Gabrielle (4 page)

—and had thought to give me more of it.

A while later, I realized he wasn't listening to records anymore. He was simply standing across the store staring at me. I pulled off my headphones and as we made our way to the door, I said, “That was great.”

“I should get you back.”

“No. I don't want to go back. Not yet.”

I wanted to get to know him better, thought maybe we could go get a coffee somewhere.

The last thing I expected was for him to pull me into the nearest alley, far out of the light, beyond where any passersby could see us.

Running his thumb across a cheekbone, stopping just at the corner of my mouth, he said,

“God, you're sweet, Gabi. The way you look. The way you play.” He leaned in over my forehead. “Even the way you smell.”

I was breathing him in, too, a clean all-male scent that I'd never known could be so potent. And I loved that the first time he'd ever said my name, he'd said Gabi, not Gabrielle. I loved that he obviously felt comfortable enough with me to use my nickname.

He whispered against my forehead, “You're so damn innocent. Too innocent.”

For the second time with him, my brain turned to mush as my body caught fire. Only this time, it wasn't his music that called to me.

It was all him.

“I'm not that innocent,” I said softly, turning my face into his palm to let the words brush against his calloused skin.

Or rather, I was that innocent, but wasn't sure I wanted to be anymore.

I heard his breath rush from his lungs and was momentarily shocked to feel how much he wanted to be with me against my belly. Perhaps, I later thought, he'd been trying to shock me—not just with his words but with his body as well.

Going up on my toes, I wrapped my arms around his neck and leaned closer, close enough that kissing me was his only option.

His kiss was softer, sweeter than I had thought it would be—than I had imagined it in my dreams—until the moment his tongue slipped inside my teeth.

My breath caught in my throat and my body went stiff with surprise for a split second.

But then, when I felt his tongue retreat, I couldn't let it go. Not without reaching out with my own and licking across his.

It was the strangest sensation, but good too. He tasted different than me. Sharper. Saltier.

I thought I'd known what passion was, that I'd felt it when music moved me. I thought it came from perfect blue-sky days. From jumping into a cool lake on a hot summer afternoon.

From reading a book that choked me up and made me cry.

But now I began to know a different kind of passion. One that took me over, inside and out, up and down, round and round. I felt as if my eyes were opening for the very first time.

And I never wanted to shut them again.

I could feel the tension in his body beneath my fingertips. The tendons along his neck and shoulders were taut as he let me explore his mouth. I had been kissed before, but I had never been the kisser.

Slowly, I ran the tip of my tongue out onto his lips. From the center, to the corner where his upper and lower lips met, I learned the contours of his mouth. And all the while, he let me explore without taking the upper hand he could have had so easily.

His fingers threaded into my hair as his tongue found mine again. Somewhere during our kiss, he had backed me into the wall. He pressed me into it so that I was sandwiched between the warmth of his body and the cool brick behind me.

Looking at the facts—that we hardly knew anything about each other, that he was so much bigger than me and could have easily hurt me if he wanted to, especially in a dark alley in a somewhat seedy neighborhood—I should have been frightened. But somehow, right from the beginning, the facts had been irrelevant. My brain, my heart, my body, all recognized him as something special.

And yet even though I wanted to get closer, to go deeper into this beautiful darkness that I had never really known existed, I couldn't just sink into it completely.

I mean, I didn't do stuff like this. And wouldn't making out with Dylan—in an alley, no less—make me just like everyone else, like all the other girls who had thrown themselves at him?

But the main thing swirling around inside of me—what I later realized I didn't want to admit to myself—was how afraid I was of what I was feeling.

I wasn't used to being out of control.

A part of me, the nerve endings that were still tingling, dancing, liked it. Obviously. But the other part of me—the sheltered girl I'd been for seventeen years—wasn't at all sure that she did.

He stepped away from me, jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I don't mess with virgins.”

My virginity had never been an issue. There had never been any kind of opportunity for me to lose it, nobody that I would've considered sleeping with. At the same time, his statement made it extremely obvious that he had plenty of experience.

Sounding much more confident about what we were doing than I felt, I said, “You seem really hung up on the whole virgin thing. How many girls have you slept with?”

“I don't know.”

I tried to hide my shock. He was my age. How many people could he have slept with?

Not enough to forget, surely. I decided he must just be trying to scare me away.

“You must know.”

“See, that's the thing. The fact that I don't know how many girls I've slept with means that you should run as fast as you can in the other direction.”

Wow. He wasn't kidding. And he was right; I had no business making out in an alley with some guy who had slept with more girls than he could count. Or remember.

But at the same time, there was a secret thrill to it.

Maybe I should have been asking myself, how much of his attraction had to do with the forbidden? How much did it have to do with Dylan being the poster child for the sexy bad boy?

But I didn't want to sit there analyzing what I was feeling.

I just wanted to feel. “What if instead of running, I told you that I wanted to kiss you again?”

He groaned. But he didn't move any closer, and that was when I realized he had just passed another test. A real player—the kind of guy he claimed to be—would've jumped me right then. Instead, he was a pillar of self-control.

“You don't know who I am. What I've done. What I've seen,” he said. “You don't want to know.”

True, I knew absolutely nothing about him, aside from the gossip that had been running around the halls all week. Of course, in that moment I wanted nothing more than to hear his entire life story from the moment he had been born.

“Where are you from?”

“California.”

“Did your parents change jobs? Is that why you moved here?”

I thought it was a yes or no question. Instead, he said, “It's complicated.”

How could I not want to know, “Why?”

He half-grimaced. “Another reason to steer clear of good girls. You ask questions.”

“And we want answers, too,” I said in as light a voice as I could manage with his kiss still running through my veins, with his taste still on my lips.

When he still didn't reply, I said, “If you're trying to be mysterious, you're doing a really good job of it.”

Finally, he smiled at me, another smile so beautiful it took my breath away. “Girls fall for the mysterious thing every time,” he joked.

I worked to relax into his smile, tried to forget that he hadn't actually told me anything about himself. But it seemed he was right: Good girls weren't happy just going with the flow.

Even when the flow kissed really, really well.

“So, it wasn't a job?”

“I'm here with my mom.”

He didn't give me anything else and it was pretty clear that he wasn't going to. At least, not yet.

“Okay then,” I said, letting him think I was dropping it, “how did you learn to play and sing like that?”

“I've always had a good ear.”

“What you've got is a heck of a lot more than a good ear.”

He smiled again. “You don't exactly suck, you know.”

“I'm more of a songwriter than a performer. What you walked in on last week was a total aberration.”

His smile fell away, to be replaced by that intense stare that kept making my legs shake.

Just a little, but still, it was a new sensation for me.

“You blew my mind, Gabi.”

As far as I could see, there was still no point in playing games. Either something was going to come of this attraction, or it wasn't. The question was, what did I want?

Who was I kidding? I knew exactly what I wanted. Whether or not it—whether or not
he

—
was good for me.

“You blew mine, too. The way you played. The way you sang.”

I knew I shouldn't say any more, that good girls didn't talk like this, but I had to. “And the way you kiss.”

The same crazy vortex that made me say how much I liked his kiss had me taking a step closer, had me saying, “Kiss me again.”

Finally, I got to see that look he'd given me in the practice room a week ago. Like I was taking his breath away word by word.

And he wasn't sure how to get it back.

“Now I know why I keep away from girls like you.”

I took another step closer. “Why?”

“Because you're irresistible.”

I thought he was going to kiss me again, but then he was moving away from me, saying,

“The first time I saw you, sitting there at the piano, I knew who you were. You were as far out of my league as a girl could get. I could smell money on you. Safety. Perfection. I want you, but I don't want to be the guy who takes all of that away from you.”

I guess I should have appreciated his chivalry. But how could I when I was reeling from his rejection? Plus, it upset me that he would judge me so quickly. So unfairly.

I wanted desperately to prove him wrong.

“You don't know anything about me,” I said.

Taking my words as the challenge that they were, he raised an eyebrow, his mouth curving up slightly as if he were laughing at me.

Foolish, foolish me, hating his doubt, hating that he thought he was somehow bigger, harder, more complex than me, I said, “My grandmother was a courtesan.”

I let the words fall onto the cement between us, watched them slip and slide into his brain, and honestly reveled in the knowledge that I had shocked him.

“Your grandmother was a prostitute?”

Hearing my words twist around in his mouth to come back to slap me across the cheeks, I realized I'd gone too far. I'd thought only of proving to him that I, too, had darkness hidden in my past. I'd simply wanted to show him that we weren't that different at all.

But in a heartbeat he'd gone from surprised to disgusted.

“No,” I protested, frantically working to erase that horrible word, thinking of everything my grandmother had said to me the night we'd chopped vegetables in the kitchen. “Being a courtesan is about more than sex. It's about art. And culture. And travel.”

And love,
according to my grandmother. But I didn't say that to him, not when it seemed like such a big jump from prostitute to love.

Not when I didn't believe it myself.

“What the hell do you know about what a courtesan does?”

“My grandmother has always been honest with me about her life. About her past.” In saying so I dared him to be as honest with me. My chin lifted high, I kept my eyes steady on his.

“Her mother was one, too.”

Our family business,
I almost joked.

“What about yours?”

I didn't get his question. “What about my what?”

“Your mother.” His voice dropped dangerously low. “Was she a prost—a courtesan, too?”

I took a step away from him. “Of course not.” The pain that always speared me when I thought about my mother nailed me. Way down deep inside. Hidden away from everyone.

“She's dead,” I whispered.

He tried to reach out to me then. I heard him say, “I'm sorry, Gabi,” but all the magic had gone out of our afternoon. Instead of a darkly romantic alley, all I saw was the garbage on the cracked cement—and all I could hear in my head was his horrible question.

Was she a courtesan too?

Of course my mother hadn't been one. She and my father had been in love. He'd died in a car crash before they could marry.

It wasn't fair to hate Dylan in that moment for simply asking what I should have realized was an obvious question. But I did—because with only a handful of words he'd made me doubt something I'd always taken for granted.

“I've got to go.”

“I'll make sure you get back home okay,” he said, following close behind me.

We didn't speak as we got back on the train, headed back to school. I could see he wanted to say something to me, that he felt horrible about what he'd said, but when we got to the stop at our school I made sure to squeeze in between two large women who were getting off before he could say another word. The doors opened and I disappeared.

As soon as I got home, I went looking for my grandmother. She was sitting in her favorite floral print chair by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which were full of books in several different languages.

“
Ma petite
, how was school today?”

I put my backpack down on the floor and sat on the couch facing her in the living room.

“It was okay,” I said, and then, “
Grandmaman
, I've got a question about my mother.”

She shifted in her seat and put down the book she was reading on the oval side table. “Of course. I will tell you anything you want to know.”

All my life my grandmother had told me stories about my mother. I'd been especially hungry for them as a little girl, in the years immediately after my mother passed away. Whenever my grandmother would find me lying on the bed crying, wishing for my mom—wondering
why..