The One in My Heart (30 page)

“All the while I still hesitated—still hoped that I’d wake up and forget about you. Then we ran into each other outside the Met. Do you know how many times you said no to me that day? I lost count. Every time you did, I told myself not to walk away, but run. Instead I kept doubling down. When you refused to be my girlfriend I said how about a fake relationship. When you wouldn’t take that I offered money. When even money couldn’t move you I…” He took a deep breath. “I think it’s fair to say that I begged you to come to the wedding reception with me. I’ve done some crazy things in my life, but that night was the first time I understood what batshit insane felt like.”

We had been in this exact room. I remembered pushing pieces of poached pear around on my plate, freaking out over his escalating offers, and wondering what the hell he actually wanted from me.

Everything. He wanted everything.

He reached for a fortune cookie from the table and broke it in two. An ironic look crossed his face as he scanned the tiny scrap of paper inside. He pushed it my way.

Love is not for the weak of heart.

“I believed then—as I did about my reconciliation with my parents—that time together was all we needed. That the rest would take care of itself. But as you remind me time and again, progress doesn’t happen on its own—someone has to speak the truth first. Well, the same applies to us.

“We’ve also been going around in circles. You are as crazy about me as I am about you, but being in love has done nothing to loosen you up. At this point you’re no more likely to open up to me than Gollum would be to the idea of a vacation somewhere nice and sunny.

“So I’m taking your advice. I’m putting all my cards faceup on the table. You can see them for what they are.”

I didn’t want to. I was happy to have guessed enough of the truth. I was ecstatic with the way things were. But he had to upend my beautiful castle in the sky. “Now what?”

His response was slow to come. “Now I admit that I’d hoped you wouldn’t be staring at me with the kind of alarm that borders on horror.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, glancing down at my hands. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“Is it really that frightening to have someone love you?”

No, when I realized that he loved me, it had been one of the best moments of my life. What was frightening was that he wanted to peel back my layers and expose what I’d tried to keep hidden all these years.

I said nothing.

“I don’t require that you make the same kind of exhaustive confession, you know,” he murmured. “At least not tonight.”

“But you will, at some point.”

He picked up his wineglass. I had the feeling he wanted to drain the whole thing, but he set it down again without taking a sip. “Do we, as a couple, matter to you?”

I grabbed my wineglass and downed what remained of its contents. “What are you really asking?”

“I’d like to know if you’ll make an effort. Will you try to be open, and not change the subject whenever it comes too close to something that hurts or that you’re afraid of?”

I felt suspended, above an absolute void. “You want too much. You should have left things alone.”

“Believe me, I’ve thought long and hard about leaving things alone. But then there will always be this wall between us.”

“It’s all ugly things behind the wall,” I said, not looking at him.

“I’m not afraid of what’s behind the wall, only the wall itself.”

But the wall was my exoskeleton. It was what held me up. Sometimes it was the only thing that held me up.

He lowered his gaze, his lashes shadowing his eyes. “Is not answering your way of letting me know you won’t even consider it?”

What was there to consider? Without the wall, would I even exist?

Rain hurtled into the windows, the noise that of a distant barrage of bullets. The silence between us seemed to turn solid, a hard, unmovable entity.

He picked up his wineglass again—and drained it this time. “So between the wall and me, you’ve made your choice.”

I stared down at the table.
Love is not for the weak of heart.
“You knew how this was going to go,” I said. “You knew this discussion was never going to end well.”

“I knew it would be difficult, yes. I didn’t know it would be impossible. I didn’t know that your fear is strong enough to crush my hopes.”

I reeled, thunder rolling and crashing in my head. “I still have some work to do on my paper. I should go home.”

He rose. “Thanks for dinner.”

“You’re welcome.”

I didn’t know how I stood up—I’d become as heavy as a monolith from Stonehenge. Back in the living room, as I reached for my purse, I remembered. “Are we still a fake couple? Do you still need me for anything with your parents?”

He leaned against the mantel, looking as worn as I’d ever seen him. “If I tell my dad the truth, I might as well tell him the whole truth.”

“So my services are no longer required.”

“That’s not how I’d put it….” He shrugged. “I’ll still honor the financial part of our agreement.”

“Don’t worry about that. I didn’t do it for the money.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, as if to himself. “A contract is a contract.”

“And ours specified that if I quit before the end of the six months, you won’t be out a dime,” I reminded him.

“I guess there’s that.”

I fiddled with the handle of my purse. “So this is good-bye?”

He traced a finger along the chrome candelabra on the mantel. “I’m sure we’ll run into each other here and there.”

I wished I felt even heavier. I wished I were so massive I’d collapse under my own weight and become part of the floor. “Guess this had to happen, when I finally got used to the idea of a nice fake relationship.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t apologize.”

“I was only stating how I feel. I’ll miss you.”

I’d miss him too. Desperately. I’d just settled into the rhythm of seeing him regularly, of eagerly anticipating those meetings and relishing every moment of our time together.

I’d just had a taste of not being alone.

Walking up to him, I kissed him on the cheek. Now I should go, leave with some dignity and conviction while I still could.

I didn’t move an inch. We stood a bare centimeter apart. I stared at the pulse at the base of his throat; then I was touching it, feeling the erratic beats of his heart. My hand traveled up the column of his neck and trailed along his jawline. I loved touching his face, whether it was freshly shaven or like now, rough with a two-day stubble.

The pad of my thumb traced across his lower lip. He caught my hand, his grip tight. I pulled his hand toward me and rubbed the inside of my lower lip against a knuckle. He sucked in a breath.

“I know why you were walking in the rain, by the way,” he said. “I found out from Mrs. Asquith that Zelda wasn’t well at the time.”

My innards tightened. I turned his hand over and nibbled on his palm. “Then why bother asking me?”

“
You
should be the one telling me. And I shouldn’t be brushed aside anytime I ask an important question.”

I drew his index finger into my mouth, wanting to shut him up. His eyes darkened. “Why are you so afraid?”

Because life as I know it can end any moment. Because nothing is safe. Because if I don’t protect myself, nobody will.

I said nothing, but pressed an openmouthed kiss below his jaw.

“You’re not walling yourself off from heartache—there’s no possibility of that. You’re only walling yourself off from life.”

Beneath his pajama trousers he was already thickening and rising. I maneuvered him down onto a nearby armchair and kissed him. But he pushed me away. “You don’t want to kiss me. You just want me to stop talking.”

“Then why don’t you?”

And why couldn’t you have left well enough alone?

“Because I care. Because you’re stuck. Because there’s no coming unstuck for you unless you’re willing to change.”

I fell to my knees and licked his erection through the pajamas. It flexed under my tongue. “I don’t want to change.”

“Nobody wants to change, goddammit. But sometimes you have to. Did you think it was easy for me? Did you think I wasn’t exactly like you?”

I pulled down his waistband and took him deep into my mouth. He was shower-clean, with a hint of the musk of arousal. I gripped the base of his shaft, and caressed his scrotum with my other hand.

He still persisted—his fingers digging into the arms of the chair. “I never spoke about Moira to anybody. I never spoke about my parents. I could never stand for anyone to know that my life wasn’t one hundred percent perfect. But for us to have any chance, I knew I had to be honest with you. And if I could, why can’t you?”

I deep-throated him. He emitted a guttural sound. I didn’t know what I was trying to do—this went far beyond silencing him. Part of me wanted to punish him, possibly, for everything he was taking away from me.

For the abyss that awaited me outside. And within.

I looked up. His eyes were shut, his teeth clenched together. And then he opened his eyes, and the way he stared at me, with both anger and despair—pain scorched my heart.

I deep-throated him again. He tried to remain quiet and motionless, but couldn’t. He thrust into me. His breaths turned harsh and sibilant. Then he plunged his hands into my hair and came in my mouth.

I swallowed and swallowed. When it was all over I wrapped my arms around him and set my cheek against his thigh, unable to let go. He was the one who moved away, leaving me with my head on the chair and no one to embrace.

He returned all too soon. “Your cab will be downstairs in two minutes.”

I got up, feeling heavier than ever. Before the private elevator he handed me my coat and my purse. “Maybe you should try to deal with your abandonment issues.”

I recoiled. “What do
you
know about abandonment issues?”

“My parents turned their backs on me because they didn’t like the person I dated. And the woman for whom I gave up everything sat me down one day and told me that I was too bourgeois for her. What don’t I know about abandonment issues?”

Before I could react, he pressed the button on the elevator. “Good-bye, Eva.”

I trudged into the elevator. By the time I turned around, the doors were already closing, blocking him from view. And then I was looking at my own reflection in the bright chrome, a wide-eyed, bewildered woman who still couldn’t believe that she’d lost the best thing to happen to her in a long, long time.

Chapter 16

IT WAS BARELY PAST NINE
o’clock in the evening when I got home. From the living room, Zelda looked up in surprise. “Back so early, darling?”

I managed a smile. “Bennett has a late shift.”

White lies were a necessity of life. Yet the moment the fib left my lips, all the lies that I’d ever fed Zelda crashed toward me, an avalanche of falsehood.
No, I never think about my mother. No, I’m not afraid, ever. Of course I already have everything I want in life.

“Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m fine,” I said reflexively. “Well, maybe a bit nervous. Saturday Bennett is meeting his father, the two of them.”

It had become second nature, hadn’t it, this deflection?

The deflection worked. Zelda’s eyes widened. “Are they? I wonder if Frances is on tenterhooks too.”

“I’m sure she is.”

Zelda reached for her phone. “Let me text her.”

“Say hi to her for me. I’m going up.”

In my room, I sank down on the edge of the bed. Why couldn’t Bennett be happy with us the way we were? Why must he want what wasn’t in me to give? Why, if he knew I was fucked-up, did he take up with me in the first place?

You don’t hook up with someone crazy unless you’re willing to let them be unhinged.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the backlog of our texts. Still not that many of them, and mostly of a mundane nature, the discussion of when and where to meet next.

Yet I read them over again and again, this record of my all-too-real fake relationship. I wished now that I hadn’t turned him down for Valentine’s Day. That I hadn’t let weeks and weeks go by between meetings. That I hadn’t wasted four months last year not contacting him.

But would anything have made a difference? Or would I still end up sitting alone in my room, my heart in ruins?

I scrolled again through all our texts. So few. Too few. In no time at all I’d arrived at his fatal invitation.
Are you free tonight? I’d like to see you.

To which I had blithely and innocently replied,
I can be there about 7:15.

See you then.

We’d seen each other, and everything had fallen apart.

I swiped the screen again. There was one last exchange, from this afternoon.

How’s the book coming?
I’d asked, regarding his progress on
The Fellowship of the Ring
.

They are about to go into Moria and I’m afraid.

The idea of his joining us for the movie marathon had been incredibly appealing, a wide new vista. But now there would only be Zelda and me.