The Ferryman (17 page)

“You kicked his ass?” she asked.

David nodded.

“How did it feel?”

“Pretty damn good, I confess. Annette said she wished she had it on tape.”

The last of the laughter between them died away, but both still wore wide grins. David sipped his wine.

“He threatened to sue, of course. Wants me to stay away from you because he expects that things will work out between you two eventually.”

Her jaw dropped. Janine could feel the blood draining from her face as she stared at him. “He didn't really say that?”

“He did.”

“Jesus, what a deluded son of a bitch,” she whispered.

In the aftermath of that exchange, they retreated into silent contemplation during which they studied the menu. The waiter arrived a few minutes later and took their order: insalata caprese and ziti with chicken and broccoli for her, Caesar salad and veal parmesan for him. When the waiter had retrieved the menus and they were alone again, David reached across the table for her hand.

He slid his fingers over hers, twined them together, and Janine let him. It felt good and right. She ran her thumb over the back of his hand and he flinched. With a frown, she glanced down and saw that the knuckles were red and swollen.

“I'm glad you did it,” she said, her voice low. “I'm afraid of what it might cost you, but I'm glad you did it. I would have done it myself if I could have.”

David nodded. “Have you talked to a lawyer? About his lawsuit?”

“Today,” she replied. “I'll tell you, David, after I got that summons on Wednesday, I really had to wonder if God had it in for me. I didn't tell you this, but I didn't go in to school yesterday.Tom Carlson subbed for me himself.”

“He's a good man,” David said.

Janine smiled softly. “He truly is. Anyway, I woke up this morning and I just felt ... different. I've been having a hard time sleeping; I told you that. Bad dreams, even creepy dreams. Dreams about the baby. There's not much I can do about that. I can't bring my baby back. I can't go back in time and tell myself not to be a fool, to stay with you, to keep away from Spencer.

“But I can fight him. I've been hurt. Pretty badly wounded. It'd be easy to wander around like some emotional cripple, to just spend all my time crying about what a bastard he is. Even now. Even with this.”

His fingers closed more tightly around hers and Janine leaned in closer over the table. Candlelight flickered off his eyes and cast his handsome features in waves of shadow. She could smell the rose.

“That's not me, David. This morning I woke up and I realized that it isn't me. I've had some pretty awful shit come into my life in the last year, especially in the last month. Every step of the way, he's had me in a situation where there was nothing I could do to fight him. But I can fight this. And I'm going to.

“I talked to my mother this morning. She and my stepfather have plenty of money, and they know a lot of lawyers, even up here. I talked to one of them, this woman Elaine Krakoff, today. She said the case was unusual, but she did find precedent. There was something like it in Virginia in the early nineties, but in that case the mother had moved to another city, where she became a crack addict, had the baby there, and it was buried in a pauper's grave.”

“So she thinks you'll win?”

Janine sat back a little, let her fingers slide out of his. She reached out and traced one nail down the stem of her wineglass.

“No way to be sure. But, yeah, she doesn't think he's got a case. Even if I win, though, that won't make what he's done any less painful. If there were any way I could make him suffer for it, I would. Then again, maybe you gave him a little taste of his own medicine today.”

David raised his wineglass in a toast. “Here's to fighting back.”

Her fingers curled around the stem, and then Janine raised her glass as well, slowly, deliberately. “Here's to starting over.”

“I like that one better,” David whispered.

Their glasses clinked together, and they both sipped at the dry Italian wine.A moment later the waiter brought their salads and conversation turned to other things, particularly Annette's new girlfriend and the birthday party the next night. Both of them were looking forward to celebrating with their friend. Also, though, they were both insanely curious about the new woman in Annette's life.

The spatter of rain came and went quickly. After dinner they walked around the North End for a little while, enjoying the feeling of history in that old neighborhood. They had coffee and dessert at Mike's Pastry, which was legendary in the area. By the time they found their way back to the car, it was ten thirty.

When David unlocked her door before walking around to the driver's side, she stopped him with a soft touch on his arm. He glanced down at her, and in his eyes she saw love and warmth and hope and fear.

Their lips met, and Janine laid her head on his chest a moment and listened to his heartbeat. It made her feel safe.

All the way home, David drove with one hand, his other clasped in hers.

When they pulled into the driveway at Janine's apartment house, the headlights washed over the old barn in back and the trees beyond it. Behind the barn, not far from the trees, the lights momentarily illuminated a lone figure, a man who stood frozen there.

Janine clutched David's fingers tightly. “Did you see that?”

He slipped his hand away and placed it on the wheel. “I saw something.” Quickly he turned the car so that the lights again shone upon the backyard.

Nothing. The figure was gone.

“You don't think it was ....” Her words trailed off.

“Spencer?” he finished for her. “It could have been.”

“Bastard.” She sighed. Janine could not even muster the anger she knew she should feel.

“You should call the police, at least have a report on it. Otherwise if you need to bring it up later, in court or whatever, they're going to ask why you didn't call.”

He parked the car and they both got out. David walked her to the door, where he paused to push her dark hair out of her eyes and to kiss her, first on the forehead, and then on the lips. The kiss went on awhile.

The backyard was not visible from the front steps, but David cast a concerned glance in that direction regardless. Then he studied her closely.

“I'm not assuming anything, Janine, but ... do you want me to come up? Just until the police come?”

Janine slipped an arm behind his back and pressed herself against him, molded her body to his. To think she had given up this man for Spencer ... it was enough to make her cry. Or it would have been, if not for the fact that whatever shitty things God had done to her lately, He had seen fit to give her a second chance with David Bairstow.

She didn't know if she was ready for what came next, but it scared her to wonder if she would ever be.
Ready or not,
she thought.

“I want you to come up,” she whispered, her gaze locked on his, making certain her intent was clear. “But not because I need you to protect me. In fact, I'm not going to call the police just yet.”

A troubled frown creased David's brow. “But what about—”

With a kiss, she shut him up. He relaxed into her, and she pulled back to gaze at him again. They went upstairs together to her apartment. Once inside, they undressed one another slowly, without turning on the lights, only the glow of streetlamps to see by. With the languid, smoldering passion of former lovers reunited, they caressed and tasted each other, discovering new things, and rediscovering what they had nearly forgotten.

David touched her with a hunger that Spencer never had. Janine felt that same yearning for him in return. She wanted to stroke and kiss him, but he was coy and playful, and kept out of her reach, insistent upon pleasing her. He kissed and licked all of her, and she shuddered with pleasure and stroked his hair as he gazed up at her while he teased the insides of her thighs with his tongue.

Then he was through teasing.

Janine closed her eyes and shivered, weak with her ecstasy. But even that was not enough. She pushed him away and turned him over on his back, then crawled on top of him.

When she slid herself down onto him, Janine gasped at the feel of him inside her, filling her up. David sighed with pleasure and reached up to trace his fingers down over her breasts and belly, propped himself up enough to take her nipples in his mouth, each in turn.

They moved together and took their time, and Janine knew that this was what was meant to be. Making love could not erase her pain, but it could provide bliss as a counterbalance. All the hesitation and awkwardness that the past couple of years had built up between them was burned away in the heat they created.

Everything would be all right now, she was convinced.

They had a second chance.

David would drive the bad dreams away.

T
he brief rain shower on Friday evening was only a flirtation with the storm that rumbled in on Saturday morning. The sky was heavy with thunderheads, black and ominous as they roiled above, yet seemed to move so slowly across the sky, to linger with malicious intent.

David hardly noticed the rain at all. Though they had fallen asleep before two a.m., they were up again by eight. A crack of thunder greeted him when his eyes slowly opened, and then he focused on Janine, her raven hair splayed across the pillow, her luxurious curves peeking out from beneath the rumpled sheets. When he reached out to caress her face, her eyes fluttered open and she offered a sleepy smile.

Then she reached out to drag her fingernails suggestively down his chest.

It was well after lunchtime when they finally, reluctantly, got dressed. Somewhere in the middle of the morning there had been a shower, but as they were together at the time, cleanliness had not been the first priority. A little past one, David made them both chicken salad sandwiches at the kitchen counter while Janine blow-dried her hair in the bathroom. Though David had tried to follow her in, she had insisted that each of them take their second shower of the day alone.

They ate their sandwiches at the small table in the kitchen. An open jar of pickles and a bag of potato chips were arrayed on the table with an informality that David loved. It reminded him of the intimacy they had once shared, the comfort level that had once existed between them. Over lunch, they talked about Annette's party that night, speculated about her new girlfriend, and avoided any conversation about their hours of lovemaking, as though some third party had joined them in the room. Yet from time to time they shared a secret smile. A kind of giddy humor suffused David and yet he dared not speak to Janine about what he felt for fear that the heat that remained within him might rob him of the caution he knew was necessary. At least for the moment.

The last thing he wanted was to reveal too much of himself, to presume an emotional intimacy that could scare her off.

She had missed him.

For now, that was enough.

 
Aside from having one of the longest, steepest subway escalators in the Northeast, Porter Square had very little going for it.True enough, there were plenty of restaurants, both franchises and unique hangouts, and a wide variety of retail stores, but it was simply not the sort of place tourists went to wander. Close as it was to Harvard Square, there had always been the sense that Porter Square was the poor relation of Cambridge locales. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that Davis Square—just over the line in nearby Somerville—had inherited the trendy, Bohemian charm Harvard Square had increasingly abdicated over the years. Davis also inherited the trendy Bohemians that went with it, which left Porter Square smack-dab in the middle of two places most people would rather be.

A stop along the way, a place to do errands, and not to linger.

There were exceptions, of course. Porter Square was on Massachusetts Avenue, which was punctuated all along its length by fascinating little boutiques and pubs, bookstores and cafés. Among those exceptions, just a block or so up from the T station with the terrifyingly long escalators, was the Cayenne Grill.

The Cayenne was one of the quirkiest restaurants David had ever been in. Though its name was derived from the peppers most frequently found in Cajun and Creole cooking, only a portion of the menu focused on such fare.There were dishes from all over the country available at the Cayenne, whose interior reflected the diversity of its cuisine, decorated in an eclectic collection of styles from around the country. Somehow, it worked.

The owner of the Cayenne was Carl Montenegro—though David had always doubted that was his real name. Montenegro had been part of a program aimed at giving gay teens role models in the real world, people who were stable and successful and content in addition to being gay. It was through that program that he had first met Annette, argued with her quite loudly and publicly about her position as a teacher at a Catholic school, and how he felt that undermined everything gays were attempting to do. She was, in essence, working for the enemy.

David recalled the argument well, for he had had a ringside seat. It had begun while they waited for a table at the bar. Annette had promptly told the owner of the restaurant to fuck off, and then proceeded to explain that in her estimation, the only way to change the system was to infiltrate it and rebuild from within. Anything else, she told Montenegro, was cowardice.

First he threatened to throw them out.Then he gave them dinner on the house. Though David got along with the man passably well, he knew him only incidentally. Annette, however, had forged a strong friendship that night.

This was the third year running that Montenegro had hosted her birthday party in the second-floor function room at the Cayenne Grill. He kept the bar on a cash basis—he was not about to fund anyone's drunk-driving accident or arrest—but dinner for all the guests was on him. Every year David found himself speculating about the revenue the place must generate for the man to be able to be so cavalier about such an expensive proposition. And every year he found himself realizing that it may well have simply been that Montenegro loved Annette.