Phoebe’s small whimpers aroused her unspeakably, luring her fingers down through the slick kiss of flesh to the parting in between. She entered with more restraint than she felt. The cry this evoked made her hesitate for a moment and she looked up, seeking Phoebe’s eyes.
“Don’t stop.”
A plea Rowe answered with a gentle thrust. Working her way deeper inside, she bent low and took Phoebe’s clit in her mouth, rolling the hood back with her tongue and sucking and tugging until she could feel Phoebe flexing and contracting around her fingers. She heard ragged gasps. Fingers dug into her shoulders. Shivering, Rowe moved in and out faster and harder, responding to the tempo of Phoebe’s cries, the kneading clench of her hands and compulsion of her hips.
She was so close to coming herself that she moved her free hand between her legs and almost lost it instantly. Clamping her thighs over her knuckles, wanting to wait, she curled her fingers a little inside the hot sheath of Phoebe’s body and bore down harder with her tongue. Phoebe’s breathing grew ragged and one of her hands moved to Rowe’s head, the fingers twisting in her hair. Her body stilled against Rowe, her hips exerting relentless pressure.
Rowe slowed her thrusts, eased the tension of her mouth, and heard a low, animal cry as Phoebe let go. A gush of fluid surged around her fingers and filled her palm. Astounded, unbearably turned on, she released the fist clenched between her own legs and worked her fingers along her clit with just enough pressure to make herself explode. Coming hard and fast, she gave herself over to sensation, her head resting on Phoebe’s stomach.
When the spasms finally subsided, she forced herself up just enough to gently kiss Phoebe’s saturated core, then fell back against the cool sheets. Sapped, her heart pounding wildly, she stared across at her new lover. Phoebe stared back, and for the first time in her life, Rowe felt she was truly seen. The experience was as disconcerting as it was thrilling. She had no idea what to say, how to express what it meant.
Phoebe reached out and took her hand. “Happy?” she whispered.
Tears flooded Rowe’s eyes. “Incredibly.”
*
Cara dropped her car keys on the table and quickly undressed. Briefly, she considered getting back into bed without showering, but she smelled of sex, and who wanted to wake up with a stranger’s juices on their hands and face? She strolled into the bathroom and turned on the shower. In the mirror she checked out the few blotches on her throat and breasts. Even soft bites always showed up later on her fine pale almond skin. She didn’t mind. In fact, she was always turned on by the evidence of a good fuck. Some of her encounters left more emphatic marks, but Fran was the gentle type.
They’d had fun and Cara felt a pang of regret that she’d insisted on taking her one-night stand back to La Montrose. But having casual partners sleep over was not a good idea. It was awkward the next morning. They would suggest breakfast and Cara would feel bad if she said no. Then came the inevitable conversation about seeing one another again. Sometimes they both understood this polite lie was just a way of saying good-bye, but there were always women who didn’t get it and insisted on exchanging phone numbers.
Cara stepped into the shower and stood beneath the hot jets, methodically soaping herself. Women like Fran were the exception, not the rule. She’d been completely open about her agenda, or lack of it, and they’d agreed on their intentions like mature adults. They were both looking for the same thing. No strings.
At one time, Cara had assumed that she and whoever she picked up would be on the same page. But this was not always the case, so she’d evolved a few rules to avoid feelings getting hurt. She was always honest about where she stood. No one spent the night. They treated one another with respect. And no meant no.
She turned off the shower, dried herself, brushed her teeth, applied face cream, and got into bed. She still didn’t understand why she had broken her rules with Adrienne. Look where it had gotten her. She’d spent a year seeing no one else and feeling pretty good about having a steady girlfriend, even if they were on opposite coasts. She’d actually started thinking about buying an apartment in Westwood, figuring Adrienne could live there and Cara would divide her time between her two homes. She couldn’t move out of the Islesboro house. Phoebe would never cope with the idea of her “leaving.”
Cara rolled onto her side and stared into the darkness, trying to identify the feeling that came over her at these times. It was an odd hopelessness, a sense of something restless within, as if a part of her was tethered to some deeply buried stake and was gnawing at its ropes. Puzzled, she slid a pillow beneath the bedclothes and curled into it. It wasn’t like she was unhappy. She had a great job, a nice home, and people who loved her. She could buy most things she wanted and was free to do pretty much anything she liked.
Of course, most people would claim that being single was the problem, like you weren’t complete unless you were in a long-term relationship. Cara had never felt that way. As far as she was concerned, being single had a lot going for it. For a start, no girlfriend meant no drama. Who had time for that shit? And she didn’t need another person to make her feel complete. She couldn’t possibly be lonely. When you had an identical twin you were never really alone.
The thought preyed on her. Sometimes she wondered if she was controlled by her own unique urges or if her mind was somehow colonized by her twin’s. It was almost as if she couldn’t trust her most private thoughts to be untainted. Over the years she had grown accustomed to the sense that she and Phoebe shared a strange unconscious dance. There was no escaping it. Even in sleep, the music played on and they moved in step.
Now, as she closed her eyes and allowed her mind to drift, a profound contentment advanced on her, evicting her nagging anxiety. She knew the feeling was not her own, but she surrendered to it anyway and closed her eyes. An instant before sleep, she realized the pillow she was hugging smelled of Fran. Funny how the scent of another human being could be so comforting.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Phoebe hung the final red glass apple on the Christmas tree and hit the power. Zoe instantly leapt up from the rug and barked at the blinking lights. She was one of those dogs who reacted to change, losing her mind if a houseplant was moved six inches. Rowe had installed a new chandelier in her vestibule and Zoe got hysterical every time she saw it.
“Come here, silly.” Phoebe gave her a reassuring cuddle and, once the Lab had calmed down, guiltily fed her a treat.
Rowe insisted on rationing these because Zoe tended to put on weight and she’d snuck off to the deer barn recently and stuffed herself on apples. Phoebe wasn’t meant to give the dogs table scraps either, but they knew a sucker when they saw one.
She surveyed her decorations with satisfaction. The room smelled of pine and the cookies she’d baked that morning, and with the garlands and Christmas stockings, it felt homey and festive. Cara drew the line at angels and nativity scenes, pointing out that Christmas was nothing but a pagan feast hijacked by an upstart new religion trying to make conversion painless for the heathen. Officially, in the Temple home, they celebrated the solstice festival of Yule.
Phoebe was dismayed that she hadn’t made it to Boston to shop this year. Her work for the FBI had been a huge distraction. Next year she would organize things better. Meantime, thank goodness for the Internet. Yesterday’s mail delivery had to be dragged by handcart to the door. Phoebe went over to the table where her gifts for Cara and Rowe were piled up, waiting to be wrapped. She wanted to have everything done by the time Rowe got back from her last-minute shopping expedition to Portland. Cara wouldn’t be home until Christmas Eve, and she would bring all her presents with her, professionally wrapped by those glamorous sales clerks in the ritzy boutiques where she shopped.
This year, for once, Phoebe was going to give her sister something just as fabulous as anything Cara might choose from Tiffany or Louis Vuitton. Sliding a square red leather box from its shiny white outer, she opened it carefully and inspected the contents. Cara had coveted a Cartier Pasha watch for many years and had even pinned a picture of the model she wanted on the refrigerator a few months back. Phoebe had taken this as permission to splash out, something she and her twin seldom did. When you grew up making your own soap and wearing secondhand clothing, frugal habits were hard to shake.
Grandma Temple had ingrained in them her views on extravagance and waste—the elderly lady still insisted on driving a twenty-year-old Ford rather than squandering money on a new car. Over time, Phoebe and Cara had recognized that her ideas were extreme, but Phoebe still practiced many of the home economies they were reared with. She grew most of their vegetables, canning and freezing through the summer so they would have enough to last through the winter. And despite Cara’s insistence that there was no need, she made their soft furnishings and sewed many of her own clothes.
Phoebe knew she should be enjoying her glamorous FBI salary, but she couldn’t assume it was going to last. Her second sight had arrived out of the blue and it could vanish just as quickly. Meantime, she was thrilled that she could donate extra money to WSPA and other causes she supported and buy some special things for the people she cared about. Humming to herself, she wrapped Cara’s watch in a sheet of beautiful embossed paper she knew would horrify her grandmother, who always presented their gifts in recycled tissue, decorated with dried flowers she had pressed herself.
After tying Cara’s box to a high branch, she wrapped a few of the more mundane gifts she’d bought. Books, DVDs, perfume, clothing. She’d also had the Colby Boone pastel framed. This was now hanging on the wall near the tree. While she was in the gallery, she’d purchased a couple of other paintings, one of them for Rowe. She still couldn’t believe her luck at the find. It was an oil painting of Dark Harbor Cottage by an unknown artist, painted about a hundred years ago. The moment she saw it she knew it belonged in Rowe’s front parlor in the gap above the rolltop desk they’d dragged in from the carriage house.
Ignoring an urge to take it from its protective crate, she contented herself with wrapping it beautifully. Rowe was going to be delighted, and the painting wasn’t the only special gift. Phoebe opened a small box and studied the ring she had chosen for her lover. She supposed some women would be frightened off, receiving this symbolic gift so soon into a new relationship. But it wasn’t a wedding band, and Rowe had mentioned one day that she’d lost a signet ring she was fond of. Phoebe had found a heavy handmade replacement she could imagine Rowe wearing. She hoped it would fit.
Picturing her lover’s pleasure, she felt her body react as it always did to the mere thought of Rowe. Her breathing shortened, her nipples grew taut, and she got wet. Weak kneed, she pulled out a chair and sank down into it. She still couldn’t believe they were together. More amazing still was that, for the first time ever, she felt certain she was in a relationship that had a future. The conviction was instantly tempered with unease. She hadn’t told Cara. She knew she was putting it off out of cowardice, trying to avoid a shadow being cast on her happiness.
She didn’t want her sister’s steely perception slicing through her own, wounding her with doubt. It was so often that way between them. Sometimes it seemed they shared a mind, thinking each other’s thoughts, feeling each other’s fears, living each other’s lives in countless tiny ways. They often wore the same colors unintentionally, injured the same limbs on the same days, made the same impulse purchases when they weren’t shopping together.
It was as if they inhabited an invisible womb, each seeking space to grow yet held captive by their dependence on the same blood supply. They were eternally trapped by their togetherness, one another’s first and most enduring passion, each the soul mate none other could be.
That was why she needed to tell Cara face-to-face, not over the phone. Being with Rowe did not mean rejecting her twin. But she had a feeling Cara might take it that way.
*
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Cara spooned cranberry sauce into a crystal bowl.
Phoebe closed the oven door and wiped her hands awkwardly on her apron. Her eyes pleaded and her mouth was set in the small mutinous line that always spelled trouble. “Because I didn’t want us having one of
those
conversations over the phone.”
“So instead you wait until Christmas Day to explain she’s joining us because you’re now fucking her.”
Phoebe flinched. “Don’t say it like that. I’m in love with her.”
“How can you possibly say that? You only met the woman a few weeks ago.”
Cara carried the cranberry sauce into the dining room. The table was set for three, and Rowe was going to show up pretty soon. Swallowing her anger, she found a place for the sauce and refolded the napkins to give herself time to control her breathing. Damn Phoebe. Why couldn’t she behave like a responsible adult just once? And Rowe. Cara supposed she couldn’t blame her. The woman was obviously lonely and had let herself be charmed. So much for her reluctance to get it on with Cara because they were neighbors. Apparently her reservations had not extended to Phoebe.
She plunked down the napkin rings harder than she intended, stalked over to the bar, and hauled out the champagne glasses. When she turned toward the table again, Phoebe was standing in front of her, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Please don’t spoil this,” she begged. “Please be happy for me. I really think she’s the one.”