Along Came Trouble (Camelot 2)

“It doesn’t matter,” she said hastily.

“Oh?” He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “I’d expect you to have opinions on this kind of thing.”

She did have opinions. Health care reform, feminism, global warming, the economy, unions, affirmative action—she’d developed a lifetime’s worth of opinions in the last few years, and sure, they were a lot like the opinions she’d had before, with Richard, but she cherished all of them now, because this time they belonged to no one but her.

If Caleb’s taste in news programming was any indication, he didn’t share any of them. But that wasn’t the part that worried her. What worried her was that she had a distressingly urgent desire to find out what he thought. To measure the size of the gulf between their views of the world.

And what would the purpose of that be, if not to determine whether it was bridgeable?

No bridges, she admonished herself. Caleb wasn’t her boyfriend, and she wasn’t planning to marry him, so it emphatically did not matter if it turned out that they had next to nothing in common.

“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated aloud.

“You think this guy is full of shit.” Caleb said it cheerfully, as if the knowledge delighted him.

“Can we watch the Bogart movie, do you think?”

“What if I don’t like Bogart?”

“Oh, don’t. You have to like Bogart.”

His lips curved into a wry approximation of a smile, and he reached out to squeeze her knee. “I like Bogart. And I don’t agree with everything dick-for-brains here has to say, either.”

Ellen looked at her bowl. She found a hitherto unnoticed pocket of hot fudge and smiled. At the fudge. Not in relief.

“But I do agree with some of it,” Caleb added nonchalantly. “Feel free to ask me which parts.”

“I’m not asking you any questions,” Ellen said. “I don’t want to know. You’re a slab of beef to me, Clark. A bit of stuff.”

He chuckled and stole the spoon from her fingers. After bending over the bowl to fish a cherry from the melted ice cream at the bottom, he looked up. His face was slightly below hers, drawing her attention to how thick and dark his eyelashes were. Eyelashes like that should have been wasted on a man, but they weren’t wasted on Caleb. He gazed at her and ate the cherry. His eyelashes made the fluttery thing in her heart beat its frantic little wings.

His eyelashes. Not the warm compassion in his eyes.

“You do, though,” he said quietly. “You wish you didn’t want to know, but you do.”

Ellen fixed her gaze on the screen. “Look at that guy’s tie,” she said. “It’s an abomination.”

Caleb replaced the spoon and retreated to his spot on the couch. “You’re right. You can rest assured that I’d never wear a tie like that.”

He found her hand and covered it with his own, and Ellen went somewhere in her head where she heard the clink of her spoon against the ceramic ice-cream bowl and felt the cold sweetness dissolve in her mouth. Where the droning of the newscaster’s voice blended with the bold, aggressive images on the screen and the feel of Caleb’s body nearby.

She went somewhere in her head where she could just be with him, and nothing else mattered very much at all.

A commercial came on, and he turned to look at her. Before she could even think about it, the question popped out of her mouth. “Who’s your favorite president?”

“Eisenhower.” No hesitation.

She had to close her eyes for a second. “It can’t be. No one’s favorite president is Eisenhower.”

“Mine is. Who’s yours?”

“Lincoln.”

“Really? I’d have pegged you for an FDR woman.”

Ellen made a pfffft noise. “He tried to pack the Supreme Court. No respect for the law. What could anyone possibly like about Eisenhower?”

“Great general. And he gave that speech warning about the military-industrial complex.”