Leaving Haven (12 page)

A thrill went through her at his words, a feeling of excitement in the pit of her stomach that sent a surge of electricity through her body, her heart, her mouth. She opened her mouth and almost expected sparks to fly out, like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. At the same time, she said, “No. Oh, no, no, no.”

“You don't have to tell me no,” John said. He sat back with a sigh and rested against the passenger-side door, so they were as far apart as possible in the confines of Alice's tiny Fiat. “All I think about, day and night, is no. I've told myself no a million times. But it doesn't change anything.”

“Well, then I'll tell you no,” Alice said. She sat up straighter. “I'm married. You're married. Georgia is my best friend. She's your wife and the mother of your child,
and
there is absolutely
no way
anything is going to happen between us.” She felt better even as she said it, more in control.

“Oh, darlin',” John said, turning those eyes on her again, full of affection and even pity. “It already has.”

A
ND
THEN
THE
momentum of it all carried her forward, a glissade down an icy slope. For a few days she didn't return his texts or phone calls. She tried to keep busy, meeting with students and doing research and looking for extra opportunities to volunteer at Wren's school. She took Wren to the mall. She made love with Duncan. But none of it erased the image of John's eyes on hers, the sound of his voice saying, “Oh, darlin.' ”

He texted her on the following Tuesday:
One last talk? Meet me in Old Town, by the restaurant. We can walk by the river.

She went. And when she saw him standing there on the sidewalk, his hands stuffed in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, the wind from the river ruffling his hair, she was overwhelmed with yearning. It wasn't even a yearning for John as much as a desire to be desired, to have someone want her
that much
.

He didn't say anything when she walked up, just looked at her with those eyes full of sorrow and wanting, and she hugged him and then he kissed her, and then they walked and walked, and when he led her into Hotel Monaco and pushed the button for the elevator without even stopping at the front desk she understood that this was something he had wanted and planned, and still she followed him.

And then they were in the hotel room kissing, and his tongue parted her lips and met her tongue, and she felt her body swell and flush. He ran his hands lightly over her waist and down to her hips, pulling her toward him so she could feel his hardness pressing against her stomach, and then he unbuttoned her blouse and his hands were inside her bra, his thumbs caressing her nipples as he cupped her breasts, his mouth warm against her collarbone. He slid his hand behind her back and fumbled with the hook on her bra, finally unfastened it, and slid her shirt off and her bra off. She shivered.

“God, you're beautiful,” he said.

He bent his mouth to her nipple and began to trace his tongue around it in circles. His other hand caressed her other nipple, and then he pushed her breasts together and moved his tongue back and forth from one nipple to the other. The sensation shot straight down through her and she heard herself pleading
Please. Oh. Please.
Then they were on the bed and her skirt was up around her hips, and the smooth skin of his chest was pressed against her breasts and he was kissing her ears, her jaw, her neck—devouring her, really—while she moaned in a most un-Alice-like way. And even then it didn't feel like cheating, not until the moment she felt him enter her.

At that instant, her eyes widened in surprise and she thought:
Duncan and I are broken now.
And with that thought she felt tears rise in her throat and turned her face to the wall, away from him.

“Hey.”

John stopped moving and held still, his weight pressing against her, his unfamiliar hardness still inside her. “Alice.”

She turned her face back to him, and he saw the tears in her eyes.

“You want me to stop?”

“Yes.
No
. I don't know.”

He withdrew, and lay on top of her, holding her. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I thought—”

“This isn't me,” she said. “I can't do it.”

John rolled off her, and lay next to her on his back. “Okay,” he said. “We won't do it.”

She felt both relieved and oddly empty. This connection she had shared with John over these last few months had filled a hole in her she hadn't even known was there. And now that she was aware of the hole's existence, she would be forever conscious of its presence, a great, gaping emptiness that would never leave her.

“I can't go back,” she said, thinking out loud.

John rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow to look at her. “Yes, you can. Just give yourself half an hour to calm down and pull yourself together.”

Alice shook her head. “I don't mean I can't go home. I mean I don't know how to go back to being who I was before you and I—before we—”

“We haven't done anything, Alice, not really,” John said. “Don't take yourself so seriously.”

“Oh, please. We're in a hotel room together.
In bed
. Don't whitewash it.”

Alice detested this kind of murky morality, the same kind of placid attitude toward right and wrong her mother had always had. “Listen, honey,” her mother used to say, when Alice would point out that while it might indeed be fine to date three different men at once, she should at least let them
know
about each other, “when you get older you'll figure out things aren't so black-and-white. You've gotta learn to live with a whole lot of shades of gray.” “Maybe
you
do,” Alice would say, “but
I
don't.”

John reached over and traced a gentle line down her chest with his finger, from just beneath her collarbone to her navel, and moved his finger in slow circles around her navel. She shivered. “Please,” she said. “Don't.”

“Sorry.” John pulled back his hand. “God, you have a magnificent body.”

“
John.
” She reached down and pulled her skirt down, and crossed her arms over her chest, covering herself.

“Hey.” He reached over to brush a lock of hair from her forehead. “Alice. I wasn't looking for this, and I didn't expect it. It's a gift.”

“It's not,” she said. “It's a poison apple.”

He smiled. “You have an answer for everything, don't you?”

“Obviously not,” she said. “Or I wouldn't be here.”

They were both silent. She thought of her mother, who had moved—yet again—three weeks ago. She thought of Duncan, of the way he raised one eyebrow when he was surprised or dismayed, of his long silences, of the careful, cautious way he did everything, including making love to her.

John's eyes searched her face and she reached up and put her hand against his cheek.
She could not go back.

So she went forward. She drew her fingers down the side of his face, down his neck, ran her fingertips lightly over his collarbone, the curl of dark hair on his chest. He leaned forward, their faces almost touching, and she was breathless, panting, with fear and excitement. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him on top of her, closed her eyes and pressed her mouth against his. She slid her hands down his back to his hips, pulled him inside her. He moved inside her slowly, finding a rhythm, then with more urgency, and the rhythm of her body met his own. Her senses were sharpened by the strangeness of it all, the way he moved inside her, the unfamiliar feel of his skin, his face. He held her face between his hands and stared into her eyes the whole time. She looked back into those dark, dark eyes—brown disappearing into black—even as she came, back arched toward the ceiling, her legs taut around his hips.

Afterward, she felt ashamed, confused, guilty—and yet,
full
. She, so careful in all things, had never imagined she would be overwhelmed by passion. What she had done was awful—the worst thing she could imagine, really. It had turned her understanding of herself inside out, as though her very skin were on backward. She realized that the weakness she had always disdained in others, despised in her mother—was hers, too, part of
her
. And with it came an unexpected sense of connection, a strange empathy with the human race.

When he called the next day, she didn't answer. She didn't answer the next ten times he called, either. The eleventh time, she flipped open her phone and said, “I can't talk to you,” and hung up.

He texted her one word:
Alice.

She thought of her mother. She thought of her straight-A record: not one B from first grade through that final semester of her master's program. She thought of Georgia. She thought of the PTA, the League of Women Voters, and the million other volunteer duties she fulfilled with such efficiency. She thought of Wren. She thought of herself twenty years from now, fifty-four and still careful and safe and responsible, faking a smile (and more) as Duncan brought out his damn feather. She thought of the way John had looked into her eyes when he made love to her, as though all the things going on between their bodies were just a small part of the union of who they were, their selves.

She picked up her cell phone, brought up John's number, typed a one-word text message to him and pushed “send” before she had time to change her mind.

YES
, it said.

8

Georgia

A Year Earlier, May–June 2011

T
he day after Chessy announced her pregnancy, Georgia didn't get out of bed, at least not right away. She lay on her side in the half-light, gazing at the stack of books on her bedside table, which included
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
(for her book club),
Keep Calm and Carry On
(a gift from Liza last Christmas), a cookbook called
Butter Sugar Flour Eggs,
Dorie Greenspan's
Baking with Julia,
and some American Girl book on feelings she'd been meaning to read so she'd have a better understanding of what was going on with Liza these days. She hadn't opened any of them except the two cookbooks, because whenever she got in bed to read she was too tired to think about anything more demanding than pound cake.

Georgia rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. John, who had gotten home at 2:00
A
.
M
., was flat on his back, face to the ceiling, deep in sleep.
Chessy is pregnant!
The thought had raced through Georgia's mind all night. Chessy couldn't be an egg donor for at least a year now, by which time Georgia would be forty-one, up against the absolute edge of her ability to bear a child. Georgia hadn't realized how hope had grown in her, unfurling like a moonflower into a sweet, white bloom. She felt the loss of that hope now. Then there was the whole idea of
Chessy
as a mother. Georgia could hardly wrap her mind around it. She was thrilled; she was jealous. The baby she had pictured in her mind for so long—a baby with John's heavy-lidded eyes and her own small nose, had morphed over these last few weeks into a baby with Chessy's wide-set eyes and John's fine, straight nose, and now had morphed again into Chessy herself as a baby, with a round face and a head covered with dark ringlets. Georgia hadn't slept all night, considering these various babies, worrying how Chessy would afford the baby, whether or not Ezra was a decent man who would be a good father, grieving the baby she had begun to believe she herself might have.

So Georgia did what she always did when she was upset. First, she rolled over onto her side and wriggled up against John, wrapping an arm around his waist and burying her face in his neck, breathing in the scent of him. John always came home smelling of garlic, something she found warm and comforting.

He shook her arm away. “I need to sleep,” he murmured.

“I'm just snuggling,” she said.

“It's not even daylight.”

“It's after seven. I had a bad night's sleep.”

“I'm sorry, but I didn't get to bed until three and I need
my
sleep. Can you at least move back over to your side?”

Georgia sighed, rolled away from her husband, and got out of bed. Then she did the second thing she did when she got upset. She went into the kitchen to bake.

She mixed up a batch of Belgian waffles, separating the eggs and whipping the whites into stiff peaks before folding them into the batter to make the waffles extra light and crispy. She sliced fresh strawberries, and warmed the maple syrup. As she worked she tried to figure out what she would do if she didn't have a second child; Liza would be gone in five short years.

She thought, when she had turned to John on her fortieth birthday and said, “I'm done,” that she had
meant
it. They had been on the back porch at dusk, watching the fireflies flicker outside the screen. The very scent of the air, thick and humid and loamy, had castigated her with its fecundity, reminded her why she was ready to give up. She was tired of the constant refrain that ran through her head:
Why is Polly so fertile, and I'm not? Why can that woman in the blue coat have a baby and I can't? Why can cats and dogs reproduce and not me?
Enough.