by Jill Barnett
“This is our future, babe.”
“Cale.” She closed her eyes.
He touched her cheek to stop one of her tears from trailing to her mouth. “It will all work out, baby. You’re the reason I do this. You believe in me. Whenever I think I’m going to break, whenever it gets to be too much and I’m exhausted and sick, I think of you, and I can go on.” He yawned, then added, “I don’t think I could do this without you.”
“Yes, you can. You’re strong, Cale, stronger than I am. You don’t need me.”
“Yes. I do. I do, baby.” Then he fell into a long-needed deep and peaceful sleep.
19
Laurel understood that the words I love you flowed all too easily from the tongue. To say I don’t love you anymore felt impossibly hard. She had been so scornful of her mother. But now she was just like her mom—without the courage to say good-bye. Wrapped in the warm escape of cowardice, unable to tell the truth to the man who was asleep in her lap, unable to hurt him, she closed her eyes, exhausted by what she did and didn’t feel, and when she opened them again, it was morning. She was alone on the sofa, covered with a soft afghan, and sat up, stretching like a cat, before she saw a crisp white note folded tent-style on the smoked-glass coffee table.
Sleep tight. Had to run to classes. Will call.
I love you,
Cale
Just holding the note felt traitorous. She was momentarily overwhelmed by a crazy sadness she couldn’t shake. Even in the morning, when things were usually clearer, she didn’t understand her mixed-up feelings of love any more now than the day she met Cale. She looked down at the note and said out loud, “I don’t love you. I don’t even know what love is.” But empty rooms had no fragile hearts to crush. Empty rooms didn’t tell you that you were the reason they could follow their dreams. You could say anything to an empty room, even in the bright light of a new day, and it wasn’t the same as saying good-bye.
The day passed with a gray heaviness; time just went on even though nothing was resolved. Cale did call the next day, but warned her he had finals soon, and if she didn’t hear from him, not to worry. So his exam schedule gave her a reprieve.
Jud showed up at the restaurant one night for a late dinner and because it was raining, insisted on driving her home. At her apartment, he killed the engine. “How’s my brother?”
“Heading into exams. Tired, run down. I think if you tried to call him now, you’d get through. I don’t think he has the energy to be mad at you.”
The rain stopped and she reached for her purse, and when she sat back he kissed her gently on the cheek in a brotherly way. “I’ll call him.”
Awkward and feeling all too warm, she left the tight confines of the sports car and could breathe again. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Sure.”
He didn’t drive off, but sat in his car and watched her go up the front steps. When she opened the front door and looked back, he called out, “Inside safe and sound, Jailbait.” Then he waved and drove off leaving her strangely warm and comfortable, snug in his casual protectiveness.
She grew up with no father who walked nearest the curb of the sidewalk, no father to hold her hand or carry her across busy streets, and learned childhood safety from women who were alone, not from a man’s concern for hers. It was a gift she hadn’t known she’d missed until that moment. With Jud she was a different person, not insular.
Walking to the bus stop the next day, she was aware of the scent of the air after a night of rain, the warmth and breadth of a giant blue sky, the feel of lazy wind on her skin, and the aromatic, citruslike taste of late fall in California.
Two days later the phone rang and rang. She expected Cale’s call and would stare at the ringing phone until she found the nerve to pick it up. “I owe you dinner,” Jud said.
She sank into the folds of the sofa, leaned into its arm, relaxed. “You gave me that case of wine.”
“You don’t want to have dinner with me.”
“It’s not that. You don’t owe me anything, Jud.”
“I hate to eat alone.” Then he tempted her with impossible-to-get reservations that night at a new restaurant written up in all the LA food columns. “I’ll pick you up at six thirty.”
Banning men didn’t take no easily.
Dinner was exceptional and they left the restaurant at nine. But once outside her apartment, they sat in silence, which was odd, since talked flowed so easily all through dinner. In the pale, true light of a half-moon and the false glow of the streetlights on the corner, shadow defined his angular features and light turned his hair a paler shade of gold. It struck her that Jud looked like a portrait of a man from the past—some aristocrat destined to ascend the throne—out of reach and the kind of man who could be dangerous to the heart.
“Thanks for the company, Jailbait.”
“You know my birthday was back in May.”
“So you’re not jailbait anymore?” He shrugged. “The truth is I like the way you react to it.”
“React? How do I react?”
“You get this look like you just ate a lemon.”
“I do not.”
“Okay, Jailbait. Pucker up and let me see.”
She made a face at him and he kissed her quickly, just a soft touch of the lips, as if she were breakable. He pulled back and gave her an easy smile.
That was exactly why she thought he was dangerous. “Pretty sneaky, Jud. Does it work often?” She got out of the car.
“You think I would use a line on a woman now? In this time of great reform? Betty Friedan would cook my goose.”
“Women might have changed, but men haven’t.” He laughed.
She closed the car door. “Thanks for dinner. I had a good time.”
“Me too.” He waited till she went inside, and she was smiling when she heard him drive off.
Jud waited a week before he took her to dinner again. He tried for time and space and still couldn’t stay away. They met at a small bistro in Westwood, ate pintade a la Medici—guinea hen stuffed with truffles, created for Catherine de Medicis—and Laurel explained the history of truffles when he teased her and called them fancy but ugly mushrooms.
“They couldn’t be cultivated successfully, at least not the most flavorful, wild ones. Louis the Fourteenth commissioned a study on cultivating truffles. Some farms in France have used the same forest oaks to grow them, but the experts all claim the product inferior.” She held up a fork. “These are the real thing: the flavor is as rich and dark as the forest where they were grown. You can taste the damp earth. Wild truffles from the forests of Perigord in southern France. Hmm. Taste it.”
He had never thought fungi erotic.
“Hundreds of years ago, they used pigs to sniff them out. Now, I believe, they use dogs.” She laughed. “It’s probably easier to hold back a dog from gobbling them up than a pig.” She popped a bite in her mouth. “They are quite the delicacy.”
Throughout dinner they spoke in the gentle light of table candles flickering over her face. Her sleek brown hair touched her shoulders. She wore brown suede boots, a tight turtleneck sweater, and a long skirt with a slit almost to heaven. Her neck was covered and her thighs showed. When she left for a minute, then walked back to their table, he thought of her story of the dark truffle, thriving only in deep, damp forests where few men had cut a path. Rare, earthy delicacies that gave sustenance unique flavor. Laurel was a delicacy, a prize found only if you search the darkest forest, and her beauty was changeling, as if touched by each second of time passing, a hundred different looks, subtle, perhaps undetectable to most, but he caught the smallest nuance and thought he could fill a lifetime just watching her.
Tonight he saw the slow and complete abandonment of her fear of him. Gone was the wary look of an animal about to be cornered. Her manner was easy, her voice keen with natural emotion, no invisible barrier to protect her and keep him at bay. Every time he was with her, he was reminded that he had lived most of his existence in a man
’s world, where things were what they were. No women to give his life flares of emotion, highs and lows, and another pair of eyes, more sensually refined, with which to tenderly view the world around him. Later, Jud sat in his car studying her profile. It was difficult to look at her and not see what was missing from his life.
“Look at all those stars,” she said, her head back against the seat. “When I was little, I used to sit in my grandmother Peyton’s lap and she would tell me that the biggest, brightest star I could see was my father looking down at me.”
He had to trace her jaw with his finger.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was charged, as if it was caught in her throat, shaky and vibrating.
“Touching you.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“I know. The best kind of danger.” He rubbed his index finger over her bottom lip. He was re-creating the delicate lines of her face on a blank page, or maybe tracing it into his memory.
“You’re too old for me, remember?”
“I know, but I don’t care.”
She looked down, then pulled away, her hand on the door handle. “I’d better go.”
“I’ll walk you up.” Once there, he leaned against the post and watched her.
Before stepping inside, she paused and looked at him. “I can’t give you what you want.”
He didn’t push. He didn’t speak. At that moment he felt what she was feeling, thought what she was thinking. The face he was looking down at was one that had haunted him.
“I’m sorry,” was all she could say.
“I know you are.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, Jailbait.” He walked away, courageous; it was such a hard thing to do when he was consumed with the most overwhelming feeling of regret. Inside his car, he just sat there, then glanced back at the closed door. Holding on to the steering wheel with both hands, he tried and failed to will away the longing, then put the key into the ignition.
Laurel stood in the kitchen, washing down three aspirin with a large glass of water. The knock on the front door startled her. She flung the door wide open.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Jud said.
“What?”
“Open the door like that. Someone could just barge in.”
“Someone like you?”
“Someone like the Manson family.”
“Okay, point made. Should I close it now?”
“Here.” He held out her wallet. “I found it on the floorboard.”
“It must have fallen out of my purse. Thanks.” She didn’t close the door, didn’t want to. What was it about desire that made you unable to function?
He wasn’t making any kind of move to leave. “When you look at me like that,” he said, “I wonder what you are looking for.”
“Oh, Jud.” She glanced down at the floor, then back at him. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m not looking for anything. I think I’ve already found it.”
“Cale?”
She shook her head. “No.”
The truth was out there, hanging in the air between them. He studied her face, searching too, then stepped to the edge of the door and rested his arm on the frame, looking down at her. “I won’t come any closer than this unless you ask me to.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You want to.”
“Yes,” she admitted and could feel tears in the back of her eyes. Her heart pounded in her chest and she was struck with the first feeling she’d ever had that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
“I don’t want any regrets.”
Now she was the one that stepped closer, until they were separated by just a few inches, the width of the doorjamb, and she was standing on the edge of something vital.
He wouldn’t move. “You can step back, Jailbait, and close the door in my face, and this moment will be over.”
“Over,” she said, “but not gone.”
“No. Not gone.”
Everything up to that point in her life became this one, single, living, breathing, naked moment. Human drives and wants and needs. Life’s choices were the hardest things to live with. She saw what she was feeling reflected in his aquiline face and the blue flare of his eyes, then a pale, regretful look of lost time, missed opportunities, if only’s blurred his expression. He was about to give up. So she grabbed his tie and pulled him inside.
20
A trail of scattered clothes marked a path to Laurel’s bedroom, where moonlight came through the window and spilled over the bed, turning her white sheets and their naked skin pearlescent. Rising from the deepest places in the body came the powerful scent of the sea, and the sublime, peaked awareness of the senses, the true sensual: on their tongues, the taste of salt and each other; their legs hopelessly tangled, sleek against rough; arms that held each other tightly; and the wild, slow, honeyed words whispered when someone was moving deeply inside of you.
Laurel had no fear, no worry, no thought of anything but there and then, and who. Certainly no regret. She flew wherever his clever hands and body took her. Completely lost in abandon, she followed him naturally. His thrusts were measured and slow, his motions easy; it was something he seemed to want to make last.
Every kiss, every touch, every second together felt so right. A hundred years from then, another whole lifetime away, she would remember each moment as if it were yesterday and would know on that singular night, the stars fell to the earth, the ground shook, and the impossibly unknown became real.
He took her to orgasm on a higher plane than the physical, her shudders like little earthquakes, her heart beating so fast she couldn’t keep up. Her mind was nothing but the sweet, warm, white fog of spent desire. When her head cleared, she opened her eyes to find him watching her. Silently, he took her head in his warm hands and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her chin, then her lips. They lost themselves again, and again.
The sun was warm and high when she awoke, naked and sleek between warm sheets, and to the spicy scent of someone else’s skin. Jud lay next to her on his stomach, sound asleep. To her, love had always been myth and magic, a bedtime story told inside her head every night until she had become love’s proselyte. Love was the end-all and be-all.
Yet here she was, so inexperienced she didn’t trust what she felt now, even though it was there before her, a neon-lit billboard: This is love. This is love. Even if she could trust what was in her head and her heart, she had to face the awful truth that she was still tied to one brother and in love with the other.
“I’m a mess,” she said aloud.
“Well, if you are, then you’re my mess.” A long masculine arm slid around her. Jud was looking at her with a sleepy smile, eyes so blue in the morning light it was like looking through fine crystalline glass at the expanse of a summer sky “You look beautiful to me,” he said.
How strange that she was thinking the same thing. She didn’t explain her mess was on the inside.
“I like you tousled and naked.” He pressed his lips to her bare hip, then shifted and tossed aside the sheet. “I want to see you in the sunlight.”
Strangely, she didn’t feel exposed, but revered, and when he touched her, when he whispered he wanted her, she lay back into the safety of his arms and the sweetness carried her away.
After only two hours sleep, Jud stood in the kitchen, drinking strong, black, eye-opening coffee and talking with Laurel, so soft and lovely, a woman radiant in the morning after. From the window, the sun painted the day with its warm amber glow. The earth was a wonderful, quiet place, and he felt solidly grounded in the last ten hours. The coffee was pungent, espresso black, and bitter when it cooled, so he poured another cup, thinking that his past experiences, his judgments of women and sex and matters of the heart, had just been wiped out in a single, shattering night.
The doorbell rang, and he started to stop her. “Laurel?”
But she swung the door wide open. Cale walked inside as if he owned the pl
ace. “What’s Jud’s car doing out front?” Cale looked at him, still in the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”
Laurel’s expression turned pale and bloodless, the warm glow gone and the white glint of fear and horror in her eyes. Jud took a sip of coffee and said to her, “I warned you about the door.”
“What’s going on?” Cale wanted his answer from Laurel and stood between the two of them, but Jud knew his brother had been between them for a long time.
Laurel placed her hand on Cale’s arm. “I tried to tell you.”
“What?” Cale’s voice rose, high emotion in it.
“When?” He wasn’t shouting, but almost. “Tell me now.” He looked at both of them, but neither spoke. To Jud, he asked, “Have you slept with her?”
“No.”
“Yes,” Laurel said at the same time.
The sound that came from his younger brother said it all, the kind of anguished sound no human can control. Cale seemed to shrink as if he were falling into himself maybe crumbling inside, and looked at Jud in complete disbelief “You’re my brother. You’re my brother.”
Saying it twice made the words cut deeper. Jud didn’t move.
“It’s my fault,” Laurel told him.
Cale’s expression turned ugly for an instant, then seemed to collapse as he shook his head. “Oh, Laurel. I wonder if this has anything to do with you.”
“What do you mean?”
His younger brother looked at him, eyes wild and burning with condemnation, and Jud thought he looked just like Victor.
“You bastard.” Cale gave a sharp, achingly pain-filled half laugh that hit Jud square in the deepest part of his guilty heart. “You explain it, big brother.” Then Cale walked out the door.
Laurel moved first. “Cale! Wait!” She stopped at the edge of the door. “Please. Don’t leave like this.”
“Good-bye, Laurel,” he said and didn’t look back.
She hung on to the doorknob because if she let go, she’d sink into the floor. When she found the strength, she faced Jud. “What have we done?”