Playing for Love at Deep Haven (12 page)

Chapter 9

They could have
gone somewhere closer for dinner. Violet guessed that the drive to Bar Harbor was
an excuse for Zach to jump-start her long-ignored musical education.

Once upon a time,
before Yale, Violet’s heart had beat solely for folksy female troubadours like
Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and the Indigo Girls. Poetry to music. A soft guitar
and a clear voice. The messages and meaning moved her. The simplicity made her
heart swell.

When she met
Zach, he’d introduced her to all different kinds of music. Blues, metal, jazz,
rock, classical, ’50s, opera, New Age, and swing. He had only one condition:
his room was a no-folk zone, so that Violet was forced to broaden her auditory
horizons whenever she was there, which was all the time. And although he
nicknamed her Vile when she exclaimed, “No more heavy metal, Zach! It’s vile!”
the reality was that she appreciated the thorough education Zach offered her.
She’d learned more about music in those precious weeks than in the previous
nineteen years.

But old habits had
reasserted their control without his continued attention, and in the years
since their enchanted autumn, she’d fallen back into old patterns, listening exclusively
to the folk music she loved so well, sometimes interspersed with the classical
that
Shep
preferred. Her musical landscape had grown
very narrow once again.

“So,” said Zach,
pulling the SUV out of the driveway, “What do you want to listen to?”

“You know
exactly what I want to listen to.”

He grinned. “Come
on, Vile. I should make this SUV a no-folk zone.”

“And force me to
listen to some vile metal, Z?”

“I should. Or
zydeco
. I’m really into that lately.”

“I don’t even
know what that is.”

“So uneducated.
It’s shameful.”

She watched as he
fiddled with his
iPhone
. His brown hair, which was
pulled away from his face in a neat ponytail, had red and gold highlights
picked up by the setting sun shining through the car window. His cheekbones
were high and angled, and his eyes had that perpetually heavy, sexy thing going
on that made her toes curl and her tummy flutter. She glanced over at his hands
on the wheel, her eyes zeroing in on the little violet tattoo on his wrist,
which she loved and hated simultaneously.

“How many
tattoos do you have? Total?”

“Total? Um, eleven.
No, twelve.”

“Twelve! A dozen
times you let someone stick needles in you and pour ink under your skin?”

He looked up at
her as music came from the speakers.

“This is
‘Bonfire Heart’ by James Blunt. Then we’ll hear some Mumford & Sons, Joshua
Radin
, Vance Joy, and the
Lumineers
.
If you want folk music, the least I can do is update your repertoire and balance
it with some
male
folk.”

“Okay,” she
said, noting the change from no-folk-zone Zach to now, then paused, listening.
It’s nice. Really nice.

“And yes. Twelve
times I let someone stick needles into my body and pour ink under my skin, although
that’s a pretty dramatic way to describe it.”

“Sounds accurate
to me.”

“Spoken like a
true expert. Where are yours?”

“My what?’

“Your tattoos.”

She gave him a
sour side-glance before looking ahead.

“Oh, right. You
don’t have any. You’re talking out of your ass, Vile.”

“So enlighten
me, genius. Why is your body all marked up? Why’d you do that to yourself?”

“There was this
girl I met in college. This amazing girl who told me she was falling in love
with me. And I freaked out and pushed her away because I couldn’t handle it. A
few weeks later, I saw her kissing this rich, preppy frat dude. I went back to
my dorm room, opened a bottle of whiskey, and I don’t remember the five or six
hours after that, but when I woke up in a pool of vomit on my dorm room floor,
where she used to sleep sometimes, I had a tattoo of a violet on my wrist. At
first I was pissed with myself, but I’d look at it all the time, and I realized
I liked it. I liked that I was wearing my regret. I liked it because it was
your place on my body. It was your spot. It belonged to you.”

She stared at
him as he paraphrased her poem, feeling a sharp frustration. They’d spent so
many years apart, and all the while she’d believed in his indifference. She
didn’t like rewriting history, but if he was being honest with her, she’d need
to.

James Blunt
phased out, and the lively banjos of Mumford & Sons rang out as they
passionately sang, “
And I will wait, I
will wait for you. And I will wait, I will wait for you.”

He’d pushed her
away, yes, but looked at in a different light, maybe she’d shared her intense
feelings with him and hadn’t given him a chance to catch up. While she was
emotionally extroverted, he’d been the exact opposite, cagey and enigmatic.
He’d finally been able to make out with her, yes, but he’d never actually told
her how he felt about her. At all.

For the first
time since that Sunday night so long ago, she understood her complicity in the
situation. That night? She didn’t tell Zach that she really liked him or
thought he was great. She told him she was falling in love with him. And if she
really and truly meant it, maybe she should have waited. Maybe she should have
given him a chance to process and accept her feelings. Instead she’d gotten
hurt and angry and thrown herself into
Shep
Smalley’s
strong, kind arms.

“I’m sorry,” she
murmured.

“For what?” he said,
glancing at her twice in quick succession before fixing his eyes back on the
road. “No, Violet. No. I don’t accept your apology. You didn’t do anything
wrong. I walked away from you.”

“I used the word
love
,” she said, wondering if it was
possible after so many years if the word
love
could possibly surface between them again. “Not
like
.
Love
. I should have
waited for you. At least a little longer.”

He reached up to
rub his bottom lip with his thumb, then, without looking over at her, stretched
his hand toward her. She clasped it, anchoring it to hers, lacing her fingers
through his and drawing them to her lips.

“I didn’t know,”
she said. “I didn’t know you cared for me.”

“There’s no way you
could have known. I acted like a fucking asshole.”

And I will wait, I will wait for you. And I will
wait, I will wait for you.

She took a deep,
shaky breath, lowering their hands to her lap. “What about the rest? The other
eleven?” Tattoos were, unimaginably, the safest topic of the moment.

“Huh. Um. Well,
the one on the back of my neck is the last three bars of ‘Clair de Lune.’” He
braked
at a stop sign and leaned forward, pushing his hair
up with his free hand to reveal musical notes and the words “
Votre
âme
est
un
paysage
choisi
.
”

“Your soul is a chosen
landscape,” she whispered, reaching over to run her index finger over the
words, wondering how he’d felt, what he was thinking, as the needles punctured
the taut skin. His next words answered her unspoken question.

“It is,” he
murmured, leaning back to catch her eyes. “
Your
soul . . . is my chosen landscape.”

She felt her cheeks
flush hot and the muscles deep inside her body twitched under his gaze. He
grinned, watching her face closely, then pulled up sharply on the emergency
brake. He lifted his shirt a little to show a double spiral that spanned a four-inch
area of his pelvis directly over his . . . She pressed her hands to her cheeks,
and when she lifted her eyes, he laughed softly, as though he could read her
mind.

“We just rolled
around on my bed all
aftern
—”

“I know!” she
exclaimed, laughing softly with him. She’d lived so modestly for so long, she
wasn’t used to such blatant sensuality.

He must have
decided not to tease her anymore, though his eyes twinkled with amusement. “Okay.
You know my thing with the solstices and equinoxes? You remember that?”

She nodded.
They’d spent the fall equinox together that year, drinking too much on
September 21 while Zach drunkenly rhapsodized about the beauty of balance and
harmony.

“So, this is the
Celtic symbol for balance.”

She didn’t reach
out to touch it as she had the other, its location making her ridiculously shy
after sharing her body with him so recently, so intimately. But Zach reached
across her body to take her free hand, pulling her fingers to the tattoo and
laying them across it like a whisper, like he needed for her to touch him
there, to accept him there.

She felt his
breathing change as her fingers made contact with his skin, and her fingers slowly
traced one spiral, following the circles, wider and wider, until her finger
moved
savoringly
across his flesh to the other
spiral, which she traced, around and around, until her finger rested.

Joshua
Radin’s
voice broke through the silence of the car as
Mumford and Sons faded out: “
So many
moons have come and gone, all along I heard this song inside me . . .”

Zach looked up
and down the deserted road, then, shifting in his seat to face her, he cupped
her jaw with his hands and pulled her toward him. She closed her eyes as his
lips found hers in the dim light. He brushed them gently once, twice, before he
groaned softly, shifting closer to her. He fit his mouth, open and hot, over
hers, as his tongue swept inside of her. Her hand pressed flat on the skin of his
belly, her pinky and ring fingers slipping inside the waistband of his jeans,
lightly stroking the wiry hairs under her fingertips.

His lips trailed
down her cheek to her earlobe, which he took between his teeth, making her arch
toward him, making her fingers curl reflexively, her knuckles grazing the hot,
hard tip of his erection.

Even at that
light contact, he groaned into her ear, his breath scorching and fast against
the sensitive skin of her neck.

“Violet,” he
gasped when she leaned forward, pressing her lips to his neck as her fingers
moved lower, wrapping around his length in the snug confines of his jeans. “We
can’t—”

She moved her
hand up and down slowly, and he stopped arguing. He leaned back in his seat,
his head against the headrest, his breathing fast and ragged as he covered his
eyes with one arm.

She didn’t
actually have a plan. They were stopped at a stop sign in a car on a lonely
back road in rural Maine and it was mostly dark. But they couldn’t have sex. They
were trapped in an inconvenient place with too much emotion, too much
attraction between them, and not nearly enough privacy.

Yet the need to
touch him, the power she felt as her touch affected him, the intense desire to
pleasure him, was so great, it took all of her willpower to stroke him
fleetingly one last time before withdrawing her hand.

“Oh, come on,”
he muttered after several seconds, his eyes still covered.

She leaned back
in her own seat, folding her hands on her lap, facing forward and trying not to
smile. She could tell he was in a certain amount of pain by the way he winced. Finally,
he adjusted in his seat, awkwardly, and looked over at her accusingly.

“I never pegged
you for a tease, Vile. Thanks.”

She grinned then
because he looked like a little boy, so disappointed and pouty in his
long-sleeved, black Iron Maiden shirt. A fierce rocker, with his piercing holes
and twelve tattoos, pouting because he couldn’t have Violet when he wanted her.
She loved it. It made her rush hot and wet, her body petitioning her brain to
reconsider its decision against being bareback with Zach until he’d gotten
tested. She could unzip him right now and scoot across the seat to straddle
him, her back against the steering wheel as he pounded up into her. Her face
flushed at her thoughts, and she turned away from him.

Vance Joy’s
catchy ukulele beat swam around them, cutting the tension as Zack sat up and
released the emergency brake: “
Taken away
to the dark side, I
wanna
be your left-hand man . .
.”

“Just wait till
later, Violet-like-the-flower,” Zach growled as he released the brake and pressed
the accelerator. “Guess who’s not going to get a single second of sleep
tonight?”

“Is that right?”
she asked as the muscles in her pelvis clutched, then released, in
anticipation.

“You can take it
to the bank. I have a few more tattoos for you to meet, and it’ll be much easier
if I’m naked.”

Naked.
Her mouth went dry, thinking about his
naked body holding hers this afternoon. After the initial shock of seeing his
colorful chest, she’d barely noticed his tattoos. She’d been so carried away by
their lovemaking. She was surprised to find she wanted to meet them, too, after
discovering they weren’t just arbitrary pieces of graffiti, but meaningful art
that meant something to Zach. How could she have thought, even for a second,
that brilliant, beautiful Zach Aubrey would be completely thoughtless when it
came to art in any medium?