Once More With Feeling (24 page)

I didn’t want to fight Carolyn for Tim. Nor did I want
to sit around, frozen in my inaction and martyrdom, like some tossed-aside puppet waiting for the puppeteer to come to his senses and bring me to life again. If Carolyn was what Tim wanted, she could have him. I’d have to investigate the legalities involved in divorcing someone who was incapacitated, but I was sure I could do it. After Christmas, I thought. It would be my New Year’s present to myself. I would stop holding onto things I’d already lost. And I would stop looking for myself in other people’s lives. I would make my own. And whatever else it was, it would be mine.

The truth was, I wanted it all. I wanted all the things I’d always wanted, and all the things I’d set aside. I wanted to keep my memories of Tim, of all the reasons I’d married him and loved him. It didn’t matter what had happened afterwards. It didn’t matter how it had ended. I could hold on to the beginning, to the life we’d planned and shared, however briefly. I could hold on to my newly resuscitated friendship with Brooke. I didn’t need to live with her, or even in New York, but we could still be as close as it felt like we should be now. I wanted that back. I wanted her in my life, where she belonged.

And I could let myself remember Alec the way it had been, not the sanitized version I’d allowed myself these past years. I could let myself really remember all of his dangerous passion, his challenging forthrightness, and how much I’d loved him before I’d lost him to his own dreams. I didn’t have to hide that away just because he
was the man I could only have in tiny snippets here and there. The man I could never really have the way I wanted him. That didn’t invalidate how I felt when I was with him. Or it shouldn’t.

I didn’t want to give parts of myself away any more. To anyone. No matter what. I didn’t want to choose between diminishing options, the lesser of two evils. I had to figure out how to go about holding onto what mattered to me. And I figured that like most things, that meant letting go of the rest. Of the things that didn’t fit, and maybe never had. I stared down at my left hand, at those rings that symbolized something I understood, finally, was irreparably damaged. There was no putting it back together. These trips through my old lives, these Goldilocks attempts, had taught me that, if nothing else. I swallowed, and then I tugged both of the rings off my hand and slipped them into my pocket.

There was no going back. And that was okay.

I really believed that, for the first time.

‘Let’s eat,’ Alec said from behind me, and when I turned to face him, I felt entirely new. At last.

And so we ate. The night seemed to ease out around us, holding us, smoothing all our history away and making it into magic. The tension from before changed into something brighter, warmer. Familiar. It didn’t so much disappear as grow into something else, something with roots and different possibilities. I decided to stop thinking about it. I let myself fall instead.

‘I can’t help but think that wild, detailed fantasies about being tapped to join some secret occult sect can’t lead anywhere good,’ Alec argued at one point. ‘What kind of person will that make you? Why not learn about the real world? About responsibilities and consequences?’

‘Because, first of all, that’s boring,’ I retorted. We’d long since finished our meal and were still sitting at the comfortable kitchen table, our chairs pushed back, debating our way through a bottle of wine. Thus far we had covered the Kardashians (Alec believed they were a harbinger of the End Times; I agreed but had argued otherwise for the pleasure of watching his disbelief) and what he called the tattered remains of the American education system. ‘No one would want to read that book. You sound like a pompous after-school special.’

‘I think life is complicated enough without resorting to flying around on broomsticks in your head,’ he said. As usual, his face was so very serious while his dark eyes laughed.

I laughed back at him. ‘I think you’re jealous because Harry Potter has a magic wand and you don’t.’

He actually smiled then, and it didn’t fade away immediately.

‘Probably true,’ he conceded. ‘I could do a lot of good with a wand.’

‘So does Harry Potter.’ I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘This argument might have more weight if you’d actually read the books.’

‘So it would.’ He looked entirely too pleased with himself, as ever. And not in the least bit shamed by his own ignorance. ‘But what would be the fun in that?’

We moved into the family room again, and the conversation kept going as we settled into the worn and comfortable couches. He propped his feet up on the coffee table. He told me about his years in Africa: the heartbreak, the struggle, the slender hope that the small bit of good he was doing might somehow balance out what sometimes seemed like far too much bad, like a kind of avalanche there was no hope of stopping.

‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll burn out?’ I asked. I was drinking coffee now, in a desperate attempt to combat my dizzy head, but it didn’t help. And I was perfectly aware that it was not the wine that had gotten to me this way; it was Alec.

His expression then was something close to sad. Or was it merely fatalistic?

‘I burn out at least three times a month,’ he said, his low voice gruffer than before. ‘Burn-out isn’t relevant. It can’t be. You keep going, because no matter what state you might be in, you’re some of these people’s only hope.’

I looked at my coffee, and my bare fingers clutched around the mug.

‘That sounds terrible.’

‘It’s not.’ He was sitting on the couch opposite me, his arms stretched out along the back. ‘It’s really not. It’s … worth it. Hard and demanding, but no one ever said it
would be anything but that. Challenging. But not everyone can do it, and I can. And I think the rewards of that make up for the rest, however hard it is to see them sometimes.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess that when that changes, I’ll stop.’

The fire danced against the grate, and outside, the dark night had grown windy. It bumped against the old house, making the windows jump.

‘How do you recharge in between burn-outs?’ I asked softly, wondering what he saw then, his dark eyes focused on something so far away. Distant. On continents I could hardly imagine. When I thought of Africa I thought of a great big sky, safaris, the cliffs of Cape Town. I had a sense of immensity. I doubted that was what he saw.

‘There’s a beach I like in Namibia,’ he said after a moment. ‘Sometimes I camp there for a few days. Just me and the waves and the occasional seabird.’

‘I hope you’re not responsible for any promotional materials for your clinic.’ I shook my head at him. ‘You’re not exactly selling it.’

He laughed at that, and rubbed his hands over his face, as if scrubbing it clean of whatever dark things lurked within him. If only it were that easy, I thought.

‘It’s been a tough few months,’ he said. His mouth moved into something a little bit too self-deprecating to be a smile. ‘I’m feeling a little more down about things than I usually do, I guess. You’re catching me at a bad time.’

‘Well,’ I said, meeting his gaze and finding it too raw, too much. I looked down again. ‘That’s going around.’

The conversation twisted and turned, from books to politics to war and then back again. Alec told me what it was like to stand in a supermarket for the first time after living in a tiny village in Africa – how that always seemed to be where he felt the culture shock the most. All those options! All that food! We talked our way from food to wine to what it was like to defend idiots like Benjy Stratton from the consequences of their own behaviour.

‘But he deserves to lose his licence,’ Alec argued, as if baffled that there could be another side. Which there wasn’t, really. Except in the technical sense.

‘How I ended up defending drunk drivers is one of life’s great mysteries,’ I told him, as if I were confiding a great secret. ‘I guess it turns out I’m good at it.’

But was it enough to be good at it? Shouldn’t I want more from my career, too? At the moment, tucked up in a Vermont farmhouse a lifetime away from Benjy Stratton and the rest of my over-entitled Rivermark clients, I didn’t want to think about what I should do instead.
Something better than DWI cases
, I told myself.
Which means
anything
besides DWI cases
.

We had moved on to talking about some old friends of ours that neither one of us had seen in years when I let out a huge yawn, surprising myself. Alec sat up and looked over at the clock, and I did too. It was just before midnight. I had to blink and look again, not believing what I saw the first time.

‘Shit,’ I said, completely taken back. ‘I didn’t even notice how late it was. I have to get out of here.’

Alec looked at me for a long moment, and I felt the heat between us swell again, brighter and hotter, like some kind of crescendo. I put my mug down on the coffee table in front of me, very carefully.

‘I have to go,’ I said again. Maybe a little bit desperately.

‘How long is the drive?’ he asked in that quiet, intent way of his that made my stomach clench. ‘Four hours?’

‘Five.’

‘Come on.’ He smiled slightly, and it was like throwing gas on an open flame. ‘Stay.’

Stay.

What a host of images that simple syllable conjured up in my head. Memories mixed with fantasies mixed with entirely too much longing. I felt his mouth against mine again, so hot and hard, and his hands against my face. I remembered the slick thrust of him inside me years ago, the taste of his skin, the way he pinned my hands over my head, grinned down at me, and dared me to match him. And I always had. I sighed, and shifted in my seat, pretending I didn’t know why I suddenly felt so restless. So close to undone.

‘Alec …’ But I couldn’t seem to continue. I didn’t know what I wanted to say.

That was a lie.

But I wasn’t going to say it.

‘I will, of course, make every effort to protect your virtue,
Sarah,’ he said, all that laughter in his voice and in his eyes, though he didn’t smile. ‘I’m not a teenage boy.’

He hadn’t been a teenage boy the last time I’d stayed here either, as I recalled, and that hadn’t prevented him from taking me in hot, breathless, heart-stopping silence with my back against the wall and my legs wrapped tight around his waist, his parents sleeping peacefully down the hall as we both managed, somehow, not to scream.

Good lord. Where had
that
come from?

I could only describe the way he was looking at me then as
wolfish
, very much as if he was accessing the same memory. Which, I told myself, he wasn’t. Of course he wasn’t. I felt slightly feverish, and told myself I was acting like an idiot. Alec was many things. Annoyingly argumentative. Intense. Dedicated to his pet causes in ways I didn’t believe he would ever be devoted to people. He was endlessly fascinating to me, still. But that didn’t make him psychic.

‘Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve,’ I pointed out. As if that were either relevant or necessary for us to note. That crook of his mouth only deepened.

‘Which is why you shouldn’t drive off in the middle of the night, fall asleep at the wheel, and splatter yourself all over I-91,’ he said.

He got to his feet then and stretched, which was really just unfair. It was late and he was gorgeous. Too lean, and far too tanned in the swathes of skin I could see when he raised his arms up over his head like that. He lowered
them, bringing my temperature down slightly, and then raked his hands through that wild mess of his hair. It stood about in spikes and looked ridiculous and I wondered how it was possible to want anyone this much.

‘Okay,’ I said, feeling hushed. Reverent. Even scared. But I didn’t want to leave him yet. I knew that was true, if nothing else. ‘I’ll stay. If only to keep myself from becoming roadkill.’

And Alec smiled.

I helped him clean up in the kitchen, and then stood around feeling awkward and somehow obvious while he shut down the house, putting out the fire and locking doors. I crossed my arms over my chest, then stuck my hands in my pockets. I felt like the teenager he’d assured me he wasn’t. He led me up the stairs to the bedrooms, and I was sure I could hear my heart pounding like a kettledrum as we walked – so loud that I thought he could probably hear it too. If he did, he was polite enough not to mention it.

The upstairs of the farmhouse retained its original flavour – the rooms weren’t huge, but cosy, and the halls were uneven and tight. It was hard to remind myself why all of this was a bad idea when the cold wind howled outside and I was standing in a tiny, breathless space with Alec, who seemed to be entirely focused on acting like the perfect host. I stood in the doorway of the cheerful yellow guest room and he handed me a small stack of sage-green
towels from the nearby linen closet that squealed in protest when he opened and closed the door. Which was pretty much how I felt. I gripped onto the soft towels as if they were life rafts and I’d suddenly found myself adrift on the high seas.

For absolutely no reason at all, except maybe to torture me, he lifted his hands high over my head and braced them on the doorjamb above me. So he could look down at me from that delicious and inappropriate angle. So he could mess with my head. So he could make it all that much worse.

I could have stepped back, further into the room.

I didn’t.

‘I don’t know if you remember the bathroom’s down there,’ he said, nodding toward the other side of the small hallway. ‘And I’m in there.’

This time he indicated the doorway that was catty-corner to mine. Through it, I could see the pile of his bags at the foot of his bed, the unmistakable reminder that he was not a man who stayed put. I stared down at the stack of towels in my hands.

‘Um,’ I said. I couldn’t seem to banish all the images in my head, of Alec spread out across a bed like a pagan sacrifice for which I would very much like to be the reigning priestess, naked of course, tossing and turning with all of that golden skin on display …
Not helpful
, I snapped at myself. ‘Thanks,’ I said inadequately and when I looked up at him again, those dark eyes of his were
gleaming. With far too much knowledge and wicked delight.