Making It Last - A Novella (Camelot Series) (13 page)

They all wanted the same thing from her.
Be here for me to talk to. Be here for me to grab and fill my hands with when I need you. Be here to feed me and listen to me and help me solve my problems. Make it possible for me to feel content
.

It had to be fucking exhausting being the person whose presence put everyone else at ease. Janet had sounded weary and fed-up on the phone after one night of it.

Amber had been doing it for a decade.

He dried the back of her hair and kissed her, right where her shoulders met her neck. She twisted to look at him, and her face was so solemn.

He put the towel around her and went out and found her some clothes to wear. Underwear, bra, some shorts, and a T-shirt.

“What happened?” She dropped the towel and started to dress.

“How do you know something happened?”

“It’s in your eyes.”

“Your mom called. Jake’s got a fever.”

“When are we going back?”

“We have a couple hours to kill. First flight’s at one.”

“You already booked it?”

He nodded.

“Is he okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I talked to him. He misses you.”

She hooked her bra, then stepped closer and rose up on her tiptoes, fingers skimming the back of his neck, and kissed him like she was about to go on a long trip, and she had to fit all her goodbyes into this one moment.

He put his arms around her, tugging her close with his hands on her ass. Her skin felt too warm. Her kiss was too mournful, and he knew she was taking pieces of herself back again. Big pieces. He could feel it.

He could hardly blame her. She needed those pieces to survive the life he’d pushed her into—this life she maybe didn’t even want. The kids. The husband who never took a weekend off, never whisked her away for a break, never made it easy on her or even thanked her except in the most routine, unimportant ways.

When she broke the kiss, she was breathing hard, and she wouldn’t look at him.

There was a pause as he skimmed his hands down her spine. Her flanks.

Stay here with me
, he thought.
Just stay
.

But that wasn’t possible, even if she’d wanted to.

“What else?” she asked.

“Clark thinks we’re getting a divorce.”

“Who told him that?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s just putting two and two together and getting eight. But he must have told Ant and Jake, because Ant said we’re not coming home, and Jake thinks he’s going to have to pick who he goes to live with.”

Amber rested her forehead against his shoulder. “I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”

“It’s not.” He pulled her closer. Covered her skin with as much of himself as he could.
“It’s mine.”

They held each other, unmoving except for the rise and fall of their chests, and Amber drifted away.

He thought that if he were her, he’d drift, too. He’d take any excuse he could find to cut and run.

Even if she didn’t leave him, she was gone.

There was nothing he could do to fix it.

They ordered breakfast in the room. One of the perks of the suite was that a personal butler took their order, delivered their food on silver trays, and waited on them at the table.

It was supposed to be luxurious, but mostly Amber found it uncomfortable. They hadn’t made the bed. Even though the window was open, she was paranoid about sex-smells and the half-empty wine bottle on the dresser.

She thought maybe she wasn’t cut out for pampering, since she felt guilty for not enjoying herself more. The spa had been kind of the same thing—all these supposed luxuries that felt either ridiculously privileged or flat-out odd. Paying people—and no, it was not insignificant that they were
black
people—to rub scented oils into her skin or find all her hidden zits and squeeze them.

Or the fact that there were combs in the locker room—a jar of combs in that blue disinfectant stuff, like at a barbershop, except come
on
. Surely no one ever used the combs. No one ever lotioned up with the spa-dispensed lotion or swabbed their ears with the spa Q-tips.

But someone must. Someone had
defined
this whole experience as luxurious. Lots of someones. So even though Amber couldn’t really believe that anyone could enjoy eating breakfast ten feet from a bed while attended to by a strange man who kept his face carefully blank, she felt as though there must be something wrong with her for not loving it.

The waiter piled up all the dishes on a cart, and Amber and Tony sat awkwardly, watching him go.

After he’d wheeled the cart out of the room, Tony rubbed his forehead and said, “That was fucking horrible. Let’s never do it again.”

She smiled, because at least she wasn’t the only one. And because he was trying to shake her out of her funk.

Tony smiled back. “What do you want to do for the next hour or two?”

“Can we go up the beach? There’s an artists’ colony that’s about twenty minutes’ walk. The aesthetician told me about it.”

“Sure you don’t want to lay by the pool? Your last day in the lap of luxury.”

“I’d rather move, if you’re game.”

“Sounds good to me.”

She threw some water and sunscreen into her purse, and they went down to the beach and took their shoes off, leaving them next to several other pairs by the resort’s steps so they could walk on the hard-packed sand by the surf.

“Nice morning,” Tony said.

“It is.”

It was beautiful. Seventy degrees, sunny, with a breeze off the water. Paradise.

“We should take another vacation sometime,” he said. “Maybe leave the kids with my sisters or your mom and dad and drive up to Canada. Take that second honeymoon you wanted, just the two of us.”

“That would be fun.”

She tried for a cheery smile.

Tony took her hand and squeezed it.

What she would have given a month ago, even a week ago, to be here in the sand with her husband beside her, telling her that.

This is what you wanted. Everything you wanted
.

Amber looked out over the water, frustrated because she didn’t feel the way she was supposed to, and pretending she did made her feel plasticized and vaguely ill.

“Are you worried about Jake?” Tony asked.

“Not really. I feel bad that he’s sick, but you said he sounded okay.”

“He did, yeah.”

“And my mom will spoil him, I’m sure.”

“So what’s the problem, bun?”

The sound of the surf rang in her ears, and the question struck her in the heart, a quivering arrow.

What’s the problem?

The same question he’d asked her all those years ago when he took her apartment door off its hinges and flushed her out of her burrow.

The same words he’d said when he walked into the house and found her weeping at the kitchen table, a positive pregnancy test in front of her and two feral toddlers clamoring for her
attention.

What’s the problem?

You can tell me. Let me do something. Let me help
.

She looked down at Tony’s bare feet crusted with sand, his hairy calves and the khaki cargo shorts she’d bought him ages ago.

What was the problem?

He was here. He was trying to fix their marriage, because he believed it was fixable, and he believed it was worth fixing.

He was doing everything he could think of, and she was doing nothing.

She was the problem. Her.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

That was it. That was all. She was afraid.

“What are you afraid of?”

“Everything.”

She walked closer to the water, close enough so the wavelets would run over her feet as they chased each other up the beach. Because her hand was clasped in Tony’s, her vector toward the ocean pulled their arms taut between them.

He drew closer, and their line went slack.

Then he came closer still and halted completely, but she didn’t. Not until she had to stop walking or let go of his hand.

She stopped.

He pulled her back.

Reeled her into his arms.

“Tell me.”

Her nose pressed into his clavicle. Her heart pressed into her throat.

She didn’t know what to say. She’d started this, but she didn’t know how to finish it.

I’m a mess
.

I’m alone
.

He would hear an accusation in anything she confessed. He would think it was his fault, and she didn’t want to add anything to his burden, or anyone else’s. She wanted to be strong enough all by herself.

But she knew that if she said nothing, then nothing could change. Something had to change. It
had
to, because she couldn’t do this anymore, and part of that
was
his fault. Tony had long since stopped asking if it was okay for him to work a fourteen- or fifteen-hour day. Tony didn’t want to talk about their other options, didn’t ask her to contribute, get a job, find ways to economize. He brushed her off when she made those kinds of suggestions.

When life got hard, he bore up, and he didn’t ask if she could stand to bear up, too. He just assumed she could, and she would.

She wanted to be able to be as strong as Tony, but she wasn’t. She just
wasn’t
.

“I miss you,” she said.

She paused. Took a breath. Tony didn’t reply.

“I miss you, and I hate that you’re never home.”

She tucked her head so she wouldn’t have to see his reaction. His breath came slow and calm, more regular than the waves, and the evenness of it gave her the courage to say, “I think sometimes that you wouldn’t come home at all, if it weren’t for the kids. That you come home to see them, and we talk about them, and that’s all I am to you anymore. Some kind of annex to the boys, like the nanny, except we share a bed.”

“That’s not true.”

His voice was soothing. Not offended. Just direct.

“I know it’s not. You told me last night, and I guess I knew already, but Tony? I think maybe it
should
be true. I think … I look in the mirror sometimes, and I can’t even see myself. I sat down at the table last week to make a list of errands I had to run in town, and I flipped over the page and tried to make myself write down ten things I wanted, and I couldn’t think of ten. I couldn’t think of
three
. I wrote down ‘A shower’ and then ‘Time to run in the morning’ and then I sat there and stared at it for half an hour, and I couldn’t come up with anything.

“And you know how on take-out night we all get a turn to choose what we want to order, and you always get meatball subs from Contino’s in Mount Pleasant, and Ant always gets pizza with green olives? I dread my turn. I
dread
it. Because I don’t even know. I don’t know what I want to eat. I don’t know what I want to wear or look like, and that’s why I cut my hair and had that evil woman at the spa wax me and paint my fingernails—because I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m afraid I’m not anybody. That I’m only your wife and the kids’ mom and that’s it.”

He kept his arms tight around her. Rubbed his cheek over the top of her head, pressed his
fingers against her ribs. He didn’t say anything, and that was good, because his silence gave her space to catch her breath.

She hadn’t intended to say so much. She’d opened her mouth, and the words had been piled up behind her tongue, waiting to come out. Impatient.

When she closed her eyes, there were more.

“You remember when we met?” she asked.

She felt him nod.

“You remember that I told you I was afraid I was going to live my whole life and then be on my deathbed and realize I hadn’t done anything? That I hadn’t really lived? And you made fun of me because I was too young, you thought. Well, I’m thirty-five now. I’m thirty-five, and I haven’t been anywhere. I haven’t done anything. I quit my job and had three babies. I think if the person I was when I met you saw who I am now, she wouldn’t even recognize me. And I know what I
have
done is important, too. I know that. It’s not like I want to go become the first woman to climb K2 backwards or whatever. It’s just … the house is so big. It’s so empty when there’s nobody home but me, and I don’t
have
anything. I want to have something so that when you don’t come home until nine or ten, and the kids are sleeping, I’m not just waiting for you.” The last word came out too dramatic, too accusatory, because her voice was breaking.

You
.

Tony stroked her neck and her back and her butt, and water rushed over her feet and into the sea, and she felt calmer. Not calm. But calmer. Less poisonous.

They stayed there for a long time, and gradually she started to notice the tension that had crept into Tony’s body. The weird way he was holding her, no longer natural. As though he didn’t want her to get away, but he didn’t want to keep her, either.

She sighed and stepped back, giving him the space he seemed to need now that she’d attacked him. “It’s not … there isn’t anything you can do, so I don’t want you to think I’ve been waiting for you to …”

Fix it. Solve me
.

But she had. She had, and that made it even worse—to realize how passive she’d been, and what a drag that added on both of them.

“It’s only in my head, I guess. I need to take a pottery class or join a book club, whatever it is that moms do. Visit the self-help section at the college bookstore.”

She tried to smile, but it didn’t quite make it, and Tony—something was really wrong with Tony. He crossed his arms. Uncrossed them. He made a face that was possibly supposed to be a smile, in return, but it was horrible to look at. Completely horrible.

“See, this is why I didn’t tell you,” she said. “I knew it would make you feel bad, and I hate that. Pretend I didn’t say anything, okay? We’ll just …”

She trailed off, alarmed by the bleakness in his eyes.

“Tony, what?”

“You should have time to run,” he said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“No, it is.” His hands curled into fists. “It is a big deal. You love to run. You always loved it, and you like to do it first thing, when the sun’s coming up. I know that. You should be able to do it. I don’t know why—” He broke off staring at the water, and when his eyes met hers they were fierce. Almost scary.