Dangerously Happy (18 page)

“
I had no idea. I mean none. God, I didn’t even think you knew I was in the room half the time.”

“
Now you know why I’m so good at keeping our secret—much better than you, by the way,” he teased. “Years of practice.” His playful tone evaporated, and with a moving vulnerability that made me feel like I was falling more in love with him by the second, he said, “Why did you think I was so cautious with you when things started between us?” He laughed, but it was a fragile, almost wounded laughter. “You have no idea how desperately I wanted to kiss you that first night you let me touch you. To kiss you, to try to take you to bed. I can still hardly believe I had the resolve to send you away.” Another pained little laugh. “You made it so fucking hard, you sadist. ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me?’ I’d never let myself imagine that I’d ever have a chance like that with you. So I damn near killed myself trying not to ruin it. When I realized how that story I gave you to read was affecting you, know what my first thought was?”

“
What?”

“
That you’d hate me for it. That you’d be so embarrassed about getting a hard-on in front of me that you’d never come back to the loft.”

“
So you gave me an out.”

He grinned. “You noticed?”

“
The way you put words in my mouth, saying I didn’t like the story. And you got up, tried to leave me alone so I could escape with plausible deniability.”

“
And you called me back. Thank God. Because if you hadn’t, I’d never have dared.”

He kissed me. It was a deep, desperate kiss. Like kissing someone goodbye for the last time. After, he looked so sad it started to scare me.

“
When I think about it,” he said, “I still can’t believe you were so brave. I think all the time about how, if you hadn’t done that almost impossible thing, we never would have been together.”

We kissed for ages, cuddling and touching and looking at each other. At some point we both fell asleep, but in the middle of the night we woke up and made love again.

It was strange how little I knew about Dario's work, when he was so immersed in mine. But when I asked him why he didn't seem to be writing anymore, I found out he'd finished his second novel, and it was pretty much out of his hands now that it had been edited and was in the final phases before publication.

“
Now I'm in hibernation. I just lie around like a lazy dilettante, reading and musing until inspiration strikes again.”

It was true. I couldn't believe how much he read. Two books a week, at least. Real books. The kind I'd pick up because the author's name or the title rang a bell, and would abandon after ten pages because I was already lost. Joyce. Pynchon. Faulkner. García Márquez. Mann.

“
You didn't let me read it.” I was hurt. He was the first person I played each new song for.

“
Do you want to read it?”

“
Of course. I told you I loved your first novel.”

“
Wouldn't you rather wait for the hard copy? You don't want to read nine hundred pages on a computer screen.”

“
At this point, I guess I can wait,” I said, knowing I was behaving like a spoiled baby.

“
Love,” he stroked my back, drew me close. “I finished it while we were apart. Next time I write something, you'll be the first person I show it to.”

A few days later, Dario got an email, then told me someone was coming to the loft to interview him that afternoon.

“
I'm sorry it's going to cut into our Sunday. We had it arranged for a weekday, when you'd be at work, but her schedule got shuffled around.”

“
No worries. I'll just go run some errands, or something. You can text me when she's gone.”

He grinned. “You don't have to leave. Hang out upstairs and work, if you want. She'll never know you're here.”

“
You'll know I'm here.”

He laughed.

“
Won't that make you more nervous?” I asked.

He grinned, leaned in, brushed his lips over my neck, sending a cascade of chills from where his mouth was touching my skin, down the length of my body. Then he whispered, “Maybe. But I like it when you make me nervous.”

When the critic buzzed from the entrance, I retreated to the nest. I'd planned on putting my headphones on and working on a new composition, just to give Dario his privacy, but in the end I couldn't resist listening in. I wanted to hear what someone who knew something about literature would ask him about the new book. About the last book.

I knew he'd had good success with his first novel, that he'd made some best seller lists, that the critics were buzzing about him. But hearing the woman downstairs praising Dario's style, saying that Dario had Anthony Burgess's flair for language and the secretive nihilism of Cormac McCarthy, hearing her talk like Dario was the most exciting thing happening in literature, an unexpected swell of pride swallowed me.

For almost two hours they talked about Dario's writing, about the first novel, about the new novel, about Dario's favorite novelists and poets, about which works of fiction had influenced him. Then, little by little, she started asking him about his life, asking him what experiences had shaped him as a writer, what experiences he'd woven into his fiction. Then she asked him, “You're not married?”

And Dario said, “No.”

“
Do you have a significant other?”

Dario didn't answer her right away. I waited, not breathing. Finally he told her, “I don't like my personal life hashed over in the public forum.”

“
There are rumors,” she said. What the hell? Did she work for a literary magazine, or
People Magazine
?

“
If rumors interest you and the rest of the press, that's fine. But they don't interest me,” he said. God, I loved that about him. How he could sound so at ease even while fending off her intrusiveness.

“
There's a rumor,” she repeated, her voice hard-edged, now, almost aggressive the way people sound when they're intimidated, “that you're gay.”

My face flushed hot and I went rigid, as if I were about to jump into the middle of a fight.

I heard Dario laugh, then say, “That's not a juicy rumor. That's just a dull, established fact.” He said it softly, easily. No fight in his voice at all.

“
Do you have a partner?” she asked, her voice almost back to normal.

“
If we're done talking about literature, I'll have to excuse myself. I had to squeeze this interview into a busy day.”

I heard them get up and walk to the door. “Sorry about that,” she said. “The editor insisted.”

“
Never hurts to ask, right?” he said, sounding like his usual warm, assured self.

“
A friend from out of town is coming to stay for a few days,” he told me the next week. Since our reunion, I’d been way less jealous and insecure, and since our mutual confession of love I’d felt more sure of my relationship with Dario than I’d felt with anyone before him. But I confess his announcement sent a pang of possessive alarm through me.

“
So . . .” I admit I was on a fishing expedition. “I guess I should stay at my place while he’s here?”

Dario laughed. “That’s up to you. Either way, Vera sleeps on the couch.” Still grinning he kissed me, obviously wise to my jealousy relapse. “We don’t have to tell her about us if you don’t want to. She lives in New York, but since she’ll be staying here over the weekend, I suppose that even if we tell her we’re keeping this private she might accidentally give us away. She’s not a gossip, but her poker face is even worse than yours.” Another kiss. “But I hope the three of us can at least have dinner when she gets here on
Wednesday
. I think you’d like each other.”

Half an hour into dinner, Vera said, “How long have you two been together?”

“
Look who’s back in my life,” Dario teased, “little miss assumption.”

“
Please. The air in here is so polluted with love I can hardly breathe.”

“
Three weeks,” I said, and Dario looked at me so joyfully I felt like an absolute asshole for hiding our relationship for so long, because he’d obviously cared a lot more than he’d pretended.

Like a cartoon sleuth, she was looking piercingly at me, then Dario, and then at me again. “And, what, you guys have been ’hiding’ it all this time? And I say ’hiding’ in air quotes because anyone with one eye and half a brain would know immediately.”

“
We’re not telling people yet,” Dario said. “So when you meet our friends this weekend, you have to join the conspiracy.”

“
What did you guys do? Abandon your boyfriends to be together? Or are the boyfriends still around, wondering why you never want to fuck them anymore?”

“
I’ve never had a boyfriend before Dario,” I said.

She stared at me for a minute, then quietly said, “Aha.”

“
Cherish this moment,” Dario said. “Vera’s too stunned to speak.

“
You’re wrong, Dario. As usual. I’m too angry to speak. How dare you steal that one? He’s so fucking hot.”

“
I thought that was our job. Recruit all the beautiful, talented ones.”

“
Monsters,” she sneered. Then she fixed her green-eyed sleuth’s gaze on me and said, “So, you’ve switched teams? Or you’re making a special exception for our local laureate?”

“
Hey,” Dario interceded—for my benefit I’m sure—“you gave up the right to claim me and my literary prowess when you moved to New York.”

Suddenly Vera’s hand was on my thigh. Not in the middle, where Dario had put his hand that first time, but about an inch from my limp but suddenly alert cock, and those green eyes were probing mine. “Be honest. If Dario weren’t saturating all the cells of your thumping, swollen heart, would I have a shot at luring you to bed?”

I was used to Dario making me blush like an ingenue, but I’d be willing to swear an oath that that was the first time a woman had ever had that effect on me. Her lips—red as a retro starlet’s and the perfect compliment to her green eyes and black hair—spread wide in a huge smile that framed perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth that were maybe just slightly too small in proportion to those full lips. I looked at Dario, afraid, sure that in a moment of carelessness I’d undone all the joy that my declaration of being his lover had provoked, but he was looking at me with one of his easy smiles.

“
Knowing Aidan as I do,” Dario said, “you should take that as a yes.”

I confess that when Dario brought out the weed after dinner, I had some fleeting suspicions. Nothing concrete. But without shrugging them off, I got high too. I liked how Dario was with Vera. If he was always at ease and affable around the guys from the band and even when his loft was churning wall to wall with the crowd that came for the art and the music on the weekends, with Vera he was playful the way kids are playful. Utterly unselfconscious. Lighter than I’d ever seen him, except when we were alone.

In the end, despite the pot and all the flirting and innuendo that had come it its wake, Dario made up the couch for her, and he and I went upstairs to the bed. As we were mounting the stairs, though, Vera called up to us, “While you’re doing it, don’t be quiet for my sake. Be nice and loud so I have something to masturbate to.”

Vera couldn’t see that she’d made me blush again. But Dario did. He gave me one of his mischievous grins, pressed himself against me, fingertips sneaking under the hem of my shirt to feather over my abdomen, and purred in my ear, “Do you like that? The thought of her touching herself while she listens to us fucking?”