Just Like Heaven (29 page)

She just hadn’t expected it to happen now, when their time was running out.

The funny thing was that her emotions were still vivid Technicolor reds and blues and greens, sparkling golds and shimmering silvers. Mark was the one who had changed.

He seemed distant, almost a stranger, and she sleep-walked through the motions of making coffee, serving dessert, like a robot in a bad science fiction movie.

By ten o’clock they had run out of things to say to each other. The dishes were neatly stacked in the dishwasher. The pots were scrubbed and put away. The candles on the table outside had been extinguished, and so it seemed had the last flicker of warmth between them.

When he stood up to say good night, she heard his words before he uttered them. His house was sold. He’d said all of his good-byes. Why spend the night in a motel when he could spend it on the road and be in Greenwood by daylight?

Just because he’d saved her life didn’t mean she was entitled to the rest of his.

“It’s late,” he said. “I should—”

“Stay.” She reached out and took his hand. “You should stay with me tonight.”

Now the choice was his.

Twenty-two

They never made it beyond the hallway. The words had barely escaped Kate’s mouth when they crashed together in a clumsy, ardent, wild explosion of heat and longing that stripped them both of everything but the need to touch and be touched.

Her hands slid under his sweater. His fingers unbuttoned her shirt. The shock of flesh against flesh was painful, sweet, breathtakingly erotic.

They undressed each other clumsily, hungrily, never taking their eyes off each other. Sweater, shirt, jeans, skirt, shoes, everything piled together on the floor. Forgotten like the world beyond the front door.

They kissed with eyes wide open, intimate, probing, with nothing held back. They brought everything they were to the moment, all of their hopes and dreams and disappointments.

They dropped to their knees, half on the rag rug, half on the polished oak floor, then fell the rest of the way, limbs entwined. He rolled over onto his back, pulling her on top of him.

For a second she froze, suddenly aware of where she was, the man she was with, the enormity of what was about to happen between them. There was nothing casual about it, nothing simple. Her life would never be the same. They would never be the same.

He was big, wonderfully hard. She loved the way he felt pressing against her belly. She loved his broad chest and muscular shoulders, the way his thick dark hair fell across his forehead. She loved the anticipation building between her legs, the way he stroked her with his fingers, long voluptuous strokes that made her wetter and hotter than she had ever been before. She almost came just from the excitement of knowing that any moment he would be inside her while she rode him until they were out of their heads with pleasure.

She leaned over him, breasts brushing against his chest, laughing softly at the tickle of hair against her skin. He found a nipple with his mouth, circling it with his tongue, sucking hard until she cried out from the jolt of electricity that shot through her body at his touch. He gripped her hips and positioned her over his rock-hard erection. He watched her as she lowered herself slowly slowly onto him, watched her as she cried out again from the sheer joy of it, never once took his eyes from her as she leaned back and began to move against him.

They were there together in every way that mattered. Her skin was exquisitely sensitive to the touch. Her mind was an erogenous zone. She was fully there, more completely herself than she had ever been before, and she knew without asking that it was the same for him.

He rolled her onto her back, covering her with the delicious weight of his body. He was gentle and strong, wild and powerful, everything she had ever wanted in a man.

She wrapped her legs around his waist and he gasped into her mouth, drawn even more deeply into her body. She felt his heat building, caught the flame and fanned it into a raging fire that burned away everything that had come before.

“Wow,” she said later, after they had napped in each other’s arms. “That wasn’t the way I remembered it.”

He pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. “This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

What she had had with Ed didn’t come close to this, and now she knew why.

They were wrapped in a soft blanket, curled up together on the lemon-yellow sofa.

“How did we get here?” She glanced around the darkened room. “The last thing I remember was lying on the floor in the hallway.”

“Astral projection?”

“Maybe we dreamed the whole thing.”

“Don’t move.” He slid under the blanket toward the end of the couch and threw her legs over his shoulders. She tensed and he murmured soft words against her belly until she sank deeper into the soft cushions. His breath against her heated skin was warm and moist. He drew a line with his tongue from her belly to her navel to the cleft at the top of her thighs and her last bit of resistance vanished at his touch. When he found her center, logic, reason, and sanity vanished along with it.

For the first time in her life, Kate was well and truly lost.

“Are you hungry?” Kate leaned up on one elbow and smiled at him. “I make a great fake-egg omelet.”

She wore nothing but the creamy pink sheet draped around her creamy pink shoulders and if God decided to end things now, Mark would have no regrets. He had already had a glimpse of heaven.

“Fake eggs?” he answered, brushing a lock of shiny auburn hair back from her face. “Should I be afraid?”

“I was at first,” she admitted with a roll of her big hazel eyes, “but they’re really not too terrible.”

“I’ll give ’em a try.”

“Don’t think you’re just going to lie here like a sultan awaiting his handmaiden,” she said, laughing. “I need a sous chef and you’re elected.”

“How long have we been up here?”

“A long time,” she said as she slipped into a short cotton robe and belted it around her waist. “A
very
long time and I’m
very
hungry.”

He sat up and looked across the expanse of bed to the clock on her nightstand. “It’s two in the morning.”

“Very good,” she said, pretending to clap her hands. “Do you know the alphabet too?”

He leaped from the bed before she had the chance to run, tossed her over his shoulder in a fireman’s hold, and then carried her downstairs to the kitchen.

He loved her laughter. There was nothing guarded about her laughter. It was slightly bawdy, slightly goofy, completely irresistible. He set her on her feet and she playfully made to swat him with a dish towel.

She put him to work chopping onions and green peppers while she wiped some tiny white mushrooms with a damp towel and sliced them paper-thin.

“I have fake cheese to go with the fake eggs,” she said, “or, if you like, we could add cubes of fake ham or fake turkey.”

“You make it sound so . . . edible.”

“What can I tell you?” She plucked a container of cholesterol-free spread from the fridge. “Once you have a heart attack, fake becomes the new natural.”

She was clearly at ease in the kitchen. She moved from task to task smoothly, keeping up a line of chatter as she did. He was still working on the peppers while she had moved on to setting the table and pouring orange juice into heavy crystal glasses.

The room was a feast for the eyes. A trio of china chickens watched from the top of the refrigerator. A three-foot-high anatomically correct Holstein stood guard at the French doors that opened out into the yard. A spinning wheel in the far corner was draped with bunches of fragrant herbs hung there to dry. Color was everywhere: flowers bloomed where he least expected them in bursts of yellow and orange and cherry red. The counter boasted a pale ivory wicker basket piled high with golden Spanish and eye-popping purple onions. A braid of garlic hung from a peg over the counter near the well-worn wooden block that held her knives.

This was a real working kitchen and he enjoyed watching as she glided effortlessly between tasks.

“Did you toast the muffins?” she asked as she slid the omelet onto a platter.

“Almost,” he said. “Where do you keep the jelly?”

“Top shelf.” She pointed toward the fridge. “Raspberry preserves, orange marmalade, grape jam.”

“Grape jam? No contest.”

The omelet was huge, bursting with green peppers, red onion, mushrooms, crushed red peppers, and herbs. She served it on one enormous platter and was about to divide it onto two separate plates when they looked at each other and started to laugh.

“Grab a fork,” she said. “I’ll start on the right side. You start on the left. We’ll meet in the middle.”

They toasted each other with orange juice. He slathered the crispy muffins with jam and fed her bites with his fingers. They polished off the omelet, toasted an extra muffin, and washed everything down with a big pot of herbal tea.

By the time they loaded the dishwasher, the sun was coming up and they stumbled upstairs and fell into bed.

“Do you have a favorite side?” she asked around a yawn.

“The side next to you,” he said.

And then they slept.

 
 
Sometimes the best thing you can do is lock out the world.

Kate’s home became their sanctuary, their hiding place from the reality that was waiting right outside the door. Being together was the only reality that mattered. They slept, made love, ate, laughed, and talked and never once looked at a clock, but time was slipping away from them just the same.

In some ways it was probably too easy. Too perfect. There was no period of adjustment. The sex was both sweet and incendiary, intensifying a connection that seemed to run straight to the center of their souls. Their habits meshed perfectly. She liked the window side of the bed, while he preferred being closer to the door. They were open and at ease with each other. She didn’t feel as if he had invaded her home. He never felt anything but welcome.

He had spent years blaming God for Suzanne’s death and the ruin his life had become, but there with Kate in his arms, he was finally able to see where the journey had been headed all along. He was finally at peace.

If only it didn’t have to end in less than seven hours.

They were curled up on her squashy yellow sofa eating ice cream and watching a
Sopranos
rerun, both trying to ignore the fact that by this time tomorrow their idyll would be over.
The Sopranos
turned into
Sex and the City
, which became
Entourage.
Neither one noticed. They were lost in a world of their own creation.

“I want you to do something for me, Kate,” he said as they slowly climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

She would do anything for him. Didn’t he know that by now?

He didn’t want to say good-bye. When it was time to leave in the morning, he would just leave. No tearful good-bye in the driveway. No Lifetime for Women drama on the front porch. Anything that needed to be said they would say in her bed, with their bodies and with their hearts.

Moonlight streamed through the open window and pooled on the floor near the bed. A gentle breeze ruffled the curtains. Spring in all of her painful beauty managed to work her magic even in the dark.

Too bad spring didn’t have any magic up her sleeve that could make paradise last a little bit longer.

Kate awoke to the sound of a car in her driveway. She stretched and buried her face deeper into her pillow. The mail carrier, most likely. Or maybe UPS. It didn’t matter. They were part of the real world and the real world didn’t exist here in paradise.

She opened one eye and peered across the bed. His side was empty. He had said this was the way he would do it and, true to form, he hadn’t lied.

She leaped up, wrapped the pale yellow sheet around her, and dashed to the window in time to see the beat-up Honda moving slowly down Indigo Lane.

Six weeks from beginning to end, like the story arc on a prime-time television show. They meet. They fall into something that may or may not be love. They part. You turn off your television set and move on to the next thing while the fictional stars of the romance live on in some happily-ever-after dreamworld.

Reality wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.

She sat near the window for a long time. It wasn’t that she expected him to turn around and come roaring back up Indigo, so much in love with her that he would turn away from his dreams and responsibilities to be with her forever. She didn’t know what she expected, but this flat echoing emptiness inside her heart couldn’t possibly be all that remained of the happiest weeks of her entire life.

If only she could cry. For weeks she had been able to weep buckets of tears over parking spots, baby ducks, the theme song from
Cheers
, but now she was desert dry.

They were two consenting adults who had known where they were headed from the first moment they met. So why did it feel like a surprise? She felt as if fate had pulled a fast one on her, shown her a glimpse of what life could be like, how love could feel, and then snatched it away from her the second she began to believe it could last.

Had she really believed he was going to abandon his plans, the people he cared about, to stay in New Jersey with a divorced agnostic he barely knew? That wasn’t the way things worked, and the old Kate, the pre-Mark Kate, understood that better than most.