Page 23 of No Kind of Hero
Not that he left her that exact second. He couldn’t. He brushed a final kiss over her mouth, then trailed his lips across her cheek, kissed her in the fragile spot beneath her ear, and said, “You’re kinda tempting, you know? What is this we’re having again? ”
“Mm. I don’t have words.” It was a murmur, and she arched her back and turned her head to give him better access, which—oh, yeah—didn’t turn him on much. “Don’t stop.”
Another metallicclang,like somebody was dropping pipes out there, and he sighed, stood back, and said, “You could memorize that and say it again. As many times as you want. Want to help me prime?”
Her pupils were dilated, and there was a pink flush on her cheeks that matched her shirt as she slid down off the counter with her hand in his. “Yes.” She was flustered, putting a hand to her hair, and he loved seeing it. “I really did come to help. And maybe I want to make you as crazy as you made me all those years ago. Not that that’s possible.”
He busied himself prying open the paint bucket, because otherwise, he was going to kiss her again. Or maybe he was going to think about exactly what it was they were having, and neither of those things would be a good idea. But he still had to say, “It’s possible. All we need is the dog, and it’ll be just like before.”
“Henry?” She picked up a paint roller. “I thought about bringing him, but the paint would have been overpowering.”
“Also just like before. No, I meant Rosie. I guess she isn’t around anymore. It’s a long time.”
“No.” Beth’s expression shifted like a cloud passing across the sun. “No. She died three years almost to the day after we broke up. It was right after I graduated from law school, the day before I took the bar exam. I was in Seattle, and I found out two days later that my mom had taken her to be put down. She had to do it, because Rosie had cancer, but I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I . . . I raged.”
His hands stilled a moment, and then he poured paint into the pan, aiming for his usual deliberation. “Sorry to hear that. She was a good dog. You raged to your mom? I’d like to have seen that.”
“No. Of course not. I raged alone. It was . . . excessive, how I felt. The same way I feel now. The same way I—” She stopped, then said, “I know she was a dog, not a person, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was so sad. Like none of it had meant anything at all, so what was the point? Like after all that, she just . . . died anyway.”
Beth caught herself even as she choked up. Here she was, getting kissed by Evan like he couldn’t keep his hands off her, and two minutes later, she brought up her dead dog? Who did that? Hadn’t she learned a thing in almost ten years? What was this, the remedial romance class? Over-Emoters Anonymous?
She stuck her roller into the pan of white primer and moved it back and forth, then ran it over the ridged slope the way Evan had taught her all those years ago before asking him, “Start anywhere?” Maybe if she just shut up . . .
“Yeah,” Evan said. “We’ll do the walls, and I’ll get the ceiling later, once I’ve talked to Kristiansen. See how wild and crazy he wants to get.” He began to stroke primer onto the wall next to the door, every motion practiced and sure, then said, “You can tell me. I want to know.”
“The ‘My Dead Pet’ story,” she said, trying for jaunty. “Pretty much Viagra.”
He laughed. Quietly, the way Evan did most things. “Nope. And some people could say that babies put a little bit of a damper on the romance themselves, but you lived with that all right yesterday. Life happens to everybody.”
“I guess so. It’s just that when it happened to us, it was so easy at first. Got me spoiled, maybe.”
“Mm,” he said, looking at her with more than heat in his eyes now. With warmth. Something against which she had approximately . . . zero defenses. Just like before.
It had been bitterly cold on that late December morning that marked the halfway point in Evan’s house-painting job and Beth’s winter break. The sun had turned every snowbank into a spectacle of glittering crystals, the evergreen carried softening blankets of white, and the lake gleamed blue as a jewel laid on white velvet. Beth left the house and walked up the drive, then turned and looked out at the panorama spread before her. And was that enough to satisfy her? Of course not. Instead, she had a romantic vision of Evan walking with her, holding her hand.
Except that Evan was in the house painting. Doing his job. And her fantasies needed to slow the hell down and take a rest. All he had to do was look at her with that steady, intense gaze to make her knees weak and the heat flood her cheeks, and she had—let’s see, no idea at all if he felt the same way. If he did, why hadn’t he made a move? She was only here for another week. Time was running out.
So why hadn’tshemade the move? That was what powerful women did, right? But if she asked him out and he felt like he had to say “yes” because of the job? Or if he said “no.” What did powerful women do then? Presumably not cry.
Strong women made the first move when it needed to be made. She believed that. Intellectually. Too bad she still wasn’t doing it. But shewasn’tgoing to show up to help paint her dad’s study this morning like a hopeful puppy. Maybe Evan would miss her, and maybe he’d say something, and maybe . . .
No.She fastened her snowshoes on and kicked her way up to the road, then across it to the trail, and set off with determination. Endorphins. Energy. She was going to come back all worked-out and glowing, and then she was going to go for what she wanted before her chance passed her by like a semi blowing by on the highway.
She’d worried for so long that there was something wrong with her. She had sexual feelings—she had them every single night, in fact, which was inconvenient when you had a roommate. But when it came down to it, she’d always balked, and she couldn’t even say why. It was ridiculous to be romantic when you believed in empowerment and rationality and equality, but . . .
Well, she was ridiculous, she guessed. Nobody had ever seemed like the right guy, no matter how good his hands and mouth had felt, no matter how insistently her body had urged her to take the next step. A part of her had always been held in reserve, sitting back, watching, judging. For so long, she’d thought,What am I waiting for?And now she knew. She longed for Evan, who’d never laid a hand on her, with a physical intensity that scared her, especially since she couldn’t tell if he felt the same way.
There was a word for women who only fell for unattainable men. Well, there wasn’t, but there ought to be. “Perfectionist hopeless romantic” probably fit. Or “Thirteen-year-old girl safely having crushes on pop stars,” perhaps.
She was getting breathless now, stomping up the hill, but she kept going. All right. Look at it logically. Since she wasn’t thirteen, she was obviously projecting something else onto Evan and their non-relationship, using it to avoid focusing on something she didn’t want to face. Fear about what would come after college, that law school was the wrong choice, or maybe just that she wouldn’t get in. One of those, because you didn’t actually meet “the one” and fall in love. Or if you did, he wasn’t likely to feel the same. And anyway, this wasn’t what her mind needed to be tangled up in right now.
She should think about something else. She was twenty, and that was much too old to get herself stuck in this kind of whirlpool like somebody who’d never heard of love hormones, of dopamine and serotonin, of pheromones and all the rest of it. If Evan seemed like exactly the spot where she wanted to jump off that cliff, and also like the place she wanted to rest afterwards? There were reasons for that, and it wasn’t just his slow, calm voice, his clear, steady eyes, the width of his shoulders, or how hard he worked. Even though it felt like it.
She tried to capture the threads of the honors thesis and weave them into something helpful. The history of secretarial work in popular American culture post-World War Two, a fascinating subject on which she’d put in her usual two hours of work this morning. She was still working on it, having actuallyhelpfulthoughts about romance novels, when a blue jay called overhead, raucous and bold, then flew like an arrow straight across her path. A rapid drumming that had to be a grouse flushed by the jay’s call came from her right, she caught a glimpse as it too evacuated the premises, and she forgot about the history of secretaries as stand-ins for the shifting view of women in the fifties. After that, she kicked on up the hill, got to the top, and turned around.
Lake, mountains, trees, snow. The lakeside properties, softened by white, blended into their surroundings, a few fireplaces sent up trails of white wood smoke, and she could almost imagine that she was looking down on the winter lodges of the earliest inhabitants, retreating to communal shelters for the dark, cold season, telling stories, weaving and mending, and enlivening the winter nights with jump dances.
Did the young ones long for each other back then, too? Did they look into a pair of eyes across the fire and wish for that one person with an intensity bordering on desperation? Probably. All those hormones—they were as old as humankind, and so was the desire to belong to somebody else and to have him belong to you.
