"Sweet Baby Jesus," he finally murmured, rubbing his cheek against the top of her head. "I know it must have been good before," he said hoarsely between gulps for breath, "because my words have come back to haunt me more times than I can count. But it could not have been like this." His fingers squeezed her neck, tightened on her hip, holding her to him possessively. Stropping his cheek against her hair, he said quietly, almost to himself, "I don't care how loaded I was, I would have remembered this."
"It wasn’t like this," Hayley agreed. She had never felt anything like this before and she had a sinking feeling she knew what made the difference. Even as she took comfort in Jon-Michael's arms, in the soap-and-water scent of his neck where her nose was buried and the heat and strength with which he surrounded her, she assured herself weakly that this was not love. No fricking way. It was simply good sex with a sober partner. And good sex was a dime a dozen, right? Well, maybe not for her, but that was only because circumstances had seen to it she didn’t get around much. That could change, though, and when it did she probably wouldn’t even remember what doing the rocking chair boogie with Jon-Michael had been like.
Really.
"Hayley?"
"Umm?"
"Why did you sleep with me that night by the lake?"
She stiffened all over and felt his shrinking penis slip out of her. "I have to get going," she said, struggling to sit up.
His arms tightened. "No! Listen, never mind, it doesn't matter. You do not have to talk about it if you don't want. Just ...don't go yet, okay? Stay with me for a while."
She subsided, but muttered uneasily, "Well, just for a little while. Then you have to take me to my car. I have stuff to do before I go to work." And she had to think.
She really needed some time alone to think.
Jon-Michael got Hayley to shower with him and he fed her, but although she talked to him with apparent ease, there was a reserve about her that kept her closed away from him at the most basic level. He seethed with frustration when he delivered her to her car an hour and a half later. It must have shown, too, for the two journalists who were sitting on the Pontiac's hood took one look at his face and unyielding posture and quietly removed themselves without attempting to interrogate her.
"Don't you ever put up the top?" he asked as he opened the car door for her. It creaked in protest.
"Occasionally. If it looks like it's going to rain."
He handed her behind the wheel and closed the car door. Then squatting down he propped his chin on the hands he had curled around the window opening. "Come home with me after work."
Hayley had been congratulating herself on the fact that this was Jon-Michael’s night off and she would not have to face him. And, yet—
Slipping on a pair of sunglasses, she gazed at him through the protective shading of their lenses. "I don't know, Jon."
"I'll come pick you up so you don't have to run the gauntlet of reporters to your car."
"Then you would just have to drive me back to my car again tomorrow."
"I don't mind."
She started the Pontiac, staring straight ahead. "I have to think about it."
He rose and leaned over the door until his lips were a centimeter from her ear.
"Fine," he said in a gruff rasp that raised goosebumps down the entire side of her body. "You think about it. Think, too, about the fact that no way in hell was this a one-off deal. If you don't want to come to me, then I will come to you. I'll just wait until you're asleep to slip into the house, slip into your room…maybe even slip into you. 'Cause, baby, I know something about you now."
He trailed a rough fingertip over her temple, down her cheek and, catching her hair, gently hooked it behind her ear. His breath was warm as it traveled the whorls leading to her auditory canal. "I know you are eeeeasy—" his voice went low and rough on the word, stretching it out "—when you first wake up."
Hayley could not stop the shiver that slicked down her spine any more than she could stop her next breath.
"And Hayley, honey," he continued in his everyday voice as he pushed to his feet and looked down at her with dark, intent eyes. "While you’re busy doing all that thinking, think about this. I will not hesitate one second to use that to my advantage."
Sixteen
Strongly held opinions had drawn a line in the sand between the citizens of Gravers Bend. Those who made money off the journalists overrunning their peaceful little town liked having them around. Everyone else found them a pain in the ass.
"Christ a'mighty," muttered one of the Blue Dolphin's regulars when he walked into the cafe and discovered someone had usurped the counter stool where he had sat to eat his breakfast and shoot the bull with his friends every Monday through Friday for the past seventeen years. If that was not insult enough, even the seats considered undesirable were all filled up; there was not an available spot in the joint. "When the hell are all these yahoos goin’ home?"
It was a question many wanted answered. The media had booked all the available rooms at the Royal Inn and was busy crowding the town's restaurants and bars. Most were well mannered. There were enough behaving with arrogant big city condescension, however, to give them all a bad name. And their very reason for being in Gravers Bend sparked arguments over weightier matters than having one's usual place commandeered by an out-of-towner.
The Peninsula Women's Garden Club, comprised largely of genteel elderly ladies with discreet blue tints, nearly came to blows over the moral ramifications of capital punishment. Not since learning Bev Eldridge's granddaughter Molly had gone to Seattle for an abortion had the club seen such divisiveness over an issue. Acrimony was served up alongside tea, petit fours and watercress sandwiches.
The media's entrenched trend toward allowing speculation to take the place of good old-fashioned reportage of the facts and just the facts was debated over the dry-fly case at Gaard's Sportsman.
Differing opinions over the First Amendment’s original intent nearly closed down the bar at the country club. Sides were swiftly drawn between those who believed the First Amendment offered blanket protection to all journalists, regardless of their behavior, and those who argued that a journalist's freedom to hound a body to death in search of a better rating was not what this nation's forefathers had in mind when they had penned the Bill of Rights. The membership, usually constrained by impeccable manners, grew so loud and irate that the hostess was forced to ask them to take the argument outside. When they did just that, she looked around to discover only two people left in the room.
Overnight, the sleepy little town of Gravers Bend had turned into a hotbed of controversy.
I am saddened by Joe's refusal to come home but not particularly worried by it. I go about my daily business, conducting my life as usual. Eventually he will be back. He is just going through a little early onset midlife crisis. He will get over it sooner or later and come home where he belongs.
Another aspect of my life has begun to bother me a great deal, however, because nothing about it has gone at all the way I expected. I have invited Hayley to meet me for lunch, for coffee and once for a glass of wine at the country club. Not once has she been able to make it.