Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
‘I might just take off my clothes right here,’ I say.
When he looks pleasantly taken aback, I qualify: ‘What I mean is, this day has gone on forever. If I go up to my room to change, I might never come back down.’
He nods. ‘You do that. I’m gonna go up and change.’ And then he takes off across the patio.
The water is wonderful after the cold night air. The floodlit pool is the only object calling out a shape against the indigo sea and sky. Off in the distance, a lone beam from an oligarch’s yacht cuts through the darkness, perhaps on its way to Mykonos, and the winking lights of Imerovigli pepper the cliffside, a little constellation of existence that reminds us we are not alone. I try to relax and concentrate on the feel of the hot water gently rolling against my skin, but now I’m stricken with unease.
Even though you’ve just had very a serious – arguably castrating – conversation with him, and you’re feeling closer to him because he’s confided in you, being in a hot tub in your underwear with Frank is probably a very, very bad idea . In fact, there’s hardly a probably about it.
I’m just about to run for the hills when I hear, ‘Well, hello.’
When I turn, he is standing there in his white towelling robe brandishing two bottles of water like the fairy godfather. Something about him is a tiny bit apprehensive, or maybe that’s just my imagination.
‘I asked the Lord for beer, and he answered with these instead.’ He sets the bottles down on the ledge, shrugs off the robe, and comes and stands right beside me, his bare feet inches from my shoulder. My eyes do a lightning sweep of his body. Even though I have touched him and kissed him intimately, the one thing I never got to do in our passionate frenzy was to just let myself appreciate the sight of him with no clothes on.
He’s fit. Not quite Daniel Craig when he walked out of the water, but his shoulders are big, his waist narrow, and his legs are strong. He lowers himself in, and the temperature in this thing seems to go up two hundred degrees, making my face blaze.
‘Mmm…’ He tips his head back, his left arm grazing my right one, an electric tingle travelling down my spine.
‘You could sit over there you know.’ I indicate the opposite side. ‘It’s not like we’re expecting ten more people.’
‘Why?’ He slides me a lazy, amused look. ‘I like being near you.’
I stare at the defined little hills and valley of his top lip, the patient, good-natured way that mouth flicks up at the edges. That mouth that I have kissed. That mouth that has explored my most private of places.
‘This is nice,’ he says.
Oh, it was, I think. It really was.
And then my other voice barges in:
Don’t romanticise him . He doesn’t want a married woman any more than you need to be a married woman who wants him right now. This is not the solution to anything. Nat is right. Besides, he may hold women to impossibly high standards. At least Rupert never did that.
His left arm is now fully pressed against my right, like we are of one arm, like our skins have sought the other out. Every inch of me is on fire, my pulse pounding in my temples.
‘I’m shrivelling up,’ I say. ‘Might not last long.’
‘I can’t say I’ve got that same problem.’
‘Oh God.’ I close my eyes.
‘Oh God, what?’ There’s a smile in his voice.
‘You know something?’ he says, right as I’m aware that my crotch is actually throbbing because of this arm resting on mine. ‘You’ve got a lot of freckles on your chest, but not a single one on your face.’ He is sweeping my decolletage like I am enchanting to him. ‘Did you get that laser stuff done? Have them blasted off the surface of the earth?’
‘You have such a colourful way of describing things, Frank. It must be the writer in you.’
He just moved his hand. The back of his knuckles just made accidental contact with my thigh. The air is gridlocked in my chest because he isn’t moving his hand away. The hand has not moved.
‘It was just my roundabout way of saying they’re charming.’
‘Very roundabout. But thanks.’ I try not to concentrate on the fact that I can still feel him inspecting my entire epidermis, his eyes like hot pulses of curiosity on my skin. And I remember how his warm mouth explored places no man other than Rupert has explored, igniting me in ways that Rupert never has. The way I have longed to feel, without ever allowing myself to dwell on its absence.
‘ You are charming, by the way. Not just your freckles.’ His voice has taken on a disarmingly tender quality again.
‘Well… thanks… For the, er, plethora of compliments.’
‘Pleth-or-a,’ he repeats.
The hot tub is going to be a very bad idea. A very bad idea indeed.
I close my eyes again, and I’m hit with a flash of myself on top of him, how he so naturally positioned my hips to better have an orgasm – a tiny adjustment, like a bolt coming loose by vibrations. How it worked. How Rupert would never have thought of that. How our lovemaking always lacked a bit of artistry, lacked soul. We never stared deeply into one another’s eyes when we were engaged in the most intimate act two people can engage in. Our eyes rarely met.
‘And you know what else you are?’ I hear him ask. His thumb absently moves against my leg so that the entire area south of my navel is now buzzing and pulsing like a thousand cicadas have begun nesting – or starting a war.
About to spontaneously combust with longing?
‘No, Frank. But I think you’re going to tell me.’
‘You’re caring, and kind, and fun. And funny, and fair, and something else…’
‘Near naked?’ About to pounce on him?
‘Well, there’s that. Which is pretty epic.’
His tone tells me he’s trying to be serious, so I try to pull my mind back from the graphic hot tub sex scene writing itself in my mind.
‘But also,’ he says, ‘you didn’t ask me if it was true… The rumour about me.’
It takes me a moment to process that he has taken us back to that. ‘Didn’t I? I think I did.’
‘No. You said it was the natural question for people to ask. But you didn’t ask it.’
‘Hmm… Well… I don’t know why I didn’t. I mean, you seem like a decent person to me.’
Didn’t he once say those words to me?
‘But of course, as we said, lots of guys who appear decent are the very opposite.’ He is listening like he wants me to go on, so I do. ‘It’s just a feeling I have about you, I suppose. I’m obviously not right all the time about people. But my instincts are generally my sonar in a black ocean, so I try to trust them.’
‘I like that,’ he says after he tries it on for size. ‘I like it a lot.’ And then he surprises me by saying, ‘Thank you for thinking that way about me.’
The oligarch’s yacht shimmers in the distance, its white lights changing to blue. Our arms remain together, a companionable silence between us. Some of the sexual tension has diffused but has been replaced by something equally as beguiling to me. ‘I also want to tell you that I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Sorry?’ He looks puzzled.
‘For making that comment about you not writing any more. The fact that you…’ Had a hard time writing the stories that came naturally to you. So now you don’t write at all.
He cuts me off with a quiet, ‘It’s okay.’
We let this settle, then I say, ‘You wrote an incredible novel full of emotional honesty about the woman you loved. I think that’s the most unique and wonderful thing anyone could do.’ The intimacy of our conversation makes me yearn to lean into him. To smell him, taste him, to imprint with him. To let myself be that woman I was in his arms.
‘Thank you,’ he says. Then, after a lull he adds, ‘She gave me a hard time when we met because she thought I had a high opinion of myself… Unwarranted, of course.’ The tell-tale smile of someone retrieving a memory that never went to its final resting place, and probably never will.
‘Just like Ford in Love for Lara .’
‘Just like Ford,’ he says.
‘No one will ever write a book about me,’ I say, almost tragically, though it sounds a little self-serving, like I’m fishing for something.
‘How do you know?’ He is looking at me in a certain open-ended way.
‘I suppose I don’t know,’ I say.
A black cat trots along the ledge of the floodlit swimming pool, and I wonder where he’s going so purposefully. To a rendezvous with a secret feline friend?
‘Was there never anyone else?’ I ask, and I feel his bicep twitch against my arm. Every nerve in my body has become wired to his.
‘Never really met anyone else. Never really looked, I suppose.’
‘But hasn’t that been lonely?’ I stare at his handsome face in profile. I suddenly want to know everything there is to know about this man. I am craving it like I crave air.
‘I’m not a monk,’ he says, mildly scathing. ‘But I guess after a time you just get used to being mostly on your own. You get into the habit of dwelling in your own head.’
‘How is that healthy though?’
He turns and meets my gaze. ‘Never said it was healthy.’
‘No online dating?’
‘Too old-fashioned for that.’
‘Younger women?’ I tease.
‘Nice skin. Not enough life experience.’
‘So you’re not a cliché then?’
‘I strive to be anything but a cliché.’ He looks at me candidly. ‘I had one long relationship. Five years. More a friendship with benefits. Maybe a touch more.’
‘What happened?’ I am loving this back and forth.
‘Just ran out of conversation, I guess.’
I think about me and Rupert. How most of our conversation is either about Harriet, or what we’ve got lined up to watch on Netflix. Have I ever talked with a man the way I am talking with Frank? I think I know that answer. I think that answer is no.
‘I wasn’t really looking for a big commitment,’ he says. ‘And I didn’t want to just have people come and go in Aiden’s life. And then time just passes so very quickly. The older you get, each year seems to consist of fewer than three hundred and sixty-five days.’
‘So true,’ I say. Sobering and true. I pull a face. ‘I’m not sure I’d want to marry again, either. Having to learn a new person’s history, navigate all those gaps in his knowledge about mine.’ I catch myself saying something I don’t even know is correct.
‘You’d just do casual relationships?’
‘Hmm… Not sure I’m a casual sex sort of person. Knowing me, I’d fall in love.’
I realise what I’ve just said.
He catches on to it quickly. ‘But you don’t believe in being in love, remember?’
‘Don’t I?’ I smile rather ruefully. ‘Oh yes. You’re right. I forgot.’
After a contemplative spell of our gazes hanging together, he says, ‘I’ve had casual sex, but I’m not really a casual person…’
The way he leaves it there makes me want to pick up the ball, but I don’t know where to run with it.
And then he says, ‘Moira, I…’
He is looking at me so intently that I find myself hanging there, in almost excruciating suspense.
‘Tell me,’ I say. I want to say, Better yet. Don’t tell me. Just kiss me. Kissing me will make up for all the difficult things we might struggle to say. But he just searches my face – searches and searches – like he’s running outcomes in his mind. The tension is so thick I cannot defuse it.
We are back in Athens. Back outside that hotel room door.
‘Look,’ he says. He is nodding to himself like he’s just flipped a coin only to find it’s the same on both sides. ‘Whatever my selfish desires… I’m not the kind of guy who tries to take what might not be available.’ He tips his head back, closes his eyes, and my eyes run the length of his throat where I long to kiss him. ‘What happened between us in your apartment… That wasn’t about me, was it? That was about him.’
It’s too blindsiding. The question. The way he is looking at me. My eyes tick around his face, what I’m on the brink of saying already cancelled by the time it’s taking me to say it.
‘Got it,’ he says, curtly, flat.
At his reaction, I fill with a something akin to panic. I’m about to say No! You haven’t got anything! But then his phone rings.
We process its arrival like it dropped from outer space.
‘Aren’t you going to get it?’ I ask.
‘Nope.’ He sits there stiffly, his mouth set in a hard line. Then he surprises me by hoisting himself out of the tub in one swift movement. His phone is still ringing. He reaches for a towel and starts drying himself off with his back to me.
‘It might be Aiden,’ I say.
He tugs the towel across his shoulders. ‘Fuck it.’
The strength of his reaction makes me bolt back.
His phone stops ringing.
Mine starts.
I stare at my bag lying on top of my clothes, too far out of my reach, an unsettling feeling brewing in me.
‘Aren’t you going to get it?’ He wraps the towel around his waist. Then he looks at me with so much hostility that it almost takes my breath away.
What the hell just happened?
I am almost too paralysed to move. But then the ringing stops.
His rings again.
Our eyes meet, joined in the same thought: something is wrong.
He picks his phone up from the chair. I see the slight frown. ‘It’s Aiden.’
Something inside of me just falls away and my heart start a furious beating. ‘What is it?’ I clamber out of the tub, as he is saying, ‘Hello, son.’
The cold air slaps me to my senses. I grab a towel, clutch it to me as I stand there shivering in my sodden underwear. I can hear Aiden’s voice but not what he’s saying.
‘Okay…’ Frank latches onto my eyes, holds them while he tells Aiden that we’re actually here in Santorini, that we came to surprise them.
But there’s no pleasure in his voice. This is not a man who is letting his son in on a fun big surprise.
‘What’s going on?’ A wave of dread climbs my gullet; that sickly sensation I’ve had so many times in the course of being a mother; the knowing with certainty what you can’t yet know. ‘What is it?’ I press.
I’m so cold, my jaw has gone stiff, and my teeth are chattering. I reach for my wool hoodie but am too stressed to remember how to dress myself.
‘We’ll be there shortly,’ he says to his son. He clicks off. There’s a brief hesitation where he seems to take in the trembling mess of me.
‘Please don’t panic,’ he says, ‘but Harriet is in the hospital.’