He was a little embarrassed that he’d pulled out a word like sorceress. But her face was turned up toward his, luminous and unguarded, close enough for him to count her freckles. She was listening, softly enthralled, her eyes brilliant, intent, in that way he remembered from when they were so hungry to touch each other.
And just like that it felt like someone was playing racquetball with his heart.
His hand closed around her arm. He tugged her up against him.
Her mouth was there to meet his, all softness and yielding hunger. Everything he knew her to be—the sweetness, the ferocity, the fearless pleasure seeker—was in her kiss, and any plans he had for finessing it were swept under by a greedy panic of want. They kissed as though they’d been starved of each other.
Her fingers curled into his belt loops to pull his hips hard against hers; he slid his hands down to cup the curve of her butt and urge her hard up against his cock. A bolt of pleasure cleaved him; her breath snagged and her head fell back; he claimed her lips with his again, and their tongues met, tangled, teased, in a familiar carnal little dance. The only sound was the saw of breath as their lips met, parted, went back for more, for harder, for deeper.
And now their hips were doing what their lips were doing, finding a rhythm that helped them mine every second of contact for every minute degree of bliss, just like teenagers. His cock was rock hard and he thought his head might fly from his body to join the moon overhead from the rush of pleasure. He was beginning to plan how to get her out of that ridiculous bathing suit when . . . not abruptly . . . gently, but decidedly . . .
She took her lips from his.
She ducked her head.
And went still.
A second after that she placed her hand gently on his chest.
He knew that signal. The one for “Stop.”
He looked down.
Her hand was rising and falling with the rapid sway of his breathing, like something tossed into a tide.
He lifted his head.
The world was spiraling.
“Mac . . .” The word was scarcely more than a breath.
He decided he had the sexiest name in the world, if it could be said like that.
“Mmm?”
He had a powerful feeling he wasn’t going to like what she said next.
“I can’t do this.”
At least his intuition was dead on.
“If by ‘this’ you mean kiss like you invented kissing, I disagree.” His voice was a husk.
But that was just him trying to be glib.
To rearrange his armor and pull it back into place. He was just trying to forestall the inevitable.
He was pretty sure he knew what she meant.
She eased out of his arms. He had no choice, really, but to let her. It still felt like a sundering. He literally had vertigo.
“Mac . . . it’s . . .” She swept a hand back through her hair. “It’s just . . .”
And said nothing more.
She stared at him. Her chest still rising and falling with swift breathing.
“Avalon?”
“Sorry . . . thank you. Good night,” she said finally.
She pivoted and headed for the house.
He stared blankly.
Thank you, good night? Like she was Lynyrd Skynyrd, and he was a San Francisco crowd?
Chick Pea jumped down from the lounge chair and clicked along after her, and he watched both butts sway off.
It was a pretty adorable view, even if they were walking away from him.
Click.
She turned the lock.
He realized that he did not, however, like watching her disappear, whether it was behind a door or not.
He gave a soft, stunned laugh.
Kissing her for the first time, in the path lined with wild blackberries on the way up to Devil’s Leap, to this day remained one of the braver things he’d ever done.
And he’d been here at Devil’s Leap for about three years, but now he understood something: touching her again was the real homecoming.
But it was both perilous and as exhilarating as walking a wire strung high over the Hellcat River at snowmelt, when the water is moving most violently over jagged rocks.
The kiss was leaving his body only slowly.
And so that’s how he made his way back to his cottage. Slowly, so he could feel every moment of that unique intoxication; and by feel, through the dark, the familiar pale flagstones of the lawn and the moon overhead lighting his way.
MAC COLTRANE KISSED ME!
If she’d been fifteen again, that’s what she would have written in her diary that night. She would have surrounded it with little hearts and exclamation points. And maybe some lyrics from that particular Roxy Music song.
And then she would have written “Avalon Coltrane” about a dozen times under that. Just testing it out.
How dangerous it now seemed to be that innocent. To not know that kissing boys had ramifications that could fan out through a lifetime and trip you up when you least expected it and cause all kinds of problems, like those invisible laser security systems in sci-fi movies.
She headed upstairs to the bathroom, Chick Pea clicking daintily behind her. She peeled off her mother’s absurd old swimsuit with some effort and got in the shower, turned on the warm water, closed her eyes and aimed her face up at it the way you would if something ached. She did ache. Everything ached. Sweetly and savagely. She felt precisely as if she were being pulled apart, slowly, along some sort of serrated internal edge.
She started to tremble.
It was a surfeit of emotion, but damned if she knew whether it was stress or joy or what on earth to call it. The kiss had been so amazing she wanted to cry from it. Not because of its beauty or anything so precious or any of the romantic words that would have made Mac scoff; just because it was now very clear that nothing, nothing had ever felt that right since the last time he’d kissed her. So enormous, so peaceful, so consumingly hot. And laughing or crying, those were the things available to humans when emotions needed celebrating or releasing. Maybe the next iteration of human should include the ability to shoot rainbows from their eyes.
It was entirely possible she’d spent too much time looking at animated games.
So: it felt right.
But that didn’t mean it was right.
She’d learned that from him, after all.
But shouldn’t things that felt so good and promised to be amazing be good for you and meant for you, and not cause pain instead? What in God’s name was the point?
Life. Now with More Irony.
She reached up to turn the water off and the old but handsome hot water handle broke off in her hand. She swore blackly.
And she got into the giant flannel nightgown and roped her hair up into a ponytail and sat down on her bed in the turret and curled her feet up underneath her, and Chick Pea went up her doggie stairs to sit on the bed next to her.
She stared through those old curved windows, ever so slightly warped, at the sky full of icily glinting stars, and thought she understood why the original millionaire had built the house there and why they’d included a turret. Because it was like sitting in a pile of diamonds.
It occurred to her that Mac had been a lot of things to her over the years. Rich Boy and First Crush and First Orgasm and Traitorous Heartbreaker and Flag Bearer for All That Was Perfidious About Men. Above all, a symbol.
Implicit in the word symbol was a sort of distance.
And distance was safety.
And as an icon he was manageable.
As a person . . . he was potentially devastating. In every sense of that word.
But until tonight, she realized it was entirely possible she hadn’t fully experienced him as . . . a person. With dimensions and complexities and motives and vulnerabilities that in all likelihood didn’t have much to do with her, though she would bet a few of them did. Shaped by forces she could have actually analyzed and sussed out if she’d tried,
because she was good at that sort of thing. She’d been so focused on her own heartbreak. She’d been the tragic heroine of her own story. One she’d allowed to be dictated by the hero.
The hero’s story kept going after that book was over.
She had a hunch Mac, on the other hand, had always really, fully seen her. Maybe better than anyone else had back then. She knew it based on how she felt with him: as though the entire world was dialed cleanly into focus.
She’d thought of herself as enmeshed with Corbin, but it wasn’t entirely true. The details of their lives were. But it ought to have hurt more to pull free of him. Really hurt, clean to the bone. And here she was, kissing another guy, as if this was where she actually belonged.
She could only imagine the kind of pain that would lead Mac to just sever ties with his whole family. If something was killing you with pain, wouldn’t you want it gone? But cutting off a member of her family seemed to her like hacking off a limb because she’d sprained it.
Whether Mac realized it or not, he had his dad’s ruthlessness, too. He saw things in black-and-white.
Avalon had a hunch that inherent in that ruthlessness was fear.
So while Mac kissed like an angel, it wouldn’t pay to forget that he was just as hard as he was gentle. Being seduced by one could mean being destroyed by the other. He was not a guy who did things by halves.
She sighed.
When she’d laid her hand against his chest to end that kiss . . . she’d felt his heart thudding against her palm. Racing exactly as it had the very first time he kissed her on the path between wild blackberries.
She turned her palm upright and rested it on her lap like something she’d rescued.
She closed her eyes. Suddenly unutterably weary.
Her bed wanted to suck her in the way the hot springs had.
And in one of those romantic gestures that likely would have made Mac scoff, she raised her palm and pressed her lips gently to it. As if she could comfort him that way.
As if she could comfort herself that way.
She certainly wasn’t going to come up with any solutions tonight. All she would do was create more existential shreds. Kind of like she’d done to the wallpaper in the master bedroom.
She gave a start when her phone buzzed in a message.
She looked down at it. Her heart gave a sickening, reflexive lurch.
It was Corbin.
Avalon, I don’t blame you for not wanting to talk to me. But I wish you’d let me know where we stand.
Aw. Corbin didn’t “blame” her. Wasn’t that magnanimous of him.
Still, she could almost hear the misery in his voice. Her throat knotted.
She never could bear his misery, either. Mostly because that’s what she did: she wanted to comfort and she wanted to save.
She needed to comfort and save herself.
She did have an answer to one of his questions. She didn’t know if he’d find it a relief or not.
There IS no “we” anymore.
She sent it, and then shut the phone off.
She wasn’t going to be able to avoid an actual conversation with him, or her life in San Francisco, forever. But unlike Corbin, she didn’t just foist the difficult things, the things that hurt, the things she didn’t want to do, off onto someone else. She would talk to him. And she would take it like a big girl.
She patted the bed next to her and Chick Pea settled into a circle in the crook of her arm.
She closed her eyes and breathed in and breathed out.
And before sleep took her under, she tucked her palm against her cheek.
And she imagined Mac’s heart beating against it.
Chapter 16
That night she dreamed the master bedroom was papered again in that black-and-gold wallpaper. Every bit of the part she had scraped off had grown back. Horrified, she desperately lunged at one wall with a scraper; it regrew the minute she’d cleared a teeny patch.
She ran downstairs in a panic only to discover all of the walls were covered in it. Outside, Mac’s face was pressed to the window; his mouth was moving but she couldn’t hear his words, though she thought she detected the word “honey.”
She turned around to see Corbin sitting on the giant brown sofa, completely nude and wanking off. “Nobody else has wallpaper like that,” he said happily and smugly. “Nobody!”
She was so horrified she woke up gasping.
Chick Pea gave a little woof.
Sweet Jesus!
She felt a little cheated. She’d had a hot kiss yesterday! You’d think she could have at least used it for dream kindling!
Maybe that’s what her subconscious was doing.
She’d have to mull that one.
She snuggled with Chick Pea while she waited for full consciousness to settle in and provide a sort of emotional weather report.
The primary sensation was amazed, bursting joy, shot through with trepidation, all tied up in a bittersweet ribbon. Self-preservation suggested she shouldn’t kiss Mac Coltrane again.
And in the light of day, it somehow seemed entirely possible to resist him.
It would require not seeing him, of course. She knew that much. She admitted this to herself ironically.
She draped an arm across her fuzzy dog who nuzzled her cheek. So much better than waking up next to Corbin, she realized.
She fumbled for her phone: it was only eight. There were no urgent texts or emails from GradYouAte. There was a request for an interview from a trade blog, but it had a wide-open deadline; she could put that off.
In truth, she felt both determined and a little more fragile today than she did yesterday. As if in exposing a little of the darkness and hurt Mac carried around with him he had somehow exposed her, too. They were a little more real to each other now. But also a little more like two live, increasingly bare wires. And everyone knows what happens when live bare wires touch each other.
Today she intended to finish at least one damn wall of that wallpaper.
It was all she did. Methodically, meditatively. Without swearing very much. Her goal was to wear herself out, but she was still a little buzzy from nerves, contemplation, and lingering lust, so exhaustion didn’t quite set in the way she’d hoped.
At about three o’clock she finally stopped, took a shower, threw on a green striped T-shirt dress that Eden had donated, eschewing a bra because why subject herself to a lace-and-wire prison, and checked on the frozen lasagna she’d put in the oven a while ago.
She pivoted and glanced at the stove clock. Maybe she should try to make a sal—
BING BONG zzzt clank!
She about jumped out of her skin and even Chick Pea gave a little woof.
That effing doorbell. Funny how back in San Francisco she would barely blink at the sound of two drunks screaming at each other about existentialism in the street, which had in fact happened about a month ago beneath her apartment window. But the quiet here in the country was so complete all of her senses were as new as a wall scraped free of wallpaper. A phenomenon she truly hoped to experience one day.
She craned her head.
She saw the shadow at the door. And knew instantly who it was.
Boom. Boom. Boom. That was her heart.
She smoothed her hands down the front of the dress.
She opened the door.
Mac was wearing jeans and an untucked green plaid flannel shirt, which did remarkable otherworldly things to his hazel eyes. His skin gleamed from what looked like a fresh shave.
“Wow. Smells great in there,” he said. She liked his nontraditional greetings.
“It’s lasagna.”
“From scratch?”
“From Costco. Though someone really ought to name a retail chain ‘Scratch.’”
He smiled at that. And then the smile dropped away. “I . . . I brought hummus.” He gestured with a little Tupperware container.
“Ah, ‘I brought hummus.’ That’s Hipster for ‘I come in peace.’”
&
nbsp; For some reason the words I come throbbed in the air like some sort of Sesame Street graphic and they were momentarily flustered.
A sort of fuzzy heat rushed over the backs of her arms and neck.
“Did you grow the garbanzo beans yourself in gourmet poop?” she recovered.
“Next year, I think I’ll give that a shot,” he said equably. “I’ll probably give making olive oil a shot, too. There are about a half dozen olive trees on my property and room for more. I have room for a little vineyard, too. So I think I might give wine a shot.”
He stopped talking and frowned a little, perhaps realizing that he was saying “shot” rather a lot.
“Anyway, my hummus secret is I add a few white beans in with the garbanzos. Gives it a mellower flavor. Goes a little better with crackers that have a little bite to them, like chili or garlic or za’atar. I have a few of those right . . .” He produced a little package from behind his back. “. . . here.”
She contemplated these offerings. “You actually have ‘culinary secrets’?”
“Most of them are children of necessity. As in once all I had was white beans when I was really jonesing for hummus.”
“And here I thought you weren’t into children of any kind.”
“Ha. Listen to how we banter.”
And just like that it went dead quiet and awkward.
He cleared his throat. “Avalon . . . I wanted to apologize for last night.”
“Which part of last night?”
He sighed. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
She smiled crookedly. “That’s a rhetorical question, right?”
“I got caught up in the moment. I mean, that green polyester bathing suit with the little frill on it . . . you siren.”
She gave a short laugh. “Come on, Mac. It’s not like I fainted or swatted you away. You made a pass, I kissed you back. We’ve done that before. Together and separately. Not my first time.”
“Boy, could I tell.”
This statement made her realize that few people were ever this genuinely direct. It belonged in the category of things that required getting used to, like ouzo or sauerkraut, but were ultimately addictive.
Dirty Dancing at Devil's Leap Page 17