Long minutes passed. Tim’s throat was dry, his breath coming a little quicker as his erection returned, more painful than ever. He could not help but start to imagine the scene taking place next door, picturing positions and stiletto heels. In his mind the guy was a blur, but the woman had a body sculpted by desire, with round, heavy, real breasts and hip bones perfect for gripping.
He rolled his eyes and shook his head, not daring to look at the clock, though he felt sure he had been awake at least half an hour by now, and had no idea how long they had been going at it before they had woken him.
And still they went on.
Tim lay on his side, listening closely. There was no alternative except leaving the room or hiding in the bathroom, and so he surrendered to eavesdropping, trying to pick out each word. Mostly it was repetition, dirty talk, and baby-oh-baby-come-on from him and give-it-to-me from her. The classics, he thought, chuckling tiredly. Unoriginal but much beloved the world over.
And then a break in the rhythm, a pause.
“Can I?” the man asked.
The answer, when it came, sounded clear and intimate and close, as if she had whispered the words into Tim’s ear.
“You can put it anywhere you want.”
Jesus, he thought, breath catching in his throat. It really had sounded like she was there in bed next to him. He listened as the sounds started up again, but soon the man lapsed into silence broken only by wordless grunts. His lover continued to urge him on—demanding, pleading for him not to stop.
Then the man let out an almost sorrowful groan and the woman cried out in triumphant pleasure and, at last, the thumping of the headboard subsided.
Tim’s heart was still thudding in his chest and his face felt flushed, but he figured if he just lay there in bed, he would calm down enough to go back to sleep. He closed his eyes and took a breath.
And she spoke again, there on the other side of the wall.
“Thank you, baby,” she said, and he heard it as though she were whispering it right into his ear. “That was exactly what I needed.”
The hunger and the pleasure in her voice did him in. He threw back the sheets and went back into the bathroom, where it took only seconds for him to get himself off.
Afterward he lay in bed, ashamed and frustrated and missing Jenny so hard he felt ripped open inside.
Eventually, he slept.
ROOM service brought his breakfast at nine o’clock on the dot. Tim figured that most people who had their morning meal brought to their rooms were up and out of the hotel for meetings by nine A.M., which explained their being so timely. He signed for his breakfast, giving the thin Mexican guy who’d delivered it a decent tip. In his visits to Los Angeles over the past few years, he had been consistently amazed by how much more effort Mexican immigrants seemed to put into their jobs than native-born Los Angelenos. And not just more effort, but more hustle and greater civility. There was a lesson to be learned in the great immigration battle, but he had lost too much sleep last night to give it very much thought.
Sunlight splashed into the room through the sliding glass door that led out onto the balcony. He liked to sleep in the dark, but during the day he wanted as much sunshine as he could get, and if there was any place in the world to find it, it was right here.
In light cotton shorts and a blue T-shirt Jenny had bought him two years back in Kennebunkport, Maine, he carried the tray out onto the balcony and set it on a little round table. First order of business, he poured himself a cup of coffee—cream, no sugar—and sipped it as he looked down at the beach below, the waves crashing on the sand. The surf made a gentle shushing noise that comforted him.
The hotel backed right up to the ocean. From the balcony he could see the Santa Monica Pier. At night, the lights from the pier provided their own kind of beauty, but during the day the view was truly spectacular. Tim breathed in the salty ocean air and felt cleansed, refreshed. The coffee relit the pilot light in his brain, and he started to feel awake for the first time this morning.
Jenny had loved the view. They had stayed here during both of their visits to L.A. together, the first time only months after they had started dating—it had been that weekend, Tim believed, that they had fallen in love—and the second as a special getaway for their fifth wedding anniversary. Not in the same room each time, of course. Jenny might have remembered the room numbers—he had never asked her—but guys just didn’t pay attention to that sort of thing.
And, anyway, it was the view that she had loved, not the room.
With another deep breath, he sipped at his coffee and then set it down, settling into a chair beside the small table. He removed the metal cover over his breakfast plate to reveal a western omelet accompanied by a small portion of breakfast potatoes and half a dozen slices of fresh melon. Sliding the table over in front of him, he tucked into his breakfast. The omelet was delicious, but halfway through, his appetite failed him and he wondered why he hadn’t just ordered juice and toast. He ate the melon because it was sweet and good for him, and drank the small glass of OJ that had come alongside the coffeepot, and then he settled back to digest.
Already the day had grown warmer. The weatherman had said it would reach the mideighties by noon, and Tim had no trouble believing that. He planned to go to Universal Studios in the afternoon, just for a few hours—it was what he and Jenny had done the last time they were here together—but this morning he intended to take it easy. He got up and went into his room, fetching the James Lee Burke novel he’d bought to read on the plane. Then he shifted the chair to keep the sun out of his eyes, poured himself another cup of java, and sat reading and enjoying his coffee with the sound of the ocean enveloping him.
Twenty or so pages later, he was pulled from the book by the sound of a slider rattling open. He looked up to see a woman stepping out onto the balcony of the room next door. Instantly his mind went back to the night before and the sounds that had come from that room, and he felt both embarrassed and aroused at the same time. This had to be the same woman whose voice he had heard so clearly. It was too early for her to have checked out and a new guest to have arrived.
“Good morning,” she said, raising a coffee mug in a toast to him.
Her smile was brilliant. His throat went dry just looking at her—five feet nine or ten, lean and limber like those Olympic volleyball girls, long blond hair back in a ponytail, bright blue eyes—and the pictures he had painted in his mind of last night’s acrobatics became that much more vivid. She wore a black and gold bikini that nearly gave him a heart attack.
“Morning,” he said, wondering if she would notice the flush in his cheeks—was he actually blushing? God, he felt awkward.
He forced himself back to his book, desperate to look at anything but her. The words blurred on the page. The balconies were open- post style, and he had gotten a fantastic look at her stunning legs.
Just read, he thought, trying to focus. Should he get up and go into his room, or would that be even more awkward?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Am I disturbing you?”
God, he thought, you have no idea.
“Not at all. Just enjoying the morning.”
“I know what you mean,” she replied, sinking into a chair and stretching her legs out, propping her feet up on the railing of her balcony. “I don’t have to be anywhere until after lunch and wanted to get a little sun while I have some downtime. It’s quiet out here this morning.”
She stretched out to maximize her body’s exposure to the sun and, consequently, to Tim as well. He held his place in the book with one finger and turned to smile politely at her.
“It’s a weekday. People are off at business meetings, I guess.”
She shielded her eyes from the sun to look at him. Her lips were full and red and perfect. “No meetings for you?”
“Fortunately not.”
He shifted uneasily, not sure he wanted to have this conversation but also not wanting to be rude. And God, she was beautiful. Th
e sounds from the previous night returned as he stared at her, and he could not help imagining those lips saying those things, pleading, moaning, and then . . . You can put it anywhere you want. Shit, he’d almost forgotten about that, and now that he’d remembered he could barely even pay attention to what she was saying.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What was that?”
She smiled, a sparkle of mischief in her eyes, as if she knew exactly what had distracted him.
“I asked what brought you to Santa Monica, if not business.”
Tim ran though possible answers in his mind, but they all came down to a choice between lying and telling the truth, and he had given up lying years before. He and Jenny had been going through a rough patch, distance growing between them because he had been traveling for work so often, and he had been unfaithful. It had nearly ruined his life, nearly destroyed their life together when he confessed to her, but they had gotten through it. He had vowed that he would never stray again, but it had taken years before she actually seemed to believe him. Forgiving him, though, was something else. She had said she did, but he had always wondered, and wondered even still.
“Honestly, it’s sort of a sad story for such a beautiful morning,” he said. “What about you?”
She cocked her head curiously, maybe intrigued by the tragic air about him. Tim had seen it before. Maybe someday he would take advantage of the way some women reacted to sad stories, but he had not yet reached a place where he could do that.
“Just sightseeing. A little California dreaming, you know? Started in Napa and made my way down with . . . Well, Kirk’s no longer with me.”
So his name had been Kirk.
“Kirk?”
She arched her eyebrow suggestively. “I guess I was a little too much for him.”
Tim could have taken that any number of ways, but the eyebrow made it clear what she meant. In his mind he could practically hear Kirk’s voice even now, calling her every filthy thing he could think of. When he had imagined the woman on the receiving end of those words, she had been nothing like this lovely creature on the balcony. As beautiful as she was, she seemed sweet, even charming.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tim said.
“It’s a morning for sad stories, I guess,” she said. “My name is Diana, by the way.”
“Tim,” he said.
“Sorry if we kept you up last night, Tim.”
He grinned, feeling himself flush even more deeply, and glanced away. If he had seen the comment coming, he could have prepared, pretended to have slept through it all, but her directness had sneaked up on him.
“Nah, it’s fine. I mean, not for long—”
Diana pouted. “I think I might be insulted.”
“—no, no, that came out wrong,” he stammered. Then he laughed at his own embarrassment. “I’m a pretty sound sleeper. And who hasn’t been on the other side of thin walls at least once, right?”
Her eyes seemed to dance with merriment. “Exactly. That’s so true.”
She sat up to take a sip of her coffee, her breasts straining against the thin fabric of her bikini top, a single strand of her blond hair—loose from the ponytail—hanging across her face.
“So, are you going to tell me why you’re in Santa Monica?”
Her boldness impressed and entranced him. As he thought about it, he could see this woman being the honest, passionate, carnal lover whose voice he had heard through the wall the night before. Yet Diana had many facets, and he saw one of them now, as a kind of sorrow filled her eyes.
“I don’t mind sad stories. I’ve got a whole catalog of them myself. Go ahead. I’m a big girl. I can take it.”
Something in that last line made him wonder if she had said it to tease him, but he might have imagined it, added a pouty, sexy insouciance to it that was really only an echo of the night before.
“You might think it’s a little strange,” he ventured.
Diana turned her chair slightly, basking in the sun even as she transformed their two balconies into a strangely intimate confessional.
“I like strange.”
Tim thought about Kirk, the idiot who had apparently left this woman after a night like they’d shared last night. What kind of fool must he be?
“All right,” Tim said. He turned down the page in his book and laid it across his chest, staring out at the ocean for a moment before returning his focus to Diana’s curious gaze. “I’m on a kind of tour, I guess. I’ve been to New Orleans and Montreal and to Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod. I even went down to this little village on the Gulf of Mexico. They’re all places that were important to my wife, Jenny, and me during the years we had together.”
The kindness in Diana’s eyes broke his heart all over again. “She’s gone?”
“Just over a year ago. Pancreatic cancer. It was agony for her, so it was probably good that she went quickly, but I didn’t have time, you know? No time to get used to the idea of life without her. It’s taken me this long to accept that I’ve got to live my life. I know she’d have wanted that for me. I’m only thirty-seven. There are a lot of days ahead, if I’m lucky. So I’m on vacation, but it’s also kind of our farewell tour.”
“Wow,” Diana whispered, almost wistful. “That may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. You’re, like, the perfect husband.”
A familiar guilt filled him. It had grown like rust on his heart over the years. After he had betrayed Jenny, he had spent every day trying to make it up to her. He doubted he would ever have been able to, really, no matter how much time they had been given together. But he had wanted more time to try.
“Far from perfect,” Tim said, staring out at the Pacific.
“No, you’re a good guy. I can sense those things,” Diana said. “And you’re lucky, too.”
He frowned. “Lucky?”
The mischief returned to her eyes, and she stood, adjusting the strap of her bikini top.
“You said you were a sound sleeper,” she reminded him. With one hand on the handle of the slider, ready to go inside, she glanced over her shoulder at him in a pose so sexy it was painful to behold. “I always have trouble falling asleep. I need someone to tire me out. The only way I can really sleep well is if I’m so exhausted that I’m a quivering mass of jelly. And with Kirk gone . . .”
Diana glanced away, almost shyly, before looking back at him with renewed boldness. “I don’t know what I’ll do tonight.”
Tim could not speak. He dared not move for fear that she would notice the effect she had had on him, if she hadn’t already.
Obviously pleased by his speechlessness, Diana opened the sliding door into her room. “Enjoy your day, Timothy.”
He managed to croak, “You, too,” before her door slid shut.
Shaking his head in amazement, he went back to his book, the erection Diana had caused—the second in a very short time—slowly subsiding. After a few minutes he realized that his thoughts were straying and he had not understood a word he’d read, and he laughed softly at himself. Had that really been an invitation? Did she mean it?
Not that it mattered. As arousing as it was just being in the presence of this woman, Tim knew that any sexual trysts were still in the future for him. In another life he would have climbed mountains for an opportunity to sleep with a woman like Diana, and he knew that he would remember what he had overheard last night for years, maybe forever. Maybe someday he would even regret being faithful to a woman who was now only a memory, but this trip was about him and Jenny, and he would honor that, no matter what. He wanted to start a new life, but not quite yet.
He laughed again, thinking of Jenny. If she were alive for him to tell her the tale, she would have mocked him with love but without mercy. Men, she had often said, were pitifully simple and predictable creatures. Pavlov had used dogs to test his theories about programmed responses, but all he would have had to do was put a man in a room with Diana, and there would have been no need to experiment further.
; This final stop on his farewell tour was by far the strangest.
How Jenny would have teased him. God, he missed her.
THE phone woke him. In the darkness he searched for it, fingers scrabbling on the nightstand, and only managed to find it when it rang a second time. As he pressed the receiver to his ear, he saw the faint glow of the alarm clock.
Twelve seventeen A.M. After midnight. Who the hell . . .
“Hello?” he said, voice full of gravel.
“I can’t sleep,” she whispered.
It took him a moment, and when the pieces clicked together, his breath caught in his throat.
“Diana?”
“Hey,” she said in a sleepy voice.
Tim had come back to the hotel around eight P.M. and eaten a late dinner alone in the restaurant downstairs. Afterward he had held his breath walking past her room, heart racing. Their conversation on the balcony that morning had stayed with him all day, and he had caught himself fantasizing about her, wondering if her thinly veiled invitation for tonight had been more than just flirting.
It hurt his heart. This whole strange vacation had been meant to be about Jenny, and his not being able to get Diana out of his mind seemed a dark stain on pure intentions. But, Christ, he was only human.
“Did you have a nice day?” she asked, when he didn’t reply.
“Yeah. I guess. Do you . . . do you know what time it is?”
Even her laugh had that soft, sleepy intimacy about it.
“I do. I’m sorry. I told you I have trouble falling asleep.”
They both let that hang in the air for a bit. Lying in bed in the dark, hearing her voice in his ear, Tim found his memory of the previous night returning with perfect clarity. He could practically hear the thump of the headboard against the wall behind his head, and now that he knew what she looked like, the images in his mind were more than imagination.
Death's Excellent Vacation Page 24