by Cara Nelson
Becca went to him, laid a hand on his chest. He looked down at her as if startled to find her there, as if her antics were no longer distracting him and she’d become superfluous. She bit her lip, remembered that this trip was about Abe and his family, not herself.
“What is it?”
“I stayed here with my dad and Brandy—one of his wives—when I was a kid. We were visiting my grandparents, but Dad and Opa always fought so much that we stayed in a hotel. I thought that was terrible—that my Opa was so warm and loving. Who would be so mean as to stay in a hotel when their family was right nearby?” He sank onto the bed, looking down at the floor.
“You’re not doing the same thing. It’s okay to have a little space for yourself to retreat to. You’re going to see your Opa. That’s what matters, that you came.”
She sat beside him on the bed. Abe turned to her and untied the belt on her robe, kissing her and pressing her back onto the bed, parting the voluminous folds of white fabric to put his hands on her, his mouth on her. Becca wound her fingers in his hair and wriggled with pleasure at his touch.
He rose up off of her for a moment to remove his clothes; there was desperation, hurry in his touch when he returned to her. Instead of teasing her around her bra and panties, leaving her panting and needy, he stripped them away without a word. He kissed her mouth again and again, as if asking something, needing something. She gave herself to him eagerly, body and heart as well. She held up her arms for him, welcoming him as he plunged into her embrace, kissing her deeply, thrusting in hard. The intensity of his need seemed to ready her, his frantic thrusts making her skin tingle, her nipples harden until she shattered beneath him, crying out just as he gave in to his own completion.
Abe collapsed on her, gathering her into his arms as he rolled onto his side, kissing her with a desire mingled with sadness until their hearts stopped racing from their hasty coupling on the hotel robe.
“I’m sorry. I needed you so much, I should have slowed down,” he said, letting go of her and turning away on his side. Becca sat halfway up, her arms going around his back and shoulders.
“It’s okay. I’m here because you need me. We’ll take it slower later on,” she said, kissing his shoulder, wishing he wouldn’t turn away from her.
“I’m going to go get cleaned up and head to Opa’s,” he said, levering up off the bed and dodging into the bathroom.
Startled, she heard the shower start up and abandoned the idea of getting in the shower with him. He was pushing her away, but maybe he needed some space. She hung up the clothes from her duffle bag and pulled on the I’m-a-natural-star jumpsuit and fussed with her hair, finally taming the bedhead with a flatiron. She put on her makeup and waited for him to come out of the bathroom and talk to her.
Instead, he emerged in dress pants, naked to the waist. He wordlessly unzipped his garment bag and selected a light sport coat, a shirt, and a tie. He dressed half turned away from her in a small formality that wrenched her. When she went to him to straighten his tie affectionately, he shook his head and fixed it himself in the mirror. He didn’t even glance at her, not even her beseeching reflection in the mirror.
“I’ll be a couple of hours. Feel free to order room service or whatever. I don’t know how long it’ll take,” Abe said.
Gobsmacked, Becca’s mouth fell open.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“It would be best if you stayed here. I’ll go alone. Don’t look so sad—I’ll be back before you get too bored.” He said it with a condescending smile he’d never shown her before.
“Bored? I’m not here for entertainment, Abe. I came to help you and be by your side. I know this is really hard for you, and I’m trying to be understanding, but this is total bullshit.”
“I have family business. I’ll see you later,” he said, his voice colder than she’d ever known it.
Becca sank down on to the bed and watched Abe walk out on her. She felt hollowed out, desolate, like some sort of trauma victim stunned by the suddenness of an accident. But this was no accident. This, like every breakup in her relationship history, had started with herself. She had pursued him. She had kissed him over coffee, had brandished a dildo in public, had announced that she was in love with him way too soon, had slept with him too soon and too often to earn a commitment...every self-help book she’d ever read had told her that she was too needy, too impulsive to ever keep a man. She’d discounted those experts as unhappy, negative people. Gut now, all jumpsuited up and nowhere to shine, she sat in a German high-rise hotel and thought they might be right after all.
Becca needed someone to talk to. Since the first person she wanted to call and cry to was Abe himself, she settled for her sister, the sister who had told her so all along.
“It’s me,” she sniffed into the phone.
“Are you okay? Is the grandpa dead already?” Hannah asked.
“He left me. Abe left me.”
“In GERMANY? I will KILL HIM. He dragged you all the way across an ocean to dump you an hour after you landed? What a creep. Honey, stay where you are. Do you need money? I can wire you money so you can get a place to stay while I hop on the Cates jet and come to Germany to KILL that bastard. Also I’m calling Cynthia. She has a friend who’s a witch and I want to buy some kind of powerful diarrhea charm to give this bastard,” Hannah fumed.
“No. It wasn’t like that. He just, we got here and he’s left me at the hotel so he can see his family alone. He didn’t kick me out or anything.”
“Did he just bring you to be his fuck bunny, Becca? There is no point to bringing you along to Germany if he’s not introducing you to his family and letting you be a part of this process. He’s disgusting. I should have known when you told me he was rich that he’d turn out to be a jerk.”
“Hey, Jasper’s rich,” Becca said defensively.
“Jasper is different. He’s one of a kind. I had hoped so hard that this guy would be—better for you. I guess he was after—maybe he’s just immature—” Hannah couldn’t seem to decide how to spin the situation, so she just sighed loudly into the phone.
“I hoped so, too. I’m just going to take a long bath and sleep for a while. I love you.”
“Love you, too,” Hannah said.
She unpacked her things, hanging them dejectedly beside his garment bag in the spacious hotel closet. She arrayed her cosmetics on the marble countertop and looked covetously at the complimentary chocolates on the nightstand. Despite her rebellious feelings about not wanting anything from this man who was clearly using her, Becca was hungry. She ordered up a salad and some juice while she ran her bath. Even the salad in that place looked sumptuous, greens arrayed fanlike on the china plate, an artful pile of intricately chopped vegetables in the center. Becca texted her sister a picture of the pretty salad, tried to be upbeat about the whole thing. She’d been to Europe now, at least. Check that off the bucket list, she rationalized. Then she ate joylessly and scrubbed herself in the deep soaking tub.
Becca tossed and turned on the bed, unable to nap because she couldn’t relax. She kept thinking of the night she met Abe, the way he’d bent to bandage the little patient’s doll, even the tender way he’d taken her own hand in his before stitching it. She should have believed him when he acted like an egotistical jerk in the ER, asking if she was on drugs and accusing her of being theatrical about her pain. Maybe she had been a touch theatrical, but it was rude of him to mention it. Instead, she’d latched on to one isolated moment of kindness, his gentleness with the little girl, and spun it into the idea that he was a knight, a hero, a man who might love her back.
Trying to find an English-speaking channel on the television proved annoying and nearly impossible, so she gave up on entertainment and brooded instead. Becca was not an accomplished brooder like her sister, so it took her a while to get into the swing of things.
When she had dwelt on his betrayal, his use of her body and dismissal of her heart and spirit, she burst into tears. She had
believed, really believed with everything she was that Abe would be her man for life. This trip was supposed to be proof that she’d stand by his side in sickness and in health, in pain as well as pleasure. Instead, she was a distraction, like a Sudoku book or an Adam Sandler movie on basic cable. The thought of herself as an Adam Sandler movie made her cry harder, because she’d auditioned for a small part in one of those last year and was deemed too old by the casting director. She wasn’t even the right age and type and talent to have a bit part in a real distraction, which seemed to add insult to her broken heart.
Oo00oO
Abe faced his grandmother, her regal bearing and still-black hair chastening him in her sad serenity better than his mother’s scolding had done. He’d run the gauntlet in the first hour, having to listen to a catalog of imprecations from his dad, a litany of all the ways he had disappointed his family. Feeling defeated, trying to make himself compact and simply endure until he could see his Opa, he hadn’t expected his grandmother to head him off at the sick room.
“Your father is hard on you, yes?” she began, hands folded composedly. Abe nodded. “Harrison, it is because his father was hard on him, too. Knut was the youngest, left to me to raise. He was my darling, but your grandfather insisted on having the training of the eldest, and his way was perhaps too harsh.”
“Thanks. I’d like to see Opa now, if that’s okay.”
“You are not comfortable here,” she said.
“No. It’s through no fault of yours, I assure you. I just—don’t fit with my parents, especially my dad. And you know Opa always wanted me to take over the business, but I love medicine, I like being a doctor.” His voice was pleading. She patted his shoulder indulgently.
“Like your Opa, I thought it was a whim, but I see you are devoted to the idea. If you would just take on some role, however honorary, in the business, it would please your Opa so. It might even make inroads with my eldest son.”
He shook his head. Her dark eyes were so hopeful. What right had she to hope at him after all this time? To load his shoulders with expectations, just because they shared a bloodline? Seeing she’d get no acquiescence from him, she stepped aside and let him enter the sickroom.
Before, it had been an opulent guestroom, but now it housed a hospital bed and bleeping monitors. His grandfather’s once-broad form was shrunken, withered. More than anything, he looked like an apple core. Hovering near the door in the dim room, Abe hesitated, wanting nothing more than to run from that room and not stop till he was back at the airfield. He didn’t want to be this man, this adult who was such a disappointment to his family, whose vital, blustering grandfather was so reduced, so frail, whose girlfriend was sitting at the hotel wondering why he’d rejected her after she’d come all this way. Nothing about this moment was what he wanted.
“Opa?” he said, his voice cracking, barely audible above the beep of machines in that room fitted out for the dying.
The man in the bed bore little resemblance to the Opa who had taken him ice fishing and on boats of every description, who had tried to hammer into him the importance of loyalty and the family name. The man he’d let down more than anyone else in his life. It would have been so simple to be the golden boy, to have outstretched his arms to that shipping legacy and accept the mantle of duty and all its attendant approval. Just now, he couldn’t even remember why he’d started rejecting it, rebelling against it.
Maybe medicine was his calling, or maybe he’d run from the idea of becoming his dad, who was the son of a Jewish father and Greek Orthodox mother. When he put it to himself in those terms, it seemed awfully juvenile—he was a boy who’d been mad at his father and did everything he could to anger his dad in return, even if it meant breaking his Opa’s heart. Frankly, it made Abe feel like an asshole.
He approached the bed, touched his grandfather’s papery hand, so ashen and chilly. He bent down and kissed the old man’s brow.
“I’ll be back. There’s somebody I want you to meet,” he said, his voice stronger, more sure.
Oo00oO
Abe dashed out of the house, his sharp footfalls making a jarring noise against the old wooden floors, jangling the crystal drops on the chandeliers with his haste. He brushed past everyone who tried to stop him, taking a cab instead of waiting for one of his grandfather’s cars.
When he reached the hotel, even the elevator seemed too slow in the face of his urgency to reach Becca, to beg her to come meet his Opa, to have the introduction she deserved. It took three attempts before he got his key card to open the hotel room door and when he did, it wasn’t the scene he expected. He’d thought to find her asleep and wake her with a kiss and apologize. Instead, there was his golden-haired actress, weeping and red-faced, jerking dresses off hangers wildly, wadding them up and stuffing them into her duffel bag.
“Becca, what’s wrong?” he asked, rushing to her side, wondering if something was seriously wrong with her sister.
“You! You’re what’s wrong!” she snapped. “I’m wrong, too. I should never have come here, flown across a goddamned ocean to be your concubine. I’m not a geisha!” she shrieked, throwing a silky blouse at him. It drifted toward him and landed on his shoulder, a gossamer thing, oddly light as it slithered down his sleeve to the floor.
“Of course you’re not a geisha,” he said, trying very hard not to laugh at the phrasing that manifested her histrionics. “I didn’t bring you here to, um, attend me. I brought you here to meet my family, but when I got here, I was—” He broke off, looking for the right word.
“Chicken shit?” she supplied, retrieving the blouse and cramming it into her overflowing bag.
“Well, yes. I suppose I was,” he conceded. “I’m very sorry. I shouldn’t have left you here like that. It was a shitty way to treat you, and you deserve better.”
“Is this the bit where you say it’s not me, it’s you?” she challenged, hands on her hips.
“No, this is the bit where I say I was wrong and I beg you to come meet my family. They’re mostly assholes like me, but I think you’ll like my grandpa. I know he’ll be crazy about you. I’d go so far as to say you’re probably just his type.” Abe ventured a grin and Becca’s answering smile reassured him.
“That’s too bad, since I only seem to like assholes like you.”
“Come here,” he said, pulling her unresisting into his arms and kissing her. “I want to take you home to meet my parents, but I gave us both a scare, acting like that, and I’d feel much better if I debauched you before we leave.”
“Did you seriously just say ‘debauched’?”
“Yes, I did.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever been debauched properly. I’m intrigued,” she said, loosening his tie.
“That’s too bad. I intend to debauch you most improperly.”
“I was right. You are a knight, Abe. Who else would suggest debauching me improperly? It’s positively courtly.”
“I don’t think knights did the things I’m about to do to you. They had to take sacred oaths and the like, which forbad such behavior.” He grinned wickedly and unbuttoned her jumpsuit, reaching the zipper and staring, puzzled, at the garment. “Is this some sort of giant onesie? What is this?”
“It’s a jumpsuit. Clearly you don’t subscribe to Vogue,” she said, feigning offense as she shucked off the jumpsuit and stepped out of her heels. “It’s one long piece, and once you remove it, it’s nothing but this.” She turned around, modeling the lacy panties she had on beneath the jumpsuit.
“No. I don’t like those either. They’ll have to go,” he said, hooking his fingers in the waistband and pulling them off, trailing his calloused fingertips along her legs as he did so. She shivered deliciously, ready to squeal with relief that Abe wasn’t just a bastard who’d used her; he was a man who’d come back. A man who might, someday, love her back.
Becca pulled him onto the bed and rolled him onto his back.
“Now,” she said, sitting up on his stomach. “I expect you t
o win me back.”
“I said I was sorry. What do you want me to do?”
“Sing,” she said. “Cat Stevens. The REAL words.”
“I’m not singing the wrong lyrics to classic seventies rock just to appease your whim, Bec.”
Becca leaned down and kissed him, long and slow.
“Okay, fine, I’ll do whatever you want.” He laughed. “I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there/Just remember there’s a lot of bad and beware.”
“EVERYWHERE,” she corrected, tickling him unmercifully. “There’s a lot of bad EVERYWHERE.” Becca kissed him again. He leaned up, his hands on her hips, and flipped her over onto her back. She squealed and laughed as he pinned her down.
“And. Beware,” Abe insisted, taking her hand, the one he had stitched, and kissing it softly as her legs wound around his hips and he pushed inside her with one smooth stroke.
“A lot of bad everywhere,” she argued, her breath coming in pants as his thrusts came faster.
“A lot of bad and beware,” Abe teased, punctuating each word with a deliberate thrust.
He levered himself up and reached between them, touching her between the legs. She threw her head back and screamed with pleasure. He kissed her chin, her throat, and finally, her mouth. Becca’s arms went around his neck and her moans as she clung to him overwhelmed him. He surrendered.
After a few minutes of holding her close, reassuring himself he hadn’t lost her, Abe made himself disentangle himself and get up.
“Here, put on your onesie and come meet my Opa,” he said, tossing her the jumpsuit.
“I’m not an expert on European etiquette but isn’t it customary to wear panties the first time I meet your family?”