His eyes were open, but I knew he wasn’t seeing me as he lifted his other hand and brushed my face with the tips of his fingers, as gentle as a butterfly. “Victorine,” he said, his hand falling and capturing my free hand, his voice lighter.
“Yes. Go to sleep now. Nobody is going to hurt you.”
“Stay,” he whispered, his eyes closing.
The words fell from my lips before I could recall them. “I’ll stay. For as long as you need me, I’ll stay.”
His breath slowed to an easy rhythm, his hands tightly clasping mine. Just a few minutes. I’d wait for just for a little bit, until he was in a deep sleep, and then I’d leave. With my hands still held tightly to his, I found a comfortable spot on the headboard to lean against and lifted my legs on the bed. I left the light on and began counting ceiling tiles again, trying to ignore the heaviness of my eyelids. Just for a minute, I told myself as I finally allowed them to close.
When I opened them again, the room seemed dipped in black ink. A warm body pressed against my back, a heavy arm pinning me to the bed. Disoriented, I rolled to my back as the body behind me shifted. I blinked, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Looming over me, I saw the outline of Cooper’s head.
I was about to close my eyes and go back to sleep when the realization of where I was and with whom struck me. I tried to rise but found myself restrained by a firm hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t worry. You haven’t been asleep very long.” I heard the smile in his voice.
I tried again to rise, but he continued to hold me down. “It’s not yet dawn. You don’t have to go.”
“Of course I do. I shouldn’t be here.”
“This is your room. I feel guilty for kicking you out.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it. I shouldn’t be here. With you. And you don’t have a shirt on.”
“You noticed?”
I could feel the warmth of his skin, his chest close enough that if I leaned forward just slightly I could press my lips against the soft skin under his neck. No. I jerked back, his hand holding me tightly.
“I just wanted to thank you. I know tonight isn’t the only time you’ve come to me during one of my nightmares. Nurse Hathaway told me that you’re the only one who can calm me down.”
I relaxed into the pillow, the Southern slurring of consonants somehow reassuring in the blackened room. “I didn’t think you knew it was me. You always call for Victorine.”
“My muse,” he said.
“You mean Manet’s muse.”
His face hovered over mine. “No, mine. Ever since I saw that miniature, she became my muse. I named her Victorine. The dark-haired beauty with green eyes.” Gentle fingers brushed my throat, lifting the heavy ruby stone. “Where did you get this, Kate?”
I should go. But there was something otherworldly about this room in the summer night, my bones suddenly limp in the languid heat. His voice soothed me like a hypnotist’s, and I found myself suspended in the darkness, where morning and war and fiancées didn’t exist. Where my career aspirations seemed very far away. I placed my fingers over his and it was as if he knew my touch, and I knew his.
No! The word was so loud in my head that I imagined I’d shouted the word. I struggled to rise but he held me back. “Don’t go. Please. I know you’ve felt it, this connection between us. I can’t explain it. You look just like the woman in the miniature, the woman I’ve always called my Victorine. And you wear her ruby necklace.”
“It might not be the same . . .”
“Kate. Don’t. You and I both know it is. Please stay. Just a little longer. And tell me how you came to own this necklace.”
I lay back down, unable to walk away from him no matter how much I knew I should. He lay down, too, our faces only inches apart. I took a deep breath, smelling the laundry detergent clinging to the pillowcase and the alluring smell of man and sweat and him. “It belonged to my grandmother, and then to my mother. It passed to me when my mother died. She never wore it, although several times when I was a little girl, I’d see her take it out of her jewelry box and put it on for a little while. But she never wore it outside the house.”
His fingers lifted the stone from my throat, feeling its heft, turning it around in his hand, the brush of his skin against mine like tiny flaming matches. “It’s a large stone, probably worth a great deal.”
“I never really thought about it until I showed it to my friend Margie—she keeps it in her apartment for me. She said the same thing and she and I agreed that it didn’t make any sense. You see, my grandmother was a baker’s wife. I never could figure out how a baker’s wife would come by such a beautiful and expensive piece of jewelry.”
He gently rested the stone against my neck, then placed his arm around my waist as if it belonged there. He was silent for a long time, and I wondered if he’d gone back to sleep. “What are we going to do, Kate?”