by Lark O'Neal
“Let me ask you a question.”
I nod.
“Take a minute and think about a time you were very happy this past year, when there was no man involved.”
Looking out the window at a pair of young women in tall boots walking back toward the parking lot, scarves flying out behind them. I roll the memories back—anytime I was in the greenhouse, either my dad’s or the one by my old house; when I was planting anything, harvesting corn, eating peas Electra let me take out of the garden. When my father and I were surfing. The moment I saw the ocean again at Cloudy Bay. When I swam with the dolphins, even though Kaleb was with me and it connected us, the power of it was in the dolphins, not anything between Kaleb and I.
There are others, too. The moments when I started to understand how to act in the commercials. When I got the email from Mercedes, when I read a book I loved. “Lots of them, actually.”
“Try to pick just one when you felt your heart open wide.”
I close my eyes and I’m in the water with the dolphins, their skin and noses under my palms, and the day I smelled the water and remembered the sea, and—
“When I looked out the window of the plane and saw New Zealand below me.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Because I was so glad to see it, and because I was on my own and so far away and it was cool.”
She laughs. “That’s what you think of, Jess. You’re going to be fine, no matter what men bring or don’t bring into your life. Make yourself happy and everything else will fall into place.”
I nod. First I have to be myself. Maybe the trouble has been trying to be something for everybody else.
* * *
Which sounds all fine and sensible. Electra walks me across the street and leaves me in the lobby with a hug. On the way up to the suite, I’m thinking about our conversation. What would I do if I were acting just for myself?
Mercedes is not there when I arrive, and when I check the bedroom, neither is Kaleb. No one has left a note that I can find. I text Kaleb. Where are you guys?
No answer. Did they go somewhere together?
Is Kaleb sicker than he was? I urgently text Mercedes. Is Kaleb okay?
She texts right back. Way better. He went to get something to eat. I’m out looking for a martini. c u ltr
Now what? For awhile, I pace around the living room, looking toward the light on top of Pikes Peak, thinking that Tyler is straight down the road about six miles. I think of how ragged he looked on television.
You need to finish it with Tyler, Kaleb said to me.
Maybe I do. I text Kaleb: There is something I need to do. I’ll be back later.
Kaleb does not reply.
I don’t know why I’m doing this. It just suddenly seems urgent that I know what is real and not real with Tyler, as well as Kaleb. I am not in a committed relationship with either one of them—and the sound of Tyler’s voice, that slight raggedness, the edge of defeat, has been weighing on me all day.
I ask the doorman to get me a cab, and he drives me to Manitou, but when we get to the icy street where Tyler lives, he refuses to drive up it. I pay him at the bottom and make my way on foot. The sidewalks are fine for the most part, though I have to walk carefully through ankle high snow in a couple of spots.
It’s cold and dark as I crunch over the sidewalk to his front door, but even before I get to the porch, I see him through the multi-paned windows of the studio. The only lights in the house spill out onto the snow in neatly divided yellow squares, broken by the shadows of little things he’s placed on the sills—a tiny crystal vase, a glass egg showing wavery light through itself onto the snow, the uneven shape of a piece of driftwood, a heavy darkness. This is something I find so alluring about him, the way he surrounds himself with beauty, even in those small things. Maybe that appreciation for beauty is something that comes with his artistic nature, or maybe it’s something he learned growing up in a world where pretty little things are not always out of reach.
I pause before going down the sidewalk to his door, because there he is, half-sitting on a stool in front of an easel, a palette in one hand, paintbrush in the other. He’s wearing a toque that slumps back from his forehead, and I know it must be cold in there, the unheated room with all its windows. I make myself very still, trying to hear the music he might be listening to, but all that reaches my ears is the sound of night—the silence of stars and wind in the tree branches, a car on a street in the distance , someone in a house nearby laughing.
And Tyler, the bad boy of slopestyle who has such a reputation, dabs paint onto a canvas, carefully, delicately. He pauses, his mouth moving as his eyes narrow, and he leans back, tilts his head, reaches out to touch his brush to the canvas lightly. Not right, his head shakes.
He is so beautiful it almost hurts to look at him. I remember drawing his face, the triangle of nose, the rectangle of brow. I think of him kissing me in the pub and tasting that lost, five year old boy who so needed someone.
Dangerous to come here. Because it’s not so much that he’s some wild bad boy who knows his way around a woman’s body that is so tempting. It’s not his elegant bone structure or even his monied background. It is his vulnerability.
Especially to me.
How can I walk up to his door now, seeing what I see, and push him out of my life?
Is that even my plan?
Maybe the person I need to be honest with is me. Seeing him there, painting and lonely and so beautiful and lost, I want him. I want to put my hands on him and kiss some healing into him and ease some of that burden he’s carrying. I’ve never known anyone as lonely as Tyler Smith.
I didn’t come here to break up with him. Maybe some other person could, someone smarter or wiser or harder. Maybe Jules, the character I’m playing, could do it, but I can’t. I know too much about loneliness myself, how it feels as if it will eat you alive from within.
Taking a breath, I pick my way down the unshoveled sidewalk. I’m here now. I might as well say hello and let him call me another cab. Raising my hand to knock, I pause.
Am I lying to myself? Am I testing my feelings for Kaleb, for Tyler, by presenting myself such a fierce temptation?
I don’t know. I also know that I can’t leave. Before I can dither any more, I knock on the door, firmly, loud enough that he’ll be able to hear me even if the music is on.
It takes a minute. My shoulders are getting cold in the night air and I shake around a little. I can see into the living room through the window in the door, and I see him come around the corner, curious, a paint-stained towel in his left hand.
I have the advantage of knowing I’m here, while he has no idea it’s me standing out here in the darkness. He pulls the door open and halts, his expression puzzled, then wary. “Jess!” He tugs open the screen door and gestures for me to come in. “What are you doing here?”
I step inside and it smells the same—deeply, strongly of Tyler, so heady. It makes me dizzy. My hands are in my pockets.
“I don’t know,” I confess.
He closes the door and for a moment he just looks at me, his clear eyes so beautiful in the yellow lamplight, his mouth soft and vulnerable. “Are you coming to tell me you don’t want to see me anymore?”
I swallow, then slowly shake my head. “No.”
With a barely audible noise, he reaches for me, pulling me close for a kiss that tastes of promise and a gilded season and things I’ve never known and maybe never will. I feel the moments we’ve shared binding us—in this room I sent the email that led me to my father. In this room, I fell in love with him. In this room, he took off my shirt and kissed my breasts. In this room, he pushed up my dress and—
“Your hair,” he says at last, brushing his fingers along the base of my neck. “Wow.”
“Wow good or wow bad?”
He steps back, his hands still on my shoulders, and inclines his head, studying me. “You know I loved it, but I always thought it overwhelmed you. Now I can see you.”
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Touching it myself, I move from foot to foot.
“Okay,” he says. “What about a cup of tea?”
I let go of a small laugh. “Sure. That would be great.”
“Come on. I’ll show you what I’m working on.”
In the kitchen, he turns on a small light over the stove, then fills a battered kettle with water from the tap. When he turns the control for the burner, blue flames leap out suddenly, then settle into a cozy quiet flicker. Again, I’m struck by the tidiness of his habits as I look around the room, not like most guys who think cleaning is something fairies do at night. Through the windows over the table, the lights of the city are spread out in the blackness. “What a great view.”
“I know. I miss it when I’m gone.”
He limps a little, and I see that he’s wearing a half boot around his left ankle. “Are you supposed to be putting weight on that?”
“No, technically. But I can make tea.”
I shrug out of my coat and put it on the chair. “Or you can sit down and I’ll make the tea.”
He gives me that sexy, sideways grin. “Go for it.” He sits at the small table tucked under the windows. “Cups over the sink, tea to the left of the stove.”
“I remember.” I take out two cups and settle them on the counter, thinking of my father’s house. “I love it that you have tea, honestly. I’ve only been back a few days and I miss it already.”
He smiles. “Tea cures everything, they say.”
I lean on the counter while the water heats. “I’ve been reading A Moveable Feast. It’s kind of a sad book in a way, isn’t it?”
His face brightens. “Why do you say that?”
“It’s obvious that it was one of the best times in his life, that he looks back on being poor and dreaming big as something he misses.”
He nods, in that way that means he’s listening. His hands are still, one on the table, one on the knee that is propped up on another chair. The low light from the stove edges his nose and brow, a study he might like painting himself. “I see that, too.”
“I like this a lot more than his other work. He’s mean about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and kind of sneers at other people, but he’s more vulnerable, more real, than he is in a lot of his other books.”
“You don’t like him?”
I shake my head. “No. So macho, really. Just not my kind of writer.”
“You like girls.”
“Not necessarily. I loved the Bradbury you gave me, Dandelion Wine? It was so magical.”
“I wanted that childhood so badly when I was a kid. Small town, everybody knowing everybody. It seemed like it would be safe.”
“I get it. Me, too.” The water starts to boil and I pour it into the waiting mugs. “Some places in New Zealand feel that way to me.”
“I bet.” He stands. “Let those steep. I’ll show you what I’m working on.”
“Okay.” I keep meaning to tell him that I can’t really stay, but it’s easy enough to follow him into the studio that’s so familiar. A strong lamp stands beside the easel, casting a circle of warm light around the stool and the canvas and his palette, smeary with colors of all kinds. A battered table stands beside it, also stained.
There are dozens of sketches tacked up on the walls, but I see the difference in them now, the confidence. A hand with a wine glass, a neck with pearls, and on the easel, a woman with hollow, empty eyes. “Your mother?”
He looks at her and nods. “I guess I’ve been working up to it.”
“Cathartic?”
A shrug, a rueful twist of his lips. “Not as much as I’d like.” He settles on the stool, and as if he can’t help himself, picks up a brush, dabs it into a pool of paint, swishes it across the jaw, darkening the angle. “And this is the first sketch. Who knows where it will go.”
“I’m not a critic or anything,” I say, crossing my arms, “but even I can tell your work is so much stronger, Tyler. It really is.”
“I know. Thank you, I mean.” He gives me a rueful half-grin. “That’s not meant to sound so arrogant. It’s just that—” he touches his upper belly with his left hand “—I can feel it. Like, feel where I want to go, what my voice is like.” He points the brush at me. “And a lot of that came from trying to see what it was that caught me when I looked at you.”
The bright light touches his lips and I watch them move, remembering the first time I saw him at Billy’s and how much more I know about him now.
“Why did you come here, Jess?”
I think with perfect clarity, to finish it. But what does that mean?
I still don’t know. What I do know is that he is lost and needs me at this moment. For all that he brought into my life, I can bring something into his. I step forward and put my hands on his face. “I just needed to see you.” I touch his cheekbones, and the faint grizzling of beard on his jaw. “When I saw you flying on that slope, so elegant, so confident, I couldn’t believe you ever let it go. I can’t believe you can do this, too, and you’re so smart and yet—”
He’s looking at my mouth, his tongue touching his lower lip, and something about the sight makes my hips go soft. “And yet?”
“You know.” I bend and taste his mouth again, lightly. His hands slide up my back, shape themselves to my body. “And yet.”
“I do know,” He breathes against my lips, and then he’s kissing me, hard, pulling my body into his, my pelvis tight against his, his thighs cradling me. His tongue teases and dances with mine, and then his hands are hot on my shoulder blades.
And I don’t stop him, because I need to know. I need to know what I feel, what’s really here or not here. I slide my hands under the collar of his sweater, feeling the smooth skin of his neck.
“God, Jess,” he whispers against my mouth, “I miss you so much.”
The emotion in his voice pierces me. I press into him more closely, pull his hat off and shape my hands to his head. Our mouths lock hard, his hunger igniting my own, our mouths finding a rhythm they never forgot. I touch his ears and his neck, and his hands slide over my back, down to my butt, over the back of my thighs. Suddenly, he lifts me and pulls me into his lap, pressing our pelvises close together, my crotch fitting over the hard-on between us, and his hands are more urgent, reaching for the hem of my shirt and pulling it over my head. He pauses for a second right then, looking at me, probing my face for motives, maybe, and for one quarter millimeter of that second, I wonder if it would be wiser to stop. But it’s that look in his eyes, that lostness, that pushes me forward.
Holding his gaze, I reach behind myself and unhook my bra and let it fall to the floor.
Urgently, he pulls his sweater off over his head and pulls us together, chest to chest, his skin hot against mine, and he’s kissing me wildly, almost too wildly, his hands hard against my back, his tongue devouring me. With a faint sound, he breaks away from my mouth and kisses my neck, my throat, my breasts, and the heat starts to build in my body as I trace his shoulders, kiss his neck, the lobe of his ear.
“Stand up,” he whispers, and I climb off him. He unbuttons my jeans and pulls them down. I step out, my eyes on his face, so I’m watching as he skims his hands down my torso, as if memorizing it, down the sides of my waist, between my legs. “You shaved,” he says, smiling, tracing the V of my now-naked crotch with two fingers.
“I liked it,” he says, “but this is nice, too.” He puts his fingers between my legs, expertly sliding into the space, but I stop him. “You now.”
He stands, and we’re face to face, my body naked, his still in jeans, and I lean in and kiss his nipples, spread my hands over his ribs. “You’re so thin,” I whisper, and find the buckle of his belt.
“Not where it counts,” he says with a rough laugh, and his cock springs free, ruddy and eager as I push down his pants, but he nearly stumbles with the logistics and ends up sitting on the stool while I have to kneel and take off the foot cast. On my way back up, I kiss the inside of his knee, the side of his waist, use my
hand to greet his cock.
“Not in here. Condoms in the other room,” he says, clicking off a light, and leading me through the kitchen into his bedroom.
“Here,” he says, and we’re on the bed with him over me, the sheets smelling of his skin, of him. He kisses me, reverently, head to toe, and I find tears are flowing silently from the corners of my eyes, tears I don’t understand, but I let them be. His fingers trail fire over my skin, and my skin sends wild messages to my heart, and everything is in a wild tangle as we join, as he moves inside of me, both of us silent and then kissing, and he reaches between us to touch me and I’m coming, right along with him, heat and tears and orgasm and Tyler and kisses all mixed up in a long ribbon that wraps us together.
As he pulls me into his side when it’s over, and tugs the quilt over us, I know what the tears are—this is my way of saying goodbye. He doesn’t have to know that right now. This can buoy him for the Olympic trials and get him through to the other side, and I can go make the movie and this can just be the last sweet note in our rocky, doomed relationship.
We don’t speak, which is not the way we have ever been. His hand moves on my back.
Finally I say, “Penny for your thoughts.”
“I know why you’re here, Jess,” he says, and there’s grief in his voice. “What all of this is. You’re such a good person, and you wanted to leave me with something and—”
His voice cracks ever so slightly. Alarmed, I sit up. “Tyler!”
There is a single tear running down in a straight line from his eye into the hair of his temple, and it breaks me. “No!” I cry softly, bending to kiss him, his mouth, his cheeks. “No.”
And then I realize that I’m doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t: I’m lying to myself, lying to him, lying by osmosis to Kaleb, just by coming here.
Tyler grabs my hands. “Jess.”
I bend my head, pressing my forehead to his hands. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with him,” I say, and the floodgates open. “I wanted to wait for you to figure things out, to make things right, to—”