Slow Dancing on Price's Pier (32 page)

 

 

Thea had dropped off Irina with Jonathan on Monday, and then she arrived early to wait for Garret. She'd gone down the Cliff Walk, where three and a half miles of Newport's most scenic ocean views had been forever reserved for a public walkway. The air smelled of wet rocks and brine, and the clouds were knotty, low, and dark. Thea pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders against the wind. Where she stood, the Walk was relatively isolated, but farther up or down the trail, the great mansions loomed over the ocean on their wide swaths of fading green grass.

She and Garret had met at these steps a hundred times before in what seemed like a different lifetime, and the steps had not changed. They marked the midway point of the Cliff Walk, and they led no farther than a platform halfway down the rock face, where she stood waiting. Below her, the waves were lapping the shore, and she was struck by the contrast of the hard rock and the soft, sloshing water. But she knew not to be fooled by appearances: in the game of the ages, the soft ocean waves would prove more unyielding and merciless than the rocks that sat so solidly on the shore.

She heard Garret's footsteps on the stairs behind her as he walked down to the landing where tourists regularly snapped pictures of the cliffs and water views.

“Hi,” she said, suspicious of herself for the little buzz that shot through her when she saw him. He was dressed in work clothes, the rumpled and slouchy folds of a suit that had been worn over the course of a long day. No man had a right to look as handsome as he did when he was so obviously tired.

“Thea.”

“Are you okay? Do you want to meet some other time?”

“No, I'm fine. It's just been a long day.”

The wind caught her, chilly and slicing, and she reached into her pocket for a band to pull back her hair. Strands jumped out of her fingers, uncatchable as they swept across her face. She felt Garret watching her as she forced her ponytail under control. “Do you want to walk?”

He nodded, somber.

They scaled the stairs, then moved down the walkway that was so well known to them. There must have been a point, Thea thought, when they'd discovered parts of this path, when it had been new. But now she was familiar with every slab of concrete, every set of stairs, every rock, and she could not remember a time when the path felt unfamiliar. Garret, she thought, was much the same. It seemed the missing years had done nothing to dull their intimacy; what time had created was only a facade of separation—a painting of the horizon, the illusion of distance held as close as her own hands.

“I was thinking about what you said,” she began.

“I say a lot of things. What thing in particular are we talking about?”

Thea knew he wanted her to say it. But she didn't trust herself to. “About how you think you feel about me . . .”

“Right. How I think I feel.”

“We haven't properly talked about what happened. I think that if we got it out in the open, it might get easier for us, going forward.”

When he sighed, it was such a big gesture that she could see it, almost feel it. “I shouldn't have said that to you.”

“Do you want to take it back?”

“I didn't say I regret it. I just said I shouldn't have done it. Two different things.”

They strolled slowly along the walk, and when the path narrowed they trailed one behind the other, until hard-packed red earth gave way to a wider concrete walkway. The waves crashed along the shoreline, spraying their faces with cold and salt.

“So it's attraction that we're dealing with,” she said.

“We? As in both of us?”

She didn't look at him. “It's perfectly logical that there's still something physical between us. We'd thought we would be so good together, and then . . .”

“We weren't,” he said. “I know. I was there too.”

“What I mean is, it's like there's something unresolved. An open door that needs closing. I get that. That's all I mean.”

They walked a few more steps. Ahead of them, the path dipped into a small, brown stone tunnel—perhaps built as some millionaire's concession to keep the Cliff Walk open to the public but to keep the public from making an appearance in his yard. Thea walked slowly, dragging her feet, hardly noticing she was walking at all.

“I'm sorry it wasn't good, your first time,” Garret said. “You deserved better than that.”

Thea shrugged. “I'm sorry I didn't know as much as you did. Maybe if I had it would have been better.”

Garret stopped, and Thea too paused to look up at him. When he spoke again, there was something bemused and vulnerable in his eyes. “Thea . . . that time with you . . . it was my first.”

“What? But you told me . . .”

“I lied.”

Thea briefly closed her eyes. “You were a virgin too.”

“Yes,” he said.

When she looked at him again, his face had colored slightly; even now, it seemed hard for him to admit that he hadn't known what he was doing. For all these years, she'd believed that Garret had lots of experience with sex before he'd started dating her. She'd believed he had known the right way to make love to a virgin—if there was such a thing—but that he hadn't given her that courtesy. That he'd been as inexperienced as she was turned that whole pivotal moment of her life on its head.

“But . . . why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I was an insecure eighteen-year-old. I didn't want you to know. It was just . . .” He ran a hand through his hair. “You had all these huge expectations. It was like you'd built me up into this kind of hero, and I just . . . I didn't know how to live up to that. I wanted to, though. You have no idea how much I wanted to . . .”

“I'm sorry you felt like you had to lie.”

“Thea.” He touched her arm, fingers cupped gently around her elbow, and when he looked at her again, his face was focused and intense. “I can do better.”

All at once, she was overwhelmed by the bigness of the afternoon, the glowering sky, the salt spray whipping in the breeze, and Garret—standing next to her, promising her once again that he was the hero he so badly wanted to be. “You're talking about sex.”

He pulled her gently just inside the edge of the pedestrian tunnel, where the earth was soft under their feet. The rough-cut stones of a long barrel arch smelled of damp and moss, and the temperature dropped as if they'd stepped into an icebox.

“Haven't you ever wondered?” he asked. He touched her cheek. “What might have happened if we'd tried again?”

Heat snaked through her, years of compressed desire loosening, a fire unspooling within. She tried to fight it—to smother the fire that grew hotter and bigger—but his eyes wouldn't let her go, his fingertip burned her skin when he brushed her cheekbone, and she ached to her core for him, the memory of his weight, his hands, his mouth arresting her as if it was only yesterday that he'd touched her and she'd cried his name. “Yes,” she said, swallowing hard, willing her voice to sound even. “I wondered. In the past.”

“You still wonder,” he said, his thumb skimming her bottom lip, pulling it slightly open. “And so do I.”

And then he was kissing her. Not the kiss of a young man but the type of kiss he was made for—a kiss that was a dark question, a cord of heat cinching tight, a flagrant intent. And she remembered, everything at once coming back, the nights on the floor of her bedroom, the pinch of her hip bones against the floor, his seeking fingers in her mouth, her hair. Her heart caught in her throat as she wrapped her arms around his neck, dragging him closer. He tipped her head to the side, and the kiss slid deeper, into a hotter, more fearsome place—familiar and entirely new.

“Wait.” She pulled away. Her breath faltered. “Are you kissing me because you think you have to prove something? Or is this more?”

“How can you even ask me that?” And when he kissed her again, her whole body went flush with heat. His hands were everywhere, traveling her back, tugging her hips tight against his, brushing her breast. He backed her against the wall, lifted her knee until their hips ground together, until agony and pleasure were indistinguishable, and Thea had never in her whole life felt such powerful hatred for her clothes. His kiss dragged her deeper, pulled her down, but it was a pathway leading nowhere. They were long past the days of making out—when a rushed and ill-planned collision could satisfy without leading to more. Eventually he must have felt it. He pulled away.

“This wasn't supposed to be about sex,” she said, though her body screamed
liar
.

“What is it about?”

“It's about closure. About moving on.”

He let her go. She felt the loss instantly, as if she'd been abruptly set back on the earth though her feet had never left the ground. “Some part of me will always wonder what might have happened if you hadn't married my brother . . .”

“And some part of me will always wonder what might have happened if you hadn't stopped talking to me when I needed to know that everything was okay . . .”

“I've said I'm sorry for it.”

She crossed her arms. “This . . . whatever this is . . . it's just leftover energy that's been building out of proportion. That's all.”

“How do you know it's leftover? How do we know it's not new?”

“I guess I don't know,” she said. “If things had ended differently, more completely, we might not be feeling like this.”

“Maybe,” Garret said, and there was something pained yet resolute in his voice. “But either way, we can fix it.”

“How?”

He walked away from her, out of the tunnel. She followed him, and he stood looking out over the bay, the whitecaps slicing the rough blue denim of the waves. He ran a hand through his hair, took a deep breath. When he turned to face her again, his expression was distraught.

“I hadn't planned to say this. I
shouldn't
say it.”

“What?”

“How is it that I can argue before some of the most intimidating and powerful politicians on the East Coast without breaking a sweat, but
you
drive me half out of my mind?” She saw the moment he resolved to touch her again. He took her hand. “Thea. Sleep with me.”

She stepped away. “You don't mean that.”

“I know it's insane. But I don't know how else to get you out of my system.”

She leaned her hands against the wet stones of the tunnel's outer wall. What if . . . what if he was right? What if sleeping with him once might be what she needed to end this terrible feeling that she'd faced since the day Garret had shown up back in her life?

“I think of you all the time,” he said. “You keep me up at night. You make everything I eat taste like cardboard. I've imagined it—a hundred different times—what it would be like to touch you again. I don't know if sleeping with you is the best solution, but at the moment it's the only one I've got.”

She said nothing, stunned and frightened to hear his confession—to encounter a desire that she'd once held so sacred here before her again.

“Look.” He shifted his stance; frustration gathered around him like the first crackling electricity of a summer storm. “I'm not saying we should . . . see each other. I'm just saying . . .”

“I know what you're saying,” she said. She pulled her hand away.

She'd meant only to talk with him today, to find closure. She'd meant for them to have a long stroll, deep conversation, and she'd pictured them laughing and shaking their heads afterward, arms linked, two old friends who'd found stasis at last.

But what she'd collided with instead was this: the force of her own desire and his, stronger now than it once had been. His suggestion appalled her—the idea of a quick screw. It was cheap, demeaning. Morally, she wanted to recoil. But physically, her body railed against her, heat fanned by the promise of a long-awaited—final—release.

“No,” she said. What was she thinking—considering his offer even for a second? It was all wrong. “There's a thousand reasons we shouldn't even be talking to each other, let alone talking about sleeping together.”

“I'm asking you for this,” he said, stepping closer to her. “Once. Just once, and then we'll never talk about it again.”

She looked him in the eye. “And what about Jonathan?”

“I don't want to do anything to jeopardize my relationship with him,” he said, pulling up straight. “If we get this out of our systems, once and for all, the whole family will be better for it. Maybe you and I can start seeing each other without it feeling weird for everyone. It doesn't have to be a big deal.”

She shook off his hand. “We're going to have to find another way. I'm not sleeping with you. Not now or ever again.”

He nodded, and she noticed he wasn't breathing. For a moment, they stood quietly. Out on the water, seagulls sat on the surface of the waves, bobbing like buoys. The clouds tumbled over one another, shades of dark and light.

“You're probably right,” Garret said. “We shouldn't see each other again in private. It hurts more than it helps.”

“And we definitely shouldn't sleep together,” she said, her mind racing with images so vivid she already knew the friction of his palms gliding over bare skin.

“Yes,” he said. He leaned down, kissed her. His mouth was warm, sweet, and not enough. “But let me know if you change your mind.”

Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked farther down the path, leaving Thea to stand alone, her brain reeling and the ocean battering the shoreline, wearing the rocks down.