By Blood Written (21 page)

“I’ve got an appointment with a broker Thursday morning. She’s got about six places for me to look at, including a house on Hudson Street.”

“Hudson Street?” Taylor asked, surprised. Hudson Street was prime Greenwich Village real estate. Very few co-ops ever came up for sale in that area, let alone a whole house.

“Great location. Very pricey, though.”

“More than I ever thought I’d be able to spend. But hey, who’s counting?”

“Wow, the Village. You’ll love living there, but it’s going to be an adjust—”

“I want you,” Michael interrupted.

“What?”

“I want you. Right now, this minute. I want to be inside you, as far as I can be. I want my mouth on you, my hands on you.”

Taylor felt her skin flush as a wave of energy went through her. “Yeah?” she whispered. “And then what would you do?”

“I’d roll you over onto your back and hold your legs up in the air and I’d pull almost all the way out of you, almost, and just stay there for a few seconds. And then I’d pull you onto me as hard as I could.”

Taylor moaned. “I miss you,” she said quietly, hoping no one else was listening in on line three.

“I miss you, too,” he said. “This’s driving me nuts. Will you wait up for me?”

“I think I can stay awake that long.”

“And when I get there, can we have a glass of wine and snuggle up on the couch for just a bit, just enough time to decompress, maybe? Talk, catch up …”

“Sure, I’d like that.”

“And then can we just go to bed and fuck our brains out?”

Taylor gasped. She’d never before been with a man who so freely and spontaneously and so naturally used the F-word.

Most of her other lovers, if they referred to the sex act by name at all, talked about “making love” and “being together” or some other new-age, sensitive-guy euphemism.

She had never talked about sex this way before with a lover.

There was something deliciously naughty about it.

“Only,” she whispered, “if you do me really hard.”

“Oh,” Michael laughed, “you keep talking like that, we might not make it to the bed.”

“And that would be a problem?”

“Not for me,” he said. There was a moment’s silence. “I really do miss you.”

“Me, too.”

“What’s the weather like over there?”

“Oh, God,” Taylor snapped. “Now we’re going to switch to the weather?”

“No, I’m asking for a reason.”

“Okay, you got it. It’s dark and gray and cold and icy. The wind’s picked up. They say it might snow. And how about Cleveland?”

“This is the Lake Erie snow belt in early March, baby. Use your imagination.”

“I’d prefer to save my imagination for other things. So why were you asking?”

“You packed?”

“Oh, that. Haven’t even started. But we don’t leave until Saturday morning.”

“Well, you just walk outside in the sleet and the cold and imagine yourself on a beach, the two of us alone, lying on the hot sand practically naked.”

“I won’t spend too much time on that one, as I have a lot more work to do today.”

“Clear everything with Joan?”

“Well,” Taylor answered, drawing the word out, “I don’t think she was real happy with my being gone for the whole week. But now that I’m representing a guy who’s probably going to have five books on The List at one time before it’s all over, I’ve got a little more juice than I used to.”

“That’s right,” Michael said. “You just tell her your star client insists on taking you to Bonaire for an entire seven days of sun, diving, and incredible sex, not necessarily in that order.”

Taylor groaned. She had never before thought of herself as—she could barely bring herself to say the word—
horny
, but ever since she and Michael got together, she thought about sex and needs and drives more than she ever had.

“You’ve got to stop talking that way,” she said breathily.

“You know how much I miss you.”

“If it’s anywhere near as much as I miss you, then we’re going to fry the entire northeastern power grid. It’ll be the next great blackout.”

“Will you please, please,
please
hurry home?”

“As fast as I can, my darling. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“Yeah,” Taylor said. “Yeah, you will.”

Michael hung up, and Taylor sat there for a moment holding the phone. She stared out the grimy window of her office to the top floor of the discount camera store across the street. Below her, the Manhattan street noises—taxis honking, brakes squealing, loud voices yelling in a hundred different languages, the squall of far-off sirens—seemed muted now, as if there were a fog between her and the rest of the world.

She had never felt this way before. She had been in love and she had been in lust, but never both at the same time. Her stomach knotted and her face flushed as she relived some of the past times in bed with Michael. She tightened her hips as she felt herself getting wet. He was the best lover she’d ever had, by far, and he had brought out something in her that she didn’t even know was there. Something deep within her had been freed, and she wondered just how wild and scary and crazy this was all going to get before it was over.

Four days later almost to the hour, Taylor gripped the armrest of her window seat on the starboard side of the ancient twin-engine DeHavilland Otter and squeezed until her knuckles turned white. Next to her, in the aisle seat, Michael sat calmly reading a book as the plane went into what felt like about an eighty-degree bank. Their side of the plane was on the downside of the turn, and Taylor, her throat tight and dry, squatted down to look out the tiny window.

All she saw was blue, the deepest blue she’d ever seen before.
Water
, she thought, wondering what it would feel like to drown.

And then it came into view, the green and browns of Bonaire, the next island over from Aruba just off the coast of Venezuela. The flight from JFK to Aruba had been on board a 757, a huge, comfortable, and what felt like rock-solid safe jet. When they had disembarked at the Aruba airport and the male flight attendant had smiled and pointed toward the DeHavilland Otter, Taylor had felt the blood drain out of her face.

“Oh no,” she whispered, grabbing Michael’s arm. “Not that. They’re not actually going to fly over water in that thing.”

Michael smiled, patted her arm. “It’ll be fine. It’s only about a twenty-minute flight.”

“Can that stay up for twenty minutes?”

But it had, and as the pilot lowered the flaps and set the plane up for final approach, Taylor felt herself relaxing even as her stomach rolled with the rapid loss of altitude. The plane was coming in awfully fast, she thought, but then before she knew it, the plane bumped the runway and began slowing. As they slowed to a stop in front of the single building that served as the Bonaire airport terminal, Taylor read the sign that said, WELCOME TO FLAMINGO AIRPORT.

“Okay,” she muttered. “Anyplace that calls its airport the Flamingo is going to be all right.”

The twenty or so tourists, most of them clearly divers, climbed down off the plane and were whisked through customs. The Bonaire economy was built on tourism, and everywhere, it seemed, the island was geared to make visitors comfortable. Taylor and Michael stood in line for a cab, and barely a half hour later were checked into their bungalow at the Divi Flamingo, staring out a window arm-in-arm as the sun fell slowly into the Caribbean.

“It’s stunning,” she said.

“Seven hours ago, we were freezing our asses off trying to get a cab in a snowstorm,” Michael offered.

“Hard to believe. It really is a different world, isn’t it?”

Michael turned and pointed toward the bottle of iced-down Roederer Cristal he’d arranged to be in their room when they arrived. “Thirsty?”

Taylor smiled. “Kind of early, isn’t it? It’s barely five.”

Michael walked over to the ice bucket and pulled the bottle out. “Hey, we’re on vacation. Besides, we’ve got a couple of hours before our dinner reservation.”

“Where are we eating tonight, kind sir?”

“Ah,” Michael said, gently pulling the foil off the top of the champagne bottle, then carefully unwinding the wire around the cork. “That’s a secret. But I will tell you this: this tiny li’l ol’ island here has over fifty restaurants on it, many of them world-class. And over the next seven days, we’re going to hit as many of them as we can.”

The champagne was wonderful, the sex afterward as powerful and as intense as anything Taylor had ever experienced in her life, and the dinner exquisite. The first few hours had taken them from a stressed-out midwinter Manhattan frame of mind and put them firmly on island time. It was nearly eleven by the time they left the restaurant, and just before midnight, they found themselves walking alone on a beach with their third bottle of wine of the evening and a couple of glasses. The Caribbean moon was nearly full and low off the horizon, throwing out bursts of silver onto the ocean’s surface that seemed to light up the whole sky.

Taylor slipped off her shoes and felt the warm sand under her feet. She was sleepy, exhausted, sated, but didn’t yet want to let go to sleep. Next to her, Michael walked silently, shuffling his feet in the sand. She took his free hand in hers and gently guided him toward the water’s edge. The tide was coming in, the water lapping softly against the sand. Taylor dipped her feet in the water and found it surprisingly warm.

She leaned over and put her head against his shoulders as they walked.

“Want to sit down and open this guy up?”

“Sure,” Taylor answered, smiling. “Although I’m not sure how much wine I’m up for. I’m a little tipsy now.”

Michael eased her over to a small mound of sand just ahead of the water and held her hand as she settled onto the ground. He eased down next to her and set the two glasses in the sand, then reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a corkscrew.

“It’s amazing,” Taylor said softly as Michael twisted the corkscrew into the neck of the bottle.

“What’s amazing?”

The cork came loose with a slight pop, and Michael poured two glasses of red wine.

“This, all of it. How can it get any better? I mean, this is perfect.”

Michael lifted a glass in each hand and handed one to her.

Taylor took it and stared at him over the top of the glass.

“I don’t know,” he answered after a moment. “I don’t know that it has to get any better. When you’ve reached perfection, that’s as good as it ever has to get.”

“Great,” she chided. “That means we’ve got no way to go but down.”

He reached over, clinked her glass gently. “No,” he said seriously. “Never. Never say that. It’s just going to get better in different ways.”

She lifted the glass and took small sip. The wine was as perfect as the evening had been.

“How’d I get so lucky?” she asked.

“I was just asking myself the same question.”

Michael leaned over and kissed her softly, sweetly, as a cool wind from the sea blew quietly over them.

The next morning, Taylor and Michael climbed out of bed about a half day earlier than she wanted, but they had an appointment with the dive master. At Michael’s urging, Taylor had signed up for scuba lessons in Manhattan, but had held off on taking her check dive until they got to Bonaire.

She went through the procedures, the equipment, and a test dive off the beach, followed by a quick quiz with the blond, sunburned Australian who ran the dive operation. The next thing she knew, she was standing in front of a passport camera having her picture taken for her “C” card, which certi-fied her as an open-water diver.

“Congratulations, love,” he said. “Now let’s do the real thing.”

She, Michael, and a dozen other divers hauled BCDs—the buoyancy-compensation devices that enabled divers to control the rate by which they ascended or descended—goggles, fins, regulators, and the heavy air tanks on board a thirty-foot dive boat. Taylor had eaten a light breakfast with a little juice and coffee, so was able to hold off the worst of the impending seasickness as the boat pushed through the swells toward open sea.

An hour later, they were farther north on the leeward side of the island, where the reefs were pristine and untouched, the water barely sixty feet deep and crystal clear. Michael had warned her that the first time she dived in open water, she might feel just a touch of anxiety, of drowning panic.

“Remember,” he told her as they sat on the side of the boat, preparing to roll backward into the ocean, “don’t forget to breathe, slowly and steadily. When we go in, let’s just float for a couple of minutes until we get adjusted.”

Taylor already had the regulator clenched firmly in her mouth. She nodded, pulled her goggles down over her eyes, held the regulator with her left hand and the mask with her right. Then she let go.

It was only a couple of feet from the gunwale to the water, but she felt as if she were falling forever. She hit the water, which suddenly seemed colder, and went completely under.

Her eyes widened, and for a moment she felt the surge of panic. She bit down hard on the regulator, trying to calm herself, to fight the urge to start paddling and fighting to the surface.

Then the BCD brought her to the surface and she bobbed there like a cork, her neck and face well out of the water, the heavy metal tank on her back now weightless. She looked around, and Michael was next to her a couple of feet away.

He brought his hands up like a referee calling a touchdown and then bent his arms into circles and tapped the top of his head with both hands. It was the universal scuba sign language for “I’m okay, how about you?”

Taylor forced herself to let go of the regulator, then brought her arms out of the water and mimicked his arm motion. She tried to loosen the muscles in her neck and to let her legs go limp beneath her. She looked down and realized it was almost like being suspended in air, sixty or seventy feet above the ocean floor. The water was warming now, her body adjusting, and she felt almost as if she were inside a womb.

The two floated there for what felt like at least a full minute, then Michael slowly paddled over to her and took the regulator out of his mouth and held it up out of the water.