The One In My Heart

My heart skipped a beat. “No, I only ever feel sorry for the masturbation couch. It probably had greater ambitions in life. I’ll bet it gives you the side-eye every time you sit down, thinking, ‘Motherfucker, how hard can it be to get laid these days?’”

He laughed. “True, not very. But I don’t want my parents to get the idea that I’m a slut. They should believe that when I’m not saving lives, I’m making out with you in elevators.”

I bit a corner of my lower lip, wishing I didn’t react with such longing to what he described. “So…are you ready to run into your parents again?”

A beat passed before he answered. “I don’t have to be ready when something is this important. I just have to be there.”

Oddly enough, I was reminded of the first time Zelda suffered an episode after she came to Manhattan. I’d been five, too confused—and scared—to cry. So instead I held on to the guardsman teddy bear she’d given me and trailed Pater around the house.

Is she going to be okay? I’d asked, when I could bear the silence no longer.

Pater drained the Armagnac in his glass. I don’t know.

So what do we do?

We don’t have to do anything, he’d answered. We just have to be here.

“And hope for the best?” I murmured.

“And work for the best,” answered Bennett.


THE EXTERIOR OF LA FIGLIA del Mare was a pure, deep vermilion, a color that seemed better suited to Versailles’ drawing rooms, rather than the coast of the Mediterranean. Amid a cliff’s worth of pastel houses, it could have stood out like a sore thumb. But instead it exuded a whimsical, old-world charm.

Bennett had booked a two-bedroom suite on the highest level of the hotel, with whitewashed walls, rustic furniture, and a large, private balcony overlooking the Bay of Positano. The setting sun was a distant glimmer of reddish-gold, barely visible through the fog. The steel-grey sea, two hundred feet below, felt less like the waters of the Mediterranean and more like those of the Atlantic.

All the same, it was beautiful.

And chilly.

Bennett draped his trench coat about my shoulders. “I love an opportunity to be gallant.”

“You weren’t wearing it.”

He had taken off the trench coat to drive. Coming out of the car he had carried it over his arm.

“Even better. I love an opportunity to be gallant for which I don’t have to suffer.”

I smiled. He adjusted the collar of the trench coat, his fingertips brushing against the underside of my jaw. I had trouble sustaining my smile. Perhaps I also had trouble drawing in my next breath.

“Imagine people on the lower terraces looking up,” he said softly.

“Are you an exhibitionist?” I tried to sound severe. “That’s not part of our bargain.”

His eyes were on my lips, gazing at me the way Caesar must have once gazed at Gaul—as something to be conquered and made his own. “Of course not. You want closed doors. All the closed doors in the world—and maybe some high walls too, just in case.”

I swallowed. Was it a coincidence that his words were also an accurate description of my psyche? “Then why are you asking me to imagine people looking at us?”

“We should practice for when my parents might be among them.” He drew me toward him by the lapels of the coat and kissed me below my ear, the graze of his stubble a hot singe I felt all the way to the soles of my feet. “I want them to think I have nothing on my mind except being inside you all night long.”

There was no reason for me to feel jittery—I always understood that by becoming his fake girlfriend, I’d also said yes to more sex, possibly a lot of it. Yet my heart was slamming into my rib cage, and not only with arousal.

With every encounter I became less and less sure what he wanted from me. Not just sex, that much I knew. And I was under no delusion that he found me a fascinating puzzle. No, it was something else entirely.

Sometimes it seemed as if he already knew what I was hiding behind high walls and all the closed doors in the world. A few of his questions, in retrospect, felt like experiments—not looking for answers, but gauging how much and how instinctively I lied.

“You can’t stay all night,” I said. “I’m not a twenty-four-hour diner.”

He smiled slightly. “But you are open dinner hours, at least? Six to nine?”

He smelled of fine wool and Proven?al soap. Part of me wanted to bury my nose in his skin; the other part wanted to run far, far away. “That’s still a long time.”

“Not for what I have in mind.” He guided me back into the sitting room, shutting the balcony door as he did so. “It’s barely enough time to do you justice.”

Inside it was quite warm. Or was it me, burning up at his words? He took the trench coat and tossed it onto the back of a chair. My leather jacket he unzipped and peeled off. Underneath I wore a form-hugging sweater—in a green that was an almost exact match for the color of his eyes.

Was that why it had caught my attention?