This is Chapter 11 from Magdalene linked from the second round of the Group Creativity Experiment, featuring “Fairground” by Simply Red.
WHEN DID YOU FALL
I OPENED MY DOOR at two minutes to eight to see him standing there relaxed, his hands in his jeans pockets, a long wool overcoat swept back behind his strong arms. His sandy hair glinted a slight red in the glow from the street lamp and his eyes seemed lighter in the reflection off the snow. He had a sly smile on his face and I wondered if he would kiss me at the stroke of midnight.
Was it only a month ago I’d thought him ordinary?
“Come in for a minute,” I said with an unintentional huskiness to my voice. I stepped aside, but his smile change from sly to amused and he said,
“Thank you, but no. Not coming in.”
It took me a second or two to figure that out, then said, “You think I’m going to seduce you.”
“Attempt to.”
I smirked.
“Appearance of impropriety and all that.”
“Ah, okay.”
Chuckling, I went to find my coat, then shoved it into his hands when I stepped out onto the stoop and locked my door. He assisted me into it as I had expected him to.
“Did you get my test results?” I asked as he handed me into the car he’d hired for the night. I slid over a proper distance so that he wouldn’t be too tempted.
“Yes, I did, thank you,” he said with a chuckle. “And I turned off my phone.” Once he was comfortable and we were on our way, he looked at my lap, grasped one of my hands, and wrapped my fingers up with his. “Did you have a good birthday?”
“Only because of you.”
Oh, my God. I hadn’t really said that, had I? I had. His frown told me I had. “What does that mean?” he rumbled.
“Uh … ”
“Are you telling me that your family didn’t do anything for you?”
“Uh … ”
“And your daughters all live at home, right?”
I looked past him out the window, seeing nothing. “New Year’s Eve is … New Year’s Eve. It’s special to them. It’s always been difficult.”
“Even when you were a kid?”
“Um … ” I cleared my throat. “No. My parents— They made sure to put me first. Then … ”
“Then … ?”
“Then I got married,” I said flatly, hoping he would back off. He knew what had happened—at least, what was in the public record as having happened.
His jaw clenched then and he looked away as if to hide it. His hand closed a little tighter on mine, and I wondered— “Do you ever get angry? Really angry?”
He looked at me sharply and his expression melted into a smile immediately. “Not much, no,” he said. “I’m pretty easygoing.”
Liar.
I didn’t say it, though. He’d deny it and I really didn’t want to spend my evening trying to get him to admit something probably very few people knew about him.
“That book you sent me,” I said. “I like it so far. Thank you.”
“How far in did you get?”
“Angélique’s marriage.” I launched into the oddity of his having chosen that particular book to send me and why, and, because I couldn’t keep my fucking mouth shut, I said, “Did you send that to me because of my marriage?”
He started. “No. I— It’s my favorite book. It … helped me get through a rough time in my life. I didn’t see any connection in it. I wanted to— Um … ”
I closed my other hand over the knot that his and mine already made. “It’s okay,” I murmured. “It wouldn’t have bothered me if you had. I was curious, is all. Big coincidence.”
He stared at me for a second, his expression somber. “Tell me about it.”
I took a deep breath and sighed, then shifted to make myself more comfortable. I knew what he was asking and I didn’t pretend otherwise. “Gordon was twenty-five. I was fifteen and madly in love with this dashing older man. He saw me as a well-behaved little girl … a pretty life-sized doll who could walk and talk. He didn’t object when his father and my father set up the deal. I sure as hell wasn’t going to object.” I stopped, thought back. It was humiliating, thinking how I’d doodled Gordon’s name on my notebooks, being so very … fifteen about it. But fifteen was fifteen and not forty-six, and was to be expected. I was far more forgiving of, say, my twenty-four-year-old assistant’s crush on the kid in payroll than I was of my fifteen-year-old self.
“We had three years of an entirely chaste and fairy princess courtship. I thought Gordon refused to kiss me because I was underage, which only proved to me that he was honorable. We got married a week after I turned eighteen. My father didn’t figure out until my wedding day why Gordon’s father was so eager to get us married off.” I laughed. “Hell, Gordon didn’t even know.”
“When’d he come out?”
The warmth of Mitch’s big hand seeped into my cold ones. “When he got out of prison. Before he went into treatment.”
“And your father put you in that position, even though he knew.”
“He didn’t know,” I said. “He suspected. Didn’t know what to do because if he were wrong, it would’ve blown back on all of us very badly … I try to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“I see. You were the one hit with all the aftershocks.”
I shrugged. “I was a good girl. I did what I was told.”
“Until you couldn’t anymore,” Mitch muttered, his head bowed and his voice far away. I leaned forward a little to look up into his face.
“Mitch?”
He glanced up at me, then chuckled wryly. “You and Mina. Good girls backed into a corner, then came out fighting.”
“Your wife?” I asked, not in the least bit jealous. I’d be suspicious of any man who didn’t want to talk about the woman he had loved so long, the mother of his children. After years of studying men, fucking a good many of them, and acting as overpaid therapist to more than a few, I had come to the conclusion that ones who’d lost beloved wives after long marriages made excellent relationship material, and I wasn’t threatened by a ghost.
“She was seventeen when we met,” he said slowly. “Very shy, soft-spoken, eager to please. Physically delicate. She was sick even then, but nobody knew it. She had never rebelled, not even so much as smarting off. I was … without prospects, so her father— He was—is—a CPA with his own successful firm, very upper middle class. He disapproved of me.”
“Putting it lightly?” I asked, hearing the edge in his voice.
A corner of his mouth turned up. “I think you read me too well.”
“I think you let me.”
He tilted his head in acknowledgment of that.
“And?”
“And I … stole her.”
“Stole her? From whom?”
“Her father. The man he wanted her to marry. They had it all arranged for her to marry him the week after she graduated from high school.”
“So you eloped? How’d that work out with her family?”
“Disowned her. Never spoke to her again. I got into S&T, so after she graduated from high school, we moved to Missouri and stayed there for eight years. It was easier for her that way, anyway. She could use distance to excuse them.”
Well. Mina Monroe and Cassie St. James, two sides of the same coin.
“Now?”
Mitch waved a hand. “Her mother died before she did. Her father never had anything to do with me or the kids.”
“Still?”
“Still. My son is having a hard time with it right now, same way my daughters did. Do.”
I sighed.
“And … what’s your ex-father-in-law doing these days?”
That startled a delighted laugh out of me, as he had surely intended. “My ex-father-in-law is working at a convenience store somewhere on the Tex-Mex border.”
“How much of a hand did you have in that?”
“Both hands, both feet. And I make sure to keep my stiletto heel in his jugular at all times. Revenge is best served in a Slurpee cup, you see.”
He and I laughed, and we were still laughing when our car pulled up to Bryant Park. “Mitch,” I drawled, not in the least surprised. “Ice skating? What a chick-flick cliché.”
“Well,” he said as he got out and pulled me out after him, “it’s free and I didn’t have much money left after that ridiculously expensive basket I sent you.”
“Don’t tell anybody I’m such a cheap date. Did you make those cookies?”
“Uh, no. The young ladies in my ward—parish—”
“I’ve got the lingo now, Mitch. Ward, not parish.”
He grinned. “—were making them as a service project, so I asked my Relief Society president—my female counterpart in the ward—to swipe a few, write the words, and wrap it up.”
“Service project?”
“Yeah. It’s where somebody in the ward is identified as being in need of having something done. Sometimes it’s a job the teenagers can handle with little or no supervision. They get together and work on it, get it done. Project. Service. Service project.”
“I’m not in your ward-slash-parish.”
“No, but I am. And I was in great need, let me tell you.”
We laughed.
And continued to all evening as we attempted to skate, neither of us very good, leaning against each other, propping each other up, occasionally pulling the other one down. We may have spent more time upright than on our asses, but I wouldn’t have bet on it.
Breathless, we retired to a bench a couple of hours later to watch others who were far better than we were. Mitch draped his arm around my shoulder and I snuggled in for warmth. He curled his free hand around mine, and I felt his strength even through several layers of wool.
“Where are you staying?” I asked. “Did you drive?”
“I drove. Staying at The Mark.”
I glanced up at him, surprised. “Just around the corner from me!”
He simply smiled, which carved concentric laugh lines into his cheeks.
“You’re ornery.”
“That I am,” he murmured.
“What would God say about that?”
“God made mosquitoes.”
I burst out laughing then. “Point taken. Then I will assume you have something planned?”
“My only plan was to spend the day with you, if you were free.”
I was supposed to go shopping with Clarissa, during which she would attempt—and fail—to wheedle a five-thousand-dollar dress out of me. Boy, would she be pissed when I canceled. “I’d like that,” I said, more softly than I’d intended to. “But not in my house?”
“Not alone, no.”
I tried to be angry, but I couldn’t. It was simply too funny.
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Ha ha ha.”
“Oh, don’t be mad. I haven’t laughed this much with a ma—” Well. He didn’t need to know that.
“I think,” he said slowly, looking off into the distance, “that it’s time for hot chocolate and brownies. Jacques Torres.”
“What are you talking about? They close at nine on Friday and maybe earlier today.”
“You sure about that?”
My breath caught. “You evil man.”
“The epitome.”
WE HAD THE CHOCOLATERIE to ourselves, and we were seated with much ado—New Year’s Eve, almost three hours past their closing time and coming up on midnight. People were knocking on the door to get in, but were ignored.
Midnight.
I was getting jittery, wondering how Mitch kissed, unable to wait for the new year when I would feel his mouth on mine.
Happy birthday to you …
I gasped and turned in my seat when the singing began.
A cake.
With sparkler candles.
Fuckers wouldn’t go out when I blew at them, either. There were only four, but they kept sparking and sparkling. I kept blowing and blowing.
“Dammit!” I plucked them out of the cake and dunked them in my water glass.
Mitch roared with laughter. I tried not to, but failed.
“That was a nasty little trick,” I grumbled. He opened his mouth, but I held up a hand. “I know, I know. God made mosquitoes.”
The cake was cut and we each had a piece. There were chocolates and hot chocolate and ice cream and fruit and by the time we left at two, we were buzzed on sugar. We bounced nonsense off each other, in hysterics over things that, in daylight, would be simple stupidity, not even worthy of eyerolling.
The hour, the laughter, the sugar, the dark, the cold kept at bay in the back of a warm car with a warm and attractive man— It made me say and do things I knew I would find humiliating in the morning because they were so very … fifteen.
“I didn’t get my midnight kiss,” I whined, but it had taken me almost the entire distance home to cut through our silliness enough to remember it.
“You were otherwise occupied blowing out candles, and now it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late for a kiss.”
He cocked one eyebrow at me. “You think?” He shifted and leaned toward me and, with a sigh, I closed my eyes.
And he kissed me.
My eyes popped open. “What the hell was that?” I demanded.
He spread his arms, all wide-eyed innocence, and said, “I kissed you.”
“On the tip of my nose! I barely felt it!”
I was squeaking. Oh, God, I was fucking squeaking!
“You weren’t very specific.”
I screeched. He laughed. I screeched louder, but it turned into a fit of giggles. I fell over and lay across the car seat with my head in his lap, simply looking up at him. He smiled and smoothed my hair, picked up a strand only to let it slip through his fingers.
“I’m drunk,” I said.
“I know. You’re worse than a toddler. Can’t hold your sugar worth a darn.”
I blinked. “Darn?”
“That’s right.”
I sat up. “You don’t swear?”
He shook his head slowly. “Never.”
“You better write me a list of things you can’t do.”
“Tomorrow. It’s a long list.”
“And then I will attempt to get you to do them.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
I sobered a bit. “Mitch, I— I wanted to tell you. Tonight was … ” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed my face. Benadryl. I needed Benadryl. “This was the best birthday I’ve had in a long time,” I murmured. “Maybe ever.”
He looked at me, no longer amused, and said, “I’m sorry.”