My Favorite Mistake Read online

  “Did I do something wrong?” I asked.

  “Of course not. Don’t worry. We’re fine.” But his voice sounded flat as he started the truck. He reached over and pulled me across the seat so my shoulder leaned into his. I managed to keep my mouth shut and let him re-establish physical contact at his own rate.

  “So,” he said, “tell me more about this juice bar of yours.”

  Okay. Not sixty seconds ago, he had practically been ready to take me up against the side of the pickup truck and now he wanted to chitchat about juice?

  No doubt about it. Sondra Cutler was getting her money’s worth on that voodoo curse.

  “Well…” I sketched him a very appealing—and very selective—description of what I’d been doing since high school. I left in the juice bar, the “Street Food” column, and Europe. I left out the isolation, the moody liquor-soaked boyfriends, and the insomnia. “What about you?”

  “You heard. Went to college, played some hockey, started working.” He shrugged.

  I was starving for the rest of this story. “That’s it?”

  “What do you mean, ‘that’s it’? That’s ten years’ worth of activity.”

  I jabbed him with my elbow. “What about all the details?”

  He stared at me. “I just gave them to you. What else do you want to know?”

  “Oh, you know…” Just for example, out of idle curiosity… “Like dating for example. Did you have lots of girlfriends?”

  “Did you have lots of boyfriends at the juice bar?” he countered.

  I exhaled, a weary sigh originating at the soles of my feet. “Flynn, let me explain something to you. Some men are like Fords or Hondas. Chevy. Like a rock. You get the idea.”

  “Not really.” But I could see a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  “This truck, for example. Ford. It’s not exactly a status car. But it always gets you where you need to go. It starts in sub-zero temperatures. You can fit all your baggage in the back without a problem. Now, some men—the kind of guys one wants, ideally—are the Fords of the male world.”

  “I see.”

  “And then there are the sports cars. They have leather interiors. They look cool. They go fast. But they aren’t always reliable. It’s like that old joke: if you get a Jaguar, you have to buy two. One for you, and one for your mechanic to follow you around in.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That’s an old joke?”

  “It is in L.A. Anyway, the problem with sports cars is that they look good, but their performance is sketchy. They’ll leave you stranded at four A.M. in the middle of an icestorm. You can’t take them anywhere because if they don’t throw a rod, they’ll get themselves stolen.”

  “What about Mercedes?” he countered. “They’re dependable.”

  “It’s an analogy. Work with me.” I gave him a look. “What I’m trying to say is that I spent too much time with Fiats when I should have been looking for Fords.”

  “Fiats,” he repeated.

  “It’s a teeny Italian sports car.”

  “I know what a Fiat is,” he said dryly.

  “Well, I’ve had enough of them,” I said. “I am at the point in my life where I’m starting to appreciate Fords.”

  He seemed nonplussed.

  “You are a Ford,” I supplied helpfully.

  “I am a Ford?” I couldn’t read his expression in the shifting shadows. “I see. May I propose a theory of my own?”

  “Please do.”

  “You are a loon.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Instead of thinking of car analogies, you should be thinking about how you’re going to win me over after all these years.”

  The man had a point.

  14

  We crossed the county line at 12:08 A.M.

  “It’s like something out of The Blair Witch Project out here.” I stared at the inky silhouettes of pine trees against the sky.

  “That’s what I remember about you,” Flynn said. “Always the soul of romance.” Ten minutes later, white city lights glinted among the sprinkling of summer stars, and soon we were weaving our way through Saturday night uptown traffic.

  Flynn turned the truck down a quiet street and pulled over in front of a long, low brick house. The sidewalk was lined with family homes, small apartment buildings, and tall shade trees rustling in the breeze. The very heart of white picket fence territory. He cut the engine and turned to me.

  There was no doubt about it: falling into bed with this man was just insane. We had been apart so long, we had no idea what was going on, we had no idea what was going to go on—

  “Follow me.” He opened the driver’s side door. Bathed in the moonlight, his face, his eyes, and his body were an intriguing blend of the familiar and the unfamiliar. He didn’t only look like the guy I’d left—he looked like the one I wanted to find.

  So I followed him. I made a conscious decision to put the white picket panic attack on hold, open the car door, and get my ass in gear. Surely all this apprehension would serve a purpose. It would help us to slow down, set a pace. We could have a nice rational discussion over dinner and a few glasses of wine, and then we’d just see where the night might take us.

  As if.

  He strode purposefully up the steps to the brick building, then ushered me through the massive front door (solid oak complete with ye olde brass letter slot) and down a dark hallway. He didn’t turn on the lights. When we arrived at the foot of a wide, shadowed staircase, he placed my hand on the massive carved banister and led me up to apartment 2B.

  He unlocked the door and I brushed past him into the pitch-black, groping blindly on the wall for the light switch.

  The door slammed behind me and he wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me back against him. My body woke up in the dark, replacing hesitation with heat. I kissed the side of his face and felt his smile against mine.

  “Hi,” I whispered.

  “Hi,” he whispered back, nibbling my ear.

  This felt good to the point of paralysis. I wanted to turn around and wage a full frontal assault, but I also wanted to stay anchored against him while his hands roamed all over the front of me.

  In the space of a heartbeat, he had me facing him and backed up against the wall. We were tangled up, completely cornered. An abrupt rush of chilled air swept in between us as we yanked at each other’s shirts.

  In the distant recesses of my brain, my rational mind was tapping its foot and warning that this was probably not so smart. Like it had such a spotless track record. So I ignored it and concentrated on some of my other body parts.

  We stumbled through the blackness together, finally collapsing on a soft down comforter. I felt crushed by the weight of his body but somehow this was not as claustrophobic as I’d thought it might be.

  His technique had improved considerably over the past ten years. And my senses were heightened by the heady mix of discovery and déjà vu. Turns out, the body has its own memory.

  “God,” was his only comment in the first few moments of afterglow.

  “I know.” I gave him a kiss and smiled against his lips. “I thought the male sex drive decreased after eighteen?”

  He yawned. “Yeah, but the difference is about as noticeable as an ice cube melting in hell.”

  Later that night, I tripped through the semi-darkness to Flynn’s bathroom, which was exactly what I expected. Clean and empty, with threadbare gray towels and no frills. The shelf above the gleaming white sink held a razor, a toothbrush, and a roll of athletic tape. A single bottle of shampoo stood next to a bar of soap on the edge of the bathtub. At least he was using shampoo these days. As a teenager, he used to claim that a bar of Irish Spring was all a real man needed for daily ablutions. “It’s shampoo and conditioner in one. Just add water. What could be easier?”

  Before I flipped the bathroom light off, I peered down the hall and saw the telltale glint of a wide-screen TV. Over which, if I wasn’t very much mistaken, hung a poster featuring a hockey player. Ju
st imagine the treasure-trove I could unearth while he slumbered away in the next room. The possibilities were staggering. What did he read now? What did he eat?

  No need to get carried away and ransack his home immediately. There’d be plenty of time for that kind of psychosis later. Like tomorrow.

  Back in the air-conditioned bedroom, I curled my toes against the varnished hardwood floor and groped around for something to wear. My hands closed on his T-shirt and I pulled it over my head.

  He had lapsed into one of his deep, comalike sleeps, and I knew from experience that he was down for the count. This was the time of night when my insomnia usually kicked up, but tonight I felt utterly exhausted. I edged onto the mattress, shivering at the friction of the crisp, chilled sheets against my bare legs. His body heat kept the air conditioning at bay as I reached out and touched his wrist so I could feel his pulse in the dark—a strong, steady Morse code assuring me that everything would work out between us.

  He was such a peaceful sleeper. I had forgotten that about him. The ebb and flow of his inhalation pulled mine into the same rhythm, and I snuggled against the contours of his body, falling into a sleep so deep that I would not have thought it possible without a prescription.

  Everything was perfect. For about eight hours.

  15

  I woke up disoriented, blinking into consciousness after the first night of real sleep I’d had in months. Sunlight streamed in through the tree branches crisscrossing the window. My limbs were tangled up with Flynn’s and I turned my head to look at him. He was still sleeping, his breathing deep and even, and I noticed that the tips of his ears were sunburned. I lay still, trying not to wake him while I drank in his calm, unguarded features.

  It occurred to me that, unless one is in love with a man, one does not generally rhapsodize over his sunburned ears. Do the math, and you arrive at the same conclusion I did.

  But I did not panic. I did not flee the premises. And that, along with my sudden affinity for sunburned ears, was highly unusual.

  I waxed poetic about ears for another three minutes. Then I just wanted him to get up and ravish me. So I draped myself over him like a chinchilla coat and began stroking his cheek.

  “Mmm?” he said, part sleepy question, part growl.

  “Good morning, good morning to you,” I sang into his sunburned ear.

  He threaded his fingers through my hair and tugged lightly. “What are you so happy about?”

  I stroked my way down his chest and stomach. “You.”

  He opened his eyes and gave me a disheveled grin. “Since when are you a morning person?”

  I leaned over to kiss him.

  “Wait,” he said, stopping me with a frown.

  I slid my bare legs against his and mirrored his frown. “What?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t think we should…do this yet.”

  I rolled away from him with the sheet clutched around my chest. A cold front was creeping into my core. “Do what yet? Cast your mind back—we already did this last night.”

  I felt him turn toward me. “I know,” he said.

  “So?” I knotted the sheet in my hand.

  He sighed. The mattress shifted as he lay back, moving away from me. “Last night was probably a mistake.”

  All molecular motion ceased.

  “Wait, Faith. Before you freak out, and I know you’re about to, let me explain.” He rested a hand on the nape of my neck, but I shrugged him off.

  I was trying to rally the troops. Inhale. Exhale.

  “Last night was incredible, obviously,” he said slowly. “Incredible. But I don’t want to just jump in and have everybody take for granted that this is now a really serious relationship.”

  “Everybody?” I repeated. “Define ‘everybody’.”

  “Look. I don’t want a replay of last time. I mean, I’m really relieved that you’re even here this morning.”

  “Well, isn’t that good?”

  “No. I shouldn’t be relieved that you stuck around for the second act. That should be a given, not a cliffhanger. I can’t pretend that the past never happened. We shouldn’t do this”—he gestured to the tangled bedclothes—“until we work out what we need to work out.”

  “Well, you’re a day late and a dollar fucking short on that one.” My voice was high and clipped. “Were you not here last night? You initiated it, you never said anything about nonescalation or whatever, and you seemed to have a fine time.”

  “True.” He sounded utterly calm and controlled. “However—”

  “However what? However, you decided you’re not attracted to me anymore?”

  “Faith—”

  “However, I was just a one-night stand?”

  “You know—”

  “Or how about this one? However, you’re still trying to punish me for what I did when I was eighteen and even stupider than I am now?” I choked on the end of this sentence.

  His hand was back on my neck, smoothing my hair. “I’m not trying to punish you. Would you stop being so irrational and listen for a minute?”

  I shut up, but only because his unmitigated gall left me speechless. So this was how crimes of passion started. A woman who has been grievously wronged points out the obvious, and then the guy busts out the I-word.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to sleep with you. I obviously do. To the point of losing my good judgment.” He paused for a moment, I assumed to savor his conquest of the dizzy broad who should have known better. “I’m not trying to punish you. I’m not saying last night shouldn’t have happened at all, or that we shouldn’t get involved. We already are.”

  “However?” I asked, icicles dripping from every syllable.

  He sighed again. “However, we need to slow down.”

  I thrashed around in the sheets like a trout on the bottom of a rowboat. “Oh my God! Are you actually going to lie there, in bed, with no pants on, and tell me that you think we need to slow down?”

  He set his jaw. The stubble, which had looked so masculine and sexy fifteen minutes ago, now seemed sloppy and Neanderthal. “We do need to slow down. There’s a lot of stuff we still haven’t dealt with.”

  Just my luck to find the one man in the Western World who wanted to deal with relationship issues.

  “What ever happened to not wanting to talk about it?”

  His stubborn look was intensifying. “I would rather slow down and give this a chance to work out than crash and burn again.”

  How subtle. The crash-and-burn finger pointing right at me. My blood began to boil.

  He remained impassive. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it my way this time. I admit that I got a little, uh, carried away last night. That was my fault. But things are going to be different from here on out.”

  “I didn’t realize you were such a control freak,” I bit out.

  “I told you, I’m not trying to punish you or control you or confuse you. All I want is to establish a solid foundation before we start throwing up walls and support beams and roofs.”

  “When did we start with the construction analogies? And what the hell does that even mean? You’re saying my foundation is faulty?”

  He rubbed his forehead. “I can’t tell yet. I hope not. I hope to hell it’s not, Faith, because the last time we collapsed, I spent years recovering. I do not ever want to do that again.”

  “Oh.” This took the wind out of my sails.

  Now he was scrutinizing the ceiling. “I didn’t know what happened to you. I had to ask your mom where you’d gone. I had to get Skye to tell me about California and Hank.” I winced at the sound of that name coming out of that mouth.

  “I know,” I said softly. I wanted to touch him, but I couldn’t bear the possibility that he’d shrug me off like I’d shrugged him off.

  “All I knew was that I’d had sex with you and I wanted to marry you and you disappeared. You just took off. I didn’t know if you were ever coming back. I didn’t know a damn thing.” His expression w
as completely neutral, his words even and measured.

  “But you broke up with me,” I reminded him. “When you knew what I was going through at home, when you knew I needed you so badly. And afterward, well…I wanted to call you. I wanted to explain so many times, but…”

  We lay there in silence, wary and raw under the harsh morning sun. I could hear the faint sounds of traffic outside, everyone on their way to somewhere else.

  “But you didn’t call. For a while there, I was worried you had gotten pregnant.”

  I had never even considered this. The idea of him thinking that, staring up at the Minnesota sky while I streaked off towards the Pacific, made me ache.

  “Flynn.” My voice was steady. At this point, words were all I had to prop myself up with. “I’m sorry. I am sorry a million times over. But I cannot change the past.”

  He looked at me. “I’m not asking you to change the past. I’m asking you to figure out the present. Do you even know if you’re staying in Lindbrook? Or for how long?”

  “Uh…”

  “I just want to be a little more confident about the future before we build on the foundation.”

  I glowered at him. “Will you please stop comparing me to a construction site? It’s really very insulting.”

  “Fine,” he agreed. “We’ll use your car analogy. I don’t want to be a Ford.”

  “But Fords are good!”

  “Sure, good for you. I’m glad you think I’m dependable and tough and roomy enough for all your so-called baggage. But what do I get out of it?”

  I sensed a trick question. “What do you want to get out of it?”

  “I am more than your trusty backup. I am more than the guy you call when your ‘Fiat’ breaks down and leaves you stranded at four A.M.”

  “Of course you are.” I clasped my fingers together.

  His expression was dubious. “We’ll see.”

  “We’ll see what?”

  “We’ll see what happens.” He resettled his body under the few scraps of covers I’d left him. “Let’s table this for now. Do you want to use the shower first?”