Along Came Trouble(117)
“Nothing.” Everything. “Just a little emotional. Long day.”
He looked down at the top of Henry’s head, then back at her. “I guess you’ll want to take him home.”
“Yes. Thanks for—thanks for keeping him company.”
“No problem.”
Caleb stood up. She stepped close to take Henry, who stirred but didn’t wake. Tucking her son’s arms around her neck, she felt the heat of Caleb’s body on Henry’s skin while Caleb’s breath on the side of her neck made her break out in goose bumps. It was so intimate, this transfer of her son from one safe harbor to another, and she wanted to linger in the moment. To close her eyes and absorb Caleb’s heat and strength, storing it for all the cold months ahead.
He stepped back and crossed his arms. He had his soldier face on. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
Her heart hammered insistently, and she felt suddenly, giddily like a teenager again, standing backstage at one of Jamie’s shows and mooning over some headliner. A girl with a crush, wondering what to say and when. How to find the right words to open up all the possibilities she’d dreamed about.
Only there never were any right words, were there? There were just the regular ones, and they were worthless in this situation. She’d used him, gotten him in trouble at work, and thrown him away. He didn’t even seem angry with her. He seemed flat, totally emotionless, and she couldn’t imagine the route that would take them back to where they’d been this morning so she could have a do-over.
She didn’t know how to change, anyway. How to be somebody different, someone less freaked out and protective of her independence and her heart. Even if he wanted her, what could she give him? What did she have left, at the end of the day, that was worth sharing?
They descended together in the elevator and traversed the empty lobby of the hospital. Caleb was as hard and cold as the polished industrial floor, and she couldn’t come up with anything to say or do that wouldn’t slide right off him.
She didn’t know this Caleb. She only knew the warm, funny one. The sexy, wicked one. The bossy, frustrating one. This one was a stranger. She couldn’t think how to talk to him.
At the car, he waited as she buckled Henry into his seat with fumbling fingers. When she emerged from the back, she nearly walked into him, he stood so close behind her. She tried to meet his eyes, but he was looking over the top of her head, watching the hospital entrance. He had his hands in his pockets, and everything about him said keep out.
“Drive safe,” he told her. And then he took a few steps away and watched, impassive as a statue, as she started the car and backed out of the parking spot.
She ran out of tissues on the way home.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Caleb wiped his sweaty forehead on the sleeve of his T-shirt and muttered curses at whoever it was who’d sold his father these skylights for the apartments. They were the wrong skylights, designed for roofs with a steeper slope. They’d been wrong when his father installed them twenty-odd years ago, and since he’d never had the money to replace them, they were still wrong, but older now, and therefore even less adequate.
They leaked, and he and his dad caulked them. They caulked them before the snow, checked and caulked them again in the spring, and then when the skylights leaked in the summer rain anyway, they climbed up on the asphalt shingles in the 95-degree heat and sweated buckets doing it a third time. Caleb had been caulking these f*cking skylights since he was in high school. If he ever managed to make any money, the first thing he was going to do was replace them. Maybe replace the roofs while he was at it.
Scraping the old caulk out of a seam with a screwdriver, he slipped and banged his hand against the shingles, opening up the cuts in his knuckles. He swore and threw the screwdriver into the parking lot, which only succeeded in making him feel like an *.
He was such an *. A pathetic, angry, sweaty * who couldn’t stop thinking about Ellen and how sad she’d looked at the hospital, even though what he really needed to be thinking about was how to save his company or find some other way to keep his family afloat.
Ellen didn’t need his comfort or anything else he had to offer. Ellen wanted him to back off, and damn it, that was what he’d done.
He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his hand, which was bleeding freely. Again.
The extension ladder shuddered against the side of the building, and after a moment his father’s head poked over the top, cap first. Today’s cap advertised the feed store in Mount Pleasant. Red, which meant he was feeling jaunty.