Warren Lane Read online

  “You got me all wound up,” said Will.

  “It’s not hard to do,” said Ella.

  “I like you,” Will said.

  “Mmm. I like you too.” She plucked a hair from his chest.

  “Ow! What was that for?”

  “For letting your guard down.”

  She turned onto her stomach and propped herself on her elbows. “Will. You said the other night you like a woman’s body. Every part of her body.” She rolled onto her back and said, “Show me what you like.”

  Will sat up and looked at her.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Take your time, and show me all the things you like.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I got what I wanted. Now it’s your turn.”

  This comment, more than anything she had done or said, caught him off guard. He thought he had just gotten what he wanted. He thought that was his turn. Who was playing whom in this little game?

  Did it matter? She had invited him in for more.

  Chapter 2

  That was how the affair began, and Will thought it would end there in Miami. But she told him she would be in Los Angeles the following month for a series of photo shoots. Will lived in Santa Barbara and had plenty of excuses to travel to LA, where his company maintained an office, a warehouse, and a showroom.

  He told her to rent a car and pick a nice hotel. “Put it on your card, and I’ll pay the bill.”

  When he first saw her in LA, he was struck again by the brightness of her presence. Her clear eyes, clear skin, clear voice, her openness and her ready smile brought youth and light into his day. But she was on her way down, he could tell. In bed, she was wild in a way that none of his prostitutes could fake, as if she were willing to destroy herself all at once, in a single act.

  If he had had soul enough to care for her, he would have been alarmed. He would have tried to help. But he was having too much fun, and he didn’t expect his young prize to be around much longer. LA had plenty of men with eyes out for women like her.

  The last time they were together in the hotel in Los Angeles, she looked tired and worn, and she kept sniffling. After sex, they watched TV in the hotel bed while she held on to him. He looked at all her shopping bags full of new clothing and tried to calculate in his head how much it would cost him to pay off that credit card bill. He made a guess and divided the figure by the number of times they had sex. She was cheaper than some of his call girls.

  When he got up to leave, she said, “Please don’t go.”

  “I’m spent for today,” he said. “I couldn’t go again if I wanted to.”

  “I don’t mean that. I just mean... we could order in some food. I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to be alone.” Her eyes were a little bloodshot and red around the rims.

  She’s not as pretty when she looks sick, Will thought. I don’t like her when she looks like that. He started to put on his clothes.

  “I haven’t slept in two days,” she said. “I’m fucking up, Will. I have to get out of LA.”

  “I have a house in Goleta,” he said as put on his shirt. The house was one of the secrets he kept from his wife. He stored some valuable furniture there, and kept the place handy for dalliances when he couldn’t get out of town. “If you need a retreat, you’re welcome to it.”

  “Send me the address,” she said.

  He didn’t think she’d take him up on it, but she called him on her way up from LA a few days later. He met her in front of the house, and she wouldn’t get out of the little convertible Mustang she had rented, so he got in and they talked.

  In LA, she said, she was doing a lot of cocaine. “I just... I just hooked up with the wrong people.” Her eyes kept drooping as if she might nod off. “I wouldn’t touch it in New York, because I hate what it does to people. It brings out the worst in everyone. Even me. I start acting like my sister. I can’t go back there.”

  Will gave her the key to the house. He left her alone, and she spent much of the next three days sleeping. When he stopped by the house on the fourth day, she was just returning from a run. Her glow and her smile were back.

  In the kitchen, she reminded him that he’d promised to pay her credit card bill. “I’ll pay it,” he said.

  She hesitated then said, “I have three cards.”

  “OK,” Will said.

  “Two of them are maxed out. And I’m down to, like, two hundred bucks on the third. Do you think you can pay one of them?”

  “Send me the bills,” Will said. “I’ll pay them.”

  He didn’t ask for sex that day. He wanted to give her another day to recover. As he drove back to his office, he thought, I’ll wait a while before I pay those bills. If she’s really down to two hundred bucks, she can’t go anywhere.

  After a couple of days, Ella understood he was stalling. She thought her generosity in bed might inspire him to pay, but it only made him want to keep her around longer. By her seventh day in the house, she resented him and felt trapped. She had enough gas in the car to get back to LA, but things there would be worse. Her job was gone. She had missed four days of shooting and hadn’t returned her agent’s calls. The only thing waiting for her in LA was her troubled group of friends and their cocaine.

  Her eighth day in the house was the first day of summer. She called her sister and asked her to buy a plane ticket back to New York.

  “Why can’t you buy it yourself?” her sister asked.

  “Because, Anna, I just don’t have any money right now.”

  “Oh, God, what the hell did you do?” Anna asked. “Did you get yourself fired?”

  “I... I don’t know. I kind of drifted away. I started seeing this guy in LA. His friends were all, like... They were a mess. None of them ever slept.”

  “So you’re in LA?”

  “Goleta, actually.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  Ella was silent.

  “Well?” her sister demanded. “Are you going to answer?”

  “I’m sorry,” is all Ella could say.

  “So you’re seeing some guy in Goleta? Are you pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  “No.”

  Her sister let out a long sigh. “I can’t tell you how much it pisses me off to see all the ways you fuck up.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Ella said. “I know, OK? I know I fucked up. Will you help me?”

  Her sister sighed again, as if to rub it in. “OK. Santa Barbara to New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any particular day?”

  “As soon as you can.”

  “OK,” said Anna. “I’ll call you back.”

  Anna called back later that afternoon. “I got you on an afternoon flight in three days.”

  “Thank you,” Ella said. “Thank you.”

  “You’ll have to find your own way from the airport.”

  “Thank you,” Ella said again.

  “You owe me,” said Anna.

  “I know.”

  Once again, her spirit was light. Will noticed it immediately when he visited that afternoon. He found her irresistible when she was bright and happy, and he couldn’t wait to have sex with her. At first she demurred. She was done with him and wanted to be polite about it.

  But he was persistent and so blinded by desire he couldn’t see how far apart they were in their feelings for each other. Finally, she agreed. She would express in this one final act all her hatred for him. Her contempt for him only grew when she saw how excited he was. He trembled, as he had that first time in Miami.

  She pushed him down angrily, leaning against his throat as she climbed on top. She gave free reign to her hatred, and in doing so, she tapped into a deep well of frustration with her life and herself. It flowed out freely and unc
ontrollably. She was aggressive, rough, rude, and abusive. The act of love looked like an act of violence. Will found this a tremendous turn-on, and to her surprise, so did she.

  All she could think about after he left was how she wanted to do it again, and this scared her. She was physically and emotionally wide open, ready to receive the person who would cross her path in just a few days. The one she might otherwise have turned away from.

  Chapter 3

  Susan Moore stood in her bedroom wearing only a bra and underpants on that first shining day of summer. Her dark-brown hair, still damp from the shower, fell just past her shoulders. Her sharp, dark eyes instantly conveyed a commanding intelligence. Her chest and hips were full and soft, the flesh bulging just slightly around the top of her underwear and the side straps of her bra. Outside the window of the high-ceilinged room, down the hill, past the palms and the terra cotta rooftops of Santa Barbara, a tiny white sail glided silently across the glistening Pacific.

  On her way to the closet, Susan stopped and picked up the wedding photo from the dresser. She and Will were thinner then. She remembered the moment the photo was taken, and how genuinely she meant that smile.

  Will had found her at just the right time in her life; or perhaps, as she now thought, just the wrong time. Fifteen years ago, in the weeks before her parents’ accident, she was waiting tables at The Evening Star in Los Angeles. Will had seen her there before, but he felt no particular interest in her until she waited on him. When she approached his table that evening, he thought, Ah, the unsmiling one. She was quiet and introverted, and had the placid, slightly distant expression of a daydreamer.

  When she introduced herself and described the day’s specials, she stood with her shoulders square to him, looking directly into his face with an open, unguarded expression. Behind her eyes was a deep sea of feeling and imagination. Part of her was somewhere else. The dark, lively eyes and the direct simplicity of her manner drew him in like a whispering voice. When she spoke, he felt as if they were the only two people in the room.

  Throughout the meal, Will watched her come and go among the tables. Her face occasionally showed hints of emotion that had nothing to do with what was going on around her. She’s responding to her thoughts, Will realized. And there’s a lot going on in there.

  When she waited on him again two weeks later, it was clear she didn’t remember him. He tried without success to engage her in conversation, then watched with jealousy as a huge smile spread across her face in response to a little whisper from the bartender.

  Her face still bore a trace of that smile when she brought his check a minute later. The sight of her so far removed from his feelings of envy and desire filled him with a sense of hopelessness. She asked if everything was OK.

  “Oh. Yeah. Everything was fine,” he said, though she could see it wasn’t.

  He signed the check, adding a generous tip, and then got up to leave. Two steps from the table, he felt a touch on his shoulder, and turned to see her looking up at him with an expression of gratitude.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The powerful swelling he felt in his chest in response to this recognition was as disconcerting as it was uplifting. His heart was not the organ that normally responded to women.

  A few days later, she left LA and returned to San Diego to care for her parents, who had barely survived a collision on the freeway. She didn’t show up for the beginning of her graduate program, and when she failed to return the university’s calls, she forfeited her scholarship and the future she had planned.

  When her father left the hospital with a cane, his mouth hung slightly open. The words that had once come easily to the avid reader and bookstore owner now eluded him, and he had trouble making sense of simple newspaper articles. In the middle of a sentence, he would sometimes stop abruptly, searching silently for the next word before giving up in frustration and dismay. Over time, he talked less and less.

  Her mother, who bore the brunt of the impact, was in and out of the hospital for eight months before pneumonia finally took her. Susan was at her bedside with her father when he pointed to the oxygen tubes in her nose and said with unusual clarity, “Don’t let me go like that.”

  Those words unnerved her. Where was he going? He was all she had left. But after losing his words and his books and his wife, he found less and less to draw him out of bed each day. Susan knew he was giving up, but she couldn’t bring herself to admit it. Gentle as he was, he was the model of strength in her life. If death took him by force, there was no shame in that. But if he gave in willingly, why should anyone continue? He died less than a month after her mother.

  She never quite got over the abandonment and betrayal she felt at his death. Mentally and emotionally, she felt as if she had been stripped down to nothing, and she would have to rebuild her life and herself from the ground up. But she had no ground to build on, except the wound of her loss.

  And so, as an oyster builds a pearl around the irritating grain of sand, she wrapped layer upon layer of defenses around her wound. Over the years, a strong mind, a quiet pride, emotional depth and a natural reserve gave the pearl its luster, and men and women alike admired her. Now, at forty, she was just reaching the peak of her beauty. A younger face could not express the depth of her character.

  She didn’t remember meeting Will at the restaurant. In her telling of the story, she first saw him in LA a little more than a year after her parents’ death. She watched from the window of a coffee shop as two men argued over a parking space. It looked like the larger man was going to hit the smaller one when Will strolled casually into the scene and said something she couldn’t hear.

  The big man replied to Will with some menacing words, and the little one took the opportunity to get away. Will stood his ground and kept talking, in a casual, almost playful way, and gradually the big man relaxed. In a minute, they were joking with each other.

  When Susan returned to the bookstore where she worked, she replayed the scene in her mind, trying to fill in the words she couldn’t hear. In those days, she had a vague, persistent fear that some new disaster was always just around the corner. The little scene in front of the coffee shop impressed her because Will had intentionally walked into a dangerous situation and then took control of it. She kept asking herself, How can a person approach the world that way? But she couldn’t answer that question.

  Two weeks later, Will walked into the bookstore. She recognized him right away, and watched from the register as he browsed the business section. Her curiosity overcame her shyness, drawing her silently forward until she stood beside him.

  When he turned to find the eyes from The Evening Star looking up at him, the expression of surprise on his face caused her to say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

  She wondered as his look of surprise melted into recognition: Do you know me?

  “Can I help you find something?” she asked.

  He had already found the book he came for, and he watched her quietly as she rang up the purchase. She kept her eyes on the register and didn’t look up at him until the sale was complete, although she could tell he was admiring her. As she folded the top of the paper bag and handed it to him, she finally raised her eyes to his and looked at him with the same open, unselfconscious expression that had enchanted him twice before.

  Her eyes took in everything, feeding the mind that churned visibly beneath, and he could not help falling into them as they studied him. But her face showed nothing of what she felt. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t find the words.

  Then she startled him with a simple question. “Are you going to ask me out?”

  If she had asked this with a smile, with a hint of excitement or annoyance, he could have gauged his chances right away. But she asked it as a simple matter-of-fact inquiry, as if she just wanted to know, Am I reading you right?

  “Because if you are,
” she said at last, “I’ll say yes.” Her brow softened. The flesh on her cheeks moved upward almost imperceptibly as the hint of a smile appeared on her lips. Beguiled by these little changes that transformed her, he struggled at first to speak, and then stammered, “Would you like... Would you like to go to dinner?”

  She answered softly, “Yes.”

  At dinner that night, she asked him about the incident in front of the coffee shop. Will didn’t remember it until she fed him some details.

  “Oh, that,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “I don’t know what that guy’s problem was.”

  “Why did you get involved?” Susan asked.

  “I thought he was going to put his fist through that little guy’s face.”

  “So you volunteered your own face? You don’t mind getting hit?”

  “Oh, no,” Will said. “I do mind getting hit.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I asked him if it was really worth getting that upset over a parking space. He kind of looked at me and sized me up, like he was wondering if he should hit me. I could see he didn’t really want to take on someone his own size.

  “He was wearing a Clippers shirt, so I said, ‘You know, the real reason you’re so pissed off is because you’re a Clippers fan, and they suck.’ He didn’t know quite what to make of that. He said, ‘Are you a Lakers fan?’

  “I said, ‘Not really. But if you’re going to pick a loser, why not shoot the moon and go with Golden State?’”

  When Susan asked him to explain, Will said, “The Warriors lost sixty-five games this year. They finished dead last in the NBA. Anyway, he thought that was funny, and he started to loosen up.”

  “And you kept talking to him,” Susan said.

  “Yeah,” Will shrugged. “He started getting friendly. Whenever I see an opportunity to bring someone over to my side, I take it. Maybe I’ll never see him again, but I know there’s one more person in the world who bears me goodwill.”