“Oscar,” she replied with a teasing lilt, and decided,I’ll be damned if I’ll make this easy. “Is that your way of asking for a kiss goodbye?”
Before he could respond, she took matters into her own hands and stepped right up to him. Her arms went around his neck and, without pressing against him—she couldn’t quite make herself do that; it was too painful—she lifted up on her toes to kiss him.
It was a tender kiss, soft and sensual, and she felt him melt against her. His breath caught in a little ragged sigh against her mouth, and he kissed her back. Deeply and, she thought, a little desperately.
Good.
The jerk.
She was the one to pull away, and when she looked into his eyes, she saw that the exhaustion had fled. Instead, there was heat burning there.
Then, suddenly, it was gone. He stepped back and gave her a crooked smile. “That was one hell of a goodbye.”
“Make sure to look me up if you’re ever in New York.” Then, just to twist the knife, she added, “You can get in contact with me through my publisher. Safe travels back to Princeton, Dr. London.”
She managed to keep it together until she heard his Jeep crunch over the gravel. Then she threw her mug across the kitchen so it shattered and sat down for a good cry.
She could sweep up later.
* * *
Oscar was three hours away from Wicks Hollow when he pulled off the highway and rested his head against the steering wheel.
What am I doing?
He’d been fighting with himself pretty much ever since he got up this morning.
But he’d made a promise to Marcie. He’d come back, and they’d talk…but try as he might to imagine it, all he could think of was Teddy.
What am I going to do?
He sat in the parking lot of a McDonald’s for a good ten minutes before he pulled out his phone and called Dina.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said as soon as she answered.
“Oh, Oscar.Thisis why I didn’t tell you about Marcie.”
Damn. She knew him too well.
“I left Wicks Hollow this morning. Packed up my stuff into the Jeep, and now I’m driving back to Princeton…but I’m about to turn around and go back.”
“Go back?”
He didn’t immediately answer her implied question. Instead, he began to talk, just dumping it all out. “After you and I talked, Marcie and I texted for a while. She said we need to talk, and I said okay—”
“Of course you said okay, because that’s you, Oscar,” Dina said, her voice a little tense but still filled with affection. “I told Bethany now that you knew about it, you’d be back in Princeton by the weekend. I guess I miscalculated, because you’ll be back sooner, but she still owes me fifty bucks. She said you weren’t going to come back at all.”
He heaved a sigh. “I don’t know. Ever since we broke up, I knew I wanted to try and work things out with Marcie. And then when she got engaged to Trevor, I was— Well, I figured until she said ‘I do,’ there was still a chance we’d get back together. Not that I said or did anything about it—I sure as hell wasn’t going to go after her or anything that radical.
“When she texted me last night to tell me, and said we needed to talk, I was surprised but…all I could think was it was a miracle.” He tipped his head back against the seat. “But ever since I left Wicks Hollow, all I can think about is leaving Teddy.”
“Teddy?Uh…I thought I was the only gay person in our family. Are you shagging a guy?”
He smiled weakly. “Teddy’s a she. She’s…something else. Really something else. And we’ve been, well, sort of living together for the last few weeks.”
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me you’ve been having an affair with this Teddy person—who I’m guessing you just met there on your sabbatical in Wicks Hollow—and you just up and left her to go back totalkto Marcie? What thehellis wrong with you, Oscar? You don’t jump from one woman’s bed and rush off the minute your former fiancée crooks a finger!”
“No, no, Dina, it’s not like that.” He went on to explain the double booking and how they’d come to terms with sharing the space. “We haven’t been actually sleeping together,” he ended.Yet.“The—uh—relationship, I guess, hasn’t progressed that far.”
