Elodie sighed in exasperation. "No."
It was his turn to pause. "Are you planning to be either of those things tomorrow, so that you can cancel out on me?"
He had her pegged perfectly. Elodie prevaricated just a bit, and sounding quite indignant, said, "I am not!"
"Uh huh." He didn't believe her one bit.
"I—uh—I called because I didn't remember what time you had said, and I wanted to be sure to be ready."
Not a bad bluff, but a bluff nonetheless.
"Seven."
"Seven," she repeated.
"Short of contracting malaria or dying, you aren't going to get out of this."
"I don't know what you are talking about."
He almost chuckled at the outright despair in her voice. You would have thought he was asking her to tramp through the sewers instead of accompany him to one of the nicest restaurants in the county.
Harden, Texas was a consciously small town. Its carefully cultivated cowboy-rustic aura attracted tourists by the droves in the summer, even though the beach was fifteen miles away. The small town council refused to allow their McDonald's to have its usual golden arches out front, and even prevented them from having a drive through, all to maintain an old, rustic charm. One of the few things it did have, besides tons of small, expensive boutiques quaintly dotting Main Street, was a plethora of good restaurants—Back Home Diner not withstanding—and Red Creek was one of them. It was nowhere near as pretentious as some of them; the meals were items that anyone could recognize and you didn't need a degree in French to read the menu. The portions were pretty big, and that was something Clay, being the size that he was, looked for in a good restaurant. There was nothing he hated more than paying thirty dollars for a meal and still walking away hungry.
"Yes, and you'd better be ready."
April had always made him wait—it had been one of the few bones of contention between them. But, as he recalled, Elodie had never been late to one of their lunches. In fact, she'd beaten him there sometimes.
*****
"Uh huh." How was she going to survive a dinner alone with him without giving herself away? At night? It was like... it was too close to a date for comfort. Lunches were just that—a meal in the middle of the day. But dinner—that was a date.
"Are you all right?" His deep voice rumbled across the phone.
"Yeah, why?"
"You just don't sound like yourself."
It was out of her mouth before she thought about it. "You don't really know me very well, so how would you know?"
"Intriguing. Makes me want to discover what I've been missing."
Elodie was sitting there with her mouth hanging open, her heart battering itself against her ribcage. Her mind was screaming at her about how bizarre a conversation this was to be having with her ex brother-in-law. Her fingertips were blue, and she had a dry mouth. If she got any more nervous, he'd be visiting her in the hospital tomorrow instead of going out to dinner. She was starting to feel light headed.
And, apparently, she was hyperventilating into the phone. "Hey, hey, slow down," he coaxed as gently as he could. "Take deep breaths. Slow and deep," he began to repeat hypnotically until her breathing slowed. "Elodie, honey, what's wrong? Are you not feeling well?"
It was her out. If she said yes, he would probably let her out of it altogether. But part of her craved another opportunity to see him, in any way, shape or form, and that was the part that was complaining the loudest. She missed him. She wanted to see him every day, just to drink him in, just to be in his presence. Most of her would have preferred to do that merely as a fly on the wall, invisible to him, but able to be physically close to him, hear his voice, smell his spicy aftershave.
Another part of herself, one that had only recently begun to find its voice, was a ticking clock. Not her biological clock—that one was thankfully silent for now. This was the clock that had begun ticking when April had died so suddenly, in the prime of her life. How long was Elodie going to hang back from life, being a spectator rather than a participant, watching friends and family meeting and getting married and having babies, living the life that she was barely present in, alone and lonely as she was?
Nothing could ever come of her relationship—whatever that was, there really wasn't a name for it—with Clay, but she could glean from it what she could. She could have dinner with him and have a good time, and do something other than sitting around her apartment when she wasn't working, completely absorbed in her paintings, living through them where it was comfortable and safe, instead of in the real world, closer to the man she wanted to lie down next to for the rest of her life.
Elodie sighed, hating the war that raged within her about Clay, desperately wishing that things had been different between them from the start, then feeling the familiar pangs of guilt about wishing away her sister's happiness when she'd had such a short time of it as it was. "No, I'm fine, really."