Cocktails & Dreams (39 page)

“Come,” he said through a tight throat, putting one hand against the window glass as if he could reach out to her through it.

Jena sighed. “I know you didn’t mean what you said, Nicholas, but you were right about one thing. That probably isn’t a good idea. You need to concentrate on your family.”

“I love you,” Nicholas said quietly.

“I know you do,” Jena finally said. “I love you, too.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He heard her sharply indrawn breath. “I’ve heard that so many times, Nick,” she answered sadly. “I really have to think about us. I want to believe that you’ll never lash out at me again, but…can you promise me that?”

Nicholas was silent, knowing that the likelihood was small now that he’d pulled his head out of his emo ass, but not able to promise.

“Good. We’re not adding lying to the mix.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I need to decide if I can live with that possibility. If we’re together, I don’t want to always be afraid that you’ll push me away. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah. I guess it does.” He crossed the room to sit on the bed. “But…you said you wouldn’t leave me over a fight.”

“You said that you wouldn’t hurt me,” she lashed back. “I guess we were both wrong,” she added more softly.

They were both quiet.

“So…we’ll think about this,” Jena said, her voice shaking. “I’m sorry for the way I sent your stuff. Spend all the time you need with your family, and then come h—
back
, and we’ll go from there.” Her voice roughened, and she cleared her throat. “How’s your dad?”

Dying
, Nick wanted to blurt out, but he knew Jena and he knew that she’d be on the next plane to Boston if he did. He suddenly understood why his dad hadn’t been upfront about his illness. Nicholas didn’t want Jena’s pity, as William didn’t want Nick’s. Nicholas wanted Jena to
want
to be with him.

He fought down the urge to spill out all of his fears, and they talked for a few minutes about what he knew for certain. As the conversation wound down, Nicholas asked the most important question that he could think of.

“Jena…can I call you?”

She hesitated, and he leaned his head against his knees, thinking
Please, Jena. Please. Please don’t do this…

“Not for a while,” she said slowly, and all the air in Nick’s body rushed out like he was punched in the gut. “Concentrate on your family. I love you so much, Nicholas…but I can also use the time to think about what’s fair to both of us. I’ll call
you
, okay?” Her voice was starting to waver. “Let me know if anything changes with your dad, though. I need to go now.” Her voice broke entirely on her last words, and the line went dead.

Nicholas lowered the phone to his lap, blinking hard, and trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Jena wanted time to think.

But she still loved him.

He had to hang on to that.

An idea occurred to him. Jena had asked him not to call her, but she didn’t ask him not to contact her at all. Going down the stairs swiftly, he dug through the box until he could snag the strap of his laptop bag. With a tight smile at Laura as she watched him silently from the office doorway, he went back to his room and powered the computer up.

He might not be able to talk to Jena, but he could still let her know how he felt about her.

“D
AMN
I
T
, J
ENA
! Are you listening at all? I was just saying that I’m worried about you.”

Jena’s head jerked off the desk as, shocked out of a dream, she jumped and quickly turned around, knocking a pile of charts onto the floor. She shivered in the chilly room. “Wha—”

Travis stood in the doorway of the small office, hands on his hips, a scowl on his face, and worry in his eyes. “You say you’re taking a five minute break, and fifteen minutes later, I come in to find you asleep on the desk. This is seriously fucked up, Jen.”

Jena looked at her watch and grimaced. “I’m sorry. Is…” She racked her mind for the name of the patient she was stiffing for their time. Got it. “Teddy J ready to go?”

Travis looked at her. “Teddy was your last patient. The cheerleader chick…what’s her name…anyway, she’s your next patient and she cancelled, for which you should be damn grateful.”

She felt tears trying to come and rubbed the worry spot between her eyebrows to keep them behind her closed lids. A gentle hand rested on her shoulder.

“You need to do something, sugar. You barely eat enough to keep a toddler alive. You toss and turn during the tiny bit of night that’s left after you study all evening—yeah, we hear you. Finals are next week.”

Slipping from underneath Travis’s hand, Jena blindly grabbed a chart. “Making all the studying necessary. You do it, too.”

Trav slowly took the chart from her hands. “Mine. And, yes, I study too, but not ten hours a day.”

Looking more carefully this time, Jena picked up one of her charts. “You’re just smarter than I am, I guess.” She walked toward the door.

“Have you decided what to do about him yet?” Travis and Jena hadn’t spoken Nicholas’s name since a shouting match a couple of days after they’d gotten back from Ashland. Travis had ragged on Nicholas then, and Jena had told him to shut his fucking mouth and keep his nose in his own damned business, so she wasn’t surprised that he didn’t use it this time.

Jena shrugged, passing into the main room and looking for her next patient. Luckily, she was early, so Jena could throw herself into running her through the routine while she tried to shove the memory of her dream to the back of her head. It had seemed so real that she had to struggle with the urge to cover her nose and mouth with her hands and try to catch Nicholas’s scent on them.

It would hurt too damned badly when it wasn’t there.

After sleepwalking through the rest of her shift, Jena grabbed her backpack and coat and zipped out the door before Travis came out of the locker room, leaving him a note saying that she would be studying in the library. Settling at a table, she flipped her books and notepad open, starting to check citations and quotes for her thesis; she wanted no possibility of distraction-related plagiarism to taint her paper. Very soon, though, the absolute quiet of the library began to weigh on her, and she found her focus drifting away and to the east. To Nicholas.

Jena had felt so very sure that she was doing the right thing by taking this time away from Nicholas to really consider their relationship. The night he’d blown up in Stevie’s had been frightening, but after they’d gotten back together and she didn’t see that kind of reaction again, she’d really thought Travis had been right and it had all been a result of big-time stress. Her shock when he’d reacted so badly to Heather’s death had translated to being pissed off at him. Rob and Sharon certainly weren’t perfect, but they were honest with their feelings. Their hotheaded fights were epic when they happened. Everything was laid right on the line, and Jena wasn’t used to stress manifesting as something else.

Even with both of those situations under her belt, though, Nicholas’s insinuation that their relationship had in some way caused his father’s stroke had hit her like a gut punch. Not so much what he’d said, because Jena realized almost immediately that he was really castigating himself, but that he’d said it at all. After blowing up not even a week before, it had rocked her that he’d lashed out again so soon, and she had to wonder if his apology later had come more from not wanting to be alone than genuine contrition.

Lying wakeful that night, she’d started considering for the first time whether that was something that she could live with, day after day. No matter how much she loved Nicholas and he loved her. From his experiences as a med student, Jena could already foresee the stress that would likely remain part of his life, especially as an ER physician. As much as she couldn’t imagine life without Nick, she also couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be on guard every day, worried about what kind of mood would be facing her when he got home from work. Never mind the tearing sensation she got in her chest when she imagined coming home and not having him there at all. She rubbed her forehead with the palm of her hand. Staying together had all the earmarks of a disaster, and she was a girl who hated to fail.

Slapping her book shut to break the stillness, Jena started jamming materials in her pack. A curious librarian peeked around a shelf and quickly retreated from Jena’s glare. It was too quiet. She wanted a little bit of noise to occupy part of her mind so the rest could concentrate on her paper. Since Nicholas had left, school had become her panacea, something at which she’d always done well, and she needed to do well at something right then.

After driving aimlessly for a while, Jena parked outside the coffee shop she’d made her second home. Pushing her iPod buds into her ears and blasting the Black Angels, she immersed herself in her notes, only looking up to thank the owner each of the three times he toted her coffee. At last, a tap on her shoulder made her pop out an earphone.

“Sorry, sweetie. It’s closing time.” Jena looked at the clock over the door and saw that it was ten o’clock. “I’d stay open, but the wife…”

She started replacing study materials in her bag. “No, I’m sorry, Tim. I should have kept better watch, right?” One more thing she’d lost track of.

She said goodbye before heading out the door. Once in the car with the heater running, she hesitated, thinking about where to go next. She pulled away from the curb and drove slowly down the icy street, deciding at the last minute to take a left at the corner instead of a right, and pulled into the lot of her apartment building.

The key stuck in the lock slightly when Jena tried to turn it, and she reminded herself to oil it the next day. Pushing the door open, the first thing she smelled was dust. She tossed her keys in the familiar basket and walked around the living room slowly, thinking how weird it looked, how disjointed. Things were pulled out of place. Things were missing. It looked like Jena felt, actually.

She hadn’t been back there since the night after she’d gotten home from Ashland. Travis and Leisa had dropped her off with a few quiet words, and after they’d gone, Jena had wandered around, picking things up and putting them down, and wondering every minute where Nicholas was right then, what he was doing, if he was all right. After a while, she’d called Sharon to tell her she was home safe, and Sharon had reminded her about sending Nick’s clothes. Like Jena could forget. She’d started to feel a little angry as well as being sad and scared.

Then Nicholas had called with his half-hearted invitation to join him in Boston, and she’d just…freaked—that was the only word that fit—at the thought that he didn’t really want her with him even though everything in her said that he needed her and she needed him. Shutting her brain off before panic could really take over, Jena had gone to the local U-Haul and bought a huge box. Once she’d gotten it home, she’d begun filling it. Starting with Nicholas’s clothes, Jena had placed items carefully in the box, feeling her heart throb painfully with every item she’d folded and laid inside. After a few minutes, she’d decided to take a break, pulling a fresh bottle of tequila out of the cupboard, cracking the seal, and taking three quick shots. Even that hadn’t been enough to make her not care about what she’d been doing, so she’d taken two more, starting to pack more carelessly as the tears got closer and closer to the surface, and soon she’d been tearing around the house heedlessly, grabbing everything of Nicholas’s that she’d spotted and casting them into the box without even looking at them.

She’d wanted him there.

She’d wanted every part of him gone.

She’d wished she’d never met him again.

She’d wished she’d known him since he was a tiny boy.

She’d wished and wanted and sobbed and cursed until she couldn’t fit another thing in the box, and then she’d addressed it and used the throw rug to drag it to the door and down the stairs. The two very confused guys from the apartment nearest the stairs had come out when she’d pounded on their door and helped her lift the box into the back of her Jeep, and then she’d dropped it at FedEx. It had cost a fortune to overnight, but Jena had tried to convince herself that she was glad to be done with all of it.

Her attempt to finish the rest of the bottle when she’d gotten home might have succeeded if Leisa hadn’t marched in and grabbed it off the table, pouring it in the sink and dragging Jena home with her to stay the night. And there Jena had stayed, even sending Leisa to pick up clean clothes.

Soft chiming from her bag called Jena back to the present, and she snatched up her iPhone, flipping to the ’net screen, and seeing what she’d been waiting for all day. Her message.

After she’d missed one, she’d bought a phone with a web browser so she would always know exactly when Nicholas’s message came in, though she nearly always chose to read and listen to it on the computer. So she could save it.

Sitting on the couch that held so many memories and dreams, she opened her laptop and clicked to that day’s message:

Jena,

You were so beautiful in that soft gray sweater with snow in your hair, laughing with Leisa, and it took me about five tries to get my feet moving to walk over to you. I just wanted to watch you laugh.

I still do.

Nicholas

Jena dropped the attachment into her iTunes, like she had done every day since she last talked to Nicholas, and leaned back, closing her eyes. In a couple of seconds, Coldplay’s “In My Place
”
came from the speaker. She had a sudden and total sensory memory of that dance. How he’d smelled. How the oar calluses on his palm right below his fingers had caught on her fluffy sweater, making them both laugh. The way he’d hummed along with the song under his breath in the pauses in conversation. The feeling of the solid muscles in his back and shoulders subtly shifting as he’d guided her around the tiny dance area still tingled in her fingers when she remembered.

Her finger hesitated over the reply button, the same way it had every day for the last two weeks. Every day a new memory and a new song. Every day a choice of whether to pick up the phone or reply via computer. God, she wanted to choose the phone, to hear his voice…but she still wasn’t sure that she could make a clear-headed decision if she heard him. Why was it so damned hard to be fair? Jena’s fear was that she would make a decision based solely on her heart and then decide later that she couldn’t live with the uncertainty of Nicholas’s temper and end up hurting both of them worse if it failed in the end.

With a sigh, she tapped the key and typed in an acknowledgement, a quick “Thank you. I love you,” before shutting the computer down and resting her elbows on her knees, dropping her forehead into her hands and imagining Nicholas sitting like she was. Waiting. A hot tear dropped onto her jeans, and she brushed it away angrily. She was causing her own misery, and she had no right to feel sorry for herself. She was just so fucking scared of making the wrong decision.

A soft ringing broke into her pity party, and she answered quickly, immediately kicking herself for her thought that it might be Nicholas. She’d asked him not to call, and he hadn’t yet.

“Where the hell are you, Jena?” Leisa’s angry voice filled Jena’s ear, and she looked at her watch, startled to see that she’d zoned out and it was almost midnight.

“Shit, Leis. I’m sorry. I’m at my apartment. I needed to grab a couple of things.” Which was absolutely true. Jena just hadn’t thought of it until then.

“Well…are you staying there? Forget it. You’re not staying there. Come home and go to couch.” Leisa’s voice had softened with pity, and Jena mentally smacked herself upside the head for being such a drag on her friends.

“Actually, Leisa, since it’s so late, I think I’ll just stay. I can go to couch just as easily here, and you guys deserve some privacy. Tell Travis I’m sorry for today, okay? And I’ll see him tomorrow at work.”

“Are you sure, sweet pea?” Leisa paused for a minute, and then asked, “Did you get your message?”

Jena hadn’t told anyone very much about what was happening, figuring that it wasn’t their business and not wanting to drive any more wedges between her, Nicholas, and their friends than she had to, but apparently Travis and Leisa hadn’t missed the way Jena toted either her phone or laptop everywhere, and didn’t really relax until she got Nicholas’s message.

“Yeah. Listen, you go to bed and so will I. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

After goodbyes, Jena tossed the phone on the couch and walked toward the bedroom, not even pretending to herself that she’d be able to sleep there as she rushed in, grabbed pajamas, and quickly shut the door again.

She tossed a pillow in the corner of the sofa and settled in, pushing away the memories of the day Nicholas played the guitar in that very corner…

Fuck.

Throwing her pillow on the floor, she dragged the blankets with her as she slid off the couch and onto the floor. Lying on her back and putting her arm over her eyes, she laughed at herself. Nicholas was everywhere in the apartment, even though she had lived there far longer with Travis. If he didn’t come back, she’d have to buy new furniture, at the very least, if she could live there at all.

Jena rolled onto her side, hugging her arms around her middle as
if he doesn’t come back
rolled around and around in her brain until she finally dropped off to sleep at dawn.