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  “Jonah,” she murmured from a foggy place somewhere between heaven and earth.

  The amazement in her voice amused him. “I know,” he said, smiling, propping his arms against the counter behind her to hold the better part his weight as he leaned in for another quick kiss. She was so beautiful. “I know. I always thought I could almost imagine what this might feel like—but it’s so much better.”

  They laughed and embraced each other again. It was still too new and too scary to say the words out loud, so they held each other, testing the reality of it.

  “I didn’t know,” she said, her eyes closing as she listened to the steady rhythm of his heart through his chest. “I had no idea. And it happened so fast.”

  “Fast?” he asked, chuckling as he held her away from him. “I’m thirty-one years old. The last four weeks have been the longest month of my life. If you knew how often—” He stopped short when the phone rang. “Don’t move.”

  “Yes, it is,” she heard him say into the phone as he smiled at her across the kitchen. He frowned and turned slightly to the wall. “No, I hadn’t planned on it tonight. I ... is he ... has something happened?” A pause. “Oh. Well, can it wait till morning?”

  She began to shake her head decisively, long before she whispered his name. “Jonah. No. We’ll go tonight. We’ll go now.”

  He shook his head and she nodded hers—they were both frowning.

  “Okay,” he said finally, to both her and the person on the line. “I’ll be over shortly.” He hung up the phone and turned to her. “Paperwork.”

  “Important paperwork or they wouldn’t have called. They were expecting you. You visit with him every night, right? Tonight shouldn’t be any different.”

  He didn’t like the idea of giving up any part of their evening together, and it showed in his expression. “What about dinner?”

  “Put it in the fridge. Some things keep, some things don’t.”

  Part of him could easily liken his father to a slab of meat or a vegetable that would keep as well as their dinner, but it wasn’t a part of himself he was proud of, or one he wanted her to see.

  “You don’t have to go too. You can wait here if you want. It won’t take long.”

  “I’d like to go,” she said. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  His arms swung out from his sides. “Why would I mind? I’d actually love the company. It’s just not what I had planned.”

  She grinned at him. “According to Mrs. Phipps,” she said, turning to inspect a bowl of fresh fruit for something that would sustain her till dinner, “behind every failed plan, a better opportunity is just waiting to happen. Orange or apple?”

  “Apple,” he said, coming up behind her. “An opportunity for something better or a better opportunity to do what you were planning to do in the first place?”

  “Well,” she said airily, handing him a shiny red apple and taking an orange for herself. “You just never know. According to Mrs. Phipps, that’s the exciting part.” Her eyes were bright with a suggestive sparkle. “You know, the part that makes life exciting?”

  With serious eyes he studied her face even as his lips curved in amusement. Frankly, if you could measure excitement the way you could steam, he was about to pop. She made no secret of the fact that she wanted him, and the knowledge was twisting him inside out. He could barely breathe.

  What amused him was her innocence, her incredible ignorance. He was delighted with it. She may have had sex before, may have wanted someone, needed them, but she’d never been made love to, never surrendered herself, never felt her world shatter, or she wouldn’t be curling a come-here finger at a hungry wolf the way she was now. Teasing him and making silent promises were all well and fine, but if she were a wise woman—and he was glad she wasn’t yet—she’d also be a little bit anxious, a tiny bit fearful, and much more impatient.

  Perhaps, because he loved her, he should take this better opportunity to prepare her for what was to come.

  In one sudden movement he pulled her up tight against him, covering her mouth with his before she could catch her breath. With passion hotter than the flames of hell, with skills devised by the devil himself, he bartered pleasure for her soul. He tempted and tantalized. Savored and satisfied. She moaned in bewildered abandon, and he smiled in his heart. She wasn’t sure what was happening to her, couldn’t fight it—liked it a lot. He felt her go limp in his arms as she gave in to it, tremble when it consumed her. It was eating away at his own senses, wearing him down, gnawing at his control.

  Ellen stood there, stupid and staring, when he stepped away from her. For a second or two she thought the house had fallen on her, that she’d died and didn’t know it yet. She felt nothing and then slowly, in the pit of her stomach, something alive and ravenous began to unfurl, growing and spreading, absorbing her, making her quicken and hunger for ... for whatever it needed to live. It frightened her and at the same time she was captivated, taken by it, wanted more of it.

  “Mrs. Phipps was right,” he said, his voice a little thick. “Life is more exciting when a plan fails and a better opportunity comes along.”

  “Mmm,” she said, nodding once in agreement, staring at him.

  “You ready to go meet my father?”

  She nodded again, and he smiled, taking great jubilation in her wary expression.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  STEP FIVE

  A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

  —Charles Kettering

  It pays to be blunt sometimes. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. There are people on this planet who don’t understand anything but short, blunt, straight lines. So give them one. Be explicit. Be straightforward. You’ll get to where you’re going much faster.

  “MY FINGERS ARE STICKY with orange juice,” she told him. They were waiting at the nurses’ station for the papers he needed to sign, before they went in to see his father. She did need to wash her hands, but more, she needed a few minutes to collect herself. They’d driven the short six blocks to the hospital. The air in the car had been thick with unspoken words, unfulfilled needs, and the low rumbling of things to come—like distant thunder before a storm. It made her tense and uneasy in a way that no attitude could hide. All she could think about was ripping his clothes off—touching him, feeling his skin against hers, tasting him, taking him inside her. Standing beside him at the nurses’ station made her jumpy as a bee with six sore feet. “I’m going to find a ladies’ room and wash up. I’ll meet you at your father’s room, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, pointing down the hall in the direction of the nearest lavatory.

  Knowing that he was watching her walk away, imagining what he might be thinking, made her knees wobble like a newborn calf’s. What was happening to her? She took deep breaths and patted her face with cool water. Shook her hands and arms until there was no sensation in them at all. And all the while visions of Jonah danced through her head. Jonah laughing. Jonah talking. Jonah worried. Jonah sad. He was on her mind like moss on a rock ... and she couldn’t remember being happier.

  When she entered his father’s hospital room a few minutes later, she found Jonah sitting in a chair against the wall two or three feet from the foot of the bed. She smiled at him and he smiled back. With a small wave of his hand he silently introduced her to the thin, pale, gray-haired man in the bed.

  Earl Blake had never been a large man. In his prime he would have stood four inches shorter than his son’s six-foot-two-inch frame. Though they were both built wide in the shoulders and muscular, the term “thin and wiry” would have applied to Earl more than Jonah. Their eyes, however, were the exact same green, and where Jonah’s seemed to contain the mysteries of life through the ages, Earl’s were aged and held no life.

  His head was elevated and he was propped to one side with pillows, the sheets tucked in neatly, not a wrinkle in sight. That he didn’t move much on his own was obvious. So was the extent of his paralysis.

  S
he noticed homegrown flowers in plain glasses and canning jars placed about the room. While her heart twisted with Jonah’s pain, it also ached with pride for loving such a sweet, giving man, as her gaze finally came to rest on him. He was sitting there, leaning on his arms with his hands clasped between his knees.

  “Mr. Blake,” she said, approaching the bed, coming to stand in what she hoped was his field of vision, though his eyes didn’t move or register her presence. “My name is Ellen Webster. You might not recognize me, but I’ve been to your shop a couple of times to have film developed. I work across the street in the bank. Right there in the window.” She paused, smiling, to give him a moment to recollect. “We’ve passed each other a hundred times in the street, but we’ve never actually met, I guess. It’s funny, isn’t it, the way you can think you know someone just because they’re familiar, because you see them all the time? You know their name maybe and what they do, but you’ve never actually met?” His aphasia kept him silent, but she sensed he would agree with her. “Everyone at the bank was sorry to hear you were ill.” She laughed a little. “Then Jonah showed up and you wouldn’t believe the stir that caused.” She laughed again and glanced over her shoulder at Jonah—who was staring at her, expressionless. She turned. “What? Did you think no one in the bank noticed when you opened up the camera shop again?” He started to shake his head. “Haven’t you ever noticed how many women work in banks? Women notice men like you. Especially ...”

  “What are you doing?” he asked, cutting her off rather rudely, though he wasn’t as annoyed as he was surprised by her insensitivity. “He can’t talk. He’s had a stroke. He’s ... his mind is all ...” He jumbled his fingers to illustrate. “He’s in a coma.”

  “His eyes are open.”

  “They’re always open. The nurses put drops in them during the day to keep them from drying out and at night they close them for him. He’s ... a breathing vegetable.”

  Frowning now, she looked at Earl and then back to Jonah. “The doctor told you that?”

  “He didn’t have to. Look at him. He can’t see, or hear, or move anything.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s not in there, Jonah. Just because he can’t speak doesn’t mean he can’t hear, and just because he can’t blink doesn’t mean he can’t see. He’s not dead. He might still be in there somewhere. Thinking clearly. Hearing us ...” This reminder caused her to move away from the bed and come to stand beside him.

  Again he was shaking his head. “The doctor said the stoke was extensive, that there’d be permanent brain damage if he survived by some miracle. I know ... I know what people say about talking to people in his condition, but ...”

  “But you’re unwilling to try it?” She didn’t mean to sound disappointed or disapproving, but she did. “It’s not worth a try?”

  “I don’t think it would do any good.” He sat up a little straighter, as if visibly putting up a defense shield to protect himself from her reproach.

  “Do him any good or you any good?” she asked quietly with an inkling of understanding.

  He looked at her for a long minute, considering, then looked away. Did she somehow know that he came there every night wanting to tell him off, chew him out, send him to hell—but never did, because there would be no response, no expression of shame, no remorse? And so the anger remained inside him, festering and impotent, against someone so frail and feeble that to even contemplate hostile thoughts against him felt like ... like kicking a dying dog.

  “You know,” she said quietly and thoughtfully, walking to the window and blindly looking out, “if his mind is still functioning, he knows you’re here, and he’s expecting you to be angry with him. It might be kinder, more respectful even, to give the strength of his spirit the benefit of the doubt rather than assume that his body is a hollow shell. He might feel more your equal if you treated him as if he were.” She hesitated. “On the other hand, if he’s not there anymore, then nothing you get off your chest is really going to do him any harm at all, will it?”

  She turned then. He was watching her, taking in what she said, churning it around in his mind. Finally he shrugged and shook his head. The desire was there; he simply didn’t know how to cross the river without a boat or a bridge in sight. Sometimes you simply had to jump in and start swimming. ...

  Ellen closed the short distance between them and held out her hand to him, saying, “Come on. Give it a try.”

  Closing his hand around hers, he let her lead him to the side of the bed. If Earl saw them coming, he didn’t blink or twitch a muscle to acknowledge them.

  “Mr. Blake,” she said gently, “Jonah’s been waiting a long time to talk to you. He knows you can’t answer him and it’s okay, so don’t even try. He needs to say a few things.” She turned her head to look at Jonah, whose expression was blank as he stared down at the man in the bed. “You have to start somewhere. Say the first thing that comes to your mind.”

  “He’s an ass.”

  She smiled. Well, that was short and sweet and to the point—and it was a start. “Tell him.”

  “You’re an ass.” The sound of his own voice seemed to shake something loose inside him. It was as harsh and angry as his words. Together, they felt great. A long moment passed before another single thought entered his mind. “You shouldn’t have left me the way you did.” A little more plaster fell from the wall of anger he’d constructed inside himself. Ellen’s hand was warm and steadfast in his, encouraging him to go on. “I was a little kid. I waited for years for you to come and get me.”

  It wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t being cruel, he was simply stating the facts as he knew them. Chances were, if the old man was well and able to speak, he wouldn’t have had anything to say for himself anyway.

  “I can see now, as an adult, that you couldn’t have had a little kid tagging along on your photo shoots,” he said reluctantly. “But you could have written once in a while. You could have called. We could have spent a few holidays together.”

  He felt Ellen move beside him and lost his train of thought. She was pulling the other chair closer to the bed for him.

  “You’re doing fine,” she said, lowering him into the chair with her hands on his shoulders. “Sit down here and tell him what it was like. Tell him what you were like and what he missed. Go ahead.”

  He could hear her settling into the chair he’d vacated at the foot of the bed. He felt alone and awkward. Part of him felt like a fool talking to the unresponsive stranger in the bed, and yet he couldn’t deny that with each secret pain he spoke aloud, with every, repressed grievance he liberated, there came a certain lightness in his chest, an easing of the tightness he was accustomed to.

  “I hated that school you sent me to,” he said experimentally, feeling the release of another tight band from around his heart. “At first, anyway.” A pause. “Like I said, I waited a long time for you to come get me. After a while I figured that school was the only family I was ever going to have. I had to make the best of it.” He leaned back in the chair and laced his fingers over his abdomen comfortably. “Just for the record, though, you don’t send a six-year-old off to military school unless there’s something really ... wrong with him, you know? Most of the kids in my class were hyperactive or had a discipline problem, along with feeling unwanted, so they ended up being weirder than I was.” He was silent a moment. “But I actually think we all should have been at home at that age. Most of them went home for vacations. I dreaded vacations. Sometimes there were a couple of other guys who didn’t go home, but usually it was just me, especially in the summer.” He wasn’t even thinking of what he wanted to say anymore. The words were out of his mouth without stopping in his brain for conscious thought. He was remembering, as if he were an outsider looking in, with no real feeling. “I suppose you made arrangements or at least knew I spent holidays and vacations with the commandant. He and I never had much trouble, we ... we just stayed out of each other’s way, ate meals together. The rest of time I was on my own.”
r />   Ellen listened as Jonah told his father about a young boy given light chores and class assignments during his vacations—idle hands and minds being what the were—and how he’d spent the rest of those idle hours of his youth shooting hoops and reading and repeatedly beating his own records on the two-mile track. He talked fondly about a camping trip with the campus cook and her family one Fourth of July, and Ellen could feel a resentment all her own building up against the pale, fragile man laying under the pristine sheets. It was impossible to remain objective, to try to see both sides. Because she loved him so much, it was too easy to see Jonah as a young boy, dark hair, big sober green eyes, alone and lonely. ... She closed her eyes tight and held a deep breath. Her father may have been an alcoholic, but at least he’d been there, at least she knew he loved her. She let the sigh out and opened her eyes, stood and walked silently to the window.

  There was nothing to look at really, nothing to distract her. It was dark out. From the second floor of the small two-story hospital she could make out several rows of streetlights in different directions and the emergency room entrance directly below and the parking lot beyond that. All was quiet, except for Jonah’s deep, soft voice telling about a science fair he’d once won and how the commandant had told him his father would have been proud when he shook his hand and gave him the award. It had fired up a hope in his heart that his father was at least getting—and hopefully reading—reports about him. It spurred him to excel in everything. At his studies. In sports. To attain rank and privilege through the military system of the school. To make his father proud. To make his father want him ...

  She’d always known there were lots of people worse off in life than she was, and yet she still had the incredible nerve to complain about her lot, to feel restless, to want more. So much so that she’d turned to a ridiculous little green book for help. She knew a deep-down shame that made her want to cry. So she got tromped on a little, being a too-nice person, was that so bad? Maybe she didn’t stand out in a crowd, was that so awful? What if she didn’t have everything she wanted out of life, who did? And yet ...