I Can’t Even

Chapter Three

M y heart stopped, literally stopped, and then as if remembering its purpose, it pumped doubly hard for three beats almost sending me into a dead faint. Okay, no, that was more likely due to the man I was staring at like a prime rib at an all you can eat buffet.

His thick dark hair was still unruly, like he’d just climbed out of bed but not a bed in which he’d been sleeping. His bare chest was even more muscled than I remembered with broad shoulders, roped forearms, and a sculpted V. Sweet baby Jesus, the man had an abdominal V, you know those muscles that frame the six pack abs and lead down to a guy’s equator, yeah that V, that made me want to lick it and then bite him...it...no, him...everywhere.

I put my hand to my forehead and closed my eyes. Clearly I was having some sort of fit or hallucination, because while I hadn’t seen Liam in years, I had gotten sporadic updates from Babs, usually when she was feeling particularly cruel, and the last I’d heard he was living in the apartment above his coffee shop in the center of town. Obviously, my little jog down memory lane as I sat here in the dark had caused me to conjure something that was not there. Right? Right.

I opened my eyes fully expecting to see a dark window across the way. Nope. Instead, Liam had his back to me and was working on some sort of freestanding apparatus doing pull-ups, which for the record, completely defined his back. I felt a trickle of saliva slide out of the side of my mouth and realized I was drooling.

I wiped my chin, never taking my eyes off the man as he hauled himself up and down and up and down and up and, well you get the drift. Lost in my appreciation for his scorching hot body, I didn’t realize he was done until he dropped from the bar and grabbed a nearby towel to wipe the sweat off of his face. At which point, I moaned, out loud.

“Hey, Jules, are you going to...” Sophie burst through the bedroom door and then stopped as she took in the view. “Oh my...”

She perched behind me with her arms on the back of my chair and we watched Liam move to the free weights. When he started curling the barbell in toward his torso, I noticed he had several lines of ink on his left side, a tattoo. I wished I could read it, but I was too far away. I found myself wondering when he got it, what it said, and why he’d put it right there. Then he braced himself with one arm while flexing the barbell in toward his chest with the other. Soph and I both sighed deeply and appreciatively.

“Guys, what are you doing here in the dark?” Em strode into the room snapping on the light.

“No!” I yelped as my pupils contracted. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to drop to the floor before Liam, who would now be able to see into my room with the light on, got sight of me.

“Ah!” Sophie dove away from the window, shouting to Em, “The light! Hit the light!”

“What? Why?” Em glanced out the window and then yelped. “Oh! Oh, shit!”

Em slapped the switch, and the room was plunged into darkness. She dropped to her knees and crawled over to where Sophie and I were crouched on the floor in front of the desk.

“It’s okay, I don’t think he saw me,” Em said.

“‘Lucy, you have some ‘splainin’ to do’,” I said in my best Ricky Ricardo accent.

“Yeah, um, I meant to tell you about that, er, him,” Em said. I could just make out her face in the shadows and she cringed. “But I forgot. He’s such a quiet neighbor, I forget he’s there. Of course, my room doesn’t look into his so not having a front row seat to the show, well, that could be why I forgot. I mean, wow, just wow.”

“No problem,” I lied. “He’s back, Liam’s back, living at home. These things happen. Maybe it’s a failure to launch sort of thing, like his coffee shop tanked, and he had to move back in with the Prof. and Mrs. Mahony?”

Liam’s dad was a professor of marine biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, so he was never Mr. Mahony to us growing up but always the Prof. Even though he had retired a few years ago, his title never changed.

“Not even,” Sophie said. “Quite the opposite, actually. His coffee shop is so successful, he’s opened two more, one in San Diego and one in Los Angeles.”

“He actually bought the house from his parents so that they could move into a retirement community up the coast. His mom was super excited because they have bingo every week. She bought a swank set of daubers with their own carrying case. Doesn’t that sound fun?” Em asked.

Sophie squinted at her. “You have got to get out more.”

“Focus, people.” I clapped my hands twice to get their attention. “So, he’s been living next door for how long exactly?”

“About two months, give or take a week,” Em said.

“Does Babs know?” I asked.

They both looked uncomfortable.

“She does, doesn’t she?” I persisted.

They nodded.

“And she still hates him, correct?”

Again, they nodded.

“And yet you didn’t tell me?” I asked. “You really didn’t think this was something I might want to know to prepare myself in case I ran into him? Or worse, if Babs decided to drop this A-bomb on me over the phone?”

“Well, gees, Jules, you guys broke up like a million years ago,” Em said. “I didn’t think it was still that big of a deal.”

I rose up on my knees and peered over the desk into Liam’s bedroom. I motioned for her to follow me. Both Em and Soph popped up next to me, so the only things visible over the edge of the desk were our noses and eyes.

“Look at him,” I hissed. “That is the man I gave my virginity to, the man I thought I would marry, the only man who has ever brought me to orgasm with just a glance. In a hundred years, running into him would still be a big deal.”

“I can see that,” Soph said. “My goodness, he has muscles in places I didn’t even know you could have muscles. Sheesh, is it hot in here?” She began to fan herself with her hands.

“Um, you’re kind of oversharing, Jules,” Em said. Even in the dark I could see she was blushing. “But, yes, I see that he is a fine specimen, not obnoxiously bulky but just right, and, like super defined. It’s almost as if he’s in high def.”

“Yeah,” I said. “High def enough to make me want to lick the window.”

Soph snorted and Em looked confused. It occurred to me that we’d failed our baby sister spectacularly in the appreciation of the male form department. Good thing I was here to correct the error.

As much as I loved ogling my ex-boyfriend with my sisters, I didn’t think my poor heart could take much more. The riot of emotions coursing through me made it difficult to function. I needed to compartmentalize.

With one last lingering glance at Liam, okay, more accurately Liam’s butt, I forced myself to turn away. “All right, so why did you two come up here?”

Soph and Em exchanged confused glances before saying in unison, “Dinner!”

It was then that I heard the very distinct sound of thumping coming from downstairs. Babs!

I dove for my hair straightener. Sophie unplugged it from the wall, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the hallway.

“But—” I protested.

“No time,” she said.

Em led the way. We barreled down the stairs and jogged into the great room where Babs sat with her afghan on her lap and her face squinched up on one side like she’d just bitten into a something sour. There was a cane beside her that I hadn’t noticed before and I suspected was the source of the thumping noise I had heard earlier.

Mom glanced at the three of us, her disapproval obvious in the tight line of her lips. “Are we planning on eating tonight or are we on a newfangled starvation diet?”

“Dinner’s ready, Mom,” Em said patiently. “I’ll set the table...unless you’d rather eat here instead?”

Babs simply stared at each of us as if considering how difficult it would be to share a meal with all three of her daughters. I tried not to take it personally, suspecting it was my presence that put her off. Finally, she gave Em a sharp nod. “Dining room.”

Equal measures of relief and dread surged inside of me.

“I’ll help with dinner,” Sophie said.

“Me, too—” I began but Babs cut me off.

“You, sit,” she said.

Mom pointed a bony finger at me and then at the armchair beside her. I sat. Twenty-seven years old and I still jumped when she spoke in that commander-in-chief voice. Seriously, Babs had untapped potential; she could easily have been a world leader, devouring smaller nations and leaving death and destruction in her wake.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.

Well, that was...civil. I studied her. Now that I was rested, I could see that her face was thinner and more lined than I remembered. Her eyes were glassy and her skin crepe-like. For once my sisters had not exaggerated. Babs looked distinctly unwell. It made me uneasy.

“Yes,” I said. “Longer than I intended, actually.”

We were silent for a few moments. I heard the clock ticking in the corner, the rattle of silverware and plates as my sisters set the table in the dining room, and the quiet rasp of Babs’s breathing. That was new.

“Enjoy sleep when you can.” She glanced away from me and out at the dark night sky. “I don’t sleep well anymore.”

This seemed like a solid opportunity to ask her what was going on. I took it. “Ba...er...Mom. How are you, really?”

Her frail body stiffened and she turned to me with one of her frostiest expressions; her pale blue eyes looked positively wintery and I half expected snowflakes to shoot out her nose. “I’m fine, Julia, just fine. Thanks for asking.”

May in Gull’s Harbor was generally around seventy degrees during the day and in the fifties at night. The town maintained a perfect year-round temperature which was the reason so many people loved it, except for right now. As if Babs could control the atmosphere, I swear the temperature in the room dropped to freezing.

“Obviously, you are not fine,” I persisted, surprised I didn’t see my breath when I spoke. I tried to sound reasonable but when she rolled her eyes like a moody middle schooler, I lost the battle. “Listen, I didn’t come all this way—”

“Stop!” Mom held up her thin, age-spotted hand as if she could physically ward off my words. “This isn’t about you. It’s about me. And I say the status of my health is between me and my physician, no one else.”

Seriously? Babs was really going to play it that way? With her obviously wasting away and the three of us, her daughters , uselessly flapping our hands in dismay because we had no freaking idea what the hell was going on?

My temper spiked. This was likely the only other thing I had inherited from her besides her blue eyes. We were both a tad hot headed.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I snapped. “I raced all the way here—”

“Again, I fail to see how this is about you.” Mom made a tsk noise. It was her go-to sound when she was displeased. It had followed me around my entire life and still had the power to make my insides twist. I shook it off.

Her voice was infuriatingly calm but the two spots of color on her cheeks gave away her agitation. I probably should have felt bad that I’d upset her, but, yeah, not so much.

“Mom,” I said.

Sophie charged into the room right then and announced, “Dinner is served.”

I had no choice but to table the discussion. Damn it.

It became clear when Babs struggled to stand that she was weak and frail, using her cane to push herself up. It was jarring to see. The woman who had always dominated every room she entered with her natural grace and style was now hunched over, her posture that of a question mark.

Babs held out her hand and Sophie offered her arm to lean on while our mom also used her cane to cross the room. Shocked, I felt my throat get tight as I walked behind them and my eyes burned. As if sensing my distress, Sophie reached behind with her free hand and squeezed my fingers in reassurance.

It hit me then, all at once, that Babs really was dying and like everything else my mother had ever done in life, she was going to do it on her own terms and to hell with what anyone else thought.

Over the next few days, we settled into a rhythm. Dr. Patel, my mother’s physician for the past twenty years, stopped by daily to check on her. When he did, she always shooed us out of the house.

I balked but both Em and Soph took Babs’s side. They felt that as long as she had the wherewithal to be in charge, then we should respect her wishes. It chafed. Because I was outnumbered and had no choice, I fell in line.

Sophie had her own family to care for but as soon as Harry and Hannah left for school, she arrived at the house to sit with Babs. My older sister took the morning shift, staying most of the day until Em came home from work, when she left to make dinner for her family.

Em had cut to part-time at her insurance job and worked mornings, spending the afternoon and evening to fetch and carry for Babs. This meant the night shift was all mine, so I slept in and managed my online clients in the afternoon. I clocked in with Babs at eleven o’clock and stayed through until Soph arrived at seven in the morning. I wasn’t sure who was less thrilled with me on nights, me or Babs, but I had the most flexible work schedule, so it only made sense.

As Babs’s breathing became more of a struggle, Dr. Patel put her on oxygen. The steady hiss of the machine became the background noise to which I dozed in the recliner beside her divan. She drifted in and out of sleep, waking only when I had to give her the pain medicine the doctor had prescribed.

Once in the wee hours of the morning, she woke with a start and peered around the room as if trying to remember where she was. I took her withered hand in mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. “It’s all right, Mom. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

Her pale blue gaze latched onto my face, flickering over my features. With a curl of her lip, she yanked her hand free, shut her eyes, and turned her head away.

Instantly, I was seven years old again, bringing her a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans that I’d picked in a field up the hill. She accepted the wildflowers, looked at them and then at me without a hint of a smile when I’d dared hope for a hug. She’d opened her hand and dropped the flowers into the dirt. “There’s a bug on them.” She’d walked away, leaving me gutted.

Tears coursed down my cheeks, just like they had that day, as I gazed at her frail back. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. Why was I here? Why was I putting myself through this? It wasn’t worth it. She wasn’t worth it.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do you hate me so much? And why did you ask for me to come?”

I thought Babs was asleep. I didn’t think she would answer. Instead, she turned and glanced at me over her shoulder. In a tired voice that was no less scathing for the exhaustion in it, she said, “I never asked for you.”

She closed her eyes again and fell into a deep medicated slumber. I slumped back in my chair, feeling as if she’d taken a scalpel and cut my heart out with a surgeon’s precision. She hadn’t asked for me? Then why had my sisters said she did? It didn’t require a genius IQ to puzzle it out. Babs didn’t need or want me here but my sisters did.

I pondered my options. Because the miserable old bat wouldn’t tell us or let the doctor share what was wrong with her, we had no idea how long this could go on. Days, weeks, or god forbid, months. Could I endure this? Could I come out on the other side emotionally intact if I had to put up with her brutality for weeks? I didn’t think so.

I opened my phone and checked for flights back to New York. It would be pricey but I could be home in a matter of hours. I found the flight. I chose my seat. I was about to click buy when a noise sounded from the stairs. I glanced over to see Emily tiptoeing down the stairs.

She’d skillfully avoided the one creaky step in the middle and then she was beside my chair. Her long blond hair was loose, and she wore a set of pink-and-blue striped pajamas that had a collar and buttoned down the front with a matching set of long pants. They made her look fifty instead of twenty-five and then I thought, no, even a fifty-year-old wouldn’t wear anything that buttoned up. She was pale and her eyes had dark circles under them.

“How is she?”

“As bitchy as ever,” I said. I thought Em would chastise me, but instead a small smile tipped her lips.

“That’s good, right?” Em’s eyes were locked on our mother’s sleeping form. She reached out and adjusted the plastic tubing that hooked into Babs’s nostrils, giving her a steady stream of oxygen.

“Depends whether or not you’re on the receiving end of the comments.” I turned my phone display side down.

My youngest sis glanced at me with sympathy. “What I meant was that if Mom’s feeling feisty maybe she’ll be able to beat this thing.”

“Oh, Em.” I looked at her face and saw the hope shining in her brown eyes and just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell her we were on borrowed time. Instead, I sent her a small smile. “That would be great.”

I realized I wasn’t going anywhere. Losing Babs would be a crushing blow for Emily, and even though I hadn’t been the greatest big sister, okay, I was absentee at best, I knew I couldn’t leave her to deal with this alone. Not this time. I took her hand in mine and gave it a gentle squeeze much like Soph had done for me when the reality of this situation had punched me in the face.

“You should get some rest,” I said. “I’ll take good care of her, I promise.”

Em looked at me with gratitude and squeezed my fingers in return before letting go. “Thanks, Jules, I’m so glad you’re here.”

The bloody welts left by Babs’s rejection healed a bit as I met Em’s gaze. Perhaps I couldn’t change things with my mother, but I could be here for my sisters. I closed the app on my phone as I watched her slip back upstairs.

One of my old habits returned with force during my days at home. Much like the sixteen-year-old girl who had been infatuated with the new boy next door, I found myself spying on Liam Mahony again. I learned his routine, fifty laps in the pool just after sunrise, and hour-long workouts in the evening in the room across from mine. Occasionally, there was a bonus sighting of him doing yard work, taking out his trash, or sitting on his back deck while he read a book and enjoyed a beer.

I told myself it didn’t mean anything, that I was just appreciating the view, but the heat that licked up inside made a liar out of me. I don’t care how pretty the sunrise was in the morning, it sure as shit never made me want to touch myself the way spying on Liam did.

It was on the sixth evening since I’d returned home that I got caught. Busted. Bagged and tagged. Nabbed. Nailed. Well, maybe I just wanted to be, nailed, really, really badly.

Em was downstairs with Babs while I caught up on clients in my room. It was an unusually overcast day, so I had the light on. I figured it was okay since Liam didn’t generally work out until six o’clock. I had hours before he’d show, hours before I had to snap off the light and hide in the shadows to enjoy the guilty pleasure that was watching him exercise.

Like jumping into a rabbit hole, however, my understanding of the space-time continuum vanished while I tried to fix a glitch on the website I was creating for a bakery in Brooklyn. For some inexplicable and maddening reason, the links I’d put up to showcase their products kept yanking me out of the website, tossing me into cyberspace like a bouncy ball with no sense of direction. So annoying.

My back started to ache and my butt had gone numb, but those twinges weren’t what pulled me from my work. Oh, no, the overwhelming sensation that someone was watching me, was what finally made me glance up.

When I did, I gasped. It was him, Liam Mahony, standing framed in the window across the way. He was wearing just a pair of basketball shorts, his skin was slick with sweat and his arms were stretched up as he gripped the windowsill overhead as if he had to visibly restrain himself from coming through the window to get at me. Oh, my.

His brown laser-like eyes focused on my face, studying me as if he didn’t really believe I was there. It occurred to me that if he did reach me, he was more likely to throttle me than do the wicked things I had been imagining for the past few days.

Inexplicably, Adele’s song “Hello” began to play in my head, my breathing became shallow, and I thought I might pass out but no—if I fainted I couldn’t drink my fill of him and I desperately wanted to look until my eyeballs dried right the fuck out.

He did not smile, but instead seemed caught on the razor’s edge between furious and aroused. The heat in his gaze made my insides liquefy and I nervously licked my lips and swallowed, trying to grab any sort of moisture to cool the heat of the slow burn that raged inside of me.

His gaze moved to my mouth and his nostrils flared; clearly aroused was beating out furious on his side of the glass. He dropped his arms to the waistband of his shorts. I sat riveted, not even blinking, when he slowly, oh, so slowly, pushed his shorts off and stood there completely naked. I knew exactly what he was doing, he was letting me see what I’d walked away from so many years ago. It was a gut punch, but I didn’t look away.

The edges of my vision started to blur, and I was pretty sure that, yes, I was going to faint after all. I gripped the edge of the desk, taking in the sight of his cock, locked and loaded, his fists on his hips, and the hot hungry expression on his face.

My mouth opened to form a small o and I made some sort of female-in-heat yowl that in any other species would have been attractive but I’m pretty sure coming out of me was just scary. Thankfully, he couldn’t hear me. I released the edge of the desk and pressed one hand to the window, as if I could push the glass aside to get to him.

We stared at one another for several long moments. Was he also trying to understand this new reality where we were once again the boy and girl next door?

Liam shook his head—rejecting the idea, rejecting me, and turned his back. For what it was worth, the rearview was just as captivating as the front, and I swallowed hard as he picked up a towel and draped it over one shoulder. Without another glance in my direction, he strode from the room leaving me to watch him walk away much as I had left him all those years ago.