It Happened One Night (2 page)

The woman smelled of tiger lilies, sweet but musky. He curled around her, pressed his face into the hollow of her shoulder.
Sheets slid along sheets. Skin along skin. Her hair floated like moonlight through his fingers, and he kissed her: throat,
sternum, navel, and down.

Of course Eli knew he was dreaming.

He was dozing lightly, awake enough to know he was asleep. This woman—he
knew
her. How many times had he dreamed of the turn of her wrist, the cinch of her waist, the sweet, hot secrets of her body?
When he woke from her, he never sighed and stretched and told himself
God, what a great dream
. Instead, she’d always left him twisted up and sweating and a little disoriented, as if he’d gone to sleep on one side of
the room but woke up on the other.

A faint click in the darkness pricked his consciousness.

He turned his face into the couch pillow, not ready to wake. The woman, she was making little sounds in the back of her throat,
driving him mad.

The door opened and shut—
slammed
—and his eyes blinked open. Gray flickering light from the television pooled in the dark room. His body felt tight and gnarled.
Where was he?
Oh, right
. Lana’s living room. Her birthday. He was waiting for her to come home.

He could feel that his cheeks were crimson, that the hair at the nape of his neck was damp with sweat, and he hoped his overheated
body would go back to normal by the time Lana got around to turning on the light. He took a deep breath, gathering his thoughts
and strength.

Over the last eight months, he’d imagined a hundred different ways that he could tell her his life-changing news. Sometimes
he would hold her hand and say, “I have something to tell you.” Sometimes he would confront her, take her by the shoulders
and say, “Enough is enough.” Sometimes he would tell her without saying anything at all—just by reaching out to her with his
gaze, by touching her face, by calling on the language that men and women had been using to say
I love you
since before civilization invented words.

But now, struck by how normal—how unromantic and entirely typical—it was for him to be dozing off on her couch, he felt suddenly
nervous. In eight months away from her, the longing that he’d thought was merely homesickness had turned out to be nothing
less astonishing than love—knotted up, terrifying, low-down, miraculous
love
.

And now the emotion choked him. He didn’t want to complicate their friendship and he didn’t want to risk being humiliated
if she rejected him—again. But there was no choice. He loved her. He had to tell her. All of his hope for the future dangled
from the fragile possibility that perhaps, deep down, she loved him too.

He took a deep breath, trying to shake the dream of her body from his waking mind. He waited for her to turn on the light.
Which would happen any second now…

Any second…

He waited. But no light came.

Only breathing. Then more. The metallic thump of car keys hitting the floor. A dropped purse. A zipper. And that—Eli knew
that sound too—a faint whimper, choked by a kiss.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Lana had come home. But not alone.

Not alone.

He heard a low chuckle, a man’s. He dropped his head back down on the pillow, too stunned to think. The man gave a low carnal
growl. And rage made Eli’s head throb and spin, a wire pulling tighter and tighter between his temples.

At last, after they’d stayed in the living room so long that he worried they wouldn’t leave, he heard Lana’s bedroom door
swing closed. The sound was a nail driven into his heart. He had a quick vision of himself kicking down the door and ordering
the man to get out. But he had no interest in histrionics that might make him look like an ass. He was already enough of a
fool—to regress into misplaced love.

Slowly, quietly, he got to his feet, groping in the semidarkness for his jeans, sliding them over his hips and buttoning the
fly, and then searching cautiously for his messenger bag. He didn’t bother putting on his shoes; his feet would make less
noise without them. His only saving grace was that no one would see him like this, sneaking out of his best friend’s house.
That was an embarrassment he could easily live without.

He was searching for the button on the remote that would turn off the television when he heard a door open and footsteps growing
near.

“Lana,” he said softly. Even before he could see her, he knew the sound of her bare feet in the hallway and the whisper of
her fingertips as she dragged them along the wall.

She jumped when she saw him. In the flickering light from the television, he saw her spine go steel-straight, and he heard
the sharp intake of her breath. “It’s me,” he said quickly, holding out his hands. “It’s Eli.”

She pressed her palm to her chest. “Eli! What are you doing here?”

“What am I…?” He was taken aback by the need to make an excuse to see her. “I got back to town early. I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Of
course
I’m pleased. I’m thrilled! The timing’s a little… uh…” Her voice trailed off. He could feel her looking at him. His heart
was breaking, and he was glad she couldn’t see him in the dark. “How was the trip?”

“Good,” he said casually. “Yesterday I went to a kegger at the Museum of Natural History. Some undergrad showed Neil deGrasse
Tyson her butt.”

“And people say astrophysicists are stuffy,” she said, laughing.

Warmth and gladness rushed over him. “It’s good to see you,” he said. He saw the moment she relaxed, the subtle loosening
of her shoulders, her hand falling from its place over her heart. In the shadows the white of her sundress glowed luminescent
against the light from the television. Her hair, shoulder-length and cut bluntly at the bottom, shone platinum like the moon.

“It’s good to see you too.” She glanced toward the flickering light from her old, boxy television. “I wondered how I could
have left the TV on all night. Glad to know I’m not losing my mind.”

“I fell asleep on the couch. I came to… to give you a present.”

“What is it?” she whispered, her eyes glittery with delight. She looked like she might hug him. But of course she would not.

“Hold on.” He went to his bag and rummaged around until he found her gift. It was a small box wrapped in recycled brown paper
and tied with a polka-dot shoelace. Simple, earthy, and a little silly. Just like Lana.

His hand brushed hers as she took the box, a contact so brief and slight it was barely contact at all, but she snatched her
arm back as if she’d been burned. He acted like he didn’t notice.

“Open it,” Eli said.

She did. The shoelace wound around her index finger as she untied the bow, and the brown paper opened like a fortune cookie.
A small purple box was inside, its hinges creaking as she lifted the lid and saw a large pendant hung from a black leather
thong. It caught the bluish light of the television and gleamed.

“Oh, my… Is it…?”

Eli took out the pendant and laid it on his palm. The gnarly black stone seemed liquid in the shadows, otherworldly and vaguely
powerful. “It’s from the Sikhote-Alin’ Mountains. A fall in Russia, 1947. It reminded me of you.”

“You got this on the trip when you stayed with those old KGB guys?”

“Yeah. The ones with the pet goat…”

She snatched the pendant back from him. She hung it around her neck and covered it with her hand. “I love it. It’s perfect.
Thank you.”

For a moment Eli could only look into her eyes, rapt. She was beautiful, any man could see that. But it was more than beauty
that held him so tightly he couldn’t look away. It was
her
. Lana. The sheer rightness of standing here with her after so long. He wanted to draw her to him and hold her. To tell her
how glad he was to see her again. How he’d spent the past three days in a kind of giddy haze because he knew he’d be home
soon. How he’d realized something that made his heart want to leap and cower at the same time.

But there was no way to tell her. Not in words.

He knew he was staring. He saw her face change, tenderness slipping into a quiet disbelief, as if she’d heard what he was
thinking and didn’t know what to make of it. They were standing so close that he could smell her floral perfume, and beneath
that, the scent of her warm skin. She ran her hands up the sides of her naked arms as if to fight a chill, and the soft brushing
sound was amplified to excruciating loudness in his mind.

“Lana…” Eli could only stare, grappling with the urge to kiss her. He wanted his hands on her face, in her hair. He leaned
toward her, a fraction of an inch. If they’d been standing across the room from each other, the exact same gesture would have
meant nothing. But this close, where smell and sound were so heightened, his small, almost imperceptible movement caused shock
to flash across her face, as if he’d told her he wanted to make love on the floor.

She laughed a little nervously, stepped back, and frowned.

“Lana?” A man’s voice cut through the moment, breaking the connection between them, and Lana’s gaze darted down the darkened
hallway, panic showing on her face. Quickly, she reached out and flipped on the overhead light, blinding both of them. By
the time Lana’s date came into the room, Eli had grabbed his bag and was heading toward the door.

“What’s going on?” the man said.

Eli paused, caught. Anger and humiliation gripped his gut.

Lana cleared her throat. “Ron, this is Eli. Eli, Ron. Eli just stopped by to give me my birthday present.”

“Right, I’ve heard a lot about you,” Ron said, smiling. His white dress shirt hung open like the flaps of a tent, and his
hair fell to his shoulders in dusty brown corkscrews. He was tall and thick, and he had a strong nose with a bump at the bridge.
On the surface his smile appeared genuine. But Eli could see what Lana could not—the subtle, private menace that passed between
men in moments like this, when a beautiful woman stood exactly between them. “You’re the meteor hunter. Crazy hobby you’ve
got.”

“Actually, it’s
meteorites
. And it’s a job, not a hobby.”

“But I thought you were a teacher,” Ron said.

“That too.” Eli adjusted the weight of the bag on his shoulder. “And what do you do?”

“Mountain biker. Professional.”

“Ah,” Eli said. “I should probably go.”

Lana crossed the room to stand before him. Her eyes were clear blue—almost aqua—and he didn’t miss the message within them,
meant only for him:
I’m sorry
.

He blew her off. The last thing he needed was her pity. From the look on her face, she hadn’t felt that spark, that buzzing
of attraction that was more than simple lust. What an idiot he was. “All right. Well, I’m outta here,” he said cheerfully,
pulling at the door handle. “You two kids behave yourselves.”

“Won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” Ron said.

Eli didn’t smile.
Poor guy
, he thought to himself.
Poor, stupid guy
. He gave it two months—three tops—before Lana got bored.

“Happy birthday, Lana.”

She glanced down, suddenly shy. Then he closed the door, closed them in and away, and looked up at the stars, which were the
same stars they’d always been, the same stars he’d been studying for his entire adult life. Only tonight they seemed much,
much farther away.

Twenty minutes after she’d closed up the Barn for the night, Karin Palson reached her house in the quiet outer suburbs of
Burlington. She opened the front door of her split-level and walked up the carpeted stairs to the living room. The small television
was dark on its stand and the lampshades were filled with shadows. Apparently her husband was working late at the insurance
office again. The plastic shopping bag in her hand, containing just one small book, felt heavy enough to pull her arm from
its socket.

She sat down on the couch, not taking off her denim jacket, not removing her purse from her shoulder, not turning on a light.
She dropped the bag beside her. The house was as empty and dark as her heart.

Karin had never been the type to put any stock in folklore. The idea that her menstrual cycles followed the pattern of the
moon was a lovely idea, but as far as she could tell, it was bunk. When a woman from her book club said she’d conceived a
son by having her husband wear socks while they did it doggie-style, Karin just laughed. And when Lana proclaimed that the
reason Karin couldn’t get pregnant was because she “wanted it too badly,” she thought her sister was well-intentioned, but
utterly wrong.

And yet for all her distrust of old wives’ tales and rumors, she kept listening. She listened to her doctors, other women,
books, and the Internet. She was familiar with every technique and method of family planning: the calendar-rhythm method,
the standard days method, the sympto-thermal method, the Billings ovulation method. So many methodical methods. Enough to
drive a woman insane. She hoped that if she just kept listening, listening hard to everything, not missing a single bit of
information, then she would find the answer she was looking for.

Unfortunately, while she was lying under the furious white lights in the exam room and trying not to shiver, her doctor told
her the bad news. She wasn’t necessarily infertile, but she wasn’t necessarily fertile either.

In other words, he had no idea what was wrong. Technically everything checked out fine. From the way he’d stuttered and frowned,
Karin could tell he’d felt pressured to come up with a pinpoint diagnosis, a reason for their broken hearts. There was a chance,
he’d explained, that Karin and her husband were two perfectly healthy and fertile people, as unique individuals. But together
their bodies might not be a compatible match.

This was the answer Karin had been dreading. Science had put a man on the moon, had developed “food” that had no calories,
and had discovered a vaccine for cervical cancer. But in the most primal and important process of human life, they just didn’t
know enough to tell her what exactly was wrong or how to fix it.