“Gabe just wants to do what’s right, considering how he left things.”
“What’s right is for the two of you to get together.”
“Timing is everything.”
“When two people love each other the way you and Gabe do—the way you have since you were trying to paw your way out of a play pen—the time is always right. You shouldn’t have to wait for some paper to tell you that you’re available for Gabe again. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because you always were available, in your heart. So if you’re concerned you’re committing some grave sin, you can stop worrying. You already have, according to some people. But not in the eyes of anyone who really knows you, Gabe or Cort, that’s what matters. There’s no sin. No wrongdoing. Cort is to blame. He’s the bad guy here. Talk to any priest, and he’ll tell you—there’s no sanctity in what Cort did. Your soul is free.”
“My ‘soul is free’? Since when did you get all philosophical? You sound like Anna.”
He snorted. “Maybe. Or maybe I just feel strongly about this.”
I stared into my untouched coffee. “I can’t ‘talk to a priest.’ I don’t even know if I’m Catholic.”
“Everyone’s Catholic here, baby!” he said, opening his arms wide and beaming. “It’s New Orleans!”
*
Two hours later, I stepped out of the shower, thinking about my conversation with Jules. I’d made bad decisions in so many ways over the past few months, but making a move to kiss Gabe hadn’t felt like one of them. I wasn’t sure who was right or who was wrong. I wished for the days when I was a kid and everything seemed so black-and-white, when the answers were easy.
I got dressed, slipped out without waking Anna and boarded the streetcar with a fresh sketchbook. The one I’d been using before was still sitting on a nightstand at Cort’s and even though I was desperate to get it back—every sketchbook was personal to me, like a diary or a life story—it felt fitting to have clean pages at this moment. I wanted to be taken somewhere; I didn’t want to drive. My mind shifted and bounced along as it clattered its way down St. Charles Avenue. I studied the houses, as I always did, and thought of Gabe. When we were kids we’d put our ears to the tracks, waiting to hear a rumble. I saw the sidewalks where we used to run. There wasn’t a stop on the St. Charles line that wasn’t somehow attached to a memory of Gabe. We would ride from the edge of the Quarter to the end of the line at Claiborne Avenue and then back over to Audubon Park, where we’d hop off and hurry to our favorite bench. That was where I was headed now. I wanted to sit there and remember.
St. Charles Avenue may have been the city’s favorite haunt of haves, but the have-nots were just around the corner from many of the mansions. This street and its back corners had a spirit all their own. As children Gabe and I would make up stories about the people who lived in the mystery houses; sometimes, in the middle of our games, the people would emerge from their doorways, looking disappointingly normal.
Now Gabe was one of those people.
His house loomed on the other side of my window and even though I knew we hadn’t slowed a bit, the streetcar felt like it was moving in slow motion. I glanced at my other passengers. None of them knew or cared who lived there; to them, it was just another rich house, just another rich owner. But for me, it seemed like an invisible beacon shone over it.
Gabe’s house.
My Gabe.
Somehow he’d managed to go from a shack behind Magazine Street to an enormous first-class place on St. Charles. And he still loved me. He never stopped.
The air was getting hotter as morning pushed into afternoon. I felt my back warm in the sun as I got off the streetcar. I found our bench and sat down. There never seemed to ever be anyone sitting at our bench. It was like people knew it had its own energy buried deep within its wood—fifteen years of two young people loving each other.
I sat down, stared at the lake and opened my sketchbook. But I was too distracted to draw. I watched the ducks and searched for turtles, the same way I did when I was a kid with my head in Gabe’s lap. Back when we didn’t have a care in the world except each other. Before we made all our mistakes.
And we had made them. I knew that. I married the wrong man, and didn’t listen to people who knew it before I did. A long and frustrating road lay ahead of me—a penance for my error—and I didn’t want to walk it alone. Three years ago, Gabe had judged what was best for me, and left me behind when things could have been so different, if he had just talked to me. Both of us were stubborn spirits, and our stubbornness had driven us toward our mistakes and away from each other. But the mistakes could be corrected now. My soul was free, like Jules said.
And all it wanted was Gabe.
-22-
He always knew when I wanted him. I couldn’t hide it. He could see it in the fire of my eyes. He sensed it from the pinkness in my cheeks. He knew it when I wet my lips and gazed at him. When you love someone completely, few secrets of the heart are well-guarded. The passion comes through your pores, out of your skin, and escapes into the atmosphere like a boundless energy that cannot be contained, and the harder you try to contain it, the more restless it becomes. It builds and swells like a bubbling volcano. That’s the kind of hunger and thirst that comes with unrelenting passion—I had that for Gabriel, and he saw it. The minute he opened the door and saw me standing there, he knew it. His face sparked with recognition. He said nothing. I said nothing. We stood there and gazed at each other. We felt the energy intensify the air between us. Years of things spoken and unspoken, years without each other’s bodies, years of wondering and yearning, they had taken their toll on us, and our shared desire mixed with the New Orleans heat sent sweat trickling down my back. The cool air from his foyer blew across my heated skin and chilled me.
Neither of us spoke because neither of us wanted to speak. The intensity was too much for words. It choked words in our throats and made us breathless and speechless. I wondered how long I could stand there without him kissing me before I would break into a thousand pieces, glowing pebbles of wanting shattered across the doorstep of his vast and mysterious mansion. I felt the break coming, the moment when I could no longer stand it, when he finally took one stride forward and kissed me.
The kiss was familiar and new, all at once. It engulfed me. It inflamed me. His bulging arms wrapped around my waist and pulled me closer to him, until I could inhale every scent of his skin, every dab of cologne, every sweaty need, every thought and love and infatuation. The kiss was deep, long, hard and full of craving that I understood too well. He wanted to devour me, and I wanted to devour him.
No need to see our path back through the open door. He picked me up, turned me around and walked me into his foyer without letting his mouth leave mine for a moment. He shut the door somehow—with his foot, maybe?—while keeping his tongue in my mouth and his arms around me. Now that we were in the privacy and silence of his house, his searching tongue became even more frantic. He pushed me against the wall and moved his mouth away from my lips and onto my ear. His rough breathing filled me like a song and immediately creamed me in a way that I’d never experienced before. His tongue moved down my neck as he shoved his fingers into my hair. As his mouth moved lower—now, to my throat and collarbone—so did his hands, until they found the buttons of my shirt, which they pulled open anxiously until the cold air and the heat between us swept over my bare skin. The last two buttons snagged and fought, so he yanked and they popped off, landing on his expensive floor in dull clinks, like bullets. He pulled the shirt from my shoulders and inhaled hungrily at the sight of my breasts. The desperation to touch every part of each other made us almost manic in our desire; he pushed my bra aside and sucked my nipple, not wanting to waste any time to unhook my bra before he had a part of me in his mouth. I unbuttoned and unzipped his pants and found him easily, swelled and hard. He reached around my back as he worked on the other nipple and unhooked my bra. It fell to my feet.
He cupped both of my breasts and squeezed gen
tly as he sucked and kissed them. I pushed down his pants with my foot, feeling the brush of his hair against my cheek and chin as he caressed and kissed me. He moved his fingers to the button of my jeans and here, he slowed. He unzipped slowly, moaning and breathing against the heat of my skin, before pulling down my jeans and going down with them, until he was kneeling in front of me. He tossed my jeans aside and looked up at me with his hands on the rim of panties. His green eyes shined. They looked moist, like he wanted to cry, and maybe he did. Part of me wanted to cry, too, but not out of sadness or nostalgia—out of love. There were times that I loved him so much that it brought tears to my eyes, and at this moment, I was overcome. At that moment, there was no one in the world but us.
“I love you,” he said.
Simple. Powerful. Honest.
He pulled down my panties and tossed them aside with my jeans and bra and buttons. Then he put his hand there, felt how warm and wet I was, and pushed his finger inside me—gently at first, then deeper and faster, as I moaned. His tongue pressed there, too, and explored and tasted me. I spread my legs wider and moaned. My need for him to be inside me was so great that I was desperate for it, for him.
“Please,” I moaned. “I want you.”
He stood. He kissed me. He pressed himself against me and squeezed my ass with his hands, but he didn’t put himself inside me. Not yet.
“Please,” I said.
He wrapped his arms around me and carried me to the sunroom, where rows of daisies lit up the other side of the window. He laid me on the couch—the same one where we’d sat together weeks before—and kissed my neck, saying I love you, I love you, I love you, over and over, like he couldn’t stop himself from saying it and he couldn’t say it enough. I moaned, thinking I love you, too, and wanting to say it, but feeling too overwhelmed to even speak. But it didn’t need to be said. He knew. He knew.
I felt him between my legs, where it was slippery from my desire and his fingers and his tongue, and then I felt him slowly fill me up. My breath caught in my throat. I inhaled. My heart skipped and raced. My body was on fire. Everything about my being was, at that moment, completely vulnerable to him. If he didn’t put himself deep inside me, I would collapse, exhausted with lust, but he did—he entered me slowly, that first thrust, that first moment, the most passionate moment of all, consumed me. I closed my eyes. I felt the stubble of his beard on my cheek. He groaned and I couldn’t stop myself from crying out in ecstasy. It felt like we’d never made love before. The head of penis rubbed that spot inside of me, the one that only he knew about it, and it made every cell and pore in my body pulsate with his movements. Our bodies were in synch, our passion was in synch, with the thrusting of him inside me. We were like two separate beings who had searched for each other and could only be complete if he was there—right where he was now—and the thought and realization of that ticked inside the wet slipperiness where he made love to me, his hands still searching my body, still sliding over the peak of my breasts and the hardness of my nipples, still feeling the softness of my hair. And his lips and tongue still explored me, too, as if my body was a place they’d never been; all the while, he moaned with his movements and told me how much he loved me, and again, I thought he would cry. I thought we both would.
He slowed himself and held me close as he shifted positions. Now he was on his back and I was on top, with him still hard inside me.
“I want to look at you,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”
He watched me, looked into my eyes, looked at my breasts, my waist, looked at me as I made love to him, and there was no timidity between us; I was completely open to him and his eyes and his hands and everything he had to give me. He clutched my hips and moaned and began to thrust himself upward inside of me; instinctively my head threw back and I cried Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, feeling myself build into a massive orgasm that I hadn’t experienced in three years. When it came, he came with it, and I immediately collapsed, my hair splayed across his sweaty chest, as we both caught our breath, and our senses. My body shivered in delight.
When I was able to speak, I picked up my head and looked at him.
“I love you, too,” I said.
*
We eventually made it—on unsteady, tired legs—to Gabe’s bedroom on the second floor. I still hadn’t adjusted to the thought of him living in this enormous house, but when I saw his bedroom, hints of the old Gabe shined through. T-shirts strewn on the floor. Nothing on the walls. The four-poster king-sized bed dominated the center of the room, topped with the best of mattresses and a pricey goose-down comforter, but it was unmade, the sheets tangled and twisted. The nightstand next to it was the old Gabe, too. Loose change and crumpled receipts dotted across the table top, along with a few peppermints. And pictures—lots of pictures. All of me. There was a stack of them, some pulled out with the corners worn, others just sitting there neatly, like a miniature shrine.
He stretched comfortably across his bed as I explored the little secrets of wealthy Gabe Augustine’s bedroom. When I saw the pictures, I collapsed next to him and smiled.
“What’s with all the pictures? You a stalker or something?”
“Mm-hm,” he said, grinning. Then: “Actually I’ve had that stash for a while. I had all those developed before I left New Orleans. Taking it with me on a memory card just didn’t seem the same. Not to mention, I didn’t have a computer.”
Some of the photos were familiar, but there were several that I’d never seen before. Me and Gabe in Baton Rouge. Me and Gabe standing alongside the Cane River in Natchitoches. Me at Lasyone’s, mid-laughter. Me on Bourbon Street, covered in beads and holding a hurricane, pretending to be a tourist. Me, trying a cigarette. Me and Gabe on Frenchman’s. Me, wearing a fedora.
“Wow,” I said. “A lot of memories.”
“I have some more of your work here, too. In the walk-in closet of the spare bedroom. I even put them in these special protective envelopes because I didn’t want the papers to turn yellow.” He paused. “Maybe one day we can display some of your work somewhere. I bet I could arrange for a gallery to—”
“No, I don’t want my stuff to be put on exhibit through a financial hook-up.”
“Well, at least let me hang some of your stuff at Bells when the restaurant opens. Some New Orleans scenes. Do you have anything like that?”
“Yeah, in some of my sketchbooks.” They were all still at Cort’s. As much as I didn’t want to go back to that house, I knew I had to.
“Okay, but only if you pay me in sexual favors.”
He grinned. “That’s a deal.”
I nuzzled into his arms. I felt like I’d been away for a long time and had only just come home, like I was the one who left, not him.
“What do you think happens now?” I asked.
“You can move in here.”
I thought about this. Nothing would please me more than to be with him, but I still felt out of place in his house and it certainly didn’t seem appropriate for me to pack my bags and move in with him at this point.
“I’ll stay with Anna for a while.”
He kissed the top of my head. “Okay.”
“Jules said he would give me names of attorneys.”
“I could do that for you. I can get it all set up and taken care of.”
I paused. “No, it’s my mess. I want to take care of it.”
“Why don’t you let me take care of it for you? It’s gonna cost.”
“I know. But it’s my problem.”
“Anything that’s a problem for you is a problem for me.” He squeezed my shoulders. “Just let me know what you need, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Tomorrow I’m going to Bells to check on progress. Our pre-launch party is coming up soon. None of the Belroses will be there, except for Uncle Jacks, of course, so you should come. It’s strictly for our investors and limited guests, so they can see where we’re going with everything.”
“Where are you going, anyway?”
“Far. It’ll be fucking amazing. And we’ve got these teams working around the clock, so it’ll be done in the next two weeks. Not everything, but enough to have the pre-launch. Then we’ll take a couple more weeks to work and finish everything up, and next thing you know, the Quarter has a new fucking hotspot.” He stared at the ceiling. Picturing the image of a successful pre-launch, no doubt. “Oh, I forgot. Delilah will be there, too.”
I perched up on my elbow and frowned. “Delilah?” Ugh. Just what I needed. I could hear her now. Who are you here with? Gabe? You certainly don’t waste any time, do you? “Why will Delilah be there?”
“She’s an investor. A quiet one. Although not very quiet, since she never seems to stop jabbering to me about bullshit.” He mimicked her voice: “We should have gold trim on the menus. We need scallops. Order monogrammed napkins—now.”
The world had truly tilted.
“Why did Delilah go into business with you and Uncle Jacks? I thought she considered you both the scourge of the Earth.”
“Oh, she does. She thinks we’re low-class dogs. But that doesn’t mean she’d pass up an opportunity to fuck over her brother. And man, what a golden opportunity. Bells is gonna hit right as the Blue Note is going down. I can tell you right now, Delilah is a hell of a lot smarter than Cort. We couldn’t have pulled this off without her. She knows everything about how the Belroses do business. Everyfuckingthing. Uncle Jacks is so far out of the loop that he’s clueless when it comes to their business dealings, but Delilah? She paid a lot of attention when no one was looking. The family’s gonna be sorry that they passed her over for that ignorant dickweed. She gets off on making them miserable in her own sneaky way.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Like showing up around town with you?”
He shrugged. “Hey, anything to piss off those assholes works for me.”
“Oh, so that’s what this is about?” I said playfully. “Using me to get back at old wounds, huh?”
An Easy Dare Page 15