Chapter Twenty-Three #3
He looked at her for a long, searching moment. ‘Can we talk?’ Glancing towards the band, he added, ‘Somewhere a bit quieter, maybe?’
She nodded, standing up. ‘Let’s go inside.’
He followed her through the villa silently to her room up on the top floor, to the bed they’d lain in together. She pulled the patio doors closed, turning the party into a low background hum, and then crossed to lie on her back on one side of the bed.
Jesse stretched out on the other, and for a little while they listened to each other breathing.
‘Can I go first?’ she said, when she was ready. He rolled onto his side and propped himself on his elbow to look at her.
‘OK.’
She faltered, wondering where to start. At the beginning, of course.
‘When I came here, I thought my heart was broken. And it was, in a way, because the only man I’d ever known had left me and it felt like the end of the world.
And then I came here, and I found that it wasn’t the end of the world after all, not exactly.
How could it be, when a place like this exists?
Even if you feel like it’s the end of the world, the sun still comes up every morning over the hills, and the sand’s still warm beneath your feet, and the birds still sing in the olive trees.
There’s a gentle insistence to living here, and it seemed to insist that I meet you. ’
He listened, watching her eyes, not giving himself away as she marshalled her thoughts and lifted her eyes to the ceiling and carried on.
‘You stormed into my life on a flurry of bad temper and beautiful eyes, and you completely, utterly blindsided me. You’re unapologetically rude, and then you’re so damn thoughtful that you seem to see right inside my head, and then you stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that you have this sentimental, romantic seam running through you like words through Blackpool rock. ’
He huffed softly and she ignored him. Closing her eyes, she recalled the last time they were together in her bed.
‘And then you touched me and tried to teach me how to not let my head or my heart get involved, but, Jesse, you failed. You failed, because my head is involved. I think about you all of the time, and I miss you when you’re gone from me, and I dream about you when I go to sleep.’
She opened her eyes and looked into his, clear and direct.
‘You failed, because my heart is involved too. I thought it was broken when I came here, but I was wrong. It was never his to break, because I never loved him the all-encompassing, sun-moon-and-stars way I love you.’
Slow devastation seeped into Jesse’s face, but when he went to speak she shook her head for him to wait.
‘But in the most important way of all, you didn’t fail. I was afraid when I came here. I wouldn’t have said so, but I see now that I was.’ She swallowed. ‘I’m not afraid any more, and much as I want to stay here, I can’t. Corinna mentioned your wife, that the sculptures were of her.’
Again, he opened his mouth to speak, and again she shut him down.
‘It’s OK, it really is. You don’t need to explain.
It’s time for me to go, that’s all. I need to find my own place, just like you did.
I need my own Skelidos, somewhere to put down roots, to work, to find a life that suits my bones.
You’ve taught me all of that. You loved me better, Jesse Anderson, even though you never intended to. ’
She stopped speaking and drew in a deep, shuddering breath, feeling more naked and exposed to him than she ever had before.
‘I’m done,’ she said, with a tiny, vulnerable half smile.
He nodded. ‘I know. And I want to kiss you until you feel better again and tell you it’ll all be all right, but I can’t.’
There was a melancholy edge to his voice as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a photograph folded in half. Opening it, he handed it to her.
‘This was Erin. My wife.’
The woman in the photograph was young, early twenties, and she was laughing, her long blonde sea-tangled waves swinging around her suntanned shoulders.
‘She was beautiful,’ Winnie said.
Jesse nodded slowly. ‘She was. We were starving art students intent on changing the world one piece at a time, and she was that girl. The one everyone’s drawn to because her laugh is the loudest, her wit the sharpest, her talent the brightest. And out of everyone she could have picked, she picked me, and I thought I was the luckiest bastard alive. ’
Winnie listened, and even though it was ridiculous, she envied the woman in the photograph that she was loved so much.
‘We married in January, and in July she stepped in front of a train.’
‘Jesus, Jesse,’ Winnie gasped, horrified by the blunt end to the love story.
‘She was too much of everything,’ he said, closing his eyes, remembering. ‘Too talented, too jealous, too effervescent, too emotional. She could be wildly loving and then incredibly mean, generous to a fault and then take my breath away with her selfishness.’
Jesse shook his head. ‘My commercial success eroded her confidence in her own ability, even though she was always streets ahead of me. I got lucky and she got furious. She packed away her tools and never touched them again after we married.’ He opened his eyes.
‘Artists need to make art, Winnie. You have to, or else it builds up inside you like pressure, like a bomb, it makes you irrational and brittle and delusional, and if you don’t let it out it makes you step in front of a fast-moving train to escape from it. ’
Winnie understood now exactly why he’d given her a key and a room to work, and her heart twisted for him.
‘So you came here,’ she said, quietly.
He nodded. ‘I came here. I didn’t plan on staying for ever; it just turned out that way. And I thought it was enough, right up until the moment I knocked on your kitchen door.’
He took the photo from Winnie’s hands and looked at it. ‘You reminded me of her, like someone kicked me in the guts wearing spiked boots. Something in the shade of your hair, the curve of your hip, the air of special that surrounds you.’
There was a compliment wrapped up in there somewhere, but his confirmation of Corinna’s suspicion was all Winnie’s fragile heart heard.
‘I tried to stay away from you. I told myself that it was wrong, that your fleeting similarity to Erin was the reason I felt drawn to you. But still you came to see that damn donkey, and every minute I spent with you I saw a different woman, not her at all. You’re soft, and you’re kind, but then you have this huge fucking brave streak that shines from you like, I don’t know, frickin’ She-Ra, and you have the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met in my entire damn life. ’
He stopped and stared at Winnie, and she just stared right back, both of them breathing a little too fast.
‘I’ve spent the last ten years feeling guilty that she died, and guilty that there were so many sides to her that I found hard to love.
One-night stands, skin-deep sex. It was my way of coping, and it became my way of living.
And then there was you, beautiful gorgeous you, and I was all kinds of screwed because I knew one night would never be enough. ’
Just as he hadn’t interrupted her, Winnie stayed silent to let him speak.
‘It was something, wasn’t it?’ he continued.
‘That night, right here in this bed? My God, I’ve never known it.
Not back then, and never since. I wasn’t lying when I said that there was a difference between sex and making love, Winnie, and I only knew because you showed me.
Those sculptures, the drawings at the gallery.
You know, Corinna got that wrong. They’re all you.
You’re a mermaid on the rocks calling me in, and you’re the fairy who can change lives with one careless wave of your arm.
You couldn’t see her face on the sculpture, but it’s there.
You’re there, and that mischievous, devil-may-care light is there in your eyes.
The same look you had in my studio when you took your clothes off and asked me to draw you naked. ’
Winnie wasn’t certain where this conversation was headed, or where their lives were headed.
‘Someone bought them,’ she said. ‘I saw the sold stickers.’
He shook his head, as if she ought to know better.
‘They were never for sale. They’re mine, and they’ll stay here.’
‘Oh,’ she sighed, glad. ‘Oh.’
‘Will you stay too?’ he asked. ‘Will you stay with me always?’
A tear slid from her eye to her hairline. ‘What about your one-night-stand rule?’
Jesse’s arm slid beneath her neck, and they rolled onto their sides and lay forehead to forehead.
‘It still stands,’ he said, stroking her hair back from her cheek. ‘I just want it to be with you, over and over again.’
Outside, Frankie and Gav danced beneath a canopy of a million stars and things got decidedly raunchy for Stella and Angelo behind the newly planted arbutus bushes, and upstairs Winnie and Jesse slid between the sheets for the second of a lifetime of one-night stands.