Snowstorm Confessions Page 16

  He appeared to be fine, tapping busily away at his laptop from his wheelchair. His face, while still purple and black from bruising, had nearly returned to its normal dimensions. His knee bent normally now, too. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. Give me a sec.”

  She was willing to do that. Without giving it a second thought, she stripped off her jeans, bent over a few times as she tried to ease the stiffness in her back, then sat on the askew couch to unwrap her knee and replace the neoprene knee wrap with the ice pack. The ripping sound of opening Velcro must have caught Luke’s attention.

  “Bad?” he asked.

  She looked up. “A bit. I didn’t get a break today. My back’s stiffening up, as well.”

  “After you get done with the icing, I’ll see how much of a massage I can give you. Probably not a very good one.”

  She had to laugh. “Not from a wheelchair.”

  “I could teeter on my crutches.”

  “You’ll be hanging on too hard to the crutches to rub.”

  “Objections, objections. Think positively.”

  “I will. And a couple of ibuprofen will help a whole lot with that positive thinking.”

  “Funny, I have a bottle of that right at hand. Wonder why.”

  She laughed again. “I’ll get some in just a minute.”

  “Can you take it with coffee?”

  “In moments of desperation, I can take it dry.”

  Luke pushed his table to one side, grabbing the pill bottle on it, and wheeled her way. “If you want water, I discovered today that I can manage that, too.”

  She smiled. “Soon you won’t need me anymore.”

  She might as well have dropped a stink bomb in the room. He froze. She froze. The urge to say she hadn’t meant it that way seemed to glue her tongue to the roof of her mouth, because she wasn’t sure it was true.

  “I’ll be glad when I no longer need you as a nurse,” he said, finally breaking the awkwardness. He passed her the bottle and rolled his chair back a few paces.

  All of a sudden she grew acutely aware that she was sitting there in her panties and a fleece shirt. Too much skin lay exposed, and she knew he was tracing her legs with his eyes.

  Well, she had put them on display. Desperate to change the atmosphere, which seemed to be growing heavier and even a little musky, she asked, “Did you ask Jack to take down the icicles? At least I assume it was Jack.”

  “His idea. He finished the ramp for me, then got right to it. Why?”

  Her reaction was probably all messed up. Jack was just trying to be nice. She was imagining that he had encroached a little too far. Just being neighborly.

  “Bri? You’re doing that thing again. Looking disturbed but not saying why.”

  She realized he was right. She had this crazy, uneasy feeling and she was already dismissing it as invalid. But it sounded so nuts she didn’t want to say it out loud.

  “It’s crazy,” she said finally.

  “Try it out on me,” he suggested. Rolling closer, he took her hand. “Let someone else decide if it’s crazy. Just try it.”

  She hesitated. He’d been right about her and all the feelings she had dismissed over the years, feelings she probably should have at least expressed so they could be dealt with instead of becoming a restless graveyard of fears and resentments.

  “Okay,” she said at last. “I was hoping you’d asked Jack to take care of the icicles.”

  “I never even thought of it, which I guess makes me a fool.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not the point. It suddenly struck me as I was coming in that he’d gone way past the point of doing a task he was hired to do. Yeah, he could just have been being neighborly. I get it.”

  “But you didn’t feel that way?”

  “No. Actually I felt as if...as if he was encroaching. Trying to make a claim, as if this house were his. That’s stupid.”

  “Is it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, has he always done things like this?”

  “No. Usually he does just what I hire him to do.”

  She stole a look at him and was relieved to see his expression didn’t seem to indicate that he thought she was nuts. Far from it. He looked soberly at her.

  Finally he spoke. “Keeping in mind that I recently had a concussion, frankly I think your feeling is right. It started since I got here, right?”

  “The extras? Yes.”

  “He was asking about our marriage.”

  Bri caught her breath. “That’s none of his business!”

  “All of this could be passed off as just being friendly.”

  “I know.”

  “But I’m with you anyway. That young man is pushing boundaries with you.”

  “But why?”

  “Because he wants you to like him and depend on him. I’m here, I’m your ex, and maybe he’s just trying to show you how useless I am. Especially now.”

  “You’ve never been useless!”

  “Not until I took that fall. Regardless, I can’t do any of this stuff for you, so he’s making himself look good. Like not wanting to be paid for clearing your roof. I told you, he’s sweet on you.”

  Bri looked down at her knee. Almost time to remove the ice pack. This time she couldn’t dismiss what Luke was saying. Jack had been popping up an awful lot lately, offering to do things for free, going out of his way to take care of things that she hadn’t even mentioned.

  She really didn’t want him to be sweet on her, as Luke put it. She liked Jack, but she didn’t feel anything more for him, and after all this time, surely she should have felt some spark of attraction if that were going to happen.

  “Oh, God,” she said finally. Another mess confronted her and she didn’t know what in the world to do about it.

  “Talk to me.”

  She glanced at him. “I don’t want that.”

  “Okay.” He waited patiently.

  She struggled to voice more, knowing that he was trying to get her to talk about things, a lesson she seriously needed to learn. She stumbled around, trying to give expression to her feelings.

  “It’s not like I led him on or anything,” she said eventually.

  “That’s not always necessary. All that’s necessary is for him to want you. I think he’s trying to woo you, and he’s pushing harder because I’m around.”

  “But we’re divorced! The whole town seems to know that. Why would your being here cause him to do more?”

  “Because you invited me in. You didn’t have to do that. Ergo, you might be reconsidering.”

  “God,” she said again, appalled and feeling bad all at once. “I don’t want to hurt him. He’s always been so nice. But friendship is as far as I’ll go. Heck, I’ve never so much as baked something for him. I pay for his work. Business relationship.”

  “That’s how you feel. His world is a different one.”

  She sat glumly, contemplating that. She valued Jack, but as a wonderful handyman who always did a good job and never let her down. Once again she started questioning herself. Had she made mistakes? Sent the wrong signals without realizing it?

  Anything was possible, she supposed. He might have taken her being nice in an entirely different way than she intended. Especially considering that she had sometimes been effusive in her praise.

  “Do I send out a lot of wrong signals?” she finally asked Luke. “You said you were confused when we were married.”

  “I think you were sending the right signals, you just didn’t explain them, then you blew them off. That’s different from encouraging a guy when you don’t mean it. It’s possible he’s reading more into how you treat him than you mean by it. But that’s on him, not you.”

  Well, there she went again, feeling as though everything inside her had been thrown in a blender. She hated to think she might be hurting Jack. She hated to think that he was seeing Luke as a threat. Although if she were to be perfectly honest with herself...

  She stopped. Honest
with herself? Did she even know herself well enough to be truly honest even inside her own head? Dismissing her feelings, especially unpleasant feelings, had helped ruin her marriage. Maybe it was time to spew some bile.

  “Do you have another ice pack?”

  “I have a ton of the instant ones from the hospital for you.” She looked at him and couldn’t help remarking, “Your face looks so much better.”

  “Just a little mottling from the bruises. It sure feels better. Bri, are you evading?”

  She was, she realized. Easier to talk about his face than about the things that had once made her angry or disappointed, than to talk about the messiness inside her now.

  He didn’t press her, but she could feel him waiting. It was as if he wanted some dam to break inside her so he could really understand. Well, if she got to that understanding herself, she might just do it. How much of her life had she wasted and ruined by doubting her every unpleasant thought and feeling?

  She looked at Luke again. He sat in his wheelchair like a wounded warrior, but his expression was one of utter patience. And maybe a little sorrow, as if he were contemplating all they had lost for lack of communication.

  “It’s not easy for me!” The words burst out of her.

  “I know. It’s not easy for most of us to be vulnerable, but for you, harder than most thanks to the way you were raised. If you say something not nice, you expect a bad reaction. You weren’t allowed to have those kinds of feelings. But truthfully, Bri, I’m not afraid of those feelings. They’re as important to me as they are to you.”

  “Well, I already blew everything up. I suppose I could hardly make it worse.”

  He smiled. “You might even make it better for both of us. God knows, I think confusion led to the mess more than anything. Except Barbara and her machinations. I really did not have an affair with her, you know.”

  “I think that’s where we started this conversation.”

  “Seems like.”

  She hesitated. “I believe you.”

  The look of relief on his face made her heart feel as if it were cracking. After all this time she apparently still cared deeply about him. Maybe not the way she had before when they were married, but she still gave a damn.

  “I’ll get you another ice pack while you think.”

  She watched him wheel out of the room, then laid her head back, ignoring the ache in her knee. The past and the present seemed to somehow be melding in her mind, along with the addition of a problem named Jack.

  Feelings she had thought long behind her surged and reminded her of all her dissatisfaction from their marriage, most of which were really only a few things.

  Then there were the feelings he was eliciting in her now. She wanted him. That had never died, but she was also rediscovering the absolutely stellar man he had always been. Whatever she had blamed him for had come from within her, not from his failings.

  That made it all the harder to think about. The admissions she needed to make would not be easy. They’d be embarrassing, and they probably weren’t even fair. But here she went again, trying to dismiss them.

  As for Jack... She could put that on the back burner right now. He might be trying to woo her in some crazy way, but she couldn’t address it unless he said something. That would be a huge step out of line, would probably be hurtful, and she and Luke could both be wrong about his feelings.

  Luke returned with another ice pack but she didn’t crack it. “Ten more minutes,” she said as she laid it by her side.

  “Coffee? I can carry one mug at a time.”

  She glanced at the cup she had put on the small end table. “I still have some.”

  “Probably cold by now. Give me a thermal mug any day.”

  So he was off again, and it occurred to her that after all the care she had had to give him initially, it probably felt good for him to be able to do for her. She could understand that.

  And once again her mind turned backward to the past, to the morass of feelings she had never sorted through. She had voiced one of them when she had said they’d had more of an affair than a marriage, but what did she really mean by that?

  Luke ferried to the kitchen again to get himself some more coffee, but then he came back. Once again he took her hand as if to give her silent support. When he’d been around, he’d been as supportive as she would let him be. She knew that. So what the hell had been wrong with her?

  He was still waiting. She could feel it. He might need the answers to what had happened even more than she did. For all she’d dismissed her own feelings, she at least had some idea what she was ignoring. He had none.

  “I still want you,” she blurted.

  “Oh, darlin’, you have no idea how much I missed you saying that.”

  Darlin’. How much she had missed hearing that endearment from him. His voice always changed when he said it, growing deeper, drawling slightly. He squeezed her hand.

  “But it was a mess, Luke. From my point of view, it just kept getting messed up.”

  “How so?”

  Well, that was the crux, wasn’t it? “I missed you when you were gone, but you knew that. What I didn’t tell you was that it was getting harder, not easier. I felt alone too much, and lonely.”

  He nodded, offering no commentary.

  “I started to resent you going away.” God, that sounded ugly. She had married him knowing how it would be. It wasn’t as if he’d started traveling later. He’d been doing the same while they dated.

  She was grateful that he didn’t bring that up. It would have killed her to hear, “Well, you knew that at the outset.”

  Instead he said, “You can’t really know what something is like until you’ve lived it for a while. It was hard. It was hard on me, too.”

  “Really?” She looked almost hopefully at him. “I wasn’t just being unreasonable?”

  “Every time I left it got harder.”

  “But it was your job! You couldn’t just quit.”

  “If I’d known you were feeling the same, I might have looked for another line of work, one that didn’t take me away so often or for so long. I guess I screwed up. I never told you that I’d begun to think of changing.”

  “And I never told you I was needing a change,” she admitted.

  “Was that so hard?”

  “Not now. Not with nothing riding on it.”

  She watched his face darken, and felt the panic begin. She’d said the wrong thing again. She should just keep her mouth shut. But he surprised her.

  “I get it. The real shame is that nothing I ever felt about you was riding on the fact that you wanted me around more. Nothing would have ever changed if you’d told me you were resenting my absences. God knows, I was.”

  “Maybe I should have traveled with you like you suggested.”

  He shook his head. “More resentment. You’d have given up the job you love. I’m not in love with mine. I enjoy it, but I could enjoy other things just as much. But that’s not all of it, is it?”

  She shook her head, reached for the ice pack and cracked it, squeezing it between her hands. She leaned forward and placed it on her knee. “I think that’s enough for one night. I need a break. It’s been a long day, and trying to figure out my head is taxing. Some of it I have to reach back a long time for. How do I know I’m remembering correctly?”

  “Maybe we should just move forward with a new policy of honesty.”

  Her heart quickened. He was talking as though there might be some kind of future for them here. But that was impossible. All that hurt they’d felt at the end of their marriage couldn’t just be erased, or overcome in a single leap. It would always be there, like a scar. What if they fell into old habits and wound up in the same place? She had heard that was the hardest part of a second marriage: reacting to the first one even when it was a different person. How much harder would that be when it was the same person?

  Yet a little seed of hope persisted deep inside her heart. She had once loved this man, heart and
soul, and the idea that they might be able to salvage something was almost irresistible.

  But for that, he was right. They needed real honesty. Even if all they did was move on separately, both of them needed to deal with what had happened and why.

  She sighed.

  “How’s the knee?” he asked.

  “Better. I can probably stop icing it after this.”

  “Good.” He pushed his chair closer and astonished her by running his hand down her bare leg. A shiver pulsed through her, and sweet passion arose in an instant.

  “Aren’t you cold?” he asked. “Want a blanket?”

  “I’m fine.” Because she was. His touch had ignited an internal fire that made any chilliness go away.

  He stroked her leg again. “If I weren’t laid up, and your knee weren’t hurting, I’d...”

  Her mouth turned dry. Her heart climbed into her throat, not with fear but with hope. “Honesty,” she croaked.

  “You promise it in return?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’d pick you up and carry you to the nearest bed and make love to you until we were both too exhausted to move.”

  “And I’d let you,” she said, even though it was hard to admit how utterly vulnerable she was at the moment. Then a giggle escaped her.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Look at us. You in three casts, me with ice on my knee. It’s ridiculous.”

  A smile dawned slowly on his face and he gave a lazy shake of his head. “It would call for some creativity.”

  Her breath stuck in her throat. Her mind scrambled around trying to imagine how they could deal with their impediments.

  “I think I saw a chair in the kitchen,” he said huskily. “One without arms. You could sit on my lap.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.” It was a weak but honest protest.

  “I don’t think you could. You’re light as a feather. If your knee didn’t hurt, I’d ask you for a complete bed bath. Think of the fun that would be.”

  A smile began to crack the astonishment she was sure must cover her face. “It would certainly be a first. You’d be at my mercy.”

  “So I would. You could really drive me crazy.”

  “You’re very inventive.”