Long Summer Nights (19 page)
Read Long Summer Nights Online
Authors: Kathleen O'Reilly
Tags: #Romance: Modern, #Contemporary, #General, #Romance, #Romance - Contemporary, #Fiction, #Fiction - Romance
“I
T WASN’T SUPPOSED
to end this way. The world was supposed to implode upon itself, a punishment for the sins that the firmament had been forced to endure. The sky had been expected to glow black and empty. The seers had told of seas rising to great heights, a giant mouth to swallow mankind and destroy the poison forever.
“Cain emerged from the hollow in the ground, and was surprised by the sun, by the fiery yellow ball that still hung in the sky, and his skin was warm under its blanket of light.”
Aaron sat back in his chair and frowned, ready to rip out the paper and start anew, but he kept rereading the words, and deep in his gut, that merciless critic that never sat silent, the critic…
liked it?
Who was he fooling? It blew great chunks of sugary cheese, coating his fictional world in a pink cobweb of Utopian joy. Ew.
Yet like the car wreck with the mangled bodies and the screams of agonized pain, he couldn’t look away.
That couldn’t be right.
Thankfully, before he was forced to endure further literary analysis of the destruction of his creative brain,
he heard the knock at the door, checked his watch, and realized that Jennifer had left work early. He pushed at the typewriter and winked at Two, who only stared back blindly.
Two was still loyal to the code of discontent, but Aaron was slowly, joyfully abandoning it.
Jenn walked in, her mouth pulled into that nervous line that never meant good, and he steeled himself for pain.
“I turned down the job this morning,” she told him, and he nodded stupidly. It was done. They were over. He had given her the last thing that he could, and she had turned it down.
THE END.
He walked to the typewriter, pulled out the sheet of shit and tore it into long strips that he tossed to the floor like a losing lottery ticket. “Okay, if that’s what you want to do.”
“I changed my mind,” she began to explain, and he held up his hand, because he didn’t need to hear anymore.
“Whatever you need to do is fine,” he told her, but she chose to ignore his words and carried on, and he realized he was going to have to stand here and listen, when all he wanted to do was run.
“I talked to my mom. I told her that it was time that I didn’t worry so much about security, that I didn’t worry about appearances. I wanted to be happy. The thought of working at the
Times
doesn’t make me happy anymore.”
“I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry.”
She walked to him and touched him, and he wished she wouldn’t touch him right now because it made him soft and pliable and…hopeful. “It was lovely what you did, but I don’t want a bought job.”
“
Extortion
is probably the better word,” he said, beginning to breathe again because apparently she wasn’t
breaking up with him—she’d only turned down the job at the
Times.
He stared at the trash on the floor, and wondered if he could piece it back together.
“I’m going to freelance for a while. I’m going to work at Starbucks for a while. I’m going to be happy for a while.”
“I can support you.”
“Yes, you could support two hundred of me, but I don’t need your money nor do I want your money.”
“Except for desserts?”
She laughed then, and it was musical, like what heaven must be. “Except for that. I wanted to tell you. I didn’t want you to think the wrong thing.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he lied, and watched her walk toward the door.
She turned and smiled at him. “I love you.” Then she turned again, ready to leave, not expecting anything from him at all.
Aaron swallowed the stone in his throat. “I love you, too.”
She stopped, but didn’t look at him, not yet. She was disbelieving the words, her brain hearing the foreign sound, running on the synanpses of the brain that had not been formed. Until now. He understood that disbelief, that self-doubt, but Jenn was much smarter than he was. Much stronger.
She did turn, and there were tears glimmering in her eyes like diamonds, and he knew he’d done well.
“I’ve loved you for such a long time. Every day that I write, when I wallow in the most vile and putrid parts of humanity, I make myself keep one light burning. A marker, because without that one flame of brightness, there is no soul, there is no story, there is no man that is worth being born. Sometimes I wake up, surrounded by
the dark, drowning in it, but then I hear you breathe, your hair brushes my chest, and I see my candle. I see my soul. It’s you. I thought about telling you, but I didn’t think you’d believe me, so I waited. And then, I didn’t want to tell you, because I’m not good at this. I’m not a good person, and you’d think I was lying, only saying it to keep you happy, so I tried to figure out a way to prove it to you, but there was nothing. Nothing seemed good enough. I don’t know what I can do to make you believe, but I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.”
“I believe you,” she told him quietly.
“I don’t understand why you don’t love someone better than me. Someone easier. Someone who doesn’t need a candle to remind them of their soul.”
Jenn thought carefully, aware that there were few words that could sway the tormented jihad of this man’s heart. “Is there any man who could love me more than you?”
He knew the answer right away. “No. That’s the only reason I can live with myself. I should feel guilty that I want to keep you. I should send you away to be with someone who’s less of a bastard, but the delicious irony is that I’m too much of a bastard to do that. I couldn’t live without you, Jennifer.”
He stood stiff, frozen, always expecting her to leave him, and she wasn’t sure that the fear would ever go away, and so she walked toward him, and locked her arms around him, mooring them together. Shipwrecked heart? Ha. The shipwrecked heart had finally come home.
December 24
T
HE RITUALS OF THE
holiday season were new to Aaron. His father had never believed in another god apart from his own self-worship, and Two had never bought into the crass commercialism that was the Christmas season. Unlike Jennifer, who, no surprise, was a total sap.
He was giving Kevin an iPhone, and explained that he bought one for himself, as well.
“You aren’t supposed to buy your own Christmas presents.”
“As you get older, you learn to make exceptions. Sometimes it’s easier just to go out and buy something than to explain to someone else how you might have made incorrect assumptions about the use of technology and the hazards of overuse. And this way, by not having to explain all that… It’s just easier.” He held out the box. “So here.”
“You wrapped it, too?”
“The store did it.”
“You didn’t have to tell me beforehand. You could have let me open it.”
Aaron sighed, because in many ways Kevin was as
critical as Aaron. “Next year we’ll progress to opening presents and cute surprises and fuzzy puppies and unicorns with rainbows coming out of their asses.”
Kevin snickered, and they shared a moment of bonding. Jennifer would be proud.
Sometimes biology bound people together, and sometimes it was something else—the heart. He looked at the boy who wasn’t his son and smiled. Someday he wanted a son just like him. “There’s a lot of cool things you can do with the phone,” he explained. “You can watch movies—do you like to watch movies?”
“Not really.”
Aaron beamed proudly. “Excellent. You can also use it as an educational tool.”
“Can I download porn?”
“Kevin,” he warned, in a stern parental tone, or what he hoped was a stern parental tone.
“I had to ask. Mom doesn’t want to talk about that sort of thing.”
“Yes, I can see why,” Aaron said, and then cleared his throat, because he didn’t want to talk about that thing, either. Not yet. Not ever.
“So I can ask you about sex?”
“Not yet. I need some time to work up to the next level. I just got a phone, Kevin.”
“Sorry.” The boy looked at the phone in his hand, and pushed at the wire frame of his glasses. “Thanks for it. It’s pretty cool.”
“S’all right.”
Aaron got up from the stoop, and Kevin looked at him, almost anxiously. “You’ll be here tomorrow.”
“After lunch. Your mother said it was okay.”
Kevin’s smile was awkward and nervous, and Aaron nodded, awkward and nervous, but they both understood.
After leaving the house, he headed for the F train, back to Manhattan, back to Jennifer, back home. He looked at his phone, took a deep breath and punched in her number.
“Hello, Jennifer. It’s me.”
“Why does caller ID say Aaron Barksdale?”
“It’s my cell phone.”
There was a loud squeal, heard in five counties, nearly deafening him. Bravely he endured. “What brand?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he lied, not wanting to hear her squeal again, at least until he discovered the volume.
“You’re becoming a lemming. I hear it in your voice. When I get home, we’ll have to watch TV. A reality show. Oh, this is awesome.”
“I don’t want to watch TV.”
“You have other ideas?”
“There’s always Scrabble,” he suggested.
“You know there are games for the phone….”
Aaron blinked at the photo that had appeared.
Jennifer?
“Did you just send me porn?”
“It’s me,” she said, and then laughed, low and husky, and Aaron realized that perhaps he was going to like this technology thing after all.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-5497-2
LONG SUMMER NIGHTS
Copyright © 2010 by Kathleen Panov
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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*
Men to Do
*
Men to Do
**
Do Not Disturb
†The Wrong Bed
††The Martini Dares
‡Forbidden Fantasies
‡‡The Wrong Bed: Again and Again
***
Where You Least Expect It