Chapter 16
NORA
The house in Malibu has no neighbors, which I can't help but love.
Isaak called it a getaway. The night before we left, watching my face while he said it, he called it the other thing: Lev had spotted a car on the access road twice that week that didn't belong to anyone who lives on it, and somebody was asking questions at Halo again.
Until he knows who, he'd rather have me somewhere he can lock down to one road and a long stretch of empty water.
This house has one road in. The men I'm not supposed to notice are parked at the top of it.
The producer who built a glass box on an open beach built it like a vault, every window rated to take a hurricane head-on, and Isaak picked it for exactly that on a day I thought he picked it for me.
"There's nothing here," I tell Isaak, standing in the middle of the great room. Glass on three sides, the Pacific filling all of it, and not one stick of the furniture looks like anyone's ever sat in it. "Who comes here?"
"No one. That's what it's for." He drops the bag by the door. "I bought it from a producer who needed cash in a weekend. I've slept here twice."
"Twice." I look at the ocean doing its enormous indifferent thing past the glass. "You own a house on the most expensive dirt in California and you've slept in it twice."
"Now it's three times." He says it to the view, not to me. He always does, with the things he means. "I wanted you somewhere with no men in it but me."
I don't have a comeback for that. The corner of his mouth goes, because he's noticed. I've spent a lifetime with a comeback ready for everything, and he keeps finding the seams where I don't.
I wander the great room to escape it. There's a kitchen nobody has cooked in, a fireplace nobody has lit, a wall of books I'd bet money were bought by the yard. I run a finger along the spines.
"Has anyone read these?"
"No."
"Have you?"
"I read my own. These came with the house." He's stopped looking at the shelf. He's looking at me, steady, unhurried, until I'm the one who breaks it. "Why does it matter?"
"On the ranch we had four books and a Bible. Three of the four were about horses." I pull one out at random. It's in French. I put it back. "A whole wall of books nobody's touched. It makes my chest go tight. All that, and no one's lonely enough at night to open one."
"You can read them. They're yours now."
"Everything's mine now. You keep saying that.
" I turn around. He's still by the door with the bag at his feet, too big for the room, watching me make myself at home in a house he bought for a stranger and gave to me.
"It's a strange way to be married, Isaak.
I keep waiting to find the part where it's a trap. "
"There isn't one. I keep telling you that."
"I keep not believing you. Take me to the beach. It's harder to lie to me where it's loud."
So we both know somebody is circling. He thinks it's a car and a question or two.
I crouched over the proof four nights ago with a flashlight and I still haven't handed it to him.
The cut ends are bright in my head every time I close my eyes.
Every time I open my mouth to say it, I look at him and swallow it back down.
The man already sleeps with one eye open.
I can't be the one who proves him right.
"Walk on the beach with me," I say instead.
"It's November."
"It's California November. Put on the sandals I know you own and didn't pack." I'm already at the door. "Come look at the water with your wife. It's free. Everything else you've shown me cost a fortune."
He comes.
The beach is empty in both directions, a long gray curve of it, the tide going out as the light goes down. The surf is loud. Loud enough that we have to stand close to talk, loud enough that the rest of the world drops out and leaves the two of us alone with a sound too big to argue with.
I take my shoes off. The sand is cold, wet, perfect. Isaak walks beside me with his hands in his pockets, shoes still on, a six-and-a-half-foot man in a four-figure sweater refusing to be a person about a beach, so I bump him with my shoulder until he gives up and takes them off too.
"There," I say. "Was that so hard?"
"Yes." He curls his bare toes into the sand like it's done something to him. "I don't like things on my feet I can't control."
"It's sand, Isaak."
"It gets everywhere. It's lawless." But he's looking at me when he says it, not the sand. The wind has my hair everywhere, the cold has me laughing, and his face has gone open the way it doesn't, the hard set of his mouth loosened, watching me like he's forgotten to guard it.
We walk until the house is a glass box behind us.
"You've seen the ocean before," I say. "A real one. Cold."
"The Baltic. I was a boy." He says it to the water. "It was the color of a gun and it never got warm, even in August. I used to think the whole world was that color until I was grown."
"That's bleak, Isaak. And you have told me some bleak things."
"It's not bleak. It's just north." A breath. "I left the first chance I had something to leave with. I haven't missed it once."
"I saw this one once before today." I have to lift my voice over the surf.
"My dad drove us out the summer I was nine.
Six hours each way, no air conditioning, a cooler of bologna.
We couldn't afford the parking, so he left the truck at a gas station and we walked a mile in.
" The memory still has a sunburn in it. "Best day of my childhood. The whole thing ran him a tank of gas."
"You're a cheap date."
"I'm an expensive date. I just have good taste in free things." The surf eats the end of it. We lean in to be heard. His hand finds the small of my back to steady me over a rock, and stays.
"You're cold," he says, against my hair.
"I'm fine."
"Your hands are blue. Don't lie to me at the beach, it's beneath you."
"Then warm them up." I put both my cold hands flat on his chest under the sweater, just to hear him swear. He does, low, in two languages, and doesn't move away. He covers my hands with his, trapping the cold against the heat of him.
"You did that on purpose," he says.
"I did everything tonight on purpose. The walk.
The shoes. You're slow, so I have to lead.
" I spread my fingers under his. His heart is going harder than a man standing still on a beach should be able to explain.
His hands are twice the size of mine and I feel the size of them in a way that has nothing to do with the cold. "Your heart's not behaving."
"No."
"Want to tell me why?"
"You know why." He says it plainly, no game in it. "I stopped pretending I didn't a long time ago. You're the one who keeps the door shut. I stand outside it and wait, because you told me once that nobody decides for you again. I believed you."
That's not fair. He's not allowed to remember the exact shape of the line I gave him in a conference room over my dead father's debt and hand it back to me on a beach. I open my mouth to tell him so.
"Don't," he says. "Don't make it a fight. Not tonight. We can fight tomorrow. Tomorrow's free."
"That's my line."
"I'm aware. I'm using it because it works."
That's where it changes. Not a big moment. His heart going under my palms, the water filling everything, the light almost gone. I look up to say something smart. He's already looking down, and the smart thing leaves me.
He kisses me like we have all night, which we do. Like it's the first time, which it isn't. The difference tonight is that nobody's keeping score. There's no door at my back. No fight to win. Just his mouth, the cold, the enormous sound of the water making a private room out of an open beach.
I get a fistful of his sweater. He makes a sound into my mouth I've never gotten out of him before, rougher than the bedroom, softer somehow underneath it, and his hands come up to hold my face like I'm something he's afraid of breaking.
Being held that careful scares me worse than any rough thing he's ever done to me.
"Inside," I manage, against his mouth. "The cold. I want."
"I know what you want." He's already walking me backward up the sand, slow, not letting go, his forehead to mine. "I've known for an hour. I was letting you get there."
"Generous of you."
"I'm a generous man," he says, the old line, the cigar-terrace line. I laugh, the laugh goes into the kiss, and we get the door open behind me without either of us looking at it.
We step inside and the door falls shut behind us, but the windows are already open somewhere ahead.
The surf comes pouring in with us, loud, endless, turning the dark house both private and wide open at once.
He walks me backward through the dim rooms by touch alone, hands steady on my waist, my ribs, my face, until we reach the bedroom.
The sound of the water is everywhere here, filling the space between every breath.
We undress each other slow. His sweater comes off first. My palms slide up under it and stay there, flat against the heat of his chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart, the same one that was under my hands on the beach.
Only now there's no cold water between us, just salt on our skin, the waves coming in through the open windows like they're part of the room.
Sand scatters across the sheets when his sweater drops.
"Everywhere," I murmur, and he huffs a soft laugh against my mouth, the sound low in his chest.
He peels my clothes away piece by piece, slow, like he's got all night and intends to use it.
His mouth follows to my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my breast, tasting the ocean still on me.
I arch into it, fingers in his hair, pulling him closer.
When his hand slips between my legs I'm already slick, wet under his fingers as he strokes me in long, unhurried passes, learning me again in the dark with nothing but touch and the sound of the surf.