The One in My Heart (24 page)

With
him? Lying side by side…all night? “I don’t know if I can sleep in a strange place.”

“We don’t have to sleep right away. We can stream a movie. But the only TV that’s set up for streaming is in my bedroom, so you’ll have to come there for now.”

“Okay,” I said, still feeling uncertain, but resigning myself to the fact that I didn’t have enough willpower to actually leave. “I guess we can watch a movie.”

Even though it was getting ridiculously late.

I brushed my teeth. We pulled the curtains shut, tossed a few more pillows onto his bed, and started an action flick that promised to be entertaining and not terribly demanding. But less than ten minutes into the movie, I’d already stopped paying attention to what was happening on the screen.

Bennett nuzzled my neck, raining little drop kisses that turned into dangerous bursts of heat deep in my abdomen.

“You’ll miss the next set piece,” I told him.

“What a tragedy.”

“Is this really the only TV that streams?”

“Of course not,” he murmured.

And turned my face to kiss me, a leisurely kiss that led to another. And then another. He kissed my throat and opened the buttons on my pajama shirt. “I love how you look in these pajamas.”

“Is that why you don’t want to see me in them anymore?”

“Exactly. Everything you look great in must be stripped off.”

Unhurriedly he kissed me everywhere. Without any haste he entered me. We kissed, our bodies joined, and went on kissing, until slow-simmering pleasures again more turned needy and frantic.

“I love the taste of your lips,” he whispered in my ear. “I love the texture of your skin. I love the sound of your breaths. “

And then: “I love everything about…about this moment.”

The orgasm that ensued was the most intense one yet.

AFTERWARD BENNETT CLICKED OFF THE
TV and wrapped an arm around me. I snuggled closer to him, warm in his embrace.

Was this the illusion of intimacy I’d wanted?

“In
Henry V
, King Henry says to Kate, ‘You have witchcraft in your lips,’” Bennett murmured sleepily. “Do you know where you have witchcraft, Eva?”

“Do tell,” I answered archly, expecting him to heap praise on my private parts.

He pressed a kiss into my shoulder. “In your eyes.”

What a dirty, rotten thing to say to your fake girlfriend, who’d have to carry around the memory for the rest of her life, wishing she could hear it again.

Everything he said about us always had that glossy patina of plausible deniability—compliments and declarations that were extravagant but ultimately insubstantial.

And I loved and hated them as Gollum loved and hated his precious.

Bennett’s breath slowed to the deep, quiet rhythm of sleep, while I stared into the darkness, beset with an angst I’d come to know all too well, exactly the kind of turmoil I’d hoped to avoid by refusing him again and again.

Why couldn’t he stick to business? I could handle business. I could even handle an occasional bout of frenetic coupling. But I was powerless before anything that lent itself to interpretations of deeper feelings on his part.
It was love at first sight. You are the best thing to happen to me in a long, long time. Yes, this is what I’ve always wanted, to make love to you with nothing between us.

When he spoke like that, hope pierced me like arrows—and hurt almost as much. Because I wanted so much to believe every word, every sentiment, plausible deniability be damned. I wanted to forget that we were essentially onstage and focus only on his eyes, his voice, and those words of deeply felt avowal.

Don’t fantasize, Eva
, came my sensible-grown-woman voice.
You must look at the facts. You must—

Forget lightbulbs turning on. No, this was every massive star in the sky going supernova at once: a blinding blaze of insight.

I was a scientist, a pretty damn good one too. A core principle of science was that the hypothesis must fit the facts: One didn’t bend, ignore, or dismiss facts to suit one’s hypothesis.

All along, I’d postulated that Bennett was using me for other goals. At the beginning my hypothesis made sense—he’d stated as much. But now I had many more facts at my fingertips, and…and…

I was almost afraid to think it. But if I looked at the entire picture objectively, it was much more likely that I wasn’t simply a means to an end. I was an end in and of myself.

Take the time line. What had Damaris Vandermeer told me at Charlotte’s wedding?
He went out with my friend a few times last summer and then dumped her like a bag of cement
. I’d put money on it that the friend was, on paper at least, perfect girlfriend material, with a strong connection to the Somerset family. Bennett hadn’t gone out with her merely for fun, but to investigate her potential as a partner in his quest for reconciliation.

But then that had gone no further. Why? Because I came into the picture at the end of summer. Because our one-night stand—hell, our one-hour stand—had been as memorable for him as it was for me.

He reconsidered his strategy and started laying the groundwork for the professor. Had we not run into each other the day after Christmas, he’d still have made sure we met again via the new ties he’d cultivated with Zelda.

From that point on, it had been quite the pursuit. The million-dollar carrot aside, his parents aside, what had he been trying to do? To get me to spend as much time with him as possible. He didn’t need to get to Amalfi Coast a day ahead of his parents. He didn’t need to ask me out for Valentine’s Day. He didn’t need to scheme for me to spend the night.

He wanted to.

Only minutes ago, when he’d said,
I love everything about…about this moment,
that was him barely restraining himself from saying
I love everything about you
.

As for why he never told the truth except with a varnish of plausible deniability…It wasn’t to play games with me, but to protect himself. I was a begrudging lover. I turned him down constantly. And I was almost always trying to put greater distance between us. If I were a man who had been badly burned in love, I’d approach me with the same kind of cautiousness.

In fact, I’d swerve wide to avoid me altogether. But that was neither here nor there.

My elegant new hypothesis thrilled and scared me in equal measure. If it was true—and I had a tremendous intuition that it was—then it changed everything. The man I loved didn’t just return my feelings; he was crazy in love with me.

I took his hand and laid it over my heart. Could he feel it beating with astonished glee? Lacing our fingers together, I luxuriated in his closeness and smiled hugely.

It was a whole new world.

I WOKE UP TO THE
aroma of fresh coffee brewing. A greyish light filtered in from the edges of the curtains—an overcast day outside. My dress and my underthings, last seen on the floor of the living room, had been neatly gathered in a chair, next to the lingerie Bennett had bought me for Valentine’s Day.

No crotchless panties in the bag. He did get completely impractical items—I might have whistled softly at a set of transparent bras and panties—but there were also pieces that were both pretty and wearable.

As I put his pajamas back on over the see-through set—why not?—I studied the room. Above the fireplace hung a Pissarro, possibly the one he had mentioned to my father years ago. But otherwise it was empty of personal touches. The rumpled bedspread and his vintage Patek Philippe watch on the nightstand were the only signs that he’d slept here.

But whereas earlier I’d have felt an unhappy weight that I’d fallen in love with a man who didn’t betray himself even in his own home, now I was…reassured. After all, my house, despite its coziness, was just as opaque in its own way: There was nothing of my mother. The stacks of photographs that she had sent me, the ones I used to pore over, had all been banished to the attic, denied a place among the pictures and memorabilia that constituted a visual record of my life.

A real relationship was beyond me. But in a fake one with a completely enamored Bennett, I had a chance. And the more opaque he remained, the more protective he was of himself, the more likely that we would continue exactly as we were: fun dates with my friends, sleepovers, and everything else that was desirable in a relationship without requiring either of us to open up.

I bounced down the stairs. Bennett was in the kitchen, hair still mussed from sleep, flipping pancakes in a San Francisco Marathon T-shirt that had a hole on the right shoulder. My heart tugged—he was unbearably appealing in his domesticity.

“I thought your culinary repertoire was limited to grilled cheese sandwiches,” I said, leaning a hip against the kitchen counter and mentally adding “yummy breakfast” to the list of pluses that characterized our current arrangement.

“And you thought wrong. Until I turned twenty-one and came into those paintings I could auction off, Moira and I were pretty much broke. So the boy toy cooked.”

Spatula in hand, he kissed me on the lips. We were practically a Norman Rockwell couple on this lazy Saturday morning, weren’t we?

He returned to the stove and cracked eggs into a different pan. The sizzle of protein joined the aroma of buttery carbs. I tried to recall whether my real boyfriends had ever made me breakfast—only to realize that I’d never spent the night with anyone. That I’d always been the girl who went home by herself, no matter how late the hour.

“Speaking of Moira, isn’t that MoMA retrospective of hers starting this weekend?” Instead of sour grapes, I was feeling a lot of goodwill toward Moira—without her, there wouldn’t be this perfect fake relationship. “Have you been worrying about your naked pictures?”

“I’ve made my peace with the fact that there are going to be some. I’ll just say I occasionally modeled for her when I was her tenant.”

He plated the eggs and the pancakes and carried them out to the breakfast nook, with its big bay window facing the balcony. That was when I realized it was snowing outside—and had been for hours. A good four inches of powder blanketed the parapet. The potted evergreens along the balustrade too were covered in snow. The windows across the streets were lit from within by a soft, golden light—the whole scene looking like something out of an old-fashioned Christmas card.

“So much for a walk in the park for us,” said Bennett, following my line of sight. “Do you have any plans today?”

Was he about to offer further proof to buttress my new hypothesis? “My grad students are out of town this weekend, so I have to go into the lab this evening.”

Bennett returned to the kitchen to pour coffee into two cups. “That means you’re free during the day. What do you say we actually watch that movie from last night and then go to Chinatown for lunch?”

Ding! Breakfast made from scratch, movie, and lunch in Chinatown—if this wasn’t love, then I didn’t know diamonds from graphite.

I pretended to think, cutting my stack of pancake into neat pieces. “Well, you’ve found my weakness—I can’t say no to Chinatown.”

“Me neither, as it happens,” he said cheerfully, passing me the butter dish and a small cruet of maple syrup.

I looked at him a moment too long before putting a forkful of pancakes into my mouth. “These are good.”

The banana-and-pecan pancakes were more than good: warm, moist, fluffy, the sweetness of mashed banana perfectly balanced by the subtle tang of buttermilk. With the addition of butter and maple syrup they were practically breakfast heaven.

“Before I went into construction, I was a short-order cook at a twenty-four-hour diner for a few months.”

“Tough work.”

“It was. But I was thrilled to find out that I could handle it. Up to that point in my life, someone else had always footed the bill. Bringing home a check made me feel like a man.”

“Did you feel like a hundred times the man when the millions started rolling in?”

“You’d think, but I treasured my grease-smudged checks more. That was an honest exchange of labor for remuneration; the investment income felt like Monopoly money. Especially since I wasn’t even that good an investor.”

“You made a twenty-fold return on your original investment. No need to be modest.”

“I’m not modest. I put half the money I cleared from the auction into start-ups my financial advisers recommended. The other half I put in random ones—like, pulling-names-out-of-a-hat kind of random—because I wanted to see whether my advisers would get me better returns than a dart-throwing monkey.

“And guess what? Seven of the nine companies that later sold for big bucks were out of the control group. So when I say I’m no Warren Buffett, I’m not being self-effacing; I was literally the dart-throwing monkey. Not exactly the sort of accomplishment to make me feel like I’m swinging a twelve-inch dick.”

“You aren’t?” I said, my eyes very wide.

He laughed—and maybe blushed a little. Then he leaned forward. “You know what does make me feel like ten times the man?”

I rubbed the pad of my thumb against his stubble. “What?”

“When I can get you to say yes to anything.”

My heart skidded. Twenty-four hours ago I wouldn’t have understood. Twenty-four hours ago I’d have pointed out that I caved in to his demands every step of the way. But then again, twenty-four hours ago my grasp of the situation had been as backward as when people believed that the sun revolved around the Earth.

But now I was following proper scientific procedures. Now I saw how much effort he had put in where I was concerned. Now I knew I’d been given yet another piece of proof that my new hypothesis was not only sound, but ironclad.

“Well,” I murmured, “you’ve found Chinatown. I always say yes to Chinatown.”

AFTER BREAKFAST WE RESTARTED THE
movie. But the poor flick didn’t stand a chance once I showed Bennett what I was wearing under the pajamas he’d loaned me. In nothing but those fuck-me bits of transparent fabric, I went down on him with an almost trembling greed.

I’ll never forget the reaction I wrought from him—his head thrown back, his pelvis coming off the bed, his hands knotted tightly in my hair. And the sounds he made, so much raw lust, a cascade of filthy imprecations that turned me on unbearably even as I drove him out of his mind.