wanted to go away to school, as a twelve-year-old, and it had taken him months—had taken hooking up with Dusty and Brant—for him to settle into Cliffside.
And now here were these stupid schoolbooks he put away every year like a pack rat, because something inside him wouldn’t allow them to get thrown away.
He took out a stack of them and flipped through, finding worksheets about the ocean and weather, and words with sh in them that gave him a little twist inside because of the fact that Liz, who would have been so proud and so interested, had never seen them.
Was that why he kept them? Some stupid, illogical, subconscious, impossible belief that if he kept them long enough, her benign spirit would pay a visit and take a look?
Brrr, shake it off, Callan.
How much working space did Jacinda need? He didn’t want to slight her writing ability with just three pages, or scare her with a whole blank book. He thought he understood too much about her fears.
Jacinda looked nothing like Liz. He’d told himself lately that he’d been looking too hard for Liz in those other two women, three years ago, and maybe he’d seriously believed last night, down at the creek, that with her long dark hair and olive skin, Jacinda looked different enough to cure the problem.
The Problem.
A cure?
Maybe it was only getting worse. A man hit his sexual peak by twenty. At thirty-four, things could easily have started to slide. The level of need. The frequency. Had losing Liz pushed him so far away from his natural potency that he’d never claw back the lost ground?
Everything had been fine … fantastic … powerful … intense … while he and Jacinda had kissed last night. The chemistry between them was huge, not something you could explain or trace to its source but something animal and instinctive. Water on a thirsty day. A completion. She had tasted so good.
He loved the way she moved. Loved how at first she’d been happy just to wait and feel those motionless, paralyzed lips of his against her neck while he gathered his courage and gloried in his unexpected and almost shocking need.
Oh hell, he’d wanted her so badly and it had felt so good to rediscover how that felt. A little later, he’d loved her moments of hunger and impatience, too. How could a man’s ego not be gratified by that? She wanted him, and she hadn’t kept it a secret.
But then the pressure of her needs and her expectations had hit. He’d felt her heat against him, telling him she wanted more, insisting it with warm, full pressure, and he’d panicked and … oh, hell … deflated and pulled away—hopefully before she could have noticed.
He hadn’t compared her to Liz. He hadn’t—was this wrong?—even thought about Liz while he was kissing Jacinda. Not for a second. And when he’d panicked, it had been about the other women, the two very different blondes, and the excruciating awkwardness that had played out both times when his performance had fizzled.
He could still remember it in painful detail. The girl at the races, with her disinterested Whatever … when he’d stumbled through an apology and hinted at an explanation. After my wife … If the girl had noticed his raspy throat and horrible struggle for words, she hadn’t reacted. She’d already been putting on her clothes, miffed at her disappointing night.
The other woman, the backpacker, had soothed him like a baby at first. He’d felt foolish, so uncomfortable at her sickly reassurance. It was the way you talked to a three-year-old who couldn’t get his pants on the right way around.
Never mind, sweetheart, we’ll keep working on it and you’ll do better next time.
She’d turned the whole thing into a personal challenge. Dr. Birgit, Scandinavian Erotic Therapist, to the rescue. He’d felt as if they were writing a new chapter in a sex manual, full of strenuous gymnastic positions and clinical efforts at stimulation.
None of which had worked.
Oh, jeez!
Stop thinking about it!
Here. How about this book? He flipped through Joshie’s “Journal Writing” notebook from three years ago and saw several pages of painstaking numbers showing the date, and labored sentences summarizing his day. “We wnt to the crek. I rod Sam. His sadel sliped. I staid on. Dad fixded it up tite agen.”
The book had about twenty spare pages left at the end of it. If Jacinda could fill those, she might not feel so tense and uncomfortable about asking him for more.
He hoped she did fill them, because he could tell it was important to her.
He put the file box away, closed his office door and took the notebook along the corridor to where she waited for him in the kitchen. Her hands still didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. She hugged herself, finger-combed her hair, picked up a cleaning sponge and wiped down the countertop even though it was clean already.
“Oh, you found something?” she said, when she saw the book in his grip. She smiled eagerly, but dropped the smile too soon, as if she didn’t want him to guess that this remotely mattered to her.
Too late for that.
Handing it over, he hid the depth of his understanding and told her, “Just let me know when you need another one.”
“Thanks,” was all she said.
After asking Callan so impatiently for paper to write on, Jacinda left Josh’s old notebook blank that night. She looked at it for a while, standing alone in the kitchen after Callan had gone, fingers and brain tingling to begin, but then fatigue overtook her.
And doubt.
What would she write in it, anyhow?
What was the point?
The simple act of having to ask Callan for it seemed to have doubled the pressure. Even though she’d tried to play it down, he wasn’t stupid. He was a practical man. He’d expect results. He had no idea about writing. He’d want to see six new chapters of her long-gone novel by tomorrow night.
Why had she brought the subject up? She could probably write down all the words left inside her on the inside of her wrist or the palm of her hand. She should have asked for a Post-it note.
Carly did sleepwalk at midnight that night, after her earlier fear about Mommy’s safety out in the dark. Or was it because she’d picked up on Jac’s own tension over—well, various things? Carly’s emotional radar was scary, sometimes, and Jac wondered how much Kurt’s behavior during the separation and divorce had affected her daughter deep inside where it might never clearly show.
During her nighttime escapade, Carly had a drink of water in the kitchen, went to the bathroom and checked on the dogs sleeping on the veranda, all of it in her sleep. Then, fortunately, she seemed happy to be led back to bed. Jacinda slid gratefully between her own sheets and didn’t lie awake for another hour as she’d feared she might.
And when she awoke the next morning to the sound of Darth Vader crowing in the chook run, heralding first light, the second thing that came into her head after looking across at her beautiful and safely sleeping daughter was the notebook Callan had given her, and
