Chapter 12
TWELVE
Iris – Goo Goo Dolls
We’ve gotten it out of our system.
Dallas powered through the mix of anger and anguish that rose every time her statement floated through his mind.
He hadn’t gotten shit out of his system.
At his desk in the Dispatch office, he wrote friends, stared at it, then struck through the word until the paper gave way.
The stink of burnt coffee was overpowering today, doing nothing to erase the scent of floral promise that still seemed to cling to his skin.
Like his tattoos, Gabi Wilder was inked deep, but this time on his soul.
He doodled in the margins of a piece on the county council meeting, due in an hour, while Justin, Ransom, and Campbell argued with Lloyd Halpern about a special section they wanted to run on businesses committed to space in the mill.
Of the four men involved in the conversation, not one of them agreed on anything.
Justin wanted photographs. Ransom wanted numbers.
Campbell wanted heart. Halpern wanted ad commitments before he devoted eight pages to “pottery and scones.”
Dallas snuck a quick look over his shoulder, inching the pad underneath his article out and adding a line. Then, with a frown, another.
For the record, I’m trying very hard not to think about you in my shirt.
I miss the cabin. I miss your laugh. I miss the way you looked at me before—
Fuck, Dallas thought, throwing down his pen. He’d written so many notes to her in the past week, he’d had to get a box for them, which he hid under his bed like nudie magazines and stale joints. High school all over again, only somehow more embarrassing.
Friends didn’t write love notes.
Friends didn’t lose sleep over each other.
Friends didn’t kiss or make love or watch movies together under a ratty blanket, legs entangled, fingertips slick from buttered popcorn.
The cabin had a VHS tape of E.T., which Gabi couldn’t believe he’d never seen.
And, yes, he’d cried. How could a person watch that goodbye scene and not bawl like a baby?
God, he missed her.
He’d only seen her once, when she came to pick up Sam at the library on Tuesday and found him there, too, pulling research for a freelance story The Washington Post had contacted him about.
He’d stayed near the checkout desk, glasses hiding his stricken expression, he hoped, careful not to come any closer than fucking friendship allowed.
Dallas sketched idle boxes on the page, considering their options.
He could make it home three times a year.
He had leave, something he’d rarely used before but guessed everyone would be damn glad if he used this time.
But it would be the extreme example of a long-distance relationship.
Email was possible in Cairo, if he had access to a decent line, which he might not.
In the field, phones failed, faxes jammed, and satellite calls were expensive enough to make every word feel rationed.
There was no thought of her coming along.
Maybe if they were younger, if there were no kids.
But that wasn’t her, or him.
Anyway, maybe the relationship was unbalanced.
He’d chased enough of his dreams that he might be getting tired, ready to take a breath and live.
Love someone. Gabi hadn’t even dated since her divorce.
She hadn’t had time to have fun, to be careless, to take something without immediately calculating the cost. Or Wilder Grounds could be all she had room for right now.
Had he turned up at the worst possible time, yet called it fate?
Dallas knew he was in deep—lovesick, heartsick.
He’d just spent the most amazing weekend with a woman he couldn’t keep his hands off, but now had to because he’d agreed to be friends.
A woman he liked more with every trivial thing he learned about her.
Someone he’d had a crush on, let’s be honest, since he was fifteen and only now had any real chance of getting.
He’d found a pair of her panties mixed with the clothes in his backpack, and he’d kept them.
Washed, because he wasn’t that depraved, but tucked in the drawer with his boxer briefs.
Every time Dallas looked at them, which was too often, he remembered her lips closing around him.
Her moans, this ragged one she let loose when she was almost there, keeping him up at night.
Her laughter at his stupid jokes, her tears during the movie.
The remembrances were killing him and having her underwear by his bed didn’t help.
Pieces, so many pieces of her scattered through his life now.
But it’s not like he could return a lacy black thong to that wicker box or stuff them in her mailbox. Not like he could return memories.
And—
He sighed and circled the sloppy heart he’d drawn. He’d had a nightmare, something he didn’t talk about with anyone. He couldn’t remember it, really, only her comforting him afterward, a categorically calming presence.
Then he’d slept like a baby.
Rare enough a thing to additionally scare the hell out of him.
The Dispatch’s phone rang, jarring him from his tender spiral. Halpern swiveled in his chair and grabbed it off the hook, spoke a few words, then gestured to him.
Dallas shoved away from the desk and crossed the room, avoiding the prying gazes of his brothers and cousin.
The conversation was brief, the request plain.
It was Fontana, Campbell’s wife, on the line from the Children’s Center.
Sam wasn’t feeling well, nothing urgent, but he couldn’t stay in case he was contagious.
His parents couldn’t be located, so could Dallas come get him?
He hung up and went for his jean jacket, working his arms into the sleeves before anyone could ask.
“What’s that about?” Of course, Justin was first in line. Nosy bastard.
Dallas felt the color hit his cheeks and didn’t dare look up, focusing instead on turning down his collar. The last thing he needed was this group seeing anything. “It was Fontana. Art lesson at the Children’s Center. Sam’s sick. I gotta go get him.”
Ransom sputtered what sounded too much like a laugh.
“Why you?” Campbell asked. When his wife could have demanded he come, but she was too busy playing matchmaker.
Dallas shrugged and shoved the stuff he’d been working on into his backpack, then slung it over his shoulder. “How should I know?”
“Didn’t you say Gabi’s touring her space at the mill?” This from Justin.
“No phone there yet. No way to reach her.” Campbell.
“That legal? Calling someone who isn’t a relative to get a kid?” Ransom. “Would never happen in New York.”
Dallas counted to ten in French and headed to the door, paused, remembering. Shit. “Can I borrow someone’s car?”
He turned, no way to avoid it now.
They were grinning, every last one of them, even Halpern, who hadn’t smiled this much since Nixon resigned. Four different kinds of smiles, every one of them meant to sting.
“Could be his ballgame you went to Saturday,” Campbell offered. “Making everyone get ideas, I mean.”
“Library with Sam on Tuesday.” Justin.
“Don’t forget that showy motorcycle spectacle with his mama last weekend,” Halpern mumbled around a cigar he had, thank you, God, not lit.
“Whole town’s been talking about it. Like something outta—what was the one with the motorcycle?
—Top Gun.” He stabbed the cigar in Dallas’s direction.
“Why not call you if the little fella’s sick? I think it’s just fine. Just fine.”
Sure he did, because falling in love and marrying Gabi Wilder, a fantasy, would keep him here.
Dallas realized he was doing the brooding thing again, proving what everyone said about him. Black moods and such. Aloofness, every editor he’d ever worked with liked to call it. Well, he wasn’t aloof with her.
“Keys,” he said, snapping his fingers.
It was Justin who came to his rescue, as always, now that Dallas thought about it, tossing him his.
“Be careful,” his brother said before Dallas reached the office door.
He meant more than picking up Gabi’s son. Dallas just knew it.
Sam didn’t seem even a little sick.
Slightly flushed, maybe. Sweaty, his Goosebumps T-shirt sticking to his chest. But otherwise, normal. He’d talked a mile a minute about a thousand different topics on the ride home. How could he remember so much trivial information?
“Where’s your thermometer?” Dallas asked, shoving Sam’s scuffed Reeboks in the rack by the door so Gabi didn’t trip over them on the way in.
Sam pressed his hand to his forehead. “I’m cool as a cucumber,” he announced, earning a chuckle Dallas should have kept hidden. Sam cut his tawny eyes his way, ones so like Gabi’s that it made Dallas’s chest ache. As if he needed another mental keepsake. “But I’m hungry.”
“This seems like a scam,” Dallas whispered, heading to the kitchen.
He tried not to stare on the way there. Tried not to see her everywhere.
In the bright throw pillows on the sofa, the Bake Me mug by the sink, the romance novel beside a vase of fading zinnias.
In the cookbook left open on the counter, the dusting of flour near the sink, the pastry box folded flat beside the trash.
In the half-finished puzzle on the table, only sky and corner pieces done.
Tried not to smell her, the enticing fragrance that haunted his dreams.
He failed on every front.
“I told Miss Fontana you’d come get me,” Sam added, climbing into a chair at the table and searching through puzzle pieces.
He attempted to fit two unsuccessfully before quitting.
“We sometimes eat in the living room. On that big coffee table, since this one doesn’t have any room left.
I get to watch fifteen minutes of TV if it’s been a good day.
Which means I didn’t get any warnings for talking too much or pulling Tabetha Carmicheal’s ponytail again.
I got a green for behavior. Green is the best. Red isn’t. And yellow is a big, fat maybe.”
Told Miss Fontana you’d come get me.
Hmm, Dallas realized, getting jelly from the refrigerator, then searching for bread and peanut butter in the cabinet. The kid had set him up.
“Is that your mom’s latest creation?” He nodded to the covered tin that smelled like blueberries and heaven.
Sam made a gurgling sound in the back of his throat. “Mom’s always making me taste test. That’s what she calls it. Last week it was some moldy cake with raisins. Yuck and double yuck! I mostly just wanted a popsicle.”
Dallas wished he could be her taste-tester.
And it hurt, on some fresh, foreign level, to hear about their life as a family.
Puzzles and pastries, things he wasn’t a part of and never would be.
The dog Gabi was planning to surprise her son with, a houndish mutt she’d already made arrangements to adopt from a local rescue group.
Sam had promised to name one, if it ever happened, Scooby, which seemed both predictable and impossible to argue with.
Dallas avoided staring at the pictures on the refrigerator, though one of Gabi from high school, in that cheerleading uniform, making a victory pose, tested him badly. Even if he’d said that hadn’t been what attracted him—and it hadn’t—no living, breathing male could argue with the outfit.
Forget about glancing down the hallway toward her bedroom.
Sam blew out his cheeks, making weird noises and swinging his feet. He had a hole in one sock, a tiny toe poking through. “Did you know my mom before? Like in school?”
Dallas paused, knife in hand as he cut the sandwich in half. “Sure, well, a little. She was two grades ahead of me. I was on the newspaper staff, and she had her cheerleading stuff plus a lot else, so we didn’t cross paths much.”
Sam grimaced. “You’re younger?”
Dallas thought that was an indictment, probably thanks to the sprinkling of gray in his hair that seemed to multiply by the day.
So, he decided not to tackle it. Instead, he opened the refrigerator and searched for a drink.
He grabbed a box with an apple on the front, then found a bag of chips in the cabinet.
“Wow. Straw and everything in this thing.”
Sam rolled his eyes, taking the drink. “Juice box. They’ve been around, like, forever.”
Dallas made his own sandwich, found another juice box, and sat across from him at the table, nudging puzzle pieces aside with his elbow.
Sam crunched thoughtfully on a chip. “Mom says you have a big job. Important.”
Dallas felt something ridiculous and warm open in his chest. “She said that?”
Sam nodded, munching. He squinted at Dallas, pointing to his glasses. “School newspaper?”
Dallas braced himself.
Sam grinned. “Nerd.”
Dallas couldn’t argue, and bit into the first PB&J he’d had in years.
“My mom likes nerds.”
Dallas perked up despite himself. “Really?”
Sam stuffed a bite into his mouth, then chewed with it open.
“She’s reading this book. It has a couple on the front, hugging in these really old-timey clothes.
Ick.” Sam made a grotesque kissy face. “She said she likes brains more than muscles, which is, you know, nerds. My dad has a lot of muscles, even in his neck. Maybe that’s why they don’t live together anymore.
” He lifted his arm and poked his nonexistent bicep. “I’ll be a nerd with muscles.”
Dallas’s heart clenched, right there in Gabi’s cozy yellow-and-green, still-kind-of-’70s kitchen. He would never understand how Theo didn’t want every second he could get with his son. Sam was incredible. If this were his kid, he’d never miss a minute he didn’t have to.
In addition to cheating on Gabi, being unreachable today and absent every other damn day gave Dallas another solid reason to hate the guy.
After the impromptu snack, after Sam showed him the pen marks on the doorframe proving how much he’d grown, Dallas got conned into turning on the TV, a show about a blue dog and a man who talked to furniture.
He wasn’t sure what else to do, but he knew Gabi would be back any minute. She’d never let Sam hang for long.
“What’s the deal with this guy?” Dallas asked, five minutes later, from inside a blanket tent that had begun with architectural promise and barely survived the pillow fight that followed and was now sagging badly on one side. “Why does he talk to the furniture?”
Sam, stretched out beside him with his socked feet crossed, didn’t look away from the TV. Actually, one socked foot. They’d lost the other sock during the fight. “Because they talk back.”
On-screen, the blue dog barked at a mailbox.
Dallas frowned. “And what’s the mailbox’s excuse?”
Sam shrugged. “He lives there.”
Fair enough.
By the time Steve started looking for another clue, Dallas had one hand braced on the collapsed tent roof, one leg going numb under the coffee table, and a humbling new respect for Gabi’s daily life.
Parenting, as it turned out, was not a soft assignment.
They were both asleep before Steve found the third clue.