Claire LaZebnik - Knitting Under the Influence

“Do we want to revisit the question of whether his father's a letch or not? Because it seems to me-”

“Please,” Sari said. She put her hand to her forehead. “It's not like that, Ellen.”

“Really? So tell me what it's like.”

“I don't know,” she said. “Can I get back to you on that?”

“Whatever it is or isn't, keep it out of the office,” Ellen said.

“I promise.”

“And if you ever ask to be taken off a child's case again for personal reasons-”

“I won't.”

“You better not. Or you'll be out of here. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“All right then.”

Sari went to the door.

“One last thing-” Ellen said.

“What?” She turned.

Ellen scooped up her briefcase off the floor and dropped it onto her desk. “Don't forget to go over there later. Might as well finish what you started. Only this time in the appropriate environment.”

Sari managed a nod and stumbled out of the office.

Jason was putting Zack to bed when Sari arrived. She volunteered to read Zack a bedtime story, and Jason sat on the bed and watched her intently through the whole book. It made it hard to read.

Once she was done, she put the book back in the bookcase while Jason tucked the blanket around Zack's little body. Over his shoulder he said to her, “I have to lie down with him until he falls asleep or he'll scream for an hour.”

“You should let him scream,” she said. “Eventually he'll learn to-”

“No,” he said. “Not tonight. I want him to go to sleep quickly tonight.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”

“Wait for me in the family room?”

“Okay.”

She was alone in the family room for almost half an hour. Which gave her plenty of time to wander around looking at photos she would rather not have looked at and then to torture herself by studying them minutely-photos of Jason and Denise getting married (she wore a satin slip dress cut on the bias and was gorgeously slim and elegant), photos of a weary but triumphant Denise cuddling a newborn Zack, photos of the whole family on vacation near a beach, Zack just a toddler in his fathers arms-photos, over and over again, of the perfect family, perfectly happy together.

Jason walked in while she was still studying one of the older photos-Denise and Jason in their college graduation gowns, kissing, each of them holding a diploma up to the camera, but otherwise apparently oblivious to its presence.

“Hi,” he said, coming to stand next to her.

“Is he asleep?”

He nodded then gestured at the photos surrounding them.

“So what do you think?”

“There are a lot of them,” she said, carefully placing the one she was holding back among the rest.

“I know. I’d like to get rid of some of them. Or even all of them. There's something sad and creepy about having to look at them all the time, like nothing's changed. But I don't know how Zack would feel about it if they all just disappeared.”

“Yeah, that might be hard on him.”

“It might.” They were both silent for a moment.

Then Sari said, “She's really beautiful.”

“I guess.” He nudged her shoulder with his. “I like the way you look.”

“You didn't back in high school.”

“I barely knew you. If I had ever stopped and really talked to you-“

“It wouldn't have made a difference,” she said. “We weren't in the same place back then.”

There was another pause. Then: “How mad was Ellen?”

“Pretty mad. I don't blame her. We were acting like-” She stopped.

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Teenagers, I guess. Getting carried away by our hormones.”

“That's not such a bad thing,” he said, and he grinned suddenly. “Want to do that again?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I do.” But when he reached for her, she suddenly ducked away. “I’m sorry,” she said, twisting her hands together. “It's just a little scary.”

“What?”

She gestured toward a photo of Denise sitting by a pool and laughing. “Well, she is, for one thing. The way she looks… it just makes me wonder how many other beautiful women you've been with.”

“Not that many,” he said. “You'd be surprised.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “In high school alone, they must have numbered in the dozens. All those cheerleaders.”

He shook his head and reached for her hand. Just the touch of his fingers on hers made her want to jump out of her skin in a good way. “You're nuts. I had two girlfriends in all of high school, and they both ended up dumping me.”

“You were always with some girl or another,” Sari said. “Always. You were like this movie star on the campus. All those girls, all over you-they were always giving you massages on that wall behind the cafeteria and-”

“You gave me a back rub not that long ago,” he said. “That I remember.”

“A back rub?”

“With a hot towel.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “Did you like that?”

“Are you kidding? It was maybe the most erotic two minutes of my life.”

“Don't say that. I was there to work with Zack, not to turn you on.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I did my best to hide it.”

“Anyway, what are you talking about, two minutes? It was a lot longer than that.”

“It was not. You were in and out. Got me all excited and then walked away-telling me to go take Advil. You're a cold, cold woman, Sari Hill.”

“Turn around,” she said and he obeyed her. She pulled up his shirt, put her hands against his warm back.

He shivered. “You really are cold. Your hands are like ice.”

“They'll warm up,” she said. She slid her hands all the way up under his shirt, to the muscles of his shoulders and let herself really feel how warm and strong he was, then she slipped them down and around his waist to his flat stomach and up again to explore the broad planes of his chest.

“Ah,” he said.

They stood like that for a moment, her hands pinning him against her, front to back. She rested her cheek against the swell of his right shoulder. And then he turned around, so her hands were caught for a moment in his shirt and by the time she had worked them free, his arms were pulling her tight against him, and then his mouth came down on hers and for once-for once -they were alone somewhere private, with no cars or people to stop them from doing what they both wanted to do so badly, and no anger left in Sari to make her pull back and reject something that she wanted with all of her body and all of her heart.

As the old year gave way to the new one, Kathleen found herself with a lot of free time on her hands.

For one thing, she no longer had a job. After Hawaii, she had never even bothered returning to the office. “You can kiss any references goodbye,” Sam said when he found out she hadn't given two weeks’ notice. It didn't matter: her sisters had asked her to come back to work for them and she had said she would, after a few more weeks of vacation.

So her days weren't busy, but neither were her nights. Although both Lucy and Sari continued to show up faithfully at the Sunday morning knitting circle, once the evening rolled around, they almost always had plans with their new boyfriends. They often invited her to join them, but Kathleen had never much liked being the odd man out, despite-or because of-all her childhood experience in that role.

Getting a boyfriend of her own would have solved that problem, but since the whole Kevin thing Kathleen hadn't felt much like going out to bars and meeting new guys. Sometimes at night she remembered that she might have been married at this moment- would have been, if her friends hadn't interceded-and her heart would start pounding with fear. It wasn't the thought of marriage itself that was so scary-just the realization that, left on her own, she was capable of making such a hugely bad decision. How could she have come that close to marrying Kevin, when now she didn't even miss him? She felt that, for the moment at least, she should avoid putting herself in the position of making more mistakes.