Most people smiled in those pictures, and so did she. Barely. Her smile said, Happy to see you, my dear. I know your secrets, and I’m going to use them to chew you up and spit you out.
All right, so I was projecting. Back in the real world, she was a buyer for a textile design firm, which sounded like a glamour position for a glamorous person, and that’s how she looked. In fact, she looked more than that. In a sleek black dress that showed both the richness of her curves and the slimness of her waist, she looked dark, predatory, and mysterious. In other words, Hemi’s match, and my polar opposite. I was about as mysterious and predatory as a puppy. I’d have been willing to bet big money that she had at least four inches on me, too. In height and bust size.
I switched the subject with an effort, and by the time Karen and I finally headed back to the house, it was starting to rain. We had to run, and that helped. After that, we watched a movie, and Karen went to bed with her book, and I didn’t.
I’d hoped Hemi would text me when he was done, but nine o’clock came and went, and I’d still heard nothing. I took a shower, thought about putting on something sexy, and didn’t do it. I’d never wanted more to push, and I’d never been more sure that pushing would be wrong. So instead, I dressed in something else from Shades of V: a pair of silky-soft white cotton pajama pants and a pale-pink camisole embroidered with flowers at the neckline.
I wasn’t going to try to be something I wasn’t. If I had to compete for Hemi’s love, for his desire? I’d already lost. And then I finally got into bed, opened my book, listened to the rain drumming on the roof, and read the same page over and over again.
When I heard the front door open, I put the book down and got out of bed, trying to calm my heart.
No pressure, I told myself. No fear.
I went out into the hallway, then out to the lounge, walking softly so as not to wake Karen, and found Hemi taking his shoes off by the door. He was in jeans and a dark brown merino T-shirt tonight. Whether that had been to tell me this was casual, or to tell Anika, I didn’t know.
He stood when I walked in. He looked at me, and his eyes…they were empty.
I walked straight into his arms, put my own arms around him, and said, “I’m glad you’re home.”
He didn’t smell like Hemi. He smelled like tropical flowers and oriental spices. He smelled like another woman. Looking up, I saw a trace of red lipstick on his neck, below his earlobe, and then I didn’t look, because he was holding me tight, squeezing so hard it almost hurt, picking me up so my feet left the floor. And I could swear his arms were shaking.
“Shh,” I whispered, barely knowing what I was saying. “Shh. It’s all right. Come to bed. Come with me.”
I held his hand, then, through the dimly lit house. Outside, the wind whistled and howled, and the rain beat against the huge windows as if the night wanted the world to become water. As if it wanted to drown us. It couldn’t, though. It couldn’t get in here.
When we reached the bed, he sat down, started to say something, then stopped and ran a hand over the back of his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m all good.”
“Hemi.” I drew my hand over his carved cheekbone, the same way he’d done with me the night before. “No. Please lie down. Please.”
He stared at me for long seconds, and I held my breath. And then he lay down.
I took my clothes off. Slowly, because I knew he liked to watch. I shimmied the soft trousers down my legs, and then I drew the camisole over my head and dropped it at my feet. I didn’t take off the matching pale-pink flower-embroidered thong, though. I knew he’d like to look at it a little longer, to delay the moment when he’d touch me, when he’d feel me. And tonight? It was all about what he liked.
He still hadn’t said anything when I climbed over him and straddled his hips, and he didn’t say anything when I stroked his face and kissed his lips, either. That was fine with me. I didn’t want words, and I didn’t need them. Instead, I tried to tell him everything I needed to say through my hands and my body, through the power of my touch. How much I loved him, and how glad I was that he was mine. How sure I was that he was mine. And how sure I was that I was his.
I held my breath as I finally, so slowly, pulled his T-shirt up and over his powerful chest, but he sat up and let me do it. And when I kissed his mouth and stroked his sculpted arms, his chest, his firm abdomen, his sides, tight with hard muscle—he didn’t say anything then, either. But he closed his eyes.
I tasted her on him, so I washed him clean. I kissed his neck where her lipstick had stained his skin, and then I licked it away. I kissed my way down his throat, over his chest, finding his sensitive spots and lingering there. Down here, I tasted him, but I didn’t taste her. But then, I’d known I wouldn’t taste her.
When I felt him sinking into the mattress, relaxing under my touch, I pulled off his jeans and briefs, climbed off of him, and drew my thong down my legs. His eyes were open now, and I was suddenly, fiercely glad of it. I wanted to be the face in his vision tonight. I wanted to be the woman in his arms and the peace in his dreams. I wanted to be his everything, the same way he was mine. I wanted him to know it for sure. I wanted him to believe.
For once, he wasn’t trying to be in control. For once, he let me make love to him. He let me kiss him, and touch him, and lick him, and stroke him. And finally, he let me climb on top of him, and he let me please him.
I touched myself, too. I slid my hands over my breasts, my belly, and then on down, bold and fearless, and he lay in the light of this bedside lamp, his breath coming harder now, and watched me do it.
I didn’t want to make him work tonight, but when his hands came up to my breasts, I didn’t object. Instead, I hummed, closed my eyes, rocked him a little better, and said, “Yes.”
He was caressing me, then. His hands felt so much better on me than my own did, and when they held my hips, when he started to move me over him? That felt the best of all.
“Hemi,” I said, continuing to touch myself, doing exactly what I wanted, exactly what I needed as he pulled me over him, onto him, again and again. “I love you. I love you. I…”
After that, though, I couldn’t say anything else. And neither could he.
Hemi
Hope had stolen my heart long ago. Tonight, she locked it away and took the key.
When we were lying together, when my breath had come back and hers had, too, I said, “I didn’t sleep with Anika.”
She had her hand on my chest, two slow fingers tracing the whorls of my tattoo. “I know.”
“How do you know? Why do you trust me? I haven’t been a man any woman could count on. And I came home stinking of her.”
“Hemi.” She propped her chin on my chest, now, and ran a hand over my bicep, then up to my shoulder. “If you had, wouldn’t you have taken a shower?”
I had to laugh, the barest breath. “Yeh.”
She smiled, a thing of such sweetness and such light that I had to catch my breath. “I didn’t need that in order to know, though. Of course I didn’t. When you say you aren’t a man a woman can count on—when haven’t you been that for me? When haven’t you tried?”
“Well, not so much at the beginning, maybe.”
“Maybe not so much then, but you’re trying now.”
She stroked me some more, her fingers running lightly over the cool greenstone of my pendant, the adze that stood for strength and courage and determination. All the hard things, all the things I’d always thought mattered most. She traced up the braided cord and down again, over my skin, over my heart. And because she didn’t ask, I told her. “It wasn’t good. She said some things to try to hurt me, and I said things to hurt her. Like old times, eh.”
“Mm.” She was still drawing that soft hand over me, and it soothed me and calmed me in exactly the same way as water flowing over rock, just as I’d imagined earlier. The rain beat down outside, drumming out its liquid message of connection, of going away and coming back again, of the endless web that w
as life and death, past and present and future. Of the world and all the creatures that moved in it, and the people, too: those who’d been, those who were, and those yet to come. Of the world to a Maori.
And inside, in the warmth, in the night, Hope untwisted my heart and made me whole.
I put my hand over hers, felt the smoothness of her skin and the solid edges of my ring on her finger, and said, “I love you.”
She held my hand, kissed the spot on my chest where my heart beat, and said, “I know.”
Hope
Something changed between Hemi and me after that night. Some twisted place in him had loosened, and he laughed more easily, smiled more broadly, and, I could have sworn, loved more deeply. I knew I did. I loved him more, even though I wouldn’t have said that was possible. Or maybe the answer was, I loved him better.
To truly love, we have to see, don’t we? And the more Hemi let me see him, the more I saw to love, even when what I saw wasn’t entirely lovable.
That makes no sense? It felt true anyway. But then, I was pretty new to love, and loving Hemi wasn’t exactly wading in the kiddie pool. I’d been in the deep end from the start.
Too bad we couldn’t take all that love and get married with it. Instead, we made our leisurely way down New Zealand and ended up in Queenstown, the adventure resort in the lower part of the South Island, where an enormous lake glowed as richly as the sapphires in my bracelet beneath a ring of snow-covered peaks and an ice-blue winter sky. And in the mountains, Karen learned to snowboard, and I found out that I hated skiing. Which was awkward.
Hemi loved to ski, naturally. And even more naturally, he was good at it. At least he seemed like he was to me, although what did I know. As for Karen—something about the medical crisis she’d been through had made her fearless. She said after her first morning’s lesson, when I commented on it, “I already kind of died, you know? Now I’ve got all this life, and I just want to do it all.” And I looked at Hemi, he looked at me, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. I’m going to be vetting every guy who turns up, no worries, and he’s going to notice me doing it.
I was probably overprotective. Hemi definitely was.
But—skiing. Karen didn’t mind falling. It made her laugh. Not me, though. It made me tense up, and after about the ninth or tenth time, it just made me want to cry.
“Get your poles under you,” the instructor, an impossibly fit young brunette with a sparkling smile, coached me on Day Two as a very tiny child in a jumpsuit—and probably diapers—rocketed down the bunny slope next to where I lay sprawled. Well, it looked like rocketing to me. “Push up,” Ms. Skiing’s-Dead-Easy said, “and away you go.”
I struggled, felt snow going down my waistband, up my pant legs, and down my neck, swallowed past the tightness in my throat, blinked the tears back, and thought, How about not. After which I thanked the instructor very much, saw her taking her mental impression of American toughness down another notch, decided that Karen was going to have to carry the flag for both of us, and snowplowed my way down to the lodge—hey, at least I didn’t slide down on my butt—drank a hot chocolate, and told Hemi and Karen, when they showed up for lunch, “I’ve discovered there’s this thing called snowshoeing. I’m doing that.”
“You’re kidding,” Karen said. “Hope. Lame. What are you, an old lady?”
“I am somebody,” I said, doing my best to maintain my dignity, “who enjoys the gentler pursuits.”
“But you wouldn’t even get to go fast!” she said. “You’d be going exactly the same pace uphill and downhill, slogging along, and it’d be hard instead of fun. What’s the point?”
“That is the point.” I looked at Hemi. “Thank you for giving me the chance to discover skiing. And if you don’t pressure me to keep doing it, I’ll thank you even more. Consider that a clue.”
His eyes were warm, but he didn’t smile. “Don’t enjoy the thrills, eh.”
“Not this kind,” I said. “And life’s too short to do something you hate just because other people like it.”
Anika was probably an expert skier. And afterwards, she probably threw her head back and uttered a musical laugh in between posing in her skintight jumpsuit, tossing back flaming shots, and talking about double black diamond runs and how much better they were at some other resort.
As you can see, I’d spent a few non-skiing hours sitting around in the lodge over the past couple days, waiting for the others and people-watching. I was also grumpy.
Karen sighed, but Hemi said, “Right, then. Snowshoeing. Let’s find you a tour,” and smiled at me for real, and I thought, I love you, you know?
So I did snowshoe, and all right, it wasn’t the most exciting adventure a person could ever have. On the other hand, I got solitude and space unimaginable to a girl from Brooklyn, some amazing views over snow-capped mountains, dreaming white-dusted hills, the green valley, and the blue jewel of the lake, and much less snow down my back.
Hemi didn’t hear from his lawyer until the day before we were due to fly back to New York, when we were at breakfast with Karen.
When his phone rang as he was working his way through a massive plate of eggs on toast with sausage, bacon, and sautéed mushrooms,and tomatoes, he glanced at the screen, answered, listened for a minute, and then said, “I’ll ring you back in fifteen minutes.”
He hung up and asked me, “D’you mind coming outside with me once we finish this, so we can take this call? It’s Walter.” And my heart skipped a couple beats.
Karen sighed and said, “This is the last time I go on vacation with you guys. I’m just saying.”
Hemi said, “Oh, really? Thought you were enjoying the skiing.” He was acting normal, so I did my best, too, even though I needed to hear what Walter said. No, I was dying to hear what Walter said. Hemi had wanted me to talk to his attorney with him, though, and was going out of his way to make that happen? That was what you’d call “major progress.”
Karen said, “The skiing part’s great. The New Zealand part rocks, too. It’s just all the…” She waved a hand. “Secret talks. Drama. Heartburn. I’m thinking about becoming a Buddhist, so you know.”
Hemi stopped cutting his slice of thick, meaty bacon and said, “A Buddhist, eh. Better eat your sausage while you can, I reckon.”
Karen said, “You don’t have to be a vegetarian to be a Buddhist,” and took another defiant bite of her own bacon.
“Good thing, too,” Hemi said. “As I expect we’d find you hiding in the toilets sneaking a hamburger.”
Karen said with dignity, “That’s the superficial explanation. It’s a lot more than that. A guy I know at school has been telling me about it. Noah Halliday. It’s not about eating meat, it’s about not getting attached, so everything isn’t such a huge deal. I mean, love’s great and all, I’m sure, having some kind of grand passion like you guys do, but wouldn’t it be better if you could just go with things? Noah says that if you’re Buddhist, you learn to accept change as the turn of the wheel, remember that other things will come along in your life, and serenely let it go and move on. Hope’s always so worried. Wouldn’t it be better not to be worried, or not to get mad like you do? I just want to be happy and take life as it comes. Can you really not see that that’s better?”
I was groping for an answer to that. I wasn’t supposed to have been worried? That was a character flaw? When I’d been nineteen and telling the funeral director, “No plot, and no casket, just the cremation” for my mother, because we’d needed that money for the rent? When I’d known I was the only thing between my eleven-year-old sister and foster care, so I’d better get over my fear and pain and sorrow in one big hurry and figure out how to take care of her, or she’d be lost?
All right, I wasn’t just “groping for an answer.” We’ll go ahead and call it “furious.”
I started to say something and bit it back, but Hemi said it for me. Still calmly, of course. I wouldn’t say he was great at not getting attached, but nobody did “controlled”
like Hemi.
“I don’t think attachment means what you think it means,” he said. “Or Buddhism, either, though I can see why a sixteen-year-old boy might think the ‘accepting and moving-on’ bit sounded good. I’d have been all for that idea, myself, if I’d thought of it. I’d have talked it up to a girl or two, too, I’m sure.”
He shot a glance at me, and I said, “Or maybe you could go on and tell her that you did talk it up to a girl or two.”
He suppressed a smile and went on. “And as for Hope—maybe she’s been worried because she’s had to think about survival—for both of you, which is heaps harder than thinking about it for yourself, and scarier, too—when she wasn’t one bit ready for that. And she did it anyway, didn’t she? If she was worried, that just tells you how hard it was. That’s not weakness, and it’s not wrong. Who’s Noah Halliday when he’s at home? I’m taking a stab that his dad isn’t on the dole.”
You see why I loved this man?
Karen, of course, sighed. “I should have known you guys would react like this. He’s not sixteen. He’s seventeen, all right? He’s in the Gifted and Talented program with me, too, so he’s not exactly stupid. And so he’s not poor. Why does that matter? You aren’t poor, and you understand life.”
Hemi might have had a sardonic glint in his eye now. “Yeh, well, now isn’t then. Let’s say that my dad wasn’t paying school fees when I was seventeen. Let’s go on and say, in fact, that my dad wasn’t around when I was seventeen, and neither was my mum. Most of the people I know who don’t think about what’s going to come next, the ones who assume that the wheel will turn to something better? They’ve got somebody in mind they’re thinking will be handing them that something better. I’ve known a fair few people like that. Hope isn’t one of them.”
“All right, then,” Karen continued doggedly. “So you’re not spiritual, and Noah is. Not in some voodoo way, but in a useful way. I mean, why do people kill other people, and steal, and start wars? Because they get attached, right? And how come you and Hope fight? Because you’re so attached, which means everything matters so much and is this big drama. Just imagine if instead, you could accept things more. If you could go through life and have experiences, and not have drama. Noah says, if you’re not worried somebody will take your good thing away, then you can just enjoy it in the moment. So if you’re with somebody, and then it doesn’t work out? You just think, ‘The wheel has turned, and I probably needed that experience,’ and accept what happens next.”
Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) Page 12