Swim Deep

by BETH KERY

But Prince Charming wasn’t the right descriptor for Evan. Not unless Prince Charming burned.

  He caught my hips when we reached the landing. He gently pushed my front against the wall and pressed his body behind me. I gasped in surprise and abrupt lust at the sensation of my cheek and nipples against the cold plaster and his unrelenting male body behind me. He was hard… hot. For a brief second, I had a moment of misgiving. This thing, whatever it was, between us: it was the kind of thing that could destroy me.

  He brushed back my hair from my neck, and then both of his opened hands charted the shape of my waist and hips for the first time.

  “I’m going to drown in you, Anna,” he breathed out, his rough, quiet voice and his lips moving on my neck, coaxing goose bumps from my skin. “I’ve waited, but it’s been so hard.” He bit gently at the shell of my ear. I shook. I couldn’t believe this was happening. At the same time, the truth glowed like an ember between our pressing bodies, growing hotter. One of his hands crept between me and the wall and swept across my belly. It lowered, leaving a trail of awakened flesh in its wake. He turned my chin—not roughly, but boldly, a hint of desperation in his touch. His mouth closed on my mine at the same moment he cupped my sex.

  I moaned and pushed back against the wall with my hands, increasing the pressure between our bodies. This need was intimidating, but unstoppable. He stroked me with slow, firm, rhythmic caresses until I struggled in his hold. Not because I wanted to get away, but because I was wild to absorb more of him. He ran both his hands up my arms and pinned my wrists against the wall. He broke our kiss and sank his dark head, his lips and teeth scraping the skin between my neck and shoulder.

  Had I guessed this storm raged inside him? Is that why I’d been so confused—so frustrated—by his reserve?

  “Evan,” I whispered. The raw evidence of his desire left me rattled. Exposed.

  “Which room is yours?” he grated out.

  I only had the wherewithal to nod at the door at the end of the hall. He grabbed my hand and led me down the hallway, his mouth set in a grim, unyielding line.

  When the storm finally exploded, it was epic. But I imagined that his need, which grew anguished and even forceful at times, was a tribute to me… to us. I loved it. I craved more.

  All through that night, he made love to me under the cover of darkness.

  When dawn peeked around the blinds, he pressed his mouth to my temple and rose from my very messed up bed.

  “You must be hungry,” he said as he found his strewn clothing on the floor. I loved the sound of his low, rough voice washing over me in the muted morning light.

  “You too,” I murmured amusedly, content to watch him slip naked between the shadows.

  “I’ll go get us some coffee and something to eat.”

  “There’s a café on the corner. A skinny latte with an extra shot of espresso, please?”

  “I thought you were cappuccino with two yellow packets?”

  I laughed, and buried my face in my pillow to hide my rush of euphoria. It didn’t work.

  “What?” he asked, pausing in his dressing and looking over his shoulder. I took in the harsh, unexpected angles of the gray and pale gold palette of his face. The artist in me took over. My infatuated hysterics came to a skidding halt.

  His face held me completely enthralled for a stretched moment. It was as if his features had been separate once, like they’d belonged to different men, and had somehow come to rest uneasily on this face. The mouth belonged to a sensual, sometimes angry person who had learned control the hard way, the brow to a strong man who had known suffering and loss, the nose to a warrior, the rare smile to a fifteen-year-old small-town dreamer and heartbreaker.

  The eyes, which could go hard and also surprisingly soft, belonged to a poet who could see my art. Who could see me. I resisted a wild urge to spring up from the bed and grab my sketchpad. Here was one of the things that had drawn me to Evan Halifax from the very start. His face, staring back at me steadily from the nine by twelve inch screen of my computer, silently speaking to me.

  “Anna?” he asked, his brow creasing in confusion.

  “What? Oh, nothing. It’s just… I was thinking how nice it was. That you know what kind of coffee I drink in the afternoon.” He turned to me slowly, hitching up his pants and swiftly fastening them over his taut abdomen. “But this is our first morning together,” I added.

  “Ah,” he said, his face smoothing into a contained mystery yet again. “And you have a different coffee preference in the mornings.”

  My flash of artistic vision fled. I was having trouble reading him again. But then he took two long strides to the bed and leaned down. He gave me a hard, swift kiss on the mouth. Zap. That electrical conduit between us, that primitive knowledge, sizzled again to life.

  “I want to know all your morning preferences,” he said against my parted lips a moment later. “I want to know what you’d prefer every minute of every day, Anna Solas. I want you to be happy.”

  When he returned twenty minutes later, he kicked off his shoes and tossed off his jacket before he climbed back into bed with me. At first, a playful, intimate mood prevailed. I feasted on almond croissants, fruit from a plastic cup, and his rare smiles.

  I tried to feed him the last strawberry. But his mood had sobered as the light grew brighter in the room. He turned and caught my wrist, the red fruit hovering just inches from his lips. I felt a sinking sensation. His intense passion in bed and our new intimacy could erase that sad, brooding side of him.

  But not forever.

  “What have you got planned today?” he asked me, carefully removing the strawberry from my fingers and dropping it in the cup I held.

  “I’m at the museum today from noon to six,” I said, referring to one of my two jobs. They were definitely jobs, not careers. In my mind, I was a painter, first and always. But according to the IRS, I couldn’t list that officially as my occupation. So until I made enough to support myself with my painting, I paid my rent and kept ramen noodles and canned soup in the pantry by working part-time as both a museum docent at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in sales at a posh, but substantial art gallery called Yume in the Mission Bay area—Tommy Higoshi’s gallery.

  “So you’re not at the gallery this evening?” Evan asked, twisting to set the fruit cup on a nightstand.

  He rolled over to face me. His hand snaked beneath the blanket. He spread it on my naked hip. Sexual awareness flickered through me yet again. His hands were large and warm. If I painted those hands, how could I demonstrate how they had started to encompass my world?

  “Anna?”

  I blinked at his slightly amused tone, willfully jerking my awareness from just beneath his opened hand on my skin and back to our conversation.

  “No, I’m not at the gallery today.”

  “Do you enjoy them? Your jobs?” He ducked his dark head and our mouths met in a brief, warm kiss. I squeezed a curving, dense shoulder muscle in my palm.

  “They aren’t my ideal jobs or anything. But I get by with them well enough.”

  “You’d rather be using your days to paint, wouldn’t you?”

  “God yes. That’s the dream.”

  “Why does it have to be a dream?”

  “Because it’s the opposite of reality,” I said, striving to sound airy despite the nearness of his mouth and his scent and the memories of what we’d done in this bed all night filling my head. He’d dominated my body. My senses. My spirit. It hadn’t been an intentional thing on his part, I don’t think. He hadn’t thought to conquer me. His hunger had ruled him during the night. And it ruled me, in turn. He’d made it clear, somehow, that he’d dominated me sexually because I’d dominated his thoughts.

  “Reality is making rent and paying bills and eating,” I told him.

  He searched my face. “I believe you deserve more than that
.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes. You deserve the opportunity to make your beautiful paintings. To create in the light. To capture it, like only you can.”

  His praise took me back to the first time we’d ever met. It’d been at my first showing at Yume. I vividly recalled how I’d stood there next to Evan Halifax, trembling in the expensive heels I’d borrowed from Ellen Higoshi, as he inspected my paintings.

  It’d felt like a stranger was studying me while I was naked… and I thrillingly allowed it.

  He stared at the painting for what was likely seconds, but felt like an hour.

  “It’s like it is a nature painting, but it’s not… like you’re painting a tree, but a tree seen from a different world.” My lungs burned upon seeing for the first time that small, sexy smile that occasionally shaped his mouth. He flashed a glance at me. “The view from fairyland,” he murmured, his gaze lingering on my face.

  “Are you calling my paintings supernatural?” I joked, trying to diminish the effect of his quiet, deep, voice. But his smile had vanished as he’d returned his attention to the painting.

  “Maybe. What you did with the light on this one is extraordinary. It’s so soft. But your precise technique gives the trees an almost photographic quality.”

  “Thanks. That’s what I was going for. This is part of a series I did in Muir Woods.” I waved in the direction of other paintings. Evan’s attention was caught by the next piece. I followed him when he moved toward it. We paused, and again I experienced his total focus as he studied my work. He was the most handsome, confident man I’d ever met. There was no way I could capture the attention of a guy like him, but apparently, my paintings could. It felt illicit, somehow. Exciting. I searched for something to say to fill the sucking void of silence.

  “Tommy told me once that there are certain words in Japanese that have no equivalent in English. There’s this one word: komorebi,” I said. He gave me a sideways questioning glance. “It means sunlight filtering through trees. You know, that soft, luminous quality it gets? Almost as if it’s alive?” I waved at the canvas. “I wanted to capture that contrast: that intangible glow alongside those hard, enduring trees with roots that go so deep… ”

  I faded off, realizing too late I’d started to ramble.

  “I think maybe you’re like that, aren’t you?”

  I’d blinked in surprise at his quiet question. “Like what? The sequoias?”

  “No. Like the paintings. Soft and hard at once. You may look like cotton candy on the outside, but there’s steel underneath. Isn’t there?”

  “You can’t paint when you’re holed up every day inside the museum or the gallery,” Evan was saying, his voice pulling me soundly back to the present.

  “I find time to paint.”

  “You paint at night. In the darkness, Anna. Are you saying that you wouldn’t rather paint in the daylight hours, when you can capture your favorite subject?”

  “Of course I would, if I had the time.”

  “Why don’t you let me give that to you?”

  “What?”

  “Time. I’ll give you all the time you want. All the light, as well. All the beauty you could ever hope to put on your canvases.”

  “I’m not used to hearing you talk so poetically,” I told him wryly to cover my confusion.

  “I’m not being poetic,” he stated bluntly. “I’ve decided to move back to Tahoe. I’m asking you to come there with me. Take some time off. It’s the most beautiful place in the world, and the light is extraordinary. You’d be in heaven there. You could paint from dawn to dusk, if you wanted.”

  My incredulous laugh was cut short when I noticed that his expression remained solemn, his eyes searching.

  “Seriously? You’re asking me to go to Lake Tahoe with you?”

  “Yes. I think I mentioned I had a home there.”

  You mentioned your wife did.

  I pushed aside the poison thought.

  “You told me you grew up in that area,” I recalled.

  He’d been the only child of an investment banker and a world champion ice skater. After she retired from competing, his mom had started an elite training center for skaters at Tahoe that regularly spit out world champions and Olympians. I also remembered that his parents were retired and had moved back to Long Island, where they’d grown up.

  Evan had grown up on the shores of Lake Tahoe, though. Elizabeth and her family had lived there, as well. Evan and she had been teenage sweethearts.

  “How long would we stay there?” I asked.

  “As long as you like. It’s amazing there during the summer, the fall… the winters are spectacular.”

  “Just leave San Francisco? Leave my jobs?” I asked, my voice flat in disbelief. The past twenty-four hours had provided more shocks and surprises then I’d had in a lifetime.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You can’t be serious. What would I do when I got back? Look for jobs all over again?” I started to rise to a sitting position, feeling disoriented lying there staring into his X-ray eyes. He pressed gently with his hand on my hip and I remained in place.

  “You just said you’re working for money to survive. I have plenty of money, Anna. You can focus on painting. Finally.”

  “You’re asking me to live with you? Live off you?”

  “I don’t see it that way. If you’re concerned about it, I have no doubt that if you’re given time and opportunity to paint, you’ll eventually be able to support yourself, and then some. You’re very talented. I know the owner of a very reputable gallery in South Lake. I’m sure she’d consider herself lucky to show you. Look at your last exhibition. You sold three paintings in one night.”

  “Two of them to you. I’m not sure that counts.”

  “Of course it does. I have excellent taste, you know,” he said, that tiny, distracting smile flickering across his mouth. “You just need the time and the opportunity to create… to do what you’re meant to do.”

  As always, his absolute certainty stole my voice. I can’t begin to describe what I was feeling in that moment. Disbelief, of course. A sense of the surreal. I was like a lifetime prisoner, and he’d just casually flung open the door of my cell. The bright light of the outside world stunned me. I didn’t know how to just take a step from the world I knew into freedom.

  Into joy.

  He saw my bewilderment, of course. He exhaled and shut his eyes for a moment.

  “I realize this must feel like it’s coming out of nowhere for you. You don’t know what’s been going on in my head. You have no idea, Anna, about the battle I’ve been fighting on the inside, ever since I first saw you.”

  “Sometimes I feel like what goes on in your head is the biggest mystery in the world.”

  “If it is, I’m trying to demystify things now,” he countered quietly, but firmly. He leaned down and pressed his forehead next to mine. “I’ll admit it. I was hesitant to plunge in, head first. I was hesitant to sleep with you, because—”

  “Of Elizabeth,” I whispered when he broke off midsentence.

  “Yes,” he confessed tensely. “I was afraid that if I touched you, if I crossed the line, there’d be no going back. But now that it’s happened… Well, it’s happened.”

  “What’s happened?” I asked, praying to God he’d tell me the answer to that question.

  He smiled. It transformed his face when he did. He ruffled my hair in a fond gesture that made me feel about eight years old. “I’ve fallen for you, Anna. Uncomfortably hard,” he added with a gruff, endearing laugh. He swung his long legs off the bed and sat up, his back to me.

  “You know, I don’t think I can live or rest, knowing you’re out there in the world… separate from me,” he mused, almost as if to himself. Suddenly he looked over his shoulder at me. “If you don’t feel the same way, then—”

/>   “I feel the same way,” I said in a rush, anxious I’d miss the moment and be left like a kid with a dollar clutched in her hand, watching forlornly as the ice cream truck pulled away from the curb and down the street.

  A crooked half-smile broke over his face. My flash of panic melted at the sight of it. He cradled my jaw and caressed my cheek with his thumb, and there I was…

  Flying all over again.

  Chapter Two

  Seven Weeks Later

  It was like the first couple months of Evan’s and my relationship had been filmed in slow motion. Then some unseen hand had flipped the speed button on the camera. Suddenly, we flew down a golden slope, a twisting, exhilarating rollercoaster, all inertia, no effort required.

  But then, abruptly and unexpectedly, the ride slowed.

  “Everything you’ve told me so far is a bunch of bullshit, and you know it. You’re marrying this guy after knowing him for three months? And all I get is this ‘charming, incredible, unbelievable’ crap? You make it sound like you fell in love with Prince-Fucking-Charming. It’s like you’re nine all over again, crushing over Justin Timberlake.”

  It was my sister’s muttered words resounding from next to me in the passenger seat that put the brakes on that golden rollercoaster ride. Strangely, the car I was driving continued to glide forward at a silent, modest sixty miles an hour.

  “You crushed over Justin Timberlake, not me.”

  “Liar. You always did have the heart of a romantic beneath all those black, artsy clothes you wore all the time. Seriously, Anna. Tell me what’s going on!”

  Sunlight streamed in on the right side of the car, illuminating Jessica’s face. Despite her ballsy tone, her appearance was that of an angel—albeit an earthy, approachable one, like one of those voluptuous creatures in that painting by Burne-Jones we studied once in History of Art.

  “The Golden Stairs,” I muttered, recalling the name of the angel painting.

  “What?” Jessica demanded, her perfect face screwing up in consternation. “You’re acting weird. Mom and Dad are worried about you, you know.”