Something New (29 page)

She smiles, relieved, and ushers me to the table where we begin to feast.

We are a third of the way through the bottle of wine, a quarter of the way through the duck liver, and midway through a story about Mia’s college-aged daughter and her first serious relationship when my cell phone rings. I almost let the call go to voice mail, as Mia has me in stitches with her retelling of how Lettie reacted when her new boyfriend farted for the first time in front of her and she almost broke up with him on the spot. But I assume it’s Jonah calling to let me know he and the kids arrived safely, so I reluctantly push back from the table and head for the counter, telling Mia to hold that thought.

I glance at the clock. It’s not yet one o’clock and unless Jonah drove like Mario Andretti, there’s no way he can be at his parents’ by now. I pick up my cell and glance at the Caller ID, and my breath catches in my throat. My hands tremble so much as I fumble to answer the call that I almost drop the phone into the sink. “Hello?”

“Hi. Ellen?”

“Yes. Hi.”

“It’s Ben. Ben Campbell?”

“Yes. I know.”

“Is this a bad time?”

Yes.
“No. It’s fine. How are you?”

“I’m good,” he says, then chuckles. “The kids just got whisked off by their grandparents. Linda’s at work. I’m just, sort of, basking in the silence of the house.”

“I did that all morning,” I confess. I can feel Mia’s eyes on me and I put up one finger.
Just a minute
, I am telling her.
Jonah?
she mouths, and I shake my head. She narrows her eyes at me, then cuts into the Brie and slathers a huge chunk over a piece of bread.

“When did they leave?” he asks.

“About seven.”

“So you’ve been basking for what, six hours already?”

“I’ll have you know that I’ve been very productive,” I say.

“Spring cleaning, huh?”

“Exactly.”

For a moment, neither of us speaks. Finally, his voice breaks through the quiet of the phone line.

“So, I, uh, I’m heading over to the marina in about an hour.”

“Stand-up paddleboarding,” I say.

“Right.” He hesitates for just a second. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? I mean, you seemed pretty definitive yesterday, but it is something new.”

“Just for future reference, the
something new
I tried did not require me to even leave the house.”

His throaty chuckle makes my knees go weak. “That sounds fun.”

“And,” I cut him off before he can do further damage, “it didn’t require me to wear a wet suit.”

“You only need a wet suit if you fall in the water,” he jokes, and I laugh. In my peripheral vision, I see Mia lumber out of her chair and head in my direction. She makes a show of grabbing a glass out of the cupboard and filling it with water, all the while giving me the fish eye.

“Thanks for the invite,” I tell him. “But I can’t.”

He is silent for another moment. “Okay. But if you change your mind, I’ll be at the kids’ beach next to Pier Three.”

“Have fun,” I say, then quickly disconnect the call. As I set the phone on the counter, I hear Mia clear her throat. Loudly.

“Okay, Miz Thang. What in the hell was that? Or should I say,
who
?”

I wave my hand dismissively at her and head for my seat at the table. “No one.”

“No one, huh? That’s why your face is the color of a burst pomegranate seed?”

Without thinking, I raise my hand to my cheek and find it warm to the touch.

“You
will
tell Mama Mia what’s going on, girl.”

I glance over at her and see her dark brown eyes boring into me, her left eyebrow raised in a question.

“He’s this…soccer dad I know and we keep running into each other. He’s just a nice man.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. He’s nice to everyone.”

“And he calls everyone on their cell phones?” Her left eyebrow descends just as her right eyebrow rockets upward.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I think of Nina Montrose and mentally cross my fingers that Ben is not, at this moment, calling her as a consolation prize. Then I find myself hoping that
I
was not the consolation after a prior phone call to Nina.

“Oh sure,” Mia says sarcastically. “He calls all the soccer moms and makes them laugh and blush and cross their legs.”

I look down to see that, sure enough, my legs are crossed. I quickly raise my head and shrug my shoulders casually.

“Maybe he does.”

“Bullshit,” she counters, then sighs. “Good looking?”

“Uh, yeah,” I answer slowly. Mia would sniff it out if I lie to her.

“He text you?”

I open my mouth to answer, but cannot expel the word. I nod a yes.

“Oh, girl. You in a world of trouble.”

We sit at the kitchen table and finish the bottle of wine while I recount the story of Ben Campbell. Mia doesn’t interrupt, just listens, rapt. As I tell her, I worry that I am giving the situation too much power, that I am making a big deal out of nothing, that I have created this imaginary precipice in my mind and that even if it were real, there is no way I would jump off.

I finish with his invitation to go paddle surfing, then sit back against my chair and drain my wineglass. Mia is no longer looking at me but instead at a spot just over my head. Her expression is contemplative, and I suspect she is trying to choose her words carefully, just as she does with a student who has been sent to her office. If anyone is going to give me a lambasting, it’s Mia. She adores Jonah and is very protective of family values, having witnessed as a social worker far too many families destroyed.

“It’s nothing,” I insist before she can start in on me. Because, honestly, if you look hard at the facts, it
is
nothing. Everyone, at one point or another in their lives, has to decide exactly what constitutes cheating for them. Some people would say holding hands. Others might say swapping spit. And there are those (men mostly) who insist that everything
up to penetration could be considered platonic (“It was just a friendly blow job, honey, didn’t mean a thing”). At some point in my twenties, I decided that touching tongues was an adulterous act because it required effort. Anything before that could be written off as mindless flirting. So, yes, I am guilty of flirtation, but according to my personal cheat-o-meter, I am innocent of the big
A
.

“I cheated on Sidney,” Mia says. Her voice is so soft and her admission so implausible that I think I have misheard her. I have to concentrate to keep my jaw from hitting the table.

“What? When?”

I have known Mia for seven years now, and our friendship was instantaneous, like the immediate reaction you get when you pour baking soda into a bottle of Coke. A mutual friend of ours, Julia Simpson, had started a book club and had invited us both to attend. From the moment we found ourselves seated next to each other, and discovered that we both were bored to tears by
Pride and Prejudice
, a bond was forged. After a couple of meetings, Julia informed the group that she was joining AA and would no longer be serving alcohol. At which point, Mia and I seceded and formed our own book club faster than you can say
twelve steps
.

She has never mentioned an affair to me before, not even the time we drank too many margaritas and shared our fantasies about the perfect seduction scene, substituting fetching men we knew for our husbands.

“A long time ago,” she murmurs. “Before I knew you.”

She takes a sip of her wine, sets it down and runs a finger around the lip.

I am so stunned by this revelation that I am hardly able to speak. “Wh-who…who was it?”

Her eyes fog over with memories and for a moment, I
think she may not answer my question. Then she takes a deep breath and sighs heavily. “His name was Peter Stormcloud.”

I cover my mouth with my hand to keep from laughing because I can tell by Mia’s expression that this is no joke. She catches the gesture and furrows her brow, reprimanding me with a frown. Then she shakes her head and the corners of her lips curl up into a grin.

“I kid you not. That was his name. Actually, I think his full name was Peter Gathers Mighty Stormcloud, or something like that. We worked together at family services in San Bernadino. He handled most of the Native American cases. He was…he was a beauty.” She looks past me again, a dreamy expression washing over her face as if Peter Stormcloud were standing right behind me. So vivid are the memories surfacing for her at the moment, so intense is the look of rapture those memories are painting on her face, that I almost turn to see if he is really there.

“Six-six,” she says reverently. “Two fifty. Solid as a rock. My kind of man.”

This also surprises me, coming from a woman who is married to a bean pole.

“It just happened. We were working together on a particularly nasty case, some drugs, some abuse. We just got done removing the kids and placing them in protective custody, and we decided to go out and get ourselves blind drunk. One thing led to another, you know? I rationalized at the time that we were using each other to forget the horror we had to deal with on a daily basis, and that was the truth. But we also wanted each other. Bad.”

Her eyes focus on me again and she shrugs. “Anyway, it only lasted a little while, and Sidney never found out.”

“You ended it?”

She nods, and when she speaks, her tone is bittersweet. “I’ll always regret what I did.”

“Because of the guilt?” I ask knowingly.

But she shakes her head and gives me a pointed look. “No, girl. Because until the first time Peter Stormcloud kissed me, I didn’t know what I was missing.”

I
sit in the driver’s seat of Jonah’s Lexus, my hands gripping the steering wheel even though the car is in park, and stare out at the blue water of Sea Garden Marina. I know Mia’s story was a cautionary tale meant to dissuade me from following in her fuchsia-leather-encased footsteps, but it has had the opposite effect on me. Of course, I assured her that I had no intention of meeting Ben Campbell here today, or any day, for that matter. But by the time I closed the door behind her, I had already decided I would come. And not because of the wine, either—unfortunately, right now I’m as sober as a judge.

I am still in that sketchy state of denial where I have myself convinced that I am not going to do anything I will regret. I have sworn to myself up one side and down the other that I am only here on a reconnaissance mission, to find out exactly what the hell is going on. I am not going to sleep with
Ben Campbell. I just want to find out if he wants to sleep with me.

And if he says yes?
my inner voice asks me.
What then?
But I don’t have an answer.

I can still leave and no one will be the wiser. Not Ben, whose Land Rover is parked a few spaces over from me. Not Jonah, who called just as I was raiding my newly organized closet for something appropriate to wear to the marina in the middle of March, to tell me that he and the kids had arrived in Arizona safely. Not Jill, who caught me on my cell as I was pulling out of my driveway to invite me over for dinner because she can’t imagine that anyone could enjoy being alone in an empty house. No one would know that I had almost stepped out of the car and into a situation that might dramatically alter the shape of my life. Except me. I would always know that I had come this far, only to turn around and hightail it back to the safety of my comfortable complacent existence.

I could live with that. It would be far simpler to know that I am a coward than to live with the knowledge that I have done whatever it is I might do if I step outside this car.

Just as I am turning the key in the ignition, there is a
tap-tap
on the passenger window. I glance over and behold Ben Campbell peering in at me, a smile of such radiance on his face that I almost have to squint in its glare.

“You came.” His voice is muffled through the safety glass, but even so, the pleasure that infuses his words is loud and clear.

I quickly roll down the window and he braces himself against the frame, gazing at me expectantly.

“I’m not staying,” I tell him, and watch his delighted expression deflate.

“Why?”

There are about a thousand reasons why, but looking into Ben’s eyes, I can’t grasp a single one. I just sit there, helpless, white-knuckling the steering wheel. He sighs, then pulls open the car door and folds himself into the passenger seat. He is wearing his Levi’s and a faded hunter green T-shirt with the legend
Death Row Iguanas
silk-screened across the front. He closes the door and turns to me, and suddenly the interior of the Lexus shrinks to the size of a Smart car. We have been this close, at the sushi bar, but never enclosed, and I can almost feel the air being sucked out through the vents.

“Why did you come?” he asks quietly.

Because I currently hate my husband and the feeling is mutual? Because I am tired of my boring life? Because I am sick of always making the right choice and doing the right thing? Because I feel like I could float away in your eyes every time I look into them?

Because I wanted to come.

“I don’t know,” I say aloud.

He nods slowly, thoughtfully. Then he reaches over, gently uncurls my fingers from the steering wheel, and encases my right hand in his left. There is no explosion of light at his touch, but rather a subtle, comforting warmth that slowly eases through my entire body.

We sit there in silence for a long moment, mindless of the world outside the car. After a while, Ben pulls my hand up and rests it against his chest, and I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt, strong and steady. Then he lifts it to his lips and kisses it tenderly, turns it over and kisses each of my fingertips, then my palm. For a split second, I cannot draw breath, cannot see, cannot feel any other part of my body but the hand he is kissing. I try to recall how long it’s been since
my husband engaged in such an intimate act with me, then I quickly banish the thought. Jonah does not belong here in this moment. Even if this is his car.