have sex turn them into something more? Should she put a stop to this, if it was causing so much confusion? Even if it was improving her writing about sixteen hundred thousand percent? Just today she'd written two thousand words. She hardly ever wrote two thousand words on a workday, and she'd been doing it for the past few days. And they were good words, not just filling up an empty page with “insert sex scene here” notes to herself.

She should probably wait on the feelings conversation. Once she was done writing, they would be done researching, and then she could see what was left after some time apart. Or at least some time clothed. Which would be a shame, given how much she liked looking at Henry unclothed . . .

No, she should keep her feelings to herself, at least for now.

And she also had to keep her conversation with Lou to herself, under pain of death, according to Lou. They were getting a new archive, Lou assured her. The woman was positively bubbling over with glee, which at first Helen thought was a heart attack. No, not a heart attack. A new building. It would be off campus, and they'd have to share it with the Willow Springs Historical Society, who did not have the same professional standards she did, but Lou had been assured that she would be the lead on the project and she felt confident she could whip those armchair archivists into shape.

That's great, Helen had told her. Also, what are you talking about?

They were going to demolish that old house downtown, Lou told her, and they'd build the archive up from scratch. A real archive, built to be an archive. Not some ancient administrative building that had been shoddily converted from a library into a glorified broom closet full of old stuff. She'd be able to catalog everything, restore everything, preserve everything. And it would all be in one place, and she would be in charge of the whole collection.

All they had to do was tear down Henry's dream.

How could Helen keep that to herself? She'd promised Henry she wouldn't keep any secrets from him, and now here she was, keeping a secret that she knew would destroy him. He'd put so much of himself into proving that the Wood Street house was really Madame Renee's infamous brothel, and now he wouldn't get the chance to find the answer either way. Because the house would be gone.

There would be a plaque, Lou assured her. But not a plaque that acknowledged what the house really had been, because there was no proof. Just a plaque that said how old the house was, and how it was now an important piece of the partnership between Pembroke College and the town of Willow Springs.

Rah rah rah.

She'd promised Lou that she wouldn't tell anyone. And she'd promised Henry that she wouldn't keep any more secrets.

So this was what that space between the rock and the hard place felt like.

“I don't like it,” she told Tammy, who huffed at her in response. “Great. My emotional crises don't even warrant a real bark from you.” George howled from the front room. The front door opened. Henry was here.

Helen put on her happy face as she followed Tammy to the door.

Henry did not look happy. His eyes looked drawn and dark, as if he hadn't slept well last night. Which, maybe he hadn't? Helen had slept like the dead, or at least the really, really sated. She hadn't noticed Henry not zonking out the same way she had.

As she moved closer, she realized that “tired” wasn't the right word for how he looked. He looked troubled. Her panicked head went to last night again. Had she done something wrong? Had she pushed the boundaries of their friendship? Yes, of course she had, but had she done it in a way he had changed his mind about?

Whatever was troubling Henry, though, seemed not to be Helen-related, because as soon as she was close enough, he pulled her into a tight hug, stuffing his face into her neck and inhaling so deeply she thought he would take her pulse with him.

“Hey,” she said, pulling back far enough to get a look at his face but not so far that he had to let go of her. They felt good, those arms of his. “What's wrong?”

He shook his head.

“Don't tell me nothing,” she said. “No secrets, remember?”

“No, it's just—” He sighed and she braced herself for the blow of really bad news. “Can we do this later?” He pulled her closer, and she let him.

“Can we just get this sex stuff out of the way?” she teased.

It was the wrong thing to say. Henry looked like she had slapped him.

“Is that what you—”

She cut him off with a kiss. “It was a joke.” She leaned back into his mouth. “A terrible joke.”

“OK,” he said, and he pulled her even closer, so close her feet left the ground. Then he walked her back to the bedroom and shut the door and Helen thought for sure her word count would at least double tomorrow.

H
elen was definitely sleeping.

He knew this because he had asked her. She had said yes and swatted him away. Then she snuggled in close to him and put her arms around him and now she was snoring. Just a little, but it was definitely the deep breathing of the soundly asleep.

He brushed her hair back off her face. She was flushed again, and her lips were swollen again, and she looked peaceful and sated. He felt sated. They were definitely both sated. That was some next-level closeness they'd achieved, and at the same time.

That's what it was. Not just research. Not just sex. They had been intimate last night in a way that none of their other practice sessions had been. He'd come here after work, not just because they had a date. He'd come here because he needed her.

He always needed Helen, and he always came to her when things were rough. When he was facing a professional crisis, when he'd had a bad date—Helen was the one he turned to. And she turned to him. But last night was different. Yesterday afternoon he'd had the rug pulled out from underneath him. The brothel was going to be destroyed and all of his work destroyed with it. The only thing he was sure of was Helen, and that he needed to see her, and that she would make it better.

When he came to her, she had wanted to talk, the way they always did. That was how they worked things out: He talked, she listened, together they worked it out. But that wasn't what he'd needed last night. Last night, he'd needed to feel close to something that he knew was real, and the only thing that he knew was real in his life was her.

This was dangerous ground, and he knew it. He wished he knew how dangerous. Was this just a passing thing, or would it cause irreparable damage? Then he remembered the way she looked into his eyes as he hovered over her, her face when he was inside her, and he thought it couldn't be only him. What he saw, what they shared, that had to be mutual. Hadn't she thrown her arms over him in her sleep?

And just like that, he had to get out. He couldn't breathe with her sleeping next to him, that half smile on her face and her hair a tousled mess. It was too much. It was too uncertain. Henry Beckham didn't do uncertain.

He slid out from underneath her, smiling in spite of himself at her groan of displeasure. He watched until she curled into his pillow, then he grabbed his boxers and left the room.

The dogs were there, of course. How long had they been sitting there? Was that what they did every time Helen had male company, sit outside and wait? “You guys are creepy,” he whispered to them. They snuffled, then followed him through the kitchen and out the back door.

The night air felt good. The stars were out and the town was quiet. Willow Springs was pretty much always quiet, though. He liked his sleepy little town. He hoped he would be able to stay.

He was suddenly aware that he was outside in his underwear. Willow Springs might be sleepy, and her yard might be fenced, but he felt a little too exposed. He called the dogs in—quietly—and started rooting around in her kitchen for something to eat.

He had definitely worked up an appetite. Part of him wanted to skip the snack and go back to bed, wake Helen up and see what other depths they could plumb together. Or go back to bed and not wake her up, just cuddle into her warmth and sleep. Helen's arms seemed like the best place in the world to be right now.

The ground shifted. No, he'd make a sandwich. Much safer that way.

He piled his arms high with the contents of her refrigerator (he was really, really hungry, he realized), then dumped them as quietly as possible on the small counter. As he tried to make sense of his pile, he knocked a bunch of papers to the ground. Ha, he thought. Helen was not immune to the lure of the miscellaneous pile of paper.

He bent down to scoop them up and noticed that they were not all just papers. A small book had fallen out of her calendar. It was bound in cardboard, like a cheap, handmade old diary. He read the cover.

And he forgot all about the sandwich.

* * *

“What the hell is this?”

Helen was having a wonderful dream where she and Henry were on a tropical island, making love on a cloud of pillows as the waves crashed outside their window.

Now she was awake, and Henry hovered over her with a look on his face that was decidedly more murderous than the one he wore in her dream.

“What?” she asked groggily. She reached for him. Anything that was wrong could surely be solved by an early morning snuggle. And if he took those boxers off, they could be even more productive.

But he didn't bite. He didn't even come closer. He reared off the bed and waved something in her face. Was that a book? It looked older and crappier than any of her paperbacks.

Then she remembered.

R. Butcher.

Well, so she forgot to tell him about the interesting old thing she'd accidentally stolen from the archives. “I meant to show that to you,” she said, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “I found it when I was working for Lou—”

“How long have you had this?”

He was yelling. Why was he yelling? It was just some old book that she thought he might, maybe, find interesting.

“A day or so.”

“A day? Do you know what this could have done if I'd had it yesterday?”

“Henry, slow down. What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about this diary. I'm talking about R. Butcher.”

“I know, I found it. Who's R. Butcher?”

“Renee Butcher. Aka Renee Beauchamp.”

She felt all the color go out of her face. “Madame Renee?”

“Yes, Madame Renee. This is her diary. Did you read it?”

“No, I forgot I had it, and I was going to return it after I showed it to you. But it says Butcher, not Beauchamp.”

“Butcher was her real name. She changed it to Beauchamp so she sounded more exotic.”

“I guess nobody really wants to go to a brothel called Miss Butcher's.”

“Helen, this isn't funny! This is the proof I've been looking for!”

“That's great!”

“No, it's not! They've already decided to tear down the house!”

“Oh yeah,” she said.

“What do you mean, oh yeah? Did you know?”

All the color came back to her face, burning into a furious blush. “I just found out yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“I'm sorry, Henry. Lou swore me to secrecy. But surely it's not too late—”

“Lou swore you to secrecy? I thought you said no more secrets, Helen. You promised.”

“I know, and I was going to tell you last night, but you were so—”

“Don't put this on me. You could have stopped anytime you wanted to. You could have sat me down and said
Henry, I know you think your dream has just been trampled to death, but here, I have the means to save it
.”

“I didn't know what I had! It has a fake name on it, for christ's sake! How was I supposed to know—”

“But no, you just had to get your shiny new archive. You had to get what you needed, to hell with me!”

“Henry—”

“I thought we were friends, Helen. I thought we were at least colleagues. I never thought you would deliberately try to sabotage me, just to get what you want.”

“But that's not what—”

“Well, I hope you've got enough research, because I'm done being your sexual whipping boy.”

“Hold on just a minute!” Helen jumped out of bed and went toe-to-toe with fire-breathing Henry. She didn't care that she was naked. She didn't care that the dogs were watching. She just knew Henry was out of control, and she was not going down with that ship. “You think I was just using you for sex?”

He didn't say anything, just waved the book at her with a nasty look on his face.

It probably would have been a lot less painful if he'd just slapped her.

She felt tears pricking her eyes, and that was it. He could accuse her of crazy things, but she would not let him see her cry. “Get out,” she said in a low voice.

“Are you crying?” He looked concerned, and that just made her even madder.

“Get out!” she yelled. “Take your precious diary and get out of my house!”

He might have given her a last look before he grabbed his clothes and slammed the door, but she didn't turn around to find out.