GASPING FOR AIR, I SIT up in bed, my hand on my throat, my breath heaving from my chest, seconds passing eternally as I will my heart to calm. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe. Just breathe. Finally, I begin to calm and I scan the room, the heavy drapes that run throughout the family mansion that I grew up in casting it in shadows, while my mind casts the horror that woke me in its own form of darkness. Every image I think I can identify dodges and weaves, then fades just out of reach, like too many other things in my life right now.
Suddenly aware of the perpetual chill of the century-old property, a chill impossible to escape seeming to seep deep into my bones, I yank the blanket to my chin, the floral scent of the gardens that my mother loved, inescapably clinging to it, and to me. Glancing toward the heavy antique white nightstand to my right to find the clock: eight a.m., a new dawn long ago rising over the rolling mountaintops hugging this region to illuminate the miles and miles of vineyards surrounding us. It’s also the dawn of my thirtieth birthday, and really, why wouldn’t it start with a nightmare? I’m sleeping in my dead mother’s bed.
It’s an uncomfortable thought, but not an emotional one, a reality that makes me even more uncomfortable. When my father died just two years ago now, I’d cried until I could cry no more, and then did it again. And again. And again. But I’m not crying now. What is wrong with me? I didn’t even cry at the funeral, but I’d been certain that when alone, I would. Now, eight weeks later, there are still no tears. I had my problems with my mother, but it’s not like I don’t grieve for her. I do, but I grieved for her in life as well, and maybe I grieved too much then to grieve now. I just don’t know.
Rolling over, I flip on the light, then hit a remote that turns on the fireplace directly in front of my bed. Sitting up, I stare at the flames as it spurts and sputters to life, but I don’t find the answers I seek there, or anywhere in this room, as I’d hoped when I’d moved from the identical room down the hall to this one. I’d been certain that being here, in the middle of my mother’s personal space, the scent of the gardens she loved clinging to virtually everything, including me, would finally make the tears fall. But no. Days later, and I’m still not crying, I’m having nightmares. And whatever those nightmares are, they always make me wake up angry. So there it is. I do have a feeling I can name. Anger is one of them. I’m not quite sure what that anger is all about but right now, all I can hear is my mother shouting at me: You’re just like your father. An insult in her book, but there was no truth in it. I was never like my father. I always saw who, and what, she was, where he only saw the woman he’d loved for thirty years, the same amount of time I’ve been alive.
Throwing off the covers, I rotate, my feet settling on the stepstool that is a necessity to climb down from the bedframe. My gaze lands on Nick Rogers’ business card where I’d left it on the nightstand last night, after spending the minutes before sleep replaying every word, look, and touch with that man. Admitting to myself what I had not last night. He woke me up, and because of him, there is at least one other emotion I can feel: lust. If lust is really even considered an emotion, but whatever the case, there is no other word for what charged the air between myself and that man, for what I felt and saw in his eyes when he touched me, but lust. And the more I think about that meeting, the more I know that there wasn’t anything romantic or sweet about our connection. It was dark and jagged. The kind of attraction that’s unforgiving in its demands. The kind of attraction that’s all consuming, proven by the fact that, even now, hours after our encounter, I can still feel his hand on my arm, and the sizzle that had burned a path through my body. I can still feel the hum of my body that he, and he alone, created.
And while I cannot say if that man is my friend or my enemy, I know where this kind of collision course of dark, edgy lust leads. I’ve lived it and it is not a place you want to go with anyone that you don’t trust. I’m not sure it’s a place you can even find with someone you really do trust. I think it’s dark because it’s born out of something dark in one or both people, maybe that they bring out in each other. Which means it’s not a place anyone should travel, and yet, when you feel it, I know that you resist it. But you cannot deny it, or the person who creates it in you. It’s exactly why I am certain, that despite my rejection of Nick Rogers last night, that I’ll be seeing him again, which brings my mind back to one particular exchange we’d shared that keeps playing and replaying in my head.
“You’re still touching me,” I’d said and he’d replied with, “I’m holding onto that good luck.”
Logically, he was inferring that meeting me was good luck. He’d already stated that coming here to the winery was good luck. It was simple flirtatious banter. So why did it bother me then, and why does it bother me now? Chance meeting or not? The timing…the men…the dark lust. It never comes from a good place. Maybe I’m wrong about him. I have plenty of darkness of my own right now. Maybe my energy fed our energy together. But it doesn’t matter. He’s dangerous. He’s taboo.
He’s not going to touch me again.
My cellphone rings, and praying it’s not some crisis in the winery, I grab it and glance at the caller ID. At the sight of my attorney’s number, and with the knowledge that his office just opened, my heart races, and I answer the line. “Frank? Do you have news?”
“It’s Betty,” I hear. Betty, being Frank’s secretary. “Frank wants to know if you can be here at eleven?”
“Is there a problem?”
“He’s in court. He wants to see you and he said it had to be today. That’s all I know. Can you be here at eleven?”
“Can he see me sooner?” I ask, my nerves racketing up a notch at the “had to be today” comment.
“He’s in court.”
“Right. Eleven it is then.”
My phone rings again and glance at the unknown number, hitting decline. At least the bill collectors waited until sunrise today. Three seconds later, the ringing begins all over again, and this time it’s a San Francisco number. Repeating my prior action, I hit decline and this time I have the luxury of blocking the number. I don’t need to talk to the caller to know they want a piece of me that they can’t have, and yet another of my exchanges with Tiger comes back to me. I’d asked, “Does good luck bleed?” And his reply had been, “Many people will do anything for good luck, even bleed.”
Bleed.
Isn’t that what my father did? Bleed? And bleed some more?
And why do I feel like I’m bleeding right now?
And why does that thought remind me of Tiger?
I glance down at my balled fist and open it to discover I’ve crumpled his card into a ball in my hand.