“Dev? What is it?”
His unsent letters to her—that's what all those rectangles were. He knelt down at the foot of the chair; a dark fear seemed to be tunneling just beneath his feet, making the floor rock and give way. Devan sniffed and sank her fingers into his hair.
“It’s so silly.” Her voice was rough from crying.
“Look how hurt you are. It’s not silly. Tell me.”
”I dreamed it was…all a dream. That I woke up, with the memory of you beside me, your warmth, you…but you’d never come back.” Those last four words broke her, and she was crying again. “I don’t think I ever let myself feel how bad it would be, if you never came back. How can I need you so much, when four months ago I didn’t even know you?”
“I don’t know, Dev. But it’s the same for me. I existed, I had a life, before. But after that crazy, terrible, wonderful month in the cabin, I can’t see my life without you.
Before I figured out how to come back to you, I was going crazy. I need you, Dev. You don’t need to worry. I’m not going anywhere. You can trust me. Trust this. Us.” 619
She raised and lowered the letters in a mute gesture. “I hate that you were struggling, suffering all those months. I wish I'd come to you, instead of waiting for you to come. I was just so scared. Your guilt. I was afraid if I came, if I told you how I felt, that you'd try to, I don't know, accommodate me, somehow, even if you just wanted to be free of everything. The past. Me.
“Even if I hadn't wanted to be with you, Dev, I'd have done anything I could have for you. Out of guilt. Out of friendship. But I wouldn't have pretended anything. That's not kindness. That's cruel, pretending to love someone when you don't, no matter how badly they want it.”
She was quiet, just looking at him. He smiled. Pulled her to him. He was about to coax her back to bed, so they could hold each other and talk in comforting warmth, when he spotted another piece of mail at her feet.
“Dev?”
She met his eyes, her look fractured. Distant.
“Is something else upsetting you?”
She gazed at him for a long, quiet, suspended moment. Then she bent and picked up the big manila envelope from the floor. Her hands trembled as she tore open the flap and the thin stack of papers quivered between her fingers as she read.
“I...”
Silent, patient, he waited.
“I've been accepted into NYU. Their doctoral program in comparative literature. I start in September.”
“NYU?”
She nodded. If she said any more she'd start sobbing like a baby.
“Dev. Oh my god. That's great.”
Vaughn's eyes had gone bright, his smile larger, easier than she'd ever seen it.
“You really do amaze me. Again and again. Soon it'll be Doctor Astor, then.” Her face felt numb and she had no idea what expression it bore.
“Dev. Hey.”
He twined his fingers behind her neck.
“This isn't an insurmountable obstacle, you know. We can work this out. We could keep this place here, and we could get a flat together in the city. Or maybe I'd sell this place and move altogether. Rent a space here for a month or two when we're read to go into the studio. My life's pliable that way, you know.”
“You'd do that? Rearrange your life?”
“I'd do a lot more than move to a different city to be with you,” he laughed, “I'm just glad you're not off to University of Arkansas. Besides, it's not like my life's the picture of stability. Things are quiet, now, but when we go on tour, it's weeks on the road. And when we go into the studio, it can be fourteen hour days for weeks at a time.
Actually, you'll be witnessing that scenario in just a couple weeks. That whole tortured artist thing, it turns out, is more than a myth. I've been obscenely prolific these last few months.”
He put his arms around her, kissed her hair. She pulled back and looked at him.
"I love you, Vaughn."
"I love you too, Dev."
He held her for a long while, feeling the shuddering breaths after all her crying finally even, deepen, slow. This was part of it. What he'd done to her, leaving her that day. Staying gone so long. His gut and chest cramped with guilt. But then she pulled back and kissed him, then looked at him, her smile sweet and real. A little of the squeezing pain left his insides.
“Dev?”
“Hmmm?”
“Would you mind telling me how a nineteen year old gets into grad school?” She smiled and laughed, that touchingly fragile laugh we have when we've been crying.
“For a start, I skipped third grade. And I've been on an accelerated matriculation program, so, come June, I'll have done my BA in three years. And,” she paused for a second, then went on with a smile, “I'm not nineteen any more.”
“I missed your birthday,” he said gravely.
“I'll forgive you,” she teased, “if you'll swear to be at my twenty-first.”
“Deal,” he smiled. “When's the big day?'
“February nineteenth. And when do we celebrate your birthday?”
“October 13th,” he answered in a tone of significance.
“The thirteenth?” She was trying to do the math.
“The day after I showed up at the cabin,” he solved the problem for her, “it was my birthday.”
“Oh,” was all she said while her mind rushed over the realization that Vaughn had retreated to the cabin to be alone for his birthday.
“I'd planned on going, working through some things, and looked at that birthday as a sort of marker for what I meant to be a kind of new beginning.” He gave her a wistful smile. “Funny, eh?”
She stroked his cheek, running her fingers over his smooth cheekbone, the slight roughness of his jaw. The feel of him under her hand was sweetly familiar, now.
“You know,” she said, “I don't know how old you are.”
“Thirty five.”
She tried to hide her shock.
“That bad, eh?”
“No.” Her face went hot and the realization just made the blush worse. “No,” she laughed. “I'm just surprised.”
“I'll take that as a compliment. Unless,” he added after a pause, smiling, “you're surprised I'm that young.”
“I thought maybe forty eight, forty nine,” she deadpanned.
“All those millions for cosmetic surgery. What a waste.” Thirty five. Five years older, and he'd be twice her age.
“You don't feel older to me,” she said. He didn't. Vaughn smiled at her, a little indulgently, she thought. “Do I seem so young to you?”
“No. And yes.”
She tried not to look, not to feel hurt by the implication of that.
“At the cabin, that night by the fire, that night we first kissed, first held each other,” the lit-up look in his eyes stirred in her a needful warmth, sweet, but so sharp it almost hurt. “When you told me you were a virgin, when you told me you were only 623
nineteen, well, if you'd asked me to guess I'd have said thirty before nineteen. You have an air about you—a solidity. You know,” he said with a sudden, mirthful smile, “you're my first younger woman.”
Her incredulity must have shaped her expression.
“Really. I mean, I've been with younger women. But I've never been involved, in love, with a younger woman.”
His words made the room, her body, warm and soft, and her eyes wet. In love.
They were in love. He must have seen what he'd done to her with those two words. His smile went tender and he curved his hand, so warm, so soft, against the back of her neck.
“It scares me a little,” he said after a while.
“Why?”
He looked and touched and spoke tenderly, the way he did, she was learning, when he was being careful of her.
“I had my first sexual experience when you were two—learning your first words, eating your first solid foods. I moved in with my first real partner—what? You were probably in fifth grade. You've just started living your adult life, and I'm more than fifteen years in.”
“So?”
Who cared? Not like she was some kind of child. She worked. She paid her bills. She'd been on her own, living her life, for almost three years.
He smiled. Kissed. Caressed. Still being careful.
“It's not a bad thing, Dev. It's just that...this time...it's a time of...growth. Figuring things out. I just have to keep reminding myself....”
“What?”
“Not to...stifle you.”
“Stifle?”
“It's important to me that you have room.”
“Room?”
“Room. To move around. Feel your way. I'm here, Dev. There's not even a little part of me that wants to pull back. But I worry that my being here, with you, that having me here, you look at your future one certain way. That maybe you're closing down different paths your life could go.”
“Vaughn, I...”
“All I'm saying, Dev, is that being with me, I don't want you thinking you have to be one certain version of you, that some narrow image of the future is the only one we can share.”
“Dev?”
She turned her eyes up, away from where her finger was teasing a sensitive spot just inside his hip bone, and met his gaze.
“What would you think about letting me read some of your stories? Some of the ones he didn't give me to read?”
The mischievous glint in her eye dimmed, then disappeared behind lid and lashes as she looked down.
“It's all right if you don't want me to, Dev. It's all right to keep things private.” She stayed quiet and still for a minute or two. Even her finger had ceased its teasing and settled softly on the blanket. When she spoke, her voice was small, her eyes still cast down, hiding her expression.
“I guess I'm torn.”
He waited.
“Part of me wants to share it all—everything about me. All my thoughts—even the weird, dark ones. But...”
He waited.
“It's not that I don't trust you,” she finally added. But that was all.
“You know, Dev. Conrad wouldn't let me say anything at the cabin, but he knew.
You should know. Your stories, the ones he made me read—they were incredibly arousing.”
She stayed quiet.
“Nothing in them diminished anything I felt for you,” he told her. He thought for a moment, and decided on confession. “Those stories, your stories, Dev, they were a small part of what I first loved about you.”
Lids and lashes flicked up and her eyes were on him. But she didn't say anything.
“Sometimes, Dev, I get the idea that you think I only care for, only want some certain part of you, that you think you need to hide the rest of yourself away from me.
But you don't, Dev. You won't become some different person to me, if you let me see your...less innocent side.
She stayed quiet. But two days later, as she was leaving for school, she handed him a thin, neat stack of printed pages, flashed a naughty little smile, kissed him, and ducked out the door. He read the story, teasing his hardening cock as he read, and when he'd finished, jerked of frantically. And when she came home, he told her. How hard her words, her images had made him, how excited it made him, knowing she had these hidden fantasies, how much it meant to him that she'd shared that part of herself with him.
A little more than a week later she gave him another story. And five or six days later she gave him another. At first he imagined that she was reluctant, that every new revelation was hard for her. But then he started to wonder. Maybe she understood how deeply, almost unbearably delicious the anticipation was. Not just wondering over the possible scenarios, but hungering for each hesitant confession—these revelations of the things that had fascinated her, but which she'd kept hidden from everyone all the years she'd been dreaming and writing them. Vaughn saw every story she bared to him as the most precious sort of gift—a sign of her trust, of the closeness they were building between them day by day. And he was scrupulous about reciprocating, in his way, telling her in detail how his mind and body reacted to what she'd written.
All afternoon he had been fantasizing, and when he heard the rattle and scrape of her key in the lock, there was an instant and pleasant swelling rush of heat to his cock. In the time it had taken her to work the lock Vaughn had gotten to the door. He kissed her eyebrows and the bridge of her nose, but teased her, not letting their lips meet. And then, right there by the front door, he sank to his knees at her feet, and just 627
as he'd imagined hours before and few short minutes ago, he slid his hands up along the sleek skin of her calves, her thighs, up under the skirt of black wool she'd worn to school, and, watching her face, watching her chest swell and dip with quickening breaths, pulled her panties down. Stepped her out of them.
“Lift your skirt,” he said, his voice low. Steady.
Vaughn watched a little tremor of shock ripple over her. Then she did it. She bent forward, her face coming near his, curved her pale fingers under the black hem, and rose, sliding the material up, up, baring inch after inch of milky thigh, stopping just as his anticipation peaked and he thought he'd glimpse her naked sex. He raised his eyes to her face.
“All the way, Dev. Up to your waist.”
She hesitated. That hesitation tormented him deliciously. Then she did it. Bared her sex to him.
Vaughn knelt there, gazing at the modest cleft of her pale, delicate cunt, breathing in her warm, rousing scent. With just the tips of his fingers he traced a delicate path up the insides of her ankles, calves, knees, to just the first curve of thigh, and with a touch asked her for a wider stance. With an audible change to her breathing, she stepped her feet apart, presenting him with a shadowy view that hinted at moist, pink crenelations and, back lit, the silhouette of firm curve and rousing cleft of her ass.
Sliding his knees between her ankles he made her spread more wantonly. When he looked up he found her gazing down at him, blushing adorably. He smiled and held her gaze as he undid his belt and jeans, worked them open and down, and wrapped his fist around his already rock-hard cock. He watched her lips close, watched her throat 628
contract as she swallowed, then her lips parted again as she panted, watching him slowly fist his cock. Then he brought his mouth to her cunt and licked her through three orgasms, saving his until her last.