The Heart Of It (2 page)

“Was that who you were?” She tipped her wine glass towards him. “A gamer-slash-reader?”

“No. Not as a kid. As a kid I was hockey. One hundred percent hockey. It wasn’t until I was older that I found books.”

Her brown eyes watched him with a kind of intention he found awkward. Too much talking about himself. Too many doors opened he liked to have shut.

“What’s he reading?” he asked, shifting the conversation toward the familiar. He could talk kids’ books, especially middle-grade books for boys, for years. He gave her some recommendations based on what books she told him her son had already read and went so far as to write them down for her.

“Thank you.” She tucked the slip of paper into the small black purse next to her now empty wine glass. “You know a lot about what kids read.”

Ah right, how to explain how a lawyer knows about middle-grade books for boys. Or maybe . . . maybe it was time to stop pretending.

“Would you like another Pinot?” the bartender asked Elena, but before she could answer, Gabe jumped in.

“Have another,” he said. “On me.” He didn’t want to stop pretending. He didn’t want the next step, if it meant letting go of this quiet comfort.

She smiled at him—full force—and he knew in a heartbeat that she wasn’t an actress. Her name was Elena, she did have a son and had grown up in Quebec with disapproving parents. He was a bag of lies and half-truths and she was without counterfeit. There could have been a hundred women sitting at this bar and he would have only seen her and the brilliant hard truth of her.

“Why not,” she said, and the bartender took her glass away, only to come back with a full one.

“It looks like you’re drinking gold.” He pointed to the glass.

She lifted it and gave the stupid thing he’d said consideration. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“What were
you
as a kid?”

“I don’t think the same classifications work for girls.”

“No? What are the girl classifications?”

She shook her head, and he wondered if he was making her uncomfortable. If this was yet another one of those topics one didn’t broach in flirtatious bar banter.

“My sister was a brain,” she said. “That’s where my son must get it. She was the smartest kid in school. She’s a genetics professor in Norway, now.”

“Norway?”

“I know, right? Who goes to Norway?”

“So your sister was smart and you were . . . ? Athletic? Artistic?”

“Reckless,” she said. “And angry.”

Outside a streak of lightning broke through the storm clouds and thunder rattled the window. Elena jumped, sloshing wine on the bar. Her hand flew to her throat, in such an old-fashioned gesture, he was charmed.

She laughed, the skin at her neck and chest going red. “Sorry, that scared me.”

“Like I said, a good spot to watch storms.” He grabbed a few napkins and helped her blot up the spilled wine. When she moved her hand he saw the gold locket around her neck. “Is that real? Your locket?”

“It is. It was my grandmother’s.”

“You have a picture of your son in there?”

“No, it’s me as a kid. I should probably change it, seems weird to have a picture of myself in there, but it was the way she wore it every day for years.”

“May I?” he asked and she switched to a stool closer to him, and he did the same on his side, and now they sat nearly next to each other at the corner. Under the bar, his knee bumped into hers, and he jerked his legs away electrified.

She popped open the locket and tilted her head back to give him room to see. When he leaned forward, he could smell her skin and the perfume she wore, something light and floral. Warm.

“I like the pigtails.” He glanced up from the picture to grin at her.

“And the missing tooth?” She laughed, her eyes on the rafters. “It’s got to be one of the worst pictures ever taken. I have no idea why she picked this one.”

He knew. Anyone who loved this girl would pick this picture because the little girl was smiling with all her might. She beamed. She radiated. She was joy personified.

The anger she mentioned feeling, it must have happened later. After the picture.

You’re lovely, he wanted to say. Just lovely.

“My mom did the same thing to me,” he said, again for some reason the truth finding its way to his lips. “To all of us—”

“All of us?”

“I have four brothers and a sister. I was the youngest of six.”

“Six!”

“Right.” Now he felt himself blushing. “That’s the other thing to do, I guess.”

She wiggled her eyebrows at him and the combination of all of her parts, her warm smell, her wide smile, the shine in her hair, her body in that dress—she really was too much. Too much for a man like him. A twenty-four-year-old guy with all the wrong experience.

“What was the picture?” Her palm stroked his hand, a glancing touch he felt down through his guts.

Pictures?

“All of us in stupid Christmas sweaters.” Why were they talking about Christmas sweaters of all fucking things?

“Are you close? The six of you?”

“Very. You? With your sister?”

The conversation was drifting away from him. He wanted to touch her hand or to have her touch his again. Have her hand sweep over his arm, his shoulder, down his back the tense and shaking muscles of his back. To his waist. His legs. Between them.

God, yes. Between them.

“I haven’t spoken to her in ten years.”

“Wait . . . what?”

She slipped her hand into his, curled the back of it against his palm like some warm trusting thing, and his body exploded into physical life. He felt his blood vessels, the blood thudding through them, the twitch of his hamstrings. The ache of his lungs. He felt all of it. All of himself. In the presence of her.

“Mike?”

He lifted his eyes to hers, a starving man, helpless under her brown gaze. No doubt he was revealing all of his desire. No doubt he was practically drooling.

Mike. Right. That’s me.

Before he could say anything she leaned forward and short-circuited his brain with the warmth of her cheek inches from his. “Would you like to go downstairs?” she whispered in his ear. “To my room?”

Speechless. Shaking. He nodded, once. A quick jerk.

Yes, yes please God, yes.

The heat of his desire, the way it bordered on desperation, terrified him. Panicked him.

And that horrific miasma of fear and desire, that was where the snarling monsters of his past lived. It was the ugly stew they called home.

Last year he’d gone to this counselor to try and get help with his drinking. Well, with the drinking and the sex. And the counselor told him that the drinking gave him distance when it came to sex, and that if he wanted to have sex without getting hammered, he’d have to come up with his own way of distancing himself. Of disengaging from the fear and then managing the desire.

So what he tried to do was make a nice cold hard slice between his body and his mind. He wasn’t very good at holding onto the distance, but for the moment, it allowed him to sit back, pull his wallet out, and throw a fifty dollar bill on the bar.

They stood together, and he grabbed his coat, the scarf he’d felt so stupid about.

Was that a half hour ago? Less. How had this happened? How could she seem so casual when he felt like a giant giraffe, all knees and elbows and an awkward raging hard-on that he covered with his jacket folded over his arms.

She led him out of the bar, and before he could stop them, his eyes traced the round edges of her ass, the curve—top and bottom hugged so perfectly by that dress.

I want her
, he thought.
I want her so bad
.

And then:
Please let that be enough
.

The elevator hallway was dark, and she stood next to him, right next to him. Against him. He felt her breast against his arm, her hip against his, and sweat gathered at his neck. The gold doors reflected their images. Him so tall and big, huge really. Muscle and height and a flop of red-gold hair still damp from the rain.

She looked like the twilight sky. Dark dress, light skin, that fall of mink brown hair down her back. Everyone was shorter than him, but she was tiny. He could pick her up if he wanted. Imagined her with her legs around his waist, his hands under her hips.

The doors swished open, and they stepped into the dimly lit elevator. As the doors closed she moved against him, a slow turn; her ass, her hip, and then the soft rise of her belly against his body was torture and pleasure combined.

“You didn’t ask if I was married,” she whispered, her hand against the tight muscles of his stomach.

“I don’t care,” he whispered back, his fingers finding the ends of her hair. He knew the answer, of course—or thought he did, considering the nature of their relationship—but this script was exciting. So exciting. She stepped backwards against the mirrored wall and the railing and pulled him against her.

The distance between his brain and his body threatened to close and let in the ghosts, but he thought of hockey, of work, the problem he was working on in the third chapter. Was the dad divorced? Did it matter if the boy had a mom?

Their lips never touched, he simply breathed her in, tasting her—the wine she’d had to drink, the sweetness of her beneath that. His cock throbbed hard against her belly. She pushed against him, perched on her high heels, pushed against the wall, her skirt revealed more of her long legs. He wanted to step back and look at her. Take her in with his eyes so he could imagine her later. But touching was what he was here to do. He was supposed to touch.

Be active, not passive. Another tool his counselor had given him.

Fumbling, his fingers found the smooth muscle of her thigh and when the door binged open, he walked backwards, pulling her into the hallway. “What’s your room number?” he asked against her mouth.

Her eyelids fluttered. “Three . . . three sixteen.”

They ran into the wall, knocking a picture sideways. He let go of her hips to catch the picture and felt her hands come up to cup his cheeks, pulling him down from his great giraffe height. And then her lips were pressed softly against his. A whisper, a tremor, a ghost of a kiss, really.

Shaken, he pulled away from her touch. “Room, Elena . . .”

“Go right. Third door down.” She sucked his bottom lip into her mouth, used her teeth, and he stepped back. Stepped away because all of this felt good and was so exciting. Elena was so exciting. But he felt like he was watching it. Not living it. And despite wanting this, wanting her, so bad he could taste it, he was aware of how close he was to that awful no-man’s-land between what his body wanted and what his head was terrified of.

He could split his mind from his body, but he could never manage the distance.

Maybe he needed more beers. A dozen more beers. A few shots. That was the only way this ever got done, with him blitzed out of his head. What did it matter if he was hammered?

But it did matter. It mattered so much it ate away at him, drove him to these impossible lengths.

Maybe if he’d had just ten more minutes on the ice, rendering his body lived in and useful, something he controlled. His brain an empty and whole vessel. Something, anything so he could be in control of the split, keep his brain and his body in the right spot. Enough that he wasn’t in ruins, enough that he was still here. Now. With her.

He took her by the hand and led her to the correct door where she slid a key card into the slot and stepped backwards against the door, opening it with her body, her fingers still laced with his.

The invitation on her face was as old as Eve. As potent as original sin.

Please.
It was a final thought before stepping into the room.
Please let this work.

The room was dark, plush. Like walking into a secret.

The door closed behind him and he leaned back against it. A few steps away, she dropped her purse on the floor and began to kick off her shoes.

“Leave them on,” he told her, and she smiled, a lock of hair caught against her lip. Obscuring her eyes.

Her hands pulled the straps of her dress off her shoulders, and he was breathless at every inch revealed: her shoulders, the beautiful rise and fall of her clavicle, and there, the slope of her breast, the black lace edge of her bra. The top of her dress fell away revealing her bra without any straps, her lean muscled stomach.

She pushed the sleeves off her arms and then hooked her thumbs in the slouched fabric gathered at her waist ready to push it over her hips.

“Turn around.” His voice was nearly a growl and he couldn’t move off the door. Couldn’t do anything but stand there and watch and burn.

Oh God, her smile as she turned could have brought him to his knees, if he weren’t glued to the door.

She bent, pushing the dress over her hips and letting it fall to the floor, revealing black lace panties, pale skin, and the most beautiful ass he’d ever seen.

Legs and lace and skin and perfection. That was her. That was all he saw.

And then she crossed the deep divide and three carpeted feet between them and pressed all that perfection up against him, running her hands under his shirt, over the muscles that twitched in a terrible fight-or-flight instinct.

He liked it better when she was over there, away from him. Sexy and real, but distant. So he could watch and appreciate and sex was sort of a perfect, abstract thing.

That’s what the alcohol used to do. Why he needed it.

When she touched him, it all became very real.

Sweat broke out on his neck, trickled in cold icy drops down his spine.

“Take this off,” She tugged on the hem of his T-shirt, and he nodded lifting his arms like a child so she could pull it off.

She had to know he was sweating. Like really sweating; it ran down his sides from his armpits, foul and slick. No doubt she could also feel him shaking, every muscle flexed and contracted, straining to keep him here.

“Hey,” she murmured. Her fingers traced his bones and muscles, skating across his abs, up to his chest. She brushed her palms against the hair there as if she was petting him, and he closed his eyes, pressing his head hard against the door. “It’s okay.”