The rich blues and reds were faded, but it was no less beautiful for its wear. It made her happy every time she looked at it. After that she’d forced herself to abandon all her old decorating principles, using instead the same metric she was learning to use in the other parts of her life to decide whether she wanted to bring something home.
Do I like it?
Does it make me happy?
Do I really want it or do I just think I should want it?
The result was an eclectic mixture of modern furniture and vintage accessories, pillows with exotic patterns that made her think of India and Morocco, and houseplants that somehow managed to thrive in spite of her longstanding brown thumb.
The apartment was hers in a way the house in Larchmont had never been. There she’d been engaged in a kind of performance, filling her house with furnishings designed to look like they didn’t match even though they shared common colors and lines, carefully crafting vignettes that would look genuine rather than be genuine.
She hadn’t been aware that she’d been holding her breath until she finally exhaled in the months after she broke things off with Jack and Liam. That had been her greatest crime: pretending she was okay, that she was emotionally balanced enough to enter into not one, but two sexual relationships.
Her eyes grew heavy as she took in the room she’d come to love, the late afternoon light slanting gold across the apartment’s worn wood floors. Her gaze landed on the photograph leaning against the wall on the console table near the window.
In a lot of ways, it had been the catalyst to everything — her job at the gallery, her relationship with Liam, the realization that she was in too deep.
She’d noticed it by chance right after moving to Brooklyn and had gone inside the Stockholm Gallery to take a look. That’s where she’d met Moni, where she’d been offered a part time job. It was where she’d seen Liam for the third time, where he’d first invited her to dinner after asking which photograph had brought her into the gallery.
She had no idea he’d bought it for her during Janet Wexler’s first show until after she’d ended their relationship. The picture had arrived at her apartment weeks later. There had been no note, but she’d known it was from Liam. Had felt his presence on the photograph.
She wondered what he was doing right then, if he was under a dark sky in the desert or on an island beach or at the edge of a cliff in the mountains.
If he ever thought of her.
She’d wondered the same about Jack, refusing to read the society page articles speculating about his love life, drawn only to the photographs of him, back straight, head held at a regal angle, his dark eyes as unreadable as ever.
From a distance, her time with the two men had seemed like a dream, which was better than the nightmare it had felt like in the immediate aftermath. She saw again the fear in Jack’s face outside the sex club in Paris where he’d brought her to watch two women go down on him, saw the hurt on Liam’s face when he’d learned about Jack.
She closed her eyes, letting herself settle into the rhythm of her breathing, the comfort of being home. Later, she would order takeout, watch a movie. Eventually Virginia would crawl into her lap and pretend she didn’t want to be there while Nina petted her. Tomorrow she would go to yoga with Karen and the girls and laugh over brunch.
She would not dwell on the past. She would live in the present instead.
She sent a silent prayer out into the universe: that Liam’s heart had healed, that Jack would eventually find someone who could crack his open. They deserved whatever brand of love they needed.
So did Nina. She finally believed that.
Now she just had to figure out what that was.
3
The next day she lay in Savasana, palms up, and focused on the in and out of her breath. She’d never imagined herself as someone who would become a yoga fanatic — she’d taken a few classes in Larchmont and had been ambivalent — but since finding Prana Yoga, she’d become addicted. After months of compulsive worry, her thoughts circling each other like hungry wolves, her first yoga class at Prana had made her feel like a strong wind had blown through her mind, clearing out all the clutter and noise.
She’d left the studio feeling ten pounds lighter and a whole lot more sane. She still went to the gym four mornings a week, but that felt necessary, like grocery shopping or cleaning her apartment; she didn’t necessarily love the process, but the results were worth it.
Yoga was all for her, and sometimes she even dropped in on a gym day, just to tap into the peace of mind it gave her.
Amy and Robin had been onboard with joining her from the beginning. Karen had taken more convincing, mostly because of the detested trip to Brooklyn on Saturday mornings. But after a couple classes, she’d agreed that it was worth it for Lucy, the owner and one of the instructors at Prana.
Moni had a love-hate relationship with it, mostly because of the diversity issue, but her enjoyment of the practice coupled with their customary post-yoga brunch eventually won her over. She was right: the class was filled with skinny-ass white girls, their own group of friends included.
“Let’s take five easy breaths to close.” Lucy’s voice was low and soothing. “Breathe in light… and breathe out noise… breathe in light… breathe out anything that might be weighing you down…”
Nina saw it: all the negativity leaving her body, her embarrassing fear, her guilt and shame, light entering, clean and bright, along with her breath.
She sighed with regret when Lucy told them to sit. They closed the class by repeating “Om” three times and bowing to each other while saying “Namaste.”
Nina was aware that she would once have made fun of these women. Outwardly it looked like a bunch of bullshit, like a bunch of privileged women pretending they could find enlightenment in a bourgeois yoga studio in Brooklyn, but after months of practice, Nina couldn’t help feeling there was something to it.
“Is it time to eat yet?” Moni asked as they rolled up their mats.
“It is most definitely time to eat,” Karen said, freeing her long red hair from its hair tie. “And time to drink too.”
Nina laughed. “It’s noon.”
“On a Saturday,” Amy pointed out. “Which means mimosas and Bloody Marys are fair game.”
“Point taken,” Nina said.
“Has anyone heard from Robin?" Karen asked.
Robin had had to bow out of yoga because of work. A coordinator for an NGO that worked to supply clean water to villages in remote places, she was conducting volunteer training for the organization’s next trip to India.
Nina checked her phone. Robin had texted while they were in the middle of class.
“She left ten minutes ago. She’ll meet us at the diner.”
“Volunteer training my ass.” Moni removed the brightly covered scarf from her head and her black curls bounced to life in all their glory. “She’s just smarter than the rest of us.”
They laughed, said goodbye to Lucy as they slipped on their coats, and headed for the door.
Winter had reasserted itself with a biting wind and frigid temperatures. They tucked their chins into their scarves and hurried the three blocks to Tom’s Diner, their post-yoga brunch spot.
“Jesus christ,” Karen said when they finally stepped inside the packed restaurant. “This cold is inhumane. I’d move to Florida if I thought there were any good men there under seventy.”
“You hate Florida,” Nina said, unwinding her scarf.
“Exactly.”
They hung their coats on a rack by the door and waited for Marcy, Tom’s acerbic Saturday morning hostess, to lead them to a table. The place was a cross between a diner and a bistro, the black and white linoleum crowded with booths and tables, the walls strung with white lights and cluttered with memorabilia without any unifying theme.
After they got settled around the table, they ordered a round of coffee and water, except for Amy who was attempting a caffeine detox.
�
�I give you credit,” Nina said when Amy ordered herbal tea from Sarah, their usual waitress. “I might actually die without coffee.”
“If we were talking about anyone else, I might call you melodramatic,” Moni said to her, “but I’ve seen how much coffee you drink at the gallery.”
“You’ll have to pry my coffee from my cold dead hands.” Karen aimed her green eyes at Amy. “But I respect your choice.”
Amy laughed. “I think I was getting four hours of sleep a night. Moira basically told me I would have to start sleeping in the guest room if I didn’t give it up.”
Moira was Amy’s wife and the head chef at one of the city’s hottest restaurants. They shared a gorgeous brownstone and a beautiful daughter named Ruth and somehow made it all seem easy.
They were still deciding what to order when Robin arrived, cheeks red with cold. “Sorry I’m late. There were a lot of questions.”
“Questions? About going to a village without running water in the middle of nowhere?” Karen asked. “I can’t imagine why.”
Robin laughed and took the empty chair. They made small talk while they decided what to eat, then gave Sarah their order.
“My god,” Karen said when Sarah left. “What I wouldn’t give for her skin.”
Sarah couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, with glossy blond hair, clear blue eyes, and dewy skin.
“Aren’t you the one who always tells me women just get better with age?” Nina took a drink of coffee.
“There’s a fine line between optimism and denial,” Karen said. “We bring some important things to the table, but dewy skin is not one of them.”
“Can’t fight nature,” Robin said.
Karen laughed. “The hell I can’t.”
“If anyone can win the fight, you can,” Robin said. While Karen invested huge amounts of time and money into her appearance, Robin took the opposite tack, keeping her silver hair short, her face mostly makeup-free.
Nina admired them both. She was still figuring out where she fell on the maintenance spectrum. So far bikini waxes were a yes but cleanses were a no. She enjoyed wearing heels when the occasion called for it but still embraced flats — albeit more stylish ones than those she’d worn as a suburbanite — when she did a lot of walking. She’d all but abandoned her yoga pants except when she went to the gym or yoga class. Jeans had become her go-to, and she’d been pleasantly surprised to realize they could be made suitable for nearly every occasion with the right top, shoes, and accessories.
Lingerie had been her biggest discovery. She’d always had underwear and bras of course. She’d even sprung for the occasional sexy nighty when she’d been married to Peter.
But back then the top drawer of her dresser had contained mostly functional items — nude and black bras with a small amount of obligatory lace that couldn’t quite hide their utilitarian nature, underwear that didn’t ride up her ass cheeks and didn’t leave any lines under the trouser pants that had been the biggest part of her uniform.
That was before her first big lingerie spree with Karen. Since then, Nina had become somewhat of an aficionado. She was almost embarrassed by the amount of money she’d invested in silky bits trimmed with French lace, every kind of underwear, from cheeky boy shorts to thongs that were little more than two pieces of string, bras that pushed and squeezed her boobs into the best kind of cleavage for any given neckline. She’d even branched out into garters and stockings, enjoying the subversive nature of knowing she was wearing them even when there was no man around to enjoy it along with her.
“What about you, Nina? When are you going to jump back into the dating waters?”
She blinked as Amy’s voice wound its way through Nina’s lingerie inventory.
“The waters of what?”
“That pretty much says it all,” Karen said drily.
Amy smiled. “We were talking about dating.”
“Ah,” Nina said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
“Well, think about it already,” Karen said. “You’re not getting any younger.”
Nina tipped her head and smiled. “Gee, thanks Mom.”
It wasn’t an entirely misplaced comparison. Nina’s mother had alluded to the same thing, making not-so-subtle comments about Nina’s advanced age, the remarriage statistics for women of a certain age, and the difficulty of aging alone, although her mother had no experience in the last department given her fifty-year marriage to Nina’s father.
Karen raised her coffee cup. “I’m just saying.”
Nina laughed. “I’m happy!”
“You don’t get lonely?” Amy asked.
Moni shook her head. “Why does everyone assume single women are lonely?”
Nina looked at her. “Exactly.”
They stopped talking momentarily while Sarah brought their food. She set down a bottle of sriracha next to Robin’s Eggs Benedict.
“Can I get you ladies anything else?” she asked.
“Not unless you can tell us how you get such gorgeous skin,” Karen said.
Nina dropped her face in her hands. “Oh my god…”
Sarah smiled. “Um… soap? And I use lotion sometimes too.”
Karen nodded. “Of course you do.”
She left and Amy rolled her eyes. “That wasn’t creepy at all.”
“What? It’s a compliment,” Karen said, picking up her fork.
“You’re going to get us kicked out of here,” Robin said.
Moni reached for the syrup. “She probably thinks you want her virgin blood for some kind of weird anti-aging ritual.”
“You can’t look like that and be a virgin in this day and age,” Karen said.
Nina looked at her. “Really? That’s the part of Moni’s statement you have a problem with?”
Robin shook her head. “You’re sick.”
“Remember when women our age told us we were beautiful and all we did was wash our face?” Karen asked dreamily.
“Don’t forget the lotion,” Amy said, taking a bite of her omelette.
“How did we get from people thinking we’re lonely to discussing poor Sarah’s beauty routine?” Moni asked.
Karen looked at her. “I don’t know, but I get not being lonely. I’m never lonely. It’s the sex I don’t get. Or more clearly, the sex you’re not getting,” Karen said to Nina. “I mean, aren’t you horny as hell by now?”
A year ago, Nina would have been mortified by the question. She hadn’t realized how lacking in real friends she’d been in Larchmont until she’d come to the city and been welcomed into Karen’s group. It had taken months before she was used to the excruciating honesty of the group, the probing questions and descriptions of their sex lives.
“I mean, I miss sex sometimes,” Nina said. “But it’s not that big of a deal.”
It wasn’t entirely true. She missed it all the time. She dreamt about it. She’d even taken Karen’s suggestion and invested in a high-end vibrator that was, more often than not, her date on Friday nights.
If there was a dream team of sexual awakening, it would be Liam McAlister and Jack Morgan. Liam’s sensuality, the time he took exploring her body and bringing her to orgasm again and again, had been an epiphany. They’d talked all night, made love more times than she could count, laughed in bed like longtime lovers.
But Jack’s command had flipped a switch in her body she hadn’t known existed, revealing a raw hunger that had felt both new and strangely familiar, like rediscovering something she’d forgotten about herself even though she’d never had occasion to experiment with Japanese bondage before Jack introduced her to it.
She still got wet thinking about him. Still remembered the power he exhibited over her body, the demand in his voice and hands when he took her.
“You could just find a hookup, you know.”
Amy’s voice pulled her back to the present. “No thanks.”
“Everyone’s doing it now,” Karen said, cutting a piece off her french toast. “Ugh, I should not be ea
ting these carbs.”
“I’m not everyone,” Nina said. “And you did yoga.”
Karen pointed her fork at Nina. “Yoga doesn’t offset carbs. And I’m just saying, swipe right and get yourself some D.”
Robin sputtered and shook her head. “Gross.”
“What’s gross about it?” Karen asked. “We’re animals. We need sex. Besides, you’re not exactly in a position to judge.”
Robin scowled. “Hey!”
“I’m not judging you either,” Karen said. “I’m just saying, you have a lot of ‘friends’ in a lot of countries for someone who acts so prudish about sex.”
“I am not prudish,” Robin said. “My relationships are based on shared interests, mostly with people I work with, not one-night stands. I don’t want to get murdered by some creep from Tinder.”
Nina sensed the conversation straying into potentially volatile territory. They were all different: it was dangerously easy to stray from good-natured conversation to something that sounded too much like judgement.
“I get that hookups work for some people,” Nina said. “I’m just not interested.”
“How are you going to meet people if you don’t go online?” Amy asked. “The gallery doesn’t seem like a high-traffic venue.” She looked at Moni. “No offense.”
Nina felt a rush of fondness for Amy, who always told it like it was.
Moni shrugged. “None taken. It’s not a walk-in business.”
“That’s my point,” Amy said.
Nina finished her coffee. “I don’t know. I’m just going to see what the universe brings me.”
“Good for you,” Robin said.
“I just hope it brings you some D,” Karen said.
Nina shook her head and laughed.
4
She was still thinking about the conversation as she closed the gallery Monday night.
Aren’t you lonely?
The words had been repeating in her mind since Saturday, but she’d been honest about that at least: it wasn’t about being lonely — it was about the suspicion that her decision to sit out the dating scene was another incarnation of the fear that had been holding her back in Larchmont.
The Surrender of Nina Fontaine (Awakening Book 2) Page 2