The One in My Heart (13 page)

He laughed. “True, not very. But I don’t want my parents to get the idea that I’m a slut. They should believe that when I’m not saving lives, I’m making out with you in elevators.”

I bit a corner of my lower lip, wishing I didn’t react with such longing to what he described. “So…are you ready to run into your parents again?”

A beat passed before he answered. “I don’t have to be ready when something is this important. I just have to be there.”

Oddly enough, I was reminded of the first time Zelda suffered an episode after she came to Manhattan. I’d been five, too confused—and scared—to cry. So instead I held on to the guardsman teddy bear she’d given me and trailed Pater around the house.

Is she going to be okay?
I’d asked, when I could bear the silence no longer.

Pater drained the Armagnac in his glass.
I don’t know.

So what do we do?

We don’t have to do anything
, he’d answered.
We just have to be here.

“And hope for the best?” I murmured.

“And work for the best,” answered Bennett.

THE EXTERIOR OF LA FIGLIA
del Mare was a pure, deep vermilion, a color that seemed better suited to Versailles’ drawing rooms, rather than the coast of the Mediterranean. Amid a cliff’s worth of pastel houses, it could have stood out like a sore thumb. But instead it exuded a whimsical, old-world charm.

Bennett had booked a two-bedroom suite on the highest level of the hotel, with whitewashed walls, rustic furniture, and a large, private balcony overlooking the Bay of Positano. The setting sun was a distant glimmer of reddish-gold, barely visible through the fog. The steel-grey sea, two hundred feet below, felt less like the waters of the Mediterranean and more like those of the Atlantic.

All the same, it was beautiful.

And chilly.

Bennett draped his trench coat about my shoulders. “I love an opportunity to be gallant.”

“You weren’t wearing it.”

He had taken off the trench coat to drive. Coming out of the car he had carried it over his arm.

“Even better. I love an opportunity to be gallant for which I don’t have to suffer.”

I smiled. He adjusted the collar of the trench coat, his fingertips brushing against the underside of my jaw. I had trouble sustaining my smile. Perhaps I also had trouble drawing in my next breath.

“Imagine people on the lower terraces looking up,” he said softly.

“Are you an exhibitionist?” I tried to sound severe. “That’s not part of our bargain.”

His eyes were on my lips, gazing at me the way Caesar must have once gazed at Gaul—as something to be conquered and made his own. “Of course not. You want closed doors. All the closed doors in the world—and maybe some high walls too, just in case.”

I swallowed. Was it a coincidence that his words were also an accurate description of my psyche? “Then why are you asking me to imagine people looking at us?”

“We should practice for when my parents might be among them.” He drew me toward him by the lapels of the coat and kissed me below my ear, the graze of his stubble a hot singe I felt all the way to the soles of my feet. “I want them to think I have nothing on my mind except being inside you all night long.”

There was no reason for me to feel jittery—I always understood that by becoming his fake girlfriend, I’d also said yes to more sex, possibly a lot of it. Yet my heart was slamming into my rib cage, and not only with arousal.

With every encounter I became less and less sure what he wanted from me. Not just sex, that much I knew. And I was under no delusion that he found me a fascinating puzzle. No, it was something else entirely.

Sometimes it seemed as if he already knew what I was hiding behind high walls and all the closed doors in the world. A few of his questions, in retrospect, felt like experiments—not looking for answers, but gauging how much and how instinctively I lied.

“You can’t stay all night,” I said. “I’m not a twenty-four-hour diner.”

He smiled slightly. “But you are open dinner hours, at least? Six to nine?”

He smelled of fine wool and Provençal soap. Part of me wanted to bury my nose in his skin; the other part wanted to run far, far away. “That’s still a long time.”

“Not for what I have in mind.” He guided me back into the sitting room, shutting the balcony door as he did so. “It’s barely enough time to do you justice.”

Inside it was quite warm. Or was it me, burning up at his words? He took the trench coat and tossed it onto the back of a chair. My leather jacket he unzipped and peeled off. Underneath I wore a form-hugging sweater—in a green that was an almost exact match for the color of his eyes.

Was that why it had caught my attention?

He pulled the sweater over my head and did the same for the camisole I wore underneath, exposing my bra. And then he pushed down my skirt and tights to reveal a pair of matching underpants. They were both basic black—I hadn’t wanted to look as if I’d planned to be disrobed.

“Praise the Lord,” he murmured, slipping off my undies, “for a woman who can bring me to my knees.”

My heart thumped. “What use do I have for a man on his knees?”

He eased me down on a long sofa. “Begging for a demonstration, aren’t you? Open your legs for me.”

My hand gripped the back of the sofa. I might have trembled slightly. “What if I don’t?”

He already destabilized me so; I was afraid to grant him any more access.

He traced a hand up my tightly clamped thighs. “Do you know you have the perfect face for a nun—as if you have only prayers on your mind? And then there are those times when it all changes, and you look pornographically turned on.”

He pried open my legs and caressed the places I’d tried to conceal from him. Pleasure flooded me.

“Do I look like that now?” I heard myself ask, my voice raspy.

It was his turn to sound unsteady. “Yes.”

He went down on me. And it felt so good, I had to bite down on my lower lip to not sound as aroused as I felt. But by the time he brought me to my third orgasm, I had given up any and all attempt to be quiet and contained.

Then he was inside me, huge and hard. And just like that, I was again pornographically turned on.

He watched me, his eyes a dark, dark green. I couldn’t meet his gaze, so I wrapped my arms about him and buried my face in the crook of his shoulder, wanting only enough sensations to drown out any insidious feelings of need.

I was already high enough on the plateau that it wouldn’t take much for me to tighten again, climbing toward the next tipping point. But just as I neared that point of no return, he slowed.

I moaned in protest.

“You want to come?” he murmured.

“Of course I want to come.”

“Then tell me what you masturbate to—I’ve told you all about me.”

How could I? Ever since last summer, every time I’d touched myself it had been to memories and fantasies of him. “Just fuck me. I don’t want to talk.”

He licked my nipple. “Answer or you won’t get any more.”

I was desperate to resume that upward spiral toward my next orgasm, desperate for one more pure, thoughtless release, a minute of blankness when I was wrapped warmly in his embrace and didn’t have to remember why.

I squeezed my eyes shut, as if by doing so I would be speaking into a vacuum. “You. I masturbate to you.”

At this he resumed that wonderful cadence that gave me so much pleasure. “Keep talking.”

“I imagine…” I panted. “I imagine running into you unexpectedly, somewhere out of town.”

“Somewhere like Munich?”

I quaked inside. “Maybe.”

“And then?”

“And then you pull me into your hotel room, lock the door, and fuck me.”

I was almost mindless from pleasure, but still I couldn’t bring myself to admit the rest of it—the two of us lingering over dinner, then over drinks until we were the last ones left in the hotel’s lounge, and then standing on the observation deck together, watching snowflakes big as feathers drift down from the dark sky above.

“Do I fuck you all night?” His voice was rough, demanding.

I closed my eyes even tighter. “Yes.”

He rammed into me. “But you never called. And you never texted.”

And I came like an asteroid striking ground.

THE WONDERFUL THING ABOUT HUGE
, terrifyingly powerful orgasms was that one could pretend that they were memory bombs, wiping out everything leading up to them. I certainly did, floating in an erotic fog afterward. We lay intertwined on the couch, almost asleep but not quite.

Eventually he got up and draped his coat over me. There came the sound of water running. I was just about to make myself move when he came back, clad in one of the hotel’s bathrobes, scooped me up in his arms, and carried me to the tub in my bathroom, which was already covered in a thick, inviting foam.

“Do you mind if I dump you here?” he asked playfully.

“Dump away.” I loved baths, but rarely made time for them.

The water, when he lowered me inside, was the perfect temperature. But he didn’t join me. “Dinner’s in an hour.”

The steam from the bath carried faint notes of basil and mountain thyme—the Mediterranean of late summer. Had we made the trip six months later, I would be sitting in this tub with my window open, breathing in the scent of orange trees. But now the window was closed, the fog wafting visibly outside.

My heart too felt…overcast. Bennett was certain to be attentive this evening, as we played the pair of lovers completely absorbed in each other. And the thought of it was oppressive. Painful.

When I came out of my room, in a long-sleeved, season-appropriate version of the little black dress, he was waiting for me. He had changed into a three-piece suit in grey with subtle windowpane patterns, the jacket slung over the back of the sofa.

He put away his phone and smiled at me. “I love punctuality in a woman.”

No, not a trace of the Vermont farmer.

“I’m on the clock. Of course I’ll be punctual.” I needed to remind myself—and him—that I was here because we had a business agreement.

He tilted his head. “I didn’t tell you that my parents don’t arrive until tomorrow?”

“What? Are you sure?”

“They’re still in Tuscany, spending time with friends. Tomorrow they fly into Naples.”

I thought back to our exchanges regarding our trip and had to admit that at no point had he ever said that Friday was when his parents would check into the hotel. I’d simply assumed that to be the case.

A minute ago I’d dreaded the prospect of playing the smitten girlfriend in front of his parents; but now that I didn’t have to do it, a different kind of anxiety stomped in.

The anxiety of not having a ready role for the evening.

“So…we’ll just eat?”

He opened the door for me, his hand at the small of my back. “And relax, of course.”

VINES OF BOUGAINVILLEA CLIMBED THE
pillars and the vaulted ceiling of the hotel’s restaurant. Potted lemon trees lurked in nooks and corners. Hundreds of votive candles flickered in chandeliers and tall, branched candelabras, the glow of firelight warm and golden.

The atmosphere was romance with a capital R—and all wrong for me. If I’d known ahead of time that Bennett’s parents weren’t here yet, I’d have asked for a sandwich in my room. And I’d have stayed there the rest of the evening with my door closed.

As if that could unspeak the words he had extracted from me under duress.

We were shown to a table near the arched windows. Almost immediately plates of
amuse-bouche
appeared on the table, along with glasses of mineral water. I accepted a menu with gratitude—reading it was a great excuse for not interacting with the person across the table from me.

“Bennett? Hi, Bennett!”

Did I sense a jolt of shock going through Bennett? But he smiled hugely as he rose to greet the two men in their late forties who had stopped by our table. “Hey, Rob. Hey, Darren.”

They exchanged affectionate hugs. He then turned to me. “Evangeline, Rob and Darren, two of Berkeley’s finest. We’ve known one another almost fifteen years. Gentlemen, this is Professor Canterbury, who is much too good for me but doesn’t know it yet.”

“Oh, I know it all right,” I said as I shook hands with Rob and Darren, who laughed heartily. “It’s great to meet you both. What brought you to Italy?”

“Rob and I have been talking about getting married for a while,” said Darren. He had light brown skin and a hint of the Caribbean to his accent. “And we always thought that we’d have a huge ceremony and invite everyone we know.”

“But when we started planning,” said Rob, stroking the ginger beard on his face, “we realized that actually all we wanted was that piece of paper. So we went down to city hall with Darren’s mom and my brother, and here we are on our honeymoon.”

We congratulated the newlyweds. I lost no time in inviting them to sit down with us—to serve as the buffer between Bennett and me. Darren hesitated, but Rob accepted for both of them. Bennett asked for a bottle of champagne and we drank a toast to the bridegrooms’ future happiness.

“Let me see,” said Rob. “We saw you back in November, didn’t we, Bennett?”

“October,” Darren corrected him. “At Moira’s funeral.”

A woman’s funeral in October, on the West Coast—could it be? And was that why Bennett had reacted as he had when he saw Rob and Darren? Because he knew her name was about to come up?

“Yeah, that’s right. At that time we had a summer wedding in mind, but no concrete plans. And then a week ago we were just like, ‘Screw it, we’re making it legal right now.’” Rob turned to me. “Did you know Bennett was Moira McAllister’s tenant for the longest time? We always joked that he was Moira’s boy toy.”

Moira McAllister
? Moira McAllister the famous photographer? “Oh, wow,” I heard myself say. “My college roommate had a poster of one of her pictures.”

And unless I was very much mistaken, Zelda had a coffee-table book of Moira McAllister’s work somewhere on the shelves at home.

“I’m always trying to convince people that I
was
her boy toy, but nobody would believe me,” said Bennett, watching me.