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And they ended up on the FDR, cruising out onto the Deegan, until she wheeled onto the exit for Scarsdale.
Marisa had a sweet little convertible and a heavy accelerator foot, but Gabe was happy for the rush. Daniel didn’t do this often, but when he did, Gabe was always there to bail him out.
The sports bar was on the main street in Scarsdale, a place with six TVs, flashing neon beer signs and bartenders dressed in striped referee uniforms that no man in his right mind would ever wear in a drinking establishment.
Hunched over said bar, blindingly drunk, was the O’Sullivan brother formerly known as “the sensible one.”
Gabe rushed forward. “Daniel?”
The bartender looked up in relief. “It was either you or the cops.”
“Does he come in here often?” asked Gabe.
“Never seen him before, but I’ve only been working here for a few weeks.”
Gabe paid the tab and gave the bartender a substantial tip. “Sorry.”
“He’s your brother?”
“Yeah.”
“Kept talking about some woman.”
“Michelle?”
“No, he kept talking about Anastasia.”
Anastasia? Gabe shook his head, deciding the bartender was confused. “Doesn’t matter.”
He looked over at Marisa, who was watching the scene with interest. “You sure you want to do this?”
“It’s the most excitement I’ve had since a famous Grammy winner walked into the office, and I got to show him a SoHo loft that would have paid my rent for a year.”
With a quick smile, she took a shoulder, Gabe took the other one, and they carried Daniel toward the door.
“He doesn’t usually do this,” Gabe said, needing to defend Daniel.
“I’m not one to judge.”
“He lost his wife on 9/11,” he told her, not wanting to say too much, but he didn’t want Marisa thinking his brother was a lush, but Daniel kept things bottled inside, and when they came out, it was never pretty—and usually incoherent.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Where are we headed?”
“He’s got a place down in Battery Park.” He searched Daniel’s pocket for keys and found them—thank God—because he wasn’t up to explaining this to Tessa. Trying to explain it to the absolute stranger that was Marisa was bad enough.
It took some work, but they got him in the backseat, and Gabe climbed in next to him.
“He’s kind of sad.”
“Not sad,” muttered Daniel.
The car shot forward, and soon Gabe was sitting there in a strange woman’s car with a drunk brother who looked as if was going to wake up tomorrow and hopefully forget all of this. Gabe wasn’t up to reminding him, or correcting him, but he could feel Marisa’s curiosity in the darkness.
Finally Gabe broke the silence. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to talk to him. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what not to say. I want to pretend like nothing ever happened, but that’s wrong, too.”
“Has he been to counseling?”
“Daniel? Uh, no.”
“Why not?” she asked calmly.
“He’s not the counseling type,” Gabe responded, because nobody in their right mind went to counseling, and the O’Sullivans were all in their right minds, at least most of the time.
“Oh,” she said, then went back to being quiet.
Gabe glanced at Daniel, noted the nodding head, and sighed. One of the most frustrating things was that Gabe could usually fix anything—personal problem, leaky faucet, clogged beer tap. But lately he was striking out left and right. First with Tessa, now with Daniel. For a man who prided himself on the ability to handle every problem thrown his way, this wasn’t good. “You think I should do something, don’t you? Take him to a shrink or read some books to figure out how to talk to my own brother.” Yeah, he sounded defensive. So what?
“I don’t know.”
They didn’t say anything more on the way to the building, but Gabe knew that Marisa didn’t approve of Gabe. Easy for her to make judgments when there was no right or wrong, no good or bad, just a man who had a hole where his heart used to be.
It wasn’t right.
Daniel’s building was down near Wall Street, within the shadow of where the towers had stood.
Marisa eased the car into a parking garage and Gabe looked at her in surprise. “You can drop us off. I can take it from here.”
Marisa claimed the ticket from the attendant and shrugged. “You might need some help, and it’s not like I have somewhere to be.”
Gabe gave her a long look and then waved it off. “Your choice.”
Daniel was incoherent in the back, so Gabe was grateful for the help, and they lugged Daniel upstairs to his apartment.
When they entered the apartment, Marisa looked around. “Nice place. One bedroom but roomy. And the view’s good.”
Gabe smiled, maneuvering Daniel out of his suit jacket. He was the only man Gabe knew who would get shit-faced in a jacket and tie. “You sound like Tessa. No wonder you two are friends.”
“She’s nice,” Marisa offered and then ran forward when Daniel started to tilt.
“Just remember to stay on her good side.” Gabe smiled slightly.
“I don’t think she has a bad side.”
“You don’t know her well enough.”
“You two are roommates?”
Gabe wheeled Daniel toward the bedroom. “It’s a temporary thing. She needed a place to live. I had space.”
“That’s kind of you.”
“She would do the same for me.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think she would.”
With one finger pressed to his brother’s chest, he landed Daniel on the bed. Daniel was going to be out for a long, long time. Gabe looked at the clock, saw that it was three, and suppressed a yawn.
“You don’t have to sit up. I’ll take the first watch. I think your brother’s out for a few hours.” Marisa was fast becoming a saint in Gabe’s eyes.
“You don’t mind?”
“Nah. I’ll turn the television on.”
Gabe gave her a hard look. “I’m sorry about earlier. Too bad it didn’t work. I like you.”
Marisa looked at Daniel, looked at Gabe and then shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”
GABE STAGGERED HOME ON Monday morning. Tessa hadn’t wanted to stay up, but she had. But when she heard the key in the lock, she dashed back to her room and pretended to be asleep. Not for long, though, because eventually her masochistic tendencies got the better of her. Tessa had to know.
She came out, rubbing her head, hoping he wouldn’t notice the coffeepot that was filled with fresh coffee.
Sadly Gabe didn’t look as if he was noticing much. His eyes were red, and his wrinkled shirt looked as if it had been pulled from the clothes hamper.
“How was the date?” asked Tessa, keeping her face casually interested, not wanting to read too much into appearances—telling as they were.
“Great,” answered Gabe.
“Great is good,” she said and then pulled out her box of cereal. “Want some?” she ased, holding out a handful—which, after he declined, she forced herself to eat. The cereal tasted like cardboard or that plastic food that restaurants kept out on display for decades at a time. Neither of which Tessa had an appetite for.
Gabe watched her for a minute and then shook his head. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
“You going to see her again?” asked Tessa as she watched him walk down the hall. He looked so tired, so exhausted, and she knew exactly why he was so tired, and the rock in her gut knew exactly why he was so tired, too.
Then Gabe turned around, spearing her with a glance. “Do you want me to see her again?”
With those bloodshot eyes and a shirt that should have been burned, Tessa knew she had to tread carefully. “Do you like her?” she asked, which seemed noncommittal enough. If he said yes, then she’d know that her fling with Gabe had been nothing more than that. A fling.
“She’s nice enough,” he answered, completely noncommittal—but not a yes, either.
“Yeah,” agreed Tessa.
Gabe rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, she’s nice or, yeah, you want me to go out with her again?”
“Yeah, she’s nice.”
He squinted at her. “Did you change your eyebrows?”
Self-consciously she smoothed them back. “It’s called grooming.”
He nodded once. “It looks nice.” Then he stared at the door to his bedroom, then stared back at Tessa. Then he sighed. “Are you ever going to tell me why I’m jumping through all these hoops, Tessa?”
There was something so disarming about the look in those blue eyes. This was the man who probably knew her better than anyone in New York.
She owed him something; she owed him the truth. “Because you scare me,” she said, the words coming out in a rush.
The bloodshot eyes looked at her, confused, as though it wasn’t the answer he’d expected. “Why? I’m the most unscary person on the planet.”
And for Tessa, that exact unscariness was the reason he was so dangerous to her well-being. If he was as raunchy as Sean, or as serious as Daniel, she’d have her shields up, and it’d be easy to keep a relationship alive while chasing her career. But Gabe wasn’t like most men. Her shields had never even had a chance.
“I need time, Gabe. That’s all. I have things I have to do first. I have to learn to be on my own.”
“I’m tired of your rules, I’m tired of your guidelines. Damn, right now I’m tired.”
He did look tired, and she hated that she was doing this, but if she didn’t do it now, she never would. He didn’t know how weak she really was. She had to make sure she could make it on her own. She had to make sure with one hundred percent certainty that if she needed to support herself, she could. Nobody seemed to understand that but her.
She stared into his tired eyes and willed herself to be strong. “I’ve known you for four years. You’re the first person I met in New York. The first person who offered me a job, the first person who made sure I understood the difference between a local and an express train, the first person who explained to me how to cross against the light in order to not be run over by the eight thousand people crossing against the light from the opposite direction. There’s no one that I’ve ever depended on more, Gabe. Nobody. Not even Denny. I can’t depend on you like that.”
Gabe, who had taken care of himself for his entire life, shrugged easily. “Yes, you can.”
“I have to learn to depend on myself first.”
“Tessa you can do anything you want.” He ran a hand through his hair. Dark, silky hair that probably Marisa had touched the way Tessa longed to.
Now wasn’t the time to think about his hair, she reminded herself. “You’re right. I can do anything I want. But I have to actually do it. I can’t just want to do it. There’s a difference.”
He took that in, and she could see the wheels turning in his head. Finally he nodded. “How long are we talking about here? A month? Another four years?”
And now they were discussing schedules. Tessa, who was about five years off hers, felt the familiar panic rise up inside her. “I don’t know.”
Gabe frowned, not sensing her panic, probably because he never panicked. Never felt that urgency at three in the morning, when she stared up at the ceiling, thinking of what she should be doing with her life and how much of a failure she would be if she didn’t decide soon.
“Do you know where I was last night?” he asked.
“Yeah,” answered Tessa, not really wanting to have this conversation.
“No. No, you don’t. It was Daniel’s wedding anniversary last night. Do you know how many wedding anniversaries he and Michelle had?”
“No,” she said, not understanding what Daniel’s wife had to do with his date with Marisa.
“Not a single one. They were married exactly five months before she was killed and never had one anniversary. Do you know what my brother did last night, Tessa?”
“No.”
“He got drunk. Falling down drunk in some bar in Westchester that I don’t even know how he ended up at. Sometimes it’s their anniversary, sometimes it’s her birthday and sometimes it’s nothing at all. My brother had a total of ten months with Michelle, and that was it. All my life I’ve been surrounded by people whose time was up before it was supposed to be, and nobody knows what’ll happen. We could all go tomorrow and—poof—we never would have had a chance. So you can see why I’m not eager to sit on my hands while you move forward with your life. I don’t want to end up drunk in a sports bar in Westchester because you needed time.”
“I’m sorry,” answered Tessa. And she was. She hated that people had to hurt. She hated that Daniel was hurt—he didn’t deserve that. She hated that Gabe was hurt—he didn’t deserve it either. But Tessa couldn’t fix the problems of the world, she had to focus on fixing Tessa. She had to fix herself or she never would. And maybe it didn’t matter to Gabe, maybe it didn’t matter to Daniel, maybe it didn’t matter to anyone but Tessa, but this was her last shot and she knew it. There were other people who could start over at thirty or start over at forty, or start over at sixty-five, but Tessa had never started at all. At some point she had to get out of the gate, and the clock was ticking.
“It doesn’t matter to me if you’re who you want to be or who you are, Tessa. You’re you. That’s enough for me. Why don’t we go slow? You want to do your class. Stay here.”
