R Is for Rebel

by Megan Mulry

  She liked the idea of a passionate, physical, uncomplicated romp with Eliot. She was not so sure she liked the idea of a big, deep, demanding well of emotion.

  Rolling out of the far side of the bed, Abigail walked into the bathroom to freshen up, then put on one of the heavy beige robes hanging on the bathroom door. She crossed the bedroom without looking directly at Eliot and continued out to the balcony, hoping that a bit of fresh morning air would lend a touch of clarity to what was rapidly devolving into a murky, sentimental mess. Abigail wished she knew where her room was in relation to Eliot’s; at this point, she was nearly willing to take a chance at scaling along an adjacent balcony to make her escape, rather than having to go back into Eliot’s room to apologize for being a selfish tart.

  She stayed out on the balcony for what felt like an eternal quarter of an hour, but there was nothing for it. She was going to have to walk back in, in order to get out.

  Eliot was holding a heavy crystal glass of water loosely in his long, beautiful fingers. He had put on his rumpled pale-blue collared shirt from last night, unbuttoned, along with a pair of worn jeans. He sat in that same large comfortable chair from last night, his long legs extended and crossed at the ankle. She stared at his bare feet for a few seconds. He looked as if he might have splashed water on his face, and his hair was a damnably sexy tousled mess.

  “I guess I’ll go then,” Abigail said hesitantly, wanting him to stop her or make her apologize or demand that she explain away whatever she had been unable to explain.

  But instead he just looked at her, his face cool, hard, and shuttered.

  And he waited.

  She was torn between wanting to crawl into his lap, into him, to give herself over to every carnal fantasy she had been harboring for the past few weeks—months really, if she were in the mood to be honest, which apparently she was not—particular textures and positions and smells and ideas that had been distracting her for days, things she wanted to do to him and for him and with him. Things that she had only just begun to discover last night.

  Abigail was torn between those desires and the very real possibility that she was just using Eliot—good, true Eliot—for some sort of sexual picnic. Her face heated again and it was as if he could follow every unspoken word of every tawdry thought.

  “I just figured I could be one of the girls…” She tried, and failed, to convey a semblance of levity.

  His gaze clouded and she realized he was truly and utterly furious. She had never seen him this way, and if she were not so ashamed of herself, she might have taken a moment or two to be terrified. Eliot was not a hater, but he despised a liar. In that moment, she saw herself reflected in his cold stare for the liar she was: maybe not a factual liar, but an emotional one certainly.

  His voice was not one she had heard before. It was cruel. “Would you like me to use you, Abigail?”

  The horror of it was that her first response, physical, was an unthinking, primal yes. Her breasts felt heavy and taut in response to his harsh words. She felt an involuntary quiver at her center. Her body simply called to his. Her body didn’t care about conscience or manipulation or cruelty. Or, perhaps, one day, she would think about it long enough to realize that her body knew much more about those things than her overwrought, immature, theory-filled brain was able to concede. Manipulation? Yes, her body screamed, let Eliot manipulate the hell out of you. Stop thinking, you stupid woman! Cruelty? Her body taunted. Yes, have Eliot show you the very limits of what you can stand, what we—body and mind, finally united—can bear.

  The farthest reaches of abasement, submission, loss of control, giving of control. Consent. Concede, Abigail. Her treacherous body hissed the suggestion like the last temptation.

  Then she blinked away the strange lure of forbidden desires that she was trying to convince herself had to be wrong. But they hadn’t felt wrong when Eliot touched her and ordered her about last night. She was a strong, independent, modern woman. That kind of submission and consent were the antithesis of everything she believed in, weren’t they? Her nape was tingling where the knot of the black leather cord was caught in a tiny strand of hair.

  Eliot watched her, watched the wheels of her thought process play across her eyes—first lit by the spark of desire and then dimmed by the leviathan pallor of fear. He saw the exact moment fear won, when she turned inexorably away from that tempestuous black sea of brutal, unreined passion they could have shared. For a few moments there, he thought he saw clear through to some dark beautiful place where she understood him and they would be free of… everything. Some place of abject truth, removed of every societal code, every gender constraint, every preconceived notion. Wild.

  And then he saw her emotional retreat. She wasn’t going to go there. Or, at least, she wasn’t going to go there with him now, knowing he was a fool in love with her. She probably would have done any kinky thing he could think of if he’d been cool and playful, erotic and empty. Instead, the bright silver light in her diamond eyes turned to pale, gunmetal gray right there in front of him. She slipped back into a world of fear, or perhaps a healthy caution, if he was feeling generous. A world where people stayed busy, alert, moving, bustling, the better to keep their roaring passions in check.

  He wanted to kill her. For a split second, less than a split second, even, he understood that often clichéd phrase crime of passion. It had never rung true for him, this idea that you could love someone so much that only their destruction would ease the pain of loving them. How could she be such a despicable liar? So completely dissociated from what was passing between them?

  She had changed back into her black skirt and her mother’s shirt, but she no longer had a bra. He’d seen to that. When his eyes raked her body—naked to him, even in clothes—her nipples tightened and protruded through the thin fabric of her black shirt. He took it as the smallest, meanest concession that her body, at least, had no need to prevaricate.

  ***

  Abigail briefly considered mentioning that she despised herself more than he could ever possibly despise her, but figured it would be of little consolation to either of them. She quickly bent to pick up her shoes, then grabbed her slim purse, and walked slowly, dreadfully, to the door. She didn’t bother to wipe away the stupid tear that fell down her left cheek.

  She pulled the door shut and tried to catch her breath, leaning back against the cool metal. A part of her still wished he’d come after her, to swing the door open with a violent pull behind her back, to force a confession she didn’t even understand.

  Little pieces of the truth were already starting to coalesce, forcing themselves into her mind. At base, she didn’t have the courage to admit what she really wanted.

  For all her talk of independent thought and a sense of herself that hinged on an utter disregard for society’s mores, she was a prisoner. The entire system had turned on her. Here she thought she was returning to some pedestrian, simplified male-female stereotype, a relationship that bore no undue scrutiny. Mainstream. The Usual.

  What a hideous joke.

  He would never open that door and pull her back in. She knew that after a few seconds. Not out of spite or to taunt her or to teach her a lesson, but simply because they both knew she was the one who had to acknowledge what she wanted… to open the door and walk in. Eyes open. Honest.

  The tears were running hot and messy down her cheeks. She was quietly slobbering. She tried to count to ten, to gather the requisite self-control, the most basic courage. But she had no reserve. She tried to take a quick breath to right herself, to look at the opportunity she was about to squander.

  She could not do it.

  She had not made a sound. No whimper. Only silent, copious tears. But even through a thick fire door, Eliot must have been following the trajectory of her thoughts, the loss of every possibility. Her cowardice.

  A brief, violent sound of shattering glass on the other side of the door sent her sprinting down the hall and—after an embarrassing visit to the front d
esk to ask for her own forgotten room number—back to her luxurious, lonely chamber.

  ***

  Eliot was breathing hard after hurling the glass at the door. He heard Abigail’s footsteps retreating and got up slowly to gather the larger pieces of glass and to call housekeeping to deal with the rest of the mess. He gave a short, vicious laugh at himself, marveling at the fact that certain clichés were so patently obvious that the very nature of what was meant was lost. Nice guys finish last.

  Well, sure.

  Obviously.

  But to be taught such an object lesson by a flighty, airy, idiotic woman was almost more than he could stand. A piece of glass caught the edge of his left thumb and he dumped the shards into the small garbage bin in the bathroom and put the bit of bleeding flesh into his mouth to staunch it.

  If all women were, if not repelled, at least bemused, by the good, true version of Eliot, he supposed he was perfectly capable of becoming a philandering, misogynistic rat bastard. He grabbed his cell phone from the desk and pulled up the TGV schedule site and made a reservation to get home to Geneva by lunchtime. It was just after six in the morning and he could easily make the eight o’clock train, allowing him plenty of time to shower and change and be out of Paris—and away from Abigail—long before she had any ridiculous notions about discussing or talking or coming to an understanding.

  He needed to get home to the cool, organized comfort of his home in Geneva. Where he had what he needed.

  Order.

  Respect.

  And he would start screwing women for the hell of it. As many models and stylists and fortune-hunters and dancers and poetesses and waitresses and heiresses as there were days in the week. And maybe he would lead a few of them on, just for sport, with ambiguous promises of delightful shared futures, and then laugh at their woeful misunderstanding of his intentions.

  Silly trollops.

  He doubted he could erase his feelings for Abigail, but he could certainly bury the hurt under a stack of meaningless affairs. He needed to get busy. He didn’t need to spend another ounce of mental energy dissecting unfathomable ideas like why he had fallen in love with her or how it might have felt for the two of them to spend the rest of their lives mapping uncharted sexual territory.

  What a debacle. He stormed into the bathroom and showered as if he were scrubbing off acid rain.

  By the time he walked into the front hall of his nineteenth-century home in the Geneva enclave of Versoix, he was honest enough with himself to acknowledge he would not be sleeping with every woman he came across, and probably would not be inclined to sleep with anyone at all for quite some time. Nor did he think Abigail was an idiot; some small, sad part of him even thought of calling her to apologize for something she’d never even heard him say. To apologize for his mean thought.

  All he really wanted to do was get into his pool. To wash it all away. He swam for hours, lap after lap draining any residual energy he might have left in reserve to contemplate the possibility of rapprochement with Abigail. He might not be cut out for meaningless sex with faceless strangers, but he was dead set on eradicating thoughts of meaningful sex with one woman in particular.

  No apologies were in order. No future. As Abigail had so perfectly pointed out, they had barely begun.

  He had nipped it in the bud.

  Almost.

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Abigail smiled as she turned from the narrow hall into the kitchen and saw her mother and Jack sharing one large bowl of café au lait between them and trading different sections of the newspaper across the battered wooden breakfast table. It had been almost a year since Abigail had seen or heard from Eliot Cranbrook, but being in Paris always brought on painful waves of longing. She stuffed the memories and tried to focus on the present.

  Her mother and Jack’s house in Paris was something out of a fairy tale. The fact that it was a tiny, seventeenth-century, free-standing cottage tucked into the far end of a small lane, hidden in the very heart of the Sixteenth Arrondissement, made it unique. But the residual evidence of the nearly fifty years that Jack had spent living there was what made it truly magical.

  The two bedrooms upstairs had accommodated his family, but barely. His three sons shared one room and he and his Spanish wife, Nina, another. None of them had ever thought to complain of overcrowding. They lived like young adventurers in an enchanted, private world that opened up to the expanse of the Bois de Boulogne out the off-kilter back door, and onto the sophistication of the Avenue Foch out the shiny red front door.

  Jack Parnell had taken the house on a dare after hearing about it from a law colleague as a rental during his first year in town, almost half a century ago. At the time, he thought he would be in Paris for a two-year stint, then he would return to Iowa to start a small law practice in his hometown. Instead, he fell in love with Paris. He fell in love with the little house down the lane. He renewed his lease year after year, constantly offering the owner inducements to sell until, after twenty years of renting, the owner was suitably satisfied that Jack had no nefarious intentions that involved altering or razing the unique property.

  “Oh, Abigail, did I tell you that Eliot Cranbrook is getting married?” Sylvia looked up from the article she was reading and glanced at her beautiful, if a bit wan, daughter.

  “No, Mother, you hadn’t mentioned it. Who is he marrying?” Even after so much time, Abigail found it difficult to keep her voice perfectly level when she spoke about Eliot, so she tended to avoid actually using his given name aloud. The fish and the bicycle still hung low between her breasts; she had never taken them off. Whether she wore them as her own scarlet letter or a token of love—or both—she still wasn’t sure.

  “What’s her name again, Jack? We met her in Italy last summer with Penny and Will, remember?”

  Jack hummed a noncommittal response, his interest engaged elsewhere in the newspaper he was reading.

  “Jack?” Sylvia prompted gently. Abigail noticed that her mother never lapsed into being short-tempered or cross with her second husband. The two of them had married within a few months of their first propitious meeting at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée.

  At least it had been propitious for someone, Abigail often reminded herself with no small amount of self-deprecation.

  “Yes, love?” Jack answered absently.

  “What is the name of Eliot’s fiancée again? I can’t recall.”

  “Marisa Plataneau, I think it was. Something like that. Nice woman. French. Very accomplished.” He returned his full attention to the newspaper while Abigail felt her heart fold in on itself at the thought of a most likely beautiful, nice, accomplished French woman sharing Eliot’s life.

  And bed.

  And having Eliot’s children.

  Where the hell did that come from? she wondered, then stuffed the stray thought firmly away. But she must have sighed aloud because her mother was looking at her intently when Abigail turned from the counter with her own large cup of hot black coffee.

  “What?”Abigail asked defensively, in response to her mother’s inquisitive gaze.

  Not looking away, Sylvia said, “Jack, darling, Abigail and I are going to pop by the boulangerie to pick up some extra baguettes for tonight.”

  “Mm-hmm. Good idea,” he replied without looking up from the paper.

  The cool January air helped jar Abigail out of her reverie, along with her mother’s abrupt inquiry.

  “Are you still fostering feelings for Eliot? After so much time?” Sylvia asked as they made their way along the narrow, cobbled lane that led from the small house out onto the avenue.

  “It’s not as if I haven’t tried to get over it. I just haven’t met anyone… that I like as much… since I knew Eliot…” Her voice cracked on his name and she didn’t try to hide it from her mother.

  “Oh, dear.”

  “How can I still feel so much about him when I haven’t seen him or talked to him in a year? I only knew him for a few months, r
eally. We only had sex that one time for goodness’ sake!”

  “Please, Abigail. I am trying to be modern, but there are only certain hurdles I can clear. Kindly spare me the accuracies.”

  “Very well. I shan’t go into detail. But I only mention it because I stupidly thought I wouldn’t become attached, or deeply affected, or whatever.” Abigail’s voice trailed off as she realized her mother had slowed to a stop and was staring at her.

  “Really, Abigail? You thought you could only have deep feelings for someone if the two of you had lots of sex?”

  The way her mother pinched the word sex out of her patrician mouth made it sound very small and tawdry indeed.

  Abigail sickened anew. “Yes. No! Mother. Please. I obviously botched the whole thing. I don’t know what I thought. I thought it would be a fling, something light and fun. I adored Eliot…” Then quieter, “Adore Eliot… but I treated him so abominably, so cheaply, I don’t think I would want to ever see me again either if I were Eliot… I can barely live with myself, much less imagine someone else wanting to live with me. And he was so tender and sweet.”

  “Whatever transpired a year ago is no longer the issue. The man is on the verge of marrying another woman. Think!” her mother commanded. “Are you willing to sit by and watch? To just let that happen?”

  Abigail smiled a poignant smile at her mother then looked across the almost painfully quintessential Parisian side street. A blond woman in stylish navy trousers and fitted black jacket walked her little son to school, the boy looking like a miniature, respectable banker escorting his lady friend; a bent older man carrying his folded newspaper tucked under one arm and his cane in the other, his perfectly cut, vintage trench coat catching the wind as he walked slowly away from them; the fishmonger replenishing the piles of crushed ice in the display bins inside his plate glass storefront window.