The Last Time I Saw Paris (8 page)

“Then why didn't you pursue it?”

He shrugged. “Fate dealt me another hand. There was no time left for dreams. Now, it's just a hobby and I guess I'll never get to Carrara to pick out that marble. But as they say, that's life.” He smiled at her. “And I'm a happy man.”

“I envy you.”

He looked steadily at her. “There's no need for you to envy anyone.”

Avoiding his eyes, she began busily to remove the dishes. He took her hand, stopped her. “We'll do that later,” he said. “Come, let's go for a walk along the beach.”

It was cool out and Lara buttoned her sweater as they strolled barefoot along the shoreline, with just a slender moon and the glimmering phosphorescence in the waves to light their way. She was so aware of Dan's shadowy bulk next to her, so aware of his scent, his nearness, that when he caught her hand in his, an electric trembling hit the pit of her belly and she could not look at him.

He turned her gently to face him, put his hand beneath the soft hair at the nape of her neck, pulling her closer. She heard her blood pounding through her veins as she succumbed to the lure of that other world where all that mattered was the way he made her feel. Sensual. Alive.
Female.

He was running his hands down her smooth back under the blue cardigan. “I can't get you out of my mind. I leave you here and I go home and think about you, wondering who you are,
what
you are.…”

This was so wrong, so against everything she was, she must be crazy.… She pulled abruptly away from him. “There's nothing to know.”

Dan put his hand on her shoulder, turned her back to him. “There you go again,” he said, exasperated.
“Why,
Lara? What's wrong? What happened to you?”

“I don't know.… No, that's not true, I do know.” Suddenly, she was telling him about Bill and Melissa, about how her life was falling apart. That for years she had been all these women for Bill: the young lover, the wife and helpmate, the mother. Now it had
all been taken away from her. And she was reduced to nothing. To no one.

Dan pulled her closer, stroked her back soothingly. “Bill made you feel worthless. He doesn't see you the way any other man would see you. The way
I
see you. How beautiful you are,
what
you are.” His hands were on her shoulders; he felt her trembling. He crushed her to him, her breasts pressed against his chest, their bellies touching.

Then there was nothing else in Lara's head but the way she felt at that moment. The heat of her, the need, the
urgency
to draw even closer. She wanted to breathe him, touch him, taste him.…

And she was boneless, floating in space somewhere as they sank together onto the cool sand. She felt the hardness of his workman's hand as he smoothed the contour of her cheek, ran a finger tenderly along the length of the bone, touched her brow softly. His mouth was on hers again, drinking her in, catching her every breath.

He was in control, unbuttoning, lifting her arms out of her shirt, laying her half naked against the pillowing sand. Moonlight pearlized her skin, tipped her breasts with lilac, silvered her parted lips, glimmered from her half-closed eyes. She was weightless in his arms, her inhibitions gone.

He slipped easily out of his clothes and he was as beautiful as she had imagined. Narrow-hipped, lithe, hard. Golden hair dappled his chest, and as he bent over her he smelled of sunshine and the sea wind.

He kissed her breasts, tasted her nipples, inhaled the scent of her, and Lara wrapped closer, twining her arms around his strong young neck as if afraid he might run away before she had had enough of him.

“Lovely woman,” Dan breathed in her ear. “Lovely
sweet woman, do you have any idea how beautiful you are? How sexy you smell, how hot you feel?”

Passion throbbed in her belly. His hands were stroking her so gently: the curve of her hips, the tangle of dark hair, the scented moistness of her. Then his tongue explored her, tasting her essence greedily. Rocketing her to the other side of paradise.

When she could bear it no longer, he lay over her, holding himself just inches away, looking into her eyes. “I want you so bad,” he whispered. “Tell me what you want, Lara.…” He sleeked his tongue in her ear.

Lara groaned, a heartfelt, honest-to-God from-the-gut groan. And she was lost. She was trapped by the odd limitations of erotic language. How else could she say,
Touch me here,
what other words were there for
Love me,
for
Give me your hand, your lips, hold me, kiss my mouth, oh, please, please.
. . . The poetry was in their bodies, not in their words, in what he was doing to her, and what, astonishingly, she was doing to him. She asked herself who was this woman. Could it really be her? Her cries were small and soft, inhibited by their newness to her. She was lost in the responses her body had never known it could make.

She reached down to touch him, felt him pulsate and the hardness that meant he wanted her as much as she wanted him. Boldly, she guided him into her, unwilling to wait a moment longer. But her cry was muted, as though she were afraid someone might hear, or that she herself might hear. She had never wanted to cry out before. Now, she wanted to yell, to dig her nails in, to grab and clutch, as the great breakers set the beach trembling beneath her.

Afterward, he lay on top of her, still trembling. Her outflung hands were captured in his; her body, slick
with sweat, was crushed beneath his, but she did not want to move. She wanted this moment to last forever. Because even if it never happened again between them, she knew she would never be the same.

As they emerged slowly into reality, the night air felt suddenly chilly. Dan sat her up and pushed her arms into the sleeves of her cardigan as though she were a little girl, fumbling with the tiny pearl buttons until she had to help him. He smoothed back her tumbled sandy hair then held her face in his two hands. “I'm not sure what love is,” he said softly, “but somehow I think I've found it.”

A shaft of pure happiness seemed to come from somewhere deep inside Lara as she bent her head, leaned into him. “I don't know what love is either,” she whispered. “All I know is I want what I have with you tonight.”

He pulled her to her feet, held her close, kissed her again. They were laughing as they shook sand out of their clothes. He helped her with her skirt, and she insisted on buttoning his jeans, running her hand over the gentle bulge that she now knew and for this moment called her own. She bent to kiss him through his jeans and he groaned. “Sweetheart, my love, don't or we'll never get back. And look, the tide is coming in.”

The ocean was racing toward them along with the barking dogs. He grabbed her hand and they ran, slipping and stumbling along the ever-narrowing stretch of beach, scrambling, disheveled and sandy and wet and smelling of sex and love and seaspray, up the wooden steps to the deck and into the house.

The phone was ringing.

Lara froze. She knew it was Bill.

Dan stared, astonished, at her as it shrilled on into
the silence. The wild, uninhibited sexy siren of the beach had disappeared. The color had drained from her face, and she seemed numb with fear. After a few more rings, it stopped, but the sound still echoed in the newly tense silence.

Lara turned to him, her eyes dark with panic. “What shall I do? What am I doing?” She ran toward the stairs, away from him, but he caught her arm.

“Why are you running from me?” he yelled, angry because she was afraid of what they had done. “Dammit, Lara, you only did what you wanted to do. Just the way your selfish, unfaithful husband did.”

“Oh, what do
you
know,” she cried, furious. “How can you
possibly
know what is between people who have been married for twenty-five years? How can you possibly
know
how I feel?”

She snatched herself away from him, eyes sparking anger. He stared at her, stunned into silence, betrayed by her guilt. Then he said quietly, “You're right.”

He picked up his sandy shoes and walked toward the door. “I'm sorry, Lara,” he said coldly. “But this is your call, not mine.”

Then he opened the door and, without looking back at her, he walked out of her life. And like a fool, she just stood there and let him go.

D
an did not show up for work the next afternoon and Lara paced the house, exhausted from a sleepless night, torn with guilt about what she had done—and remembering every detail of it.

Confused, she took Dex for a walk on the beach. When she reached the place where she and Dan had made love she looked for their imprint in the sand, but the tide had washed it away. The moment was gone forever.

When she returned it was already dark. There was no sign that Dan had been there, no note slipped under the door. She couldn't blame him. She had destroyed something beautiful and she would never see him again.

The phone rang and this time she leapt to answer it.

“I called last night but I guess you were out.” Bill sounded as though he was at the other end of the world, which, of course, he was. Crackle on the line hid the tremor in Lara's voice as she lied and said that she had gone to bed early with a headache and turned off the phone.

“How's it going?” Nervous, she twisted a strand of hair around her finger then let it unravel, waiting to hear him say he was never coming back.

He said, “It's going well.” There was silence, then he said, “Lara.”

“Yes?”

“When I get back there's something we have to talk about.”

His voice was low, kind of subdued, and Lara wondered if Melissa was standing next to him, urging him on.

“About Melissa Kenney?” She was astonished by how calm she sounded.

There was a stunned pause, then Bill said, “I didn't realize you knew.”

Don't you know, you fool, that after twenty-five years of being married to you, I know everything about you? Every thought, every move. I could
be
you, I know you so well.

She said, “I'm going on that trip to France alone.”

“Lara, I don't think you should do this. Not the French thing, not—”

“Not our Second Honeymoon?”

“Take a vacation, by all means. But go somewhere else. A cruise … Take one of the Girlfriends with you.”

A cruise,
she thought bitterly.
The divorcee's reward.

“I'm going alone, Bill,” she said coldly. “And I'm going to Paris. I'll talk to you when I get back.” And she hung up on him.

She slumped into a chair, trembling. Tears stung her eyes. The phone rang again a few seconds later. She willed herself not to answer. After a minute or two, it stopped.

That lonely silence that Lara knew so well settled over the house. Last night's ashes were dead in the grate, the candles had burned down, the flowers drooped. She leapt to her feet, ran upstairs, and quickly packed her bag. Her crumpled white skirt and
shirt lay on the floor of the closet. She picked up the shirt and held it to her face, seeking his scent, but there was nothing. She flung it into the laundry basket, grabbed her bag, called Dex, locked up the house, and put the top up on the white convertible.

She drove back to San Francisco, speeding along the darkened roads, hardly thinking about what she was doing. Only that she had to get away from here.

The big house in Pacific Heights where she had lived with Bill for so many years, where they had brought up their children, had a life together, seemed cold, alien, hostile as she wandered listlessly through it. What use was a family room with no family? No kids bickering and threatening each other with extinction; no mayhem, no tears, no laughter. No TV with loud cartoons, no boom box blasting, no teenagers devouring pizza and Cokes.

When the children had left, she had lost her job. And now Bill was gone. And so was her lover. In the space of a week, her life had been turned upside down.

“F
rom this point on it can only get better,” Susie said firmly.

The Girlfriends were sitting around the pine breakfast table in the kitchen of Susie's spacious ranch with its view of horses grazing in the meadow, drinking their fifth cup of coffee—with caffeine because Delia had said, “What the hell, today we need it.” They were having a “meeting.”

“Men suck.” Delia swallowed a handful of vitamins and washed them down with the caffeine.

“Especially Bill Lewis.” Susie stared at Lara, who was slumped over her blue coffee mug, elbows on the table, chin in her hands, no makeup, dark hair dragged back any-old-how, looking bleak and miserable. “That cheating bastard has put years on you in the space of a couple of weeks.”

“Must you go on this trip?” Vannie asked gently. “It's so full of memories for you, it will only hurt you more.”

“I haven't told you everything.” Lara stared into her coffee as though she had not even heard Vannie. “I met a man. I had sex with him on the beach the other night. It was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.”

There was a stunned silence; they looked at one another, then back at Lara.

She was talking like a woman in a dream. “I didn't
know it could be like that. It just took me over. I didn't know where I was,
who
I was. All I wanted was Dan and what he was doing to me, and what I was doing to him.”

The Girlfriends caught one another's eyes again, brows raised.

“It was all my fault.” Lara's voice quivered. “I knew what I was doing when I asked him to stay for supper. I knew I wanted him, even though I didn't admit it to myself. But it was there in my every move, from the candles and the wine to the white skirt and the gold sandals.”

“Slut!” Delia grinned admiringly.

“So when do we get to meet the lover?” Susie poured more coffee and brought out the chocolate cake. “It's an emergency,” she explained, as the others glanced skeptically at her. “Anyhow, it's only leftovers from the kids.”