I make a big show of gathering towels, a flashlight, and everything we need to outlast the storm. But it is all bluster. Inside, I am shaking too, and it has nothing to do with rattling windows, nothing to do with the hurricane at all.
Chapter Twenty-Four:
The Secret Lay Between Us,
a Living, Breathing Entity
I was an obedient daughter, never wanting to test my father’s temper, and an obedient wife because that was how I was conditioned. Right now, I only want to obey my own thirst. Manny Gellar is still blowing smoke, and it is definitely getting in my eyes. My hormones are fissionable and seeking release. And I am on the verge of taking a big gulp of whatever drink he is serving up. The storm is just injecting another forbidden element into the dangerous mix.
“All right, here’s your big chance to talk me out of it,” I say to Mackie when I reach her on my portable phone while enclosed in the master bathroom, squandering my remaining precious minutes of power.
“What?” her voice comes back garbled and muted, distant, like it is surfacing from the bottom of the ocean, a million miles away instead of just hundreds.
“Listen to me, Julie,” Mackie is saying in a steady, serious voice. “Absolutely everyone is calling wanting to know where you are. We’re all worried about you. Matt is frantic.”
“I’m going to turn my phone off again after this. You call him in New York and tell him I’m okay.”
“What’s it like outside?” she asks.
“Raining, windy, you know,” I said. “It’s doing typical hurricane things.”
“This is a very dangerous storm,” Mackie warns evenly. “It’s made a turn, and it’s headed right for Palm Coast. It’s out over the water, and it’s building strength. I hope you two had the good sense to get out of there.”
Silence.
“You have evacuated, haven’t you?” she presses.
“We haven’t, but my insides are about to. I’m caving. I want him, Mackie. I ache for him. I’m about to combust.”
I can almost hear Mackie shaking her head over the phone and feel her wanting to shake some sense into me.
“Well, it’s too late to get out now, anyway,” Mackie mumbles. “Okay, what’s he offering?”
“That’s what I’m about to find out. Here he comes. I’d better go.”
I think I hear her yell, “Be careful,” before I break the connection. And I know she’s talking about more than the impending storm.
“Why are you hiding in the bathroom?” Manny wonders, cornering me against the sink, maybe eager to get his hands on me, probably afraid to be alone.
“I’m not hiding, I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“Old memories.”
“Good memories, I hope?”
“Mixed. What am I going to do with you, Manny Gellar? What do I really mean to you?” Here I am, fifty years old, fairly sophisticated, yet still capable of the same range of raw emotions I felt back in college—the love and the hurt and the vulnerability. I am still that same insecure girl, full of doubts, needs, and unfulfilled hopes. Still unable to resist Manny Gellar. Still defined by this particular man who should no longer even be a factor in my life.
“You have to ask?” he says. “You mean everything to me.” Then he kisses me with all the passion he is capable of. I resist, but I want to return his kisses and pretend that things are still the way they were. I wonder if he can tell I’m trying to hold the hurricane at bay.
“I do love you, Julie,” he coaxes. “It’s okay to let me know how you feel.”
He is so good at saying all the right words. So good with the kissing. So good at strumming on my fragile emotions. His lips inch up my face before he covers my mouth with his again. It is getting harder to fight my feelings. I don’t know if it is true love or pure lust. I just know I am desperate to hang onto it, and he is hanging onto me like a shipwreck victim clinging to a piece of flotsam.
“Jewels. You haven’t said it. You haven’t told me how you feel.”
“What do you want me to say?” I whisper, almost choking on the words.
“That you love me. You do love me, don’t you?”
I won’t say it, but I can’t exactly deny it.
He whispers words of love into my mouth, his arms enfolding me. “You make me so crazy. I can’t think straight when I’m around you.”
We stand swaying in place, wrapped in each other’s arms for what seems an eternity. I can hardly catch my breath. I want more, and he does too.
Outside, night is descending with loud noises and thumping. If we strain and look out the back windows, we can see that all the palm trees are moving in one direction. The pool area is beginning to flood, but we should be safe on the fifth floor. Sand is splattering against the windows, the wind is shrieking, and the building is beginning to shake. Manny tightens his grip on my hand.
“We belong together,” he says, echoing my thoughts. “You know we do.”
He leads me to the master bedroom.
“Manny, no, not in here,” I protest. My knees are weak, and I lean on him for support as he leads me across the dining room into the guest bedroom. I stand outside the room and grab onto the doorknob, willing myself not to go in.
The guest bedroom is decorated almost entirely in white, Sherwin-Williams-Snowbound-white interior walls, a white ceiling fan, a pearl-encrusted white fabric lampshade, and a white-on-white striped satin comforter against a stark black, heavy iron bed frame. A bridal suite that will soon be visited by the devil. White for the wedding we never had. The honeymoon we never took.
“Please, no,” I repeat, putting the brakes on. “Let’s stay in the living room.” Disappointed, irritated, but resigned, he leads me back there.
“Stop playing games, Julie.”
“I’m not.”
We sit on the couch next to each other, and he places his hand possessively on my knee, pushing up my dress slowly. He rubs my thigh and talks in that dangerous, mesmerizing voice of his. I push his hand away.
“This isn’t right,” I say. “I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can,” Manny says, continuing to massage my thigh, stealing a kiss and sliding closer. “You know you want to.”
What I want and what I am going to do are two different things. The bottom line is I definitely do not want to betray my husband. I know that what I was contemplating would be a breach of trust our marriage would never recover from. Matt might be cheating on me, but that doesn’t mean I have to return the favor. If I do, I will hate myself forever. If our marriage is over, Matt is going to have to make the first move to end it. But there are still unanswered questions. I still need closure on my relationship with Manny.
“Look, if I had thought for one minute that you were really serious about me back then, things might have been so different for us,” I say. “Why can’t you just admit it now? You never were. Serious. It was all about sex. It still is.”
Manny gets up and begins pacing the spacious room.
“Is that what you really think? That what I feel for you is casual? If you do, then you don’t know me at all, Julie.”
“Then I guess I don’t,” I answer warily. Manny rarely calls me Julie unless he is out of sorts or out of control.
“Sure, I love the way we were together,” he admits, returning to sit beside me. “But my feelings for you are real. I loved you then and I love you now. I never got over you.”
Wanting to believe his words, I eye him suspiciously.
“Do you mean that?” I say. “I need to know. There’s a lot at stake here, for both of us.”
“Damn right I mean that,” he replies, moving his hands up to my breasts. When they slip inside the top of my dress, I nearly bolt from the couch, thinking lightning has struck inside the condo.
I try to get my emotions back under control. He isn’t ready to break contact, so when I try to move his hand away, he clasps mine.
“I need someone I can count on,” I say. �
��Someone who doesn’t turn his feelings on and off the way you do. Who doesn’t play games. I need to know where I stand.”
Manny hesitates before he asks. “Is it better with Matt?”
“This isn’t a contest.”
“But I do turn you on, don’t I?” he wonders.
“There it is again,” I say. “Sex.”
“I never heard you complain when we were together. And you didn’t put up much resistance to Matt, either, in college.”
“No matter what you think I did, you know I was never with Matt that way before we got married.”
“Yet somehow you managed to get yourself pregnant,” he challenges.
“I didn’t get myself pregnant, you moron. I don’t even know you anymore. I never know whether I’m getting you or some hyped-up image of you. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an honest word come out of that mouth of yours.” That incredibly sexy mouth that I want to sink my tongue and teeth into, I hear my bad self thinking.
“Julie,” Manny pleads. “Are you listening to me at all? I’m pouring my heart out to you. Do you think this is easy for me? This is real, this is me. I came all the way up here to see you.”
“To sleep with me, you mean,” I argue. “Everything is sexmanship with you.”
“Is that even a word? What will it take to convince you that I’m serious?” he insists.
“That word is not in your vocabulary,” I counter, biting my lower lip. But I desperately want to believe him. I want to hold him, really hold him, not hold back, and, as if he senses victory is at hand, he pulls me tightly against his chest.
“Enough talking,” he growls, as he slides my head onto the arm of the couch, and roughly pushes me down, barely cushioning the impact. When I push him away, he lets loose with a string of Spanish expletives.
“Why are you doing this?”
“You knew what would happen when you brought me here.”
“If I did, I changed my mind. I don’t want you now.”
“Well I can’t turn it on and off the way you can. I want you so bad I can taste it. I miss you. I need to feel you again, Julie. I need to love you again. I need you to love me. You’re wrong if you think this is just about sex.”
Somewhere in the corner of my mind I am thinking, isn’t this what I’ve been missing? Maybe this “just about sex” thing is not such a bad deal.
Panting, his perspiration mingling with his tears, he gropes me blindly and kisses my lips hungrily, almost angrily, like he has to possess me totally. In the past, I had been his completely. He didn’t have to take me by force. I would have gone anywhere with him, done anything for him, willingly. But instinctively I know he is exposing the true depth of his feelings.
So naturally I pick this most inopportune time to cry.
“I’m sorry, so sorry if I ever hurt you.” He sounds properly remorseful. “But I really thought you knew I did love you. I wish I could go back and do it all over again from the start. Fix my mistakes. Make things right between us again.”
When he holds me, time melts away. The past and present blur as my tears seem to flow into the ocean raging outside. I am in a different place, but in my mind we are back in that hotel room in Jacksonville Beach at Opal Weekend. I hug him fiercely, finally sure of his feelings for me.
“I do love you, Manny,” I say, surprising even myself. Was this what I have been waiting for? Longing to say to him? I’ve kept my feelings so tightly corked for so many years; I no longer want to deny them. And it feels good to be honest with my emotions. But what outcome am I expecting?
He wipes away my tears with his thumb.
“But it’s not real,” I breathe softly.
“It’s real, Julie,” Manny promises. “You can believe it.”
He kisses me again on my forehead. I don’t care whether this is real. I want to hang onto this feeling, savor it, if only for a while longer.
Manny’s honey-sweet, gravelly voice draws me like a magnet. I crave his large brown hands on my body again. I sigh as he cradles me in his arms. All my promises to be faithful threaten to leap out the window like traitorous lemmings. But I am determined not to let it go any further.
In that moment, the room grows dark and ominous, other worldly.
“I just wish…” Manny says wistfully.
“What do you wish?” I sigh, my eyes searing his meaningfully.
“That the baby had been mine.”
He couldn’t have surprised me more if he’d kicked me in the head. I’d imagined exactly this scenario in my mind at least a thousand times. And I am bursting to blurt out the truth.
“You know, Nita couldn’t have children,” he continues. “We tried for years, and it never happened for us.”
A single tear slips down my face, and I wipe it off slowly but say nothing.
But here’s how I am feeling. At the same time I am stealing something from Matt, I feel like I have also stolen something precious from Nita. Having Manny’s child was the only thing she wanted but couldn’t have. The one thing her money couldn’t buy. Hating her had become a habit. Maybe I shouldn’t hate her so much anymore.
“Well, you must enjoy Estrellita’s and Antonio’s brood then,” I counter. “Two sets of twins.”
“My sister’s kids are great, but it’s not the same,” Manny admits with regret.
The secret lies dormant between us, a living, breathing entity, looming monstrously in front of me, waiting to break free. Right now, I don’t want to focus on any insurmountable problems. I want to block out everything else in my life but this moment.
Chapter Twenty-Five:
The Emperor’s New Clothes
The howling wind and rattling glass shake me out of my fantasy. The couch is directly in front of a set of sliding glass doors that lead out to the patio. Water is seeping in toward the furniture. Nature is intruding on our little love nest as a strange and sinister storm rocks Palm Coast. We are going to have to leave the couch soon. I want to stay cocooned here, under the soft, warm blanket, forever.
Outside, the wind viciously strains against the glass, a monster breaking out from under the bed in a child’s nightmare. The Big Bad Wolf outside is refusing to be ignored as he does his best to huff and puff and blow my second house down. The Big Bad Wolf inside is also howling.
“Manny, could you help me put some towels in front of the sliding glass doors?” I rocket up from the couch and grab another handful of towels from the hall linen closet. I take charge of the situation again, since Manny doesn’t seem inclined or capable of doing it.
“It sounds like the floodgates are opening. Help me move the couch and the chairs and end table and cover them with sheets. Let’s move whatever food we have left into the guest bathroom so we can get to it more easily. And grab the flashlight sitting on the counter in the kitchen. Then we’d better move into the bathroom, close the door, and hope the windows in the back bedroom will hold.”
I instruct Manny to take the duvet cover from the queen-sized bed in the guest bedroom and wrap it around himself to protect his body from flying glass. He takes another duvet cover for me from the twin bed in the second guest bedroom. Closing the bathroom door behind us, he blocks the shower entrance with the queen-sized mattress he has pulled off the bed. We sit next to each other on the shower seat, praying we will survive the night. He knows the drill. He’s been through this before.
The wind takes its vengeance against the building. Outside, debris flies, more glass shatters. I’m on the precipice of a rollercoaster, right before the fall, my stomach about to lurch out of control.
The stream of rushing water won’t be denied. It seeps beneath the back sliding glass doors, pushed by the force of the high winds and steady, slanting rain. The windows rattle and the condo shakes to the rock-and-roll beat.
Night is descending. Huge, powerful flashes of light glow and fade out my back window. The streetlights are out, and the lights that arc the causeway bridge are gone. Lights in the direction of St. Augustine ha
ve blinked out. Our power is gone. It’s dark and beginning to get hot and stuffy with all the windows closed.
The palm trees splinter and crash outside to the sounds of roof shingles and fronds tossed against the windows. Glass shatters on the ocean side, blowing sharp splinters into the living room. We haven’t listened to the radio, so we know nothing about the location or severity of the hurricane. But we can hear the storm strengthen ominously. Will it be another killer like Katrina?
As the train roars, we clutch each other to ride out the tornado. It sounds and feels like the roof is collapsing and caving in around us, like the condo is being ripped apart, chunk by chunk, by a vengeful God. My pulse races. I pray that we’ll be safe in the shower.
“The bedroom door is going to blow in,” Manny predicts, probably recalling his experience during Hurricane Andrew. “We’ve got to get out of here and put all our weight up against it.” He helps me up and out of our safe place in the shower stall, and we stand shoulder to shoulder against the guest bedroom door, trying to hold it in place, to keep the wind out, while the building sways all around us. As we stand there for what seems like hours but is probably only minutes, our arms grow sore and my back aches.
A series of what-if scenarios swirl around my head. We could die. The building could collapse on us. We could get flattened by a flying palm frond. Anything could happen, and there is nothing I can do about it. It is out of my control completely. I am soaked with fear.
Suddenly, it is eerily quiet.
“I think it’s stopped,” I say. “Let’s take a look out on the back balcony.”
Stretching, we walk over to the sliding glass door. I pull up the shades and pull back the lock. From the balcony, the night sky spreads before us and we can see the stars. Unbelievable.
“That’s a good sign, right?” I ask Manny, breathing in gulps of fresh air, letting the breeze cool down the perspiration that seems permanently stamped on my forehead and my chest.
“It’s just the eye. We need to get back inside. It will be coming around again, soon, and stronger.”
Standing in a pool of water, I fasten the lock on the sliding glass door and pull down the privacy shades. Fifteen minutes later, Manny’s prediction comes true. The wind roars back, shifting direction, and the glass doors resume their incessant rattling.
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