Chapter Thirty-Six

The condo looked exactly as it had when Kendall left it the day before. Furniture still in identical places on floors, bric-a-brac still on original surfaces, rooms hadn't traded spaces with each other. To all outward appearances, nothing had changed and the earth really hadn't taken a notion to shift on its axis. It only felt that way.

Kendall walked in and dropped her bag on the floor with a thud but even the loud noise couldn't dispel the aura of unreality surrounding her. She'd been gone fewer than twenty-four hours; according to her condo, she'd never even left. Everything between it and her was still the same. It was only everything between her and the rest of the world that was different…different, different, different.

Behind her came Zach, carrying the bag of groceries he'd suggested stopping for on the way home. He didn't want to eat in the hospital cafeteria and she couldn't blame him. It wasn't that the food was bad or that he was critical of the ambiance; it was just too public a place. Being in the public eye on his own accord didn't faze him, but he refused to draw unnecessary attention to Miranda, any more than the disappearance of her mother and famous grandmother had already drawn to her….

The brief shopping trip had given them something to do, too, to put off the arrival home. It wasn't at all clear what was going to happen at that point. Now Zach simply began putting the bread, the eggs, the milk, the orange juice, the coffee, whatever else he'd thought to buy, away in the refrigerator and the cupboards without begin asked, as if he were already intimately familiar with her kitchen. Of course, his kitchen was situated just like hers, but that was just the type of man Zach was anyway, Kendall realized that by now…the type of man who did whatever needed to be done, ranging from with a minimum of fuss to pulling out all the stops, whichever seemed most organic to the situation at hand.

And if you didn't like it, well…that was too bad.

Now what? Kendall wondered, from within her current aura. Because she was learning too that she mostly ended up liking it and sometimes even loving it. She moved farther into the room, just far enough to collapse on the sofa and watch Zach at work.

"Coffee?" he asked and then, without waiting for her response, began filling the coffee-maker with water and measuring out fresh-ground coffee.

"You don't need to do all that, Zach." She made a feeble protest for form's sake.

Looking at her from over his shoulder, he replied, "I want some coffee. I want some breakfast too. Okay with you?"

"It's okay if you're planning on doing the cooking." Leaning back against the sofa, Kendall closed her eyes. "If you expect me to, we'll have to call out for breakfast because I'm not sure I even have the energy to eat anything, much less cook it." Again, it was for form's sake; if Zach wanted to eat he was perfectly capable of preparing his own meal.

"Kendall, if I can manage to scramble some eggs and toast some bread, you can manage to eat it," he asserted.

"I'd never look a gift breakfast in the mouth," she admitted. "Oh, wait a minute. Yes, I would, if came from J.R. Oh my god, J.R.!" She leaned forward anxiously. "Zach, what time is it now? I just remembered J.R.'s supposed to be here at noon. Just what I fucking don't need!"

The shell of another unlucky egg was precisely cracked against the side of a bowl, its contents unceremoniously dumped in with the whole, a whisk from the stoneware crock of utensils on the counter selected to be applied to them, before Zach gave his unhurried response. "Two hours to the big appointment. It's barely ten o'clock."

"Oh, if only we could have come back married," Kendall continued to stew. "I wonder what J.R.'s going to do now."

Zach dropped bread into the toaster and stirred the eggs in the pan. "If you have energy to waste on that, put it to some use. Come over here, grab some plates and glasses for the orange juice."

"Bossy, aren't you, Zach?" she muttered. But nevertheless found herself arranging plates, napkins, cutlery, and glasses of juice on the counter: Sometimes it was better to keep busy.

"Yes, I am. And here's your breakfast." He forked steaming scrambled eggs onto their plates from the pan, then brought over buttered toast. "Food tastes better when you work for it."

Kendall poured two mugs of coffee and placed one beside each place setting before perching on one of the two counter stools. "And I think it tastes better when somebody else buys it, cooks it, sets the table for it, and cleans up after it. You know, like when you pick up the phone and dial room service and the table comes rolling into you room like magic? If I'm not mistaken, that's what even you do at your casino."

After taking his own seat, Zach said, "Ah, but without me, there would be no casino and therefore, no room service."

"Or breakfast either," she conceded after eating a few bites of the appetizing food and beginning to feel marginally less uptight. "My compliments to the chef. Really, Zach, I don't know how I would have gotten through any of this at all, if you weren't so different from what I—"

"Don't go there, Kendall," he cut her off. "That was then, this is now. Right? Raise your orange juice and join me in another toast. Ready? Here's to our niece Miranda, to her health and to her happiness."

Repeating "To Miranda," Kendall clinked the edge of her glass against Zach's and took a gulp of the juice. "Do you think J.R. even knows she's sick or if he does will he even care as long as he can still use her to stick it to me?"

Zach chewed a piece of toast thoughtfully. "I think there's no question but that Junior will still try to use Miranda. But stop looking for trouble, Kendall. Remember, we are engaged, if not wed, but only because as fate would have it we put Miranda's welfare before our own and rushed back from our intended marriage."

"But of course we did, Zach! What else could we do?"

"That's my point. If Junior tries to use the circumstances of our non-marriage against us, he might find that it backfires. And one more thing…." Zach paused to pour more coffee.

Waiting impatiently for him to finish the thought, Kendall finally prodded, "Go on. One more thing what, Zach?"

"Kendall…." Zach paused again. "From what I observed of Greenlee's behavior, she's suffering a great deal of guilt over Miranda's hospitalization."

Kendall sighed. "I know she is and it's ridiculous. No matter how much I've been dying to wring Greenlee's smug little neck lately, I don't blame her for that. She didn't have any control over Miranda contracting meningitis."

Zach gave a small smile. "That's very gracious of you Kendall. And I believe you, by the way. But tell me, if this had happened while Miranda was temporarily in your care, how do you suspect Greenlee would have handled it?"

Promptly, Kendall replied, "If our positions were reversed, Greenlee and Ryan would nail me to the wall. Believe me, Zach—I don't need you to spell that out for me."

"Good. Then go a step farther, Kendall, and you'll see Greenlee might very well be expecting exactly that treatment from you. Not only expecting it but somewhat afraid she deserves it, for being so adamant in her pretense to being the baby care expert, and have it color her behavior toward you."

"Greenlee? Admit she's been wrong about something?" Kendall shook her head. "Greenlee would never admit that under threat of the most grisly torture you could come up with. And I'm including trading in her Manolo Blahniks for flip-flops and taking away her Lacy's credit card and making her shop at the Price Club."

Shrugging, Zach said, "We'll see what happens." Standing up and stretching his legs, Zach continued, "Now I'll leave you to get ready for Junior's next performance. I'm going home to play back messages and make sure my minions are still printing money in the basement."

Kendall laughed in spite of herself at the unexpected touch of humor, but then her face froze in panic, a panic she hated to feel rising up in her, but felt powerless against. Turning around on her stool to face him, she asked, "You're coming back soon, though, aren't you? J.R. was just so awful the last time that I dread seeing him again—I need you to be able to pull this off."

"Do you think I'd miss it?" Zach asked rather darkly, and it was as if a sudden chill had pervaded the room. "It's time to have done with young Adam Chandler Junior's interference in something that concerns him not." His words ended on such a harsh note that Kendall nearly recoiled.

"Don't do that, Zach" she said swiftly. Before he could challenge her on what she meant, Kendall added, "Don't put up that wall. I like it so much better when you don't, and you don't need to do for my benefit."

His eyebrows arched slightly. "It wasn't for your benefit."

"Well, then for yours either. I know that we…well, that our relationship is kind of hard to define but sometimes, Zach, I could almost swear…." Her voice trailed off, and it was his turn to ask what she meant.

"What could you almost swear, Kendall?" he asked, his voice sounding gentler now.

She held her hand up so that her ring caught the light. "When I look at this, and when I think about how we made love yesterday—and I have thought about it a lot—I could almost swear that no matter what else our relationship is all about, at least we don't hate each other any more."

Zach's face relaxed into back into its small, almost secret, smile. "You've inspired numerous emotions in me, Kendall. I won't deny some have been negative. But I've never hated you."

"I hated you," Kendall said frankly. "But you knew that."

Although he had said he was leaving, Zach still hadn't made it very far to the door. "I don't believe you troubled to hide it. But you know what, Kendall? I prefer that. If you're going to hate me, hate me to my face as you did, don't hate me behind my back where I can't see you."

Finally stepping down from her stool, Kendall approached him as he watched her. "I don't hate you either way now, Zach. Sometimes I could almost swear to liking you. So when you do that walling-off thing it can have an effect on me. I think I told you how I react to walls?"

"The black and blue thing," he remembered. "Ah, yes. But Kendall, it's not worth hurting yourself over."

She looked up into his face. "Don't you think you should let me be the judge of that?"

In response, Zach slowly lifted her left hand between his hands, turning it palm-side up and stroking his right thumb over the pulse in her wrist. The network of veins beneath his finger was pale blue and very fine. With the tip of a finger and using the most featherlike of touches he traced a vein to her elbow, and then retraced it back to its beginning in her wrist. "Feel that, Kendall? Your skin is very thin," he whispered.

"Maybe. But if you keep doing that, you'll be able to tell that my skin is resilient, too, Zach. Very resilient." Their eyes met, and she inhaled softly at his delicate strokes, the delicacy of his touch in marked contrast to the size and tensile strength of his fingers. It was an almost mesmerizing thing to feel.

"I know," he said. "I remember."

"Zach," she breathed, "you said we still had a couple of hours before J.R.…."

"That was before we ate breakfast, Kendall. We're probably down to an hour and a half now." He kept stroking.

"I think probably…that's enough time to…to get ready. Don't you, Zach?"

Zach's gaze penetrated hers. "I should think."

Kendall shivered in anticipation. Maybe it didn't make sense…a few moments of physical pleasure stolen from a day full of other demands that could scarcely afford such a luxury, moments that were surely unwise, undoubtedly selfish, maybe even unseemly, but….

When Zach lowered his head to hers and lightly kissed her waiting lips, the joint pressure of his mouth against hers, of his thumb against her pulse, as tenuous as it was, made her almost faint with a desire that eclipsed her very reason. The kiss began deceptively, as lightly and delicately as that feel of butterfly wings trailing over her wrist and arm, the merest tracing of lips, barely a touch. But wherever the kiss landed it ignited and soon it took on a life of its own.

Withdrawing her hand from his grasp and turning the tables on him, claiming his wrist with her fingers—Kendall took a step backwards and led him that way, with their mouths still touching, into her bedroom.