Page 43 of The Pleasure Contract
“Thank you, but we are in our fifties, Bristol. Not our seventies.”
Bristol grinned. “All I mean is that you’re happy. You’re both happy. Aren’t you?”
“Yes, but you would never be happy in a life like ours,” her mother said with such...casual conviction that it threw Bristol a little. Okay, more than a little. “Not the way we are. Your father and I have always been good at appreciating the things we have. And better still, we’ve liked that we get to sink down deep into those things, year after year. There’s a pleasure in a small life.”
“I don’t... I mean Iwantto be the kind of person who appreciates what she has, and practices gratitude, andsinks deep.”
“Why?” Margie’s voice was placid. “You’ve always been ambitious. I never was. I wanted...this. What I have. The boy who gave me my first Valentine, two little girls, this pretty house in the town where we both grew up. There’s nothing wrong with wanting something different. We can’t all be the same.”
“Sometimes I wish I was happy here,” Bristol confessed. She didn’t say,in a small life, but she suspected her mother knew she meant it. “It would have made things a whole lot easier.”
“But that’s not you.” Margie sighed a little, but in that way she often did, as if she couldn’t find the right words and was finished looking. “I don’t know what you’re going to choose to do with yourself, but I do know this. You will always work hard, because that’s who you are. And you’ll need whatever you’re working at to be meaningful to you, because that’s your heart.”
“Really? I thought you just told me that,actually, my heart is an angry, bitter ember. Plus earthquakes, and oh yeah, my entire academic life was aimed at Indy all along.”
“That’s the New Yorker in you talking,” Margie said. It wasn’t exactly a compliment. “Don’t forget, Bristol. I know yourrealheart.”
And they sat like that for a long while, while Bristol wondered if that was why it hurt so much. That her real heart had made itself known after these months of hiding. And the years of narrowly focused obsession that had come before. Her mother had somehow managed to strip all the layers away and get to that real heart with a serving of berry crumble and a trip to the backyard.
Leaving Bristol to try to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do with it, now that she could feel it beating too intensely inside her chest.
She’d been kidding herself about that hollow space. All the times she’d assured herself that she could sort it all out come fall had been like playing pretend with her sister up and down this dead-end road. She got that now.
“And not that I pay any attention to gossip, whether it’s my knitting circle or those awful newspapers in the checkout line,” Margie began with studied indifference.
Bristol snorted. “A bold lie from the woman half the county calls for information, Mom. Any and all information, because you gather it all.”
Margie ignored that. “But I’ve always felt that living in a small town gives a person all the attention anyone could ever need, since I haven’t walked through a grocery store without being recognized since the day I was born.” She flashed that sedate smile of hers again. “Then again, you always did have higher standards. It’s part of your charm.”
Bristol laughed, and couldn’t believe that her mother could make that happen so easily. Without even seeming to try.
She looked up at the branches spread out above her and all the green leaves. The sunshine that filtered through and the blue sky high above, filled with summer hope.
As if fall would never come.
When Bristol knew it would.
And more, that there was no point waiting around for a change of season when she already knew that this wasn’t a job she could do without losing herself. Maybe other women could—and had, as tough as that was to think about. Bristol supported anyone who could play that role and be good at it. Hell, she’d march in the street for them.
But the truth she’d been trying to push off to September was that she wasn’t them.
Her heart had gone hollow and she hated it.
Bristol wanted herself back, and she didn’t need her collection of degrees to know that she wasn’t going to find that loving a man who could never love her in return. Who had contracts drawn up to prevent it.
No matter how many times he tried torenegotiate, Lachlan only saw her as a clause. A business item to be handled—or replaced.
It turned out that she found the reality of that less comforting the more intense things grew between them. Or in her, anyway. Less of a lovely, soothing tide.
More of a scary riptide, hauling her out to sea.
And leaving her there to drown.
Her mother shifted next to her, and Bristol looked over. At the face she knew better than her own and that solid hand on her leg, marked with the lines and dents and years that Bristol imagined would score her own hands one day. Holding her steady, always.
That was what Margie did.
“Lachlan isn’t the guy, Mom,” she said softly, and was surprised how hard it was to say out loud. When she’d known that all along. “He’s only temporary.”