Reckless in Moonlight (17 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Pain settled into numbness, permitting Dana to go through the motions of life. She went to work, put out the trash on the scheduled pickup day, paid the bills, and even occasionally remembered to eat. But as the week continued, she felt stuck on a stationary escalator while everyone else rode by and carried on with their lives as usual.

Dana no longer cried, but she found little cause to laugh or smile. She attended the requisite meetings, commented appropriately, and fulfilled a myriad of duties, but each act required she wade hip-deep through an emotional pool of sludge, every task consuming more energy than it should. She borrowed from an inner reservoir of strength to survive the day, but by nightfall, she would be overdrawn and would collapse inward on herself. Her evenings she spent staring at the television with no recollection afterward of what she’d watched. The final divorce papers that officially freed her from her marriage arrived in the mail, and she filed them in a cabinet without even looking at them.

After several days in the hospital post-op, Roger was discharged to his condo in the care of Mila, who’d quit her job to tend to him with fanatical zeal. Dana checked on him once and found Roger in cheerful spirits and Mila clucking around him like a brooding hen, a marquise diamond flashing on her ring finger. As Roger was still recuperating and not up to jewelry shopping, she surmised the one-carat wonder had been purchased before the heart attack. Their happiness contrasted so starkly to her own misery, Dana decided it would be best for her own mental health to avoid further visits and left Roger to Mila’s doting care.

Roger had mentioned that Katie came often, but Dana herself had not seen her daughter since the surgery.

About two weeks after the fateful day, Dana was curled in a living room chair, attempting to read, when she heard a knock. Her stomach lurched at the possibility that it could be Lon. Even though she chastised herself for her stupidity, she ran to the door and practically ripped it off its hinges.

Her daughter stood there.

“Katie. Hello.” Dana forced a smile and picked up the shards of her shattered heart.

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Katie asked with an oddly hopeful lilt.

“No. Come on in.” Dana stepped aside. She wondered for a moment why Katie had bothered to knock before she recalled she’d asked her daughter to announce herself before dropping by. That was when there was a chance her daughter could interrupt something.

“How are you doing?” Dana asked.

“Fine. How about you?” Katie perched on the arm of the sofa where Lon had made fierce love to her.

No, that was where they had fucked
. Dana redacted her memories. “I’m fine,” she lied and averted her gaze from the couch.

“Dad seems to be doing well.”

Dana nodded. “I think so.”

Katie studied her toes. She wore a pair of flip-flops and had painted her toenails black. “Mila seems to be taking good care of him.”

“Yes, she is.”

Katie glanced at the murder mystery Dana had left open on her chair. “That’s not your usual kind of book, is it?”

“No, I thought I’d try something different.” She usually devoured romances but had no appetite for them now. She did not want to read about couples, even fictitious ones, falling in love and living happily ever after.

“I’m still at the beginning.” Dana glanced at the novel. She’d been slogging through chapter one for two weeks but didn’t blame the author for her lack of progress. Her mind had become a sieve, words and meaning streaming out as fast as she could pour them in. For as many times as she’d reread the same passages, she should have memorized it.

Katie stretched out one leg, arched her foot, and continued her study of her toes. She glanced sideways at Dana. “Are you still seeing what’s-his-face…Lon Corbin?”

The sound of his name kicked her in the gut. “No.”

Her daughter seemed to wince, and her gaze slid away. “I’m sorry.” Surprisingly, she sounded sincere. “I realize now that you and Dad… Well, it’s not going to work, is it?”

“No.” Dana shook her head.

Katie’s grimaced. “I’m such a bitch.”

Dana frowned. “Why would you say that?”

“You really liked Lon, didn’t you?”

Dana’s throat ached, and she opened her eyes wide to force back the tears that threatened to appear. “Yeah. But it wasn’t meant to be.”

“I did so many things wrong.” Katie stared at her feet. “Starting with inviting Mila over. If I hadn’t done that, none of this would have happened.”

“You can’t blame yourself.” Dana shook her head, unable to tell her daughter that if it hadn’t been Mila, it would have been someone else—had been someone else for years, in fact. She couldn’t ruin Katie’s opinion of her father. What happened in her marriage was between her and Roger. “You have friends. Bringing them over to the house is a normal, natural thing. Your father made his own choices.”

Katie sighed. “Well, it’s getting late,” she said and scooted off the sofa arm. “I’d better go.”

“Wait.” Dana halted her departure, knowing her daughter was still concerned. “Your dad is going to be okay. You know that, don’t you?”

Katie twisted her lips almost derisively and nodded. “Yeah. That much I know. Well, see ya.” And her daughter left.

About a week after speaking to Katie, Dana decided she’d wallowed long enough. She began accepting invitations to lunch with friends, went back to yoga class, and even finished her book. But the one thing she hadn’t been able to do was swim in the pool. That hurtle remained to be jumped.

Although the calendar insisted several weeks remained of summer, the days had grown shorter and the nights longer. On several occasions, Dana detected autumn’s scent on the air. School days approached, and in a flurry of slamming doors and squeals of excitement, the Corbin family departed for a final camping blowout one Friday evening.

Knowing she would never get a better opportunity, Dana donned her swimsuit and proceeded to the backyard before she lost her nerve. She clenched her jaw as she stared at the large, perfect orb in the sky. She and Lon had gone skinny-dipping, made love for the first time under a similar full moon.

Dana gritted her teeth with determination. She would wash Lon out of her system under that same moon. But when she risked a glance at the tree-house sentinel, a sharp pang sliced into her heart. There would be no blond hunks climbing down from it this time.

Dana draped her towel on a chair and eyed the glittering pool. “Fuck it,” she muttered. “May as well do it right.” She peeled off her suit and tossed it atop her towel. “Do it like you mean to.” Dana threw back her shoulders, marched to the deep end, and plunged into the pool.

Enveloped by the water’s embrace, she descended to the bottom. She relaxed and let the soothing liquid mend the ragged tears in her psyche and return her to the surface in its own time.

When her head popped up, she treaded water and listened to the waves slap the pool walls.
You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine
, the splash echoed.

Dana shifted and began to swim. Before the breakup, she’d swum often during the evenings and had gotten quite proficient. She discovered with a tiny surge of pleasure that her muscles remembered, and her arms and legs snapped through the water with precision.

She focused on the moment, on the smooth movement of her arms and legs, of her chest filling and emptying of air, of the insignificant splash she’d created. Dana smiled as she remembered how she used to churn the water like an outboard motor stuck in neutral. Then came the memory that Lon had been the one to teach her the freestyle stroke, and her amusement evaporated.

Time. It’s going to take time. Tonight is the first step
. She ejected all thoughts of swimming lessons taught by a muscled, blond instructor from her thoughts.

Dana swam until her arms and legs grew tired and her breathing labored. Rolling onto her back, she stretched out and did what she always liked to do: float.

* * * *

Lon slouched in the webbed folding chair on his minuscule patio deck, nursing a warm beer and a busted heart, determined to get over Dana. He glowered at the jeering full moon; he refused to permit a malicious hunk of rock orbiting the earth to chase him inside to hole up in his apartment. He aimed another glare at the sky and focused on the pool in the courtyard two floors below.

It was quiet tonight, save for one couple who were doing more flirting than swimming, their sexually laced laughter rising to taunt him. He forced himself to watch the amorous duo in hopes their antics would cauterize his wound, but so far he felt only the searing burn without the healing.

Lon picked up his near-full beer and studied the label as he fantasized clocking the couple with the bottle. He wouldn’t do it, of course, but the thought satisfied him nonetheless. With a sigh, he returned the lager to the table before his baser urges got the better of him.

Shit
. Lon rested his elbows on his knees and slumped forward. This was the first time in almost a month that he’d spent the evening at home. Most nights he’d had to work, for which he was grateful. On his rare evenings off, he had hung out with friends, pumped iron at the gym, anything to avoid his apartment, which retained too many memories of Dana, of her sucking his cock, tying him to his bed, straddling his face, taunting him with her adorned breasts.

He’d slept on the sofa for a month. He hadn’t gone to see his parents or his brothers for fear of running into her.

The woman’s giggle from the pool stirred memories of how he and Dana had joked together, how he’d loved the sound of her laughter, how he loved her.

Lon couldn’t blame Dana for going back to her ex. How could he? She and Roger Markus shared almost as many years together as Lon had been alive. Roger needed aftercare, and who better to provide it than the woman with whom he shared a history and a daughter?

Katie
. Lon knocked back a gulp of beer. A piece of work, that one. She’d disliked him from the second she’d met him. As he’d replayed the hospital scene, little things about the encounter kept nagging him, among them Katie’s avoidance of direct eye contact and her stiff posture. Patients lied to him all the time—about taking their medication, following their diets, exercising. He was getting good at reading people, and if he didn’t know better, he’d swear Katie had been lying to him.

But he did know better.

He was confusing desire with reality; his own foolish heart wanted Katie to be lying, so he was reading nefarious motives into her behavior. Her father had suffered a heart attack; it was normal for stressed people to act oddly. Besides, the conversation between Dana and Roger he’d overheard had proven Katie correct.

Can we make it work?

I would like that.

The two events—Katie’s announcement in the hall and the tail end of the conversation—corroborated each other. Without one, he would have disbelieved the other because he loved Dana and had believed his feelings were reciprocated.

But what if one
was
false? For instance, what if Katie
had
fabricated a story?

Though his heart begged him to avoid ruminating about Dana, he continued to play devil’s advocate. If Katie hadn’t planted seeds of doubt, it would have taken some mighty compelling evidence to convince him that Dana had reunited with her ex. He would not have assumed from the snippet of conversation he’d overheard that they were reconciling. They were divorcing and had many things to “make work.”

And if
that
was true, that meant Dana hadn’t dumped him. He’d broken up with her.

Lon shot to his feet. Could he have fucked up that badly? Reason argued the most likely explanation was probably the truth. His desire notwithstanding, the circumstantial evidence indicated that Dana and her husband had reunited.

But circumstantial evidence wrongly convicted people all the time.

Did he want to chuck his happiness on a probably—on the possible pejorative testimony of a girl who disliked him?

Fuck, no!

Decision ignited a flicker of hope and fueled determination. He refused to quit without a fight. He bolted into his living room, grabbed his keys, dashed to the door, yanked it open—and almost tripped over his own feet.

Katie hovered in the hall, about to knock. “Oh. Uh, hi.” Her eyes rounded, and she lowered her raised arm. She bit her lower lip as some indefinable emotion flitted across her face. “You’re leaving,” she said.

“Yes. I am,” he agreed tersely. Katie was the last person he wanted to see on his way to the person he most wanted to see. He pushed forward and forced her to move out of the way.

“Could I, uh, talk to you for a moment first?”

Not unless hell froze over. Katie already had said enough, and he would not allow her to derail him by seeding any more doubt. “No. Excuse me.” He slammed his apartment door shut and quickly locked it. Conscious of her eyes boring into his back, he strode down the interior hall for the stairs.

“I lied.” The two words arrested his flight.

Slowly, he twisted and cocked his head. “What did you say?”

“I lied to you.” Katie knotted her hands. “My parents aren’t getting back together. I wanted them to, so I told you something that wasn’t true.”

It was pretty much what he’d finally figured out, but his optimism skyrocketed. Hope swelled his chest until he feared it would burst. If Dana would forgive him, he had a chance!

He would not tell Dana the role Katie had played in their breakup. He had no desire to cause friction between a mother and daughter. Besides, he blamed his own idiocy—if he had trusted his initial instincts, none of this would have happened. He should have had the guts to face Dana and talk to her. He cringed as he recalled how abruptly, cruelly, he’d cut her off, dumped her. He’d acted like a coward, and they both had paid for it.

Lon’s eyes met Katie’s. “Thank you for telling me,” he said. He didn’t know if he would ever trust her, but he gave her credit for coming clean.

“Don’t give up on my mother,” she said. It was the closest thing to a blessing he’d be likely to receive.