by Jo Watson
I couldn’t sleep. Ten minutes of lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, was proof of that. I felt unsettled, for so many reasons. At least I knew what they were, though:
1. I was so attracted to Mike. More than attracted. There was something about him. Since the moment I’d laid eyes on him, it had been as if my body knew something about him that my heart and mind wasn’t quite aware of yet.
2. I felt guilty about lying to him.
3. I felt desperate to write this book.
The last two were in direct conflict with each other, and, together, were in even greater conflict with the first.
I was just about to get out of bed when a knock on the door disturbed me.
“Who is it?” I called out. There was a small pause.
“Me,” the voice returned.
I reached for the door handle, but stopped myself before opening it. I took a deep breath, hoping that all the unsettledness wouldn’t show on my face. I twisted the door handle and swung open the door. There he was.
We looked at each other for a moment, zoning in on each other’s eyes, and suddenly my heart was beating in my throat again, a now familiar feeling that I’d only ever experienced around him. His eyes drifted down to my mouth, and then to my neck, as if he could see my heart beating in it, but, when they kept on drifting, it dawned on me where they were going. I wasn’t wearing a bra, and the thin, white T-shirt I was wearing was probably accentuating that fact.
He took a step forward, straight into my room. He kicked the door shut with his foot and I knew exactly what was going to happen. The inevitable. Since the moment we’d first seen each other, this destiny seemed to have been etched in some stone somewhere. A cosmic rock where our future was worked out and written down for us. He took my face between his hands and kissed me.
He pressed his body into mine and I could feel he was hard; I wanted to touch him, again. I slipped my hand down his pants and wrapped my fingers around him. His whole body tensed and he reached out and gripped my shoulders. I watched his face as his eyes closed and he threw his head back, with a bang, against the wooden paneling on the wall. I kept going, his breathing becoming faster and faster. He bit down on his bottom lip and then, suddenly, his eyes flipped open. He shook his head violently as he reached down and pulled my hand away.
“Stop,” he whispered. “You need to stop.”
I smiled at him and nodded.
“Fuck, Becca, do you know how crazy you make me feel?” Without any warning, he reached between my legs and pushed them open. He pulled me in for another kiss, walking me backwards across the room while his hands slid over me. It was hard to walk like that, hard to feel my legs as his kiss deepened and his fingers slipped into my panties.
“Crazy good, or crazy bad?” I whimpered, stupidly.
“Now, that is the question, isn’t it?” He planted hot, wet kisses down my neck and then all the way up to my ear.
“So what’s the answer?” I threw my head back, feeling dizzy as his hand moved under my T-shirt and his palm covered my breast. It was slightly cold against my warm skin and I moaned loudly.
“I’m still trying to work that out,” he said, still walking me across the room.
“Where are you taking me?” I moaned again as his fingers traced circles around my breast.
He stopped what he was doing and then looked at me seriously. “Where do you want me to take you?” he asked, a wicked, naughty, dirty smile on his face.
I smiled back at him and then looked around the room. “I guess the bed is usually the preferred choice.”
His smile grew. “Bed it is.” He continued to push me towards it.
“But that doesn’t mean it should be our preferred choice.” I stopped him.
“Really?” His pupils were dilated, eating up the green part, but, in the middle of the black, there seemed to be a spark. A flame. A small, bright diamond shining back at me.
In that moment, I took charge. I put my hands on his chest and started walking him backwards. I knew exactly where I wanted him. The back of his knees hit the chair and he stopped.
“Sit,” I whispered, firmly.
“You are trouble, Becca. You know that, right?”
I nodded and climbed on to his lap, straddling him. I sat straight up and looked down at him as I pulled my shirt off and tossed it to the floor. I was completely exposed and his eyes drifted down to where I wanted them to go. He pulled me closer and buried his head between my breasts, trailing his tongue over them and then up my neck. I arched my back as he gripped my hips and slid me across his lap.
Things became frenzied, after that. Nothing followed in any logical, rational order, as we pulled at each other’s clothes, hair, dug our fingers into flesh and kissed each other, completely missing mouths as it all built to the moment where, finally, we were both completely naked.
“Condom,” I managed to whisper in a tiny, lucid moment.
He gave a small chuckle and looked into my eyes. “This time, I’ve got them.”
CHAPTER 50
I had the strangest dream in the half an hour of sleep I’d gotten. Well, I wasn’t sure if it had been a dream or not. It must have been, though, because these kinds of things don’t really happen in real life, do they?
That moment when someone is kissing you softly and slowly, when their fingers are gently tracing the length of your spine, when they’re inside you and your bodies are moving as one. Slow and purposeful. Each movement in perfect unison. Your breathing in perfect harmony, the small whimpers and moans escape your mouth at the same time, both moving slowly and steadily towards no finishing line at all, because it’s all about the journey. It’s all about what is happening now, about the way he’s staring into your eyes, looking deep inside you, and, suddenly, without any kind of explanation that makes any sense whatsoever, you feel completely and utterly in love with the person who’s telling you how beautiful you are.
Love at first sight?
Does it even exist? And, if it does, can it possibly be real? How can you feel something so strong for someone who you just don’t know? I knew next to nothing about the man I was making love to, in the true sense of the word. Not sex. Not fucking. Making love in that slow, intense way, when stars and fate and everything align. As if your bodies had been designed to do this from the start and had been going through life looking for each other, the last puzzle piece that slots in perfectly and completes the picture.
It went on for ages, like that. Me on his lap, him exploring every inch of my body with his eyes and lips and hands, making me feel things that I’d never felt before for any human being. Making my body feel things that it had never felt before. With words being communicated silently. And, when it was over, I collapsed on to his chest and he wrapped his arms around me and held me there, our sweaty bodies pressed together. I closed my eyes and breathed him in; the smell of him was intoxicating. And then, later, when he picked me up in his arms, walked me over to the bed and tucked me in, I was even more intoxicated by him. He climbed in next to me, wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close, as if this was something we did all the time. As if it was natural, as if this was the way it was meant to be and was how we’d done it a million times before. I fell asleep like that, but only for a short while, because something woke me up from my dream and sent me straight into a nightmare.
I opened my eyes. He was standing at the window with his back to me, completely naked. I appreciated the dimples at the bottom of his back for a few seconds before I felt the atmosphere in the room. Before I tasted it. It came at me like cool steel. It was like biting down on a piece of tinfoil, the smell of burnt hair and the iciness of a winter’s morning, all at once.
“Mike?” I whispered softly, my mouth dry. My heart was pounding.
But he didn’t turn around.
I climbed out of bed and stood on the floor, feet planted firmly, because my legs felt as if they were swaying.
“Mike?” I said again.
This time, he turned around. Slowl
y. He was holding something in his hands and I immediately looked down. In one hand, the burnt diary; in the other, the letters.
“I . . . I can explain,” I said.
“Really?” he asked, looking like he’d already made his mind up about me.
“It’s not what it looks like . . . Uh, well, it is, but it’s not . . . uh,” I stumbled and stuttered. I had no idea what to say. There was not really anything that could explain or justify this.
“I would recognize this writing anywhere.” He held the diary up and my heart sank. “Question is, what are you doing with it and where did you—?” And then he stopped talking, mid-sentence. He nodded his head and smiled to himself. “I see. I get it now. I should have seen this, but I guess I didn’t, or didn’t want to, or . . .”
“Get what?” I asked.
“Your research. Your new book. This has something to do with it, doesn’t it?” He waved the letters and the diary in the air now. “You’re not writing a private investigator book, set in some random small town, are you?”
I shook my head. “No, but—”
“Oh my God!” He cut me off with a loud gasp. “You’re researching my family! What about me? Is that why you booked into this place? Because you knew I was here?”
“I . . . I—” I tried to speak, but he cut me off again.
“And the library, this makes sense now, of course you were snooping around. You looked guilty when I found you.” He spoke rapidly, as if he was following a trail of bread crumbs, clues that his brain was throwing at him in logical succession. “What were you looking for in the library? Why do you have these letters and this diary? Where did you get them? Did you steal them? Did you steal them from someone in the eco estate? Is that why you broke in?”
“Uh . . .” My head was spinning. So, so many questions. No easy answers for any of them. So, I said the first thing that popped into my head: “I almost died in an elevator, a few days ago.”
He blinked at me several times. “Sorry, what? What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with this. As crazy as it sounds, that elevator has led me here—to this town, to the diary. To you. If I had gotten into a different elevator, a minute later, I wouldn’t be here.”
He shook his head rapidly and blinked at me.
“I know, it’s not making sense. It barely makes sense to me.”
“Try to make it make sense, please. I really want to understand,” he said.
“A few days ago, I got into this elevator in my building. I had my favorite bag with me—this beautiful old vintage bag I found in a charity store in Johannesburg. The lift plummeted and I grabbed on to it, but it ripped, and I found those letters inside this secret compartment in the bag. It looked like they had been sewn into it.”
“Who wrote them?” he asked, looking down at his hands.
I shook my head. “I don’t know yet, but they were written to your grandmother.”
He looked down at the diary. “And this is her diary.”
I nodded. Guilty. Red handed. “I found it here, under the floorboards, behind this bed.”
He shook his head as if none of it was making any sense. And, to be honest, the more I heard it out loud, the more it seemed so jumbled. So improbable. “How did you know it was here?” he asked.
“I didn’t. I found it by accident.”
“Bullshit!” he spat. He looked angry with me now, and my pulse raced. “Stop lying. You’ve been caught. For once, tell the fucking truth.”
“What?” I was so shocked by his tone and the language he was using with me now. How had we gone from last night, on the chair, to this ?
“Come on, Becca, you’ve been lying to me since you got here, since the moment I found you climbing over the fence. Do you deny that?” he asked.
I looked at him. Emotion welled up inside me—mouth dry, tongue sticking to the top of my palate. I bit my lip to stop the tears. “No,” I said quietly. “I don’t deny it. I’ve been lying to you.”
“Thank you for finally admitting to that.” He paused for a while before talking again. “So you’ve been investigating my family since you arrived here, behind my back?”
I nodded. “I didn’t know it was your family until I saw you here.”
He turned around and looked out the window for a moment. “You know what’s worse than sneaking around behind my back? What’s worse is that you let me offer to help you with your research. I was offering to help you secretly investigate my family. Do you know how twisted that is?” he asked, and my heart plummeted. He was right. Of course, he was right about everything. And there was no excuse in the world that would make this okay.
He turned around and looked at me with sad, disappointed eyes. “Were you only getting close to me because you were researching me, or—”
“NO!” I cut him off quickly. “No. I’m getting close to you because I . . . I like you. I . . .”
“That’s a bit hard to believe.” His voice was soft and sad.
Deep remorse and regret washed over me. “I’m telling the truth. I didn’t know who you were when I met you. I didn’t know you lived here when I checked in. I didn’t know the diary was here.”
He sighed loudly and then shrugged. He clearly didn’t believe a word I was saying. And, suddenly, I became uncertain too. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure if I was telling the truth either. I mean, what are the chances of finding the diary of someone you’re researching, in their house, because you accidentally booked into it? The chances are impossible. They are needles in infinite galaxies. And yet, here I was, finding them.
I started to feel panicky. I started to feel like I wasn’t there anymore, like I was stepping backwards into myself and the world in front of me was disappearing and dissolving. Was I lying? Had I known the dairy was here? Had I known he lived here? I felt like I couldn’t trust my mind anymore. It all seemed so strange and illogical. I took a step back and sat down on the edge of the bed again. My thoughts were spinning so fast, the facts and events twisting and turning in my mind, and, before I lost them forever to this strange confusion, I opened my mouth to speak . . .
“I found those letters in my handbag. The one that was ripped in the lift. I was on the way to a meeting with my agent—who, by the way, was furious with me and has been threatening to fire me. My new book is due in three weeks and I haven’t written a word and people are waiting for it. Do you know what kind of pressure that is? And they’ve paid me a lot of money for the book and I’ve bloody spent it all because I’m bad with money. I buy things stupidly that I don’t need, I buy things to make me feel better about myself, or to show people I’m doing well, or . . . I don’t know. So, when my agent asked me if I had written anything, I don’t know what came over me, but I said yes, and I read her one of these letters. And it was so beautiful and moving that everyone cried. And then I told her I was writing a book about two young people in love, telling the story through a series of their love letters. But I didn’t have the other letters and I couldn’t just make them up. I needed some context, some setting to get a sense of the characters. So I googled, and I realized that Willow Bay was where the letters had been written. And I came here, and—by chance, by accident, by fate, by I don’t know—I booked into this place and I found that diary under that floorboard. And that is the truth! That is the truth!” I finished and there was a deafening silence that I waited for him to fill. But, when he finally did, I hated myself a little more.
“Character?” he asked. “You called my grandmother a character,” he repeated slowly. “But she’s not. She’s a real person, who I loved, and who loved me, and who died.”
A tear slipped down my cheek. “I know. I’m sorry,” I whimpered, softly.
He shook his head. “I still don’t get this. Did you write your first book yourself?”
“Yes.” I nodded.
“But you’re stealing someone else’s story for your second book?”
More tears. “Yes.” The weight of
the shame and guilt were almost too much for my shoulders to hold up, and it was crushing down on my skeleton.
“But your first book was so good—why would you do this?”
“Because I’m stuck. I feel paralyzed with fear. How am I supposed to write something as good again? What if I can’t? What if my first book was an accident? What if I’m not good at this? What if I fail? What if I really am who they say I am? A nobody.”
“Who says you’re a nobody?” he asked.
“Everyone. Me. My mom must have thought that or she wouldn’t have palmed me off to everyone else. My ex. My ex’s partner. I’m an unremarkable someone with the wrong name. Writing a book is the only thing I’ve ever done that has meant anything. And I am going to lose it all, and then who am I? Who am I?” I felt like I was struggling to breathe as I said it. I hadn’t actually said anything so personal out loud before. I’d thought it a million times, but I’d never uttered the words, and I was even more terrified hearing them out loud than thinking them in my head, late at night. I gripped my sides, because my ribcage felt like it was closing in on me.
“Becca, breathe,” I heard him say. His tone had changed a little, now.
I nodded and tried to inhale.
“Breathe,” he said again, as I managed to get some air into my lungs.
I focused on my breathing for a while and, finally, it started to feel possible again. I didn’t look up at Mike—I couldn’t—but, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him pull his clothes on. The act seemed so final. A full stop to something. I heard him sigh and then sit in the chair—the one that we’d made love in last night.
“Your self-worth shouldn’t be wrapped up in something like that. It’s not healthy,” he mumbled.
“Easy for you to say,” I said back quickly. “Your thoughts about me changed when you realized who I was and what I’d done. We probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been a fan of my book and a fan of Becca Thorne—”
“That’s insulting!” He cut me off angrily. “I actually quite like Pebecca-with-the-wrong-name, who likes hanging out in cemeteries. The person who doesn’t wear intelligent-looking glasses and pretends to be something she clearly isn’t. I quite like the person who I met at the bar, who opened up to me, the person tonight, who was kind and gentle and shared personal stories with me, and shared . . . everything.”