The One That Got Away (10 page)

Anne-Marie settles one impeccably maintained hand over mine. “You don't have to apologize, dear. I'm sure you can understand, we're just eager, that's all.”

“Of course I understand,” I say, and push my chair back from the table. “Unfortunately, I'm afraid something from the meal must not be agreeing with me at the moment. I think I better go ahead upstairs and turn in for the night.”

“Oh no, can I get you anything?” says Anne-Marie, gracefully pretending to buy it.

“Thank you, but I think I just need to lie down for a while. Sweetie, you should stay here,” I tell Noah, who is halfway out of his chair.

“No, I'll get you settled. Mom, Dad, good night, we'll see you in the morning.”

Inside our bedroom, the window is open, and wind from the advancing storm is beating waves onto the shore so hard that it sounds like the ocean. Noah closes the door behind us, then takes both of my hands in his.

“Kitten, I'm so sorry about that.”

With one hand, I pull him over to the bed. We stretch out, facing each other, and he strokes the side of my face, over and over, as we talk.

“First of all,” I say, “where did that come from? We aren't even officially engaged yet, and they're talking about timelines and child rearing. What have you been saying to them?”

He sighs. “I told them I was going to propose to you soon, and that I hoped we'd be able to plan the wedding for fairly soon after that. They just got a little carried away.”

“And did you tell them we were going to try to get pregnant right away?”

“No. I mean, I would love that, but I would never assume it. We'll figure out the right time.”

Holy shit
. “You'd really want to try right away?”

“If you were up for it, yes.” He is studying my face like it's an unfamiliar map. “I've wanted a family for so long. Letting go of that future was the hardest thing about my divorce, but I hoped I would meet someone else who was another chance at that. And then there you were. We've had a lot of good reasons to wait, but I don't want to wait anymore. Once I'm back, there
is
no reason.”

“You've just been waiting for me?” I say in a tiny voice.

“I've been happy to wait for you,” he says, tugging me in tight. “But being away from you has made me realize that it's time to take the next step.”

“But, Noah,” I say, pulling back to look at him, “all that stuff your dad was saying. Why weren't you standing up for me? I expect that your parents will have opinions about how we raise our kids, but they shouldn't expect that we'll go along with whatever they tell us. I need you to make it clear to them that we will make our own decisions.”

He doesn't answer right away, just strokes my hair. “Well,” he says finally, “Dad can be overbearing, but he means well.”

“I know he does, but he doesn't get to tell me I have to quit my job once I give birth. You need to make him understand that he does not get to boss me around.”

“No, he doesn't. But I have to say,” Noah continues, “I agree with him on this particular thing.”

I jerk upright so quickly my eyes black over. “In what way, specifically, do you agree with him?”

My voice is calm, but he knows me well enough to proceed with extreme caution. His eyes fixate on the corner of the window as he carefully chooses his words. “I think…well, I think it would be the best thing if you stayed home with the kids until
they were old enough to go to school, instead of us sending them to daycare.”

I stare at him for a moment while I absorb this. “You mean in the abstract, in an ideal-world sort of situation? Or are you saying that is what you would want me, specifically, to do?”

He rubs his fingers back and forth over his collarbone. “Isn't it what
you
would want to do, too?”

Troubled, I shake my head. “No. It's not. Working for myself means I'd be able to keep a flexible schedule, and I've always figured I'd cut back on my hours a bit, but I can't see myself working less than thirty hours a week…anything less than that and I'd be pretty out of the mix.”

“But, kitten…once we have kids, it's not about being ‘in the mix' anymore. It's about raising a couple of tiny people, spending time with them, taking care of them. We both have to accept that our priorities are going to shift.”

“I know that. But I want to do both. It's hard, but it's possible; plenty of people do it. Nicole does it.”

“People do it because they don't have a choice,” he points out.

“People like
my
mother?”

As I watch him struggle to respond, I almost,
almost
, feel bad. Dragging my dead mother into an argument is using heavy artillery; my dead lower-middle-class
single
mother is an atomic bomb. But my point is valid and he knows it.

“I would never put down your mom, or the work she did to support you. It goes without saying that she did a tremendous job. Especially in less-than-ideal circumstances.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “Raising a kid on a diner waitress's salary with no help from the dickhead who abandoned you—that is less-than-ideal, yes.”

He strokes a soothing hand along my forearm. “But sweetheart, that's my point. She worked so, so hard for you because she
had
to. You are in a situation where you don't.”

“But I
want
to,” I say again. “My work isn't going to stop being important to me once I have a child.”

“I think you'll find the child is
more
important to you,” he says gently. “Listen, becoming a parent means you have to make sacrifices. That was a big part of why I went into corporate law instead of working in the public sector. I wanted to be a prosecutor, but I knew I'd never be able to support a family the way I wanted. So I made a deal with the devil.”

“You never told me that,” I whisper.

He strokes his knuckles down my neck. “I was trying not to hit you over the head with the kid thing. Didn't want to be the needy divorced guy. But yeah, that was a major reason. And part of it was so that my future wife wouldn't need to work.”

I kiss him softly. “That is an amazingly generous sacrifice. And I love you for it. But as it turns out, your future wife would
prefer
to work.”

“But why? When it can make such a difference in those first few years? I have so many incredible memories of special stuff my mom did with me. She might not have had time for it if she'd been working. Just say you did stay home—it's not like you'd never work again. It would only be for a few years, until the kids were in school. And what Mom said is true: you could still do some stuff on the side—”

“Stuff on the side?”
I repeat, my voice squeaking skyward. “Noah! Are you kidding me? I'm trying to build a business! A real business, with employees, and a name, and a presence in my industry. That is the
entire point
of why I left my old job at MaKA. But I guess since the most important thing I'm ever going to achieve in my life is being a
mommy
, I should have just stayed there till I was knocked up, and then quit after my maternity leave, like everybody else.”

The mattress vibrates as he drops his arm to his side. “Jesus, Sarina, why do you always have to be so—”

“So
what
?” I fume, daring him.

“So sarcastic! Disparaging! I hate fighting with you to begin with, but you make it ten times worse with these snarky comments.”

This isn't the first time he's called me out for this. Noah is an infuriatingly cautious, levelheaded arguer. He spent two years in marriage counseling with his ex-wife, learning how to fight constructively. It didn't stop them from eventually throwing in the towel, but it did make him evangelical about the right way to have an argument in a relationship. Statements like “I feel that you…” are acceptable; sarcasm, my mother tongue, is not.

“Okay,” I mutter. “I'm sorry. I just can't believe you said that. I have not been working sixty hours a week for the last three years so I could do some ‘stuff on the side.' I did not put myself through the hell of the licensing process so I could do some ‘stuff on the side.' I do not write a fat fucking check every month for liability insurance so—”

He raises a hand to cut me off mid-lecture. “Okay! Point taken. It was a poor choice of words. I don't want to fight about it anymore. Let's just table the discussion for now…we have a while to figure it out.” I stare at him, unconvinced, so he smoothes a hand over my arm again. “Please, honey.”

I let him pull me back down beside him, and he curls behind me, face in my neck. “We will figure this out,” he whispers.

I sigh, and try to let the frustration out with it. I'm sure we'll come up with a solution that makes us both happy; we always have in the past. I just can't believe this could all potentially be happening
so soon
.

The storm stalls out over central Texas for the next day and a half, dumping eleven inches of rain as it gradually downgrades from a
Category 1 hurricane to a nameless tropical depression. By the end of the second day, I've actually started hoping that the ever-increasing water level of the lake will threaten to flood, forcing us out of the house and back to Austin. With the exception of the migraine I fake and the protracted “conference call” I take in our bedroom, complaining to Nicole while I hide under the covers to muffle my voice, I haven't had a minute to myself since we got here. I ask Noah if he'd mind heading home early tomorrow, instead of at the end of the day like we'd planned. So we can spend some time with just the two of us.

“But if we go home early tomorrow, it's not going to be just the two of us,” he points out. “Isn't Danny having some big barbecue? Your house is going to be full of people.”

“Maybe we can go somewhere else, then. Spend the day on a blanket at Barton Springs.”

“We can do that here. The weather's finally supposed to clear; we can lie on the dock all day.”

With your parents
, I think.
Maybe they can interrogate me about the guest list for our still-to-be-proposed wedding
. But I agree to stay. It just feels too petty to push the issue.

When I check my phone before bed, I notice a new voice mail. The missed call log shows Eamon's number.

Hey, just checking to see what time you're coming back tomorrow
, says his warm voice.
I think Danny's planning on firing up the grill around two. Hope you're having a good weekend. And try not to feed Drano to the in-laws. You're not going to be an effective architect if you're in jail
.

Noah walks into the room, drying his face with a towel. “What are you smiling at?”

“Nothing,” I say reflexively. As soon as I delete the message, I wish I hadn't. I fall asleep wondering exactly how guilty I should feel about that.

Though I manage to avoid stumbling into any more of my future in-laws' punji traps, Noah and I don't leave Horseshoe Bay till well after dark, thereby ensuring that Danny's party will be drained to the dregs by the time we arrive back in Austin. The drive home passes in near silence. My nerves are worn raw from the effort of being on my best, parental-appropriate behavior for three never-ending days. Coming home to Danny's smartassery is going to be like sinking sore muscles into a warm bath.

By the time I park the car, Noah is giving off a strong whiff of “We need to talk,” but I'm simply not up for it right now. I'm determined that this weekend end on a good note. Somehow.

“I wonder if there's anything left of Danny's party,” I say preemptively and bolt out of the car and up the front walk. Noah follows tiredly behind me. Before I even get the door open, a burst of masculine laughter drifts up from the back terrace. They must be sitting around on the chaises after the barbecue, milking the warm summer night for every last drop of weekend. A few beers with Danny and the boys will go a long way to restoring my good humor after a weekend with the Harlows.

To my surprise, it's only Danny and Jay stretched out on the
chaises, though the archipelago of empties surrounding them attests to the fact that they had quite a crowd. A faint aroma of kerosene still lingers in the air. I feel a twist of disappointment that Eamon's already left.

“Ree-Ree!” cries Danny when I pull open the sliding door, saluting me with a raised Corona bottle. “You're home! Did you have a good time with the fam?”

“It was wonderful,” I lie. “Super-relaxing.”

“We were bummed to miss the party,” says Noah. “Looks like it was a good one.”

“Neighbors only called to complain once this time, though,” says Danny.

“
There
you are,” comes Eamon's voice from the open doorway behind us. “I'd just about given up on you.”

I turn to find him carrying a handful of beers by the necks, the bottles already beaded with condensate. He's wearing a white T-shirt and his gorgeous smile, and I have never been happier to see him.

“Dude, I'd just about given up on those
beers
. Guys, join us for a drink?” says Jay, holding out his hand for the bottle Eamon passes across to him, but Noah shakes his head.

“Thanks, Jay, but we're pretty whipped and just want to head to bed,” he says.

I touch his shoulder. “Actually I think I'll stay up with the guys for a drink or two, honey, but you should go on ahead if you're beat.”

I can tell that he wants to go but decides against it. “No, that's okay; I'll stay up for a bit.”

“Corona?” Eamon offers, and Noah plucks one out of his hands. “I'm Eamon, by the way,” he adds, setting down the beers and wiping his hand on his jeans so he can extend it to Noah.

Noah does his best cool-attorney handshake. “Hey! Sarina's
told me all about your project. I'm Noah. Nice to meet you.” He doesn't acknowledge that there's anywhere else on earth he might have heard of Eamon from.

“Well come on, pull up a chair,” says Jay, and I sink gratefully onto the open chaise next to Eamon. Noah sits down at the foot of it and pulls my legs into his lap.

“So, crappy weekend to be at the lake house, huh?” Eamon says to me and Noah. “Tell me you at least got in a few spins on the Jet Ski before the rain hit.”

“Ugh,” Noah says. “Those things are obnoxious. My parents are more yacht-type people.”

The comment lands in the middle of the conversation with a dull thud. I cringe mentally—Danny likes Noah, but he has an unforgiving memory for the occasional pretentious remark. He will dine out on this one for months. (“Ree-Ree, we're heading over to the Salt Lick for barbecue, but I know you're more of a yacht-type person, so I wasn't sure if you'd want to tag along….”)

“Noah's parents are older,” I say. “So, noisy fast things aren't really their cup of tea.”

Eventually the conversation turns to work; Danny and Jay need to hire a new manager for Albion, and everyone they've seen so far is woefully underqualified.

“That reminds me,” Noah tells me, “my mom was mentioning that Caitlyn's looking for a job again.”

“Oh no, what happened to her internship at the Met?” I ask. His sister (the “surprise” child) graduated from Hopkins this spring with top honors in art history and had landed one of the extremely prestigious internships at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

He scrunches his nose. “It ended. It was only a summer internship; the yearlong program they offer is for a financially disadvantaged candidate.”

“What a drag,” murmurs Eamon. Noah frowns slightly, trying
to figure out if he's being sarcastic. Which I'd bet Newman's tailless black bottom he is.

“Yeah. One of those affirmative action things, I guess. There's no way that other intern was more qualified than her.”

Eamon clucks his tongue. “Who was it, somebody from some state school or something?”

I do not like where I think this is going. But Noah chomps down hard on the bait. “I doubt that. Caitlyn just worked so damn hard, she deserved that opportunity.”

“We're so lucky we didn't have to worry about grades, Dan,” yawns Eamon, stretching back in his chaise. “Just show up and swim fast.”

“Jackass,” snorts Danny, who has told me in the past that Eamon had the highest GPA of anyone on their team, and won the university's student-athlete award two of his four years.

“Seriously,” says Noah, “you athletes have it made. Show up, swim fast, get laid.”

“Dude, so many chicks,” Eamon drawls reminiscently, sinking deeper into the dumb-jock caricature by the second. I am itching to smack him. “Not as many as the football players, though,” he muses. “No greater glory than playing for the 'Horns.” He nudges Danny with his foot. “Why didn't we play football instead of swimming?”

“Well, aside from the fact that gays and football go together like chocolate and garlic, I have an aversion to getting my head stepped on,” Danny says. “And you're too skinny.”

Eamon erupts with indignation. “Oh, come on! Brady and Romo and those guys, they're not that big, they're only like two thirty…”

“And you're two ten after a Salt Lick bender,” says Danny.

Suddenly I spot an opportunity to find out something I have always wanted to know.

“By the way,” I say, “since you
are
such a die-hard Longhorn,
how come you left? They train postgrad swimmers there, don't they?”

“It was a girl,” Danny pronounces.

“No, it was because the coach at the Cal club was a better fit for what I was trying to do with my training at that point,” says Eamon.

“But also, there was a girl,” Danny says.

“And, yes, the girl I was dating at the time was training at Cal,” Eamon concedes.

Envy spikes through me. I know exactly which ex-girlfriend he is talking about—it has to be the girl he started dating a couple months after we slept together. The girl he actually fell for. Hannah Gordon: untouchably dominant in butterfly, I believe, just like him. A perfect match.

“How gallant of you,” I say drily, taking refuge in irony although my heart is hammering with remembered hurt. “I hope she appreciated you.”

“Most of the time,” he says. He takes a long swallow of beer, clearly not wanting to discuss it further.

“Except for when you punched out that racist douchebag Gardner,” says Jay.

Eamon wrenches the bottle from his lips. “Jay, you had to bring that up?”

“It was topically relevant,” sniffs Jay.

This is one story I've never heard. “What happened?”

Eamon sighs. “He made a comment about her. He didn't know we were together when he said it. He figured it out after I split his lip open,” he adds flatly.

“Jesus Christ, Eamon.”

“Yeah. That's the only time in my life I've ever hit anybody, but fuck did he deserve it.” He shakes his head at the memory.

“But she…didn't agree?”

“She prefers to fight her own battles. And she's right.”

The admiration in his voice simultaneously impresses me and makes me sad. “So what happened with her?”

“Ree, don't be nosy,” Noah admonishes.

“Same thing that always happens, I guess. We weren't right for each other.”

I immediately wonder if he still has feelings for her. If that's why he's been single these last few months—because he isn't over her, and is trying to find a way to get her back into his life. The thought of it is like a sliver of glass being driven under my fingernail.

“They're still good friends though,” says Danny. “Isn't he just sickeningly well adjusted?”

Eamon slaps his Corona bottle on the concrete deck with a sharp clink. “Guys, I'd really appreciate it if we could stop rehashing my relationship history. Do you think that would be all right with you?”

Danny goes “rreeeeeerr” like an offended cat, but he lets it go. “By the way, though, I've always thought Gardner knew you were dating her,” he says after a moment.

Eamon sits upright and plants his elbows on his knees. “Are you serious?”

“He was always a weaselly little punk. It's exactly the sort of thing he would do to try to mess with you. Just to get you off your game for that meet. I bet he thought it was his best shot to take you out. I always thought you should get another tattoo,” Danny adds. “Bull's-eye, right here.” He taps the hollow between Eamon's shoulder blades.

“You have a tattoo?” asks Noah, half-laughing. I cringe; Noah thinks tattoos are stupid, but it's unusually rude of him to mock a near stranger for it. And just when Eamon had given up baiting him.

Eamon doesn't say a word, just raises his right forearm, fingers curled over his palm, to show the mark.

“Oh. Cool,” says Noah, refusing to be impressed. As if it's some lame barbed-wire tattoo.

“By the way, dude, I
was
thinking of getting another one,” Eamon says to Danny. “Since I'm back in Austin, what about a big Longhorn right across the top of my chest?”

I groan mentally. Not this again. Danny claps and shouts with laughter. “Yes! The horns can go right under your collarbones.”

“Exactly.” Eamon smiles at Noah beatifically, folding his thumb over his two middle fingers in the UT salute. “Hook 'em!” He turns to me. “What about you, Ree? What tattoo would you get?”

I'm momentarily distracted by his use of my nickname, which sounds unexpectedly intimate coming from him, and Noah seizes the opportunity to speak. “Sarina would never get a tattoo.”

Eamon gives a lazy half smile. “Why don't you let
her
answer?” His tone is mild, but the words are unmistakably protective. Noah's hands tighten ever so slightly where they rest on my calves.

“Noah's right,” I say. “I've seen some beautiful ones, but my problem is that I'd want it to be hidden most of the time, and all the parts of me that stay covered are the most vulnerable to gravity and ice cream.”

Jay laughs. “She's got a point, Ame. Maybe you should reconsider the size of the Longhorn. You're not going to look like this forever.”

Eamon gives a cocky shrug.

During the lull in conversation, Noah yawns and gently removes my legs from his lap. “All right, I think I'm going to pack it in. Babe, you about ready?” He holds his hand out to me.

I catch his hand and press a kiss to it. “I'm going to stay up for a few more minutes. Got some work stuff to talk to Eamon about.”

The minute the door closes behind him, I round on Eamon. Right now I don't even care that he's my client; he was way out of line with how he was baiting Noah, and he's mistaken if he thinks I won't call him out on it.

“What the hell is the matter with you? Why were you being such a dick to Noah?”

Danny and Jay immediately begin ostentatiously conversing with each other at top volume.

Not only does Eamon not attempt to feign innocence but he tucks his chin back as though my show of anger is somehow surprising to him. “Because
he
was being a dick,” he answers evenly. “And it annoyed me.”

My temper surges at his arrogance. “Yeah, he made a couple of tactless remarks, but he wasn't being intentionally malicious.
You
sure as hell were.”

“I opened the door, but he strolled right on through. Besides, he had no idea I was messing with him.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “No, I don't think he did. But
I
did, and I was sitting there feeling angry and tense and embarrassed while you made fun of him, so the only person you were punishing was me.”

His self-satisfied smirk evaporates instantly. “You're right. I didn't think of it that way. I'm sorry.”

“I just don't understand why you would do something like that. You respect me, right?”

“You know I do. You don't have to ask me that.”

“Okay, so even if you don't like my boyfriend, you ought to at least respect the fact that I care about him.”

“You're right. And I apologize,” he says seriously. “I got irritated by the sh— by the things he was saying, and I forgot who he was in the scheme of things.”

“Yeah. You did.” I creak to my feet, all the exhaustion from the last few days settling deep in my limbs like an extra load of
gravity. As I wave good night to Danny and Jay, I catch them exchanging a look, but I'm too tired to even hazard a guess as to what it might mean.

Noah's BlackBerry alarm shatters our sleep way, way too early the next day. As we stumble out to the car for the drive to the airport, the raw morning is gray and so overheated that my clothes are feeling too heavy before I even reach the car. There isn't much to say on the way there; this last snippet of time together is polluted with the knowledge that it's going to be another three months or so before we see each other. He puts on John's cowboy hat again to make me smile, but we both know it's a fail.