Page 36 of Stay Away from Him
She was struggling with a similar thought spiral right now.
Last time he was here, Bradley seemed to warm to Kendall and, later, even to Rhiannon.
But what if he didn’t? What if he was just pretending to like Thomas’s daughters because he sensed it was important to Melissa?
And what if Kendall and Rhiannon were doing the same, trying to get along with Bradley because they knew it was important to their dad?
Rhiannon had been cold, Kendall polite—but they both could have been more hesitant about their dad dating, more hesitant about Melissa , than they let on directly.
And now, their hesitation might have blossomed into full-on rebellion.
How else to explain their absence right now, their refusal to come down and say hello to Melissa and Bradley?
She cast her mind back, tried to remember what Bradley had told her when Kendall and Rhiannon babysat him.
They’d played together, taken a walk through the woods at the back of Thomas’s yard, then Rhiannon had made him a snack and sat with him while Kendall did some homework.
It all seemed innocuous enough at the time—but then Melissa recalled that Bradley had also gotten scared by Kendall telling him that a coyote lived in those woods.
An older kid telling a scary story about the legendary neighborhood predator, and Bradley hadn’t liked it.
Maybe Bradley’s hesitance to go find the girls was as simple as that, his remembering that one of them had made him afraid.
That left the girls themselves, and why they weren’t coming down to say hello.
Thomas’s girls had been through real trauma with the loss of their mother.
A parent dating someone new was hard enough; add the murder of a loved one to that difficulty, and it was no wonder Rhiannon and Kendall were being distant.
Thomas and Melissa might truly love each other, might have been in love with each other—but the rest of it wasn’t going to be easy. A single dinner wasn’t going to make them one big happy family.
“Melissa?” Lawrence asked.
Melissa blinked. “Yes?”
“You look like you’re a million miles away.”
“Do I?” She looked around the circle, feeling everyone’s eyes on her. Amelia studied her with an inscrutable look. She forced a laugh. “Sorry. Long week. I’m just tired.”
Lawrence nodded in a way that said he didn’t believe her.
Then Thomas came walking back in, apron off and draped over his forearm, the way a waiter at a fancy restaurant might carry a white cloth napkin.
“Dinner,” he said, “is served.”
***
The meal was terribly awkward, as Melissa somehow knew it would be.
She and Thomas sat next to each other, and occasionally he let his hand rest on her leg, his fingers brushing the bare skin at her knee where the hem of her dress rode up.
It was the first he’d touched her in days, but she was too distracted to enjoy it, to imagine Thomas’s hands moving higher, pushing her dress up her body.
Sitting together with their three kids around them, Melissa felt already like a wife and husband, a mom and a dad, which made Thomas’s touch feel chaste, nonsexual.
The kids simply watched them, not talking.
Rhiannon’s look was a glare, a dark teenage scowl.
She picked at her food—the salmon Thomas brought in on a smoking cedar plank, green beans swimming in butter, crisp garlicky roasted potatoes.
Her head was mostly down, hair hanging around her ears, but she peered up at Melissa from under her lowered brow in a way that reminded Melissa of the juvenile delinquent from A Clockwork Orange , a movie Carter, her ex, made her watch years ago.
Kendall’s expression was more pleasant, if a little hard to place.
Her smile was dull, but her eyes were sharp and intense on Melissa, and whenever Melissa caught her gaze, she wondered what was behind those eyes—whether the smile was genuine or a mask.
Next to Kendall, Bradley simply studied Melissa and Thomas, not smiling but not frowning either.
Just thinking. It looked to Melissa like he was putting something together for the first time, and as Melissa met her son’s eyes, she felt a pang of guilt at not talking to him before they came over, not explaining to him what this evening was.
Not knowing what to say was not an excuse for not saying anything, and she resolved to sit him down as soon as they got home, explain exactly how she felt about Thomas, and what it might mean for them.
The other adults at the table seemed to be picking up on the strained atmosphere.
Lawrence and Toby, normally gregarious, didn’t seem to have any idea what to say.
Even Amelia, normally so put together and sophisticated, seemed completely out of her element when Melissa glanced over at her, wearing the look of poorly concealed social panic people sometimes got when conversation in a group trickled down to silence.
It all felt like a terrible gathering where no one was allowed to talk about the thing that was really going on, but Melissa couldn’t think of anything else to talk about either.
Five minutes in, they’d burned through small talk about how good the food smelled, how great a cook Thomas was, how he seasoned the fish, and what was that herb on the potatoes?
And then there was nothing more to say. Lawrence and Toby tried their best, mentioning a few goings-on around town—a construction project that would have to start moving quickly if it was going to be done before the snow flew, the upcoming city council and school board elections that had everyone putting signs on their lawns, and yet another pet disappearance in the neighborhood—the mythic coyote striking again.
Melissa made a few paltry attempts to ask Thomas’s girls how school was going, but Kendall only shrugged and said “Okay,” and Rhiannon straight-up glared at Melissa with a look so withering she thought she could practically hear the girl snarl.
It was all so terrible that Melissa found herself grabbing for her wineglass over and over again, drinking too much before she’d eaten enough to soak up the alcohol.
It went straight to her head, and before she knew it, she was feeling hot and flushed, a little buzzed, and with the beginnings of a headache.
At one point she simply closed her eyes and focused on the feel of Thomas’s hand, still resting on her leg as he forked his food one-handed.
An anchor, a reassurance. His fingertips playing at the soft skin just inches up from her knee, sending tingles up her thigh.
She opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
And his face was so beautiful, so kind. The gray flecks in his blue irises, the soft wrinkles spidering from the corners of his eyes.
His perfect smile, the way it cracked his face open into something that shone.
Melissa recalled that while it might have been a while since they last saw each other, the last time they spoke this man had said he loved her, and she said she loved him back.
“I’m fine,” she said, and meant it. “Perfect.”
He wiped his mouth, then set his napkin down and stood, addressed the whole table.
“How about a walk?”
***
They went out, leaving the leftover food on the table, the sink full of dishes.
The evening was perfect, crisp and cooling, the sunlight cracking into shards over bare branches and falling leaves as it sank toward the horizon.
They went out the back door of the house, over the deck and down the wood steps to the yard.
The woods lay to the right, still and crackling in the quiet of the evening; a half mile’s walk through the tangle of trees and browning underbrush would have brought them to Lawrence’s back door and the entrance to Melissa’s apartment.
But they cut left instead, toward the lake.
The sight of it reminded Melissa of the night she met Thomas, his flirty suggestion that they escape the dinner party and go skinny-dipping.
“We never took our dip,” Melissa said as they came to the water’s edge and an asphalt path that circled the lake—another route to Lawrence and Toby’s house, to her basement apartment, albeit by a longer, more circuitous route than the woods.
She laced her fingers together with Thomas’s, and with her other hand reached across her body to squeeze his forearm through his wool coat, slid her hand up to his bicep.
Thomas grinned. “I’m still game,” he said. “It’s colder than it was then.”
Melissa laughed. She’d put a coat on, and her arms and shoulders were warm—but beneath the hem of her linen dress, she felt the cooling air prick at her calves.
She glanced back at everyone following them: Kendall and Bradley walking side by side, Rhiannon behind them, looking sullen, and Amelia, Lawrence, and Toby bringing up the rear.
“Too many eyes right now.”
“We’ve got all the time in the world,” Thomas said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “I intend for this to last. Don’t you?”
“I do,” Melissa said. “I’m not sure our kids agree, though. I mean, have you tried to explain anything to them? What have they said?”
“They’ll come around.”
That wasn’t really an answer to Melissa’s question—but maybe it answered the more important question of what Thomas wanted. If he still wanted Melissa , in spite of this strange week and this awkward dinner.
“All right then,” Melissa said. “Skinny-dipping. Next summer when it gets warm again.”
“And every summer after that,” Thomas suggested. “We’ll make it a tradition. On the solstice.”
A laugh bubbled out of her, blending with the sunlight and the smell of dried leaves in the air. “Sure. We’ll dance naked in the moonlight and make sacrifices to the gods of summer.”
Thomas loosed his hand and looped it behind Melissa’s back, grabbed her by the hip and pulled her close as they walked. “My sexy pagan mistress.”