“I don’t have any idea
what
kind of person you are,” he said. “I don’t
know
you.”
“Yes, you do. You know things about me I’ve never been able to tell anyone except Paul. I’ve felt close to you. I’ve felt…
attracted
to you.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Paul once told me that his relationship with Annie was hopeless because she loved you too much,” she said. “I’m not sure if I’m any closer to understanding why Paul fell in love with Annie, but I understand why Annie would love
you,
Alec. I understand that completely.”
She turned to leave, and this time he let her go.
She was in bed at ten, but she could not sleep. The baby was as restless as she was tonight. His featherlike flutters seemed frenzied, unending, and every time she changed position in the bed, he let her know of his displeasure.
She’d heard nothing from Paul, and she was not yet ready to initiate a conversation with him herself. But
Alec.
What more could she do—short of hurting him with the truth of Paul and Annie’s brief liaison—to make him understand? Ten-thirty came and went, and she lifted the receiver of the phone to her ear to be certain it was working.
At quarter to eleven there was a knock on her front door. She slipped her robe over her cotton nightgown and walked downstairs to the dark, silent living room. She turned on the front light and peered out the window to see Alec standing on the deck, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
She pulled open the door. His smile was uncertain. “I was going to call you,” he said, “but thought I’d stop over instead.”
She stepped back, and he walked past her into the living room. She closed the door and leaned back against it, tightening the sash of her robe.
“I was overwhelmed this morning, Olivia,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
It was so dark in the room she could only make out the whites of his eyes, the white stripes of his rugby shirt. She didn’t want to turn on a light, though, didn’t want him to be able to read her face all that easily tonight.
“I was wrong to keep things from you,” she said. “I’ve been walking a fine line between you and Paul. I omitted a fact or two when I spoke to you, and then another fact or two when I spoke to him. Then, suddenly, it all snowballed on me. I am not deceptive, Alec. I’m not generally a liar.”
He was quiet for a second or two. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you are.”
Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and she saw the sadness in his smile.
“How did Paul know?” she asked. “How did he figure out what I was doing?”
“Lacey, I think. He was talking to her before the meeting last night. That’s probably why he left right away.” He ran a hand over his chin. “Poor Annie,” he said. “She was so down for those few months before she died. Now I’m wondering if Paul was part of the reason—if he was hassling her in some way.”
Olivia caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I think he may have been, Alec.”
He frowned. “Do you think he was trying to get her to sleep with him?”
She shrugged, looking away from him, as though considering the possibility. “I guess only Paul could answer that question.”
Alec walked to the front door and looked out toward the street. “Why didn’t she tell me he was bothering her?” he asked, his voice rising. “I asked her over and over again what was wrong. I hated it when she’d get like that. It scared me, she seemed so…
lost
inside herself.” Alec seemed lost himself. He was no longer in this room with her. “I asked her to let me help her, I
begged
her, but she…” He shook his head. “Oh, hell,” he said tiredly. “What does it matter at this point?”
Olivia rested her hand on the back of the rattan chair. “Why don’t you sit down?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to sit down.” He took a few steps toward her and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her head against his shoulder. He smelled of his familiar aftershave, and she closed her eyes. They stood that way for a long time. Minutes. She felt a little dizzy with her eyes closed, a little high, and she let the feeling build, let it consume her until she needed to hold on to him to keep herself upright.
After a while, Alec lowered his hands to her hips and pulled her gently against him, against his rock-hard erection. She thought of freeing it, taking it in her hands, her mouth. She locked her fingers behind his back to keep them from drifting down to his belt.
“What is it about this room?” Alec spoke softly in her ear. “It always seems to have this effect on me.”
She untied her robe and opened it so there was one less piece of cloth between her body and his, and when she pressed against him once more, she could feel her own heartbeat pulsing low in her belly. Maybe she should say something. Maybe she should tell him she wanted this, she wanted
him.
No doubt Annie had been a verbal lover.
“Olivia,” he said. “Where’s your bedroom?”
She drew away from him and took his hand, leading him up the stairs, down the hallway, and by the time they’d reached the dark refuge of her room, she had lost control. She sat down on the edge of her bed and turned to unzip his jeans, drawing her hands inside and bringing his erect penis to her lips.
Alec caught his breath. “
Christ,
Olivia.” His fingers combed through her hair, down the nape of her neck and up again, while she worked feverishly at his body. She barely heard him when he asked her to stop. The request was gentle, almost polite, and he repeated it as he pulled away from her.
She was shaking, uncertain if she had done something wildly inappropriate in his eyes, or if he was about to leave her again. He would tell her they were both too vulnerable. Walk out her door. She looked up at him. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
He sat down next to her on the bed, his arm around her shoulders. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “You just surprised me. I wasn’t expecting…
that,
exactly, and it’s been a very long time for me. If you were to keep on doing what you were doing, it would all be over in seconds, and I’m not that anxious to get this over with.” He stroked his fingers over the skin beneath her eyes. “Why are you crying?”
She touched her fingertips to her eyes and felt the wetness. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
He leaned over to kiss her, softly—
too softly;
she could not tolerate moving this slowly—and she deepened the kiss with her tongue as she turned to straddle his thigh.
Alec ran his hands under her nightgown, up her thighs. He leaned back to look up at her. “Are you always like this?” he asked. “Or is it just that you’ve gone without for too long?”
“I’m
always
like this,” she said, tugging his rugby shirt out of his jeans.
He laughed, shifting her off his thigh and back to the bed. He stood up, and she watched him as he undressed. Her curtains let in the pool of moonlight reflected off the sound, and she could see the distinct lines on his body, separating dark from light, the public Alec from the private. His stomach was tight and ridged with muscle, and she imagined his erect penis was still glistening from her attempt to please him.
She rose to her knees on the bed and took off her robe, but when she reached for the hem of her nightgown, he caught her hands.
“Leave it on,” he said, closing his arms around her.
He didn’t want to see her body. She imagined how her rounded belly would look to him in the white light of the moon.
Alec bent down to take the hem of the nightgown in his own hands. He lifted it up, his palms running slowly over her thighs and hips. The cotton caught softly on her nipples as he raised the nightgown over her breasts, then over her head, until she stood as she had weeks earlier, naked and ready in his arms. He began kissing her again, and now there was a hunger, a heat in his mouth that she welcomed, that she shared. He stroked her body as they kissed, his hands skimming over her shoulders, her breasts, her hips. He slipped his hand between her legs, and despite the fact that he had seemed driven only seconds earlier, his fingers were tender as first they probed, then began stroking her, so softly that she groaned and pressed against his hand for more.
“Sit down,” he said, and she lowered herself to the bed. He laid her back on the blanket and then knelt by the side of the bed, drawing her legs over his shoulders and letting his mouth finish the work of his hands. She understood immediately what he had meant about it being over too quickly. It had been so long since she’d been touched this way, this intimately. Her orgasm was sudden, and almost unbearably intense, bringing with it a fresh rash of tears she didn’t understand.
He lifted her more fully onto the bed and was quickly inside her, pinning her beneath him in a way that gave her one brief, irrational moment of panic, that made her wonder if he was still angry. No. The thrusting of his body was careful and controlled, and it felt good.
Very
good. He moved in a way that was new to her, with a depth and pressure that took her straight back to a climax and renewed her weeping as she wrapped her legs around him to spur him on to his own release.
The stillness of the room was nearly overwhelming after the frenzied activity of the last few minutes. She tried to keep the sound of her tears out of her breathing. She did not want him to know. He had touched her everywhere. He had explored her body in intimate ways, yet he had carefully avoided her stomach, carefully avoided the evidence of her husband.
She turned her head to kiss his jaw. He was so still, so quiet.
He lifted himself from her before she was ready to lose him, briefly touching his lips to her forehead as he slipped out of her and rolled onto his back. His semen seeped from her body to the blanket, and the cool air of the house hit the dampness of her skin and made her shiver.
“Alec?” she said softly.
He found her hand in the darkness and held it on his stomach. “I didn’t leave a note for Lacey,” he said. “I should probably get going.”
He sounded empty. She closed her eyes. “What was this all about?” she asked quietly, forcing the words past the tightness in her throat. “Why did you come here tonight? Was it vengeance? Were you using me because you thought I used you?”
He raised himself up on his elbow to look at her. The reflected moonlight filled his eyes, made them look like translucent glass, blue marbles. “Did you feel used?” he asked. “Is that how it felt to you?”
She shook her head. “But you seem very distant. You seem…let down, as though it was Annie you wanted and Olivia you got, and I just don’t measure up in bed any more than I did in her studio.”
“Olivia,” he said, his voice a quiet reprimand. He smoothed her hair back from her face.
She drew the edge of the blanket over her breasts. “When Paul and I made love back in April, he told me he had to imagine I was Annie before he could…feel anything. I thought maybe that’s what you were doing, and then…”
Alec interrupted her. “Oh, Olivia,” he said, smiling. He shifted a little on the bed so there was more blanket for her, and he tucked it beneath her shoulders. “Do you ever have it wrong. Want to hear how wrong you have it?”
She nodded.
He lifted her hand to his lips, and the moonlight shimmered in the gold braid of his wedding ring. “For the past month or so, when I try to think about Annie, you always get in the way. I’d try to remember making love to her, and the only image I get in my mind is of that night in your living room.”
“Then why are you suddenly so distant? Why do you want to leave?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Is it the baby?” she asked.
He nodded. “Partly, yes.” He sighed and rolled onto his back again, looking up at the ceiling. “Everything’s wrong about this, Olivia.
Everything.
Here we are, making love in your husband’s bed. He could come over here any second. What would I do then? Hide in the closet? Climb out the window?”
“Paul and I are
separated,
Alec.”
“It makes me feel…
sleazy.
”
Olivia winced. She did not feel sleazy. She felt no guilt at all.
“Paul still loves you. You can see that, can’t you? If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been so angry when he saw you in the studio,” Alec said. “He wouldn’t care that much. It’s Paul who should be here in this bed with you, not me. This is just plain wrong.” He let go of her hand. “But that’s still not all of it.”
He stood up and began to dress. Olivia pulled herself up to sit against the headboard of the bed. When he’d zipped his jeans he sat back on the bed and looked over at her. “Annie’s been gone such a short time,” he said. “Just eight months. After nearly twenty years, eight months is nothing. I’m still too much…Annie’s husband, and I feel as though I’m betraying her somehow.” He chuckled, but the clear blue of his eyes had clouded over. “This sounds a little…I don’t know, melodramatic, I guess, but a few years ago Annie had to have surgery and she thought she might die. She asked me to promise that if she died, I wouldn’t get involved with anyone for at least a year. She needed to know she was so well-loved that I couldn’t even consider seeing someone else.” He smiled at the memory. “Well, of course I never thought she’d die. Even if she did, I couldn’t imagine being able to care enough about another woman to get involved again for a very long time. When I came over here tonight, I put memories of Annie out of my mind, but when we finished making love, it just hit me.
Wham.
” He looked out at the sound. “I can see her face. I can remember her asking me…” He shook his head quickly, then looked over at her. “See what I mean?” He smiled. “It’s just too soon for me, Olivia.” He stood up again, picking up his rugby shirt from her dresser, and Olivia wiped the tears from her face while his back was turned.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he straightened the collar of his shirt. “I didn’t mean to use you any more than you meant to use me.” He sat on the edge of the bed again to put on his tennis shoes. “I’m going to call Paul tomorrow, just to clear the air. He and I are into this lighthouse thing too deeply for either of us to just walk away from it. And I want you to tell him about the baby. Please, Olivia. For my sake, all right?” He finished tying his shoes and looked over at her. “Because once he knows, it will straighten him out. He’ll want you back. We both know that, and once you’re back with him, I’ll be able to get on with my life without thinking about you every damn minute of the day. Will you tell him?”