Art-Crossed Love

by Libby Rice

  “Technically,” he said, “the air pollution gradually caused a serious case of acute bronchitis. The smoke and exhaust—apparently you don’t get enough of that up by Central Park—irritated the air passages in your lungs until they swelled and caused all sorts of excitement. Probably pneumonia, in the end, but I wouldn’t let them drag you off for an x-ray.”

  He’d had a hunch. So of course he’d had sex with her on the floor instead of seeking help. When he’d awakened hours later to Lissa’s desperate, flailing attempts to breathe, he’d panicked, meaning if either of them got sick again, they’d need to do it in a different hotel. The doctor currently on call would probably be cowering under his desk for a while.

  Unless Lissa had an immediate relapse, then the little man could damn well deal with Cole and the threats of mayhem that came out of his mouth when riddled with worry and regret.

  Lissa settled back against the mountain of pillows he’d used to prop her up and ease her breathing. “How did you get me to take the drugs?”

  She didn’t know? “Amazing how persuasive I can be, and how accommodating you can be, when I play my cards right.”

  In fact, a relapse—so long as he was assured of a favorable outcome—wouldn’t be so bad. His Lissa made a soft, endearing patient when completely out of her mind. “Thank you,” she’d murmured. “Need you, Cole.”

  The day had passed in rounds—an antibiotic, then a cough syrup. When she’d winced in her sleep, he’d gone in with the pain killer. A steroid had topped off the cocktail, along with one of those birth control pills she’d made sure to mention. Each time he’d coaxed her to open her pretty lips, she’d obeyed with an abandon he suspected hadn’t surfaced since infancy.

  Lissa had swallowed her meds, both vulnerable and incoherent, and then burrowed against him for to sleep. “Don’t go, Cole.” He hadn’t. Only after she’d slumped into oblivion had he allowed himself to leave the bed, and then only to a bedside chair to watch her sleep.

  And to read.

  Far from recovered and probably still slightly dazed, she murmured to herself, “I do like persuasive.” Then, her head stretched forward from her shoulders, straining toward his letter. “Whatcha reading?”

  There goes the reprieve.

  He folded Kate’s letter along worn lines, returning his wife’s parting words to an innocuous, portable square. “Nothing important.” At least to you.

  “Looks old.”

  “Not at all.” Two years is practically new. Carrying it around for that long is totally normal.

  Life hit new lows when a man didn’t believe his own thoughts.

  Lissa’s fingers crawled forward across the bed. “Can I see this not-that-old piece of non-importance?”

  Too bad underwear didn’t have pockets. That one lame fact left him with nowhere to stash the evidence.

  ******

  Lissa couldn’t pinpoint exactly why, but she wanted to read Cole’s secret letter. Badly. Probably because of the wary defensiveness that flickered across his features before fading away to nothingness. Now he sank into lounging insolence, but it would take a better actor to disguise the fact that the tattered sheet had meaning he’d prefer not to share.

  A decision loomed. She owed him for a few trivials, like seeing her through the night, fetching a doctor, and coaxing her through dose after dose of drugs. Memories were popping up one after another. Cole had cocooned her in the bed. Each and every dose, down to the last pill and tablespoon, had gone down with his body stretched around hers… sitting her up, handing over the water chaser, whispering that he knew she’d feel better if she took one more swallow for him.

  And sure enough, she could breathe again. Her chest pulled tight, and her body ached with the physical memory of the night’s strain, but she could breathe. Funny how first worlders, with their overabundance of doctors and pharmacies and a 911 system that actually worked, took things like “not dying from bronchitis” for granted. Here, waking up and realizing you could only access a limited amount of air deserved the DEFCON 5 treatment.

  The Cole treatment.

  Not to say that Nurse Betty in his chair should get to lie. He hadn’t fibbed about sleeping in the same bed, but he wasn’t telling the truth right now. Sick or not—better because of him, or not—those days when she gave him a hall pass had met their end.

  Moving sluggishly against her lingering malaise, she crawled toward the edge of the bed, closer to Cole and his sentinel spot. “You saved me from—”

  “It’s bronchitis, Lissa, not lung cancer.”

  Cole used bored and superior like a bulletproof vest. He seemed to think nothing could get past him so long as he had his smug shored up. “Regardless,” she replied, not sparing a glance at the note clutched in his fist or the distinct ab muscles that clenched behind it, “a woman needs oxygen, and I wasn’t getting any. So, thank you.”

  She got a nod for her trouble. A grudging one, but discernible all the same. Seemed like as good a time as any—

  Lissa sprang forward. He hadn’t seen that coming from Sicky MaGee. Before he could jerk back—or up or to the side or even pull the note out of reach—she snatched the paper right out of his hand.

  Back on the bed, she scrambled to the headboard, sure he’d be on her tail. Balled up in the furthest corner of the mattress, with the note tucked against her tummy, she knew he either wouldn’t get to the thing or the getting would be entertaining… in a “go ahead, stretch my limbs wide and go for my tender underside I dare you,” kind of way.

  A few seconds passed. Then a minute. Then two without a sound or even a dent in the mattress. Cole was letting her get away. Still wondering at his game, she craned her head around and took a look. He sat in the chair, gravestone still, with his arms crossed over his pecs. Long, muscular legs spread wide in front of him, a GQ pose that didn’t work with the steam rising from the top of his head.

  When he didn’t make a move, relief slackened her taut muscles, letting her straighten to the position she’d woken up in a few minutes before. She lifted the note in front of her face and let it dangle. “I will read this,” she promised meaningfully. Last chance.

  He made no move to stop the inevitable.

  Slowly, with all the purpose of a woman who’d invaded another’s privacy and thought doing so boldly might somehow heal the transgression, she unfolded the paper.

  And she started to read.

  If you’re reading this… I know you believe me.

  The writing curled in a flowery, feminine script. Lissa’s heart decelerated, dragging with the kind of beat that predicts what’s coming and tries to stop the train wreck by slowing the fuck down. Only one woman in the world could have written Cole a letter that he’d be reading at another woman’s bedside thousands of miles from home.

  Cole cut in, caustic and challenging. “You see, Kate wrote that my believing her didn’t matter. She felt the fact that I’d asked the question in the first place had destroyed her. Had destroyed us.”

  Lissa suspended her disbelief that this was actually happening and read on.

  Perhaps your suspicion means you know something about me that I’m finally learning.

  Stomach cramping and afraid, literally scared to absorb the next and final line, Lissa looked up. Cole hadn’t moved. Now he challenged her with his calm. “Don’t stop now, not when you worked so hard for the privilege.”

  Right, the privilege of reading her first suicide note. Why couldn’t Lissa, for once, have left him alone? Dreading the onslaught of knowledge she needed but desperately didn’t want, Lissa returned to the page.

  “I’ll help,” Cole interrupted again. “She wrote that without my trust, she couldn’t go on. And here you wanted to know how I know I killed her.”

  Never could my choice be your fault. Yet, without you, I don’t know how to make it.

  Not what Lissa had expected. “How good was Kate with grammar?”

  “What? Fuck you, Lissa, to ask that at a time like this.”
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br />   Lissa braced herself against Cole’s oppressive fury. She hadn’t been joking. “Was she an astute writer? Because if so, this letter is not what you think—”

  A wave of coughing overtook Lissa’s revelation, and Cole shot to her side with a brown bottle of syrup. “Open up.”

  She obeyed, and within seconds another shot of codeine careened through her system.

  “This last sentence”—Lissa held the note out to Cole—“clarifies the previous one. When she says she doesn’t know how to ‘make it,’ she’s referring to making the choice she faced, not an inability to ‘make it’ amongst the living.”

  Cole grabbed the letter and crushed it against his chest. “Hair splitting.”

  “If that’s what you call reading two related sentences and assigning them the meaning they were intended.” Stupid man. Stupid, injured man.

  The letter acknowledged Cole’s fading suspicions. Kate had known the raging waters had subsided, yet to her, his initial fears meant he’d known something important about her, a secret Kate herself had been figuring out.

  Air hovered beneath Lissa’s nose, at her lips. She could hardly force it down, and this time the breathing difficulty had nothing to do with infected lungs. “Cole, why did you accuse Kate in the first place?”

  He jerked back, taking the note with him when he left the room. Probably for the best. Kate’s words were forever branded on Lissa’s brain, and Cole only grew agitated when he saw the thing in her hands. He could withhold his letter but not his answers.

  She dogged him across the suite and into his room, almost relieved when he pulled on his loose-fitting nylon pants and a sweatshirt. Almost.

  “Why,” she said again, “did two parked cars at the same hotel—an occurrence with a million legitimate excuses—make you question your wife’s fidelity? You had another reason.”

  He approached the window and looked out at the Taj Mahal, which fought an ongoing fight for supremacy against a shroud of brownish-gray clouds, keeping his shoulders to the room like he could kill the conversation with rigid posture. “I had every reason.”

  “So narrow them down.”

  “No.”

  Make that stubborn, stupid, injured man. “That letter says you knew something about Kate that left her with a choice. Seems like she thought you might blame yourself for her decision, and I don’t think that decision boiled down to ‘jump’ or ‘live life to the fullest.’”

  Never could my choice be your fault. Yet, without you, I don’t know how to make it.

  “She wanted your input. Last time I checked, one generally doesn’t ask her spouse if she should hurl herself into a ravine. That can’t be what she was debating.”

  Quiet stole over the room. Then, fraction by fraction, the tension in Cole’s body released. He turned, and for the first time since she and Cole had met, he appeared… confused, blue eyes gone vague and searching.

  If only Lissa had answers to her endless string of questions. “Your wife was torn—learning herself and fighting herself and hoping you could make it better. What was she torn about?”

  “Me,” Cole answered, his voice hoarse and final.

  Lissa tapped her toes. Cole didn’t elaborate.

  “And?” she prompted.

  Dark, flinty emotion bled into his stare. “The things you want from me, in sickness and in health, she… avoided.” A bitter traction took hold with each additional word. “She didn’t beg me to fuck her on the bathroom floor. She never let me go down on her in the cab of my truck. The bathroom was for bathing, the truck for driving, and the bed for sleeping.”

  The rough descriptions should have put Lissa off, but she leaned forward for more. “A lame sex life—one more thing I don’t generally equate with suicide.”

  “No, only with infidelity.”

  “Ah.” This time it was Lissa who sank into a bedside chair. “If not from you, then sex must have come from elsewhere. Right?” Sarcasm leached into the question, but how could the man be so dense?

  Cole shook his head. “At first I thought it a normal slow down. But the longer we went—months—the more I suspected her depression. We treated that, and she seemed to be doing better. She planted flowers and cooked dinners. Her clientele in Boulder grew beyond her capacity. She spent time with friends. But her sex drive? Nothing. When I accused her of being with Trevor, she unraveled.”

  “Because you were wrong.”

  Cole scrubbed a hand through his shaggy curls. “Can we stop? You’ve heard it all… from the root of our problems to the fact that they were irrevocably, pretty much inhumanely, my fault.”

  Lissa contemplated an intricate rug beneath her feet. Interlocking patterns swirled into a mix that, taken separately, made a mess, yet as a whole, made a museum-worthy work of art. She closed her eyes, still seeing the blues and greens dance against the backs of her eyelids. A knocking had started in her skull about the time she’d read Kate’s first word. Not a headache signaling a shutdown before she let too much in, but an insistence that she gather more, that she pay attention.

  That internal thump, thump, thump grew louder. She’d saved Cole from his slavery to realism with his own pictures. She’d save him from his guilt with his own words. “Who gave Kate my painting?”

  “I did. You know that.”

  Nice try. “Not Redemption.” The pretty one. “Revenge.” The dark one hidden beneath the bed.

  “Can’t you guess?”

  If not, she could search her records. For now, Lissa focused on connecting the dots pounding away in her head. They spelled out an answer that fluttered beyond her reach, a blinking neon sign with a few too many missing bulbs.

  Opening her eyes, Lissa reasoned out loud. “I suppose one person might have found Revenge an apt gift.”

  Cole half-nodded, half-shrugged. “Yeah—”

  “The only other person who felt betrayed by Kate and Trevor’s supposed affair.” Who still feels betrayed.

  “Getting warmer—”

  “Rhea.”

  The knocking went quiet.

  ******

  “Exactly.” Cole watched a stealthy smile spread across Lissa’s lips and bit down on his own. What good would all this do? He’d let Lissa see the note to end her craving for answers but had gotten the opposite result. The woman must lead a double life as a conspiracy theorist.

  “So the two of them dueled in code?” she asked. Then, under her breath, “Rhea doesn’t hate like normal people.”

  “There’s a right way?” If so, he wouldn’t mind perfecting his methods.

  Lissa shrugged. “After Kate presented Rhea with Sisters, Rhea set the work aside and responded with a cryptic gift of her own—Revenge—which stopped just shy of a threat.” She stood and worked on wearing a track in the rug. “I’m guessing Kate gave Rhea Sisters during happier times. After you burst the bubble with your theory about cross-pollination between the two marriages, Rhea retaliated with a painting that told Kate the last thing she wanted was a lying, cheating sister.”

  All true. After losing her husband’s trust, Kate’s best friend had gone next.

  Lissa paced faster and faster, hands wringing at her side.

  “Lissa,” Cole murmured, inching away from the window toward her progressing flame-out.

  She spun around. “Don’t patronize me. You have to accept that Rhea plays at the hate feeding your prickling conscious. All the cryptic messages? The latent hostility? They’re empty because she knows Kate did nothing wrong. When I told Rhea I suspected her of faking, she didn’t deny it, not outright.”

  Suddenly, Lissa lifted a shaky hand to her forehead, and Cole lunged forward, wrapping her against his chest. “I shouldn’t have showed you the letter.”

  “They’re related,” she insisted, sounding too thready to be convincing. “Not-so-coincidentally, Rhea’s erratic behavior makes as little sense as Kate’s note. Whatever Kate was trying to decide has to have caused, or have been caused by, Rhea’s withdrawal.”

 
A hesitant knock sounded on the door.

  Lissa’s gaze shot to his. She looked feverish and frantic. “Don’t answer. Not now. We can figure this out.”

  The madness of her plea yanked a thread of logic that had gone dormant. After their first awful morning in Colorado had planted nagging seeds of doubt, Cole had attributed her schemes to manipulations, to poorly-played attempts to snag herself a project puppet. Now, looking down at the desperation in her flushed face, he realized Lissa only wanted to release his guilt and grief. Managing him hadn’t been the goal, not for a long while, maybe not ever.

  His chest ached beneath her resting chin. This beautiful, infuriating woman tried to solve a nonexistent puzzle because she cared, powering through enough hydrocodone to tranq a horse in an attempt convince him he’d had nothing to do with his wife’s death.

  The selflessness, misguided but unrelenting, destroyed him.

  No more letting her crusade on his behalf. Cradling Lissa’s cheeks, he hardened his tone, “Lie down. You’re exhausted. Drugged.”

  For you, I’m letting go.

  He clenched. Beside her upturned face, he saw the tattered edges of Kate’s letter—ground zero of his eventual spiral—wedged between his index and middle fingers.

  The knocking on the door sounded again, more forceful.

  Cole stepped back and snapped, “I’m coming.” Before Lissa could utter one more syllable, he shredded the paper, leaving nothing but confetti to drift to the floor. The act left him feeling light, suddenly free to share the feelings formerly trapped in Kate’s words.

  A discrete clearing of a throat sounded through the wood. “It’s Sonu, sir.”

  Cole flashed a dark glance at the door. “A minute!” He wasn’t moving an inch until Lissa was flat on her back. Breathing harshly, he returned a perceptive stare to the woman barely able to stand in front of him. He waited, tapping a foot like he had all day. When she stood her ground, he growled, “Bed. Now.”

  “Lissa closed her mouth, sucking her teeth in a way that said any silence might be brief. But she plodded to his four poster and climbed aboard. Lying back, she pulled the covers to her chin and rolled until Cole stared at her curving profile from the rear.