The One in My Heart (23 page)

SO THIS WAS WHAT IT
was like to be in bed with him, I thought when I could think again. This was what it was like when the shark had had his way with me.

He stroked my hair. We were on our sides, facing each other, and I had the unsettling sensation that though his face was nearly invisible—the windows were behind him—perhaps he was seeing mine all too clearly.

“Where’s my engagement ring?” My voice held a hint of disapproval, like that of a teacher speaking to a student who couldn’t produce his homework at the beginning of class.

“Give me a sec,” he said, his words drowsy. “You melted my spine and I can’t get out of bed right now.”

“There is no ring, is there? You tricked me into coming here.”

“Would I lie to you?” he mumbled. “Two minutes.”

Half a minute later he was already asleep.

BENNETT
’
S APARTMENT, LIKE HIS COUNTRY
house, was spare and elegant. Uncluttered. Zelda and I weren’t hoarders, exactly, but we had bulging shelves in every room and walls full of framed photographs.

His homes, on the other hand, offered little glimpse into his personal life. The black-and-white botanical prints I passed as I came down the stairs had probably been selected by an interior designer, as well as the candelabra on top of the fireplace, its curves chrome and minimalist.

The opacity of the apartment echoed the opacity of its owner, of whom I knew so much and yet so little.

I sat down on the arm of a padded chair in the living room, feeling alone. The fault was my own: I’d always been anxious to distance myself from him after fantastic sex, for fear that if I didn’t, I’d become too involved for my own good.

But I’d crossed that line long ago, hadn’t I? Still, I’d slipped out like a thief in the night, instead of staying where I was. Where I wanted to be, warmly ensconced in that illusion of intimacy.

The stair light came on. Bennett descended in a white T-shirt and a pair of blue-and-grey-plaid lounge pants. “There you are. For a moment I thought you’d absconded. Are you still hungry?”

The way he filled out the T-shirt. The way the loose lounge pants hung from his narrow hips. The way he stood, his hand on the newel post at the bottom of the steps, his head cocked slightly, the expression on his face halfway between contemplation and inquisitiveness.

Yes, I’m still hungry. For you.

I rubbed the sole of my bare foot against the rug beneath the chair. “Does anyone become less hungry with time?”

He switched on the lights of the living room, then crossed over to the kitchen. I heard him turn on the tap and fill a pot. “What were you doing, sitting there in the dark?”

Thinking about you. And about what’s the matter with me.
“I thought you fell asleep.”

There came the soft but unmistakable whoosh of a gas stove being lit. “Please. Give a doctor on his one hundred and fiftieth year of training some credit for being able to wake up in two minutes when he’s promised to do so.”

He came back into the living room and kissed me on my hair. “It’s very, very nice to make love to you, but exhausting it isn’t.”

“Clearly I’m doing something wrong.”

“You’re not doing me enough—that’s what you’re doing wrong. You should keep at it until you break me.”

I exhaled slowly. He really, really knew how to turn me on with words. “So, how long will it take for the ravioli to be ready?”

“After the water boils, a few minutes,” he answered, sitting down on the other arm of the chair.

“That’ll work.”

He leaned in toward me. I was instantly nervous, afraid that he might kiss me. So I reached out and set my fingertip against his pendant, which happened to be outside the T-shirt. “I’m curious. Is there a story behind this?”

He glanced down for a moment. “Imogene bought it for me when our parents took us to Maui. I used to wear it all the time, including during my time in Spain.”

The thought had never crossed my mind before, but suddenly I had the urge to see old photos of him, albums upon albums, both analog and digital.

“My parents found out about Moira toward the end of that semester. They brought me back home. It was a bad summer, and it got even worse when they discovered that Moira had also come to the city and we were seeing each other behind their backs.

“I stopped talking to my parents. When they sent Imogene in their stead, I basically told her that she had to choose sides, and that if she wasn’t on my side then I had nothing else to say to her either. Ever. She sat on the edge of my bed for a long time and then got up and walked out.”

He stopped for a few seconds. “When I was shipped off to England, I left the pendant behind. But four years ago it came in the mail, along with a phone number—Imogene had moved to Silicon Valley. We met for lunch that weekend. After that, it was like I told you—we saw each other every week. And once that happened I met my brother too, the next time he stopped on the West Coast.”

“And you started wearing the pendant again?”

“No, not yet. At the time it was just a sentimental relic—I put it in my nightstand drawer and went on with my residency. When we got together I never asked Imogene about our parents, and she didn’t really bring them up. But inevitably they were mentioned in passing. That way I learned bits and pieces of what they’d been doing.

“Fourteen months ago I attended a medical conference in Chicago.”

I remembered he’d told me that in all the years of their estrangement, he’d seen his parents only once, at O’Hare airport.

Something beeped in the kitchen. He stood up. “That’s the timer for the water.”

Without thinking I followed him into the kitchen. “And?”

“I was about to board when I saw them walking down the concourse. It had been thirteen years since our last meeting….” He gently swept the ravioli into the pot and set the timer again. “You know how you get used to living one way and you keep going? Because you’re used to it. Because that’s the way things have been for a long, long time.”

Oh, did I ever know it.

“It was like that for me,” he went on. “I’d been an orphan, essentially, and I’d become okay with it. Even when the topic of my parents came up with my siblings, even when they headed home for the holidays and I didn’t, that was just how it was.

“But then, fifteen feet from me, my parents stopped to look at flight information. My mom said something to my dad, he smiled at her, reached over, and tapped three times on the face of her watch. That’s their code for ‘I love you.’ They did that a lot in cars. When we were little, Imogene and I used to tease them mercilessly for it. Sometimes we’d belch together as soon as one of them did the watch tapping. Sometimes we’d shout, ‘Who farted?’ Prescott would try to stop himself from laughing, but he never really could. So my parents’ romantic moment always devolved into this fiasco of stupid kids giggling and elbowing one another in the back of the car.

“The thing was, they never minded. I mean, sometimes my dad would mutter darkly. But then he’d glance at us in the rearview mirror, and he always looked…grateful.”

Bennett took out a couple of pasta bowls and set them on the counter. Slowly, he traced a finger along the brim of a bowl. There was nothing particularly revealing in his expression, but something about the motion of his hand, the seemingly casual movement contrasted with the tension in his wrist…

I’d seen him frustrated at our lack of progress with regard to his father. Now I knew that I’d only seen the bare minimum of his reaction.

Now I knew that he’d kept a gnawing doubt—and any and all despair—to himself. Even I, his partner, wasn’t to know.

Or perhaps I, his partner, particularly.

“It felt as if I stood forever that day looking at them,” he went on, “when it was probably no more than a minute or so before they walked off. But everything changed. I wasn’t an orphan. I had parents. And I wanted to go home—badly. As soon as I landed that day, I began looking into how I could transfer to a hospital here. It took some time to arrange, but by last May I was packing up my belongings.

“And when I did that, I came across the pendant and remembered that vacation. It was our last good vacation as a family—we were pretty happy with one another and glad to be somewhere fun and beautiful together. I put it on as a good-luck charm and haven’t taken it off since.”

He looked at me and smiled. “Sorry for the rambling answer.”

Something in the wistfulness of his expression broke me. All at once I felt a fierce need to hold him in my arms—so much it hurt. So much I was dizzy on my feet.

“You all right?” he asked, concern in his voice.

I was not all right. I was desperately in love. More than I had thought I would be. More than I even understood to be possible.

I reached out and turned off the burner.

“The ravioli might need a few more—”

I silenced him with a kiss, a wild one. He took my face in his hands and kissed me back just as ferociously. We somehow crossed over to the living room, shedding clothes as we went.

I pushed him down onto the chaise and climbed on top of him. “It’s two days before my period. If you tell me you’re clean, then you don’t need a condom.”

His grunt of pure arousal made me shiver. “I’m clean.”

I kissed him again and took him inside me, every inch of me feeling every inch of him. Such sensations—such hot, reckless pleasure.

He gripped the back of the chaise, his teeth gritted. “God, Eva.”

I braced my hands on his shoulders. “This is what you want, isn’t it? To fuck me bareback?”

For a minute only the sounds of our heavy, ungovernable breaths filled the air as my hips lifted and lowered, merging with him again and again.

Then he wrapped his arms around me and brought me close to him. “Yes, this is what I’ve always wanted, to make love to you with nothing between us.”

And I was lost.

We were both lost.

Chapter 13

BENNETT WRAPPED ME IN A
bathrobe and carried me upstairs to his tub, which was huge and deep, perfect for two. He didn’t join me inside, but used the shower instead. And that was fine, because I needed a moment to myself.

I needed days, perhaps weeks, to recover from the shock of not only finding myself in love, but to such a disastrous degree. And why must it be with a complicated man, one whose heart was as tightly guarded as Fort Knox?

When Bennett came out of the shower, I closed my eyes, pretending to be half-asleep. He kissed me on the tip of my nose. “I brought a few things here that you can wear.”

Then his footsteps descended the stairs—and my heart felt as if it were dragged behind him, bruising against every single step on the way down.

It was another quarter of an hour before I could leave the relative safety of the tub and put on a set of his flannel pajamas.

At the top of the stairs, I met him coming back up. “Late-night snack is ready, if you still want one,” he said cheerfully.

Offer me your undying love; then maybe I’ll think about dinner.
“Smells nice, but it doesn’t smell like ravioli.”

“Ravioli got too soggy and bloated. I made grilled cheese sandwiches.”

“Yum,” I said mechanically.

But the sandwiches turned out to be scrumptious, the cheese inside hot and gooey, the bread gloriously butter-soaked.

I sighed as I finished my last bite. “So how long have you been a vegetarian?”

“Since I was nine. I read
Charlotte’s Web
and that was it for me.”

“Hmm, when I was nine, I watched
Babe
and stayed away from pork for all of one week before I scarfed down a slice of pepperoni pizza.”

He smiled, a gorgeous man in a great mood. I didn’t quite return his smile—hard to do that when I could scarcely breathe from falling hard and fast into that eventual abyss.

His expression turned more solemn. He touched the back of his hand to my cheek. “I bolted upright in bed earlier when I thought you’d escaped my evil clutches.”

“You should have more confidence in them.”

“Usually I do.” He took our plates to the sink. “By the way, speaking of evil clutches, I already told Zelda you’re staying the night.”

A horde of thoughts stampeded across my mind, from,
Can I handle having sex seven times in twenty-four hours?
to,
Does this mean anything other than that we’ll be having sex again in the morning?
“Don’t tell me Zelda immediately sent over a change of underpants and my toothbrush.”

“She offered to. But I already have spare brush heads for my toothbrush and a change of underpants for you.”

“What?”

He turned around, braced a hand on the countertop, and grinned. “Hey, I’m a regular, hot-blooded male. I bought my fake girlfriend lingerie for Valentine’s Day. Except she refused to go out with me, so the lingerie is still in a gift bag somewhere.”

Was it wrong that I really wanted to see the lingerie he’d chosen? “I can’t go home in the morning in an evening gown. Everybody will know I’m doing the walk of shame.”

“As long as you aren’t leaving at the crack of dawn, I can have some clothes delivered for you. So go ahead and sleep in.”