Love in Maine (10 page)

Maddie’s head almost touched the top of the tent when she was astride him like that.
She placed her palms on his chest, then leaned down to enjoy every square inch of
this man’s hard, toned body.

As she learned to map the areas of his greatest response—the pale flesh of his ribs,
the turn of his neck, his sensitive ears—Maddie gradually moved down his body, just
as he had moved down hers.

“You don’t have to—”

Maddie was so close, hovering between his navel and her objective. Her hair fell along
his hip, a silky panel.

“But I can if I want to, right?” She stared at him, waiting for him to answer. “I
mean, you’ll try to like it, right?” She’d already begun touching him lightly between
his legs.

His voice was thin. “Only if you want to.”

Maddie wanted to. Badly. So she did.

After, the two of them lay there breathing hard, Maddie’s cheek against his lower
belly. Hank’s hand slowly loosened its grip in her long hair and he massaged her scalp
absently. It felt like gratitude.

They both fell back to sleep.

When Hank woke up an hour later, he was naked and alone on a pile of empty sleeping
bags. He rummaged around until he found his sweats, pulled them on, and ducked his
head as he moved out of the tent opening and looked around for Maddie. She was sitting
on a rock near the edge of the water, facing toward the long, narrowing end of the
lake, where the sun was making its slow ascent. He intended to leave her alone, but
she must have heard his rustling and she turned to face him over one shoulder. Her
face was the picture of peace, angelic, with the new sun creating a golden glow across
her wide cheekbones and gently curved mouth.

Hank’s immediate reaction was to walk backward, very slowly, like he’d been trained
to do if he happened upon a suspected land mine. Danger! Danger! That look of satisfied
harmony that emanated from her was like a spike in his gut.

“I’ll break down the tent,” he said, turning away from her and getting busy.

She shrugged and went back to watching the day explode before her eyes.

They had a couple of energy bars for breakfast and spent the rest of the morning in
the canoe. What had happened in the tent had made Maddie far softer, compliant. She
didn’t fight him on the direction of the boat or the pace of their paddling. The two
of them moved around the lake in easy symmetry, exploring small coves, pausing to
listen to the slap of a jumping fish or the slow awakening of the insects and small
creatures that lived in the woods. Around noon, Hank said it was time to pack it in
and head back to the trailhead. Three hours of portaging and three hours of driving
still lay ahead of them.

Unfortunately for Hank, Maddie’s sense of peace and ease seemed to deepen in inverse
proportion to his anxiety. On the drive home, he pecked at her with little jabs of
repartee, and she just smiled at him and said mild things like, “Don’t be such a grump.”
Or “It’s no big deal.” Or “Maybe you’re hungry.” He was far more comfortable when
she was chatty and confrontational—it kept things light to have that banter between
them. This new turn of events was starting to feel like the beginning of that most
dreaded of all words in Hank’s vocabulary: A Relationship.

Vague. Unpredictable. Amorphous.

Hank spent the final hour of the drive home silently convincing himself that Maddie
had fallen in love with him in that damned tent, and that he was going to have to
spend the rest of the summer trying to avoid her and, more importantly, any of the
feelings she stirred up in him.

By the time they pulled into the driveway in Blake, Hank practically dove out of the
car. Maddie pulled the blue backpack out and lifted it onto one shoulder, easy as
you please.

“Do you want me to help you unload the stuff?” Maddie asked. Neutral.

He was already untying the cords from the canoe. He might as well have been welding
the most complicated rigging at fifty fathoms for all the attention he was giving
the mundane task. “No. I’m good.”

“Okay.”

Here we go, Hank thought. The thank-you-for-the-most-wonderful-weekend-of-my-life
speech. He looked up finally, feeling her still standing there waiting for him to
say good-bye or something. He supposed he could look at her while she spilled her
heart to him.

But she didn’t do that at all.

He would always look back on that moment as one of his greatest lapses into solipsistic
egomania: He was the one who was in danger, not Maddie. He was the one who was going
to crack apart if this progressed any further. She was light as a feather. Whole.
Normal. She just smiled that small, satisfied smile and turned toward the back door
of his mother’s house.

“Have a good week, Hank,” she said, raising one hand in a half-hearted wave and keeping
her back to him. “I’ll see you around.”

Hank almost slammed his forehead against the prow of the canoe where it extended near
his face. Several times. Hard.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid man.

Instead, he took a deep breath and found a small thread of comfort in breaking down
the camping equipment and putting everything away with the precision and exactitude
that always made everything else seem bearable. Maddie’s blasé departure was what
he had been secretly hoping for, wasn’t it? No big deal. Just a cigar and all that.

Just to be sure, he kept his distance. When he got to work the next morning, he signed
up for two extra shifts so one of his co-workers could go to his grandmother’s ninetieth
birthday over in Wiscasset.

“You stockpiling hours to go on a vacation or something?”

“Nah, just nothing else going on, so might as well make the extra cash, right?”

“I guess.” Ned Pendleton was a single, ill-tempered former Marine. He always tried
to make jokes about how Hank was an Army grunt and too bad he couldn’t make it into
the
real
military.

Hank ignored him.

The week improved the longer Hank was away from Maddie. He didn’t risk going into
his mother’s kitchen to steal a few sodas; he went straight from his apartment to
his job and back again, grateful that his seven o’clock morning departure was a few
hours after Maddie left to start her shift down at Phil’s.

By Thursday afternoon, he was feeling almost even-keeled. So they’d rolled around
in a tent. So what? He shook his head and smiled at his own maudlin stupidity. It
didn’t need to be anything more than that.

Hank was in the locker room getting out of his deep-sea gear when Ned poked his head
around the wall from the shower area.

“Hey, Gilbertson, you want to go grab a beer? You look like you’re finally over your
little snit of the week.”

What a tool. Hank should have punched the bastard in the face, but it seemed lame
to punch someone for being right.

“Sure. Why the hell not?”

Ned pulled back behind the wall to finish drying off, but kept talking. “Have you
seen that new collegiate piece of ass working at Phil’s yet?”

Hank reconsidered the punch. Sometimes being right was even more of a reason to knock
someone’s head off. He ground his teeth together.

“Yeah, I’ve seen her, asshole. She’s renting the guest room at my mother’s house.”

A low wolf whistle came from behind the white tile. “You mean to tell me you got that
flat stomach and those perky tits right upstairs, and you haven’t done anything about
it?”

Hank slammed the metal locker door and finished buttoning up his shorts. He leaned
into the part of the room where Ned was standing so he could see his face. “Go drink
your beer alone, dickwad.”

“Testy! Testy!” Ned called out as Hank left the building, the jerk’s mocking laugh
fading behind him.

It was about half past eight on Thursday night when Hank pulled into his driveway.
He killed the engine and sat in the truck for a few minutes. The light was on in his
mother’s living room, and he could see the silhouettes of his mom and Maddie reading
or talking through the old embroidered sheers. Before he realized how long he’d been
sitting there, he saw the silhouette of his mother rise from the sofa and wave to
him.

Shit.

She opened the front door and called to him. “Hey, sweetheart! I haven’t seen you
all week. Want some supper?”

He opened the car door and flipped his keys around his index finger. Busy man of affairs
and all that. What a tool.

“No. I’ve got some stuff to catch up on.” His eyes darted to the back of Maddie’s
head—perfectly still, not turning to look at him—diffused through the gauzy curtain.

“Oh. Okay, then.” His mom was trying not to sound disappointed. “Do you have plans
this weekend? Do you want to go to the movies again tomorrow night?” She spoke quickly,
before he got away.

“Sorry, can’t. I have to work a couple of extra shifts this weekend.” He thought he
saw Maddie’s shoulders lower a tiny bit—from relief or frustration, he had no idea.
He didn’t want to know.

“Okay, then.” His mom tilted her head slightly. “You okay, honey?”

He puffed up his chest and tossed the keys a little higher. “All good, Mom. All good.”
He turned and took the wooden steps two at a time and was relieved to feel the pressure
of his mother’s concerned gaze leave him when he shut the door to his apartment.

He was screwed. There was no way he could go on living in his mother’s garage no matter
how much space she gave him. He needed to get on with his own life, and that was never
going to happen with her concerned questions waiting for him every time he pulled
into the driveway. Coming back to Blake—trying to be normal—had always been a temporary
solution. To help him reintegrate or some damn thing. Meeting Maddie was making it
worse.

Everybody talked about what it was like to go back to “normal life” after all those
years in the military. He was dealing. He had been dealing just fine before Madison
Post showed up. Now he was starting to feel all fractured again. He hadn’t seen the
kind of action he knew other grunts from his class had run into, in Somalia and Afghanistan
and every other fucked up place on earth. The fact that he’d probably killed more
people than all those guys combined was another story altogether.

Maddie’s shoulders relaxed all the way when she heard the door to his apartment close.
What the hell was a grown man doing living with his mother anyway? He needed to get
his own place. And stop driving Maddie insane with all his around-but-never-around
nearness. She didn’t know if what they had started was just a fling or if it was going
to lead to anything, but all of his special-ops-evacuation-stealth-invisibility-maneuvering
was turning their whole fun time together into something tawdry and regrettable. Maddie
was beginning to feel like maybe, on some level, he was the innocent and she was the
hussy after all. One way or another, they were going to have to have it out; there
was no way either of them could go on like this indefinitely.

Maddie closed her eyes and tried to compose herself when Janet came back into the
living room. She immediately shoved her nose into the nearest book on the coffee table.

Janet locked the front door and turned slowly to face Maddie. “What happened on that
canoe trip, Maddie?”

Maddie’s heart began to hammer, and a light sheen of sweat bristled on the back of
her neck from the spurt of adrenaline. Janet had become a friend. Maddie really believed
that she wasn’t asking as Hank’s mother, but as a concerned friend. But Janet was
always going to be Hank’s mother first. Always would be.

“I thought we had a good time,” Maddie said.

Janet sat back down on the sofa, but at the edge, not like she was going to settle
back into her book, the two of them drifting back into the friendly silence that had
come to define their evenings together.

“Maddie?”

Pulling her lips tight between her teeth, Maddie did her best to answer. “
Mm-hmm?
” She kept looking at her book.

The silence spread, slow and cold, through the room.

Finally, Maddie looked up and met the older woman’s questioning eyes.

“Are you okay?” Janet asked.

Oh, Jesus. She was asking
Maddie
if she was okay?
Take. Take. Take
. That’s what her brother Jimmy always accused her of. Maddie felt the shame of how
she had selfishly pushed things forward with this woman’s beloved son, and couldn’t
look at Janet anymore. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, sweetie. What do
you
have to be sorry about?”

Maddie couldn’t breathe. “This is wrong. Because you’re his mom. And I know you sort
of thought it might be sweet if we, you know, got together or whatever, like when
we were at the movies and it was all fun, but—” She was talking too fast, the words
were coming out against her will. She continued in a frantic whisper, worried that
Hank was up at his window listening to her strange, guiltless confession. “But he
acted like he wanted to just have fun. I mean, oh gosh, this is horribly weird, and
I’m sorry, but we didn’t have sex, just for the record, and I thought, well he
made
me think, that it was just fun and games, and then he changed and became all silent
and moody again, and now I feel like I’ve done something selfish that has triggered
something angry or unhappy in him and I wasn’t trying to be selfish—for once!—and
it turns out I might as well just revert to type if I’m going to end up in the same
place of feeling like everyone thinks I am just this selfish . . . bitch.”

Janet kept staring at her, but in a caring, listening way rather than in that questioning
way she’d been looking at her before. “Are you done?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Maddie made an attempt at a little laugh but it came out wrong,
and she reached up to her eye to wipe the moisture that she hadn’t realized was there.
She pretended she was just exercised, as her grandmother would say.

“This is when I am so grateful that I don’t drink anymore,” Janet said. “I mean, if
I was drunk right now, I would have missed all of this. But I can see you, Maddie.
And I have always been able to see Henry, even through the fog of alcohol, I could
always read him. I think that’s why he had to get away. Who wants to be known and
observed like that? It’s too much sometimes.”