Page 39 of Second Act
“Jess, I wish I could go back and unsay all the terrible words I threw at you. All I can do is assure you that they weren’t true and I didn’t believe them even then. I should have apologized when it would have meant something.”
“It means something now,” Jessica said. “More than you can imagine.” She still carried the scars from some of the ways he’d made her feel wrong. It helped to know that maybe she wasn’t.
“I wish...” He pulled his hands out of his pockets and made a tiny gesture of futility. “I know too much time has gone by.” His mouth twisted into a travesty of a smile. “The one thing I could repair was your wall.”
“You’ve repaired some other things, too,” Jessica said, her voice wavering slightly.
He pressed a kiss on her forehead, his lips warm and gentle. “You were always a better person than I am.” Then he was out the front door in three strides.
Jessica touched her forehead, still feeling the brush of his mouth on her skin.
Hugh accepted the bottle of imported beer from Gavin Miller and went back to staring out the window into his friend’s Manhattan garden. “I shouldn’t have gone there without her permission,” he said.
“Probably not,” Gavin said agreeably from somewhere behind him.
Hugh took a swig of the beer and watched a pigeon pecking at the flagstone terrace two floors below him. “I fully intended to be gone before Jess got home.”
“Yet you stayed. I wonder what that could mean.” Gavin’s tone was sardonic.
“It meant that I wanted to finish the job.” Hugh pivoted to see his friend sprawled on the leather sectional sofa, his long legs crossed atthe ankles as he drank his own beer. “I wanted to give her something that I couldn’t just buy.” He lifted the bottle and his other hand. “To get my hands dirty.”
“Well, according to our housekeeper, you also did a fine job of getting your clothes dirty,” Gavin said.
Hugh chuckled. “Ludmilla practically ripped my filthy clothes off my body so she could wash them right away.”
“Gavin—Hugh! I didn’t know you were here,” Gavin’s wife, Allie, smiled as she walked into the room, her bright red ponytail swinging with every step. “I hope you’ve come back to stay with us.”
“Hugh’s just like a college kid.” Gavin tilted his head back to look up at his wife. “He only comes to our house to drink our liquor and do his laundry before he departs again.”
People often commented that Hugh and Gavin could be brothers, and they indeed shared the same dark hair, height, and build. But Hugh knew it wasn’t their features that struck people as similar; it was the stark, almost harsh angles that cast shadows on their faces. They’d both grown up without love in their younger lives, and it showed in the depths of their eyes and the set of their jaws. Yet when Gavin’s gaze rested on his wife, all the lines and edges of his countenance seemed to blur with tenderness.
Allie sent a smile across the room toward Hugh. “Your laundry will just add to the value of our house if we ever decide to sell it.”
“It doesn’t have quite the cachet of ‘George Washington slept here,’ I’m afraid,” Hugh said.
“Well, I’d rather have you than boring old George,” Allie said. “I wish I could hang around and talk, but I have a patient to see.”
Hugh raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know physical therapists worked such late hours.”
“My patient is a very prominent person with a very demanding schedule,” Allie said. “I try to be accommodating.”
He noticed she wouldn’t even offer a pronoun to indicate the patient’s gender, such was her concern for confidentiality. He wished he had more people with Allie’s discretion in his own life. “Your patient is very fortunate.”
“Damn straight,” Gavin said. “Will you call me when you’re headed home, sprite?”
Hugh found Gavin’s nickname for Allie odd. She seemed a woman with her feet firmly on the ground, not some wispy, airy imp. In fact, she reminded him of Jessica. Both were healers to their core with a warmth and vitality that somehow got transmitted to their patients.
“Always,” she said, her voice sounding like a caress. When she leaned down to give her husband a kiss on the cheek, Gavin turned his head so her lips met his. Hugh knew it surprised Allie, because he saw her eyes widen and then flutter closed when her husband put his hand on the back of her head to hold her there longer.
When Allie straightened, her redhead’s complexion betrayed her feelings with a flush of pink.
Hugh cleared his throat in an overly dramatic way just to bother Gavin.
The writer grinned at him. “And that is how to kiss your wife properly.”
Allie’s cheeks burned an even brighter rose, but she put one hand on her hip and struck a sassy pose. “He thinks that will keep me from falling in love with one of my patients the way I did with him. It’s kind of like that old saying about when a man marries his mistress, he creates a job opening.”
Hugh barked out a laugh. “I’m so glad you agreed to marry Gavin.”
