The Memory Thief (7 page)

“That must be hard,” I said for want of a better response.

“No, not really. He was an asshole.” Aidan's voice was flat. When I chanced a look at his face, his lips were pressed into that thin line again, and his eyes were darker than they'd been before. He saw me looking at him and forced a smile.

“Enough about my dad,” he said. “Anything else you want to know?”

I cast around for a safe subject. “Did you go to college?”

“Yeah, CU Boulder. I was an environmental studies major. It let me spend the most amount of time outside.”

Aha. Perhaps that explained his extensive interest in wildlife. “I've never met a climber before.”

“I'm your first, then.” He gave me his flirtatious half smile again.

I ignored it. “Where have you climbed?”

“Like I said, wherever I can. I do rock climbing and ice climbing, and big mountain routes. I live in Colorado, so I do a lot of climbing there. But I also travel around, to Utah, New Mexico, California, Wyoming, Alaska, and a ton of other places, which is fun. And then sometimes I do expeditions out of the country, which I love. A lot of times I'll go along as a guide, so I get to make money, but sometimes I raise funds and go with my own team, just for the experience. That's what I'm doing right now.”

“Raising money for your own expedition?”

“Yeah, to Switzerland, the North Face of the Eiger. Like I told you, I came here to give a talk, a kind of motivational speaking thing. You know, the power of positive thinking, determination gets you everywhere, blah blah blah. It's decent money, plus I'd never been to North Carolina before and I heard there were a few good crags. So, here I am.”

“What else do you do?”

He thought about that one, cracking his knuckles. “Let's see. I work at a climbing gym, setting routes and giving lessons. I like to draw, and I read poetry. I don't have the longest attention span in the world, so that's easier for me than novels, although I do read some nonfiction, if I'm interested enough. I travel around giving talks, like I said. Sometimes I work construction, if I'm running low on funds. Oh, and I'm starting my own guiding company, with my buddy J. C.”

An entrepreneur. Hmmm. “What's it called?”

“Over the Top Ascents. It's just in the beginning stages, though.” He looked embarrassed again, like he had when he told me he'd had to turn back three hundred feet from the summit of Everest. I had the feeling that beneath his laid-back exterior lurked a true perfectionist.

“You're a busy guy,” I told him.

“I'm just not good at sitting still. Speaking of which, are you going to eat anything?”

I looked down at my untouched plate. “I don't think so.”

“You want to go for a walk, then? Because I'm done, and people are still staring at us.”

“Surely not.”

“They are, I swear. Here, give me that.” He took my plate and his own, brought them to the bins by the kitchen, and then came back to the table. “You ready to go?”

“Sure,” I said. I got to my feet and followed him out of the dining hall, back onto the path, where he pulled a crumpled pack of American Spirits out of his pocket.

“You smoke?” I asked him.

“Is that a problem?”

“Not hugely. I just thought, since you're a climber and all, it wouldn't be compatible.”

“It's not,” he said. “I'm trying to quit. With limited success. I take it you don't?”

I shook my head. “But go ahead. It won't bother me.”

He lit his cigarette, and we kept walking. “So,” he said. “Tell me about the guy.”

“What guy?”

“The one that put you on hiatus.”

“Oh, Andrew. There's nothing to tell. We were together for a while, and it isn't like anything spectacular went wrong. We just … got tired of each other, I guess. Or maybe we wanted different things. We'd been dating for a couple of years, and we were at that point where you have to make a decision—move in together, or break up.” I was proud of how unemotional I sounded. In reality, the experience had been devastating, more because it made me doubt my own judgment than for any other reason. I'd sworn off men for a good long while, in the wake of it. Until now, in fact.

“So you broke up,” he said.

“Yeah, we did. And then he moved away, to go to med school.” I glanced sideways at him. “How about you?”

“How about me what?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Nope,” he said. He didn't elaborate, either.

We walked for a while without talking. I felt comfortable with him, so much so that when he reached out and took my hand, it didn't take me by surprise. We fell into step beside each other. His hand was warm, the fingers callused.

“It's going to rain,” he remarked, crushing his cigarette under his foot and then putting the butt in his pocket. He didn't litter. I liked that.

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell. We should start back, if we don't want to get caught in it.”

So we turned around and walked back, winding up on the flagstone patio that overlooked the mountains. The patio was empty, and we sat and talked for a while. As the sun retreated below the horizon, Aidan pulled a pad of paper and a pen out of the pocket of his cargo shorts. He propped the pad on the arm of his chair and started sketching something, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to be doing in the middle of a conversation.

“What are you doing now?”

“Just drawing, while we still have some light. Maybe we should move over here, where I can see better.” He got up and resettled himself in another chair, under the glow from a lantern mounted on the side of the building.

“What are you drawing?”

“Be patient. You'll find out.”

I sat back and watched him. There was a look of total concentration on his face, and from time to time he bit his lower lip. Occasionally he glanced up at me, as if he was trying to get something right. Then he looked back down and kept on sketching.

“Can we talk?” I said. “Or would that distract you?”

“No, talk away. I like the sound of your voice. It's very soothing.”

This from the man who had the most erotic voice I'd ever heard. “Okay,” I said. “I was just wondering … why you wanted to go to dinner with me.”

“What do you mean?” He raised his head from his mysterious piece of artwork. His eyebrows drew down.

“The first time we met, I tripped over a log and fell on my face. Then I spilled my books all over the floor. I'm not the most athletic person in the world, or the most graceful. And here you are, Mr. Mountain Climber Extraordinaire.”

“I don't care about any of that,” he said. “I think you're smart, and funny, and beautiful. There's lots of stuff I bet you can do that I can't. Like write, for one. I don't know how to explain it, really. There's just something about you. Why did you go to dinner with me, for that matter?”

“You wouldn't take no for an answer,” I said, which was the truth—as far as that went.

“Oh, yeah. True enough. Well, here you go.” He stood up then, and handed me the picture. And then he walked away, toward the railing, and stood with his back to me. The wind had picked up, and it blew through his dirty blond hair, rippled his clothes. I had to use both hands to hold the picture steady. I spread it out on my knees. He thinks I'm beautiful, I thought, and a warm feeling spread through my midsection as I looked at what he'd drawn.

At first glance, it was a picture of a tree. Not just any tree, I realized, but the one he'd been suspended from when we met. I saw the log at the bottom, lying at an angle across the trail. I was struck by his attention to detail—the gnarled and twisted roots, the leaf-laden branches. He had some artistic talent, a fact that I stored away for later analysis. I was about to call after him when I looked closer. Like Al Hirschfeld's
New York Times
Nina cartoons, which I'd loved when I was a little girl, the first impression of this picture was just the beginning. Everywhere I looked, Aidan and I were hiding. Our nude bodies were intertwined to form the trunk; our feet melted into the roots; our hands reached into the branches; our faces were duplicated within each leaf. In some of the leaves we were smiling; in others we were kissing, eyes closed. I could see each line of our faces, each shade of our expressions.

At the bottom of the picture, he'd printed in neat, angular writing:

Below this was his full name—Aidan Sebastian James—and his phone number.

I examined the picture for a long time, the lines of poetry beneath. They were excerpted from Andrew Marvell's classic “To His Coy Mistress,” which begins famously
, Had we but world enough, and time.
The hell with Anaïs Nin; this has always been one of my favorite erotic texts. These are the last two lines.

I had never believed in fate, but standing on the deck at Wildacres, the wind whipping through my hair, Aidan's drawing in my hand, I began to change my mind.

The picture in my hand, I stood up. He had turned around and was standing there, looking at me, three feet away. His gaze was steady.

Sure enough, a light rain began to fall. I folded the picture and put it in the pocket of my jeans. When I looked up he was still staring at me, as if the rain were immaterial. In the light mounted on the side of the building, I could see the drops falling in his dirty blond hair, darkening it.

I found my voice. “I've never been propositioned by picture before.”

This made him smile, though the expression in his eyes never changed. “Is that what you think this is? A proposition?”

“Isn't it?”

For the first time, uncertainty crept across his face. “Maybe. Maybe it's something more.”

I took a step closer to him. “What else could it be?”

“I'm not sure. I only know what I want.”

“And what's that?” My voice trembled.

He closed the distance between us and took my hand. The rain came heavier now, pelting us. I blinked the water from my eyes and shivered. He, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the fact that it was pouring. We could have been having this conversation on a sunny beach in Baja. He twined my fingers with his. We fit.

We stood, hand in hand, waiting for his reply. I thought about what I wanted: to stop feeling restless, to find a place to call home, to meet a person who saw me for myself and loved every part, even the quirky ones. To get out of the rain and to kiss Aidan James, not necessarily in that order.

Even then, though, I recognized his stubborn streak, which mirrored my own. He would answer when he was ready and not before, so there we stood, getting soggier by the second. As I looked down at our hands, feeling the rain hit the back of my neck and soak my hair, I was suffused with a strange sense of momentum, as if I'd been propelled to the edge of a cliff and had paused for an instant before jumping.

Raising my head, I met Aidan's gaze. He was smiling, a funny little half grin. “What?” I whispered.

In response, he tugged me out of the light, into the shadows. Against the railing, he took my other hand and turned me to face him, pulling my body full against his. Through the wet fabric of our clothes, I could feel him as clearly as if we were naked—the long, lean muscles, the coiled strength. He bent his head and rubbed his face against mine, inhaling; the stubble scratched my cheeks, but I didn't push him away, not then and not when he trailed his lips down my neck, licked along the path he'd left, and then followed his tongue with his teeth—not biting, but grazing the surface of my skin hard enough to let me know he could. He slid his hand under my fleece and my T-shirt, cupping my left breast, and left it there, spreading his fingers wide. It took me a moment to realize that he was feeling my heart beat.

I shivered again, this time not from the rain or the cold. In response, he pulled me closer and unbuttoned my jeans, pushing my underwear aside and entering me with his fingers. His hands were wet and so was I. He kept his eyes on mine as he bent his head again. Against my lips he whispered, “You,” answering both of my questions with a single syllable and then kissing me so thoroughly that I couldn't have replied even if I'd wanted to. He was everywhere: running his fingertips over my nipples, tracing my mouth with his tongue, filling me. I didn't care where we were, that we'd just met, that my students could come outside and discover us at any moment. I didn't care that he was fully dressed, whereas I … wasn't. There was only Aidan, and what he was doing to me. He lifted me onto the railing, high above the ground, and I forgot to be afraid.

“Be with me?” he asked. His fingers traced my lashes, and I opened my eyes. There he was, an inch away. His face was open and sincere, his blue eyes wide.

At the edge of the cliff, I took a deep breath and jumped. “Yes,” I said to him, and felt myself let go of the way everything had been. “Now please.”

There on the railing, in the dark wet night, he did as I'd asked. I never worried about falling. I knew he would catch me.

We made love for hours, in the shadows at 3,300 feet, then in his small wooden room, both of us undone by the force of it. He licked first water and then sweat from my skin, drinking

us in, and I felt my clenched heart reveal itself like a moonflower, that pale mysterious bloom that only opens at night.

As dawn broke over the mountaintop, I woke to find the sheets pushed to the side, my body bare. Aidan lay next to me, tracing the contours of my breasts, my belly, my hips. Self-conscious, I tried to cover myself, but he pinned my hands.

“You are so beautiful,” he said in that husky voice that sent shivers rushing through me. In the faint light that streamed through the window, I watched him move over me, into me, with a focused, seamless grace. As he lowered his face to my breasts, I closed my eyes.