Long Summer Nights (14 page)

He didn’t wait for privacy or common courtesy; instead he wheeled around as soon as they were around the corner, backing her up against the wall. “Why didn’t you write the story?” She couldn’t believe this. He acted as if he was mad at her, as if he was the victim.

She kicked her foot at the brick, hard, needing to destroy something, and her toe was all that was handy. “That really grates on you, doesn’t it? You want so badly for me to write that slam job and destroy your life so you can stay hidden in the woods and feel sorry for yourself. I won’t. Tell me what bothers you more. That I’m not a bottom-feeder, or that you’d have to admit that you’re wrong?”

“I’m never wrong about people,” he insisted, and she wondered why it was so important for him to assume the worst.

“You’re always wrong about people. Get over it.”

A delivery man yelled at Aaron, wanting him to move. Ha. As if. He glared at the man, who wisely went around.

Then he turned to Jenn, his mouth tightening into a hard line and his eyes turning to ice. “You like to make me hurt, don’t you? Like to the take the knife and twist it, skewer me right in the heart.”

Jenn jabbed a finger in his chest, right where his heart should be. That hollow cavity that now contained her heart, which made her all the more angry, especially when he grabbed her finger and held it like he didn’t want to let go. “You don’t have a heart,” she insisted. “I know.”

He kept her hand, and the ice was gone from his eyes, the pain was back. “Why are you here?” she asked.

“To say I was sorry,” he said, and then shut his mouth as if he was done.

Oh, no, not in this lifetime. The man used words for a living. He won the goddamned Pulitzer for those words. He could do better than that.

“You’re here to say that Jenn is not a bottom-feeder, that she is a good person and cares enough about you not to hurt you. Isn’t that right?” she prompted.

“Yes. All that.”

“Are you going to let me keep putting words in your mouth?”

“Probably. I’ve missed you.” He raised her hand to his lips, kissed it once, and she hated the way her knees went weak.

“You missed the sex,” she said, needing to complain about something.

“Probably. When are you free?”

She wasn’t going to be free of him ever again, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. Not yet. He needed to earn his apology, and she wasn’t done. “Seven,” she said, pulling her hand away, retaining ownership of whatever body parts she could. Right now, the hand was the best she could do.

“We can go to dinner,” he stated, his mouth twisted in that impassive way, and he seemed stubborn and certain and detached from the world. But the eyes gave him away. The eyes warmed her heart. “I want a chocolate soufflé for dessert,” she demanded, needing to assert some level of control in this relationship, and dessert seemed a good place to start. “It’s got to be the best in Manhattan.”

“You can eat five.”

She laughed then, breathing for the first time in weeks. “Will you ever tell me no?”

“No.” Then he leaned over and kissed her, and it was better than chocolate, better than coffee, better than pride and self-respect. God, she loved him.

S
HE HAD CHOCOLATE SOUFFLÉ
from the Four Seasons. In bed. Jenn had never slept at the Seasons, although technically she hadn’t done that yet either. Of course Aaron had rented a suite. The décor was everything that the campground at Harmony Springs was not. There were live flowers and mountains of pillows and wooden furniture that you found at Sothebys instead of Ikea.

And you’d think that when eating chocolate soufflé and staying in the most decadent room she’d ever seen, she would want to indulge in this fleeting moment of grandeur. You’d be wrong. All she wanted to indulge in was Aaron.

He lay back against the down pillows, looking uncomfortable and cranky. It didn’t matter where he was, he never seemed to belong. His light blue eyes focused on her, and it touched her.

She’d missed him more than she had thought. Missed the scowling lines in his brow, missed the monosyllabic communications, and missed the feeling when he was moving inside her, and then, then…Jenn felt a sense of belonging that job security or chocolate could never bring.

The lights in the room were still blazing. She’d told him it was to admire the room. Actually, it was memorize him. She wanted to touch him and wanted to hold him, but he’d said so little to her and she had learned the hard way not to assume. So in absence of facts, the next best way to discover what she was dying to know was to interrogate.

She leaned over, regretfully moving the dessert. “What
finally did it? What finally got you into Manhattan? I mean, you could have delivered coffee forever.”

“I couldn’t kill you off anymore. I kept writing scenes. Love scenes. They weren’t good ones, either.”

“The work suffered?” she asked, sadistically pleased with the thought.

“I suffered. I kept thinking of you naked. My imagination wasn’t enough.”

“So what’s it like to win the Pulitzer at twenty-three?”

“I don’t remember. I was drunk. I spent a lot of time drunk.”

“But you don’t drink.”

“Not anymore.”

“Why did you quit?”

“I started drinking to fit the mold, to be more writerly. But at some point, it stopped being about the writing and more about the Scotch. That’s when I stopped.”

“Didi doesn’t know you’re still writing?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you tell her?”

Instead of answering, he looked at her plate. “Is that any good?”

She gave him a pass—for now—and took a bite of the dessert. “When are you going back?”

“In the morning.”

“Will you come back?”

“If you’ll let me,” he said, as if she could deny him. The silly man still hadn’t learned.

“You don’t have to buy me any more coffee.”

“You don’t like gifts?”

“I love gifts. But I’d rather have you than the coffee,”
she told him, admitting the truth. He’d taken a large step toward her, and she wanted to respond in kind. It seemed only fair.

T
HE CLOCK BY THE BED
said it was nearly four in the morning. Aaron thought she was sleeping, but he couldn’t. His eyes wouldn’t move from her, with her hand curled beneath her cheek, her breathing steady and sure. The night seemed shorter than he had thought it would be. He had convinced himself that one night of overindulging on her and the soul-destroying moment of being inside her would be enough to stop the dreams in his brain.

Diversions.

But a few short hours hadn’t eased the frustration. His fingers were itching again, not to write, but because he wanted to touch her.

He missed her, and he hated to admit that moment of human frailty. Aaron didn’t like being weak, didn’t like putting something else first. He was a writer, a haunting shadow of a human being. He wasn’t ordinary or simple, but she’d brought him lower than ordinary. She’d made him feel.

Feelings clouded his mind and made the world seem different.

As if she could feel the weight of his stare, her eyes flickered and opened, and although he should have felt guilty for waking her, he didn’t.

“How’s the job search?” he asked, racking his brain for some acceptable topic of conversation.

“Good. I have some leads. There’s a weekly paper up in Westchester that will let me freelance, and I’ve written some articles on coffee—the world inside a coffee shop, the indignity of the coffee trade—and the effects of climate change on the cosmetics market.”

“You’re better than that,” he said, worried because Jennifer should be reaching for more.

She looked at him, blinking the blur of sleep from her eyes. “I know, but thank you for saying it. I’ll be okay. I’m tougher than I look, and now I’m poochier, too.”

His hands moved over her, not writer’s hands, but a lover’s hands, but the compulsion to touch her was just as strong as his need to put down words on the page. Stronger. “I don’t think you’re very tough, and I don’t see any pooch,” he whispered, sliding down next to her, holding her, slipping a finger inside her. “Nothing here but a gentle softness and golden warmth. Nothing here but light.”

She met his mouth and rode his finger, until his hands weren’t enough. Silently he sank his cock inside here and she wrapped her arms around him. He had missed her, missed what she gave him. The world he lived in was a very dark place, but when she was surrounding him, all he could see was light. Golden, blissful light.

R
OXANNE AND
K
EVIN
K
ERSHNER
lived in Queens, amidst a long line of row houses and tidy backyards, the very picture of New York suburbia. Before Aaron paid the cabbie, he nearly ran from the sameness of the neighborhood. For a man endlessly educated on the evils of a cookie-cutter world, the redundancy was stifling. Yet today he had something to prove. To himself. To Jennifer.

Roxanne answered the door, and he was surprised at how she’d changed. Nine years ago, she’d been a party girl with peroxide hair and spiked heels. Now she had soft brown hair and pink satin slippers with a penguin on the toe.

“Aaron?”

“Surprise,” he managed awkwardly.

“Why are you here?”

“To see Kevin.”

Immediately her eyes turned cold—not that he blamed her, but it only reinforced his cowardly belief that this had been a mistake. Pages could be rewritten, but not history. History, especially the bad sort, was for keeps.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He nodded, choosing not to argue. “How is he?”

“Well.”

“How are you?”

“Well.”

“Good,” he answered.

“You should go,” she told him, and he almost left, but that wasn’t what Jennifer would do. Jennifer would stay. She would barrel her way forward until she got exactly what she wanted. All he had to do was to think like Jennifer.

“I’d like to talk.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about.”

“I want to know about him.” It felt strange to think about his son, to wonder if the boy looked like Aaron, or if he had his father’s imagination. Aaron had never allowed himself to venture that far into his own reality.

“It’s a bad time,” Roxanne explained with a quick, nervous smile.

Faced with Roxanne’s smart-minded resistance, Jennifer would argue. Aaron could argue. “I don’t think there’s a good time, Roxanne. Don’t make me go away. I won’t have the courage to come back.”

She stayed silent, hanging in the doorway, studying him, appraising his worth as father material. Eventually she nodded and let him in.

Their house was small and neat, filled with plastic toys and baseball gear and school pictures hanging in black plastic frames on the wall.

“You never married?” he asked, noticing the absence of another male.

“No. I gave up a lot with Kevin.”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized because he hadn’t meant to wreck her life. Twenty-three-year-old men—twenty-three-year-old men with the literary world at their feet—were not supposed to be self-sacrificing. His mother had sacrificed her life for his father. His father had sacrificed Aaron for writing. And up until this moment, Aaron had sacrificed his son. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

“Don’t be sorry for my choices. I’m not.” She pointed to the couch. Obediently Aaron sat, and she took the chair across from him.

“You grew up,” he told her. The Roxanne Kershner he had known before spent as much time drinking as he had, and had hung on his every word. “Have you?”

“I don’t know. Can I see him?” He looked at the image of the boy on the wall, noticed the dark eyes, the studious glasses, the light hair that matched Roxanne’s. There was nothing of Aaron in him, but that was probably a good thing.

“I told him about you.”

“I assumed you would. Fathers aren’t like Santa Claus. Their existence can’t be rationalized away as a child gets older. How much did you tell him?”

“The truth. All of it.”

“I suppose there was no reason to whitewash it.”

“No.” They stayed silent for a long time, and Aaron wanted to ask more. He wanted to know how many times the boy had mentioned him. He wanted to know if the boy hated his guts. He wanted to know thousands of details, things he had missed, but he didn’t ask. Instead he folded his hands in his lap and assumed the same pose that he
had assumed forever. Cool detachment. A man unmoved by life.

“You want to meet him?” Roxanne eventually asked, perhaps sensing that he wasn’t going to move from her couch.

“I don’t want him growing up thinking that I never cared enough to try.” Aaron’s father had never cared enough. Kevin Kershner didn’t deserve that heritage.

“All right.” Roxanne rubbed her palms on her jeans, and then left the room. Quiet voices leaked through the thin walls, and after an unsettling wait, mother and son returned. Roxanne hovered close to the boy, protective hands on his shoulders, as if Aaron could hurt him.

“Kevin. This is Aaron Barksdale,” she introduced, as if Aaron was a stranger, because—of course—he was.

The boy stared at him, detached. Then he looked up at his mother, and asked, “Are we done?”

Aaron wasn’t surprised. He knew the tone, the posture. The boy had a shell that was nearly as hard as his own. Aaron wasn’t going to make this more difficult than it had to be, but he wanted him to know that the blame rested on Aaron’s shoulders, not his.

“I wanted to see you. To know you.”

“Too late,” Kevin replied, his black eyes a fathomless pit.

“How is school?”

“We’re out for the summer.”

“Oh. Of course. Do you like it?”

“Science is okay. English sucks. I’m good at math. Mom says I get that from my father.”

Surprised, he looked at Roxanne, noticed the way she ducked his eyes, and tucked the information away. “I hated science.”

“Are we done?” his son asked, dismissing him.

Jennifer never let herself be dismissed, he reminded himself, and tried again. “I’d like to come see you again. I won’t bother you or try to intrude on your life or try to make you my friend, but I would like to know you. And I’d like you to know me.”