Running From Mercy (29 page)

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Authors: Terra Little

BOOK: Running From Mercy
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“Does that mean I can send you a contract?”
“The money,” Pam hedged. “I don't want it.”
“Neither does Moira, and I wouldn't feel right keeping all of it. You know this book is going to be a national bestseller, don't you? The profits will be significant, too much money to just ignore.”
She had a thought. “The home.”
“What?”
“I'm donating my portion to the Angels of Mercy Children's Home.”
“Include that in the foreword and the profits just doubled.”
“It's not about the money, Miles.”
“I never thought it was. I'm just stating facts. So can I send the contract?”
“Send it to my agent slash publicist,” Pam decided and gave him Gillian's contact information. “She'll go over it with a fine tooth comb and make sure I'm not getting screwed. I don't trust you, David, or Miles or whoever the hell you are.”
He chuckled into the phone. “I guess I deserved that.”
“Damn right you did. I need sleep now. Goodbye.” She hung up and rolled over, pulled a pillow under her head and fell asleep.
She opened her eyes seven hours later and settled them on Nate. He was sitting on the side of the bed, flipping through the pages of the manuscript rapidly. She remembered that he was a speed-reader and sat up to rake her nails down his back. “He wrote it anyway,” she said unnecessarily.
“It's good. Clean and fair.” He looked over his shoulder at her and smiled. Then he leaned sideways and met her halfway for a kiss. “You ready to come into the world again, P?”
“It might be time.”
“It is. You planning on putting Chad out of his misery while you're at it?”
“Is he still angry with me?” Nate would tell her the truth.
“For not telling him about what happened to you?” He shook his head. “I don't think so. More hurt that you didn't feel you could come to him for what you needed.”
“Instead of going to you.”
“Something like that.” Nate dropped the manuscript on the floor, crawled across the bed, and lay down next to Pam. He bent an elbow under his head and looked at her. “I wouldn't have it any other way though.”
Pam slid down on the mattress and scooted close to him so that her back was pressed into his chest and the length of their bodies were touching. Nate moved closer and fit his knee into the space she made between her legs. They spooned, as they had done so many times before, for so many years.
“What am I going to do with you, P?”
“You could marry me and put me out of my misery,” she suggested, playfully.
“And live with having to share you with my best friend? I don't think so. I like it better this way. I had first dibs so he's sharing with me. You couldn't choose between us if your life depended on it anyway and you know it.”
“You couldn't either and you'd probably cheat on me anyway.”
“Probably so,” he admitted with an uneasy chuckle. “Too many women, too little time. But you never can tell about these things and I always come back though. Chad won't cheat.”
“He had other women when he was married to Paris.”
“I knew that. But alas, Paris wasn't you. They'll erect a monument when you go, P. You're a dangerous woman. You make a man forget all kinds of shit he should be remembering.”
“Moira told me that once.”
“Moira was right.” Nate's hand slid around her waist and untied her caftan. He eased the material off her shoulder and replaced it with his open mouth. “You had Jose Marillo so mixed up in the head he forgot he had a wife and kids. Then you had that old Greek dude trying to buy you an island and shit.” He flicked his tongue over her shoulder, up the side of her neck and bit in. “And you had me. Quiet as it's kept, you still do.”
Pam laughed. “What do I have you doing, you fool?”
“Whatever you need me to do. Whenever, wherever. It goes both ways. You do the same for me.”
She took his hand from her breast and lifted it into the air with her own, watched their fingers thread together and clasp tightly. “You won't ever go away, will you, Nate?”
“Where the hell would I go and why? I share with the people I love, too.”
Pam shifted her head on the pillow and locked eyes with him. “I thought you went back to Seattle?”
He grinned sneakily and dipped his head to catch her lips between his. He eased his tongue between her lips and took his hand back to her breasts. She moaned and kissed him back and he pushed deeper. “I heard you calling me. You need me right now, P?”
TWENTY-ONE
Chad was just settling into bed when he heard the first ping. He thought nothing of it and leaned back against the headboard with a pillow at his back. The television was on, more for the constant noise and light it provided than anything else, and he glanced at it every few minutes, in between reading pages of the high school's faculty handbook revision proposals. He had put the chore off until the last possible minute, and he was expected to give feedback on the proposed changes first thing in the morning. It was after one now.
The second ping caught him off guard. In the brief seconds between commercials, the noise crackled in the silence and drew his eyes to the window. He set the stack of papers aside, lifted the remote from the bed, and lowered the volume of the television, counting now and tracking the seconds between pings. He estimated that thirty seconds had passed between the first and second pings, and when the third one finally came, he realized that yet another thirty had gone by.
The next three pings came one right behind the other, separated only by the length of time it took to select a pebble of appropriate size and then swing back to aim precisely. He waited, frozen in his reclined position on the bed, to see if, thirty seconds later, the second round of pings would begin, if the pattern was still the one they had decided on decades ago as being their signal.
He went to the window and pulled the curtain back just as a pebble struck the glass somewhere in the vicinity of his naked chest. She was in the midst of swinging back to launch another one and everything about her froze when he appeared in the window. From the safety of his room he spread his hands wide and shrugged.
What do you want me to do?
She stamped her foot and pointed a finger to the ground.
Come outside
. He backed away from the window and let the curtain fall back in place. He lay back on his bed, folded his hands under his head, and looked at the ceiling. There was a time when he would've heard the pings on his window and damn near broken his neck creeping out of the house to meet her. But not tonight. The pings kept coming and he ignored them.
Though the lights were off and she was snuggled under the covers in bed, Nikki was far from asleep. She heard the doorbell and sat up to listen. She was certain that her dad would be treading down the hallway and then down the stairs to see who was at the door in just a few seconds. All she had to do was wait. If it was nobody, she'd give up on trying to stay awake and get some sleep, but if it was somebody important she was ready.
Seconds turned into minutes and the doorbell kept ringing. Nikki climbed out of bed and went to stand in the hallway, looking toward her dad's open doorway curiously. His lamp was on and she could hear papers shuffling around, but his feet never hit the floor. She hesitated, then tipped down to his room.
“Dad, did you hear the door?” Her eyes darted around his room before coming to rest on him. He looked relaxed and at ease, like it was any other night and someone wasn't ringing the doorbell at after one in the morning. He was wearing striped pajama pants and his long bare feet were crossed at the ankles.
Chad's eyes slowly rose from the page he was pretending to read and locked on Nikki's.
“Did
you
hear it?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Then why don't you go and see who it is?”
Heart pounding and eyes wide, she glanced down the hallway as if she expected whoever was at the door to suddenly be inside the house, bearing down on her. “I don't know if I want to.”
“Why not?”
“I'm scared,” she admitted softly. “What if she doesn't want to see me or talk to me? What if she's just here because she forgot something?”
“You won't know that until you answer the door, Nikki. Are you going to stand there playing
what if
the rest of the night?”
“Why don't you go and answer the door?”
“Because I think she might've forgotten something too, but you'll have to be okay with her claiming it. You should decide if you want to let her in or not. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?” His gaze was intent on hers and he knew the exact moment that she really did understand what he was saying.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Anything.”
“What happens if I don't let her in?”
He considered his response carefully, wanting to be gentle, but still truthful. “Then I go outside where she is.” Nikki would be an adult in a few short years. She would make a life for herself, which was no more than he hoped for her, and he wanted to finally be able to do the same for himself.
“You really love her, don't you?”
“Yeah, I do, Nikki.”
“You want to be with her, like
together
together?”
He nodded seriously. “I do. How do you feel about that?”
Nikki slumped against the doorjamb and hugged herself tightly. A multitude of expressions raced across her face, revealing her thoughts. She was angry about what she'd learned, sad about what happened to Pam, hurt that she was lied to, and afraid of her dad's feelings for Pam. The thought of Pam being close enough to touch made her happy, but still sad because she didn't know if Pam
wanted
to be touched or even if she wanted
her
.
“I'm still a little angry with her,” she finally said.
“Why aren't you angry with me or Nate or with Paris? We all knew that Paris wasn't your biological mother, too.” He felt that was an important point to make. He had expected to be on the receiving end of some of Nikki's anger, but it had never come. She seemed to be focusing the whole of it on Pam and he wondered about that.
“I don't know . . . it's like, you and Uncle Nate were always here, you know? She wasn't and I remember always wanting her to be, but she never was.”
“You saw her a lot, when you and Paris visited her in California.”
“I know, Dad,” her tone was slightly irritated. “I know all that, but I still wanted more of her. I'm angry because now I know I could've had more of her and I didn't.”
“That's a lot like I've felt all these years. Angry because I wanted her and I couldn't have her. Here lately, I've been angry because none of what happened had to happen.”
“But you still want her now?”
“But I still want her now.”
“Did you ever love Mom?” She watched his face closely, trying to read his mind. That was another reason she was angry, though she would never admit it to him. The idea that he had never loved her mom. No kid wanted to think that, no matter how weird the circumstances were.
“She was one of my best friends, so yes, I did love her, but in a very different way. Don't get me wrong,” he put up a hand, “I'm still confused by what she did but even that doesn't make me want to take back the love I felt for her. I have some great memories of the times we spent together when we were kids.”
The doorbell rang again and she looked in the direction of the sound. Goosebumps rose on her arms and she got the same feeling in her stomach that she always got when the gun finally went off, signaling that it was okay for her to take off running and leave her opponents in the dust. The decision to open the door rushed at her and she trembled from the force of it. But first, there was something else she wanted to know.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Nikki?” At last count, the doorbell had rang seven distinct times. He worked to keep impatience out of his voice.
“What about Uncle Nate?”
“What about him?”
“Does it bother you that he and Pam are so close? They kiss a lot.”
“They grew up together,” was all he said. It had not escaped his attention that Nikki now referred to Pam as simply
Pam
, without any particular familial classification. He thought of it as a step, but he had no idea in which direction. “Have you decided what you want to do about the door?”
Chad watched his daughter shift around a few seconds longer before she disappeared from the doorway. He heard her footfalls on the stairs and held his breath until he picked up on the sound of locks twisting and the door creaking open. Their voices were low and he couldn't hear what they were saying to one another, but he wasn't really trying to overhear. At this point, their words were for each other's ears only. He'd have his time with Pam soon enough.
He dragged a hand down his face, sucked in a deep breath and thought,
What about Nate?
He was almost ashamed to admit that as he read Paris's diary, he'd looked for references to Pam and Nate, entries that might've given him answers to a few of the questions he'd pondered over the years. Nate had always been his source for information about Pam. Where she was, what she was doing and who she was seeing, if anyone, at the time. Over the years, he had casually volunteered the information to Chad, expertly slipping in tidbits here and there during the course of a normal conversation, knowing that Chad would want to know, but that he would never come right out and ask.
He'd always known that Nate and Pam had remained in close contact. There were photos of Pam in the photo albums downstairs in the living room that Nate had taken with all that expensive photography equipment he never left home without. Candid shots, posed shots, ones of her in her home, and a few in exotic looking locales. And it never occurred to Chad until after Nate was long gone and he was sitting up in the middle of the night with images of the photos stampeding across his mind, that Nate would've been wherever Pam was at the times they were taken.
He remembered one photo in particular, perhaps because it had snagged his attention and held it exclusively for a long time after he'd seen it. It was a head and shoulders shot of Pam, asleep with her lips slightly parted and her face partially hidden in the depths of a fluffy pillow, her shoulders bare. He'd held the photo in his hands for long seconds, staring at it. Then he'd stared at Nate for just as long, while he bustled around with his cell phone clamped to his ear, dictating the particulars of his upcoming itinerary to his publicist and oblivious to Chad's intense scrutiny. Chad didn't think he was meant to have seen the photo, since Nate hadn't given it to him as part of the selection he had originally shown him. In fact he knew he wasn't. He'd come across it on his own, while looking for something completely unrelated and by accident. But he'd found it and he had pondered.
He and Paris had been married four years, with him in the middle of his second affair and her regularly seeing Ben, when he first began to wonder about Pam and Nate. But all he'd ever done was wonder. He had no claims on Pam and he'd had relationships with other women, so he wasn't really in a position to hurl accusations and demand answers, particularly in light of his marriage to Pam's sister. When he reminded himself of that fact, most of the wondering ceased and the inevitability of his life had come into sharp focus.
Chad accepted that he would probably never know if Nate and Pam had crossed the line. He knew them both well enough to know that neither of them would ever speak of it, if they had. And it was for the best that he didn't know because he thought of Nate as the brother he'd never had and he simply thought of Pam all the time. Truth be told, he really didn't
want
to know. He avoided digging too deeply for fear of uncovering something he was better off not knowing.
What he wanted was for Pam to come to him and say the things he needed to hear her say. That she was ready for him, ready for what he wanted to give her and to have with her. Ready to pick up where they had left off and get it right this time. He stayed where he was, pretending to read over the papers in his lap and waited to see if the prayers he'd been whispering under his breath for the past eighteen years had finally been answered.
“I like your shirt.” Nikki stepped back from the door to make room for Pam to come inside the house. Her eyes traveled over the silky material, admiring the way the bright colors swirled together and crossed her eyes.
“You can't have it,” Pam told her. That was coming next, she knew.
“I wasn't going to ask for it.”
“Oh. Well, what were you going to ask then? There has to be something you want to know.”
They stared at each other, neither of them willing to be the first to look away. Nikki's eyes filled with tears she tried to blink away. “I want to know . . .” she began, then stopped to swallow the lump in her throat and take a deep breath. She couldn't talk around it. “I mean, I know why you left, but I want to know if you really wanted me?”
“
Nikki
,” Pam sighed heavily. “I always wanted you.
Always
. There's never been a day that I didn't want you. It sounds stupid now, but that's part of the reason I stayed away, because I didn't want to suddenly show up and confuse you. I didn't want you to think that, at first I didn't want you and then I suddenly decided that I did.” She moved closer to Nikki and reached out to smooth away a tear with the tip of her finger. “The other reason I stayed away is because it killed me to see you and hold you and smell you, and know that I couldn't have you. I died a little every time I had to hear you call someone else
Mom
because I knew I'd done it to myself.”

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