Their passion will consume everything—and everyone—in its path….

I’m on a train.

I don’t know which stop I got on at; I only know the train is going fast and the world outside becomes a blur. I should get off, but I don’t. The universe is playing a cosmic joke on me. Here I had my life—a good life with everything a woman could want—and suddenly, there is something more I didn’t know I could have. A chance for me to be satisfied and content and maybe even on occasion deliriously, amazingly, exuberantly fulfilled.

So this is where I am, on a train that’s out of control, and I am not just a passenger. I’m the one shoveling the furnace full of coal to keep it going fast and faster.

If I could make myself believe it all happened by chance and I couldn’t help it, that I’ve been swept away, that it’s not my fault, that it’s fate...would that be easier? The truth is, I didn’t know I was looking for this until I found Will, but I must’ve been, all this time. And now it is not random, it is not fate, it is not being swept away.

This is my choice.

And I don’t know how to stop.

Or even if I want to.

Praise for the novels of

New York Times bestselling author Megan Hart

“Naked is a great story, steeped in emotion. Hart has a wonderful way with her characters.… She conveys their thoughts and actions in a manner that brings them to life. And the erotic scenes provide a sizzling read.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Deeper is absolutely, positively, the best book that I have read in ages! I cannot say enough about this book. The writing is fabulous, the characters’ chemistry is combustible, and the story line brought tears to my eyes more than once…. Beautiful, poignant and bittersweet… Megan Hart never disappoints me, but with Deeper she went above and beyond.”

—Romance Reader at Heart, Top Pick

“Stranger, like Megan Hart’s previous novels, is an action-packed, sexy, emotional romance that tears up the pages with heat while also telling a touching love story…. Stranger has a unique, hot premise that Hart delivers on fully.”

—Bestselling author Rachel Kramer Bussel

“[Broken] is not a traditional romance but the story of a real and complex woman caught in a difficult situation with no easy answers. Well-developed secondary characters and a compelling plot add depth to this absorbing and enticing novel.”

—Library Journal

“An exceptional story and honest characters make Dirty a must-read.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“[Hart] writes erotica for grown-ups. She doesn’t write sex just to titillate and she holds her characters to a higher standard. [The Space Between Us] is a quiet book, but it packed a major punch for me…. She’s a stunning writer, and this is a stunning book.”

—Super Librarian

Tear You Apart

Megan Hart

www.spice-books.co.uk

For all those who have ever lost their will—

good night, and dream in color.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Playlist

Rock Opera Playlist

Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.

—Ann Patchett, from the essay The Sense of an Ending

This is a love story.

Chapter One

I came in on the train and then took a cab, but that didn’t stop the late March drizzle from destroying everything I’d carefully put together at home earlier this afternoon. My hair hangs sodden against my forehead and cheeks. My clothes cling, damp and heavy and chilled. I stripped off my dark, soaked stockings in the gallery bathroom and wrapped them in paper towels to tuck inside my purse, and my legs feel glaringly pale. Instead of the glass of white wine in my hand, I’m desperate for a cup of coffee, or better yet, a mug of hot chocolate. With whipped cream.

I’m desperate for the taste of something sweet.

There should be desserts here, but all I can find are blocks of cut cheese, sweating on the tray among the slaughtered remains of fancy crackers. The bowl of what looks like honey mustard is probably all right, but the companion bowl of ranch dressing looks like a playground for gastrointestinal distress. Courtesy of the rain, I’m more chilled than the cheese, the dips or the wine.

I haven’t seen Naveen yet. He’s flirting his way through the entire crowd, and I can’t begrudge him that. It’s exciting, this new gallery. New York is different than Philly. He needs to make an impression with this opening. He’ll get to me eventually. He always does.

Now I hold the glass of wine in one hand, the other tucked just below my breasts to prop my elbow as I study the photograph in front of me. The artist has blown it up to massive size. Twenty by forty, I estimate, though I’ve always been shit with measurements. The subject matter is fitting for the weather outside. A wet street, puddles glistening with gasoline rainbows. A child in red rubber boots standing in one, peering down at his reflection—or is it a her? I can’t tell. Longish hair, a shapeless raincoat, bland and gender-neutral features. It could be a boy or girl.

I don’t care.

I don’t care one fucking thing about that portrait, the size of it just big enough to guarantee that somebody will shell out the cool grand listed on the price tag. I shake my head a little, wondering what Naveen had thought, hanging this in the show. Maybe he owed someone a favor...or a blow job. The BJ would’ve been a better investment.

There’s a crinkle, tickle, tease on the back of my neck. The weight of a gaze. I turn around, and someone’s there.

“You’d need a house the size of a castle to hang that piece of shit.”

The voice is soft. Husky. Nearly as gender-neutral as the face of the child in the picture. I pause for just a moment before I look into his eyes, but the second I do, my brain fits him into a neat slot. Male. Man. He’s a man, all right, despite the soft voice.

He’s not looking at me, but at the picture, so I can stare at him for a few seconds longer than what’s socially acceptable. Hair the color of wet sand spikes forward over his forehead and feathers against his cheeks in front of his ears. It’s short and wispy in the back, exposing the nape of his neck. He’s got a scruffy face, not just like a guy who’s forgone shaving for a few days, but one who keeps an uneasy truce with his razor at best. He wears a dark suit, white shirt, narrow dark tie. Retro. Black Converse on his feet.

“And who’d pay a grand for it? C’mon.” His gaze slides toward me just for a second or two. Catching me staring. He gestures at the photo.

“It’s not so bad.” I’m not sure why I’m compelled to say anything nice about the picture. I agree, it’s an overpriced piece of shit. It’s a mockery of good art, actually. I should be angry about this, that I’m wasting my time on it as if the consumption of beauty is something with an allotment. Hell, maybe it is.

Maybe I actually have wasted today’s consumption of beauty on this piece of crap. I study it again. Technically, it’s flawless. The lighting, the focus, the exposure. But it’s not art.

Even so, someone will buy it simply because they will look at it the same way I did. They’ll note the perfectly framed shot, the pseudowhimsical subject matter, the blandly colorful mat inside a sort of interesting frame. They will convince themselves it’s just unique enough to impress their friends, but it won’t force them to actually feel anything except perhaps smugness that they got a bargain.

“It looks like art,” I say. “But it really isn’t. And that’s why someone will pay a thousand bucks for it and hang it in the formal living room they use only at Christmas. Because it looks like art but it really isn’t.”

He strokes his chin. “You think so?”

“Yes. I’m sure of it. Naveen wouldn’t have priced it if he didn’t think he could sell it.” I slant the man a sideways look, wishing I could be bold enough to stare at him when he’s facing me, the way I was when he was looking at something else.

“Good. I need to pay my rent. A coupla hundred bucks would be sweet.”

Of course he’s an artist. Men who look like that, in a place like this—they’re always artists. Usually starving. He looks lean enough to have missed a few meals. Standing this close I get a whiff of cigarettes and corduroy, which should make no sense, since he’s not wearing any, but it does because that’s how I work. Tastes and smells and sounds link up for me in ways they don’t for everyone else. I see colors where there shouldn’t be any. The scent of corduroy is par for the course.

“You took that picture?”

“I did.” He nods, not without pride, despite what he’d been saying about it earlier.

If he’d been talking shit about another artist’s piece I’d have liked him less, even if he was telling the truth. I can like him better now. “It’s really not so bad.”

He frowns. Shakes his head. “You’re a bad liar.”

On the contrary, I think I’m an excellent liar.

He looks again at the picture and shrugs. “Someone will buy it because it looks like art but doesn’t ask too much of them. That’s what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the expert.” He shrugs again and crosses one arm over his chest to rest his elbow on as he stares at the photo. I don’t miss the stance—it’s a mirror of my own. He bites at his thumb. It must be an old habit, because the nail is ragged. “The only reason I did this thing was for Naveen, you know? He said he wanted something more commercial. Not, like, doll heads with pencil stubs sticking out of the eye holes and stuff like that.”

I’m a good liar, but not a good poker player. I can’t keep a stone face. I know the piece he’s talking about. It’s been in the back room of Naveen’s Philadelphia gallery for months, if not years. Of course I assumed he couldn’t sell it, which didn’t explain why he kept it hung back there for so long. I joked with him that he kept it for some sentimental reasons; maybe this was true.

“That was yours?”

He laughs. “Will Roberts.”

I take the hand he holds out. His fingers are callused and rough, and for a moment I imagine how they’d sound against something silk, like a scarf. His touch would rasp on something soft. It would whisper.

“Elisabeth Amblin.”

His fingers curl around mine. For one bizarre second, I’m sure he’s going to kiss the back of my hand. I tense, waiting for the brush of his mouth against my skin, the wet slide of his tongue on my flesh, and that’s ridiculous because of course he wouldn’t do such a thing. People don’t do that to strangers. Even lovers would hardly do so.

My imagination is wild, I know it, yet when he lets my hand drop I’m still a little disappointed. His touch lingers, the way his fingers scraped at mine. I’m not soft as silk, no matter how many expensive creams I rub into my skin. And yet, I’d been right. His touch whispered.

“You’re Naveen’s friend.”

“Yeah. You could say that. We have sort of a love-hate thing going on.” I pause, judging his reaction. “He loves that I work for next to nothing, and I hate that he doesn’t pay me more.”

Will laughs. It ripples in streams of blue and green that wink into sparkling gold. His eyes squint shut. He has straight white teeth in a thin-lipped mouth. He shouldn’t be attractive in his laughter, the way it changes his face, but there’s something infectious about him. I laugh, too.

There’s music in the gallery, a string quartet in the corner painfully strumming their way through Pachelbel’s Canon and Für Elise. They must be students, because Naveen would never have paid for professional musicians. I wonder which one of them he used to fuck, because like that painting in the back room and other things here in the gallery, including me, Naveen hangs on to things for sentimental reasons. There’s food in the gallery, too, a little lackluster. And there’s wine. But there isn’t much laughter, and we draw attention.

Will tips his head back for a few more chuckles, then looks at me. “I’m supposed to go mingle.”

I want him to linger. I want to keep him from something he should be doing but chooses not to because of me. And I could make him stay, I think suddenly, watching his gaze skip and slide over my body, my damp clothes, my bare legs. He’s already touched my skin. He knows how I feel. I want him to want to know more.

“Sure, go.” I tip my chin toward the rest of the room. “I have some things I need to do, too.”

I am a good liar.

“It was nice meeting you, Elisabeth.” Will holds out his hand again.

This time I entertain no fantasies of his lips on the back of it. That’s just silly. We shake formally. Firmly. I turn away from him at the end of it, feigning interest again in his piece-of-shit-that-isn’t-art, so I don’t have to watch him walking away.

Naveen finds me in front of a few pieces of pottery on their narrow pedestals. I don’t like them. Technically, they’re lovely. They are commercial. They will sell. What’s good for the gallery is good for me. Still, they reek of manure. Maybe it’s the mud they’re made from. Maybe it’s just the twisted signals in my brain that layer and mingle my senses. Whatever it is, I’m staring with a frown when my friend puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close.

“I already have several more commissioned from this artist. Lacey Johnsbury.” Naveen’s grin is very white. He smells of a subtle blend of expensive cologne and the pomade he uses in his jet-black hair. Those are actual scents; anyone could smell them.

When Naveen speaks, I taste cotton candy, soft and sweet, subtle. There are times when listening to my friend talk makes my teeth ache. But I like the taste of cotton candy, just as I like listening to Naveen, because we’ve been friends for a long, long time. He might be one of the only people who know me as well as I know myself. Sometimes maybe better. I run my tongue along my teeth for a second before I answer him.

“I don’t like them.”

“You don’t have to like them, darling, they are not for you.”

I shrug. “It’s your gallery.”

“Yes.” Those white teeth, that grin. “And they’ll sell. I like things that sell, Elisabeth. You know that.”

“Like that?” I nod toward Will’s atrocity.

“You don’t like that, either?”

I shrug again. “It’s a piece of shit, Naveen. Even the artist thinks so.”

He laughs, and I’m in front of a Ferris wheel under a summer sky, my hair in pigtails and my fists full of spun sugar. Not really, of course, but that’s how it feels. “You met Will.”

“Yes. I met him.” I look for Will in the crowd and see him in one of the alcoves, flirting with a woman whose hair is not flat and limp, her lipstick unsmeared. She looks as if she hasn’t eaten in years. She leans in close to him. He laughs.

I hate her.

I look away before Naveen can see me watching, but it’s too late. He shakes his head and squeezes my shoulder gently. He doesn’t say anything. I guess he doesn’t have to. Someone calls his name, and he’s off to schmooze. He’s better at it than I am, so I leave him to it.

It’s late and getting later, and I should leave. Naveen offered to let me stay at his place. I’ve done it before. I like his wife, Puja, but their kids are still small. When I stay there I’m treated to lots of sticky hugs and kisses, am woken at the crack of dawn and feel as if I have to give Puja a hand with things like diapers and feeding times. My daughters are long beyond needing that sort of care, and I don’t miss it.

“You’re still here.”

I turn, the sound of his voice tiptoeing up my spine to tickle the back of my neck. “I am.”

Will tilts his head a little to look at me. “Do you like anything in this show?”

“Of course I do.” It would be disloyal to say otherwise, wouldn’t it?

“Show me.”

I’m caught. At a loss. I search the room for something I do like. I point. “There. That piece. I like that one.”

White canvas, black stripes. A red circle. It looks like something any elementary schoolkid could do, but somehow it’s art because of the way it’s framed and hangs on the wall. When I look at it, I see the hovering shapes of butterflies, just for a minute. Nobody else would; they’d just see the white, the black, the red. But it’s the butterflies that make me choose it. I don’t love it, but out of everything here tonight, I like it the best.

“That?” Will looks at it, then at me again. “It’s pretty good. It’s not what I thought you’d pick, though.”

“What did you think I’d pick?”

Will points with his chin. “Want me to show you?”

I hesitate; I don’t know why. Of course I want him to show me. I’m curious about what he thinks I’d like. How he could think he knows enough about me to guess at anything I’d like.

Will takes me by the elbow and leads me through the crowd, still thick considering the hour, but then I guess most of these people live here in the city, or at least are staying close by. There’s another alcove toward the back, this one hung with gauze and twinkling fairy lights. The inside of it’s curved, which makes it hard to hang square portraits there, and why I didn’t look at it tonight. I couldn’t face another of those stinky vases.

“There.” Will stops but doesn’t let go of my elbow. If anything, he moves closer to me. “That’s what you like.”

The piece is simple. Carved, polished wood. There’s no real form or figure, though the piece is evocative of a woman’s body. The smooth curve of hip and thigh and belly and breasts, the curl and twist of hair. It’s not a woman, but it feels like one. Without thinking, I touch it. She feels like a woman. My fingers curl against my palm as I take my hand away. I shouldn’t have touched it. Oils from my fingers could harm the finish. It’s not a museum piece, but even so, it’s not right to ruin it.

And Will is correct. I like this one. I have no place for something like that in my home, but suddenly, I want it.

“Do you know who did it?” I’m already looking for the artist’s card.

Will says nothing. I look at him, thinking he’ll be smiling, but he’s not. He’s studying me.

“I knew you’d like that one.”

My body tenses. I’m not sure if I don’t like the way he says it, or if I like it too much. Either way, I frown. “You sound so proud.”

He glances at the piece of carved wood that shouldn’t look like anything but looks like a woman. “I like to figure out what people like. I mean, it’s important, you know? For an artist who wants to sell his shit.”

“Is that what it’s about, for you? Selling things? I thought real artists wanted to...you know. Make art.”

He laughs, low. “Sure. But I’m also into paying my rent and eating. Not many people can live on art.”

Not many of the people displaying here in Naveen’s gallery tonight, anyway. New York City has galleries like this all over the place. Competition’s fierce. I told him to keep his Philly gallery, but he insisted on branching out. I’m still not sure this one’s going to make it.

“So...you like to know what people like, so you can sell them things.”

“Sure.” Will’s grin is a little sly. “And I was right about you. Wasn’t I?”

“Yes.” For some reason, I’m reluctant to admit it.

He nods as if I just revealed a secret. Maybe I have. “You like things smooth.”

I take a step away from him. How could he know that? Hell. Until a few minutes ago, I’m not sure I knew it.

Will nods again. “Yeah. Smooth. And curved. You don’t like sharp things. Angles and shit. You don’t like it when there are points.”

“Who does?” My voice is anything but smooth.

“Some people do.” Will looks again at the carved wood. “You should buy it. It would make you happy.”

My laugh snags, like a burr. “Who says I need to be happy?”

“Everyone needs to be happy, Elisabeth,” Will says.

Oh, my name.

When he says my name, I see it in shimmering shades of blue and green and gray. Those are not my colors. I’m red and orange and yellow. Brown. My name is autumn moving on toward winter darkness, but not the way Will says it. When he says my name, I see summer. I see the ocean.

Blinking hard, I have to look away from him. My breath catches in my throat. I’m sure I can’t speak, not even one word.

“You should buy it,” he says again.

“I don’t want it.” It would make me happy, but my house is corners and angles and sharp points. There’s no place in my house for something like that.

“You want it,” Will says, leaning in close for just a second. Just a breath.

Naveen saves me. He comes up behind Will and claps him on the shoulder hard enough to rock him forward a bit. Will frowns, fists clenching for a second or two before relaxing as his mouth slides into a smile, so fast it’s as if he never looked angry at all.

“What does she want?” Naveen asks with a smile like a shark’s.

Before either of us can answer, one of the musicians, a girl with a pixie haircut to match her petite stature, eases her way between us with an overly casual smile for Naveen. She holds up what looks like a scribbled receipt. Her eyeliner has smudged and, yes, I judge her for looking sloppy.

“Can I talk to you about this?”

Naveen gives her a smile considerably less casual than hers and winks at me. He puts his arm around the girl’s shoulders, his fingertips denting the soft, tanned flesh of her upper arm, bared by her strapless dress. “Sure, Calysta. Let’s talk in my office, okay? Betts, you’re good? I’ll call you tomorrow?”

“I’ll call you,” I tell him. “And yes. I’m fine.”

Will waits until they walk halfway across the room before he turns to me. “What’s up with that?”

I shrug. “Not my business.”

He squints, mouth pursed. “He’s married, huh?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not his wife.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not.”

Will gives them another look and slowly shakes his head, then lets his gaze slide back to mine. Sly, sideways, full of charm. He reminds me of a fox, I think suddenly. The slight spike at the tips of his ears, the way his hair feathers forward in front of them, the sleek and perfect arch of his brows. He leans close to me again. Sharing secrets.

“How about,” he says, “you and me, we get out of here?”

Chapter Two

I thought he meant to take me to a coffee shop. That’s what anyone would think when a stranger asks you at close to midnight if you want a cup of coffee. I’m still not familiar with the neighborhood. Naveen’s new gallery opened only a month ago, and while I can get to and from it, I don’t know about anything else nearby.

Will does. He lives close by, in Chinatown. I love Chinatown. I love shopping for chopsticks and soup spoons I could find anywhere, but which feel so much more authentic here. If I could, I’d have an entire collection of those cats with the waving paws. Money cats. I love them, too. They’re usually red and gold, and to me the ticky-tocky motion of their hands always smells like fresh lemons.

I should be surprised when instead of a coffee shop with slices of cake in a revolving case, he takes me to a building made of stone, with ornate metal bars on the windows and a front door he needs to unlock with a keypad. I should hold back, hesitant, when he turns just inside the doorway to smile back at me with that same sly and sideways grin he gave me in the gallery. I shouldn’t go upstairs with him, into his apartment, where he again holds the door open, this time so I can step through in front of him, though the space is small enough that I have to touch my shoulder to his chest as I pass.

I should go home.

I think about it. Imagine myself backing off, hands up. Shake, shake of my head and a nervous smile. I imagine myself finding a cab. Taking the train. The entire scenario takes about thirty seconds, and by that time it’s too late. I’m already inside.

It’s a loft, of course. That’s where artists live. It must’ve once been a warehouse or factory. Wood floors, big beams, brick walls. Living room, kitchen, dining area all one big space, with a hallway leading to what I assume is bathroom and bedroom. There’s an actual loft, too, with a spiral staircase that makes my heart ache with envy.

“I want an apartment.” I’ve said it aloud without realizing.

Will looks at me. “So get one.”

I laugh. “I have a house. I don’t need an apartment. I just want one.”

A place I don’t have to share. Built-in bookcases, a tiny galley kitchen I’ll never use because I’ll never cook. Hardwood floors with colorful throw rugs. A big, soft bed with all the pillows for myself. A quiet place with smooth corners just for me. It would be filled with rainbows and the smell of the ocean sand.

“So get one,” Will repeats, as if it’s as easy as going down to the apartment store and picking one out. “Hey. Coffee?”

It’s late. Drinking coffee now will only keep me from being able to sleep, but of course that’s why I need it. “Yes, please.”

He has some fancy coffeemaker that grinds the beans and heats the water to just the right temperature. I can’t explain why this makes me laugh, but it does. Will slants me a grin as I lean against his countertop—bright, polished metal like you’d find in a restaurant.

“What?”

I shrug. “I just didn’t have you figured as a fancy coffeemaker sort of guy, that’s all.”

Will leans, too, close enough that if he stretched out a leg he could tap my foot with his. “Oh. That. It’s not mine. It was my wife’s.”

Instinctively, I look around his place for signs of a woman’s touch, not that I’m sure what that might be. Flowers and throw pillows, I guess. The scent of perfume. He laughs. I’m caught.

“Ex,” he emphasizes. “Was. She took the cat. I got the coffeemaker.”

“Oh.” The machine spits and hisses, burping out black liquid. The smell is amazing. Just coffee, nothing odd. Still amazing.

He pours me a cup. Then one for himself. He pulls a bottle from a cupboard. Bushmills. “Want some?”

“Um...no.” It’s nearly one in the morning. I have to leave in a few minutes so I can catch the last train.

I shouldn’t be here at all.

“You sure?” He wags the bottle. Tempting me. He splashes his mug with a liberal dose. “It’s good.”

I’m sure it is. I haven’t had whiskey in...well, I can’t remember the last time. Have I ever had whiskey? Surely in those booze-addled college days when we drank whatever we could get our hands on, I must’ve had whiskey.

I hold out my mug. “Not too much.”

“No such thing,” Will says, and pours in a healthy shot. He raises his mug and waits until I’ve done the same. “Sláinte.”

“Are you Irish?” I take a hesitant sip. The coffee’s hot and good. The whiskey, better. Both are strong and hit the back of my throat and then my stomach with heat. Or maybe I shouldn’t lie. It’s the way he looks at me, not anything I’m drinking.

“Who isn’t?” He lifts the mug and drinks without so much as a wince. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

“Not your etchings, I hope.” The joke’s not smooth, but since everything about me feels herky-jerky, all rough edges and stumbling feet, why should my words be any different?

Will glances over his shoulder. “Something like that.”

I do hesitate then, just for a second. Then another. I’m in a stranger’s apartment so late it’s soon going to be early. I took his liquor. Would I blame him if he thought there might be more to this?

Would I be disappointed if he doesn’t?

In one corner of the vast space, he shows me a desk set up with an impressive desktop computer, stacks of file folders, bits of crumpled paper. A little farther back is a set of red velvet curtains hung on the wall. Next to that is a metal rack holding several rolls of paper backdrops. Also, another table fitted with several lights and a contraption of metal and fabric I’ve seen before. I forget what it’s called. A light box, maybe. Something to showcase items to be photographed.

“This is where the magic happens.” He turns on one of the big lights, bathing everything in a golden glow.

I shield my eyes for a second, glad the beam is focused on a battered wooden chair set in front of the velvet curtains, and not on me. That light highlights that chair’s every crack and splinter, every flaw. I can only imagine what it would show on my face.

Will opens a folder to pull out an eight-by-ten glossy of a woman seated at a desk, typing at an old-fashioned typewriter. She’s dressed like a fetishized secretary. Tight black skirt, white shirt with a bow at the collar, impossibly high heels. Hair pulled back in a severe bun, glasses covering eyes made up with far too much shadow and liner to be appropriate for a real office. I’m confused.

“Stock art.” He pulls another shot from the folder, this one of a businessman in a suit and tie, holding a paper take-out cup of coffee and a briefcase. Will waves the photo slowly.

“You took those?”

“I did.” He fits them back into the folder. “My bread and butter.”

Somehow, this deflates me. “Oh. I didn’t know.”

“Gotta eat,” Will says. “But look at these.”

He gestures for me to move closer, and to resist would, at the very least, seem impolite. I stand next to him at the desk, our shoulders brushing as he sorts through another folder to pull out a colorful print of a man and a woman in an embrace. They’re wearing historical costumes, her hair flowing. For that matter, his hair’s flowing, too. The print behind it is of the same shot, though it’s been altered to add a different background and some stylized effects. Also, text.

“Book covers? You do book covers?”

“When they hire me.” Will grins and taps the picture. “Love this one. Supersexy, don’t you think?”

It is a sexy picture, I have to admit that, though honestly, it’s the sort of cover my eyes would skate over in a store. Like whiskey, when’s the last time I picked up a romance novel? Have I ever?

He pulls another shot from the pile. This one’s darker. A woman in black leather holds a gun, her long hair in a braid over her shoulder. I covet her boots. It’s a night for envy, I think, moving closer to him without thinking, so that I can get a better look at the print.

“I’ve seen that one,” I say. “Science fiction, right? They just made a movie out of the book.”

“Yep.” He sounds proud. “It was a bestseller.”

We are standing very close. I could turn an inch in one direction and we’ll no longer touch. An inch in the other and I’ll be pressed up against him. I imagine the push and pull of the muscles in his arms if I were to put my hands on them. I do not move.

“Let me take your picture,” Will says.

That’s it. I back up one step, two, my head shaking. “No. No way.”

My reaction’s too strong for such a simple request, and I feel instantly stupid. I force myself not to turn tail and run. I lift my chin, square my shoulders. I meet his gaze.

He isn’t smiling. Not laughing. Will’s studying me with a serious look I can’t interpret, and can’t match.

“Why not?”

“Why would you want to?” I let out a slow but shaky breath.

“I like to take portraits. It’s my favorite thing.”

“You don’t want a picture of me.”

Will looks at the chair, pinned by that bright light. If I sit there, in that chair, that light will be all over me. I’ll be all light, no dark. Nothing hidden. No secrets. He’ll see all of me, every wrinkle and crevice, every line, every stray and unplucked hair. There is no fucking way I’m sitting in that chair.

Will says nothing.

“I don’t want a picture of me,” I tell him.

He picks up his camera. I know the finished product of art. The canvases, the matted prints. But I know nothing of the tools used to create it. Paints and brushes, f-stops and apertures, lenses, film speed, clay and glaze. I can tell you what it’s worth when it’s finished, but I have no idea about its creation.

He holds it carefully in one palm, the size of it impressive. I used to have a point-and-shoot until I lost the charger. Now I use my phone to take snapshots, when and if I feel the need to capture the moment. Mostly, I take pictures and forget about them until it’s time to update my phone’s software, when I upload them to my computer’s hard drive and then forget them there.

Will lifts the camera to one eye and points it at the chair. He snaps a shot. Looks at the view screen. He makes some adjustment to something. Takes another picture.

I haven’t moved. He hasn’t asked again. He just takes another picture of the chair, which also hasn’t moved and doesn’t speak. One more. Again, he checks the view screen. Fiddles with some settings.

Then I’m sitting in that chair, my heart in my throat and the light so bright it seems as though it ought to make me squint, but I don’t have that as an excuse to close my eyes. I see everything. The rest of the room seems cast in shadow, everything but this circle of light in which I sit, my knees pressed tight together, my hands linked just as tightly in my lap. Everything about me is stiff and tense and awkward. I try to breathe, and the air smells metallic. I taste roses.

If he tells me to relax, I will bolt up from this chair and out the door. If he touches me, I will explode. As it is, everything inside me has gone tight and coiled. I want to shake and can’t.

It’s just a picture.

But he doesn’t take it. Will puts the camera to his eye, but nothing snaps. He just looks. Then he puts the camera on the desk and steps back.

“Another time,” he tells me.

I blink and blink again. “What?”

Will hands me my mug of coffee as I get up from the chair. “Let me show you something else, okay?”

“Okay.” The liquid in the mug should be sloshing, but I guess my hands aren’t as shaky as they feel. I sip. It’s lukewarm, the whiskey more potent in it.

He sees me make a face, and laughs, takes the mug and sets it back on the desk. “You don’t have to drink it. But here, look at this. Tell me what you think. And, Elisabeth...”

“Yes?”

“Be honest.”

I understand what he means as soon as he pulls the sheet off the framed print leaning against the wall below the window. There are others in that stack, half a dozen at least, with a few more dozen smaller frames next to it. The black-and-white shot is of a tree, bare branches like spreading fingers against the cloudless sky. The photographer caught the shadows at such an angle that it looks as if the tree’s spindling branches are its roots. It’s impossible to tell that sky’s color. In the print it’s pure, pure white. I imagine it must’ve been a clear, pale blue.

There should be nothing special about the shot. Ansel Adams took thousands of nature shots, and he’s considered a master. This picture has nothing of Adams’s vast scale. It’s one tree, one sky. It’s beautiful. It makes me want to cry.

“Would you hang it in your house?” Will asks. “Would you put it in your foyer to impress people?”

“No.” I haven’t gone to my knees in front of it, though the picture makes me want to. “If I bought this, I would hang it in a place only I could ever see.”

He smiles. I’ve said the right thing. This is it, I think, when he takes my hand and tugs me a step closer. This is when he kisses me.

Of course he doesn’t. Why should he? We’ve only just met. I’m no cover model. I’m bedraggled and unkempt and old enough to know better. His fingers stroke my wedding band.

And oh, there’s that.

He has a cuckoo clock I didn’t see when I came in, and now it whirs into life at the half hour. Two men saw busily at a log while a waterwheel spins. A bird pops out to chirp once before retreating.

“Shit,” I say, and recover my hand as if he’d never taken it. “It’s late. I have to catch the train—”

“You won’t make it.”

I knew that when I’d agreed to come here, didn’t I? Traffic, distance, the rain. The timing. I could pretend to be upset and surprised, but the truth is I’m only a little upset and not at all shocked.

“Stay here. I have a guest room.” He points to the loft. “You can get up early. Catch the first train home. I’ll make you eggs in the morning, if you want.”

It sounds like a come-on, but I pretend I don’t notice. “Oh...I couldn’t. I’ll go find a hotel room.”

“Uh-uh. No way. I’m not letting you wander around in the dark, in the rain, trying to find a place to stay. That would be ridiculous.” Will shakes his head. “I have a pair of pajamas that will fit you.”

“I really...” I want to say can’t. I want to say shouldn’t. The words clog up my throat. Won’t come out.

“Do you need to call someone? Tell them you’ll be home tomorrow?”

There is nobody at home. The girls are off at college, probably still out at a party or tucked into their boyfriends’ beds—not that I like to dwell on that, but I’m not stupid. Ross is out of town. I should know where he is, what he’s doing, but though he told me, I didn’t pay attention. It didn’t matter, beyond knowing he would be gone.

“No. I don’t have to call home.”

Will smiles. “Okay.”

He gives me a pair of pajamas that belong to him, not a pair inherited from an ex-wife, as I feared. Faded flannel pants, an oversize white T-shirt soft and worn from the wash. I should feel awkward wearing his clothes, but he handed them to me so matter-of-factly, along with a toothbrush still in the package, that feeling odd would only make it so, and clearly it doesn’t have to be. The bed in the loft is soft, the pillows fluffy. He doesn’t follow me up the stairs to tuck me in, so it’s definitely not weird.

I sleep right away and wake when the alarm I set on my phone goes off. I’ve had only four hours of sleep, not enough, but I need to get up and get to the train. Get home.

First, though, I need the bathroom. I dress quickly, not sure what I should do with Will’s clothes. I settle for folding them neatly and putting them on the chair at the foot of the bed. Down the spiral stairs in my bare feet, I’m careful not to trip or knock into anything, because the apartment is big and silent and full of echoes from sounds as soft as breathing.

I hear the shower running just as I move to push open the door, which is ajar. I stop, of course. Or in fact, I don’t, because my fingertips nudge the door just...a little...wider. The way the bathroom’s set up, I have a straight shot gaze toward the claw-foot tub and glass-enclosed shower next to it. In addition to envying the apartment and coveting the cover model’s boots, that shower sends a thrill of jealousy through me. Tiles, glass brick, sunflower showerhead. I want it.

Steam hovers between me and the shower, Will inside it, but there’s not nearly enough to obscure any details. There he is, naked in the water, head bent as it sluices over him. His eyes are closed. One hand is on the wall. The other’s on his dick.

I swallow the noise my throat tries to make, but I’m frozen. Can’t move. Don’t want to move, let’s be honest, because everything about this sight is beauty and glory and oh, my God, he’s stroking himself slowly, as if he’s going to take an hour to make himself come. Up, down, twist of the palm around the head of his cock. His knees are bent and his fingers curl against the tile, slipping because he can’t make purchase.

If he looks up, he’ll see me watching. I should go; it’s not right to watch something so private. This isn’t for me.

His hand moves faster. His mouth opens, water filling it and overflowing when he tips his face into the spray. He fucks his fist with deliberation, and I watch the muscles cord in his arm and back, in that spot just above his ass where the dimples dent his skin.

I want to watch him come. I covet and crave it, as a matter of fact, more than I did this apartment or the boots or the shower itself. I want to see Will jerk and moan and finish, and that desire is what finally pushes me away from the door. Down the hall, to the kitchen where I use the toothbrush he gave me at the kitchen sink. I brush and brush, I rinse and spit and rinse again, my eyes closed and my mind filled with the sight of him.

I know he’s there before I turn from the sink, but though I brace myself for the sight of him in a towel, he’s wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt like the one he lent me. Wet hair, slicked back. Bare feet I carefully avoid looking at, as though the sight of his toes could possibly be more intimate than the picture of his cock already permanently sealed in my mind.

“Hey,” Will says. “You’re heading out? I thought I’d make you some breakfast, at least.”

“No, that’s okay. I’m not a breakfast person, anyway. I have to go. Really, you’ve done enough already. Thanks for everything.” I rinse the toothbrush and hold it out to him, as if he’d want it back.

He takes it, but puts it on the counter. “At least let me give you something for the road.”

I want to protest further, but he’s already opening the fridge door and pulling out a pitcher of orange juice. The smell sends saliva squirting in my mouth. It will taste like summer.

“Fresh squeezed,” Will announces. “The ex left a juicer, too.”

He pours me a glass, not a quarter full, not half full, but almost brimming. Our fingers touch when he passes me the glass, but the juice doesn’t spill. He watches me while I drink it, and though I think I’ll just sip it once or twice to be polite, the second the flavor hits my tongue it’s all I can do not to gulp the entire glass. As it is, I finish it faster than is mannerly, and I wipe my mouth with the tips of my fingers when I’m finished.

“See,” Will says. “You never know how thirsty you are until someone offers you something to drink.”

Chapter Three

I used to greet my husband at the door every night, no matter what time he got home. I’d wait up for him if he was late. I never wrapped my naked body in cling film or had a martini in my hand, and there were days when the smile on my face was definitely forced...but I always met him.

I don’t meet him anymore.

The way the earth turns you’d think we’d need to run in place to keep from spinning right off it, but the truth is we all just turn along with it. Ross and I married young, had our children, watched them grow and sent them off to college. Jacqueline and Katherine are twenty-two now. Getting ready to graduate from two different colleges, both hours from home. Jac’s got a job all lined up in another state for after graduation, and Kat’s waiting to hear on an internship that could lead to a job for her, too.

When the girls started high school, I went back to work. Naveen had been struggling with his Philadelphia gallery for a few years, asking me repeatedly if I’d come work for him and keep him in line. I’d always declined, partly because being a mom had been a full-time job and partly because I thought working with him might effectively kill the friendship that had already suffered more than its share of ups and downs. Still, taking the job with him was easier than trying to find one on my own, and though I didn’t “need” to work, I wanted to.

That’s when I stopped meeting Ross at the door. Because on the days when he got home first, he never met me. I never came home to dinner waiting for me, or the laundry folded or a glass of wine. Even when the girls were still in high school, I mostly came home to a silent house, dark in the winter, because they had after-school activities or were with their friends. I’d find him in the den, feet up in the recliner, flipping channels on the television set. I would kiss him dutifully while he pretended to listen to my answer when he asked about my day, and I pretended I wanted to tell him.

I don’t remember the first day I resented this. I don’t remember wondering why all the years I’d made the effort were not reciprocated. Nothing jumped up and bit me or slammed like a door in my face. That’s not how it happens. What happens is you get married, you raise your kids, they go off to school, and you look at your spouse and wonder what on earth you’re supposed to do with each other now, without all the distractions of having a family to obscure the fact that you have no idea not only who the other is, but who you are yourself.

Today I come home to an empty house that smells faintly of the lilac air freshener the cleaning woman sprays in all the bathrooms when she’s finished scrubbing them. My kitchen is spotless. My living room, too, the hash mark lines of the vacuum still fresh in the cream-colored carpet we installed after the girls left for college. In my bedroom I fall down on the unrumpled bed, the comforter matching the pillows matching the sheets matching the curtains matching the carpet. I spread out my arms and legs as if I’m making a snow angel, and I move them slowly back and forth. When I get up from the bed, I’ve left behind no mark.

I should be leaving for work soon. Naveen will expect me to call him to go over invoices and details and things I don’t want to talk about. At the very least, I should check my email and phone messages to see if anything important happened since the last time I looked. Instead, I go to my closet. I look at my clothes. Everything in there is black or white or gray or beige. When’s the last time I wore anything bright? A color, a real color?

In the back, shoved behind a bunch of summer dresses in navy and white, the lines severe but classic, I find an emerald-green blouse. Silk. Shoulder pads and a bow at the front, which should make it clear how long it had been since I’d worn it. I bought it to wear for my first job, when I believed making an impression was important and women needed to wear high heels to office jobs because that’s what they did in the movies. The shoes are long gone, as are the black pencil skirts I’d never be able to squeeze into again, but this shirt had been a favorite. I press it to my cheek for a minute, thinking about the rain and the taste of coffee and whiskey. The bright light showing everything.

I know why Will didn’t take my picture. Because I’m bland and gray and beige, and he makes art. I put the shirt back on the rack, but in front, where I can see it the next time I have to get dressed.

I scream when I come out of the closet, and Ross laughs. My heart pounds and I press my fingers to it. I feel the throb of it in my chest, my wrists, the base of my throat. Between my legs.

“You’re home!”

“Yeah. Decided to swing by here, take a shower, before I hit the office.” He studies me. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

His hands fit on my hips when he kisses me. Open mouth. Tongue working. No surprises; we’ve danced this dance many times. When I cup his crotch, though, he pulls away to give me a look.

“Well, well.” His brows raise. He’s making a joke.

I’m not.

It’s easy enough to walk him back a few steps to the bed. He sits. I push. I straddle him, already pulling at his tie and the buttons beneath. His body is tan and firm because he exercises even when he travels. He spends time outside in the yard, on the golf course, biking.

I’m not thinking of Will when I work my way down my husband’s body with my mouth and teeth and tongue. There aren’t any surprises. I know the dip and curve of every part of him. I know where he likes to be touched, and how. For how long. He’s hard in my fist in a minute or so. Then in my mouth. His hands tangle in my hair.

I want to be surprised. I want to find something new. I want this to feel different.

I use my hand in tandem with my mouth. Up. Down. I want to hear him groan in pleasure, but Ross doesn’t make much noise when we have sex. He never has. I’m the one who moans and sighs, even if the habit has been lost because of so many years when we had to muffle ourselves so the girls wouldn’t overhear. There’s nobody to hear us now, and I want him to shout from what I’m doing to him. I want him to shudder and writhe and clutch at the comforter while I mouth-fuck him until he can’t stand it anymore. I want him to come saying my name.

There is a surprise when he tugs my hair to lift my mouth from his cock. When he pulls me upward, over his body, to nuzzle and nudge at me through my clothes. Fingers work. We shift, we roll. I’m naked somehow, while he’s still mostly clothed. He pushes me onto my knees and slides beneath me to get at my clit with his tongue, his hands gripping my ass. My hands find the wall above the headboard, my fingers curling against the wallpaper I’ve never liked but have always been too lazy to change.

Oh, this, this, this. Spread wide, thighs trembling, all I can do is ride his face and let the pleasure take me over. He knows how and where and how long. How many times and in what direction. I come, hard, without making a sound.

I slip down his body and find his mouth with mine. The first time Ross ever went down on me, he was shocked when I kissed him, after. But if I can’t stand the taste of myself, how could I expect anyone else to? Anyway, it’s erotic, tasting myself on his mouth.

I slide one hand beneath his head, fingers in his hair. The other goes between us to grip the base of his cock and hold him steady as I slide my body onto his. Our mouths seal for just a moment before the kiss breaks on my sigh.

Twenty-two years. That’s how long we’ve been doing this. The first time was in a cheap hotel room after his fraternity’s spring formal. He told me he loved me first, and I didn’t believe him, but I let him kiss and touch me, anyway.

Ross doesn’t say he loves me now. He pushes up inside me. His fingers grip me a little too hard. His eyes are closed. His mouth is open.

He might always look this way when we make love, but it’s been a very long time since we did it in the light. I put my hands on his face and trace the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth with my fingertips until he turns his head to capture my fingers with his mouth. He bites gently. Pleasure surges, and I lose myself in it.

This is comfort. This is compatibility. This is familiarity, and it works. We both tip over into climax within moments of each other, and Ross gives me what I wanted. A hoarse shout. It sounds a little, just a little, like my name.

“What’re you up to today?” Ross asks a few minutes later, when I’ve fallen onto my own pillow.

I’d been teasing into sleep, but this wakes me. I scrub at my face before I look at him. “Work. What are you up to today?”

“Gotta put out a bunch of fires. That jackass Bingham can’t do any damn thing right when I’m gone.” He yawns.

I contemplate crawling under the covers and going back to sleep for a few hours, but it would be impossible with him in the house. He will turn on the television or bang the dresser drawers. Run the coffee grinder. He will shake me gently to ask me where to find his socks, his keys. “No, don’t get up,” he’ll say. “I can make my own breakfast.” But I know he wants me to do it, because I’m here and because he’d much rather not do it himself.

I leave my husband in the bed. In the bathroom, I run the water and splash my face. It’s cold, and I swallow it greedily, feeling the chill slip down my throat and hit my too-empty stomach. I fill a paper cup from the dispenser and take it to him.

Ross looks at me as if I’m crazy. “What’s this?”

“I thought you might want a drink.”

“No,” he says with a shake of his head. “I’m not thirsty.”

He pats me on the ass when he passes. I hear the shower running, and I sit on the bed with my paper cup of water still in my hands, and I close my eyes against a sudden sting of tears.

From behind me, cradled in its dock, my phone buzzes with an email message. It will be Naveen, I think, emailing me to remind me about the shipments due to the Philly gallery later today. Or it could be my brother’s wife following up on summer vacation plans. Or it could be junk mail that has slipped through my carefully constructed set of spam filters and is now clogging my in-box. But the message pinging so cheerfully isn’t any of those.

It’s from Will.

Chapter Four

Will takes pictures of buildings.

I’m here to carry things or hold them while he points and shoots. Skyline shots, he tells me, are really popular for stock photography. At home, he’ll manipulate some of them in Photoshop.

“Post apocalyptic scenes,” he tells me with a grin. “Make the city look deserted. Ready for zombies, that sort of thing.”

I’m holding his tote bag over one shoulder, an extra-large cup of coffee in one hand. “Uh-huh.”

“You don’t like zombies.” It’s not a question. He says it as if he already knows me. He points his camera. Takes a picture. Doesn’t even look to see how it came out, just takes another. And another.

“Not really.”

He gives me another grin, his eyes narrowing in sunshine that’s too bright for this time of year. “Vampires that sparkle?”

“No.” I laugh. Shake my head. “Not a horror fan.”

“What do you like, Elisabeth? Chick flicks? Rom-com?” Point. Shoot. He aims the camera in my direction and clicks before I can look away.

Sneaky.

“I like action movies. Lots of shooting and muscle cars. Science fiction, too.” I’d put a hand in front of my face, but that would be too obvious. I hate it when women protest with squeals and cooing about getting their pictures taken, as if the world will end. Or their souls will be stolen. It’s worse than the ones who pose and pout and primp anytime a camera’s within range.

I don’t want him to take my picture because then there will be proof I’m here with him. Not that I have any reason to deny it. I’m in the city on business. I had breakfast with Naveen. Stopped by the gallery to handle some things. I met with Will for coffee, that’s all. And now to follow him through the city as he takes pictures for his stock work. There’s nothing wrong in what I’m doing.

He takes me to a park. We stare together at the giant Easter Island–looking head in the middle of it, neither of us saying much. Just beyond it, a line of people waiting for milk shakes from a stand stretches nearly all the way around the park.

“Those must be some pretty fucking amazing milk shakes,” Will says after a minute or so.

I burst into laughter. It’s loud. Raucous. Unfettered, that’s a good way to describe it, and I stifle it with my hand when he smiles at me.

The weather’s so much nicer today than it was the night we met. The air light and clear and warm enough for me to understand why someone might wait half an hour for a milk shake. I want to stretch out on a blanket in the grass and stare up at the sky.

Will takes a picture of the statue, then looks at the digital image on his view screen. “...Art,” he mutters. “Jesus.”

“You don’t like it?” I follow him along the path toward the street again, but spy something that stops me. I bend to pick it up, already grinning. “Oh!”

“I’m just jealous. What’s that?” Will says, leaning over me.

The shiny piece of gravel’s been broken into a misshapen heart. I lay it flat on my palm to show him. I trace the outline. “See?”

“Cool.” He sounds as if he means it.

“I collect them.” I study this one for a second or so, then look at him. “Silly, I know.”

“It’s not silly.” Will takes a picture of the rock on my palm. “It means you have a creative eye. Most people would’ve passed right by that. Never looked twice. I wouldn’t have.”

His praise warms me. My fingers close over the rock. I feel the press of it against my flesh. Impulsively, I hold it out to him. “Here.”

He looks surprised. “What? No. It’s yours, for your collection.”

“I have a lot and I always find more. You have it.” I hold it out again. “Now that you’ve seen this one, I bet you find them all over, too.”

Will takes the rock and keeps it in his hand for a second or so before tucking it into his pocket. We stare at each other the way we’d both looked at the giant white statue of a head. Pondering.

“What else?” I ask him when I can’t look at his face any longer.

“I have a commission for some underground stuff. You up for it?”

I can take the train into and out of the city, and I can find my way around once I’m there, but I always take cabs. I’ve never mastered the subway. I have a secret, not-unfounded fear of getting on the wrong train and ending up lost, and the smells can be overpowering. The sound of the subway, the clatter-clatter, echoing, hurts my teeth and coats my tongue with the taste of gray.

“Of course.”

It’s easy for me to imagine H.G. Wells’s Morlocks down here under the city, creeping along the tunnels and snacking on innocent tourists in I Love NY T-shirts and fanny packs. Will is serious as he takes shot after shot of the escalators, the curving tile walls, the dirty concrete.

Watching him, I say nothing. I hand him his bag when he asks for it, and hold it when he doesn’t. Every so often, he shoots me a grin, and every time he does I’m surprised again that I’m here.

“I’m all done for today,” he says at last. “C’mon. Let’s go back to my place, see what I got. I’ll make you dinner.”

“Oh...I...” My mouth tries to make the noises that mean no, but it’s useless. I’m already following him. I knew when he asked me to meet him today I’d be going back to his place. “Sure. Great.”

Will leads and I follow.

He does make me dinner. Pasta, bread, salad. Wine. I eat but taste nothing. We talk, and I hear the sound of my own voice in answer to his, but if you asked me what it was I said, I’m not sure I could tell you. I watch his hands, fingers on the fork twirling spaghetti. The sleek fringes of hair in front of his ears, against his cheeks. When he gets up to refill my wineglass, I breathe him in and keep myself from touching him by keeping my hands on the table, instead.

Time for me to leave. I stand in Will’s foyer, and I look at the door I know I should go through. But first, of course, there’s got to be a goodbye.

How do I say it? What do I do? I offer my hand, because what else is there to do for a man who is not my friend, and still mostly a stranger? Will, with a small, strange smile, takes my hand, and I think that’s the hand he uses to jerk off with.

It happens all at once, so smoothly, how he pulls me close to him. He is going to kiss me. I am going to let him.

At the last second, I turn my face. I can’t do it. To feel his mouth on mine would be too much. It’s already all too much. Will smiles and everything inside me melts, liquid, running hot. He pulls me closer. He doesn’t kiss my mouth.

He kisses my neck, not softly or accidentally, but entirely on purpose. I don’t cringe and I don’t pull away. I offer myself to him as if I was waiting for this all along, and maybe I was and didn’t know it. But the first moment I feel the scratching brush of his stubble on my skin, all I can do is give up to it.

I give up to him.

My fingers thread through the back of his hair, holding his mouth closer to the sensitive skin of my neck as my own lips part on a sigh I cannot contain within the jail of my throat. Then my back is against the wall and Will presses against me, but he didn’t push me. I went there on my own. I pulled him against me. His leg eases between mine, his thigh pressing. My heel hooks over his calf. His kiss slides along my throat and jaw, but again, when he tries to kiss my mouth, I turn my head. My hands find the hem of his shirt. Don’t do it, I tell myself. Don’t. But I do it, anyway; I lift his shirt and let my fingertips find his smooth, hot skin underneath. His back. His stomach. The flat of my hand slides across him, and it’s not enough. It will never be enough.

“I have to go. I really should go.” Murmured between kisses against his throat, the words are insincere. No matter what I should do, what I have to do, I’m not leaving.

Will pauses, his breath hot on my cheek. He doesn’t move away, and oh, God, I can feel his cock, hard through his jeans, the thick ridge of it against my belly. I am undone.

We stay that way for the in-and-out of three or four breaths. My hands are still under his shirt. I blink rapidly, a puddle of silk ribbons in my brain for a couple seconds when my fingertips skid along the small indents of his spine. Crimson silk ribbons, that’s what his skin feels like.

“You should go,” he whispers. “You really should go.”

But I’m not leaving, I’m following a few stumbling steps toward the small alcove beneath the loft, and the couch there. Leather, overstuffed... I think it’s black but it might be brown; I can’t focus on the color or the pattern of the pillows. My hands are flat on his chest, and Will lets me push him back onto the couch. Then I’m on top of him, straddling, my dress hiked up around my thighs, and his hands are skimming the edge of the fabric the same way mine did with the bottom of his shirt, and all I can think about is how much I want him to touch me.

Everything is hands and mouth and teeth and lips and tongue. We fumble, and it doesn’t matter. Laughter stutters out of me like rocks skipping on a lake. I bend over him, yank at his belt, freeing him. My hair falls in my face, and he pushes it back so he can get at my neck again. My throat. I can not get enough of him.

I push up his shirt, then pull it off over his head. Smooth, smooth skin. Hot. My fingers curl against his ribs. He has a tattoo, a stylized bird over his heart. My thighs grip his. His erection nudges me, thick and hard, and all I can think about is touching him. My hand strokes. His hips push upward. A groan slips from his throat.

I did that.

I did that to him.

I want him bare in my fist. I want him in my mouth. I want Will’s cock inside me, but when he sits up with me still on his lap and his hands move beneath my dress, when he once more leans to take my mouth, everything slams to a halt. I tense and freeze, muscles going stiff.

“Not on the mouth,” I whisper, feeling instantly stupid. What is this, Pretty Woman?

Will doesn’t seem to mind. He mouths my jaw instead. His fingers slide along my skin, under my dress, between my legs, just a quick and almost surreptitious swipe against me. It feels so fucking good I want to writhe.

What am I doing, what am I doing, what the fuck am I doing? The thought is like a train, rushing, no end to it that I can see. I curl my fingers over his and push them inside my panties. Against my clit.

“Oh...yes.” The words slip out unbidden, but completely sincere. I shift a little so he can push his fingers inside me.

“Oh, shit,” Will mutters. “Goddamn.”

I wriggle out of my panties as he pushes down his briefs and jeans. Straddling him again, I take his cock at the base and rub the head of him against my slick, wet opening. Over my clit in small, tight circles.

We both groan. I rub myself on his cock, or rub his cock on me, I can’t tell the difference anymore. All I feel is his hard flesh on mine and the spiraling, tightening coil of pleasure. I’m going to come before I even put him inside me.

I move up, just a little, one hand on his shoulder, the other still gripping his cock to hold him steady while I fit myself over him. Slowly, so slowly, I ease myself down until he’s inside me all the way. I can’t move. I can’t think. My fingers have left red marks on his skin, but I can’t even make myself let go.

Will puts his hands on my hips, under my dress. On my bare skin. He moves. He shifts. He pushes inside me, just a little deeper than I thought he could go. Then out.

We move together, then, perfectly in sync. We find a rhythm, set a pace. Everything is slip and slide, no bad friction. My clit hits his pelvis every time I move, but that’s not quite enough, so I use my hand. I know how my body works. My fingers tweak at my clit, small circles. Then I’m up, up, up and over. Everything tenses. Releases.

Will cries out, low, a murmur of blue and green and gold. The syllables of my name float between us. I have never seen my name that way, in those colors, not from any other voice. I feel him throb inside me. That’s never happened, either. It might be my imagination. I don’t care. I watch his mouth open.

Everything slows. The beat of our hearts. Our breathing. I lean to press my forehead to his shoulder. I trace the bird with my fingertip and taste salt when I kiss him there.

I get off him. Find my panties and pull them on. I turn to give him privacy as he pulls up his briefs and jeans, but he’s still shirtless when he touches my shoulder to turn me. I’m not sure what to say or where to look.

“I really should go,” I tell him.

He walks me to the door, where we do not kiss. We don’t even hug. I offer him my hand to shake, and he takes it with a low laugh and a quirk of one brow, but he doesn’t question it. His hand is strong and warm. It squeezes mine.

Then he lets me go.

Chapter Five

I didn’t like Naveen the first time I met him. He was charming and full of himself, a shameless flirt. I guess you could say his sin was that he came on to my roommate before he hit on me, even though I had a boyfriend at the time. That relationship wasn’t working out so well, but even so I wasn’t supposed to care if other boys tried to make me laugh or not.

I’d just met my roommate, Wendi, that day. We’d spoken on the phone once or twice and exchanged a letter, our conversations limited to what we’d each be bringing to the dorm room. Wendi had a fridge. I had a small TV with rabbit ears. We both liked Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls and the color purple, though she was way more interested in coordinating our bedding than I was. We’d already agreed to bunk our beds and switch off who got the top bunk by semester. Wendi was a big girl, buxom and curvy, with lots of red hair and black eyeliner. So far I liked her, even though all the guys at this freshman mixer kept checking her out and ignoring me.

“Hey, ladies. I’m Naveen.” He leaned over the registration table, both hands flat on it. Instead of the T-shirt and jeans most of the other guys were wearing, he wore a pale pink dress shirt, open so far at the throat I could glimpse a hint of his nipples. “Have you signed up yet?”

“For what?” Wendi tossed her hair and put a hand on her hip. Bada-bing, bada-boom.

Naveen’s eyes tracked her cleavage. “If you sign up for this mailing list, you can get one of these welcome bags.”

“What’s in it?” Wendi gave the overstuffed plastic bags, adorned with pictures of deodorant and laundry detergent, a suspicious look.

“I’ll take one.” I scrawled my name and mailbox number on the sheet and took a bag. “It’s free stuff.”

“Laundry soap, mouthwash, stuff like that. Samples.” Naveen looked at what I’d written, then gave me a more assessing look than he’d given Wendi. “Did you put your phone number down?”

“No.” I paused. “Why would they need my number?”

“They don’t,” he said. “But maybe I want it.”

In those days before cell phones, each dorm room had a landline with both long distance and cross-campus service, so you could dial a prefix for the building and then the room number to connect. All he had to do was look at the mailbox number I’d put down on the paper, and he could figure it out. That’s why I discounted his flirting, why it annoyed me. Because I didn’t believe he meant it.

“And maybe I don’t want you to have it,” I told him with a lift of my chin, toss of my hair.

Wendi hadn’t moved, but she was no longer there. Nobody else was, either. Naveen leaned a little closer across the table, his smile never fading, his eyes not leaving mine.

“If you say so.”

“I’ll take a bag.” Wendi wiggled in front of me, distracting him for a second as she bent over to show him her tits—that is, to fill out the form.

The moment had passed, but it had made an impression. The common room filled with new students mingling and taking advantage of the free food the residence staff had put out. Some kids danced in one corner, others played pool or Ping-Pong, a few gathered at the even-for-then ancient Pacman and Donkey Kong video games. Naveen and I didn’t speak, but our eyes met a dozen times over the course of the night. When Wendi left me to go after a guy with spiky blond hair and a pair of round glasses, I went upstairs to finish unpacking.

She stumbled home around two in the morning, turning on the overhead light and knocking into the stack of plastic milk crates we’d set up near the wall mirror to hold our hair dryers and curling irons. I sat straight up in my bottom bunk and whacked my head so hard I saw stars. She wasn’t alone. The blond guy was with her, apologizing to me while my new roommate rifled through her suitcase for condoms. With blood trickling down my eyebrow, I assured him I’d be fine, I just needed a Band-Aid. I told Wendi I’d be gone at least an hour. I took a book, the knitted afghan my grandma had given me as a graduation gift, my room key, and tried to find a place to hang out.

The study lounge was no good. The lights were out, but I could still see the shadows of a couple on the couch inside, their slow coupling reflected in the windows. Disgruntled, exhausted and my head aching, I took the elevator to the ground floor and sought the social lounge. It was locked.

I muttered a string of obscenities under my breath—creative ones; my younger brother, Davis, was a marine. I didn’t notice the figure sitting behind the front desk in the lobby, and he wasn’t yet familiar enough that I should’ve immediately recognized his voice...but I did. The scent of it gave him away. Cotton candy and sawdust. Naveen sounds to me like a carnival smells. I hadn’t noticed upon first meeting him, because of the rest of the noise around us, but in the quiet of 2:00 a.m. it was as if I’d stepped right onto the midway.

“What happened to your head?” He twirled a little on an office chair, his feet propped on the battered desk.

“I hit it.”

He made a face. “No shit.”

I touched the wound with gentle fingers, wincing at the tenderness. It had stopped bleeding but still oozed a little. “My roommate came home with a friend I wasn’t expecting.”

“Ah.” Naveen nodded as if this made sense. He dropped his feet off the desk with a thump and opened a drawer. “Come around the side, through that door. Come in here.”

I hesitated. He looked at me. Gone were the charming smile, assessing stare. He looked me over, all right, but this time it didn’t make me feel creepy or annoyed.

He held up a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a box of adhesive bandages. “Come on. Let me take care of that for you.”

I went through the door and settled into the opposite chair with my afghan wrapped around me. I wasn’t cold, exactly, but felt on the verge of shivering. I wasn’t homesick, but the sudden longing for my own bed, my own room, swept over me.

“Chin up. This isn’t pretty.” Naveen soaked a cotton ball in peroxide and dabbed at my wound.

Stoic, I didn’t wince, not wanting to give him the satisfaction. “Gee. Thanks.”

“I didn’t say you’re not pretty,” he said in a low voice after a second. “You sure are prickly, Elisabeth Manning.”

I was surprised that he knew my name, only for a second before remembering he’d seen it on the form I filled out. I gritted my teeth as he poked and swiped at the cut on my forehead. When he smoothed the bandage over it, his fingers lingered along my scalp line and traced my cheeks and jaw before he withdrew.

We stared at each other without speaking for some long moments before Naveen broke the silence with a laugh and pushed back in his chair to prop his feet up again. Hands behind his head, charming smile pasted firmly back on his face, he winked at me. I frowned.

“Oh, come on. Throw a guy a bone.”

“Are you a dog?” I asked him smartly, refusing to smile.

Naveen blinked, his smile fading. “Are you a bitch?”

That was how we became friends.

Chapter Six

“What’s wrong with you?” Naveen’s voice has lost its cotton-candy sweetness. Now he sounds like licorice. He gestures at the pile of receipts and papers spread out on the desk in front of me, but doesn’t touch any of them.

I’ve been sitting here all morning, passing papers back and forth between my hands. Filing only a few. Finishing nothing, unable to concentrate on anything but the memory of what happened with Will. It’s been three days, and I haven’t yet felt guilty.

Until now, and that’s about ignoring my work and not because of my infidelity. I shrug, carefully not meeting Naveen’s gaze. “Nothing. What’s wrong with you?”

Naveen scowls. He paces in front of the desk, one hand on his hip, the other pressed to his forehead. It’s a common enough pose for him, because he likes to make drama. But today, something seems off. He’s agitated and anxious, not just dramatic. His dark brows knitted, black eyes narrowed, he won’t quite meet my gaze. When he turns suddenly and pushes the piles of paper to the side so he can lean across the desk to grip my upper arms, I’m more startled by the shuffle of the papers falling than how close his face is to mine.

“I’m in trouble, Betts. Bad trouble.”

He’s gripping a little too hard, but releases me when I look at where his fingers pinch. This close, I can see how his carefully groomed eyebrows need some attention. Red threads the usually bright whites of his eyes. There’s a tremor in his voice that for an instant looks like the quicksilver flash of a fish in a dark pond. Surprising, and gone before you really can be sure it was there at all.

“Are you sick? Is it money?”

Naveen always skates on the edge of financial disaster. Backed not only by his wife’s trust fund, but her steady employment as a doctor, he’s been free to pursue just about whatever he likes without much fear of facing the consequences. Not just in business, either, and I was stupid for a few seconds too long before I looked into his face and understood.

“The girl from the gallery show?”

He shakes his head and moves away, to sit on the edge of the desk with his back toward me. His shoulders hunch as he heaves a heavy sigh so deep it alarms me. This is not the Naveen I’d met in college, the one who’d had a habit of lounging half-naked in my doorway with his pants hanging low on his hips and a wicked smile that made me feel I was on an elevator that had just dropped ten floors. I’ve known this man for more than twenty years and have seen him cry only once, the night his father died.

I go around the desk to sit beside him, my fingers gentle but firm on his shoulder, not forcing him to turn toward me but letting him know he can. “Someone else.”

He’s not crying, but his smile is too fierce. “Her name is Francesca. She’s Italian. She buys a lot of art.”

I say nothing, waiting for him to go on. She can’t be pregnant. Naveen had a vasectomy a few years ago, came into the office moaning about ice packs and his swollen balls, expecting me to fetch him coffee and sympathy.

Naveen looks me in the eyes. “I love her, Betts. Oh, God. I don’t want to, but I do.”

I’m so set back by this that I actually scoot an inch or so away from him across the polished desk. The word love has always tasted like the scent of fresh ink and soft paper to me. Like a newly written poem. But hearing it now, in this context, I taste the moldering smell of musty books left unread for years.

“Her husband is older. He travels a lot, so he’s gone. He has a few mistresses....” Naveen’s voice trails off with a tremor that’s not so much like a quicksilver fish this time. More like the slow rise of an enormous shadow beneath the surface of a quiet lake. “I’m crazy about her.”

“You’re crazy, all right,” I tell him flatly. I’m no longer touching him, though I can’t remember taking away my hand. “What is wrong with you, Naveen?”

“She makes me...feel,” he says, as though that should explain it all.

Maybe it does.

It’s my turn to pace, to run my hands through my hair. Naveen’s slept with dozens of women that I know about, and I’d guess there are at least as many I haven’t heard of. He’s never been faithful to anyone for as long as I’ve known him. I’ve never asked him if Puja knows about his affairs, nor if she knows about us. The us that never happened, that is.

Jealousy smells like the water in the bottom of a flower vase after the flowers have died. It doesn’t taste much better. I recoil not just at the odor and the flavor, but with the knowledge that I am jealous of this woman I don’t even know.

This is what makes me sit again to take his hand. Our fingers link and squeeze before I let him go, though his hand still rests on my thigh. “So...what’s the problem? She doesn’t love you back?”

“She does.”

I watch the tips of his fingers trace small circles on the fabric of my skirt. Naveen’s nails are a little too long, and I can feel the scratch of them against my skin even through the fabric. I put my hand on his to stop the restless movement. We’re close enough to kiss, though I’m not expecting him to try, and I’d pull away if he did. His head dips, eyes closed so his lashes make a shadow on his skin.

“I’ve been with a lot of women....” he begins, and I laugh. Naveen opens his eyes and manages a smile. “It’s true.”

“I know it’s true, you jerk,” I say, but fondly.

“But Francesca is different. I can’t stop thinking about her. Everything about her makes me crazy. The way she talks, the way she smells. Her laugh. She’s smart and funny and...fuck me, Betts. I love her.”

His sincerity is evident in every syllable. I want to pull away, but I don’t. “So what are you going to do? Leave Puja and the kids?”

I can’t imagine it. Naveen has too much tied up in his family. Pride and money and, despite his philandering, I’m willing to bet a lot of love.

“Francesca ended it.” His misery is as bold as his sincerity. “She said she wants to stay with her husband. She said we could be friends—” Laughter barks out of him. He gives his head an incredulous shake. “Friends? Like we’re in the tenth grade?”

“If you love her, you should already have been friends.” I sound sanctimonious.

Naveen gives me a look. “I’m not sure I know how to be just friends with a woman I want to fuck, Betts.”

His words are a slap that rocks my head back, just a little. I’m off the desk again, several steps away, before I realize I’ve moved. My arms cross over my stomach for a second until I realize I’m looking defensive, and I refuse to give him that.

Naveen and I have been just friends for a long, long time.

“Shit,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“So what are you doing?” I ask.

He has the grace to look a little sheepish. “I’m being an asshole to her.”

Flashback. A memory of my hand, rapping on his dorm room door. I’ve brought a pizza and some movies to watch in his VCR, and my heart’s pounding, pounding, because it’s been a week since we last talked and that conversation hadn’t ended well. The food and films are an excuse; I’ve really come to fuck.

The door opens, and he’s there of course, chest and feet bare. And behind him, the girl. I don’t know her name, but does it matter?

“Hey,” Naveen says, as though he was expecting me. He probably was. “I’m sort of busy now. Can you come back later?”

But I didn’t, and it took months for us to talk again. I know very well just what kind of asshole Naveen can be. “Of course you are.”

He frowns, but doesn’t look angry. Only resigned. He shrugs. “I love her. She rejected me. It’s what I do, Betts.”

“I know what you do.” My voice is clipped and sharp and diamond-edged. “Maybe you shouldn’t fuck around with married women then. Maybe you shouldn’t fuck around at all, you think?”

He looks at first surprised, then wary. For all the years I’ve shared his secrets, I’ve never once judged him for any. I can’t even look him in the eyes now, though, because for once I have my own secret.

“Will,” Naveen says, looking past me, and I think that he knows.

But it’s actually Will, standing awkwardly in the doorway, not looking at either of us. One shoulder presses the door frame, one hand cups the back of his neck as he studies the floor. When he does look up, his gaze skims my face before settling on Naveen’s.

“Hey,” he says.

Naveen pulls away from me. Straightens. His warning look annoys me—as if I’d say anything more, now that we have an audience? My pride might be stung, but it’s an old wound. I stand and straighten, too, putting distance between me and Naveen that’s meant to look casual but probably doesn’t.

When I look at Will, the world stops for the time it takes him to blink and move forward to shake Naveen’s hand. They clap each other on the back. Will catches my gaze over Naveen’s shoulder, but I can’t read it. Then they’re out of my office and into the hall outside, talking about some photographs Will’s going to be showing next month.

And I’m alone.

Somehow, I find the concentration to finish paying bills and filing invoices, following up on emails and phone calls and chasing down bank statements to prove to artists that, yes, someone really did cash our checks and if it wasn’t them, they’d better take it up with whoever had learned to forge their signatures. An hour passes, then another. There’s other work to be done, but it’s on the desktop in my Philadelphia office, and while I usually bring my laptop and flash drives with everything I need, this morning I was so distracted I forgot. So now I sit and stare out the window at the city and pretend I’m not straining my ears for any sound of Will’s voice.

I fucked him.

There is no way around this, no way to make it pretty or anything other than what it is. I went to his apartment, and I let him put his hands and mouth on me, his prick inside me, and it was not by accident or coercion or because I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing. I fucked Will Roberts because I wanted him.

That’s when the shudder hits me, a tremor in my fingers, a twisting in my guts that bends me in half. My heart pounds so hard I press my fingers to it as if I can keep it from beating right out of my chest. I shake and shake and shake. My breath whistles in my throat until I press my lips together and force myself not to breathe for the count of one, two, three.

Calmer, steadier, I open my eyes.

Will stands in the doorway as if it’s a line he’s not allowed to cross. “Hey. Coffee?”

I should tell him I can’t go. I shouldn’t want to go. But I’m already standing, ready to follow him anywhere he takes me.

Chapter Seven

Because I still haven’t learned the neighborhood, we walk around the block until we find a place. Any other street in New York would have a dozen coffee/bagel/pastry shops, but not this one. We settle for a small diner that shows off what looks like decent pastries and questionable sandwiches in the case by the hostess stand. The coffee, as it turns out, is terrible. Will orders a slice of German chocolate cake. I ask for a muffin.

“Sugar?” Will asks, fingers hovering over the small ceramic container in which the sweetener packets have been shoved haphazardly, a rainbow of pastels.

“Two. Please,” I add quickly. So polite. So distant. Three days ago I had him naked and inside me, and now I can barely let my fingers touch his when he hands me the packets. I taste the coffee with a grimace and ask apologetically, “Can I have another, please?”

We warm our hands on the mugs and stare at anything except each other. The waitress brings the cake, but tells me they’re out of muffins. My disappointment is out of proportion to my need for a shitty diner muffin, and I can’t stop the frown. She offers cake, but I don’t want cake. Or pie. Really, I think as I watch her rattling off the list of desserts, all I want is for her to shut up and go away. I order lemon meringue and expect to hate it when it comes.

“So,” Will says after a second, when she’s finally gone and we have no excuse to keep ignoring each other. “How are you?”

“Fine. You?” I sip bad coffee and burn my tongue.

At first, he says nothing. Then he gives me a slow smile, sweeter than the extra sugar I added to my coffee. His smile is the kiss of ocean spray and the keening cry of gulls.

“I wasn’t sure you’d be at the gallery today.” A pause as perhaps he considers what to say next. “But I was hoping you would be. That’s why I stopped by.”

Tension eases inside me, and I find my own smile. “I’m glad you did.”

Again, he says nothing.

“Will...” I begin, stuttering on the flavor of his name. I can’t decide exactly what it is, but it feels gritty. Like sugar. No, like sand. “About what happened...”

An emotion I can’t decipher flashes across his face, and everything about him goes very still. His fingers turn the coffee mug. Turn and turn and turn. He leans forward, shoulders hunching, and rests his elbows on the table.

“Yeah. About that.”

Before he can say more, my phone trills. I didn’t program that ring tone, Jacqueline did, to set her apart from her sister and, I suppose, from everyone else. I’d ignore the call, but the look on his face says he’s expecting me to take it. And the truth is, I’m glad for an excuse to stall this conversation, because I’m not at all sure where it’s going.

“Hi, honey.”

Jac walked at nine months and talked at eleven, and she hasn’t slowed down or stayed quiet since. She is my in-charge child, bold and opinionated, capable of compassion but not so great with tact. She resembles me more than her sister does, but she’s absolutely her father’s girl.

“I wanted to wish you Happy Birthday today, because I’m going to be camping on the weekend. No cell service.” She launches into the conversation without much preamble, but I can hear the smile in her voice. “Happy Birthday, Mama! Sorry I won’t be home for it.”

“It’s fine. When you get to be my age, birthdays aren’t such a big deal.” Ross is the one who believes that, not me. I’d make my birthday a month-long holiday if I could, but it’s kind of hard to celebrate it alone. “Thanks, though. Who’s going camping?”

“Just me and Jeff. State park. Roughing it.” Jac’s laugh is almost identical to the trilling tone she programmed into my phone, all burbling bubbles, the warble of a bird. “Tents and everything.”

“Sounds fun. Be careful,” I add, because I have to and she expects it, not because I fear my daughter will be reckless. She always knows where she’s going and how long it will take to get there.

I envy her that.

“Gotta go. Happy Birthday!”

“Thanks.”

“Make Daddy take you to dinner or something.”

“I will,” I tell her, though at that very moment I’m not sure I’ll be hungry for a long, long time. “Bye.”

Call disconnected, I give Will a small smile. “My daughter.”

“It’s your birthday?”

“Sunday,” I tell him with a small shrug.

“Got any big plans?”

“No. It’s kind of a milestone birthday,” I say suddenly, revealing something I wasn’t expecting to tell him. “Not a big one. Halfway to the big one, I guess.”

Will’s smile crinkles lines at the corners of his eyes. “Forty?”

I’m so convinced he’s pulling my chain, I burst into laughter I hide immediately behind my hand. He looks confused, still smiling, his head tilting a little to look me over. “No?”

“Um, no. Thanks, though. Not quite. I’ll be forty-five.” It doesn’t sound so bad out loud, though in my head I’ve been testing it out for the past few weeks. “Seems like a lot bigger step from forty-four than it did from forty-three.”

The number five to me is the color Crayola used to call burnt sienna and we always called “baby poop brown.” It could be why it’s my least favorite number. Why this birthday, perhaps, has hit me so much harder than the last few, because when I think of being forty-five, the four—which has always been a nondescript and inoffensive cloud-gray—is overshadowed by that ugly color. I learned not to tell people that numbers had color and flavors had shape, about the prickly sensation in my fingertips when I drank wine. I’d never even told Ross, not really, although I was sure Katherine had a least a little bit of the same thing. We never discussed it, but once when she was a child she’d told me very seriously that the colors on her building blocks were wrong. They didn’t “match.”

“Wait for forty-eight,” he says. “That’s when you really look fifty in the face.”

It’s my turn to be surprised. I’d been sure I was older than him, and by more than a few years. “You’re kidding me.”

“I could show you my driver’s license,” he offers, but I wave my hand.

We stare at each other as if this new knowledge has changed things, and maybe it has. We’re both too old to behave like kids, maybe that’s what we just learned. Or maybe it’s that we’re both adults who know what they want and how to get it.

“So,” Will says after a few more seconds. “About what happened.”

The memory of feeling his skin unfurls in my mind like a flower, and I can’t stop the hitch of my breath or thump of my heart. Will has no more smile. There’s definitely no flirting in the gaze he cuts so carefully from mine. The table between us is so small his knees bump mine every time he shifts, and yet I feel so very, very faraway. When he looks at the plain gold band on my left hand, I know what he’s going to say.

“We shouldn’t have,” Will says.

“Of course we shouldn’t have. But we did.”

The veneer tabletop is patterned with interlocking circles, orange on cream. It would be retro if it wasn’t probably legitimately from the fifties. Will traces the circles, one to the other, making a figure eight. When he looks up at me, his gaze is flat, and I don’t know him well enough to tell if this is one of his usual expressions.

He waits a few seconds before answering. “I just don’t want you to think I’m trying to cause trouble for you or anything. That’s all.”

“I didn’t think that.” Of course I didn’t, just as I never dreamed I’d be sitting across from him, watching him struggle with how to tell me he doesn’t want to fuck me again.

“Good.” Will shifts, clearly uncomfortable and maybe more than a little relieved that I’m not...what? Going to go all Fatal Attraction on him?

If he knew me, he’d know that would never happen, but Will does not know me. We are strangers who shared an unexpected intimacy. Nothing more.

“I just don’t think that it would be...good.” He clears his throat. Awkwardness. I’m blushing just watching him work at finding the right words, his struggle as painful as if it were my own. “Um, you know. Long term. For either one of us. To keep on with this.”

“No.”

“I don’t think married people should fuck around,” he says suddenly, harshly enough to set me back.

There’s something important I need him to know. To make myself clear. “I wasn’t out looking to be unfaithful, Will. It just happened.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and I believe he means it.

“Don’t be,” I tell him, when I get up from the table and put a few dollars down to cover the cost of our order. “I’m not.”

Chapter Eight

The restaurant has been our favorite for a long time, since we moved into this neighborhood, which makes it close to twenty-two years. Demetri and his wife, Anatola, make the best gyros I’ve ever had, along with a homemade Greek dressing so good it should be illegal. I come here for every birthday. It’s tradition.

While we wait for our food, Ross slides a box across the table toward me. “Happy Birthday.”

I’d not-so-subtly hinted to him that I wanted a pair of black riding boots. Not for riding, of course. For fashion. I’d sent him links, told him the size. This box is too small to be a pair of riding boots.

It’s a pair of quilted, ankle-high boots. Not red or even rust, but an off shade of dusty orange. They are not my size. They are hideous. I will never, ever wear them.

“You said you wanted boots,” he says, clearly pleased with his purchase. “I picked these up when I was in Chicago.”

I slide the lid closed and smile. Big and bright. “Thank you.”

Over dinner, Ross talks about work and golf and something his buddies did, the outrageous things another friend’s wife was doing, but I’m concentrating on my salad. I chase a black olive around the plate with my fork; it’s hard to catch because it has a pit in it, and I can’t dig the tines in deep enough. I don’t really even want it. I like my olives pitted. But I’ll eat it anyway, because it tastes so good, and I’ll spit the pit into the palm of my hand and be uncertain about where to put it.

“...She wants the dog,” Ross says. “Can you believe that bitch? You don’t take a man’s dog.”

This snags my attention. Lifts my head. “What?”

“She wants the dog,” Ross repeats, with a stab of his fork toward me. “Can you believe it?”

“What makes it his dog?” I know the friends he’s talking about. Kent and Jeanine Presley. We aren’t that close, though we’ve been to their house for parties. I remember the wife. She had round cheeks and a pixie cut that somehow flattered her anyway, and everything about her had made me think of ponies. Not because of the thing in my brain that turned sounds into shapes and colors into flavors, but just because sometimes people remind you of things that have nothing to do with who they actually are or what they do.

Ross stops with a bite of salad halfway to his mouth. “What?”

I’ve captured the olive, but now I really don’t want it. I rub it through a smear of dressing as though that will convince my mouth to take it, but instead of sour olive flesh and the hard pit, my mouth has words. “I said, what makes it his dog?”

“Of course it’s his dog.”

“Why isn’t it her dog, just as much?” I think of the parties we’ve gone to at their gleaming and spotless house. The hors d’oeuvres on special plates designed for just that purpose. Him at the grill outside, flipping burgers, but leaving all the rest for his wife. “I’m sure she’s the one who took care of it most of the time, anyway.”

“What difference does that make?”

I put my fork down. “Probably a lot.”

“Not to the dog,” he says.

I laugh. “But it’s not the dog who gets to decide, is it?”

“You don’t take a man’s dog,” Ross says pointedly, and stabs more salad. “You just don’t.”

“I didn’t even know they were getting divorced.” I sip water to clear the taste of the dressing from my tongue. It’s delicious, it always is, but tonight everything seems to have a bit of sour taste. “What about the kids?”

Ross shrugs, clearly more concerned about the dog than the rest of the details. “He’s letting her have the house.”

“How generous.” Not all words have color, but generous has always been a soft powder-blue. It doesn’t match the sarcasm with which I’ve imbued it.

“They’re upside down. He’ll get out of it, find something better. In this market, he can snap something up.” Ross snaps his fingers to demonstrate.

“He can afford to do that?”

Ross pauses in the steady back-and-forth of his fork from plate to mouth. “Well, yeah. She has to buy him out.”

“So then he’s not ‘letting’ her ‘keep’ the house.” I don’t know why this irritates me so much. I barely know Kent and Jeanine, and they were always more Ross’s friends than mine. “She’s paying him for it. And I’m sure she did the lion’s share of taking care of it. So he’s not letting her do anything, he’s getting out from under a debt and starting fresh.”

Ross stares. “Why shouldn’t he?”

“Does she work?”

Shrug. “Sort of. Part-time, I guess.”

“So how can she afford to buy him out of that house?” It was twice as big as ours, and in a more expensive neighborhood.

“Look, I don’t know all the details, okay? It wasn’t really my business. I guess she’s going to make payments to him or something. And forfeit her share of the retirement. Whatever, Bethie, what do you care? You don’t even like Jeanine.”

That’s not quite true. I don’t know her well enough to not like her. I wince a little at the spurs of burnt umber spiking my name the way he says it. I’ve never liked it when he calls me that, but he still does no matter how many times I ask him not to. “Why are they getting divorced?”

“People grow apart,” Ross says stiffly, in a way that tells me he knows more than he’s letting on, but won’t share it.

I let it go. I don’t really care. My stomach’s in knots, and it has nothing to do with the end of the Presleys’ marriage.

“So she’s saddled with the kids and the house and having to figure out a way to not only get back into the job market to pay for all of it, but she sacrificed her future retirement in order to do it. That’s what it comes down to in the end? Money? After how many years together, two kids...” I pause. “A dog.”

Ross doesn’t notice the layer of sarcasm I put into the word. “Money matters, Beth.”

“Only when you don’t have enough.” The words slip out of me like puffs of black smoke.

He laughs at that. Takes my hand. Strokes his thumb over the palm in the way I told him once, years ago, turned me on. It doesn’t anymore.

“You don’t have to worry about money, honey. I’ll always take care of you.” He laughs again. Making light. “Unless you leave me, of course.”

Nothing about this feels light to me. Not the birthday hitting me harder than I was expecting. Not the way my world has tipped on end and I don’t know how to stand up straight. My fingers curl inside my husband’s to squeeze his hand tight.

“What would happen then?” I ask.

Ross kisses the back of my hand, his breath warm and moist and sending a shiver through me that’s not from arousal. “Oh,” he says with a smile, to show me he’s joking, though I know him well enough to know he’s serious, “I’d make sure you get nothing.”

Chapter Nine

If there’s ever a person who tells you in all their years of marriage they’ve never wondered what it would be like to walk out, you’re talking to a liar. I’d thought it before, when the girls were infants and Ross traveled so much and worked such long hours that I was made a single parent by default. He’d embraced fatherhood with the enthusiasm he had for his golf game. He loved his daughters with everything he had. He simply wasn’t there.

Things got better, as they do when children get older and the constant stream of diapers and feedings eases. Ross was still gone a lot, but the girls and I found our rhythm and routine. I was the taskmaster, he was the guy who came around and treated them to ice cream instead of dinner and brought exotic souvenirs for them to squeal over. It wasn’t so different from the lives of most of our friends. It worked.

My children are grown, getting ready to graduate from college, moving on to jobs and internships and adult lives. The house that had seemed perfect for the four of us now seems too big, too quiet. Too empty. My husband still travels, still works long hours, still spends his leisure time in pursuits that have nothing to do with me. And...what have I done?

I fucked another man. Without a second thought and, so far, without remorse. I’d have done it again, if Will hadn’t so ungracefully extricated himself from the future possibilities.

I’d thought about leaving my husband before. But am I thinking about it now? Sitting at my kitchen table and staring out at my perfectly manicured yard, then around the room at the nearly new appliances, the cabinets we’d just had redone, the pictures of fruit on the walls, I don’t think so.

Ross slides a mug of coffee in front of me. He takes his black, and that’s how he always serves mine even though I don’t. “Morning. What are you up to today?”

“Work.” I’ve worked for over ten years, and he still asks me—when he remembers. As if I have a long social calendar full of mani-pedi appointments and tennis lessons instead of a job.

“Here or the city?”

“Philadelphia’s a city, too, you know,” I tell him.

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