Long Summer Nights (18 page)

“I’m sorry,” she told him, and he could see the guilt in her eyes, and the pain that she felt for him.

“If you knew this, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t my place,” she lied, and he knew she was lying because she knew it was her place. He knew it was her place. And Jennifer, the woman who had never been unable to express herself, the woman
who put her heart out on the table for anyone who wanted to feast upon it, was suddenly making excuses for not telling him the truth.

“Then whose place is it? The newspapers’, my father’s, some stranger’s on the street?” His voice was growing louder, a marvelous imitation of a man in a high fit of rage, and he wanted her to hurt as badly as he did. Aaron had never liked to hurt, and she had almost convinced him that he wouldn’t have to hurt anymore, but that, like so much of her world, was a lie. A big fat lie, and it was one that he almost believed…because he loved her.

J
ENNIFER HAD NEVER
seen him angry, never seen his eyes blaze as if they were lit from within, and right now those blazes were directed at her—the innocent bystander, the plucky cheerleader, the woman who had known exactly who much this was going to hurt.

Damn Didi for making Jenn do the dirty work.

“I know this hurts. I’m sorry,” she offered, wishing that there were better words, some magic formula to make him whole.

“I trusted you,” he yelled, his hands balled into fists, and he stood there, with the ocean in the distance, the holiday traffic buzzing by, and yelled at her about trust.

Calmly she kept her eyes focused on the road, the sparkles of the sand, anything but the rage in his eyes. He was hurt, lashing out at whatever was near. She couldn’t take this personally. “I’m not the one who betrayed your trust,” she pointed out quite logically. “You need to take this up with Didi.”

“I don’t care about Didi. This is about you. We don’t have secrets, Jennifer. I thought you knew that. I thought you were honest with me.”

We don’t have secrets?
It was at that point that she lost
some of the rational calmness, because she had spent the entire summer telling herself that he needed space and time to grow. Time to trust her. But now? Oh, no, now she was the villain in the piece, the one who was the roadblock on the great relationship in his life—the one that he wanted all along? It was at that point that she got into his face and jabbed a finger into his chest.

“Trusted me? You’ve been living in the apartment above me and you haven’t bothered to let me in on that little secret. You didn’t tell me your real name until you didn’t think you would see me again. If you want honesty, if you want that sort of communication, you have to open yourself up to it.”

He grew quiet, his eyes cooler, and she knew the thought processes were starting up again. “How long have you known?”

Jenn waited, not wanting to answer this.

“How long?” he repeated, wanting her to answer this.

“Since July,” she muttered, digging her sandals into the sand, wishing it was her head.

“You should have told me.”

“Didi should have told you,” she insisted.

“Didi isn’t you,” he said, and she knew why he was mad at her. She even understood why he felt betrayed. But betrayal involves attachment, involves commitment, involves emotions and dammit, if she was going to go down for this one, she was going to have earned it. She wanted him to say it. She wanted him to see why it mattered.

“Why is that so important, Aaron? Why am I different? Or is this just another ‘let’s blame it on the world’ vendetta, where the entire apocalypse falls down on Aaron, who is left to wander the trials of civilization alone. You want the world that fits in with your misogynistic ways because it’s easier than having to love and feel and hurt. I’m sorry your
father was a bastard, but he was, and that ship has sailed. Everything now is just on you.”

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” he asked quietly.

“I love you.”

There. It was out. He didn’t want secrets? Ha. No secrets anymore. Carefully she looked at him, looked to the very heart of him, waiting for him to respond in kind.

“That’s no answer to the question I asked,” he told her, but it was an answer to the unspoken question that she had asked.

Do you love me?

I won’t admit it.

“That’s all you’re going to say?” she asked, giving him another chance, praying desperately that he could do this.

He stuffed his hands into his jeans and met her eyes, and she could see the nerves there, see all the old scars bubbling above the surface. “What do you want from me?”

“You love me, Aaron. Why don’t you admit it?”

Stubbornly he shook his head. “I don’t.”

“You’re lying.”

“No,” he told her, lying to the end, and Jenn quit trying to heal a shipwrecked heart. She couldn’t take the pain.

She wiped at her eyes, furious at the tears, furious that he could sit there calm, composed, and she needed to fall apart, but maybe that had been the problem all along.

“I thought you were better than this. I thought you wanted to be better than this, but apparently I was deluding myself just like you said. Imagine that. For once you were right. Get out of my life, Aaron, because I deserve someone better than that.”

I
NSTEAD OF LISTENING TO
lectures from Natalie, or indulging in a multitude of vices with Martina, Jenn chose to go
home. Not to her apartment, but to her parents’. Yes, there would be lectures, but she needed to hear them. She needed to have her mother’s words ringing in her ears so that she could summon up relief rather than pain.

When she came through the door, her mother knew something was wrong, and she didn’t give her lectures. Not this time. Instead she folded her up in her arms and held her, and for a long time Jennifer cried, because it was one thing to be unloved by Aaron Barksdale, but it was another, more painful thing to know that he loved you, but would never, ever know it.

A
ARON STARTED AT A BAR.
He ordered a glass of Red Label. Neat. And he almost drank from the well. He wanted something to restore his equilibrium. Something that would keep all the emotions at bay. But alcohol wasn’t it.

In the end, he packed up his cat and his typewriter, and took the train back to Harmony Springs.

There was only one thing to keep him sane.

His writing.

I
T WAS ANOTHER THREE
weeks before she heard the sounds of a typewriter being misused from the apartment above her. It surprised her because she thought that Aaron would not come back, and she had taught her heart how not to hurt so much. Not really. The pain was still there, the knowledge that he didn’t want the sort of happy life dreams that she did. But there were the sounds of his writing, the sounds of one typewriter, suffering under the fiery whiplash of his hands. She tried not to smile. She told herself not to race upstairs, that he would come see her when he was ready. Possibly another three weeks, and she listened to the music of his work, the carnival calliope of the tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-ding, and she let herself smile.

Maybe.

It took him seven days before he knocked on her door. Natalie answered, looked at Jenn—who had gained seven pounds after the breakup—with concern, but Jenn knew it would be okay. He took her hand and took her upstairs, and opened the door to his apartment, and let her inside.

It was large and sparsely furnished and would need serious decorator attention, but it wasn’t the place that drew her. It was the man.

Wisely she crossed her arms over her chest, her mouth cemented shut, and waited for him to speak. Eventually he did.

“I couldn’t stay away from you. I thought about drinking. Thought that if drowned myself in a river of Scotch, I could forget you. But I knew it wouldn’t be enough. There’s not enough Scotch in the world to do that. There’s nothing that could make me forget you. Even if you wrote that article, even if you destroyed me, I’d still want you. I’d still dream of you. I hate myself for that. I want to hate you, but I can’t. I want to blame you for everything that hurts me. I want to block you from my mind, but I can’t.” He looked pale, his eyes red-rimmed and fierce, glowing like embers in his face. “Why do you stay with me?”

She uncrossed her arms, uncemented her mouth, and unlocked her heart. He could do that so easily. “You don’t know, do you? It’s not even in your realm of consciousness that someone could love you.”

“I’m a vile person, and I don’t play well with others,” he answered without a shred of doubt, and it surprised her that he could be so unaware.

The vile cat mewed from the top of the refrigerator, probably to tell Aaron that he was wrong. “You have a heart the size of the Matterhorn. It is icy and slippery and a person could die from it, but it’s there. And it’s very big.”

He still looked at her skeptically, but she could see that icy heart melting in his eyes. “How can you love me?”

Aaron seemed to have problems with that concept, the idea that he could be loved. And perhaps that explained his disbelief in love. He’d grown up without the love of his father, with only a ghost of his mother. The people who were supposed to love him never did. To a child’s mind, it was better that love didn’t exist than to believe there was something unloveable within them.

Finally she walked to him and put a hand on his chest, feeling the erratic beat, the tense rhythms within him. “You have a large heart and you do great things for other people, growling and snapping the whole time, as if it makes you miserable.”

“It does make me miserable,” he insisted, stubborn to the core.

“Is it so hard to be loved, Aaron?” she whispered.

He stroked her hair, cupping her cheek. “I like it better when you yell at me and call me names. And then all I can think about is ripping off your clothes. Getting you naked.”

“Then I think we’ll always have to fight,” she told him, locking her hands over his, keeping him there.

“You’ll always be with me?”

“As long as you need me,” she promised.

“That’ll be forever.”

That night Jennifer slept in his arms, and in the darkest part of night, in the darkest corner of his mind, Aaron knew he loved her, and his love wasn’t the nice sort that you would ever read in a gilt book of poems. It was a violent and selfish beast that skulked through the world with dark claws and the fires of pain in its eyes. He would destroy any man who hurt her, who touched her, who dared tried to steal her away, because she was his and his alone. He didn’t understand why her eyes looked on him with that miraculous softness. He didn’t understand why one moment she would curse him and the next she could stroke his hair. He didn’t understand these things—they puzzled him. They worried him.

But he knew he would die if she ever stopped.

T
HE NEXT DAY WAS
T
UESDAY,
the September sun was spitting mad, and he met Didi in the lobby of the
New York
Times.
She was dressed in her best red suit. The one that didn’t show blood.

“You love her.”

“Yes,” he admitted, because Didi knew him, she knew what he was and what he wasn’t. She didn’t expect him to be good and noble and selfless and all those other things that were considered admirable. Jenn saw him through her love-struck glasses, but she was determined to wear them, and he prayed that she’d never take them off.

“This terrifies you?”

“
Eviscerate
is the more accurate word. Perhaps
exsanguinate,
leeching all the blood and human life from my body. She carries my heart, my soul, and she leads my cock on a short chain.”

“That is good. That is the love that will last. And does she love you? What am I saying? Of course she does. She lives with you, subjects herself to the lash of your tongue, endures the tsunami of your ego. It’s either love or dementia, and she seems very sound.”

“You like her?” That was the thing. Jenn was so very likeable. She was nice and funny and people liked being near her. But he didn’t worry what the rest of the world thought, only Didi. He needed Didi to like her. He needed Didi to approve, because he had done very few good things in his life. Actually there was only one. Jenn was his first. Barring a partial lobotomy, or a personality-altering brain injury, she would most likely be his last.

Didi laughed at him, but not in a bad way. “What does my opinion matter? You will do as you will. If I said I hated her, would you leave her? No. If I said I liked her, would you marry her? No. I am merely a fastidious old woman who wants to live a life of leisure without the pain and agony of dealing with responsibility.”

“We’ll go to France.”

“Why would we want to go to France? There are French people there, with their French ways and their French food. As if they are the center of the world.”

“The Caribbean? Warm beach, turquoise waters the exact color of the curtains at Le Cirque?”

“Please. It is like being transported to the Dark Ages. Have you listened to the endless singing, and besides, I’m allergic to coconut.”

“We should do something together. A vacation. I want you to know Jenn. I want you to love her. I want to make you happy. I haven’t done that enough.” It was a shameless bribe because he wanted to keep Didi in his life. If she wasn’t his agent, maybe she would be his friend.

“I cannot be happy. You are not a man for vacation. We must embrace who we are honestly, without vapid sentimentality.”

“I could be a man for vacation. People do that. They talk and live together. They watch television in dark rooms without talking or seething in quiet misery. We’ll take a vacation. Where do you want to go? Anywhere.”

“Anywhere?”

“Anywhere. Prague. The Alps. Paris. You love French cuisine.”

“It gives me heartburn. I shall stay in New York. And perhaps I will take up skydiving or learn to knit. If you want to take me somewhere, then we’ll dine at Michaels so that people can see I’m not wheezing at death’s door. Already they are calling with their quiet questioning voice. Asking how are things as if I can’t peer into their dark and greedy hearts. They are waiting for me to leave this business so that they can court you and woo you and seduce you with their promiscuous agenting ways. You must be smart. You must choose wisely. Lawrence Price is good. John Beck will be fair, but he will not coddle you, and it
will make you angry. Then you will kill him, and do you know the first that the courts throw the book at? The writers. Clarissa Spencer is a well-trained puppy who will roll over at the first sign of trouble. You will always be trouble. Clarissa would be bad.”

The receptionist in the lobby walked over, her smile polite and untouchable.

“Mr. Barksdale? Ms. Ziegler? Mr. Kingsley will see you now.”

Together they walked upstairs, and Aaron reminded himself that he wasn’t nervous, but it surprised him that he wasn’t. This was going to be right. He was going to make it right.

The office was nearly overflowing with paper, newspapers, magazines and books, and Quinn Kingsley, the man who had laid off Jennifer, looked at both of them and smiled quickly, the trademarked expression of a man who lives his life on a deadline.

Aaron respected the whip of the deadline and got right down to business.

“I never liked this paper. You’re a group of political hacks who couldn’t investigate your own asses because the stench would offend the sensibilities. I don’t know why Jennifer would choose to write here, but she does. You’ll hire her back now. She won’t know of this meeting. If she does, I’ll make sure you wife knows about the hot little number at the city desk and the used condom in your trash. In return for Jenn’s continued employment, you get me and my books. An exclusive peek at the books. An exclusive on my life. The good. The bad. The things that people don’t know and always whispered about when they thought I couldn’t hear. It will be raw and unflinching, and your readers will be thrilled with my own downfall.”

“Why didn’t you write an autobiography?” asked Quinn,
clearly intrigued, but not willing to commit. Not yet. Aaron knew the type.

“Autobiographies should not be a cautionary tale. They’re about war heroes or presidents. People whose life is worth the price of a hardcover. I don’t want to make money from all the mistakes that I’ve made. I only want Jennifer to have her job back.”

Didi, who never smoked, lit up a cigarette as she sat down, took a long drag and then put it out on his desk. Quinn’s eyes narrowed, but he refrained from cleaning up the mess. Aaron noticed the overflowing trash can and realized that restraint didn’t spill over into all the areas of his life. It was exactly as Jennifer said, and Aaron smiled his crocodile smile.

Quinn picked up a pen and pretended to take notes. “What’s the pub date?”

“April,” answered Didi. “You’ll run the piece a month before the book is out.”

“What if the book is crap?” he asked, and Didi gasped, but Aaron stepped in to answer.

“Your paper has descended into crap, people still buy it. Oh. They don’t. No matter, my book is not crap.”

“Let me think about it,” the man quibbled as if he suddenly had all the time in the world.

Then Didi snapped her fingers, and rose to leave. “This is tedious. You make us beg as if we were the downtrodden serfs. We will go to Los Angeles. I yearn for the sun, the air, the people who know when to fawn and bow. The
Times
will not be so bold. Or
People
magazine, although I don’t know that I want to see your picture on some drugstore rack, beside the World’s Sexiest Man. Do you like Oprah, Aaron? Perhaps Oprah. I do not know. She should have more style, don’t you think? All that wealth, and she dresses like a Frau.”

Aaron followed her, heading for the door.

Three.

Two.

One.

“Wait.”

Didi didn’t stop. “Open the door, dahling. Did you hear a voice? I don’t think that was a voice. I heard no apology. Perhaps it was a hunger-induced psychosis, hearing tiny voices that do not exist. So, where should we go for lunch? I’m thinking skewered quail, smothered in a tasty oyster cream sauce. Something to make my taste buds sing.”

“I’m sorry. Of course we’d love to have the first look at Mr. Barksdale’s book.”

Didi turned and smiled, showing great teeth, and ten minutes later, the negotiations were done.

“Do you know I love you, Didi?” he told her, practicing as they walked out the glass door of the building, into the bustle of the streets, the noise, the chaos, the life that was New York. Aaron began to smile.

“You are growing soft and maudlin. I am starting to feel old, and you feel the need to spout pithy platitudes that are designed to make me feel comfortable before my retirement. We will discuss it no longer.”

That said, she knocked aside a suit and stole the nearest cab. Aaron shrugged at the man apologetically, but it was the evolution of the city. Only the strong survive.

Like Jenn.

Like Aaron.

This time he grinned. Definitely grinned.