And there was the skin, that luscious forearm peeking out from his rolled-up sleeve.
And so she’d touched him. Stroked the fine, lightly furred skin of his arm. She didn’t understand the impetus, but she’d done it. He’d smiled down at her, widely, the imperfect front teeth charming, and offered to buy her a drink.
At that point, Sutton was a foregone conclusion.
Later, they were both drunk, pleasantly so. They left the party and went to the elevator. She thought her heart would burst from her chest waiting for the doors to slide open. She knew exactly what was about to happen. The last little bit of rational thought she possessed screamed, Don’t! But the naughty party girl in her, the one she’d so carefully excised when she’d gotten out of college, massaged her skin, slid down between her thighs, and said, You know you want him.
Then they were inside the elevator. The doors whisked closed. There were mirrors. They were alone.
“Here’s my key,” Ethan had said, rubbing up against her like an itchy cat. “Come to my room in ten minutes.”
“Why can’t I come now?” Too much Scotch was making her bold, so bold. “What are you going to be doing for all that time?”
“Trust me,” he’d whispered in her ear, licking her earlobe, sending delicious shivers down her spine. “Ten minutes.”
Trust me. Two words better off never spoken among strangers.
She’d gone to her room, brushed her teeth, her hair, put on deodorant. Glanced in the mirror, ran a finger under her eyes so the mascara wouldn’t run. Took off her panties.
The party-girl lust was making her act completely out of character, and the excitement of it was overwhelming. She couldn’t wait ten minutes, stalked the hall until her watch said it had been eight, knocked lightly. He’d opened the door and swept her inside with a laugh.
“I just wanted to see how good you were at following instructions,” he’d said, and kissed her, long and deep. The sex had been better than anything she’d ever experienced. He looked like he’d be amazing in bed; he lived up to his promise. Those hands. Those long, gorgeous hands.
They’d married three short months later, the flush of their love driving them to promises best not made, self-written vows about lifelong fidelity and never-ending support for one another’s careers, come thick or thin.
Thin came too quickly.
Soon after their marriage, they’d been at a conference together—just once, she’d never do that again—and the moderator asked what their life was like. Two creatives in one house. It must be amazing. You probably share an office, each tapping away.
Ethan laughed, and there was something in that offhand gust of amused breath that made a hand go up in the crowd. A man, of course it was a man, in a voice as pompous and bombastic as Sutton had ever heard, stood and shot an arrow through her heart.
“Don’t you feel, Mr. Montclair, that your books are more important than your wife’s? That you, as a literary author, are creating significant, essential work, and your wife, the genre writer, is simply generating entertainment for the masses?”
Her husband, the literary star, the Author with a capital A, had grinned and waved his hand toward Sutton. “But she’s such a pretty writer.”
The whole crowd had laughed, and Ethan laughed, and Sutton had to smile along, all the while feeling small and insignificant. She knew she was less in his mind, and in the minds of many of his peers. Ethan was God’s gift to literature; Sutton was a second-class citizen. Every time she thought of that moment, the words came unbidden. The words she’d heard when Ethan had dismissed her work, catering to the crowd. You are no one. You are nothing.
That her first award would drive a small but workable wedge between them was understandable. It was the second award, a truly prestigious one, that created the real problem. Oh, on the surface, things looked okay. Ethan claimed far and wide how very proud he was of his wonderful, talented wife. What an amazing writer she was. Never an author. No, never that.
All the while, at home, their happy life was withering away, those beautiful hands no longer touching her or the laptop keys or anything important. He went on long walks in the afternoons, came home smelling of bourbon and other women.
She was failing him. Failing their marriage. And then came the surprise of all surprises.
They named him Dashiell.
THE GHOST OF PAPA
Now
Paris was warm today, and Sutton was done with the indulgences. Her walk took her past the école Militaire, full of screaming, laughing children on some sort of recess break—she wondered how they ever learned anything, as they seemed to always be outside throughout the school day, shouting with glee at the singular fact of being children. Parisian mothers seemed to know something American mothers didn’t, some key that Sutton had always been missing.
She did not allow their voices to remind her of Dashiell. Dashiell, like Ethan, was no longer, and she, Sutton Montclair, was a new woman without them. She had no past. She had no trials or travails. She was a mystery unto herself.
The Seine was only a seven-minute walk from her flat. She took the Left Bank by storm, arms practically swinging as she strolled along the sinuous water toward Notre-Dame, her chin up. A grain of sand she may be, but she was a Parisian grain now, and the tourists enjoying the day watched her walk by with admiration. She was their cliché—the gorgeous Parisian woman in the elegant clothes walking along the Seine. If only, they’d think. If only we could be so glamorous. There truly is nothing more beguiling than a Parisian woman.
The colors. The colors of Paris. So overwhelming. Soft pinks and vibrant yellows, inky blacks and musty greens, the creamy white marble, the sunlit golds. Sutton couldn’t stop her eyes from roving, caressing each new sight, her ears attuned to every squeak of bicycle wheel, honk of horn, squawk of birds, all borne to her on whispers of the wind.
It was so much, so overwhelming, it brought tears to her eyes, so she fixed her gaze straight ahead on the gentle blue sky beyond the satiny gray bridges, looking neither right nor left until she could get her emotions under control. A breath later, or maybe it was two, the idea came to her. She rarely had to search for ideas—they had a tendency to show up unannounced, with fully formed characters, in vivid mental images, the scenes unfolding before her very eyes.
She saw a woman, with long, flowing red hair. Her clothing said eighteenth century, the skirts in layers of cream with a heavily ruched green velvet overlay, embroidered russet-and-gold leaves on the bodice. She was on a horse, approaching a large castle. There was some sort of celebration—yes, a marriage. She was arriving at the castle walls; all hail the new Queen. But it wasn’t in the past, it was set in the future. A future where the world had collapsed, and a marriage between warring factions would help arrest the coming apocalypse.