Once More With Feeling (20 page)

I hadn’t thought about Alec in so long. Brooke had indicated that she thought I wasn’t being entirely honest about that, but I really hadn’t. No idle imaginings. No late nights on the computer, innocently typing his name into Google. No random daydreams while I was going about my day-to-day life. I’d had strange phases where I’d thought about other old boyfriends – a rather overly optimistic term to use to describe some of the situations I’d subjected myself to in my college days and shortly thereafter, when I’d often mistaken smirks for signs of intelligent life where, sadly, none could hope to grow – but I hadn’t thought about Alec. I hadn’t
not
thought about him either – there wasn’t some big blank spot in my memory that I tiptoed around or anything. I knew perfectly well that he was the doctor I’d dated as he’d finished his fellowship in New York, and before he’d left to work at a clinic in a war-torn African nation. But that was pretty much all I ever thought, on the few occasions I thought about him at all.

Yet here I was. Following a third-party text into the winter wonderland of Vermont, to drop in unexpectedly on a man who could, for all I knew, have a wife and six
kids by now. In fact, it would be highly unlikely that he didn’t.

I remembered, then, all those snooty Ivy League girls who’d crowded around him when I’d first met him, competing with each other over their impressive vocabularies and stylish glasses, with names like
Madeline
and
Elise
, who’d raised their eyebrows at me over their very intellectual black turtlenecks and murmured to Alec about the latest opera, the newest art exhibit, the exciting new literary
tome
. He had been like catnip for brainy girls back then, and I’d certainly had my share of insecurities about it, especially centred around his most significant ex-girlfriend, a nightmare made all of gazelle-like limbs and self-possession coupled with an array of degrees and complementary languages. And possibly a Fulbright thrown in there too, for good measure.
Audrey
, her name had been. Of course. Slightly off-beat, supernaturally confident and entirely too erudite by all accounts.

I’d never met her but God, I’d hated her.

I forced my attention back to the present and reminded myself that it didn’t matter if Alec had in fact married the loathsome Audrey and if together they’d created a veritable Jolie–Pitt-like menagerie of international tots to call their very own. I was only conducting another deposition here. I was only looking for the significant facts of my own life. Not because I doubted my own memory, but because I didn’t entirely trust it. And because I thought that having a different perspective on how I’d gotten here
would make the fact that my life really
was
a bad afternoon talk show better somehow. Or different.

Anyway, it couldn’t make it worse.

I pulled the car off the smooth expanse of 91 at the familiar exit. I followed the pretty little road into the tiny town, which consisted of no more than a gas station, a general store, a drugstore that was also a restaurant, and a grocery. Nothing had changed since the last time I’d been here, almost ten years ago. It was like driving into a painting. The winter shadows were starting to pull long, and the December sun seemed bigger and more golden as it made its way toward the trees. I turned off the main street and headed up into the rolling slope of hills. There were famous ski slopes not far in all directions, I knew, but this little town’s only claim to fame was its picturesque New England charm. Which was considerable, to be sure.

I saw the farmhouse first. It sprawled across the hillside, the main building bright white even against the surrounding snow. There were two outbuildings: one which had once been a working barn and one which might still be working stables, for all I knew. I pulled the car into the cleared area in front of the house, sucked in a breath, and then climbed out.

It was impossibly quiet. And stunningly cold. I stood for a moment processing that, glad I’d changed into my winter boots again before leaving Rivermark earlier. I could hear the shiver of wind high in the branches of the trees
all around me and in the darkening woods behind the house, and the faint melody of wind chimes, though I couldn’t see the source. There was no traffic, no sound of any trains in the distance, nothing at all but snow and silence and what was left of the sun. I took a breath so deep it made my lungs hurt. Cold and sweet and clean straight down to the bone.

I climbed up the steps to the door and rang the bell. As I waited, I noted the beat-up old truck near the barn with snow piled up all over it and a dark-coloured Grand Cherokee closer to the farmhouse itself, that one scraped clean. But there were no sounds from inside. I shoved my hands in my pockets and rethought my plan, such as it was. As I stepped back off the porch, I couldn’t help but take a moment to look at the view spread out before me: smudges of blue and green and a sea of sparkling frozen white in all directions. From halfway up the hillside there was nothing to see but the far hills and the woods all around, and the cosy town snuggled up on both sides of the river that cut along the valley floor. It was gorgeous. And down below the house there was a figure shovelling snow from the surface of what was, if memory served, a small pond in summertime. I must have driven right past it on my way to the house.

Past him.

I set off down the lane rather than take my chances on the field and in untouched snow that could, for all I knew, come up to my waist if I tried to walk on it. As I drew
closer to the pond, the figure stopped shovelling, and waited. Watched me approach.

It occurred to me that what I was doing was actually, certifiably insane. Who dropped by unexpectedly to see an ex-boyfriend seven years later? No one who didn’t also boil a bunny or two in her spare time. I knew better than this kind of behaviour. Every woman who’d survived her twenties knew better than this.

But it was too late.

I could see him now, and I was certain he could see me, too. I could feel it, like a kind of electric charge in the frigid air.

He rested his hands on the handle of the shovel as he watched me come closer. He wore his jacket open over an untucked flannel shirt, and his gloves were cocked back to show slivers of tanned skin at his strong wrists. His jeans looked a thousand years old, and were tucked carelessly into the tops of his boots. He was still that same rangy kind of lean. His mouth was still serious in a way that made me want to lick it, though I hated myself for the thought, and his dark eyes were still so clever, so fascinating, as they took me in. His hair was on the shaggy side today, a riot of colours like an experiment in shades of
tawny
, and disarmingly haphazard. Pay too much attention to his often-silly hair, I knew, and you might find yourself blindsided by the thrust of his intellect. It was one among his many weapons.

I stepped onto the cleared ice of the pond. At the other
end, he tossed down his shovel, and started toward me. As he moved, he pulled off his gloves, one and then the other, and then shoved them both in the pockets of his open parka.

It was still so quiet. It felt something like ominous, so at odds was it with the tumult inside me and the alarms that blared there, the riot of sound and fury I wanted to pretend wasn’t happening.

Off in the distance, a dog barked enthusiastically, and it sounded far too intrusive against the blanket of noiselessness: almost shocking. I wanted to look and see what it was barking at – to look away, at anything else, at anything at all but him – but I couldn’t seem to move so much as a muscle. There was only Alec, all these years later, walking towards me in that way of his, so distractingly loose-limbed with that suggestion of athletic ease in every step. There was only that same impossibly intelligent face of his, older now, more weathered, but still entirely too compelling.

I fought to speak. To explain my presence somehow, in a way that played down the obvious crazy and possibly made some kind of sense out of it. But my mind was a blank.

He stopped right in front of me, and I had to tilt my head back to look at him. He was still tall enough to make my heart beat a little faster, and he looked down at me as if I was a ghost. But not the kind of ghost I’d thought I was before, in Rivermark. Not like that at all. He looked
at me as if I were something he’d gone to the trouble to conjure up himself, just him and perhaps his Ouija board, and now here I was, like a spell that had finally worked the way it was supposed to.

Hours could have passed. Ages. I was aware only of him, and my pulse racketing through my body, and the way his dark eyes seemed to kick up fires inside me that I didn’t want to admit could still burn at all, much less so hot. So high and bright.

Say something!
I ordered myself desperately.
Anything!

But his serious mouth crooked up in the corner, and his dark eyes gleamed. And I could no more have spoken then than I could have leapt straight into the air and flown around the moon that was visible despite the daylight, high up over the nearest tree. I didn’t even want to speak, suddenly. I didn’t want to do anything but this, this drinking him in as if I were so terribly thirsty, unaware that there was a world around us.

‘Took you long enough,’ Alec said, in the voice I remembered, rough and soft all at once, that always hit me in places that made me blush.

Which I did. I couldn’t seem to help it. Or, to be honest, care too much that I was turning red beneath his scrutiny.

And then he reached over, slid his hand over my jaw and into my hair with a gentle intent, tugged me closer, and kissed me.

It was as if no time had passed at all.

He kissed me as if we were both drowning and he was air, and I fell into him, against him, and didn’t even try to swim.

I just fell.

He tasted the way he always had, so male and right and
Alec
. My hands looped around his neck, skin touching skin, and it was a revelation. I moved closer to him without knowing I meant to do it. But I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t stop. He angled his mouth against mine, making it all that much hotter. Deeper.

And I felt it again. The way the world rocked and tilted, knocking me off-balance. Right off my feet, even as he held me against him with such ease. As if I belonged there.

It had always been like this. Heat. Fire. All that impossible light. And no hope at all of balance.

Finally, I pulled away, appalled at myself. I couldn’t lie to myself, either, though I wanted to – I hadn’t stood there
passively, allowing him to kiss me. Nor had I pushed him away. I’d been in it. Too in it, really. I’d kissed him back as if I wasn’t, in fact, married to someone else. Who cared what the extenuating circumstances were? I’d ceded the moral high ground, and I hadn’t even paused for the scantest second to consider the ramifications of that.

Even so, it was harder than it should have been to pull my hands away from the heat of his skin. He didn’t pretend it was easy either; his thumb traced a pattern across my cheek, then grazed along the curve of my lip, before he dropped his hand to his side.

‘Well,’ I said. My voice sounded absurd against the quiet, in the wake of all that wild, roaring passion that still hummed through me. Too high. Too foolish. ‘Um. Hi.’

He let out a breath that became a kind of laugh, and his eyes crinkled up in the corners, though he didn’t quite smile. Not serious, dedicated Alec. Not even now. He scraped his mess of hair back from his face with one hand, and
looked
at me from those clever eyes of his that saw far more than their share. I felt my face redden. Again. Still. I felt my whole body react to him, so predictably, as if that damned gaze of his was hotwired directly into my flesh and could turn me on like a gas fire. I could feel it in my breasts. My sex. My heart as it knocked hard against my chest.

‘Come on,’ he said, indicating the farmhouse on the rise above us with a tilt of his head, with no hint that he was as affected as I was. And with that familiar air of
command and the expectation of obedience that was so much a part of the big, bad, Dr Frasier I remembered. ‘It’s cold.’

I stared at him, nonplussed. And off-balance, again. As usual.
As ever
. I’d always told myself that if I kept being knocked off-balance like this, that eventually he’d knock me back
into
balance, surely. But it had never happened.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?’ I demanded. ‘Aren’t you going to point out that it’s bat-shit crazy to show up at your parents’ house, a couple of days before Christmas, after more than seven years of radio silence?’

‘I could,’ he said, his voice that lazy, amused drawl that had always had this same effect on me – that had always made my limbs a bit too heavy and my breath a bit too shallow. ‘But you just did it for me.’

It should have felt like a slap. But instead, I smiled. Almost in spite of myself.

We walked back up the road together. I felt … too big. As if my clothes didn’t fit. As if I was bloated up, expanded, and everything might just burst from the pressure. It was uncomfortable. It made me feel panicky. It made me want to forget about all of this. It made me want to climb back in the car and run away from here, from him, before I
really
made a mistake. A bigger one.

But the only thing crazier than driving for five hours on the twenty-third of December to see an ex-boyfriend you hadn’t so much as spoken to in over seven years was, I was all too aware, seeing that ex-boyfriend, kissing him
like he was my long-lost love, and then leaping back in my car and driving off like a madwoman ten minutes later.

So I followed him into the house instead. He pulled off his boots and coat in the little entryway, and I followed suit. Then, our feet clad only in socks, we made our way across the honey-coloured wooden floors in the friendly family room to the huge kitchen. Something about being in my socks made me feel vulnerable, somehow. As if my shoes were defensive weapons I’d handed over without adequately considering the ways in which I might need them. As if my toes being visible in the middle of winter would tell him things I didn’t want him to know.