Never Too Hot
Moving to his son's side, he said, “It's your hands, isn't it?”
“Comes and goes,” Connor grunted.
“What does?”
“The numbness. The pain.”
Andrew's first instinct was to protect his son. To take care of him in all the ways he hadn't as a boy.
“We should hire someone to do this.”
“Like hell we will.”
Andrew nearly jumped back at the ferocity in his son's voice. “Not that you can't do it all. I know you can.
Just that maybe it'll be easier if-”
“Fuck easy,” Connor said.
But Andrew had seen the pain on Connor's face. “Don't be an idiot. You could do more damage to your hands.”
“I'm fine.”
“No,” Andrew said, looking his son straight in the eye. “You're not.”
Connor started to walk away, but Andrew grabbed his son's arm and didn't let go.
“Do you have any idea what it was like to see you in that hospital? Lying there wrapped in bandages. Not knowing how bad the damage was. If you'd ever be able to use your hands again or if they were gone. Do you have any idea how hard it is to see your own kid hooked up to machines in that amount of pain?”
Saying the words brought it all back, took Andrew back into those first few horrible hours, where the only thing he did was make deals with God.
“I wanted to be there, in your place. I told God I'd give myself up for you, that he could take me right then if only we could trade places, but he wasn't listening, didn't seem to care that my son was lying there unconscious. I saw everything so clearly. All those years, all those Little League games, Halloween costumes, they were all gone.”
He tightened his grip on Connor's arm, gave silent thanks to the man in heaven he'd cursed so thoroughly that Connor was here at all.
“I don't want to lose the next thirty years too.”
Connor shook his hand off. “You want to come back here, be a hero, say how sorry you are. But sometimes sorry isn't enough. I should know.”
His son's message couldn't have been clearer. Didn't matter what he said, how hard he tried, Connor wasn't going to forgive him. Fine, then there was no reason to pu**yfoot around. He hadn't forgotten how upset Ginger had looked in the diner's parking lot that morning.
“What happened with you and your girlfriend?”
Connor had started walking away, but now he stopped cold, turned around. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I saw Ginger this morning. At the diner. She looked upset. Something happened between you two, didn't it?”
“You want to know what the hell happened? Last night she asked me how things had gone with you.”
“With me?”
“She didn't like my answer. Didn't believe a word I said. And when she was right about it all, I lost it.
Attacked her.”
Andrew recognized the remorse ravaging his son. Thirty years ago, it had been him, hating himself with every breath.
“You were angry at me, so you hurt her?”
“Angry at every f**king thing.”
This conversation was like quicksand. But that was good. Because it meant he and Connor were going to have a hell of a time trying to get out of it without each other's help.
“What else happened, Connor? Tell me.”
“She said she loves me.” Connor stood perfectly still now, almost as if he were bracing himself for impact. “She can't love me. It isn't possible.”
“Jesus, Connor. You can't think like that. Can't go into a relationship with a wonderful woman thinking love is impossible. Go to her. Tell her you f**ked up. Tell her you're sorry. That you'll spend the rest of your life making it up to her.”
They were all the things he'd wanted to tell Isabel. But it had already been too late by then. Because Connor's mother had come to him with the news that she was pregnant.
“Do you seriously expect me to take advice from you about relationships?”
And this time when his son walked away, Andrew had to let him go. Because Connor was right.
He didn't know the first thing about love.
Chapter Twenty
THE DINER was slammed through breakfast and lunch, but after the last customer left, Isabel said, “Looks like it's time for our regularly scheduled afternoon chat, isn't it?”
Without waiting for Ginger's response, Isabel put her hand on the small of her friend's back and pushed her out the door.
“Let's take it down to the lake this time. Get a little change of scenery.”
Families were playing along the shore. Babies splashing. Mothers tickling tummies. Fathers encouraging sons to swim all the way to the buoy. Brothers and sisters goofing around on the floating docks out in the water, hooting with laughter as they shoved each other off.
“That's what I want,” Ginger said wistfully.
Isabel lifted a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “It's not always this perfect, you know. Later tonight the kids will be bickering in the backseat, while the husband and wife bite each other's heads off over something stupid.”
“I'm not asking for perfect,” Ginger said. “Just for the chance to have a few moments like these.”
“What about Connor? Is there some reason he can't give all that to you?”
Ginger half laughed then. “I come in here looking like this,” she gestured to her still puffy eyes, her blotchy skin, “and you actually ask me that. As if there's some way I'll go home today and find Connor waiting for me with roses.”
“Roses aren't your style. If he knows you at all, he'll be waiting with a fistful of wildflowers.”
“Trust me, there aren't going to be any flowers.”
“Tell me something, when you first got involved with Connor, what did you think was going to happen? Because correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't exactly get the sense that he was riding in on his white steed like Prince Charming. More like he was the villain coming to pillage Poplar Cove.”
Ginger flashed back to the first night. To his nightmare.
“You're right,” she said slowly. “I knew, right from the beginning, who he was.”
Who he couldn't possibly be.
“And you chose to spend time with him anyway. To sleep with him.”