“You’re blocking traffic,” she said, and stepped around him, ducking under his arm.
Matt pivoted, caught up and walked with her, bending his head to get a look at her face. “Okay, what’s the matter, Deb? Did I forget an important date? Did I say something I shouldn’t have? What did I do that you won’t at least pretend to be glad to see me?”
“Oh, please!” She reached the curb and stepping up on the sidewalk. “Why would I be glad to see you?” She punched the pedestrian button to cross the next intersection. Four times. In furiously rapid succession.
Granted, Matt was not wholly unaccustomed to The Wrath of a Woman, having been the recipient of it on many occasions. But he’d be the first guy in line to confess that he rarely had a clue as to what brought The Wrath on. Seriously. No, seriously. And in this instance, he risked what he instinctively knew to be a monumental blunder and tried to get at the root of it, instead of turning around and walking straight to court like his gut told him to do. “Maybe I think you’d be glad to see me because the two of us had such a good time together.”
Debbie slowly turned her head, demon-style, and gave him one of those prosecutorial, I’ll-bite-out-your-jugular-and-eat-it look that made his balls cinch up and reminded him how thankful he was that he did not practice criminal law. “That’s just the problem, Matt,” she said, breathing fire. “We’ve been together. Just like you and every other chick in town, apparently. Seen the paper lately?”
Yow. Matt never got to answer. The light turned green and Debbie was striding across the intersection, leaving him to bob like a rubber duck in her furious wake.
He looked at the paper again that night as he waited for her call. And when she didn’t call, he looked at the paper several times over what turned out to be a very long weekend, where, in a new twist of the saga that was his life, Matt never left his penthouse loft. Honestly, he couldn’t remember the last time that he had stayed in for two solid days . . . Maybe back in ‘98, when he’d had a horrendous case of the flu. But even then, what’s-her-name had come and stayed with him (what was her name?).
It didn’t matter anyway, because this time was nothing like that time. He felt fine. He just felt sort of . . . blah. Unsettled. Weird. Nothing sounded appealing. Not chasing women, or hanging out with his pals who liked to chase women. Bars, restaurants, and houseboats did not sound appealing. Not golf, not basketball. Nada. Zilch.
What was bothering him, Matt finally admitted to himself (with the help of a couple of vodka martinis), was the goddamn pictures. The goddamn pictures and the uncomfortable and disquieting fact that he really had been gazing at her, looking deep into those blue eyes, lured in by that glimmer of light behind them. He looked almost devoted, and really, he’d never considered himself the devotee type.
This was a problem.
It was a problem because Matt was a serious high flyer, someone who had always told himself that he had neither the time nor the inclination for a long-term, serious thing. He did better with many women at a time. There was no space in his life yet for a wife and lots of kids—he had always thought those things would come in the future. When he was a little older. And had made a name for himself.
But he was thirty-five years old. And he’d made a name for himself. He had, in fact, met all of his self-imposed criteria. So what was it, exactly, the thing that he was so afraid of?
Oh yeah, right, like he didn’t know what it was. He knew exactly what it was. Didn’t understand it, not why, or how, or even what any of it meant. But still, he knew what he was afraid of, and it was a fear that gripped him right down to the bottom of his heart.
It was that warm glimmer of light deep in those blue eyes.
By the time Monday rolled around, Matt was ready to get out of his house before he drove himself crazy. Fortunately, he was snowed under getting ready for the Kiker trial, so he really had little time to dwell on the fact that she had not returned his call. In fact, he couldn’t even focus on the campaign at all until mid-week, when Doug and Jeff called from Dallas to discuss Tom’s platform, and more importantly, Matt’s work to get the Hispanic vote. “This is going to be key to the DA office, you know,” Doug reminded him “Maybe even as key as it is to the lieutenant governor’s office.” At the end of the conference call, Jeff said, “Great work with the Silver Panthers. You’re even getting a little press up here.”