Calling His Bluff

“Besides, I’m off in a couple hours.”

“Let me guess. Malaysia? No, you’ve been there. Zanzibar?”

“Been there, too. Nice island. Spice trade. Big carved wooden doors everywhere. Excellent beaches.”

“So?”

“Vegas.” He tilted his head back to take another swallow of his beer. “The film I worked on might, uh, win some kind of MTV award.”

“My buddy, the rock star.”

“Shut up, Tyler. I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

Grace was swaying with Isa and pelting J.D. with questions about whether he’d meet U2 and what he’d be wearing. J.D. tried to explain that it wasn’t what it sounded like. It was not a big deal. The film had won an MTV technical award of some kind. The director must have had some kind of belated guilt attack about the whole thing with Lana. Either that or the fact that his coffee table book of photographs had driven a surge of interest in the film had apparently gotten his name on the invite list for the ceremony. Which was, with various other non-flashy awards, being conducted a month before the main show and would probably involve wine from a box and a choice between underbaked chicken and overcooked steak.

“It’s just an excuse for a party, really,” he explained. “Everyone gets dressed up, drinks too much and pretends for a night that they’re as famous as the people on the other side of the camera.” Time for a change of subject. “So where’s your little sister, Tyler?”

“Sarah or Maxie?” Grace asked as she snagged a handful of pretzels from a bowl on the counter.

“He better be talking about Maxie.” In response to his wife’s look, Tyler said, “J.D. has already seen plenty of Sarah.”

A man had to defend himself. “Hey, the whole thing was your idea.” He turned toward Grace. “It was your husband’s idea to have me check her out, and now he’s pissed because I gave her one lousy kiss.”

“I asked you to check on her, not ‘check her out,’” Tyler retorted with air quotes.

“Stop!” Grace threw her hands in the air. She pointed at her son. “You, go to the kitchen and ask nicely for some tortellini and broccoli. You can pretend to eat the broccoli if you go now.” Daniel went. Grace passed her youngest back to J.D. and ducked behind the counter to pour herself more wine. Propping her elbows on the bar, she rested her head on her interlaced fingers and grinned at J.D. “You, tell me about that kiss. No, wait. First things first. Why were you checking her out?”

“On, checking on,” Tyler protested. “I wanted J.D. to see if he could feel her out.” As he snagged the baby from J.D.’s lap, he gave his friend a sharp look and said, “I said out, not up, buddy. Don’t get any ideas. I told him how we’re a little concerned about Sarah.”

“Worried sick and not a little pissed off is what he means,” Grace added in a helpful and pleasant tone of voice. J.D. knew that Grace and Sarah had formed a close bond from day one. The two women joked that they didn’t need to bother with the “in-law” part of the phrase “sister-in-law” since they were already sisters, separated at birth. “We’ve been trying to get her in on the planning for Susannah’s birthday, but she’s been blowing off all our calls.” He knew that the Tyler kids went all out for their mom’s birthday every year. It was a family tradition that he couldn’t imagine Sarah skipping out on, but maybe she’d been busy with work. “Plus, it just wasn’t like her to miss Daniel’s birthday last week.”

Or maybe it was serious.

“She forgot her godson’s birthday?” Shoot, he could find her right now and tie her to a chair until she explained what was going on with her.

“Well, not exactly. I mean, she sent over a gift and a card, but she made up some excuse about why she couldn’t make it to the party. We haven’t seen her in weeks. If she blows off Susannah’s party, I’m calling the police.”

J.D. settled back into his seat with a sigh. She’d remembered the boy’s birthday, hadn’t she? She came from a terrific family, but everyone needed a break from time to time. With a family like his, that break was better made permanently. All the same, he could see why Tyler and Grace were worried. Sarah had always been the responsible, quiet one, despite her unbelievably bad taste in high school boyfriends. She’d dated a kid who was busted for stealing equipment from the AV club in the hopes of making a porno, after breaking up with a guy who was caught taking bets on the football team. What were the odds?

Still. The memory of an ace of hearts etched on smooth skin flashed before him. Maybe he didn’t know Sarah as well as he thought he did. Maybe none of them did.

“What did Aunt Sarah send you for your birthday, buddy?” he called to Daniel as the boy wobbled back into the room clutching a bowlful of pasta. Spotting a disaster in the making, he scooped the kid up and deposited him in a chair, pushing his bowl away from the edge of the table.

“A book ‘bout dinosaurs.”

J.D. shook his head, reassured. That was Sarah. If the girl wasn’t trying to splint the broken leg of a squirrel, she was sitting somewhere with her nose in a book.

“I don’t know. All I can say is that she seemed fine to me. Better than fine,” he added with a grin.

“Watch yourself, buddy.”

“Aha, which brings us back to that kiss,” Grace lunged for the topic as if it were one of her children about to run off a cliff. “C’mon, J.D., fess up. Pretend you’re a girl and give me all the gory details.”

“The man is wearing a ponytail,” Tyler said as he swooped his baby girl through the air on a roller coaster ride before handing her off to Grace.

J.D. tugged on his hair where it was tied back with a leather cord. He was starting to think that this entire conversation was a remarkably bad idea. “What kind of details?”

“Was it good?” Grace, cool and classy woman that she was, looked like she was about to start breathing heavily and maybe drooling. She bounced her daughter on her hip. “Did she enjoy it?”

Tyler stuck his fingers in his ears and started humming “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

“Aw, Grace, I was just fooling around. I don’t know if she enjoyed it or not.”

“Well, did she stick her tongue down your throat or just sit there like a bump on a log?”

The visceral memory of that kiss slammed into him and his stomach dropped like he’d just crested a hill at high speed. She damn near climbed me like a tree was what he wanted to say. At first she hadn’t moved and he thought that he’d crossed a line, that he’d pushed the teasing too far this time and pissed her off. But then her mouth had melted beneath his and a second later he’d felt her hands gripping his hair as fiercely as his own were pulling her up higher against him.

Even Lana showing up in Chicago with her fantasy that they were still married couldn’t block that memory, although the hassle of dealing with his ex-wife’s efforts to track him down and lure him back as some kind of career move had complicated his life enough to be distracting.

He’d avoided thinking about that kiss ever since that night because each time he did, he relived the entire thing in every snatch-your-breath-away detail, and he wasn’t comfortable with the fact that its impact hadn’t faded at all in two weeks. To recover, he kept forcing himself to strategize about how to convince Lana that that door was closed for good.

Thank god Tyler was humming.

“She definitely didn’t just sit there.”

Grace’s “Excellent!” was drowned out by Tyler’s “Dude, that’s my sister!”

“Shush.” Grace stopped her husband’s mouth with her palm. “So tell me, what’s the plan?”

“Plan? There is no plan. It was just one lousy kiss!”

Tyler chorused, “That’s right! No plan!” and punched a fist in the air as he poured water from the soda gun into Daniel’s sippy cup one-handed. J.D. shook his head and said, “The last genius step of this plan gave me these—” he yanked up a sleeve to show off the scratches where the damn alley cat had nailed him “—and still poops in my house.”

“Hey, I just thought you’d borrow a cat. Not go all Great White Hunter on me.”

“Yeah, well, give me a couple of painkillers and I come up with all kinds of great ideas.”

“It was just an excuse to get her over there. I asked J.D. to talk to Sarah. The two of them always got on like secret pals when we were growing up,” he explained to his wife.

“Okay, A, that was a decade ago.” The door creaked open, drafting cold air inside. J.D. was grateful for whatever customer would put this conversation on hold. “And, B, I just felt sorry for Sarah because she was always mooning around about some guy she liked.”

“Mooning around?”

The new arrival’s voice was female. And deadly.

Yeah, he had a feeling that his gratitude that someone had walked in on this conversation was going to be very short-lived. He gritted his teeth, smiled and prepared to take his punishment like a man.

J.D. swiveled around on his stool in slow motion, but not even one hundred and eighty degrees gave him enough time to figure out a way to take back the words that had just come out of his mouth.

“Hey, Sarah. You look, um…” Scary, would have fit neatly at the end of that sentence. Her eyes were slits and her heeled boots clicked sharply on the floor, measuring out a straight line that brought her slowly closer to him, step by precise step. “So, figures of speech are funny things, aren’t they?”

“I was mooning,” the words were ground to a powder between clenched teeth, “over you,” she stabbed him in the shoulder with a pointed finger he was pretty sure she wished were a knife, “you jackass.”

“Right,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “Sorry about that. Didn’t notice at the time. Won’t happen again.”

“You’re damn right about that.” She turned to her brother. “And you! Is it too much to ask for a little sympathy around here? I’ve had an awful day.” She waved Tyler off before he could even open his mouth. “My car was hit by someone last night who didn’t leave a note, surprise, surprise. Today, two hookers told me that I should try to get a little color in my face if I want a man, and Officer Buttinski wrote me three, count ’em, three tickets because he’s got the heart of the Grinch at the start of the movie. And you—” a hand flung out like the finger of death in J.D.’s direction “—you ask for my help and then kiss me? And you can’t even call to say thanks or explain the damn kiss? So I come here for a little comfort, a little empathy, and what’s the first thing I hear when I walk in the door? ‘I felt sorry for poor, moony Sarah!’”

* * *

She stood in the middle of a silent room.

Even Daniel was staring at her, jaw dropped, head braced back and a little to the side, as if braced for the next bombshell to explode. She did a mental review of her outburst and grimaced.

“Sorry ‘bout the language, kiddo,” she whispered at him. He grinned.

The answer to her challenge, when it came, was completely unexpected.

J.D. rose off his bar stool, tugged on his stub of a ponytail for a second, and then held his hand out to her in a gesture that Sarah’s boiling-over brain was having a hard time understanding.

“Sounds to me like you need to get out of town for a bit. If I say thank-you and promise to explain the next time I kiss you, do you wanna go to Vegas tonight?”

Well, that cleared things up. Not.

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