The Theory of Attraction (18 page)

Ivan nodded. “So what?”

“They aren’t looking at Leandro.”

He risked another glance at the two attractive forty-somethings, then at his Adonis of a rival. “Okay, so they aren’t into Leandro. Still, so what?”

I wondered why there was never a handy wall to beat my head against when I needed one. “Mrs. Donovan isn’t looking at Leandro, but she’s been looking at
you
all night, dork. I think she has the hots for you. This could be a golden opportunity.”

“You want me to peddle my flesh to Mrs. Donovan?” He sounded like the idea was more unappealing than unthinkable.

“I want you to schmooze. Subs at the club,” I prompted. “She’s the department chair’s wife. Her friend is a gazillionaire, married to another gazillionaire. Neither of them wants the science hunk. They’re subs at the club. They want a threesome. Your job is to figure out who will be on top, who wants what, whether there are any special—”

“Oh,
I’ll
be on top,” he said firmly, in
that
voice. A tiny smile was forming at the corners of his mouth and eyes. Steely. Perfect. Ivan was back in the game.

“Remember to steer the conversation around to your short lesson on rocket science,” I reminded him.

“Wait for me by the bar, Camilla.”

I blinked up at him. For a moment, his eyes were the only thing in my world. “Yes, Professor.”

Even as he walked across the room, I could tell he had this one nailed. Within thirty seconds both ladies in question were eyeing him with interest, and by the time he sat on the coffee table facing them and the conversation really kicked off, both of them looked enthralled.

I hoped he didn’t forget what he was doing and really organize a threesome.

The crowd around the handsome and charming Dr. Lance Leandro ebbed and flowed. I considered going over to introduce myself but decided I’d better wait by the bar.

Ivan returned in fifteen minutes with a manic gleam in his eye. “We can go now.”

“It went well?”

“It went better than well. I’ll tell you in the car.”

* * *

Quite possibly, I’m a bad person. I knew I should have been overjoyed for Ivan, but on the way home I only felt tired and let down, and I wasn’t sure why.

“I think Mrs. Streetford is a closet Domme,” Ivan said, startling me up from my sour mood.

“I beg your pardon?”

He shrugged. “Just a feeling. It still worked, though. Thank you, Camilla, that was a brilliant idea. Streetford is thinking of endowing a chair.”

“Nice. And Mrs. Donovan will know you helped convince Mrs. Streetford to encourage the endowment. I told you it would work. Subs at the club.”

“There’s more,” he said. “Donovan and Yu may want to replace me, but they won’t be doing it with Leandro.”

His smug expression roused my interest. “Do tell.”

“Lady Donovan was pissed about it, and she was also pissed that he had the nerve to show up at the fundraiser. He’s been using the rumor of a job offer from the university to leverage his contract negotiations, she thinks. In any case, the negotiation is over and he’s signed up for another two seasons of his show, to the tune of close to a million bucks. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Shit! Did Donovan know?”

Ivan shook his head. “Apparently not until tonight. He was happy to see Leandro anyway because he brought a big check.”

“So your job is safe. Congratulations!”

“Safe from Leandro. Safer than it was, anyway.” He turned into the driveway and slipped the car into his parking spot, turning it off then relaxing his head against the seatrest for a minute. “God, I’m glad that’s over with. This past few weeks has been crazy. Now I can go back to doing all my normal stuff again.”

He sounded so happy, for a moment I smiled with him, then with a dizzy rush I grasped what it was that had me so down.

He’d introduced me to his entire department tonight. He’d called me his friend, his neighbor, the girl next door. But not once had he introduced me as his girlfriend.

We’d never talked about the future. Now he said he wanted to go back to the way things were before. All his “normal stuff,” he’d said. Nobody knew Ivan’s normal stuff like me, his almost-stalker. I knew I wasn’t a part of that routine, and I felt a sickening lurch in my stomach as I realized I never would be.

Stupid.
I’d been so stupid, not to see that in dealing with me, he’d adapted exactly the same strategy I’d told him to use at the party. Pretend it was the club. With me the pretense had gone a little further, maybe, but it was still only his coping mechanism. I couldn’t even blame him, because he’d warned me before we started. He told me he didn’t play out in the real world, and the whole thing was a science experiment to him. I should have listened.

I let Ivan open my car door as usual, took his hand and let him help me out of the car and walk me to my door. It was ten o’clock, time for Ivan to brush his teeth and go to sleep. We’d missed television time.

The kiss he gave me at my door was affectionate and brief, and then he was gone.

Chapter Twelve

Saturday, nine o’clock in the morning. A weekend day.

I looked out my kitchen window, knowing what I would see—Ivan with a measuring cup, watering his tomatoes. Although he was back in his beloved routine, he didn’t look especially happy. I wondered what that was all about. I scanned the garden and noticed that the last of my lettuces had finally crossed the line from struggling to dead. I had forgotten to water it yesterday, and now it was a shriveled, brownish hunk of rot.

Then the sky caught my attention, and I craned my neck for a better look. Although the storm wasn’t due until late afternoon or early evening, the sky already had a dull, gray quality. It looked too windless, flat and eerie, and I backtracked to the living room to find a weather report.

While I slept, the storm had evidently picked up speed and was now due to make landfall in another six hours or so. It was right on the cusp of being upgraded to a Category One hurricane. Lovely.

I double-checked my supplies, then started cooking things in case the power went out for long enough that the stuff in the fridge started to turn. Outside, the smell of barbecue indicated that somebody else had the same idea. Dinesh, I saw. Julia was bringing him a large rack of ribs to put on the grill.

Leaning out the door, I waved at them. “Can I throw some chicken on there, too?”

“Sure, go for it,” Julia said cheerfully. “Ivan, you got anything?”

He looked up from his tomatoes. “No, I’m good. I have some extra bags of ice in my freezer and I think I can fit everything in there if I need to.” He glanced my way, puzzled.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, finally mustering the fortitude to venture out and talk to him.

“I bought extras of almost all my supplies. More than I usually would, I mean. In case you need anything.”

I shrugged, looking away. “I think I have everything I need, thanks.”

“Are you…angry with me?”

Was I? I had to think about it for a bit. “No,” I said at last, taking a step back. “I’m annoyed at myself, but I’m not angry with you. I’d better go get that chicken while Dinesh still has room on the grill.”

I walked off before he could say anything else. When next I looked, he was carrying the last of his tomatoes inside to shelter them from the oncoming storm.

He looked forlorn, which made me sad too.

We all lunched like kings in the gathering gloom, enjoying the last few minutes outside despite the occasionally wicked gusts of wind that broke the deathly stillness to swipe at our napkins and paper plates. The sky was a grim purple-gray with a sickly tint of green by the time we finished securing the last of the outside furniture and the grill in the shed next to the carport.

Ivan was right behind me as I opened my kitchen door. I turned, lifting my eyebrows in a silent question, and he took a step back, looking confused.

“I really think you’re angry with me, Camilla,” he said earnestly, as though he was trying to talk me into the idea. “I’ve been watching your facial expressions. Did I do something wrong?”

I reminded myself that this was Ivan. He didn’t do subtext or innuendo. He said what he meant, and I would probably have the most luck if I did the same, no matter how odd it felt to lay my feelings out in the open that way.

“At the party, you introduced me to everybody as your friend.”

“Was that wrong?”

“Ivan, you called me your friend, your neighbor. Somebody who worked in another department at the university. You never… I was disappointed, I guess. You never introduced me as anything
more
than that. Like your girlfriend. And then you said you wanted to go back to the way things—”

“But you’re
not
my girlfriend. Why would I introduce you that way? You’re my submissive.” His brow was wrinkled, and it was evident he was trying very hard to understand me.

I wanted to give him credit for that, I really did. But I was so tired of finding reasons to give Ivan extra credit, and it hurt so much to hear him come right out and say it like that.

“You interrupted me,” I pointed out. “You said you wanted to go back to the way things were before, to your old routine. I’m still not sure when you managed to fit trips to a bondage club into your old routine, but I know I wasn’t in there.”

He stared at my mouth for a few seconds after I was done talking, waiting to make sure I was through. “I went twice a month on the first and third Saturdays, but I left the house at ten-thirty in the evening. You were usually either still out or already inside watching television.”

“That’s late for you to be up,” I said skeptically.

“I kind of thought of it as a substitute for dreaming. Something apart from my real life.”

I was reminding myself that he didn’t mean that in a poetic way, or as a metaphor, when a flash of lightning split the darkening sky, with a thunderclap of brain-rattling magnitude hard on its heels.

“I need to get inside.”

“I never meant to disappoint you, Camilla. I just thought you understood.”

If he kept talking, I was going to cry, and I didn’t want to do that in front of him because he would be confused, and I’d have to deal with the confusion, and it would all be about Ivan instead of about the twisting pain of loss threatening to choke me.

“You should go,” I told him. “It’s time to get inside.”

“Come over to my place. I have plenty of supplies.” He took my hand, but I just squeezed his fingers then dropped them. A burst of wind whipped his hair from one side to the other and he flicked the strands impatiently from his eyes.

“I’m good right here,” I insisted. “I need to go in, make sure my cell phone’s all charged up and everything. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

Reluctantly, Ivan stepped back and let me close the kitchen door, shutting him out along with the weather.

* * *

I cried and cried and ate all the ice cream in the freezer, because if the power went out, it would have to go anyway. By the time the rain started to fall, my tears had started to dry. I felt arid, empty, and the torrential downpour seemed bitterly ironic. It was about five o’clock, the storm was pushing Category Two strength, and I realized I was out of ibuprofen at the exact moment the power zapped out with a boom.

Nobody was there to hear me scream, for which I was grateful as that would’ve been embarrassing. The explosive sound had scared the hell out of me, and my thumping heart supercharged the headache as I ventured from the relative safety of my dining nook to the much more exposed kitchen window. The percussive thud had rattled the windows and doors, even vibrating the ground under the chair I’d been sitting in. I feared that something big had hit the house, though it was more likely a blown transformer.

From the window I saw rain, and lots of it. Fitful wind, still whipping in multiple directions, not yet bending the trees sideways as it would when the full strength of the storm swept past. I couldn’t see any fallen trees, or anything else out of the ordinary. In the storm-darkness, something caught my eye in the direction of the carport and I stood on tiptoe, trying to make out the looming black shape.

I screamed again at the pounding sound by my ear, then realized it was somebody knocking on the door.

“Cami!”

I could make out Ivan’s voice through the rising wind and rushed to unlatch and open the door. It slammed open, dragging him in with it, and we struggled together to close it against the wind, the rain-drenched floor giving us little traction.

When it finally clicked shut, I slammed the bolt home again and rested my head against the wood, trying to catch my breath. Once I regained a modicum of composure, I turned around, eyes wide, to stare at my bedraggled neighbor.

“What the
fuck?
”

“There’s a utility pole in the front yard. Are you all right? You should be in your closet.”

“I’m fine. I know there’s a utility pole in the front yard, it’s always been there. You came over here in the rain to tell me that?”

“Not
next
to the yard, Cami.
In
the yard. It hit the corner of my roof before it finished falling, I think. I was worried it might have rolled this way, toward your front windows.”

After a stunned moment, I processed what he’d said. “Oh my God! Are you okay? Were you up there?”

“I’m okay. And no, I wasn’t up there. We need to get in your closet now.”

He was already headed upstairs, and I followed from habit, even as I protested. “The dining room should be fine. It doesn’t have any windows.”

“But the living room does, and there’s no door between the two like there is at my place.”

For the first time I realized he was wearing a backpack. It was dripping, leaving a trail behind him as he made his way to my room and into the closet.

“Leave that outside, it’s soaked. Your shoes, too. What’s in there, anyway?”

“Survival stuff. All of me is soaked,” Ivan pointed out. “May I borrow a towel?”