“Are you going to join me?” His baritone voice still sent shivers down her spine, reminding her that he might look insubstantial compared to heavily muscled street cops or gym rats, but inside, he was honed steel. The light from Louise’s living room lamp picked out glints of silver in his tousled blond hair. His father went silver at a young age, and Daniel was as well. Thirty-two. He’d wear it well; Tilda felt a sharp pang when she realized she wouldn’t be around to see it.
“If you’d like,” she said. She walked up to the ledge, planted her bum on the inside, and then eased her legs over to dangle twenty-two stories above the street.
“This isn’t where I thought you’d be,” she said. She looked down at the envelope in her hand. “I should’ve guessed, though.”
“I want to know where we went wrong. I came back here to try to puzzle it out.”
Of course he did. Daniel solved puzzles for a living. She’d thought, when she married him, that it wouldn’t matter, keeping this secret. It did. Her secret brought ruin with her from the past into the present she’d hoped not to taint.
Perhaps this was the price she had to pay to end what she never should have begun, this long walk down memory lane with the man who slid under her defenses with no intention other than loving her. Her blood heated even as her stomach turned flip-flops. “How are you getting on?”
“Not very well. But for some reason sitting up here makes it easier to bear. It’s as if, up here, the last year never happened. I could go back to the beginning and start all over again, the way I should have started when I first saw you.”
He looked as serious as he’d ever looked, even more serious than he had when he found her sitting on a ledge twenty-two stories above the Manhattan streets, as desperate as a junkie for some kind of adrenaline rush.
“There’s nothing you could have done differently, Daniel, nothing you should have done differently. What’s wrong with us is actually wrong with me, and it started long before we met.”
She held out the letter to him. He took it, both of them holding on to the envelope a little longer than was necessary for the handoff. Nothing bad would have happened if they dropped it, just a slow gentle drift to the streets, but for one crazy second she thought that both of them would go over the edge after it. She because it held the only part of her life she had never told another living soul, he because he had to know.
He took it from her and turned it over, looking at both the back and the front where she’d written his name in black ink. “This is your good stuff,” he said.
She almost laughed. He meant the paper, not what was written on the sheets. That was beyond dangerous. That would end in total ruin. He now held in his hands the truth. He would know all her secrets, all her flaws.
“Read it,” she said quietly. “I don’t know that it will answer all your questions, but it should go a long way toward explaining why I asked you for a divorce.”
She shifted her weight to swing her legs back over the ledge onto the safety of the terrace, but Daniel’s grip on her wrist stopped her. “No,” he said. “Stay here. We do this together.”
Solstice
I
nside an unfamiliar place the exhaustion seemed to drown her. On the street she could identify landmarks, follow Daniel’s lead and use the sun and moon and stars to determine night or day. But so far off the ground, Manhattan’s eerie, predawn silence rang in her ears. She’d known this was coming from the moment their story began. It might even be easy, because she was so tired, out of time, out of space. Numb. Dislocated, in the worse sense of the word.
Daniel read the first few lines, then looked at her. His gaze hit her like a searchlight, flashing over her from head to toe, white-hot and exposing. Shocking. She’d not seen him since the morning; she wore nothing provocative, a simple pair of dark jeans, a white T-shirt, a cardigan, her black leather tote on the terrace behind her. She had no defenses left. A strange floating sensation tilted the ledge a little; for a moment she felt she could simply float away like an untethered bunch of balloons.
Daniel’s gaze sharpened, a blue scythe, the only brilliant color in the darkness. “Promise me you won’t bolt,” he said.
She nodded, although the response was more automatic than answer; he was using his cop voice, the one he performed like a party trick. She’d been up all night writing the letter. Her circadian rhythms and brain chemistry were completely disconnected from night and day, past and present.
She watched him for a length of time that was measured in seconds but felt like a lifetime, let herself drink in the sight of him, the compact strength, veins and dusting of blond hair on the backs of his hands, the deft way he handled the paper. Then she blinked, sandpaper lids rough enough to call moisture. Closing them felt so good. She could shut out Daniel’s eyes while he read.
Daniel—
I wanted him.
Let me say first, let me make perfectly clear, that I not only consented to what happened, but I initiated everything.
I wanted him.
You wanted to take us back to the beginning, but we didn’t begin here. None of us comes to a relationship as blank as a sheet of paper, and I am no exception. When I was seventeen, I lost my virginity in a room indistinguishable from the one you took me to on my birthday. That fall I was a rather unwilling companion for my mother during her first speaking tour. We traveled to twenty-three cities on three continents in six weeks, my mother, myself, and her research assistant, Andrew.
You remember Andrew.
It started out innocuously enough. Looks, mostly. A smile just a bit more knowing. I didn’t seek him out, but I didn’t avoid him, either. I didn’t like him. He was everything I was supposed to want to be, but he subtly mocked what he was. He’d look at me. Wink. Roll his eyes. Bring me drinks, or sit next to me for a few minutes at one of the horrid receptions in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, while I bored him with the current city’s tourist report. I think Mum had read something in the
Guardian
about preparing your child to leave the nest, and decided I needed a shove from the mother bird. I wanted to spend my gap year in Cornwall with Nan, so I resented being dragged all over the world on the twenty-first century version of the Grand Tour, sent off to see the sights to “foster independence” then sitting through the same lecture given over and over, the same jokes, attending obligatory cocktail parties, dinners, receptions. I watched Mum drop names and show off a little, for Andrew. Perhaps he saw what she was doing. Perhaps not.
I did. While Mum worked at forming alliances to strengthen her future, I worked at drawing Andrew from her side. Mum found power in her way, and I found it in mine.
I won’t insult you by asking if you’ve ever engaged in an illicit love affair. We never talked about that kind of first, the firsts that shame us, where we learn how deeply we can desire, how badly we can hurt. You won’t know how those stolen, secret moments are electrified with passion and the fear of discovery. I kissed Andrew for the first time behind a closed door separating us from a reporter for the
LA Times
who was interviewing Mum. I went on tiptoe and pressed my mouth to his, felt his tongue touch mine for a second, perhaps two, before he pulled away. It’s such a heady sound, the total silence when two people aren’t breathing for fear of discovery.
He said we couldn’t do it again.
I told him to stay away, if he could.
He couldn’t.
The next day he drew me into the empty chapel at the Los Angeles Airport and kissed me. I can still remember the way his fingers felt along my jaw as he held my mouth for his, that sweet electric shock of his tongue against mine, my heart racing, the heat and weight of his body against mine.
He kissed me without desperation, as if we were getting acquainted, soft pressure, a nuzzle with his nose that changed the angle, caressing me with lip and breath and the shadow of his scruff until my mouth opened. His hand was heavy on my hip, holding me against the wall, inciting me to arch against him. He behaved as if this were completely normal, our right, even, and so I did, too.
I’ve not thought of this for years, but now I remember the strangest details, the contrast between his hair under my index finger while the collar of his shirt and blazer were stiff under my ring and pinky, the way tendrils of pleasure unfurled, climbing around my bones, spiraling through muscle, seeking the heat and light dancing along the surface of my skin. We flew to Tokyo from Los Angeles, to the city of lotus flowers and neon lights.
Do you know how seduction feels? We were discreet, even though I would sit next to him, studying, and feel the heat from his leg next to mine spread through my entire body until I was slick and hot with longing. When we met in hallways, in lobbies, in foyers of conference centers, in these transitional spaces, I did all the things the song says. I stood too close. I looked too long. I lost my umbrella when it was raining so I could walk with him, I timed my exits and entrances so I was always in his line of sight. The more he gave me, for we were well beyond kissing but not quite to sex, the more I wanted him. Mum wanted him, too. I knew it, and I seduced him. I took the thing she wanted most, right from under her nose. He began to touch me in front of her. Elbows. They’re not erotic. They’re a gateway drug to the body, a chance for fingers to slip down the underside of a forearm and brush a palm. Or the small of a back, very proper, very gentleman-like, very much the price of admission to my hip or my shoulder.
In Tokyo, Mum sent me to see gardens and Buddhist temples. Andrew volunteered to keep me company, cheer me out of my teenage sulk. As we walked we wove together then broke apart through pagodas and along garden paths, the spring heat and sunshine collecting in my hair, my skin. Every look felt fraught with significance, every shared moment imbued with a meaning and weight that belied the lightness inside me, like the lotus flowers blooming on the surface of dark green ponds, their long stems and roots anchoring them in a primordial dark. I felt like I was floating, until he looked at me, smiled, touched one long finger to a placard or pointed out a break in the view that seemed like a rip in the fabric of reality. Desire pulsed crazily in my palms, the soles of my feet. I could feel the sunshine on my lips, imagined his mouth replacing it, hotter, heavier, as full of promise. To break the spell I stood in front of him, reveled in the raw sexual heat eddying from him, a combination of body heat and desire.
We were standing on a bridge over a pond, and when he was ready to go, he put his hand on my hip. It was not an innocuous touch, the touch of an older-brother figure to a girl, but a lover’s invitation. Not my shoulder, or my upper arm, but my hip. I remember the heat in his eyes when I looked up at him through my eyelashes, the way his eyes changed, the way his lips parted, the way he looked at me. It was a split second of awareness, but I knew he was mine, and he knew it, too. I drew him in and held him just by a look, a kiss, a touch. Now I would have him.
We went back to the hotel, to his room, and when the time came I was so eager, so ready to have him inside me. The first stroke was absolutely electric. I came. Twice. Not many girls do, during their first time, or so I’m told, but I . . . I absolutely loved it.
After that I had both the build and the release. I’d beg off an event with a headache or a paper to write for Mum (she read and reviewed the papers I wrote as thoroughly as she’d question any of her tutorial students) and he’d come back once Mum was settled into the conference to “work on the research.” We discussed philosophers and bourgeois attitudes and the tedious conventional cultural mores we were flaunting. We grew reckless, incautious, until the day Mum came back to the room unexpectedly and saw Andrew splayed back on the couch, me on my knees in front of him.
Mum booked me on the next plane to London.
I hadn’t thought about any of this until I opened Andrew’s gift at Mum’s party. I didn’t write it down, you see. I wrote long letters to Nan, and in the writing it became real. This interlude in my life went unwritten, until now, because even as I was seducing the man my mother wanted for her lover, I knew it was wrong.
You wanted to know where our end began. This is where it began, if it is possible to trace such things to an event, but it is not an event. It is who I am, but this doesn’t stop me from wanting what I cannot have. There is a price that comes with this. I pay it. I’m sorry I asked you to pay it, too.
But I’m also not sorry. I wanted you. The moment I saw you I wanted you in the way I want things that are not mine to hold. I was blinded by the way you gather sunlight, carry it with you, store it up for dark days. When you said you loved me, I forgot who and what I am, what I can and cannot have.
I’m sorry.
Tilda
While he read she floated in the sensation of feeling nothing at all, noting absence as a presence. It lasted for some indeterminate length of time, traffic noise rising in regular pulses from the street below, the same all over the world. She closed her eyes, dropped into it. It was over. She had nothing more to hide. She would close the deal, then go to Cornwall for a week and look after Nan herself while Daniel moved out. Penny could handle the day-to-day of West Village Stationery. Tilda could drowse in the sun and heal right alongside Nan, ground herself in the only place in the world that felt like home.
She opened her eyes, saw him in her peripheral vision, his solemn profile. The light from Louise’s living room picked out the silver in his hair, the dusting of gold on the backs of his hands. In that moment, the space of a couple of heartbeats, no more, she loved him so passionately her throat closed. She loved him.
Then he turned to look at her, the movement slow, as if it cost him more than he could bear to pay. She recognized the look on his face. Wrecked. Ruined, even. She’d made that real. The consequences were written, black ink on white stationery, on Daniel’s skin.
She held out her hand for the letter.
He gave it to her, but gripped her wrist when she took it. “Now we’re going to talk.”