“Well, if you’re speaking strictly about finances, I guess you’re right. But if you’re thinking it isn’t sometimes a struggle for me to keep my rose-colored glasses after the things I’ve seen on the job, my dear, you’re mistaken.” He chucked her gently under her chin. “Some days it takes everything I am to walk into that courtroom.”
The breeze blew a strand of his hair across his forehead and she reached up to move it away. It was becoming one of her favorite things to do. “Sorry. I need more optimism in my life, I know it. And I know you’ve seen some terrible things. I would never want your job to turn you into a cynic.”
His eyes were distant for a moment, and she knew she’d just conjured up images of gruesome murders and sexual assaults and child abuse. Great job, Kels. “It won’t,” he said. “If it ever starts to, I can always do something else. See? There’s always a way out.”
A little candle flickered in its votive cup in the center of their table. She found herself mesmerized by the little pinprick of light reflected in Evan’s eyes as he looked at her. He must have seen something similar in hers, because he was studying her intently. Then his fingers crept over her bare shoulder, pushing away a curl. She shivered at the touch.
“Do you remember a lot about college?” he asked. “About stuff we used to do?”
The unexpected question made her laugh. “Of course. I think I remember every minute.” Every minute with him, anyway. “It all went by too fast.”
“You must have missed a week of classes to take care of me that week I had the flu. I think about that a lot. I came out of my NyQuil coma to find most of the notes from my classes there waiting for me and an extension on my Constitutional Law paper.”
“I felt so bad for you. You were miserable.”
“Yeah—well, it’s hard to remember a lot, with the angel of death hovering over my bed at the time.” He grinned. “But I had an angel of mercy fighting him off. Shoving chicken soup and orange juice down my throat. Keeping me bundled up and taking my temperature every ten minutes. I swear, Kelsey, I don’t know what I’d have done without you. Imagine how terrible I felt when you caught it the very next week.”
She shrugged, then laughed. “You returned the favor. If you’d left me to rot in my room, then I might’ve been pissed.”
And she couldn’t in a millennium be upset over just how she suspected she’d contracted his death flu. It had been enough to give her shivers for years…and even now. Early on in his illness, she’d been particularly worried about him one night when his fever spiked. She hadn’t wanted to leave him. Whichever girl he’d been seeing at the time had been terrified of catching what he had and refused to come around. Evan had fallen into a fitful sleep watching Letterman, and Kelsey had lain in his bed next to him, watching him toss and turn and groan, until she dozed off.
In the middle of the night, she’d awakened with his feverish arm across her waist, pulling her to him, his breath hot against her ear. He’d been sound asleep, but still reaching for her. She’d let him snuggle against her and absorb her warmth, because even though he was burning her through their clothes he’d been shivering like he was freezing. So had she, just from his nearness. She’d wanted so desperately to turn and kiss him, put her hands all over him, germs and all. He probably wouldn’t have even known who she was at that moment. The half-terrified virgin in her had held her still.
When she’d awakened later, she’d found him on the couch, and the pain of that had been brutal. Still, those few minutes in his arms had been worth the misery of the illness that followed. Over the years, her mind had taken that moment and expanded it into some pretty delicious fantasies.
“After I caught it, you practically wrote a paper for me, didn’t you?” she asked, forcing herself to snap out of it. She had reality now, and it was ten times more delicious. “I’m like you, I barely remember anything about that week.” Except for him only leaving her side to attend the most crucial classes…and only then because she begged him to go since he’d already missed so much.
“Your prof wouldn’t budge on the due date because you’d had over a month to do it already, but some of that you’d spent taking care of me. So I outlined your Juvenile Justice paper for you. You did the rest. Though I did proofread it, and honestly, it looked like a monkey had written it. In the dark. So I fixed it for you.”
“Jeopardizing our future careers,” she said, shaking her head.
He waved a hand dismissively. “They never would have figured it out. I looked back through some of your old papers to see if you had any quirks I needed to know about. I can be pretty crafty when I need to be.”
“So I’ve seen,” she said, leaning forward for a kiss. He moved to meet her, only he paused inches away.
“You’ve always been there for me. It’s never gone unappreciated, Kelsey, even if I neglect to tell you often enough.”
“I know,” she whispered. “You didn’t have to say anything. You were always there for me, too.”
“I always wondered why you gave a damn about me.”
She sat back. “Why would you wonder that?”
“Because I was a shit back then, and you know it.” He laughed. “When it came to most of my relationships and even my friendships, I was the proverbial bull in a china shop.”
“I never saw that in you. I’ll admit, that day in class when Dr. Roberts assigned us to work together, and I didn’t know you, I thought, ‘Great, I know who’ll be doing all the work on this project. Me.’ Because every day you walked in class like you owned it and you sat with a horde of giggling females around you, always flirting with them and pulling out their hairclips…”
He was shaking his head self-deprecatingly now, covering his eyes. If the lighting weren’t so dim out here, she would swear he was blushing. She couldn’t tell him that aside from the dread she’d felt toward doing one hundred percent of the work that lay ahead, her heart had flipped over on itself at the thought of even possibly spending time with him. He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. “But then I got to know you,” she went on. “You weren’t stuck on yourself at all. I thought…you were amazing, and I felt bad for stereotyping you like I did at first. I was so glad that you still seemed to want to be friends with me after we were finished working together.”
“You really kept my feet on the ground back then. You came into my life at a time when I could’ve thrown it all away.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I was slipping. I was twenty. There was always a party to go to or people to see. It was becoming more important than what I was there for. Then you came along. Cracking your whip, keeping me in line.”
She smoothed her napkin in her lap, a little smile curling her lips. “Are you saying I helped you become the man you are today?”
Evan threw back his head and laughed. “I guess so, honey. God only knows where I’d be without you.” He took another sip of wine, his gaze meeting hers over the rim.
She wanted to ask him, if she was so important, why he hadn’t wanted her back then. Why, no matter what she did, he seemed to look at her as nothing more than a little sister. It wasn’t that she was an ugly-duckling-turned-swan case. She was barely any different now than she’d been at twenty. Maybe a few more wrinkles, and just after her divorce she’d discovered her first gray hair, which had sent her into another tailspin. But the same twenty-year-old Evan had ignored sexually, he’d ravished at thirty. It shouldn’t matter anymore, except that she still had a few old wounds from it that had been left to fester all these years. They’d been reopened after the debacle her life had become.