I sit very still, determined not to let you shock me.
“The truth is, my relationship with Goldie is . . .” You pause, scrubbing a hand across your chin. “How do I put this delicately? Financial in nature.”
My eyes widen despite myself. “You’re taking money from her? For . . . No.” I hold up a hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“My, my, my. You do have a naughty mind, don’t you?”
“Me? You’re the one—”
You grin, as if I’ve said something terribly funny. “She’s adding a magazine to her list of publications and she’s offered me a spot as a writer. Slice-of-life stuff. The odd social piece. Not exactly Hemingway but it’ll pay the bills until something better comes along. And I’ll get to rub elbows with American toffs like you. Who knows, I might even get a paid trip or two out of it.”
“And what about the novel you talked about publishing one day? When does that happen?”
It’s your turn to look away. “That dream’s a ways off, I’m afraid.”
“No time?”
“No pulse.”
I frown. “What does that mean?”
“It means there’s no blood going to it. So until I figure out how to resuscitate it . . .”
“You’ll write slice-of-life pieces and escort your boss to social functions?”
“In the interest of full disclosure, I’m staying at Goldie’s until I find my own flat. Separate rooms.”
I eye you skeptically.
“I haven’t slept with her,” you say firmly. “Nor do I plan to sleep with her.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m not sure anyone ever plans to sleep with her. She’s like a big blonde spider.”
“Do I detect a note of jealousy?”
“Jealousy?” I hurl you a chilly look. “I’m engaged to one of the most eligible men in New York.”
You slide off your stool and wander toward the open doors with your hands in your pockets, looking out over the rain-soaked stable yard. “Before, when I talked about marrying someone you’d never be happy with, I was talking about Teddy. Shall I tell you why?”
“I’m not interested in what you think of my fiancé.”
“Are you afraid of what I’ll say? Afraid I might be right?”
“I’m not afraid of anything you could say to me.”
“Aren’t you?”
Before I know it, you’re standing in front of me again. I stiffen, unnerved by your sudden closeness. I need to put space between us, but short of ducking under your arm and out into the rain, there’s nowhere to go. Instead, I tip back my head and meet those cool, clear eyes. “No.”
“Not even if I said I want to kiss you?”
You don’t wait for permission, but I give it as your lips close over mine, and it strikes me, as my body sways against yours, that this has always been where you and I were going. That the quiet fire that reared its head the first time I saw you would rush up one day and catch me unaware. That given the chance, it would consume me. And that I would let it.
This is what it’s supposed to be like, I think as our breaths mingle and my bones begin to melt.
This. This. This.
Regretting Belle
(pgs. 30–39)
5 September 1941
Water Mill, New York
There are a hundred reasons not to kiss you, a thousand, a million, but I can’t think of any of them as your eyes touch mine. Your mouth is there for the taking, your breath coming shallow, a tiny pulse ticking at the base of your throat, frenetic, like a bird’s.
I expect you to pull away and half hope that you will, to spare us both the mess we’re about to make. Instead, you yield with a completeness so breathtaking, I’m not sure which of us is the giver and which the taker. I’m lost in the feel and taste of you, the need for you that I’ve been trying to talk myself out of from the first moment I saw you. The fact of it—of this thing that’s been done and can now never be undone—guts me as our mouths continue to explore. Finding. Taking. Yielding.
Still, it was never part of the plan, and I can’t quite believe I’m allowing myself to be so reckless. Part of me—the part still capable of rational thought—is somehow certain that this is new for you, that you’ve never yielded to anyone in this way. The thought is a heady one, the way I suspect morphine injected into a vein might feel. A euphoric kind of unspooling you never want to end. But it must end—and does.
Even now, so many years later, I can’t say which one of us finally came to our senses and pulled away. I’d like to think it was me, but it’s hard to imagine.
That kiss was the start of so much. More than I ever knew I wanted. More than I ever thought I could bear to lose. But it wasn’t only the kiss. From the first moment, the first words you spoke, I was caught in your undertow, drawn so far out to sea that the water was over my head almost before I knew it. And you let me believe you felt it too.
To this day, I don’t understand how you could have kissed me like that—as if there were nothing you wouldn’t give me—and not have meant it. Or perhaps you did mean it in that first breathless moment of weakness and all the breathless moments that came after. Perhaps it was only later, when the newness began to wear off and the reality of what you would have with me—and what you wouldn’t—became clear, that you changed your mind.
We saw each other the next day and the day after that. Do you remember? We’d meet at the stables in the afternoons and ride together or walk in the woods where we knew we wouldn’t be seen, holding hands, stopping now and then for long, slow kisses. I was ridiculously happy, content to simply be with you, pretending it wasn’t odd that we never spoke of your engagement.
Like a land mine carefully stepped around, we pretended Teddy didn’t exist. Because saying his name, acknowledging the reality of him, might break the spell that had wound itself around us.
We seemed to exist out of time in those stolen moments at Rose Hollow, in a world of our own making, a world of only us. And in those early days of . . . what should I call it? Madness? Yes, that’s what it was. In those early days of madness, I nearly forgot what I’d come to the States to do. I was bewitched, gullibly, hopelessly mad for you. And I let myself believe you were mad for me too. The memories are still raw. Like breathing things, they wait for me when the lights go out, and suddenly, against my will—or perhaps not—it’s yesterday.
It’s the first day of autumn and you’ve packed a basket. We drive out to the lake and spread a blanket on the grass. We eat cucumber salad and cold roast chicken, sitting cross-legged on a blanket found in the trunk of Goldie’s borrowed Zephyr.