Old Enough To Know Better (4 page)

“And what was that?”  She knew she should have reclaimed her foot as soon as he’d taken possession of it, but his big, warm hands felt wonderful on it, and it had been so long since anyone had rubbed her feet . . .

Cat wished he hadn’t mentioned how cold it was on the porch, because now she was getting cold overall, not just her foot.  She folded her arms across her chest, trying to warm herself up.

While he was speaking, he gave her back her foot suddenly, stood up, and draped his jacket over her.  “Make a lot of money.”  He didn’t sound like he was trying to brag, and she knew from Jane’s accounts that her stepson, whom she considered to be her own as much as if she’d birthed him herself, was now filthy rich from having developed something that had to do with websites communicating with each other.  Neither of them understood it much further than that.

Cat was much more distracted by his gallant gesture than by his statement, although that would eventually hit her, too.  She was immediately enveloped and surrounded by the latent heat and smell of him, and he smelled like what he was – a young, vital male who wore a faint but slightly spicy aftershave.  He was bigger than Clint was by a long shot – taller and broader and more muscular and she fairly drowned in the fabric of his coat, surrounded by the very essence of him, as well as that primeval warmth.  She should have returned the jacket to him immediately, just on general principles, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.  It felt too good, frankly, to be so warm and yet still smell the sharp salt air . . .

And him.

Yet, a loud, insistent voice within her cried out at how wrong it was – that he wasn’t Clint, and she was betraying him, just by accepting another man’s – man’s? -  kindness.

And his foot massage.  There was definitely going to be guilt enough to go around about that, too, when she took the time to think about it.

“In a nutshell, I created something that made it easier for business computers to talk to each other and exchange credit card information.  It simplified the back end of online purchasing for businesses, and it was very simple to use and understand, and it took off.”  He shrugged as he settled back down after stealing a bit of what was left of her roll and a bit of butter to slather on it.  His sigh when he bit into it was akin to sexual.  He closed his eyes and his head lolled back as he groaned, “I hope old Mrs. Kellerman has taught someone else in that family how to make these rolls!”

She chuckled at his sheer, unadulterated bliss but somewhere inside her was somewhat alarmed at the idea that no one of her generation called Mrs. Kellerman “old Mrs. Kellerman.”  Granted, Finn wasn’t that much younger than she was.  Jane’s husband had been older than she was, and Finn was only ten or so years younger.

But still, it was an uncomfortable reminder of the differences between the two of them, enough of one that Cat rose and slid out from under the protective heat of his jacket.  He opened one eye, looking up a her suspiciously.  “Leaving so soon?  Was it the Mrs. Kellerman inspired orgasmic groan?  I can imagine how you’d find that squicky.  Or the fact that I stole your last piece of roll?”  But he still munched down the last bit unrepentantly, as if worried she might try to reclaim it from him in a fit of pique.

Cat found herself staring down into unbelievably deep, brown eyes that were fringed with the thickest, darkest black lashes she’d ever seen.  Lashes like that were wasted on a man, she thought incongruously.  And he was a man, damnit.  No longer the boy she’d watched grow up.  She couldn’t help but smile, though.  He was too damned handsome for his own – and definitely her – good, and had always seemed to be in a good mood no matter what was going on.  In that, he reminded her of Clint, and that was enough to pull her back from her addled, schoolgirl musings about a boy that was entirely too young for her, to say nothing of the fact that he was the son of one of her best friends.

She hadn’t been thinking of him that way, had she, really?  The thought was a disturbing one, and she latched onto it without even thinking of answering his teasing question.  Instead, she stepped back into her shoe, gathered up her plate, gave the place a quick scan to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, and headed back into the house.  Abrupt, yeah.  Rude, probably.  Absolutely necessary for her mental health?  Hell, yes.

Jane wasn’t hard to find; Cat could hear her cackling laugh above the thick Maine accents and the occasional French Canadian patois in the front parlor. She did her best to avoid this room for its floor to ceiling, four walled Rogues’ Gallery that was rife with pictures of friends and family, which naturally included several of herself and Clint. She threw her plate away, put the milk back that Finn had probably left out, and took a deep breath knowing she was going to have to convince Jane that she wasn’t ducking out of the party early just to go home and sulk.

But Jane was surprisingly easy to convince, only because she was sitting on her new fiancée, Ted’s, lap, and she was at least two sheets to the wind, and much more interested in French kissing Ted than worrying about whether or not Cat was mooning over her dead husband.  Cat, for one, was glad to see that her friend was having a good time and was truly happy, and also that she wasn’t going to have to go through the third degree just to get to her car, and also that it was easy to concentrate on Jane’s adolescent antics and she could forget all the pictures around her of herself and her wonderful husband during much happier times.

Chapter Three

Slipping away carefully, she hadn’t expected to run into him again, but there he was, standing by the front door as if he’d appointed himself the doorman . . . or as if he was waiting for her, she thought fleetingly, dismissing the idea immediately as ridiculous.

“Have you had anything to drink, Catherine?  Do you need a ride home?” he asked solicitously, although she sensed an underlying note in his tone that she refused to acknowledge, preferring, instead, to fly by him with a fake smile plastered on her face.

“No, thank you, I rarely drink anymore.”  She flashed him what she hoped was a sufficiently pleasant smile, wrapped her coat around her, and ducked out the door. She knew she should have exchanged more pleasantries, she knew she was acting like an idiot in just needing to get out of that place, and frankly, to get away from a young man who hadn’t said or done anything that wasn’t simply kind and thoughtful towards her.

But he put her on edge, somehow, made her aware of herself in a way she hadn’t been in a while, and she didn’t like it.  Not at all.  Nope.  Didn’t like it.  Not in the least.  Not her. 

She refused to examine why her heart was beating so quickly, and her palms – and other areas of her person – were growing moist – and she was panting slightly.

But she definitely didn’t like the way he made her feel.  Definitely.

It was strange to hear him call her by her first name.  Her friends were relatively strict, old fashioned parents, and their children never called their parents’ friends by their first names, ever. She had been Mrs. Taylor to Finn until the day she’d seen him off to college with Jane, and the few times she’d seen him when he’d come home since then.  Cat wondered how she’d suddenly been promoted – or was she being downgraded? – to Catherine?

And no one ever called her Catherine, except for Clint, and only very occasionally, when he was very unhappy with her, and then he’d usually used it in conjunction with the rest of her full name and that particular tone that, even just remembering, gave her butterflies in her stomach, as in, “Catherine Elizabeth Taylor, I want to see you front and center in the bedroom, right now.”  Still, he never yelled it, but that was almost worse.

As she got into her black cherry Nissan 370Z – one of her very few indulgences since Clint had died – she could see that Finn was still standing in the doorway, watching her.  She managed a small wave as she backed out, but laid a little rubber heading towards her sanctuary – the house they’d bought clear on the other side of the Island.

It was a smallish place that did nothing to reflect their net worth, but then, they didn’t need to flaunt what they had, they had only to make themselves comfortable, and since they didn’t have anyone else – including children or grandchildren to consider – they got exactly what they wanted.  It was a two bedroom house that their realtor, at the time, told them would be hard to resell, but neither of them were looking at it for the resale value.  They wanted a place on the Island that they could call their own, and, although they could have afforded to have built a house of their own design, Cat loved the flavor and character of the older houses that had been built around the turn of the century or even earlier.

The place that they found was smaller than it might have been, considering that families during that timeframe were necessarily larger, and it had been lovingly restored by a professional, who had also been married with no children, to a wife who loved to cook and entertain.  So the master bedroom was a gorgeous suite with a bathroom and dressing room/closet area, the kitchen had the latest in appliances including dual wall ovens, stainless steel appliances and mauve granite countertops, and the living room was a warm room with gorgeous wood floors, a skylight, and, for those cold Maine winters, a Franklin stove tucked into one corner that would heat them right out of the house and into the Bangor Mall some days.

They weren’t well off enough to be able to afford what they really would have liked, which was to have a huge chunk of land well away from everyone else, right on a nice sandy beach that faced open ocean.  There wasn’t much sandy beach to be had on the Island, indeed, in northern Maine at all.  That was the province of the southern coast of the state.  But the house wasn’t far from the mouth of a large inlet, with a big screened porch off the living room and decks off the master bedroom and kitchen that faced the river.  They breakfasted with the tides every morning through the early spring and as late into the fall as Clint would allow her to sit out there, shivering happily and eating her bagel.

They had water access, with their small boat tied to a tidy dock for exploring at the spur of the moment, tide permitting, and Cat couldn’t count the hours she’d spent hunting for treasures along the shore – sand dollars and dimes, sea glass, and shells with which to fill up the house.  Whenever she came back with a basketful, Clint always suggested he was going to have to move out to make room for them, which only earned him a withering glance from his long suffering wife.  The fact that he was potentially right was beside the point.

Cat drove right into the right bay of the two car garage she’d insisted they add on first thing, although had Clint bellowed loudly about it at first, like a wounded moose, clutching his dwindling wallet as if it had received a mortal blow.  But the first snow of winter that year, which, if she recalled correctly had been about eighteen inches, when they didn’t have to slog out to unbury the cars and then move them for the plow and then move them again so that they didn’t get ticketed – or worse, booted and then towed – because of the town’s plowing efforts, she never let him forget just whose genius idea it had been, despite the cost, which wasn’t anything to sniff at.

She would never get used to just how quiet the place was when she got home.  No Sports Center blaring, no one yelling at a player to run or skate or throw or whatever faster.  No mess in the kitchen to deal with, even.  She’d gladly clean up every bit of his mess . . .

She dropped her purse on the big oak hutch in the entryway of kitchen and consciously reeled in her thoughts. That way led nowhere.  Bargaining never worked, and only left her feeling even more morose.  The whole time he’d been dying, he’d never worried about himself – he’d always said it was the devil that needed to worry, since he was going to take over once he got down there.  Clint worried about her – that she would do exactly what she was doing, what she tried desperately, for his sake, not to do – wallow in the loss of him and crawl right into the grave after him.

He made her promise that, after she’d taken some time to mourn, that she’d get herself together and live the rest of her life as if he was there.  Do fun stuff, and yes, even find someone else.  The first time he’d mentioned that idea, she’d gotten so mad she’d nearly struck him, and that had never ever happened in the history of their relationship, but it was a concept, especially in that situation, that she simply couldn’t countenance.

As always, he’d understood.  And he just kept telling her, occasionally, when she least expected it, that it was okay for her to live the rest of her life to its fullest.  That that was what he wanted her to do. 

That it would only honor him and his memory if she did so.

The schlub.  Sometimes she hated him for being so God’amn noble. She knew she wouldn’t have been anywhere near as wonderful as he had been if their roles had been reversed, and she would have been a complete shrew about the idea of him finding someone else after she was gone, damn him.

She, the sports hater, turned on Sports Center and grabbed the ever present pint of Ben and Jerry’s Karamel Sutra from the freezer in one hand, a spray bottle of whipped cream tucked under her arm, and a big serving spoon in the other and headed for his recliner.  It still smelled of him, years later, and it was where she went when she missed him the most.  Ben and Jerry helped some, but being surrounded by his scent helped the most.  It was almost as if he was there, with her, holding her.

Luckily, there wasn’t much of the pint left, although she did kill her cholesterol level by finishing off the can of what passed for whipped cream by spraying it into her mouth very unrepentantly.  Might as well give the Lipitor something to work on, she thought as the can began to sputter and empty.

The big king sized bed was much too empty, but then again, she turned on the television and it helped, as it always had for her.  She found old episodes of Roseanne on Nick at Nite and fell asleep to them, much later than she’d intended, due to the sugar rush.