Cabin Fever (17 page)

“No, just the bread.”

He flips the buttered slice onto a plate and shows it to me. “Garlic bread, Oliver style.”

I lift it from the plate and take a bite. “Nice,” I say, my mouth full of garlicky goodness.

“I do it diner-style, basically. Like it was done on a griddle.”

“I’ll bet you’re good with a pancake,” I say, before I realize it sounds like flirting again.

“You don’t even want to know. Pancakes are my specialty. You’ll gain five pounds in one meal.”

I look down at my stomach, regretting the fact that I probably shouldn’t indulge in these famous pancakes of his anytime soon. I’m pushing maximum density as it is.

“Not that I’m saying you can’t stand to gain a few pounds.” He’s looking at me, obviously concerned he’s said something he shouldn’t have.

I grin, not ready to let him off the hook yet. “Nice try.”

Ack! More flirting!
I really need to stop.

“Seriously, you’re not fat. You’re thin. You’re beautiful, I promise.”

“Beautiful?” I look up at my bangs that I know are flying north, south, east and west.

“You’re suffering from a little bedhead, but that’s nothing a brush can’t fix, right?”

I act like I’m going to throw the rest of my bread at him and he ducks, but I don’t want to waste it. It is pretty good, this diner-style garlic bread. I drop the last bit on the floor for my faithful hound who’s sitting at my feet. He gobbles it up before it even hits the floor.

I’m supposed to be apologizing to Jeremy for my earlier mean-girl act, but now it feels like it would turn the atmosphere awkward, so I put that plan on hold.

What I really want to know is how he’s maintained such an amazing body when there’s no gym anywhere around here. His back is practically twice the width of mine and his arms are as big around as my thighs, well muscled with veins showing everywhere. But I know what kind of trouble that question would get me in, so I stay with the boring conversation topics.

“So, where’d you learn to cook spaghetti?” I ask, working hard at keeping the conversation going and on neutral, non-sexy ground.

“My wife. Laura. It was a family tradition. We used to do it every weekend, on Sunday. Everyone would come to our house and Laura would serve it up. My sister would bring the garlic bread and my brother would bring the wine.” Hearing him call Laura his wife, like she’s still alive, makes me sad again. And jealous. I want someone to feel that way about me. Someone who would want to keep my memory alive long after I’m gone. Laura was one lucky girl.

“Sounds awesome,” I say. I imagine doing weekly spaghetti dinners with a family, alongside a man I love. I could totally get into that scene. I picture Jeremy and Cassie and his siblings and my friend Leah.

When I realize I’m imagining myself as Jeremy’s plus-one, I quickly pull my head out of that fantasy and change the subject.

“So, what do you do for a living?”

He shrugs. “Not much.”

“How are you surviving out here if you don’t have a job?”

“I have money. Why?” He looks over his shoulder at me and grins. “You worried about me?”

“Maybe a little. I know your family tried to track you down and couldn’t find a trace anywhere.”

“That’s how I wanted it.”

“But you must be using credit cards or something.”

“Nope. Just cash. When I run out, I go back to Manhattan and pull some out. No big deal. I don’t live large or anything. The electricity bill is practically nothing, and I live on burgers and fries pretty much.”

“That’s horrible for your health.”

“Not something I cared about for a long time.”

“You said ‘Cared.’ Past tense?”

He shrugs but doesn’t answer.

I get a shiver of happiness when I imagine it might have something to do with me being here, with my influence. But then just as quickly I slap myself down. Could I have a bigger ego? I don’t think so. So what’s the reason for the use of past tense? Why does he care now? I’m burning to know, but I don’t want to seem desperate. Better to stick to less personal questions.

“Did you work when Laura was alive?”

“Yes. We rehabbed brownstones and apartments in Manhattan and flipped them. She was the designer and the general contractor, and I worked with various sub-contractors doing different things, like finish-carpentry, drywall, some plumbing and electrical.”

“Sounds like you were a great team.”

“We were. In pretty much every way.”

I can’t think of what to say to that. All I can imagine is what it might feel like to be so in love with someone, so perfectly matched, and then have it all disappear in a single moment when your back is turned. I try to picture what that day was like for him — the day he got the news that his wife was gone. But I can’t. Nothing in my life could have been even remotely devastating. My morbid curiosity gets the better of me and I speak before I think.

“What happened the day she died?”

Asking that question puts me squarely in the role of Asshole of the Year, but it was out of my mouth and in the air between us, so he either had to answer or completely ignore me. I’ve gotten the impression over these past couple days that Jeremy has manners and he feels bad when he doesn’t use the good ones, so I prepare myself for what I expect to be a very sad answer.

He faces the stove as he speaks. “We were working a job. A renovation on the Upper East Side. One of the subs ran out of material. Drywall tape, if my memory isn’t totally shot. I was going to go get it, but I was up to my elbows in soldering, just finishing up the installation of a sink in the kitchen. Laura said she’d go, and I just grunted. I was angry at the stupid pipes, if you can believe that. I wasn’t even thinking about my 9-month-pregnant wife having to go out in the rain to get something as stupid as drywall tape. I remember I didn’t even stick my head out to give her a kiss goodbye.” His shoulders move as he stirs a pot of what I assume is sauce. “That was something we always did. We never parted without a kiss. I think that was the first and only time it happened.”

“Superstition?” I ask.

“No. Maybe kind of. It’s just that Laura was always saying you never know when it will be your time to go.” He sighs and stops stirring, his hand just hovering over the stove. “I used to go along with her silly ideas, kissing her before she left every time, knocking on wood when I said certain words like cancer or HIV, whatever; but I never believed in that stuff the way she did. I never thought God would take her away so young. We were doing everything right. We were good people. We gave to charity and treated people the way we wanted to be treated. We were playing by the rules, but we still lost.” He shakes his head and hisses as he stirs the pasta in boiling water. “She was convinced she was going to leave earlier than the rest of us, and I was convinced she was crazy to even think it.”

The goosebumps are back, and I have the strangest desire to look over my shoulder. But I don’t, because I don’t believe in ghosts, and even if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go looking for one.

I try to think of something supportive to say, but my brain draws a blank. Again, I just let the words fly out. “So, to sum everything up, it was basically the worst day of your entire life.”

“Yes. Easily, it was the worst day of my life. The death of my parents was bad, but nothing like the day Laura left me.”

The room has gone so dark with his sad memories, I can’t stand it anymore. I have to lighten things up.

“So what are your plans now?”

Jeremy puts two bowls down on the island counter and then strains the water from the pasta in the sink.
 
“What do you mean?” He comes over and puts half the noodles in one bowl and the other half in the second.

“I mean, what are you going to do with your life now? You’ve been in solitary confinement, mourning for around nine months, but you have to come back to the real world eventually. So what’s the plan for that?”

He pours sauce over both bowls of pasta, hissing when some of it splashes up and hits his bare hand. I try not to stare as he puts his mouth to his skin and sucks on it, but it’s impossible not to. I can picture those lips on mine so clearly.

I squirm in my chair, uncomfortable with the fact that my brain can talk about his tragedy at the same time it’s fantasizing about being naked with him. What is wrong with me? What kind of sex-monster am I?

“Says who?” he asks, jerking me out of my troubled thoughts.

I have to think for a second about what I asked.
Oh, yeah. Plans for the rest of his life.

“Says everyone who cares about you. Says your own common sense. Says your survival instinct.”

“I’m surviving out here.” He pushes a bowl in my direction and hands me a fork, smiling for the first time since I started this conversation.

I take the fork from him, nearly having a heart attack when our fingers touch and another spark flies out into the air between us.

I literally try to laugh my reaction to his touch off, acting like he’s a comedian. “Ha-ha! You call that surviving? If I hadn’t thrown the booze out into the snow, your liver would be getting pickled right now.”

He doesn’t say anything to that; he just digs into his spaghetti, feeding himself a bite big enough for a St. Bernard.

We eat in silence for a while before he talks again.

“I guess my plan up until now has been to just forget.”

“And now?”

He shrugs. The air between us is positively electric. I’m holding my breath.

“I dunno. Maybe I should make a plan.”

I point at him with my fork. “You should! Absolutely. That’s what I did.”

He looks up. “You made a plan? When? Last night?”

“No, silly, a couple months ago.” Has it only been that long? It feels like it was a year ago that I made that fateful decision to end my lease. And ended up here with this gorgeous man, snowed-in together in his cabin.

Deep breath. Just relax.

I look up and recognize his curious expression and realize that I’ve said too much. He’s going to want an explanation now and I can hardly refuse him, especially since he’s revealed so much about his life and his past.

I chew my lip, nervous about where this conversation is going to go next.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“TELL ME ABOUT IT,” JEREMY says. “This big plan of yours.” He winks at me to take the sting out of his mocking tone.

I twirl some pasta around my fork, wishing the conversation weren’t about me. “This is great spaghetti, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

Silence. I keep eating, hoping he’ll come up with something more interesting to talk about.

“So?” he prompts. “You made a plan?”

“It’s no big deal. I just … decided to make a change in my life.”

“A change from what?”

I look up, expecting to see a smile, but instead I see genuine concern. It makes me go warm inside and loosens my tongue.

“I was teaching art classes at a high school for several years, but I just got to the point where I wasn’t into it anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” I push pasta around in my dish. “Maybe I’m not a good teacher. My students seemed happy enough, but I stopped painting in my free time.”

“That’s not good.”

He says it like he understands, and it fires me up, reminding me of the reasons why I’m out here in the middle of nowhere with no snowplows. It was a good reason, and I need to stop second-guessing myself.

“No, you’re right, it wasn’t good at all. I’d been painting since I was in grade school, and then I just stopped.” I shrug. “I hit a wall. I couldn’t do it anymore. My creativity dried up and my muse left me.”

“Wow. You’ve been painting since you were that young?”

I smile at some memories flitting across my mind. “My parents decided I was a prodigy when my classmates were drawing stick figures and I was drawing self-portraits in crayon on the walls using the bathroom mirror to see myself.”

When he laughs, my head jerks up and I catch him looking genuinely happy for the first time since I met him. His eyes crinkle at the corners and his grin reveals beautiful teeth that could be featured in a dentist’s ad.

“You drew your face on the wall?” he says.

I nod. “Yep. I covered every wall in the house with my work. My parents finally got me private lessons to try and curb my juvenile delinquency a little.”

“Did it work?”

“Nope. I just made better drawings on the wall than I was making before.”

“Classic. I wish I could have seen that.”

“Oh, you can if you want.” I think of the stack of binders I boxed up and put in storage. “My mother took pictures of every one of them and put them in photo albums. She documented my progress as an artist all the way through college.”

“Wow, that’s awesome. I wish I had done that. With my marriage, I mean. Then I’d have something to look at when I start to forget.”

“I thought you were trying to forget,” I say softly.

“Not everything.” He grabs more pasta onto his fork, but his mood isn’t as dark as I expected it to be, considering the subject matter.

“What parts do you want to remember?”

He swallows his food and points a fork at me. “No fair changing the subject. We’re talking about you now.”

“Just answer that one question,” I beg. I’d much rather talk about him than me.

“Which parts do I want to remember?” He lets out a long sigh and stares off into the distance. “I’d like to remember everything and nothing.” He moves his head and his gaze locks onto mine. “Obviously I’m a fucked up individual.”

“No, not fucked up. At least not for that reason. I know exactly what you mean.”

“You do? Well explain it to me, because I don’t.”

“You want to remember everything because it was so wonderful, but you want to forget it all too because it hurts so much that it got taken away. Sometimes you must think to yourself that you would have been better off never having met Laura. That’s got to be totally depressing in and of itself.”

His hands rest limply on the counter as he looks at me. He chews very slowly. We’re staring at each other so intensely, I finally have to look away. I focus on the fridge behind him instead. After a few seconds, I look at him again.