Chapter 15
15
By the time the bees were collected, contained, and expelled, Rosie had vanished. And although Tom had not found a roofer by lunch, he decided to reward himself for the morning’s effort—which had, after all, included several bee stings and difficult conversations with Boyd and his delusional groupies!—by walking back across the road to parse out exactly where Rosie’s boundaries lay between kissing him and letting him sleep in the big bed. But she wasn’t there.
When he texted her, her response was uninformative and yet terrifying: Went into town with Boyd.
So Tom spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone with potential contractors, frequently looking out the front window of the inn toward the dark windows of the cottage across the street, waiting for Rosie to come home like Jay Gatsby monitoring the dock light at East Egg.
He didn’t see lights on in the cottage until almost six, and he immediately called it quits for the day. At the bottom of the main stairs, he happened to stop, look right through the kitchen doorway, and spy Boyd with the two nutjobs he’d tossed off the front lawn this morning. They were looking at a laptop on the island countertop, pointing and discussing something in low voices.
Tom froze, wondering if they’d noticed him. Boyd was difficult enough to deal with, but Boyd and his fans together were nearly insufferable. Maybe he could edge out of the inn without any unpleasant interactions.
Still—
Right, he was playing the responsible adult now.
“Uh, those girls look real young, Boyd. Do their parents know where they are?” he called.
Both girls turned to glare at Tom, as though he were the pervert for thinking that maybe Boyd shouldn’t be left alone with two possible minors.
“We’d never try to get between the two of you,” the blonde said haughtily.
“And neither of us would allow anything inappropriate in light of the power dynamics ,” the South Asian girl declared.
“It’s okay, I know they’re fans,” Boyd said, blinking innocent brown eyes at Tom and pantomiming his hands in the air. Tom and Ximena had previously had a conversation with Boyd to the point of Don’t show your penis to any groupies , so that was a good acknowledgment. “They’re going to help with Rose’s design vision.”
“Rosie wants them here?” Tom clarified, eyes widening.
Everyone nodded, but Tom frowned. Weren’t Boyd’s fans responsible for most of her incorrect ideas about him and Boyd? Did Rosie really want to be exposed to more of that?
Near the door, Tom spotted a large binder on the front table. Thinking it might have been left there by Rosie or one of the contractors, he picked it up.
Inside the binder were several folders and a hand-bound leather book. The lowercase title of the book was embossed in gold foil on the cover: you’re the one (who tried to burn it down) . Although he should have known better, Tom flipped to the title page, which declared the book to have been composed by Snow Wolf for the Great Puffin. All rights were reserved to Boyd Kellagher, Tomasz Wilczewski, and the Toronto Maple Leafs. The author specifically and emphatically disavowed any infringement of the Maple Leafs’ trademark on the second page. The third page contained excerpted lyrics from a Phoebe Bridgers song. The fourth page contained a highly stylized, anatomically suspect, and beautifully colored illustration of Boyd and Tom engaged in a ménage a trois with a hockey stick.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” muttered Tom. He slammed the book shut. Casting a baleful look at the kitchen, Tom hurried out of the inn. It seemed likely that Rosie had spent the whole day with Boyd and his groupies, and God only knew what she’d heard about him. I am not dating Boyd. I am not sleeping with Boyd. I have never had carnal knowledge of a hockey player, let alone a hockey stick.
“Rosie?” he called cautiously as he approached the cottage. He was braced for anything.
“Come in!” she responded, sounding reassuringly upbeat.
The scene inside hit him right in the heart.
Rosie was curled up on one of the love seats in her pajamas—dainty baby blue satin this time. Her face was flushed, and her curly hair was wet from the shower and combed loose across her shoulders. She’d acquired a breakfast tray and set out a wedge of brie, an open jar of raspberry jam, and a package of fancy water crackers on the coffee table. In semicircular array around the cheese plate, she had a big bottle of Evian, a glass of white wine, the TV remote, her embroidery hoop, and a stack of home design magazines. The TV was playing last season’s Drag Race finale.
Oh, it was just the scene he thought he’d come home to every night for the rest of his life: Rosie with her little snack, her little drink, and at least three ongoing projects. Tom halted in the doorway, mouth trying to pull in multiple directions as he felt joy and piercing regret at once.
“Are the bees gone?” she asked, eyes flicking to the Band-Aid on his neck.
Tom grinned. “The bees are all gone.” He felt like a Spartan warrior coming back from battle, and Rosie looked like a hero’s reward: the satin of her top was stuck damp to her skin where her hair had soaked it, and the shape of her breasts and the points of her nipples were visible through the thin fabric.
He dropped onto the love seat, wedging himself in next to her. She wrinkled her nose, probably because he was filthy from construction grime while she smelled like shampoo and wine, but she scooted to the side to make more room and gestured that he was welcome to her tray.
Tom knocked his denim-covered knee against her bare one, admiring their legs stretched out next to each other, then helped himself to some of her cheese board.
“Did you have an okay day?” he asked through a mouthful of crackers.
“A really good day,” Rosie said.
The way she smiled was familiar, stirring up a swirl of old memories. For a moment, Tom thought maybe she looked younger with her hair combed out and no makeup on. It took another moment, and a tilt-turn jolt of guilt, before he realized that no, this was just what Rosie looked like when she was happy, and it had been a while since he’d seen that.
She knocked back another sip of wine. “We were so productive. We made tons of progress.”
“We?” Tom asked.
“So it was mostly me and Puff, because Puff’s got the artist’s eye. But it was Snowy’s idea that we should remodel the basement space with a stage. And then she found a used karaoke set for sale on the island, and Boyd offered to buy it for us right then. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Oh yeah, wonderful for Boyd, Tom thought sourly, who’d gotten to spend the day with Tom’s wife while Tom got stung by bees and ghosted by roofers.
“Puff and Snowy?” Tom asked, shoving away his jealousy.
“Two of Boyd’s groupies. I decided to put them to work as long as they’re lurking on my lawn making fancams or whatever.”
“I don’t suppose those are the two Michelangelos who drew me in a three-way with Boyd and a hockey stick?”
Rosie blinked several times in astonishment before recovering. “You know…I didn’t ask what the story was about? A hockey stick? Wait, don’t tell me any more. They’re entitled to their hobbies.”
“But do I need to have a talk with Boyd?” he wondered.
“About?”
“The girls,” Tom said warily. “And their pornographic hockey dreams. Like, for liability reasons.”
“Oh! No. Not at all. He was very professional with them.” Rosie gave Tom a chiding look. “He’s so nice, Tom.”
“Of course,” Tom said. Because, sure, Boyd was very nice. He was just a movable disaster.
“And he’s afraid you don’t like him anymore.”
“I like him just fine,” Tom insisted. He’d worked with worse people, even if Boyd was the only one who’d almost gotten him drowned.
“And he looks up to you.”
“Me?” Tom laughed. “What, he’s impressed by my many credits in the chorus? The cereal commercial I shot five years ago?”
Rosie shoved him with her shoulder. “No, you know. You’ve been in theater your entire adult life. And he’s just started. He never had any formal training at all. So, like, you could be conscious of that when you talk to him—don’t be too hard on him. Don’t yell. I think you hurt his feelings this morning.”
Tom snorted. “You think that just because I read some Brecht fifteen years ago, I’m in a position of authority over Boyd Kellagher ?”
“No, I just—give him a chance,” Rosie said, eyes wide and sincere. “He really wants to do something nice for you. He knows you both could have died.”
“Huh,” Tom said noncommittally. “So did he actually help today, then?”
“Mm,” Rosie agreed. She settled into a more comfortable position as the TV turned to a montage of the current season. And then she launched into a convoluted explanation of her design dreams for the basement pub. She imagined the space lightened, brightened, set up to accommodate wedding receptions or anniversary parties, with a small stage for a four-piece band or karaoke performances. She alluded to a mood board and a new business plan.
It sounded like an awful lot of work to Tom, who still didn’t have the roof situation under control, but Rosie was glowing and hopeful in the way she described it, and, God, at some point she’d stopped looking like that, even though this was his favorite Rosie of all Rosies: Rosie on a mission.
She halted in the middle of a lengthy exposition on the pros and cons of various flooring materials and seemed to catch herself monologuing, or maybe she’d caught the force of Tom’s besotted, bittersweet attention.
“Um, so,” she said. “I think I can make it work with the budget since Boyd’s buying the sound system. Which is amazing of him. We should get him a thank-you card.”
“Okay,” Tom gracelessly agreed.
He thought he would have liked buying things for Rosie, if he’d ever been anything but broke, but then it occurred to him that he actually did have a gift today.
“On the subject of presents,” he said, standing up and lifting his eyebrows.
He fished in his backpack and offered a Tupperware to her. When she was slow to accept it, he knelt next to her and made more of a flourish to present it.
“Um.” She hesitantly opened the lid. “Oh no. Did you pull that out of the walls?”
He had a whole entire honeycomb in the bowl, shaved by the bee lady so that it oozed raw honey. Tom stuck his finger into the goop and then obnoxiously sucked it clean just to make Rosie shriek.
“You know those bees ate nothing but trash for months,” she squealed, scooting back. Tom followed her onto the love seat. Something about the jerky way she’d scrambled away triggered memories.
“Are you drunk ?” he demanded, equal parts delighted and affronted. He’d really missed out today. “Oh my God, you are.”
“I’m not drunk. Anymore,” she said, blushing furiously. “We were researching wine bars.”
“Is that what you call it?” Tom grinned at her. She was pink and embarrassed and beautiful with it. “You should have told me you were getting started. I’d have quit earlier.”
He stuck his finger back in the dripping honey and offered it to her. When she shuddered away, Tom sucked the honey from his finger and bent down to kiss her. He got one bare taste of her vanilla lip balm and wine-scented mouth before she pushed him away with another delicate squeal and flailed her hands at him.
“What?” Tom demanded with mock innocence. He put the Tupperware on the coffee table so he could catch her hands and loom over her.
“I don’t want any of your trash honey,” Rosie insisted with tipsy dignity.
“You looove my trash honey,” Tom sang. “It’s the sweetest.”
“It’s trash spit out by bugs.”
“I’m sure they were eating the clover next door too,” Tom said, leaning in to kiss her again. He got more of her this time, her mouth hot and wet against his for three heady seconds before she ducked her chin and pushed back with her hands.
“Don’t give me salmonella poisoning,” she said.
“The bee lady said it was perfectly safe.”
“The bee lady, who was taking them out with no protective gear and no smoke?”
“C’mon, Rosie, try the honey,” Tom said. “This is a moment of victory. You defeated the queen and drove her from your lands. Hear the lamentations of the bees as you eat the winter stores they were saving for their children.”
She snorted but kept her arms straight. Tom linked their fingers and balanced over her, letting her have the illusion she was holding him off.
“I’ll try the honey, but I’m not kissing you to do it,” Rosie said.
“Why not?” Tom said, wounded.
“We don’t have a kissing relationship,” she said, tilting her chin up stubbornly. “You can’t just come in and kiss me whenever you want to, all casual-like.”
Tom exhaled in disappointment. “So, wait, I can’t kiss you at all? Or I can only kiss you sometimes?”
Rosie gave him a heavy-lidded look of feminine secrecy. “That situation is subject to change. You’ll just have to check whether it’s a day I’m interested in kissing you.”
Tom let go of her hands long enough to scratch the back of his neck in performative consternation.
“Well, you’re the boss, of course, but I think all the fucking we’re going to do will feel real unfriendly if it’s on a day you don’t feel like kissing.”
Rosie bent her head back and cackled before she caught herself and remembered to glare at him, her mouth twisting from the effort of holding back her smile.
“Why do you think I’m going to sleep with you, when I just told you we don’t have a kissing relationship?” she demanded.
“Well, here we are, in this nice snowy cottage with a big bed,” Tom said, thinking hard, “and you’re wearing some very attractive pajamas, and you smell like vanilla and expensive wine.” He ducked his head and stole another kiss off the corner of her pursed lips. Rosie swatted him, and he took her hands back in his. “And, um, I can tell you’re not wearing a bra.”
If he could just lower himself a few more inches, he’d be able to feel her breasts against his chest, their bodies separated only by one thin layer of satin and his clothes, which were dirty and ought to be removed anyway.
Pinned, Rosie tossed her hair over a shoulder, now obviously pleased. “I do sound really fuckable,” she agreed. “But you just showed up with sawdust in your hair and your mouth full of trash honey.”
The obscenity in her mouth sent a rush of heat directly to his cock, and he spread his knees, planting them to bracket hers. He became pleasantly aware of the way her wrists in his hands felt, of the soft fragility of her skin under his fingers.
“I could shower,” he murmured, pressing his lips to the corner of her jaw.
Rosie slitted her eyes at him, her expression considering.
“I’ve been drinking,” she said with a trace of regret.
“That’s a self-resolving problem,” Tom said. “Because after my shower and the Drag Race finale and a couple hours of foreplay, you’ll be plenty sober.”
“Is that how it works? I don’t really do casual sex,” she confided.
“It doesn’t have to be casual,” he said. He hadn’t thought of it that way.
Rosie squirmed beneath his grip. “I especially don’t think you and I could have the serious kind.”
“We had a lot of extremely serious sex within five hundred yards of this exact spot,” Tom pointed out.
“You know what I mean. That didn’t end well.” She sighed heavily, looking away as he lowered her wrists. “Am I the only one who finds this tricky to navigate?”
She seemed to expect him to back away, but he didn’t. There were definitely some tricky parts, but not this—this had always felt very simple to him. Wanting her.
“What are you worried will happen?” he asked.
She fixed slightly bloodshot blue eyes on him and tried to focus. “You know. I’ll get hurt. You’ll get hurt. We’ll wonder why we thought things would work out any better this time.”
Was that all? Fear of future regrets? Tom could report that regret was nonfatal, even when it felt otherwise. It wasn’t regret that had kept him from anything he wanted in his life. Regret wasn’t something to fear. Regret had pointed his way home. Regret had brought him here.
“Babe,” he said softly. “Are you really sorry for any of the days when I kissed you?”
Rosie wet her lips, thinking, then shook her head. No. Everything they regretted had happened on days he hadn’t.
“Well, since I already kissed you once today, we’re clear till midnight,” he announced.
He knew there were some logical flaws in that argument, but she gave him a brief smile before he pressed his mouth to hers again. This time, when his lips begged hers for more, she opened to him sweetly, and he got to absorb the hot wet of her mouth and the intoxication of her scent with all his senses. He clutched her tighter, savoring the soft, warm weight of her body against him. Rosie finally slid her hands into his hair, which was full of dust and needed cutting, but the tug of her fingers took him back to other times, other beds where he’d held her in the same position: an extra-long twin in the Boston College dorms, the salvaged IKEA full they’d shared their senior year, the big four-poster king in the suite at the inn.
He dipped his head to the wet satin clinging to her front, mouthing her skin through the fabric. The water stain didn’t go down quite far enough, so he pressed his tongue against her nipple through her shirt before sucking it into his mouth. He was rewarded with a sharp inhale and the lift of her hips, but before he could pursue that movement, there was a noise from the other side of the room. A knock.
Tom didn’t stop, because he didn’t care about the noise at all. He didn’t care who was at the door: it could have been the pope and Bernadette Peters together with a flat tire breakdown, and he’d tell them to take a hike. He had Rosie back in his arms.
But Rosie noticed it too, and she pushed him off her.
She sat up and adjusted her shirt. As her front was barely decent, she wrapped herself with a throw blanket and called, “Come in!”
Boyd hesitantly opened the door and stuck his head into the cottage.
“Hey,” Boyd rumbled. He looked at Tom—who anyone could have perceived to be half-hard and in the middle of something —cringed, then turned his attention to Rosie. “Just wanted to see if you still wanted to order pizza. The Great Puffin said she’s hungry.”
Rosie’s eyes lit up. “Yes. Pizza sounds amazing.”
Tom made a noise of protest. “I was going to cook tonight.” Shakshouka. Cheap, healthy, and it only got one pan dirty: an appeal to a very basic caveman standard of I can provide sustenance for you and your offspring; please let me back in the cave .
“Do you have enough for Boyd and the girls too?” Rose asked.
“No,” Tom replied, surprised at her eagerness to keep them around. He wasn’t feeding someone who lived on entire, unseasoned salmons and rotisserie chickens, much less his pornographers. Why was she so interested in their company?
“Okay, you and I can do dinner tomorrow, then,” Rosie told him, ignoring his disappointed grimace. “Did you check to see whether anyone delivers out here?” she asked, turning back to Boyd.
“I can go pick it up,” Boyd volunteered.
Tom sat up. “Were you drinking too?” he demanded.
Boyd’s big shoulders bunched defensively. “Not very much,” he said. “It’s tiny glasses of wine at the tastings.”
Tom sighed, trying to convey to Boyd his annoyance. How had he ended up in charge of Boyd and a set of hotel renovations, when all he’d wanted to do was get Rosie alone somewhere for a few days? “You promised me no driving if you had anything to drink at all,” Tom said firmly. “Go back to the inn. I’ll get the pizza. And tell the kids they have to scram after dinner.”
Boyd bobbed his head in an agreeable, submissive way and closed the door. Tom snarled and stood up, thinking about baseball and hunting for his socks.
“You could be nicer to him,” Rose said. “He was a big help today. And he’s going to tape all the crown moldings tomorrow. And he bought that sound system—”
“I’m getting him pizza!” Tom interjected, shoving his feet into shoes. What, did she want him to kiss Boyd on the mouth for her?
Rosie rounded her eyes at him, seeming to detect his plunge in mood.
“I’ll pay for the pizza, at least,” she said. “Since I invited him and the girls.”
Tom tried to demur, but she rolled off the love seat and went to her purse. She fished a credit card out of her wallet and tried to press it into his hands, only seeming to think the better of it at the last minute. Her eyes widened with a flash of apparent panic, and she jerked the card back toward herself.
This double take caught Tom’s attention, and acting on instinct, he intercepted her tipsy, uncoordinated hand and snatched the card from her fingers. Rosie made an abortive jump for the card as Tom held it up over her head, out of her reach.
“It’s not what you think,” Rosie blurted.
Tom turned his back to her so he could bring the card protectively against his chest and read it.
“I’m not thinking anything,” Tom temporized. He supposed there could be a lot of reasons that Rose’s credit card was still in the name of ROSE K. WILCZEWSKI, and all of them were appealing ones. He turned back and smirked at her, card pressed flat against his chest. No, maybe tonight wasn’t ending on a disappointing note.
“Lots of women don’t go back to their maiden name when they get divorced,” Rose said unevenly, her face turning bright red.
“Uh-huh,” Tom said. “I can see why you’d want to hang on to Wilczewski, especially.” He grinned wider.
“It’s not a weird name,” Rose said.
“That’s what my grandmother from ?ód? told me,” Tom said, taking a step closer to her.
“I only kept it because people at my first job would have made really terrible R. Kelly jokes if my email address had changed,” she insisted. “I just didn’t want to call any attention to it.”
“Makes sense to me,” Tom said, placing his hands on her shoulders. This was amazing. He couldn’t wait to tell his parents.
“And I use my maiden name at this job,” she said. “On everything except legal documents, actually. I may still do the name change thing.”
“Sure,” Tom said, beaming now. Rosie was not the sort to put things off. Something had kept her from taking that last step and erasing the evidence that she’d ever been married. He dared more commentary. “I just think it’s charming that you always planned to be Rose Kelly Wilczewski for the rest of your life.”
Rosie’s lips thinned in distress. “I didn’t.”
“What?” Tom asked.
She shot an unhappy look up at him, then glanced away again. He waited for her to explain, but she only did it reluctantly.
“I didn’t think I’d be Rose Wilczewski for the rest of my life. I didn’t think I would be at this point, even.” Her shoulders bunched, and she sighed. “Shows how good I am at planning how my life should go. I thought I’d do the exact same thing I couldn’t handle the first time, then ended up doing nothing at all.”
It took him a moment to work through that, plus why she’d expected him to be upset. When would she have changed her name? Oh.
She’d thought she’d get remarried and take some other guy’s name. She just hadn’t wanted to go back to Kelly in the interim.
Tom had worried about that. He’d never stopped worrying about it, actually. That someday Adrian would take him out to get stone drunk on a flimsy excuse, then drop the news that Rosie was marrying someone else. Tom thought that news would have prompted him to action in the same way the hurricane had, but this opportunity was surely a lot neater than hiring assassins to knock off her fiancé.
She ducked her head like she was embarrassed, and he cleared his throat. He waved the card between two fingers. “I’ll go buy the pizza. Do you want to get dressed and meet me over at the inn?”
“Sure. I should probably move over to the inn suite if the bees are gone? I could pack up?” She made it a question.
Tom shook his head. “I wouldn’t. It’s still a mess. And there’s lots of construction to come. Let’s stay here for now.” Like hell he was letting Rosie sleep farther from him tonight.
She agreed easily. Very easily, he noted as he put shoes on and headed for the door.
He liked to think it was the same reason she hadn’t ever changed her name. She still wanted what she’d always wanted. Some part of her still thought he could give it to her. And the part of himself he liked best still thought he could too.
He still liked the idea of Rose Wilczewski, for the rest of their lives.