to supplement what I earn as a journalist, and I’ll be able to fly Luke and Joey out to see me—us—more often.” He reached across the table and took both of her hands. “We can make this work, I know we can.”
And as she sat there, looking into the warmth of his eyes, she could almost believe him.
“Come on,” he said, but his next words weren’t Let’s go get that hotel room. “There’s a really great ice cream shop down the street. I’ll buy you a cone. We have time for a stroll through town before Maggie gets home from school.”
“You want to get ice cream,” Arlene felt the need to clarify, as Jack held out his hand and tugged her up from the table. She grabbed her bag and slipped it over her shoulder.
“I want to go to Las Vegas and then have sex for a solid month, straight,” Jack said, “but buying you ice cream and window shopping with my arm around you sounds really good, too.”
Bemused, she let him lead her away from the entrance to the hotel lobby and out into the brilliant sunlight of the early afternoon.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They had dinner that night with Maggie, and the sound of Arlene’s laughter mingling with her daughter’s made Jack smile.
Will and Dolphina purposely made themselves scarce, no doubt taking advantage of Arlene being home to spend some alone time of their own over at Dolphina’s apartment.
So Maggie and Arlene and Jack played a board game called Settlers of Catan, in which Maggie kicked their collective ass, but after which she insisted she had homework to do and vanished into her bedroom, closing her door tightly behind her.
It was only then that Jack trusted himself to kiss Arlene because he knew damn well that she wasn’t going to sleep with him—not with her teenage daughter awake in the next room. At least not until after they took that trip to Vegas …
“You’re diabolical,” she gasped between kisses, out of breath in the kitchen, as she clung to him. “Now you kiss me …?”
“I want you to take me seriously,” he told her before he kissed her again.
They eventually moved back into the living room and pretended to watch a movie on TV while, in truth, they made out on the sofa until the light that shone from beneath Maggie’s door went out.
At which point, Jack told Arlene he’d pick her up again at nine the next morning, kissed her good night, and sent himself home.
That next day, her T-shirt was tighter, her shorts were shorter, and he could tell she’d spent some time on her makeup and her hair.
When she got into the Zipcar and he kissed her hello, her hand traveled up his thigh, inside the leg of his shorts. But he caught her wrist, asking, “Is that your way of telling me you’re ready to go to Vegas?”
She laughed as she shook her head no, but told him, “You know, I do take you very seriously.”
“Only because I’m not having sex with you,” he pointed out. And then he drove them to Concord, where they walked the Minuteman trail until it started to rain, so they ran for the car, and then went to the mall and got tickets to a movie.
The plan was to have popcorn for lunch, but they ignored it—and the movie—and just sat there in the dark, alone in the small theater, kissing and touching like they’d never had a chance to as teenagers.
At least not together.
With incredible restraint, Jack limited himself to second base.
He won the real prize on their way home, when he got her to talk—just a little—about the latest of her friends who had died in Iraq as the result of the blast from an IED. It had been soul-crushingly awful—and just another day in a war zone.
They pulled in front of Will’s apartment building as Maggie was walking up the street, coming home from school. And this time, instead of hanging around, having dinner and making Arlene and Maggie laugh, Jack gave them both the excuse that he had to get back to his place in Watertown to work—that he had an assignment to write.
In truth, when he found out that Maggie had plans to do a homework project over at her friend Keisha’s house from seven to ten, he knew he had to stay away.
Jack was, after all, only human. And spending three hours alone with Arlene would require superhuman strength.
Besides, he’d set himself a capitulation date.
Saturday.