Kiss River (26 page)

“Oh, God,” Gina said. “How terrible.”

He was glad of the falling darkness, glad the emotion in his face would not be that visible to her.

“A couple of months later,” he said, “I was cleaning up the files on her laptop computer and I came across an e-mail she’d written to a friend in Texas the day she left. She talked about how much she didn’t want to go, how much she hated putting herself
and Raven through it all. How she knew she would have nightmares afterward. But that she was glad she could do it for me, because…” He felt his voice starting to break and took in a deep breath. “Because she was so proud of me and so glad that I was finally getting the recognition I deserved.”

“She didn’t say anything in the e-mail to her friend about being pregnant?” Gina asked.

He shook his head. “She must have just found out. I know why she didn’t tell me. She knew if she did, I would have stopped her from going to Florida in my place, and I’d miss out on being on the Discovery Channel.”

“And you would have done that, wouldn’t you? Gone in her place.”

“Yes!” he said. He would give anything to have that chance all over again. To do things right this time. He was not a monster. He squeezed his eyes shut as Fiona’s words about the baby came back to him. “I can’t believe I was going to be a father.”

“Is that something you wanted?”

He nodded. “We both did. We’d been trying, actually, but it just wasn’t happening.” His voice caught in the back of his throat.

Gina turned to wrap her arms around him, and the gesture unleashed something in him and he began to cry. She rocked him ever so gently, half mother, half friend, one hundred percent confidante. After a while, he lifted his head from her shoulder and she loosened her grip on him. Only then did he see the tears in her own eyes.

He smiled, touching his fingers to her wet cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

She smiled back. “It’s all right,” she said.

“No one knows that I sent Terri in my place,” he said. “Except you. And I didn’t mean to dump it all on you.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m glad you did.”

“Let’s go down,” he said, standing. He held his hand out to her to help her up.

Carefully, silently, they made their way down the spiral staircase, then across the yard. At the door to the house, Gina touched his arm.

“Terri was wrong about one thing,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“You can, too, talk about your feelings.”

G
ina sat cross-legged on her bed in her robe, the Barbie doll in her hand. She’d opened both her windows wider, but still, the steamy heat of the night was barely broken by the ocean breeze. For once, she was not thinking about Rani or the lens. Out there on the lighthouse stairs, for just a moment, she had forgotten about her own pain and been caught up by Clay’s. He’d lost his wife, his child. His future. The anguish in his voice was still with her. Hard to believe his wife had said he was unfeeling. She’d had him all wrong.

For the first time in years, she wanted to hold a man, to wrap her body around his. She wanted to awaken in the safety of his arms, a safety she had once imagined but never truly known and had given up on ever experiencing. In the room down the hall, she thought she might find it. She might find comfort, and she might be able to give it back.

Standing up, she tightened the belt of her robe over her T-shirt and opened the door to her room. The hallway was dark and silent, except for the ever-present whisper of ocean waves in the
distance.
Courage,
she said to herself, taking a step forward.
The worst he can do is tell you to leave. You’ve had worse done to you before.

She moved quietly down the hall, then knocked softly on Clay’s door, not wanting Lacey to hear.

“Yes?”

“It’s Gina, Clay,” she said. “May I come in?”

He didn’t answer immediately, and she bit her lip, waiting.

“Yes,” he said.

She opened the door. The room was dark except for the rectangle of moonlight falling across his bed, and she could see that he was sitting up, bare-chested, leaning against the tall, wrought-iron headboard. He was covered only by a sheet, a light summer quilt folded at the foot of the bed. Sasha padded toward her to nestle his head beneath the curve of her palm.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

Now that she was here, she felt embarrassed and awkward, inspired by one contemplative moment in her room that he had not been a part of. Maybe she had misunderstood what had happened on the lighthouse stairs. Maybe she’d mistaken his need for confession for a real intimacy between them. But now she was here. She just needed to blurt it out and take the consequences.

“I was wondering if I could get in bed with you?” she asked, her fingers deep in Sasha’s fur.

He looked up at her, the moonlight playing in his pale eyes and on his lips. She saw the slightest hint of a smile there, and after a moment, he pulled back his sheet.

“Get in,” he said, reaching for her hand.

She took his hand and slid beneath the sheet, and when she wrapped an arm across his chest and breathed in the salty scent of his skin, she started to cry. For what, exactly, she could not have said.

He wrapped both his arms around her then, holding her the way she had held him earlier on the lighthouse stairs. She felt him stroke her hair, kiss her head.

“It’s all right,” he said, although he could not have known the source of her tears. “It’s all right.”

After a while, he drew away from her, gazing into her eyes. Lowering his lips to hers, he kissed her.

They moved deeper into the bed, and lying next to her, he tugged on the sash of her robe to open it, then reached inside to find her still well clothed in her nighttime T-shirt and shorts.

He laughed, pushing her away from him a bit to get a better look. “What do you have on here?” he asked, running his hand over the T-shirt where it covered her ribs.

“It’s not too elegant, sorry,” she said, giggling. “I didn’t know I was going to be doing this tonight.”

He lifted his hand slowly, then smoothed his fingers over the side of her breast through the shirt, one small touch that made her hungry for more. “I can tell this is the final layer, though,” he said. His thumb grazed her nipple so softly it might have been a mistake, and she sucked in her breath. “Nothing under here but you,” he said. “And you feel so good.” He leaned over to kiss her again, one kiss that went on and on, and she felt her body open up to him.

It had been months for him, years for her. She had not known she would ever want this again, but she did. She’d forgotten how it felt to be undressed slowly by someone else, to be touched delicately, intimately, to be suckled by a lover who made her remember how connected her lips and her breasts, her neck and her earlobes all were to that place low in her belly that wanted him inside her. How could she have thought she would never want this again?

Once he
was
inside her, he moved slowly, saying her name, and she wrapped her arms tightly around his shoulders, loving the closeness. Loving
him.

There was no mistaking it when he came. Her husband had come so quietly that she was sometimes not sure, but Clay groaned loudly with release, his body rigid above hers. When he lay on top of her again, he was careful to keep his full weight from crushing her, and her eyes filled once more with sudden, unexpected tears.

They lay that way for a while without speaking. Then he rolled onto his side, his arm and leg still circling her, as if he was not quite ready to let her go. Lifting his head to look down at her, he ran his fingertip over her lips. “You didn’t get a chance to come,” he said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t hold off any longer.”

She laughed quietly. “I’m glad you didn’t, or you would have been holding off for a long, long time,” she said. “It’s not that easy for me. I’ve never come that way.” The words embarrassed her, but it seemed a night for honesty.

“Ah,” he said. “You should have told me.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It was wonderful anyway. Being close to you was all I wanted.”

“Maybe so,” he said, “but it’s not all you’re getting.”

He kissed her gently, then moved down the bed until his head was between her legs. The first touch of his tongue made her catch her breath. The only man who had ever done this to her had been her husband, and then only a couple times. It took her “way too long,” he had complained, and the more he complained, of course, the longer it took. But it didn’t take her long tonight. Clay’s mouth was magic.

Afterward, they lay together holding each other tightly, and his silence began to worry her. She knew it was possible to do things in the heat of passion that you would regret the moment that heat became lukewarm.

“Don’t feel guilty about this, Clay,” she said, her hand on his chest. “Please don’t. I don’t want you to feel—”

He leaned away from her and pressed two fingers to her lips. “I’m okay,” he said. “Actually—” he gave a slight laugh “—I feel pretty good. I like how you were able to tell me what you needed.”

She returned his smile, then snuggled up against him again. If this was a night for honesty, she had far more to tell him. Even so, she knew she would be leaving things out.

“You told me so much tonight out on the lighthouse,” she said. “Now I’d like to tell you about me. Something I’ve been keeping from you. From everyone.”

He smoothed her hair away from her damp forehead. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”

She pressed her lips to his shoulder. Where to begin?

“My mother,” she said, “was adopted.”

“Is that another reason you’re interested in adopting a child?” he asked.

“Only in a small way,” she said. “My mother was adopted as
an infant, practically a newborn, and she was the only child of a couple who lived here in North Carolina.”

“North Carolina?” he asked in surprise.

“Yes. Raleigh, I think. Anyhow, my mother didn’t remember much about
her
adoptive mother because she died when my mother was very young. But her father was…not abusive, really, but I guess he sort of fell apart after his wife died. He moved them to Bellingham, for some reason I don’t know. I guess he got a job there. I don’t remember the sort of work he did, but it was a blue-collar job. He was an alcoholic and he gambled away his earnings. Although he himself wasn’t abusive, some of his gambling buddies were, and he didn’t do anything to protect my mother from them.” She lifted her head to look at Clay, whose eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. “Are you following this?” she asked.

“Completely.”

“Well, her father ignored her for the most part,” she said, her head on his shoulder again. “He said she was in the way. So when my mother was seventeen, she got married to her high-school sweetheart, mostly to escape life with her father. But he was a drinker, too. That was all she knew, I guess. He wanted kids, and she had a couple of miscarriages, so he got fed up with her and divorced her.” She was beginning to feel the old anger toward the entire masculine sex creeping in again, and she hugged Clay tighter.

“Then she was on her own for a few years,” she continued, “working as a custodian in an elementary school, when she met a guy named Damon. They moved in together and she got pregnant and had me. They never married. Damon, who I don’t remember at all, felt trapped by her and a baby, at least according to my mother. He took off when I was a year old, and he was killed when I was three in a motorcycle accident.”

“I’m sorry,” Clay said.

She shrugged away the sympathy. “My mother was wonderful,” she said. “She took the place of two parents. She was still a custodian as I was growing up, in the same elementary school I went to, and the kids loved her. I never felt embarrassed that she was just a custodian. I didn’t know any different, really. She was warm and friendly and funny. We lived in an apartment
building that people would probably describe as seedy, but inside our apartment it was always clean and pretty. My mother would get fabric remnants and make nice curtains and things.”

Gina took her hand from Clay’s chest for a moment to hug herself. God, she missed her mother!

“You chilly?” Clay asked.

“No,” she said, but she pulled herself closer to him. “My mom spent most of her time and energy on me. She never got married or really had a boyfriend after my father. She’d given up on men by the time I was in school.”

“Understandably,” Clay said.

“Right,” Gina concurred. “So it was the two of us against the world, or at least that’s how it felt. We were each other’s best friends. And we were the only family either of us had. She pushed me in school. She didn’t want me to end up like she did. She was so proud of me for becoming a teacher.”

Clay was quiet, but she felt certain he was listening.

“I, um…I ended up marrying a guy I met in college,” she said. “His name was Bruce, and he was wonderful, or so I thought. Even my mother, the man-hater, liked him. I trusted him completely. I was dying to start a family. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Family. I only had my mom, ever. That’s one reason why I want Rani so badly. I’d like to think I’m going through with the adoption just to help her, but it’s for me, too. I want her.

“We planned everything out, my husband and I. We decided to wait until we were thirty, when we’d be established in our careers and have some money put away. But then my mom got sick. That was two years ago. She was diagnosed with breast cancer that had already spread to her lungs. I knew she was dying.”

Clay held her tighter and she pressed her lips to his neck. She could hear Sasha’s gentle snoring in the corner of the room. “My husband and I talked about having her move in with us so we could take care of her. There were no other relatives, and I didn’t want her to go into a nursing home. She was only fifty-seven. My husband was totally supportive of the idea. I thought I was so lucky to have found him. Then one day, one of my friends told me that she knew Bruce was having an affair with one of
her
friends, a woman I didn’t know.”

“Oh, shit,” Clay said. “There’s your problem with infidelity.”

“Right. The woman had told my friend what a terrible wife I was, how I’d brought my mother to live with us and everything. She’d said, ‘What twenty-eight-year-old man wants to live with his mother-in-law?’ But Bruce had never told me that it bothered him, so how could I know? That’s one reason why I admire you so much, Clay. The way you look after Henry.”

Clay squeezed her hand where it rested on his chest.

“I felt like I was hearing about some other man when she told me all this about Bruce. It was so hard to imagine him having an affair to begin with, and saying that sort of thing was just so out of character. But it all turned out to be true.” She remembered something else Bruce’s lover had told her friend, something she couldn’t share with Clay because the pain was still too great. The woman had said that Gina had never had an orgasm with Bruce, that she’d made him feel like “less of a man.”

“So,” she continued, “I confronted Bruce, and he said that he no longer loved me, but he hadn’t known how to tell me that. He said the affair had been going on since the week after our wedding.”

“Oh, Gina,” Clay said.

“We split up, and that’s when I decided I would be better off without a man in my life.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” he said.

“It got worse, though. It turned out that Bruce had bought all this stuff I didn’t know about. He’d bought the other woman jewelry, taken her on expensive vacations when I thought he was out of town on business, et cetera, et cetera. And half that debt became mine when we split up. I lost all my savings. I managed to pay off the debt before I applied to adopt Rani, but it left me broke.”