As Good as It Got (21 page)

“Who told you you couldn’t dance?”

Kevin’s name came to her lips, but she couldn’t betray him that way, couldn’t admit to the memory of dancing with him, feeling his rigid disapproval as she stumbled through the steps. Or maybe she just didn’t want to say his name during this magical moment with Patrick, and make him real again. “Well, actually—”

“That’s who I thought.” He pulled her closer, their bodies touched, hers thrilled again. “Put your head on my shoulder, Cindy. Close your eyes. Try to empty your mind.”

Oh, yes
. Cindy put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. She could not empty her mind, though. Not with so much Patrick to think about, how tall and solid he felt, leading her gently around the room until she imagined herself Ginger to his Fred.

As Good As It Got

181

“Tell me . . . ”

“Mmm?” She found a more comfortable spot for her head, pillowing her cheek on firm, smooth muscle.

“Does he make you feel good at anything?”

His question stole back at least half of the delicious relaxation he’d given her.

“Patrick . . . ” She turned her forehead to his chest. “I don’t want to talk about him. It doesn’t feel . . . right.”

“I see.” His hand moved from her waist around to the center of her back. “Why do you think that is?”

She couldn’t tell him that. “I don’t . . . I mean—”

“Shh. You don’t have to answer. Just think about it.

Okay? ”

“I’ll try.” She wouldn’t. The music floated on, the woman’s voice bringing hot, easy Bourbon Street to chilly New England. All she could think about was dancing and Patrick and how she already knew she’d miss him and this night when she was back home with her discontented board of a husband.

“What song is this?”

“
‘My Foolish Heart,’ by Carmen McRae. Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes.” Her voice came out small and breathless, probably girlish and foolish too. She didn’t care. Being held in Patrick’s strong embrace, smelling his wonderful smell, she felt protected and cared for in a way she hadn’t in way too long.

“Patrick?”

“Mmm?” His low dreamy voice actually made her shiver.

“What do you think about love?”

His hand slid up her back, his fingers into her hair. “It’s a many splendored thing.”

She laughed softly, moved where he guided her, infatuated with her own grace. “Do you think it’s real?”

182 Isabel

Sharpe

“Ah, Cindy. The world would be a sad place without love.”

He hadn’t understood. Or maybe the question was too big, too complicated, too scary to be tackled while dancing to jazz on a moonlit night.

“I mean romantic love, do you think it can last?”

“As long as the two people are meant to be together, yes.”

She laughed bitterly. “All brides and grooms think they’re meant to be together.”

He lifted his arm, turned Cindy under it and brought her back against him; all his toes remain unharmed. “Why do you want him back?”

“He’s my husband.”

“And if he doesn’t come back?”

She sighed. “He will.”

“If he
doesn’t
?”

“Patrick . . . ” She tried to move away but he gripped her shoulders and wouldn’t let her. She tried harder and his grasp became hard enough to hurt.

“If he doesn’t come back, Cindy?”

She stared up at him, breath coming high and uneven. Her giddy mood dissolved. Her head dropped. She stared now at their feet, recently dancing, still pointed toward each other.

“I don’t know any other way to be but married to him.”

“That’s what you need to learn, Cindy.” He spoke urgently, with a faint note of triumph. “How to be you.”

She leaned against him, this time in exhaustion. She was already her. How could she be anyone else?

“If Kevin loved you, he couldn’t cheat.”

“No.” She shook her head wearily. “It’s not that simple.”

“It is, Cindy.” His arms came around her again, she tried to relax back into the music, and into him. Patrick believed As Good As It Got

183

in love the way Martha did. The way Cindy once had, so long ago she could barely remember. What had she missed out on?

“That . . . man that you—” She tried to get herself to say the word “loved,” but couldn’t bring herself to think about Patrick with a man. Not when he was once again making her feel like the girl during the high school slow dance everyone assumed would go all the way later in his car. “The one you were . . . with. You loved him?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know?”

“I just did.” The abrupt words were not what she’d expected.

She wrinkled her brow against his chest. Maybe this was a bad subject to bring up. Maybe the pain of losing this man had been so great, he still couldn’t talk about it.

“Was he—”

“Cindy.” His voice was slightly hoarse.

“I’m sorry. I know how painful it must be to—”

“No. It’s not that. It’s just that with you here, he seems so . . . ”

The song drifted gently to a close. Cindy stopped dancing, heart pounding; she lifted her head, gazed at the dim outline of his face. Maybe Patrick didn’t want to bring up a loved one’s name just now either, for reasons that still scared her enough not to want to name them. “He’s so what?”

“Far away,” he whispered. His face drew closer, and for a breathless second she thought he was going to kiss her.

Of course he wasn’t going to kiss her. Gay men didn’t—

He kissed her.

His mouth was warm, soft and achingly tender, and even 184 Isabel

Sharpe

as she knew she wasn’t supposed to respond, that he didn’t mean it, that she
couldn’t
mean it, she surrendered to the sheer physical pleasure of kissing someone who wanted to kiss her, who wasn’t doing it out of habit or guilt or love so complicated and worn that it barely resembled the bright shiny passion they’d started with.

He drew away, then came at her again, more passionately this time, as if the first delicious exploration had only un-leashed a stronger hunger. She responded, feeling female parts that had been wounded and betrayed and dormant for too long stirring to life. His leg moved between hers and she welcomed the intrusion, found herself wanting, yearning, lusting for intrusion to a far greater and more satisfying degree.

How could she?

Why shouldn’t she?
Kevin had never hesitated, she was sure of it. The first woman to give him a come-hither stare had him naked, coming in her hither, before five seconds had passed.

“Patrick.” She buried her mouth in the smooth firm skin of his throat, moaned and pushed against his leg like a love-lorn poodle. This was insanity. This was ecstasy. This was also a little . . . strange. Him being
that way
and all.

He bent and lifted her; she wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his shoulders. He walked them over to his bed, sat, then lay back so she sprawled on top of him.

Now she was able to make her mind go blank. It was the only way. His hands were inside her jeans as fast as hers were inside his. Pants and underpants discarded, condom on, they were joined so quickly that even if she’d been capable of thought she wouldn’t have had time.

As Good As It Got

185

She rode him insistently, flushed and panting and triumphant.
Take that Kevin. Take that.
She imagined her husband naked and erect, lying on his back, Patty, who she imagined looked like Ann, straddling him. Cindy and Patrick, Kevin and Patty, all making love together—no, screwing. They were screwing together. What’s more, Cindy was going to come. Easily. And Patty was going to have trouble.

As soon as she had the thought, Patrick found her special place with his thumb and she came so quickly thinking of her husband and another woman, with Patrick inside her, that she barely had time to realize what was happening. Patrick followed soon after, with a low groaning noise that unfortunately sounded exactly like Kevin after Mexican food.

There.
There
.

She’d done it.

She slumped onto Patrick’s broad chest, wrapped her arms around his shoulders and felt the most deep wracking need to cry she’d ever felt in her life.

“Cindy.” He took her shoulders, lifted her away so he could see her face. His had gathered into anxiety. “I am so sorry.”

She could only stare dully, fighting the pain in her throat.

What could
he
possibly have to be sorry about? He hadn’t cheated. Except on his sexual orientation.

“I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what came over me. I . . . haven’t been with a woman since high school, and that was a disaster that never got off the ground. But you . . . ” He caressed her cheek reverently, brought her close for another kiss and cradled her tenderly against his chest. “You woke something in me I didn’t even know was there, Cindy.”

She reached up and touched his shoulder, stroked it. The 186 Isabel

Sharpe

urge to cry receded and a deep and growing warmth took its place.

“Oh. Wow.” All thoughts of Kevin vanished. She couldn’t see herself but she was sure that if she had access to a mirror, she’d discover her eyes were shining.

Patrick was her first, in a way, and she was his first in another way. Maybe there was something really special between them, something powerful enough to supersede the fact that Patrick only liked men, and that she had vowed only to be with Kevin. Maybe there was such a thing as never-ending love after all. Maybe she’d simply missed it the first time.

Maybe she had a chance to find it now.

Chapter 12

Martha sat out on her favorite ledge in her favorite meditation pose, but she wasn’t meditating. She simply sat, watching the beautiful view as if it was her favorite TV

show. The islands turned bright to dark in moving patches as clouds drifted through their morning sunlight. A steady breeze kept away mosquitoes and created carnival rides for birds up so high they looked like a child’s double-arched representation in black crayon. One pair gracefully circling and twining the drafts she suspected were hawks—maybe osprey, maybe eagles. Dinah had spotted an eagle visiting its nest on one of the islands and had bludgeoned them with facts, including that eagles mated for life.

Obviously, Dinah wasn’t an eagle.

A quick scent of pine entered the breeze, and Martha arched up to meet it, eyes closed, head back, smelling and feeling and being. She knew someone on the camp staff was close by keeping tabs on her. She knew if she picked up a big 188 Isabel

Sharpe

rock and heaved it in the water, the splash would bring attentive feet running. But in this beautiful spot she could at least pretend to be alone.

This morning she’d woken up strangely peaceful. Maybe she’d taken a few more steps toward accepting Eldon’s illness. Maybe denial was just giving her a break from the painful and frightening emotions. Maybe her revolt against death had shocked her gratefully back among the living.

Wednesday at dinner after her kayaking accident, she’d told Ann that Eldon was sick, acknowledging him out loud for the first time in well over a decade. She’d felt she owed Ann after having figured out Ann’s husband killed himself. Finally making her relationship with Eldon exist outside of her own secrets had not felt like a violation, but a glorious validation.

Ann accepted what she’d said and offered her own clumsy brand of sympathy and caring without question.

That night, Martha had gone to bed repeating the conversation over and over in her mind. Four simple words,
my
boyfriend is sick
, and Martha’s relationship with Eldon was instantly as real as anyone else’s, and she had the right to grieve deeply and openly for his impending loss. Yesterday she’d been bold enough to talk to Cindy about their love, and the envy in Cindy’s eyes had fed her starving soul.

Maybe that breakthrough was responsible for her mood today. All she knew was that colors were brighter, smells more vivid, and sensations sharper.

“Martha?”

Martha started. Her stomach sank. She hadn’t heard Cindy pushing through the alders to reach her rock of solitude. “Hi.”

“Wow. This is beautiful.” Cindy put her hand like a visor As Good As It Got

189

over her eyes and scanned the view. “Not that it’s so different from over on the beach, but the perspective is shifted or higher or something.”

“Yes.” Martha could not have been less in the mood for Cindy’s nervous edges and anxious chatter.

“So, well, anyway.” Cindy turned and examined Martha instead of the horizon. “Betsy wants to talk to you in her office.”

What had happened? In went Martha’s breath for nine, held for three, out for fifteen. She wished now that she had been meditating, so she could face whatever this was about evenly. Eldon was still alive; she would have felt if he’d passed. But she caught Betsy staring at her a couple of times at the bonfire two nights earlier, and this morning at breakfast she’d stopped by their table, started to speak to Martha, then changed her mind.

Martha stood, reluctantly leaving contact with the warm steady rock, and followed Cindy to the path, wishing she had her shawl on for comfort.

“I keep meaning to ask how you are doing after your kayaking spill, and I keep forgetting.”

“Fine.” She glanced at Cindy striding gawkily along, returned her eyes to their destination, then glanced over again, suddenly wanting another fix of her new drug. “I was distracted when I fell in. I found out my boyfriend in the hospital contracted pneumonia.”

“Oh. That’s terrible!” Cindy was so distressed she stopped walking. Martha’s pleasure rush of adrenaline was immediate and energizing. Now Martha and Eldon existed concretely for Cindy too. “Do you think . . . I mean is Betsy going to . . .

Do you think he’s okay?”

190 Isabel

Sharpe

“If he died, I would have felt it.”

“Oh. Right.” Cindy’s eyebrows drew down. She seemed annoyed. Martha should have let it rest. “I’m going back to the cabin to read for a while, so if you need someone to talk to after you see Betsy, that’s where I’ll be.”