Stephen began to laugh. "No. Dick. Aren't you seeing someone?"
"Not really. Casual stuff only. But hey. Don't get all prickly. If you can win the lovely Viola, I won't poke a stick in it, but it looked to me as if she’d be more likely to take a flogger to you than offer herself up in sweet surrender."
Remembering the way her body had surrendered to his in the elevator increased the ache in his genitals. It had been like that all those years ago, too—strong, almost magical chemistry, the kind where you knew with absolutely certainty that you were compatible in the bedroom, that everything would be smooth and easy there, and that your desires were not only strong, but also complementary. "I’d prefer it the other way around."
Jeff snorted. "When you knew her before, was she into the kinky stuff?"
Having known each other since their teenage years, he and Jeff had always been open with other about the ups and downs of their sex lives. He could tell Jeff just about anything.
"I thought so, but I really wasn't with her long enough to be sure. I was just a kid myself, remember. It was crazy hot, but afterward I felt like I’d molested her. Her father was my mentor." He muttered a curse. "I haven’t thought about her for years. I guess I must have buried the entire incident. I mean, who wants to think of himself as a child molester?"
"Wait. How old was she when this happened?"
"Seventeen."
"You’re off the hook, then. The age of consent in Massachusetts is sixteen."
"How on earth do you know that?"
"I’m a resident advisor at the college; it’s my part of my job to know stuff like that."
"Ah, okay, makes sense. I did figure, afterwards, that Percy was just blowing smoke, but the guy intimidated me in those days. I was young and stupid, and I felt guilty for maybe doing something to a teenager against her will."
"But it wasn’t against her will, right?"
"No, no, not at all; she was very passionate."
"Anyway, this was what—nine years ago? You were what, 21? Lots of teenage girls have older boyfriends."
"Still. The time was out of joint for us. Plus, she was a virgin."
"And you initiated her?"
"It didn’t go quite that far, but it was intense." Jeff was his best friend, but even so, he didn’t require all the details. The odd thing was how vividly Stephen remembered the details. Viola had been hungry for knowledge. She had seized each new experience with enormous zest. She had been adventuresome, unembarrassed, and willing to try anything. Her joy in her own blossoming sensuality had been wonderful to behold. "We went from never even touching to tearing each other’s clothes off in, like five minutes. It was that crazy. It all just came out of nowhere." The way it had come out of nowhere a few hours ago in the elevator. "I fell for her. I wanted to protect her and take care of her and be her white knight forever." He shook his head at the wonder of it. "The whole thing was insane."
"Sounds like it," Jeff said dryly. "So, is there any chance that the lovely Viola is drawing the same blank about you that you drew about her?"
"No." He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he was absolutely sure of it.
Just how good
is
your memory?
"She was pissed." He felt his pulse jack up as, again, he relived the interlude in the elevator. "She wouldn’t give me her number." Why hadn't he pushed a little harder? "Do you have it?"
"I don't think so," said Jeff, pulling out his smartphone, "but I do have access to the faculty directory." He thumbed a few keys then handed the phone across the table to Stephen, who pulled out his own device and entered the contact info. He stood.
"Thanks. I'm gonna step outside and call her."
"Now? It must be after midnight."
"I have to."
"Stephen?"
He stopped, looking back at his friend.
"Make your date for tomorrow. Tonight you're mine. Completely." Smirking, Jeff began to sing along with the song playing on the jukebox. "You give your heart..."
Stephen flipped him off as he headed for the exit.
It was pouring outside, so Stephen dashed across the bar’s small parking lot to take shelter in his car. He wanted to think for a few minutes before he called her. He couldn’t blow this; he had to do it right.
Sitting in the driver’s seat of his car with the rain thrumming on the roof, Stephen fell into the past. He had met Percy Quentin when he'd signed up for a writing seminar offered during his senior year at college. Percy had been that year's writer-in-residence.
He'd gone ill-prepared to the first seminar, not having read any of Professor Quentin's books, and not expecting much. He thought creative writing courses were a waste of time. He'd envisioned a guy with the name Percy Quentin to be stilted, effete, and possibly British. He’d figured him as the author of comedy of manners novels set in F. Scott Fitzgerald's day.
But Quentin turned out to be more of Hemingway type than a Fitzgerald. He was big and burly, with thick auburn hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He wrote hard-boiled mystery novels featuring a sarcastic, in-your-face private detective who took no shit even while relying more on brains than brawn to solve his cases.
Like his hero, Percy took no shit in his seminar. Rather brutally, he made everybody who signed up write a five page short story—no advance warning or time to plan—on the first day of class. Anyone who didn't meet his rigorous standards would be ejected from the seminar. More than half the class was gone by the second session. Stephen was permitted to remain.
There followed a semester of the most difficult, challenging, infuriating, and terrifying class Stephen had ever been a part of. Percy dominated each two-hour session with his fierce, relentless critiques of everything his students produced, and he succeeded in reducing several of his students to tears with his withering comments on their efforts. Stephen’s stories received their share of Percy's scorn, but after he cooled down and stopped wanting to throttle the bastard, he'd usually he had to admit that Percy was right.
He liked the challenge of trying to meet the crazy man's high standards. He worked hard, focusing most of his energy on his writing. He learned and he improved.
At the end of the semester, Percy invited him to participate in an independent study project with two other students. They were each to write a novel. His fellow students both grew discouraged by the end of the school year—their final year—but Stephen was well into his novel by then and had made up his mind that writing was to be his career.
Percy was not encouraging. He had been honest from the beginning with his students about the unlikelihood of any of them ever getting their work accepted for publication, but Stephen was ambitious and tenacious.
His own father had died when he was sixteen and left him a small inheritance, so he mapped out a five-year plan where he would live frugally, write all day, and do some bartending in the evenings to make ends meet. If at the end of five years he hadn't succeeding in finishing three books, getting an agent, and earning his first advance, he would endeavor to find a more stable and lucrative career.
After graduation, Percy had volunteered to help as Stephen continued his work on the novel. They had become friendly. They'd had found other things in common too—they both liked basketball and film noir, and Percy taught him to fly fish. He spent a weekend late in May at Percy’s cottage on the Cape, and he and Percy had fished, sailed, scuba dived, and eaten fantastic seafood while also talking books, films, and writing.
The weekend had been so much fun that Stephen had gladly accepted when Percy suggested that he come down every weekend to go over the latest chapters. These weekends sometimes stretched into entire weeks.
The routine had been idyllic until the last weekend in June, when Percy’s daughter turned up to spend the rest of the summer with her father. Stephen hadn't known that Percy had a daughter, and he expected her to destroy the male camaraderie. But by the end of that first weekend, he’d decided she might not be so annoying to have around, after all.
Viola was easy-going and quick to laugh. She was good at the same sports that Percy loved and that he, too, was learning to enjoy. She had gone fly-fishing with her dad in Belize (for tarpon and bone fish), Montana (for trout), and Alaska (for salmon). She could tie her own flies. She could sail and she could windsurf, a sport he wanted to learn. In the water she was quick and graceful.
In the evening, she played poker with him and her father. Sometimes he and she dueled each other on the Xbox. Surprisingly, she was just as good at computer gaming as she was at outdoor sports, and he endured several epic kickings of his digital ass at her hands.
She seemed to have no awareness of him at all as a male. None. As far as Viola was concerned, he was one of her dad’s cronies, and she treated him with the same cheerful affability that she extended towards her dad.
Having assigned her to the kid sister category, Stephen had initially ignored her feminine qualities. He wasn’t into her Goth look. But it must have been something she’d adopted for high school, because when her fake tattoos washed off in the sea water and her black nail polish chipped, she didn’t bother to renew them. Slowly, her true self seemed to emerge, and he began to take notice.
She was tall and gangly and still a bit coltish, as if she hadn’t quite adapted to her long legs, but she was fit and active, and the real curves hidden under her shapeless T-shirts were revealed when she stripped down to her bikini for water-oriented sports. Viola in a bikini was definitely worth a second look.
There was an attraction between them, but it thrummed along beneath the surface. He felt it more and more as the summer went on, but she didn't reciprocate. She had a boyfriend back home in California, and she spent numerous hours on her cell phone talking to and texting the guy.
At some point towards the end of summer, she and the boyfriend broke up, and she’d cried a bit on Stephen’s shoulder. He’d assured her, with all the authority of his status as a recent university graduate, that she would meet all kinds of interesting new guys in the fall when she started college.
This had remained the status quo all summer, until that last crazy weekend.
It was funny—he could still remember exactly how it had happened. How everything had changed.
It seemed so sudden, but it must have been coming on slowly. She'd tried to teach him to wind-surf. He couldn’t seem to get the knack of it. When he finally succeeded, they'd whooped and laughed and spontaneously hugged in the water, and lightning struck. Just like in the elevator. Sparks, fire, conflagration.
For the next few hours they'd both been dazzled by the force of their sexual attraction. He'd caressed her on the beach, and a bit later, in her father’s boathouse, where things had gone even further. It had seemed perfect. Not just the sex, but the feeling of finding someone who was the right match.
He'd started envisioning an entire future for the two of them—lots of sex and laughter, sports and games, while she went to school and he worked on his book. They would both be in the Boston area, so it was possible. She’d be living in a college dorm, and he in his crappy apartment in Cambridge, but that could work, couldn’t it?
No way.
His host had waited until Viola had gone to bed that night before dragging Stephen outside and threatening to have him arrested if he didn’t promise never to lay a hand on his daughter again. Percy had seen the two of them stagger ashore, fall down in the wet sand, and get it on.
Stephen had been so horrified and embarrassed at the thought of being observed by Viola’s father that any chance he might have had to make a case for himself was cut out from under him. When Percy had angrily declared that a man of his age could go to prison for having sex with a girl of under eighteen, Stephen had been shocked and scared.
Percy had made the whole thing sound so sleazy and wrong. All his fantasies about an idyllic relationship between himself and Viola were strangled at birth. She was, as Percy kept shouting at him,
only
seventeen
.
Looking back on it now, Stephen was struck with how young he, too, had been. And how stupid.
Percy had great force of personality. He was famous for running roughshod over anybody who opposed him, and he did it with a certain flair and charm that made him almost impossible to resist. Stephen was no pushover. In most relationships, he was the leader, not the follower, but Percy was his mentor, and the alpha male in his own household. His daughter, it seemed, was sacrosanct.
He'd felt he had no choice but to do as Percy ordered and back off. So he had left the Cape, left Viola, and, as it turned out, left his mentor forever. Percy had twisted something that had been sweet, hot, and loving into something resembling a porn movie. Stephen couldn’t forgive him. In later years, their infrequent interactions had grown hostile, as each of them slammed the other’s books.
As it turned out, he hadn’t needed Percy’s help in his career. He was a published novelist within three years. A couple of years after that, his third Bartholomew Giles novel hit the
New York Times
list, and he was, officially, a bestselling novelist.
Now Viola was back. She hated his books, but the attraction between them was stronger than ever. This time he wasn’t going to let her go.
Pulling out his phone, he scrolled down to the number Jeff had given him and initiated the call.
Viola woke with a start, her heart beating fast. The phone. Shit. She had forgotten to turn off the ringer. She usually did that at night, since being jerked out of sleep was such an uncomfortable feeling. It reminded her of the days when Derek kept calling her at odd hours, freaking her out.
The thought of her ex gave her a sick lurch in the stomach. Stop that, she ordered her stomach. He was gone. History. No more thinking of the creep. No more vulnerability. Own it!
Feeling a lot better, she groped for her phone. The screen informed her helpfully that the time was 12:25 a.m. She hesitated. She didn't recognize the number.