by Susan Ward
He arches a brow. “Seattle?” he repeats in a rough sort of way. “Why are you going there?”
Normal question in not normal context.
I stare at him without answering.
His eyes do a casual study of my living room and then shift back to my face. “How long have you had a guy living with you?”
I tense. How does he know that? My gaze focuses on Neil’s surf board and wetsuit propped against the wall.
“I don’t see as how it’s any of your business how long I’ve been living with Neil.”
His eyes flare and widen. “And I don’t see why you care if I know.” He stomps out his cigarette on a plate I left on the coffee table. “It was a polite question. Conversational. Nothing more.”
That comment hits me like a slap on my face.
I force myself to look at him directly. “I think you should leave, Alan. Why did you come here?”
He takes out another cigarette, lights it, and takes a long drag, staring at me through the smoke again. “I’m in San Francisco. But you know that.”
I pretend not to understand what he means.
He says, “It seemed ridiculous...” There is just enough edge in “ridiculous” that my scalp prickles. “…not to cross the bridge to see you.”
I change course. “So how is Nia?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.”
I blink at him.
What does that mean? Are they getting divorced? Maybe the stories in the press aren’t true. Maybe they’re not deliriously happy together.
“Where’s your boyfriend? Seattle? Is that why you’re going there?” he asks.
“Yes.”
It’s probably a stupid question, but right now it feels like the most important question in my life. “If you don’t know or care where Nia is, why did you marry her?”
His simmering gaze locks on me, and I feel the punch even before he bites out through clenched teeth, “To forget you.”
I can barely breathe. Weird, convoluted, harshly spoken, Alan honesty. I don’t know how to deal with him when he’s this way. I’m relieved when his eyes move from me to focus on stomping out his cigarette.
“It didn’t work,” he adds on a rasp. “I still think of you, always.”
“Were you thinking of me when you married Nia, four months after I left New York?”
I watch the dark light in his eyes change. His gaze clouds into something painfully harsh.
“I think of you when I fuck her,” he says in a brutal, quiet voice that is deafening. “Is that good enough for you, Chrissie?”
I flush deep crimson and my eyes fix on his face. I fight to recover from the shock of him saying that, and realize he’s watching me and expecting some kind of reaction. He’s assessing every change in my expression. I don’t know what has slipped onto my face, but his features lose their harsher arrangement.
“Do you ever think of me?” His voice is so quiet I can barely catch his words.
“I think of you every day, Alan.”
His posture and expression change in a flash. For some reason my answer kicked up his anger. I can see something powerful coursing through him.
He stands up, pacing the room as if struggling to contain something. He takes a deep breath, stops, turns, and then stares down at me.
“Then can you do me the courtesy, Chrissie, of explaining why you haven’t responded to a single phone call or letter. One returned call would have sufficed to tell me directly to fuck off.”
The last of that is said through gritted teeth. Calls? Letters? What is Alan talking about?
“You called? You sent me letters? I don’t understand,” I choke out.
His gaze burns into me. “What don’t you understand, love? That even the worst cunt would have picked up the phone once, or answered at least one letter?”
My face snaps up. I feel shaky inside. My heart stops.
Oh no…cunt. I see it on his face and I don’t want to. Alan isn’t here because he loves me; he’s here because he hates me. Oh God, he hates me. Alan is here because he hates me.
“I understand you leaving New York, Chrissie. What I can’t understand is why you had to be such a bitch after you left.”
Everything inside me collapses in a fast free-fall.
I spring from my chair and race to the kitchen. I don’t want Alan to see me cry. My fingers curl around the edge of the sink, my head lowered as I struggle to breathe in and out.
He thinks I’m who walked away from us. It’s too much for my emotionally undone senses. That I haven’t a clue why I never received a phone message or letter from him doesn’t matter. Alan hates me. It would have been so much better if Alan hadn’t come to Berkeley. If I had never known this.
Alan’s voice sounds behind me, void of emotion, but at least no longer angry.
“Why are you crying, Chrissie?”
“You can be so mean sometimes, Alan. Why did you come here if all you wanted to do is insult me and call me names? I would have preferred to pass on that.”
“I would prefer not to be here as well.” He says it coldly.
“Then why did you come?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “It did seem ridiculous to be in San Francisco and not to see you, Chrissie. So I came here.”
“You sent me roses for Christmas, didn’t you?” I whisper.
A long pause; I can feel him staring at me.
“Yes,” he says, the edge returning to his voice again.
I push my lips tightly together, fighting a fresh wave of tears. I knew they were from Alan. I knew it in my heart. I felt it in my skin.
“Was there a card with the roses?”
“No,” he says in a rough way. “I had given up sending you cards by then.”
“How long after I left New York did you continue to call me? Send me letters?”
“I don’t see as how that’s important now.”
“It’s important to me.”
He takes a minute.
“A year.”
Another heavy silence between us, and the emotion warring in the room isn’t only my own.
“Why didn’t you call me, Chrissie?”
The room is suddenly overfilled with the feel of Alan. His anger. His hurt. I’m dizzy and confused.
“I didn’t know you tried to reach me. If I’d have known you called me, I would have called you back. But I didn’t know. I didn’t get your messages or anything else. I thought, when I left New York, we were over. Clean break. You told me we were over if I left. What was I supposed to think?”
“I was angry. It was bullshit to get you to stay. I didn’t mean it when I said we were over. I regretted saying it the moment you walked out the door.”
Time stops around me, heavy and silent.
“Where did you go the summer after you left me?” he asks in a worried way. “Linda wouldn’t talk to me about you. It got me concerned. And Jack doesn’t take my calls since New York.”
Concerned. I can’t begin to process that one, or what I hear in his voice.
“I drove across country with Rene. An after graduation road trip we’d planned all through high school. Jack thought it would be good for me. So we went.”
“So you weren’t in Santa Barbara?”
“No.”
“I traveled to Santa Barbara two weeks after you left to try to reach you. Went to your house. Maria said you weren’t there. I’ve always wondered if she lied to me.”
My senses slowly grow aware that I’m still facing the sink with my hands clutching the counter, the only thing keeping me on my feet.
Two weeks. He only just missed me. “I wasn’t there.”
Another long exhale of breath. “Chrissie, look at me,” Alan orders.
I can’t move. If I let go of the counter I will drop to the floor.
“Please, look at me, Chrissie.”
He brushes the hair from my neck with his fingers. I want to turn into him. I want him to hold me. My entire body fee
ls vacant with shock, like I’ve been run over by a truck. All this time, I thought he ended it with me.
“I apologize for being an ass earlier,” he murmurs, his voice pulling me from my thoughts. “I didn’t mean a single word. Not the cruel ones. I’ve been nervous since I walked through the door.”
My fingers curl tighter around the rim of the sink. “I’m really glad you came to see me. It’s been hard wondering why we ended not at least as friends.”
Alan’s body eases closer into me, not touching, but close enough to surround me with the feel of him anyway.
“It’s been hard for me, every day, not being with you,” he whispers.
I hear him swallow.
“I love you, Chrissie. I never stopped.”
“I need you to go, Alan.”
He places a feather-light kiss on my neck. It ripples along my nerves, and then jolts in my sex.
“Are you still in love with me?” he murmurs.
“I want you to go.”
“I have two days, Chrissie. I don’t have anywhere I have to be for two days.”
Two days. The blood starts pumping even more fiercely through my body. That unrelenting pull. The electric current. The want. Here, now, over a year later in Berkeley.
“Do you really want me to leave?” Alan whispers.
I hesitate.
He turns me around, away from the sink, and eases into me, one hand planted on the counter, holding his body just beyond me. I lift my face and his mouth lowers. The touch of his lips is just a touch, gentle and yet a sharp reminder of how we used to be. I feel his finger lightly on my cheek, nothing more, but the feel of him is all across my flesh.
I part my lips and he deepens the kiss in slow degrees, giving the feel of him, inch by inch. I’m about to melt in my skin. He slowly pulls back.
I open my eyes to find him staring down at me.
“Tell me now, Chrissie, if you want me to leave.”
His expression betrays nothing. He hovers over me, watching my shifting emotions as my brain, my body, fills with my need.
“Please, tell me you want me to stay,” he says softly.
I take in a steadying breath. I say nothing and he leans into me. His lips touch my neck, my breathing increases, my head tilts back as my heart accelerates. I don’t stop him. Then I’m pinned against the counter and he’s kissing me passionately.
I lock my mouth on his as we devour each other’s lips in an almost desperate, frenzied way. I let him press my body against him, lifting me into his pelvis, molding us together, giving me the feel of him there.
He lifts me from the floor, never breaking contact with my lips, and he carries me from the kitchen. Somehow, he knows where to take me and eases me back on my bed. I don’t resist as he undresses me and I lie still as he gazes down at me. The cool air of the room touches my flesh, and the warmth of his fingers brush it away.
He starts to remove his clothes.
A kiss on my arm; my heart skips a beat.
A touch on my shoulder; tears in my eyes.
He covers my entire body with a kiss and a touch, but he doesn’t say the words whispering through my memory. He doesn’t need to. A kiss: I’m sorry. A touch: I love you. Soon, all I’m feeling is him and I’m out of my mind with the feel of him.
His clothes are in a pile on the floor. He’s naked, standing there staring at me. He exhales, a ragged shudder through his limbs, and then he’s in me. I close my eyes and I revel in the feel of him, the taste of his mouth, the bite of his fingers as he holds my hips, easing out of me slowly, and then again, harder, slamming into me.
He moves faster and faster. I wrap my legs around him. I rake his back with my nails. I bite his shoulder. I run my tongue along his flesh. I feel myself tighten and tighten. I’m whimpering and he’s overfilling me as I melt around him.
He lifts up onto his knees, taking my hips with him, going as deep as he can go inside me. I come quickly, calling out his name. Alan follows with another hard thrust, and the surface of his flesh is claimed by trembling as he pours himself into me.
Slowly he quiets, lowering us to the bed, until he’s on top of me, his face in my hair. I kiss his head. My fingers wander the surface of his back. We’re both quiet inside, and I’m lost in Alan, again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A sound, distant and faint, pulls me from sleep.
My slowly focusing senses finally identify what woke me. Oh crap, the cordless phone in the kitchen. I never went to Seattle. I never called Neil.
I check the clock on the nightstand and it’s after midnight. I lift my face from Alan’s chest and ease away from him. I gaze down at him, blinking. It still feels just enough unreal that he’s here in my condo in Berkeley that I almost can’t take my eyes off of him.
After the second time we made love, Alan fell asleep quickly. I stared at him for hours afterwards before sleep finally made me stop doing it.
There’s enough light in the bedroom that I can see the perfect lines of Alan’s face. He looks so peaceful in sleep right now, younger and less intimidating than he did when he brushed past me into the condo yesterday. I want to run my fingers along his features, and memorize, with my touch, how he looks at this moment. But I don’t want to wake him.
I slip from the bed, take Alan’s shirt from the floor, and tug it in place as I quietly go from the bedroom to the kitchen.
I grab the cordless from the counter and click it on. I slide downward, my back against the counter to sit on the floor. “Hello?”
“Chrissie…” is said in a long, amused, aggravated growl. Neil. Silence. Then, “What happened?”
I scrunch my nose. “I missed my plane.”
Laughter. “Obviously. I waited at the airport for two hours before I figured that one out. What happened?”
The tension uncurls, just a smidge, from my body. He isn’t angry.
“Do you want to hear the highlights or the lowlights?”
“Oh, definitely the lowlights,” he says, amused.
“I drank too much last night and passed out on the couch. I woke up late. Can we just leave it at that?”
Neil laughs. “If you want to.”
I definitely want to, I think to myself, feeling really shitty, even though we have an understanding. An expressed understanding. When we’re not together, it means we’re not together.
Neil’s rule, not mine, delivered before I left Seattle, surprisingly tucked into an overly long non-Neil like discussion about how he doesn’t want me ruining my college years waiting on a guy who spends most of his life on the road. It was just a touch arrogant. A touch conceited. Totally Neil. Totally sweet.
My fingers tighten around the receiver.
“Why didn’t you call?” he asks. “I’ve been worried.”
“Trying to figure out how to fix everything. Then I fell asleep.”
“You’re still coming right?”
“In a few days. There are some things I should really take care of.”
“Chrissie.” Another growl. “I want you here now.”
I laugh, but I don’t feel like laughing. “I’ll be there soon.”
“Call me with your flight info.”
“OK.”
“Night, Chrissie.”
Click.
I hold the phone in my hands and just stare at it. I spring to my feet, turn the ringer off on the cordless, grab a glass of ice water, and leave the kitchen.
When I enter the bedroom, I freeze. The light is on and Alan is sitting up in bed, smoking.
“A little late for someone to call. Everything all right?”
I tense, searching his eyes, wondering if he could hear me from the kitchen. “That was Neil. He wanted to know why I never made it to Seattle today.”
“What did you tell him?”
I shrug. “That I missed my plane.”
Alan stares. “Why is he in Seattle?”
“Work. He doesn’t live with me anymore.”
I climb onto the bed
and sit facing him.
His eyes soften with amusement. “What is he? A broke musician?”
There’s enough edge in the way he says it that it should piss me off, but it doesn’t.
“A brilliant, broke musician.”
Alan laughs. “I wouldn’t have expected anything less if he’s got you interested, Chrissie.” His finger lightly traces my cheek. He leans into me. “Give us a kiss, love. You were gone too long.”
I melt into him, into the play of his fingers, the feel of his lips, but he holds the space between us. His mouth leaves mine in a slow disconnect, and then he pulls back the rest of his body.
“So what’s he like?” Alan asks.
My heart stops in my chest. I can’t believe Alan just asked me that.
“Neil?” I repeat stupidly.
Alan lights another cigarette. He laughs, amused. “Yes, Neil. What’s he like?”
I shrug. “The exact opposite of you. Very low key. Outdoorsy. Likes to surf.”
He watches me, unruffled. “Did you meet him in Berkeley?”
“No. Santa Barbara.”
“Before or after me?”
I have to give it thought. “The same night I met you. We bumped into each other on campus and have been sort of hanging out together ever since.”
I put my water on the nightstand. God that sounded lame.
Alan laughs. “Why is it the girls who are everything wrong for you are the ones you cannot forget? He probably couldn’t forget you either, and bumped into you on purpose. You’re probably all wrong for him, too.”
My body grows cold and I fight to keep from my face that that jab hurt me.
“Why do you think I’m everything wrong for you?”
He takes me in his arms and moves me until I’m curled in bed beside him, my head and arm on his chest. “Because you won’t run away with me,” he whispers, and I know the voice, the silky ribbons of theatrics. “Tell me you will and we can leave Berkeley together.”
I feel his words in my center, but my calm inside suddenly vanishes and I’m messy again. This night has been so much more for me than I thought it would be, and it hurts how much I wish I could leave here with Alan.
“You look really good, Alan. Better than you did…”