The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [24]
Ginger grunts, or hums. It’s all she can get out of her mouth, though not exactly an answer. She can’t remember the last time she and Eddie had this much unbroken time together, alone, without sexually aware children within earshot. Max can’t barge in to demand a driving lesson, or brandish his learner’s permit in their faces if they refuse. Rachel, safely across town at Sally’s, can’t spend her day staring mournfully at the Lamm house, thinking grim thoughts about Paisley’s condition and her beloved Brynne.
Experimentally, Eddie pinches Ginger’s nipple to make it stand up. From where she lies, she gets a fine, close-up view of his profile—russet hair as thick and wavy as it was eighteen years ago when she met him, pug nose just as youthful looking, chin still firm. She chose wisely. So many men fall apart.
After all their activity, Eddie’s sheet has inched its way down far enough to leave him fully exposed from the hips up. Ginger finds this interesting. Although she knows his private parts in detail, she doesn’t think she’s looked this closely at the rest of Eddie’s unclothed body for years. He’s always had nice skin, tan even in winter, more olive toned than you’d expect on a man with that much red in his hair. The skin seems to fit him more loosely now. Although not tall, Eddie has always been rather muscular. A mesomorph, they used to call it. Well, not so meso anymore. Without a shirt, the hard cut of his torso used to be impressive, even with the curly chest hair, whose color Ginger found somehow comical, on a chest. In a T-shirt or button-down dress shirt but no jacket, the younger Eddie was clearly someone whose muscles wanted to burst out from the confining cloth. Not now. All his edges have softened, his chest and midsection especially. He’s lost the hardness of his youth. When did it happen? Why hasn’t she noticed this before? Does it bother her? Well, no. She rather likes it. Eddie’s shape is becoming—what? More welcoming, somehow. Friendlier.
Friendlier! What a thought.
“This is more action than we’ve had in months,” Eddie says, his voice thick, sexy, not at all friendly, in that gender-neutral sense. As exhausted as she is, Ginger feels once again the first twinge of desire.
“More action than we’ve had in months? Is that a declaration of devotion?” She grins at him. “You know what your trouble is, Eddie? You’re not romantic.”
“I’m a techie, not a poet.”
“See? You sound like you don’t even care.” In what feels like slow motion, Ginger moves his hand away from her breast and sits up. There was a time when her breasts would have stuck straight out when she did this, instead of slumping tiredly toward her stomach, but she’s too relaxed in a dreamy, postsex way to worry about this.
She tells him, “Say, ‘Oh, my sweet darling, you are the love of my life. Without you I would be desolate.’ Say that.”
“Did anyone ever tell you you’re a pain in the ass?”
“Is that your final answer?”
“It is,” he says.
“Well, fine.” Ginger slides back down onto the mattress, the effort of sitting being too taxing. She arranges the sheet to bare her breast again, so Eddie can resume his attentions to it.
It isn’t until later, after the dinner they knew all along they had to attend, after socializing with dealers and sales reps whose names they won’t remember once they leave the ballroom, that they grow serious again. “When my father was sick, he looked so awful,” Eddie says. “So old.”
“Well, he was old.”
“Remember his fingernails?”
Ginger does. They were thick and yellow, unwholesome looking.
“Paisley has nice fingernails,” she says. “She doesn’t even polish them unless she’s going to something big, like a wedding. Doesn’t have to.”
“And nice teeth,” Eddie adds.
“Teeth?” Eddie has been noticing Paisley’s teeth?
“Straight. White. Her parents probably spent a fortune on