The One in My Heart

by Sherry Thomas

  “The thing was, they never minded. I mean, sometimes my dad would mutter darkly. But then he’d glance at us in the rearview mirror, and he always looked…grateful.”

  Bennett took out a couple of pasta bowls and set them on the counter. Slowly, he traced a finger along the brim of a bowl. There was nothing particularly revealing in his expression, but something about the motion of his hand, the seemingly casual movement contrasted with the tension in his wrist…

  I’d seen him frustrated at our lack of progress with regard to his father. Now I knew that I’d only seen the bare minimum of his reaction.

  Now I knew that he’d kept a gnawing doubt—and any and all despair—to himself. Even I, his partner, wasn’t to know.

  Or perhaps I, his partner, particularly.

  “It felt as if I stood forever that day looking at them,” he went on, “when it was probably no more than a minute or so before they walked off. But everything changed. I wasn’t an orphan. I had parents. And I wanted to go home—badly. As soon as I landed that day, I began looking into how I could transfer to a hospital here. It took some time to arrange, but by last May I was packing up my belongings.

  “And when I did that, I came across the pendant and remembered that vacation. It was our last good vacation as a family—we were pretty happy with one another and glad to be somewhere fun and beautiful together. I put it on as a good-luck charm and haven’t taken it off since.”

  He looked at me and smiled. “Sorry for the rambling answer.”

  Something in the wistfulness of his expression broke me. All at once I felt a fierce need to hold him in my arms—so much it hurt. So much I was dizzy on my feet.

  “You all right?” he asked, concern in his voice.

  I was not all right. I was desperately in love. More than I had thought I would be. More than I even understood to be possible.

  I reached out and turned off the burner.

  “The ravioli might need a few more—”

  I silenced him with a kiss, a wild one. He took my face in his hands and kissed me back just as ferociously. We somehow crossed over to the living room, shedding clothes as we went.

  I pushed him down onto the chaise and climbed on top of him. “It’s two days before my period. If you tell me you’re clean, then you don’t need a condom.”

  His grunt of pure arousal made me shiver. “I’m clean.”

  I kissed him again and took him inside me, every inch of me feeling every inch of him. Such sensations—such hot, reckless pleasure.

  He gripped the back of the chaise, his teeth gritted. “God, Eva.”

  I braced my hands on his shoulders. “This is what you want, isn’t it? To fuck me bareback?”

  For a minute only the sounds of our heavy, ungovernable breaths filled the air as my hips lifted and lowered, merging with him again and again.

  Then he wrapped his arms around me and brought me close to him. “Yes, this is what I’ve always wanted, to make love to you with nothing between us.”

  And I was lost.

  We were both lost.

  Chapter 13

  BENNETT WRAPPED ME IN A bathrobe and carried me upstairs to his tub, which was huge and deep, perfect for two. He didn’t join me inside, but used the shower instead. And that was fine, because I needed a moment to myself.

  I needed days, perhaps weeks, to recover from the shock of not only finding myself in love, but to such a disastrous degree. And why must it be with a complicated man, one whose heart was as tightly guarded as Fort Knox?

  When Bennett came out of the shower, I closed my eyes, pretending to be half-asleep. He kissed me on the tip of my nose. “I brought a few things here that you can wear.”

  Then his footsteps descended the stairs—and my heart felt as if it were dragged behind him, bruising against every single step on the way down.

  It was another quarter of an hour before I could leave the relative safety of the tub and put on a set of his flannel pajamas.

  At the top of the stairs, I met him coming back up. “Late-night snack is ready, if you still want one,” he said cheerfully.

  Offer me your undying love; then maybe I’ll think about dinner. “Smells nice, but it doesn’t smell like ravioli.”

  “Ravioli got too soggy and bloated. I made grilled cheese sandwiches.”

  “Yum,” I said mechanically.

  But the sandwiches turned out to be scrumptious, the cheese inside hot and gooey, the bread gloriously butter-soaked.

  I sighed as I finished my last bite. “So how long have you been a vegetarian?”

  “Since I was nine. I read Charlotte’s Web and that was it for me.”

  “Hmm, when I was nine, I watched Babe and stayed away from pork for all of one week before I scarfed down a slice of pepperoni pizza.”

  He smiled, a gorgeous man in a great mood. I didn’t quite return his smile—hard to do that when I could scarcely breathe from falling hard and fast into that eventual abyss.

  His expression turned more solemn. He touched the back of his hand to my cheek. “I bolted upright in bed earlier when I thought you’d escaped my evil clutches.”

  “You should have more confidence in them.”

  “Usually I do.” He took our plates to the sink. “By the way, speaking of evil clutches, I already told Zelda you’re staying the night.”

  A horde of thoughts stampeded across my mind, from, Can I handle having sex seven times in twenty-four hours? to, Does this mean anything other than that we’ll be having sex again in the morning? “Don’t tell me Zelda immediately sent over a change of underpants and my toothbrush.”

  “She offered to. But I already have spare brush heads for my toothbrush and a change of underpants for you.”

  “What?”

  He turned around, braced a hand on the countertop, and grinned. “Hey, I’m a regular, hot-blooded male. I bought my fake girlfriend lingerie for Valentine’s Day. Except she refused to go out with me, so the lingerie is still in a gift bag somewhere.”

  Was it wrong that I really wanted to see the lingerie he’d chosen? “I can’t go home in the morning in an evening gown. Everybody will know I’m doing the walk of shame.”

  “As long as you aren’t leaving at the crack of dawn, I can have some clothes delivered for you. So go ahead and sleep in.”

  With him? Lying side by side…all night? “I don’t know if I can sleep in a strange place.”

  “We don’t have to sleep right away. We can stream a movie. But the only TV that’s set up for streaming is in my bedroom, so you’ll have to come there for now.”

  “Okay,” I said, still feeling uncertain, but resigning myself to the fact that I didn’t have enough willpower to actually leave. “I guess we can watch a movie.”

  Even though it was getting ridiculously late.

  I brushed my teeth. We pulled the curtains shut, tossed a few more pillows onto his bed, and started an action flick that promised to be entertaining and not terribly demanding. But less than ten minutes into the movie, I’d already stopped paying attention to what was happening on the screen.

  Bennett nuzzled my neck, raining little drop kisses that turned into dangerous bursts of heat deep in my abdomen.

  “You’ll miss the next set piece,” I told him.

  “What a tragedy.”

  “Is this really the only TV that streams?”

  “Of course not,” he murmured.

  And turned my face to kiss me, a leisurely kiss that led to another. And then another. He kissed my throat and opened the buttons on my pajama shirt. “I love how you look in these pajamas.”

  “Is that why you don’t want to see me in them anymore?”

  “Exactly. Everything you look great in must be stripped off.”

  Unhurriedly he kissed me everywhere. Without any haste he entered me. We kissed, our bodies joined, and went on kissing, until slow-simmering pleasures again more turned needy and frantic.

  “I love the taste of your lips,” he whispered in
my ear. “I love the texture of your skin. I love the sound of your breaths. “

  And then: “I love everything about…about this moment.”

  The orgasm that ensued was the most intense one yet.

  AFTERWARD BENNETT CLICKED OFF THE TV and wrapped an arm around me. I snuggled closer to him, warm in his embrace.

  Was this the illusion of intimacy I’d wanted?

  “In Henry V, King Henry says to Kate, ‘You have witchcraft in your lips,’” Bennett murmured sleepily. “Do you know where you have witchcraft, Eva?”

  “Do tell,” I answered archly, expecting him to heap praise on my private parts.

  He pressed a kiss into my shoulder. “In your eyes.”

  What a dirty, rotten thing to say to your fake girlfriend, who’d have to carry around the memory for the rest of her life, wishing she could hear it again.

  Everything he said about us always had that glossy patina of plausible deniability—compliments and declarations that were extravagant but ultimately insubstantial.

  And I loved and hated them as Gollum loved and hated his precious.

  Bennett’s breath slowed to the deep, quiet rhythm of sleep, while I stared into the darkness, beset with an angst I’d come to know all too well, exactly the kind of turmoil I’d hoped to avoid by refusing him again and again.

  Why couldn’t he stick to business? I could handle business. I could even handle an occasional bout of frenetic coupling. But I was powerless before anything that lent itself to interpretations of deeper feelings on his part. It was love at first sight. You are the best thing to happen to me in a long, long time. Yes, this is what I’ve always wanted, to make love to you with nothing between us.

  When he spoke like that, hope pierced me like arrows—and hurt almost as much. Because I wanted so much to believe every word, every sentiment, plausible deniability be damned. I wanted to forget that we were essentially onstage and focus only on his eyes, his voice, and those words of deeply felt avowal.

  Don’t fantasize, Eva, came my sensible-grown-woman voice. You must look at the facts. You must—

  Forget lightbulbs turning on. No, this was every massive star in the sky going supernova at once: a blinding blaze of insight.

  I was a scientist, a pretty damn good one too. A core principle of science was that the hypothesis must fit the facts: One didn’t bend, ignore, or dismiss facts to suit one’s hypothesis.

  All along, I’d postulated that Bennett was using me for other goals. At the beginning my hypothesis made sense—he’d stated as much. But now I had many more facts at my fingertips, and…and…

  I was almost afraid to think it. But if I looked at the entire picture objectively, it was much more likely that I wasn’t simply a means to an end. I was an end in and of myself.

  Take the time line. What had Damaris Vandermeer told me at Charlotte’s wedding? He went out with my friend a few times last summer and then dumped her like a bag of cement. I’d put money on it that the friend was, on paper at least, perfect girlfriend material, with a strong connection to the Somerset family. Bennett hadn’t gone out with her merely for fun, but to investigate her potential as a partner in his quest for reconciliation.

  But then that had gone no further. Why? Because I came into the picture at the end of summer. Because our one-night stand—hell, our one-hour stand—had been as memorable for him as it was for me.

  He reconsidered his strategy and started laying the groundwork for the professor. Had we not run into each other the day after Christmas, he’d still have made sure we met again via the new ties he’d cultivated with Zelda.

  From that point on, it had been quite the pursuit. The million-dollar carrot aside, his parents aside, what had he been trying to do? To get me to spend as much time with him as possible. He didn’t need to get to Amalfi Coast a day ahead of his parents. He didn’t need to ask me out for Valentine’s Day. He didn’t need to scheme for me to spend the night.

  He wanted to.

  Only minutes ago, when he’d said, I love everything about…about this moment, that was him barely restraining himself from saying I love everything about you.

  As for why he never told the truth except with a varnish of plausible deniability…It wasn’t to play games with me, but to protect himself. I was a begrudging lover. I turned him down constantly. And I was almost always trying to put greater distance between us. If I were a man who had been badly burned in love, I’d approach me with the same kind of cautiousness.

  In fact, I’d swerve wide to avoid me altogether. But that was neither here nor there.

  My elegant new hypothesis thrilled and scared me in equal measure. If it was true—and I had a tremendous intuition that it was—then it changed everything. The man I loved didn’t just return my feelings; he was crazy in love with me.

  I took his hand and laid it over my heart. Could he feel it beating with astonished glee? Lacing our fingers together, I luxuriated in his closeness and smiled hugely.

  It was a whole new world.

  I WOKE UP TO THE aroma of fresh coffee brewing. A greyish light filtered in from the edges of the curtains—an overcast day outside. My dress and my underthings, last seen on the floor of the living room, had been neatly gathered in a chair, next to the lingerie Bennett had bought me for Valentine’s Day.

  No crotchless panties in the bag. He did get completely impractical items—I might have whistled softly at a set of transparent bras and panties—but there were also pieces that were both pretty and wearable.

  As I put his pajamas back on over the see-through set—why not?—I studied the room. Above the fireplace hung a Pissarro, possibly the one he had mentioned to my father years ago. But otherwise it was empty of personal touches. The rumpled bedspread and his vintage Patek Philippe watch on the nightstand were the only signs that he’d slept here.

  But whereas earlier I’d have felt an unhappy weight that I’d fallen in love with a man who didn’t betray himself even in his own home, now I was…reassured. After all, my house, despite its coziness, was just as opaque in its own way: There was nothing of my mother. The stacks of photographs that she had sent me, the ones I used to pore over, had all been banished to the attic, denied a place among the pictures and memorabilia that constituted a visual record of my life.

  A real relationship was beyond me. But in a fake one with a completely enamored Bennett, I had a chance. And the more opaque he remained, the more protective he was of himself, the more likely that we would continue exactly as we were: fun dates with my friends, sleepovers, and everything else that was desirable in a relationship without requiring either of us to open up.

  I bounced down the stairs. Bennett was in the kitchen, hair still mussed from sleep, flipping pancakes in a San Francisco Marathon T-shirt that had a hole on the right shoulder. My heart tugged—he was unbearably appealing in his domesticity.

  “I thought your culinary repertoire was limited to grilled cheese sandwiches,” I said, leaning a hip against the kitchen counter and mentally adding “yummy breakfast” to the list of pluses that characterized our current arrangement.

  “And you thought wrong. Until I turned twenty-one and came into those paintings I could auction off, Moira and I were pretty much broke. So the boy toy cooked.”

  Spatula in hand, he kissed me on the lips. We were practically a Norman Rockwell couple on this lazy Saturday morning, weren’t we?

  He returned to the stove and cracked eggs into a different pan. The sizzle of protein joined the aroma of buttery carbs. I tried to recall whether my real boyfriends had ever made me breakfast—only to realize that I’d never spent the night with anyone. That I’d always been the girl who went home by herself, no matter how late the hour.

  “Speaking of Moira, isn’t that MoMA retrospective of hers starting this weekend?” Instead of sour grapes, I was feeling a lot of goodwill toward Moira—without her, there wouldn’t be this perfect fake relationship. “Have you been worrying about your naked pictures?”

&n
bsp; “I’ve made my peace with the fact that there are going to be some. I’ll just say I occasionally modeled for her when I was her tenant.”

  He plated the eggs and the pancakes and carried them out to the breakfast nook, with its big bay window facing the balcony. That was when I realized it was snowing outside—and had been for hours. A good four inches of powder blanketed the parapet. The potted evergreens along the balustrade too were covered in snow. The windows across the streets were lit from within by a soft, golden light—the whole scene looking like something out of an old-fashioned Christmas card.

  “So much for a walk in the park for us,” said Bennett, following my line of sight. “Do you have any plans today?”

  Was he about to offer further proof to buttress my new hypothesis? “My grad students are out of town this weekend, so I have to go into the lab this evening.”

  Bennett returned to the kitchen to pour coffee into two cups. “That means you’re free during the day. What do you say we actually watch that movie from last night and then go to Chinatown for lunch?”

  Ding! Breakfast made from scratch, movie, and lunch in Chinatown—if this wasn’t love, then I didn’t know diamonds from graphite.

  I pretended to think, cutting my stack of pancake into neat pieces. “Well, you’ve found my weakness—I can’t say no to Chinatown.”

  “Me neither, as it happens,” he said cheerfully, passing me the butter dish and a small cruet of maple syrup.

  I looked at him a moment too long before putting a forkful of pancakes into my mouth. “These are good.”

  The banana-and-pecan pancakes were more than good: warm, moist, fluffy, the sweetness of mashed banana perfectly balanced by the subtle tang of buttermilk. With the addition of butter and maple syrup they were practically breakfast heaven.