by Megan Mulry
Max rubbed his eyes and stood up. “I have to crash, Eliot. Do you mind? Just throw a blanket over Abby if she won’t wake up when the movie’s over. She’s impossible to rouse.”
“Thanks again for everything, Max. Sorry to be such a fifth wheel on your family weekend.”
“Don’t be silly. If you’ve helped Sarah and Devon get back on track, you’re probably a more valuable asset to this family at the moment than I am. G’night.”
“Thanks again. Night, Max.”
Something of relative consequence may have transpired in the final half hour of the movie, but Eliot spent the entire time staring at Abigail Heyworth’s gently sleeping body. She had the look of a windswept, pre-Raphaelite muse: wavy black hair tumbling everywhere, sooty black eyelashes resting against pale creamy skin. He sipped the excellent scotch and enjoyed the view.
***
Saturday dawned a splendid spring day.
The more splendid, thought Sarah, for beginning in the secure hold of Devon Heyworth’s strong arms and one of his legs cast across my hip. She inhaled until she thought she might hyperventilate, her face burrowed into his chest, his embrace possessive even in sleep. There were distinct benefits to being with a man who slept this soundly. She was so eager to see him, all of him, she started rooting around under the sheets just for the fun of it. She lifted the edge of the blanket cover to let in a little light and started working her way down his body like a miner: touching a small scar on his leg, tracing the way his hip muscle curved over the bone and down, outlining the firm contours of his stomach. She started to doze again.
Last night, they’d made it through dinner (barely); both of them begged off coffee and after-dinner drinks, practically drumming impatient fingers on the mahogany dining room table. Thankfully, Max had suggested a movie so they could continue on their way while everyone was standing around in the hall without having to blatantly excuse themselves from the dining table to make their escape. They had very nearly sprinted up the wide stone staircase, Sarah tripping over the edge of thick hall carpet at the top landing; they grabbed at each other and tried to move in the direction of the bedroom at the same time.
“Which room?” Sarah breathed between kisses.
“I don’t care. We’re just across the hall from each other and a few doors down. Let’s go in your room so you don’t have to make the walk of shame. I’m used to it.”
Her face must have shown that she didn’t quite like the sound of his repeated (legendary?) late-night and/or early morning walks of shame.
He smiled. “Aaah-haaa… you are jealous! I meant I’m used to it because you insisted on going back to that damned hotel both nights in October, so I had not only the walk of shame, but the drive of shame and, the coup de grace, the breakfast of shame with Abby and Bronte and Max.”
Her expression cleared and he kissed her again, then whispered, so close to her ear that she felt it like more kisses, “I want you to be jealous… to feel what it’s like to want me like I want you.”
“I think about you all the time, Devon.” She shivered in response. “You are with me all the time. I was too much of a coward to call you.”
He angled her against the wall of the hallway, gently caging her with his arms flexed taut, his hands flat against the wall on either side of her head, his body slightly away from hers. She arched toward him, her breathing labored, and he pulled slightly away. He began kissing her neck, her cheek, her ear, the line of her jaw.
“Why are we still in this corridor?” she pleaded, barely able to form the words.
“Because I might have to have you right now.” His hand pushed against the crotch of her pants and he felt the concentrated heat of her body through the fabric.
She tilted her hips into his palm, gasped sharply, then moaned her exhale, her head falling toward his chest for support.
“You did not just do that!” he laughed quietly.
“I did,” she whispered after a few more breaths, with a guilty, happy grin on her face. “I couldn’t wait a second more, and then you touched me and, well, it’s been awhile. I was… ready.”
He felt like he could breathe in her words, like air. He hoped “a while” meant that she hadn’t been with anyone else. He hoped—even though he tried not to—because thinking about the implication of another person touching her still brought on a wave of impossible feelings.
She half-walked and was half-carried the few yards into her room. Devon turned to quietly close and lock the door behind them. Their hands trembled like Puritans on their wedding night as they removed one another’s clothes and slid into the cool, wide bed. They traveled through worlds of memory and lust, intervals of light sleep and vague caresses, ultimately falling into a deep, secure sleep of intertwined limbs and synchronized breath.
Saturday morning, Sarah gradually woke with her head resting on his stomach, looking at his… well, looking at him. The morning light in the room had lengthened somewhat, and the deep bass of his voice reverberated in her ear through his abdomen: “Did I sleep through something delicious? You are in quite the compromising position.”
She turned her head to look at his face, keeping her body curled around one side of his midsection, partially covered by the sheets. She saw from the clouded look in his eyes that the sensation of her long hair accidentally falling across his pelvis had given him unexpected pleasure. She lifted her head a bit and let the layers of hair travel with more purpose across his waist, down a bit, then back up. She let her head come to rest near his neck, loving the welcome curves and strength of his body that seemed to take her in, absorb her, from every angle.
His hands were trailing up and down her bare back when both of their phones started ringing simultaneously. Hers was a shrill and insistent version of “Duke of Earl”; his, a vibrating hum.
Devon gave her the devil’s smile. “Nice ringtone.”
He stretched his long arm to the bedside table and grabbed both phones. He looked at her screen and passed the phone. “Bronte for you. Max for me.”
“Hi, Bron, hold on a second. He’s talking to Max and I can’t hear you.”
“Hey, Max… no, I didn’t forget… when do you want to meet up?… sure I’ll be down in a half hour…are we riding or walking out?… who else is coming?… really… okay… interesting… all right, I’ll see you at the stables at ten.”
Then Sarah said, “Okay, I can hear you now… sure, I’d love to.”
Devon had resumed his aimless wanderings down her back and her body started to go limp again.
“Mmm-hmm… yes!… yes, I’m listening… okay, I’ll come to your room in a half hour and we’ll coo all over him.”
Sarah lifted herself up to a sitting position as she turned the phone off and put it back on the bedside table, pulling a piece of sheet up to cover her chest. “What are you doing today?”
“Why are you covering your chest?”
“I don’t know. It always seems sort of vulgar by the light of day. All that flesh hanging out everywhere.”
“Are you crazy?” He laughed, then saw the storm approach, and silenced himself. “Don’t answer that. But, come on, give a guy a break. I haven’t seen you for months and you should not be covered up.” He tugged gently at the sheet. “Please.” He gave her his best supplicating look, flop of hair, eyes wide.
“Stop with that!” She swatted him away half-heartedly, but she couldn’t help reveling in the fact that this man loved her curvy body. “I’m going to spend the day with my soon-to-be godson, the practically-perfect-in-every-way Wolf Heyworth. I think strolls and feedings are on the agenda. What about you?”
“We’ll be leaving the pack to secure sustenance, then returning to the cave with ample birds for supper.”
“Who else is going?”
“Abby, of course. Anything involving horseback and firearms and she’s on it. Apparently your Eliot has a good seat too.”
“First of all, he is not my Eliot. Are we going to talk about any of these lin
gering misunderstandings? Do we need to have The Talk? You are the one who is supposed to be older and wiser. I’ve never—I mean, I’ve never felt this way before. I don’t know at all what to say or do. Do you court me? Do I get pinned?” She smiled and hoped her added levity might cover for her near-miss on the I-love-you gaffe.
“Neither have I. I have no idea what to say or do either.” His sincerity was crushing her. “Of course, I’ve had feelings for people, and I hope you have too if you went to the trouble of bedding them—before bedding me, I mean—but I really have no interest in anyone or anything anymore except you. It sounds so trite and—”
“No, it doesn’t!” she interrupted quickly, then paused and continued. “It sounds honest. And while we’re being honest, I’ve never gone to the trouble.”
“Of what? Having feelings for all those rakes? Good. The easier to leave that life of wanton revelry behind you.”
“No, I mean, I’ve never, ugh, it’s so stupid, it doesn’t even matter, really, but I feel like I need to tell you for some reason, to remedy this vision you have of me as this hoyden who comes to country weddings and house parties and sleeps with the best man and I’ve never done that… ever… with anyone… and it seems insincere somehow to go on acting as if—”
“So I was your first best man?” Devon joked.
She shook her head slowly from right to left, then smiled. “You might be right. I guess that is basically the gist: you were my first…”—she kissed him on his neck—“…best…”—then she kissed him on his cheek—“…man…”—then she kissed him tenderly on the lips. She pulled away for a second and repeated slowly, “You were my first. Full stop.”
Devon was trying to process what she was telling him: he weighed egomaniacal humiliation (he had more or less tossed her over a bedpost and driven into her like she was a serving wench when he took her virginity) against a surge of arrogant, masculine, proprietary joy (no one had ever touched her except him… she was his, totally and completely).
“Say something,” she whispered.
“I don’t know whether to crawl from view in shame for making your first sexual encounter the equivalent of a debauched fling or to shout from the rafters in a diabolical baritone that you are mine, all mine!”
She turned her head, maybe to hide her face, maybe to get closer to him, then buried her head deep into the crook of his shoulder and half-laughed, half-cried, then sort of hiccupped. He slowly peeled her body away from his. “Why are you crying? You waited for exactly the right person. All the rest of us wasted our time casting about and fumbling around with the wrong people, and you just… got me… right out of the gate.”
He moved her gently off of him and down onto the mattress, situating her more fully onto her back, and then he straddled her body, the sheets between them. He laced his fingers through hers and pushed them flat into the deep pillows on either side of her. Then he kissed her with such a profound tenderness, a gentle coaxing that erased any hint of embarrassment or tentative insecurity from her mind. The kiss left her warm and content, with a feline desire to curl up and nap on and off for the rest of the day, with a big book in front of a small fire.
“Luckily there’s a sheet between us; otherwise I’d never make it to the stables on time.” He rolled off the bed and she murmured some quip about varying definitions of luck as her eyes slid closed and she curled back into a delicate half-sleep.
A few minutes later (after hearing the intermittent sounds of a zipper and the soft sluice of fabric being pulled over skin), it was so quiet, she thought he had left the room. Sarah was already half dozing, half planning what she was going to wear for the day when she heard the gentle sound of his feet against the carpet. Then his face nestled into her hair and nape. He took a long inhale, growled low with pleasure, then turned back toward the door and left without a word.
Sarah rolled deeper into the pillows where he had slept, taking in the remnants of his warmth and scent, then forced herself to get out of bed and begin this splendid new day.
Twenty minutes later, she was fulfilling her cat fantasy, curled up at the end of Bronte’s enormous bed with Wolf stretched out between them.
“It really is ducal, Bron!”
“Oh, cut it out.”
“Seriously. Who sleeps in a room this size? It’s like Grand Central Terminal.”
“Stop it! I can’t help it if his marauding ancestors wanted to make a splash.”
“They weren’t marauders, Bron.”
“No one gets this much stuff without at least a little marauding. But enough about the internecine family lore—what the hell is going on with you and Devon? Max told me you guys left after dinner ‘around the same time,’ which is obvious Max-speak for: they were practically shagging like minks at the dining room table. So spill it. You’ve been so tightly wound for so many months.” Bronte paused and cocked her head to get a better look at this new and improved Sarah, then smiled broadly. “It’s nice to see you a bit more relaxed.”
“Stop! You are so impossible. How can anyone get a word in?”
“I know I am the worst… after Devon, that is… he is far more…” Bronte slowed to a stop when she noticed Sarah was all of a sudden thoughtful. “What is it?”
“I think I’m falling in love with him, Bron.”
“I tried to warn you, remember? I told you at the wedding he is a heartbreaker.” Bronte was playing with Wolf’s legs, circling them as if he were riding a miniature bicycle. “Devon’s a real cipher in a lot of ways… do you know that in the nine months since we’ve met, I’ve only been to his apartment once? And even then, it was only because I finally demanded to see where he hangs his proverbial hat. He could have been living in a cardboard box in the middle of Leicester Square for all I knew. He always comes to our place for dinner and all, the perfect guest and all that. But still.”
“I know what you’re saying. He has that private side, but I don’t think he is really a secretive person. I think it’s more a result of years of habit, evading his mother, that sort of thing.”
“He couldn’t be more transparent with Max, I know, but I just don’t want you falling into something that’s all well and good on the surface, only to be held at bay, you know, on a deeper level. Does that make sense?”
“Of course it makes sense. He’s perfectly open to me at every level. I promise.”
“Are you blushing? How divine!” Then in a higher pitched voice, “Wolf, look at your Aunt Sarah. She has a crush on your Uncle Devon and she’s getting all missish about it; isn’t she adorable?” The infant stared at his mother with a look that only she could interpret. “I know, right? Isn’t she adorable?”
Sarah started laughing at the wonderful transformation that had taken over her formerly cold-blooded, heart-of-stone, kick-ass businesswoman of a friend. “Who are you? And where is Bronte Talbott?”
“Lost.” Bronte shook her head in mock dismay. “Utterly lost. She’s gone the way of the dodo, I’m afraid. Last seen haunting the halls of the attic. Now, in her place, sitting here before you, you have this doting beast of a mother, fawning concubine of a wife, prying bitch of a friend—well, that last bit has stayed pretty true to form, no?—but the rest? Completely MIA. Beware of those Heyworth men. They’re seductive vampires, Sarah: they gradually suck the blood from your veins and replace it with a burning desire for more bloodlettings.”
The two friends laughed again; the little babe kicked his feet.
“I’m only half-joking!” Bronte added between barks of laughter.
Sarah continued to laugh softly at her friend’s unexpected happiness.
“Let’s get some breakfast, Bron. I’m starving.”
“Well, if you’re going to be tight-lipped about everything in the romance department, I suppose food will have to do.” Bronte swaddled Wolf into a tight ball and slipped him into the baby sling she had taken to wearing. “I look like a friggin’ Navajo for Christ’s sake. Who am I?” But she smiled down at her baby, then up
at her friend, and Bronte had never been more certain of who she was.
By early afternoon, the three of them—Bronte, Wolf, and Sarah—were fast asleep on Bronte and Max’s enormous bed.
“The best way to get him to go down for a nap is to pretend you are falling asleep,” Bronte had explained to Sarah with her newfound maternal authority. So the two friends had pretended at first and then fallen fast asleep in earnest, the little cub splayed out between them, arms tossed over his head, a look of pure bliss on his face.
Max and Devon came in quietly, Max going on as usual: “Dev, you have to come look at the baby when he’s asleep; it’s so great.”
Devon agreed but made a mental note to tell his brother in a few weeks’ time that all this baby craziness needed to be curtailed at some point.
The two men pulled up short.
Speechless.
“Lucky bastard,” Max said under his breath, arms crossed, staring down at the baby snuggled between the two beautiful women. “I haven’t been able to get that close to her for weeks.”
Wolf was nestled between Bronte and Sarah, his head turned to his mother, lips moving gently in a milky dream, and one small fist wrapped around Sarah’s index finger. The three were utterly lost in a deep, gauzy sleep.
Devon just stared at Sarah’s turned body as it formed a natural bend around the baby. His gut turned. “This is sublime.”
“Oh, Dev, you have no idea,” Max said quietly. “You need to get yourself one. Or two.”
“I think just the one should do it.”
Max turned to look at Devon, serious now. “Are you sure?” he said in a lower voice. “Sarah seems so young.”
“Look at her Max; she’s perfect. She’s beautiful, she’s Catherine Deneuve in Belle du Jour, she’s a phenomenal businesswoman, and she seems to tolerate my advances with equanimity… well, at least now that she knows I am a jealous beast.”
“Just be careful, Dev,” he said softly, then grabbed his younger brother in a one-armed embrace and led them back out of the room. “Come on, let’s let them rest. There will be plenty of time to harass them later.”