Water from Stone - a Novel (14 page)

Caroline brings those eyes back to him. “I’ll take a Chardonnay, in case you’re asking.”

“Damn! I’m sorry. I’m not doing very well here, am I?” He turns to the bartender and asks for her wine.

“You’re already a partner, you don’t have to impress me, even if I did have some influence with my grandfather, which I don’t. At least,” she smiles, “not at the firm. Thank you. And cheers.”

“Cheers,” Jack agrees as the rim of her glass slips between full, moist lips and his cock throbs suddenly to life after its long hibernation.

Twenty-Five

Mar.

The weeks have flown. And it seems that all her time and thoughts are wrapped up in Kevin. When he isn’t actually with Mar, he makes it a point to call her. Before going to meetings or classes, he sends her silly emails and texts. She sketches cartoons, emails them back to him. Without being aware of it, something is happening. She is starting to have very real feelings for Kevin McDermott. Feelings that he is showing every sign of returning.

The problem is, what to do about them? He is pretty heavily committed for at least the next year and, while she can set her own schedule, she isn’t about to fly all over the planet with a toddler, chasing after him like some demented groupie.

In fact, the whole situation is impossible, she tells herself, applying gloss over the lipstick she had just put on. She is settled, happy. She looks at her hair. As usual, loose curls have slipped free of the pins she had tried to contain them with. Frustrated, she pulls them out and shakes her hair loose. “What the hell have I gotten myself into?” she asks her reflection. Picasso stretches out beside her on the floor, chuffs companionably. Mar bends down and scratches the dog between her eyes. “Come on, fatso, be honest, how do I look?”

The dog looks up at her and twitches her eyebrows in a very good imitation of looking Mar over.  She exhales sharply through her nose, closes both eyes and drops her head back onto her paws.

“That good, huh?” Mar returns to her reflection. What she sees is a woman who hasn’t been laid in too many years staring back at her. Earlier, she had frantically searched through her lingerie drawer to find something half decent, if not wholly enticing. The elastic had gone on her first choice, a lacy black number that hasn’t been worn in years. She’d thrown it out and scavenged around until she found the current outfit – a little red thing with matching bra. She’s been wearing grocery store panties for so long she’s forgotten what a g-string feels like and has to reach behind herself to pull the wedgie out of her butt crack. Throwing her shoulders back, she tries for a sultry pose and barely manages ridiculous. “Jesus Christ on a broomstick, Mar,” she murmurs, “what were you thinking?” Sucking in her stomach, she turns sideways. The image doesn’t get any prettier.
Face it,
she tells herself,
Barbie just does not live here.
 

Mar returns to her closet and digs through the clothes there, knowing as she does that there is nothing even slightly sexy about her wardrobe. Her daily outfit consists of jeans and one of Joaquin’s old undershirts. Wife beaters, Diane calls them, and urges Mar to splurge a little and spend more than three bucks on herself. Mar, for her part, can’t justify spending money on decent clothes that will just end up paint-spattered and ruined.

After pushing her clothes left and right and pawing through drawers, Mar finally comes upon a bustier that she’d bought for her honeymoon. She pulls off her bra and puts the bustier on backwards, fastens all twenty-one, count them, hook-in-eye clasps and then has to yank it around so that the cups face the front. She’s put on some weight. And it is good, she tries to reassure herself, doing a little hip gyration in the mirror. Oh, yeah, extra breastage in a bustier is what it is all about, Mama. Then she notices the extra waistage that seeps between her breastage and hippage. Not good. She wrestles the bustier down so that its bottom overlaps the top of her panties. Much better, even if her nipples threaten to spill forth.
Hell, what good are breasts if not to be beheld?
She tries doing the Scarlett O’Hara eyebrow thing and fails. Grabs a pair of jeans and steps into them before slipping her feet into the only pair of slingbacks she still owns.
Well?
she asks the mirror.

God, you look stupid, her reflection answers, and Mar has the good sense to agree. She grabs a blouse from a hangar and pulls it on top of her too obvious attire, tying it at the waist. “So, Picasso, will you still respect me in the morning?” she asks the sleeping dog. Picasso’s only answer is to fart and roll over.

Mar regards the dog for a moment and considers euthanasia. She sighs. “OK, fuzzface, have it your way, but it’s time to get Lizzie ready and head downstairs.”

At the sound of her name, Lizzie looks up from the toys she is playing with. “Mama wanna play?” she asks.

“Not right now, punkin'. It’s time to get you into your pj’s.” She picks the toddler up and swings her onto her hip. “Hey, guess what? Kevin’s coming over to have dinner with us.”

“Kevvy?” Lizzie asks, grinning.

“Yep, how’s that sound?”

“Goooooooooood!” Lizzie purses her lips, drawing out the sound to make Mar laugh. “Casso coming too?”

“Yep, Picasso’s coming, too. OK, now which pj’s do you want to wear?”

“Superman!” Lizzie squeals.

“You wore Superman last night. Don’t you want to be someone else tonight? How about Bunny Rabbit or your ballerina pajamas?”

“Nope! Wanna be Superman!” 

“OK, then Superman it is!”

Later, they go down to the kitchen, Mar terrified at every step that she’s going to trip in the stupid heels and send them flying, to begin getting things ready for dinner. After putting Lizzie into her play-yard, Mar moves to the refrigerator and begins removing the ingredients she needs to make a salad. She sets out a variety of cheeses on a platter to give them a chance to come up to room temperature, takes out sun-dried tomatoes, Kalamata olives and crackers, uncorks a bottle of Sterling Merlot, pours herself a glass and puts a Luther Vandross CD on the stereo. Wonders for a moment if that is too obvious. Decides
screw it
.

All is going smoothly, in fact Mar is beginning to get into the music’s groove, to loosen up and move a bit with it when the doorbell rings. “Oh, shit!” she jumps, her wine slopping onto the floor, where Picasso promptly slurps it up.

Suddenly, Mar realizes that she is nervous. She likes Kevin, she feels comfortable with him, in fact she feels better in his company than she has in a long time.  So far, he’s kissed her goodnight several times and is always affectionate, but he’s let her maintain her distance and has waited for a sign from her that it is OK to advance. It is just that she feels as if this night will be different, as if they will take their fledgling relationship to a new level. She is sure she wants it, wants him. Hell, if the workouts she has been giving her vibrator are any indication, she is desperate for it. She just isn’t sure she is ready for it.

Mar ducks into the gallery restroom to check her makeup. It appears wrong, all wrong. Too bright, too brassy. Stupid.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
. She grabs a washcloth and begins scrubbing at her face, then grabs toilet paper and dabs at her lipstick. It doesn’t help.

The doorbell rings again and she freezes, catches the look of panic in her eyes. “Come on, Mar,” she encourages herself, “you’re a big girl, you’re allowed to be horny.” Her reflection doesn’t loosen up. “Shit,” she repeats and stumbles on too-high heels to open the door.

Twenty-Six

Mar.

Later, Kevin helps Mar clean up. The dinner had been a success, though, to Picasso’s delight, there had been way too much of it. Lizzie, who had taken to Kevin from the beginning, thrilled at his attentions. When it was time for her to go to bed, it was Kevin who the little girl had wanted to put her down.

“You’re good with her,” Mar tells him when they return to the kitchen.

“She’s easy to love. Besides, I grew up with all those brothers and sisters. When you come from a good Irish Catholic family, there’s always little ones to help with. OK, so what else can I do?”

“I was going to have another glass of wine. Would you like one?”

“I’d love one.”

Mar hands him the corkscrew and then takes down a couple of salad bowls. “I hope you like brownies?” she asks.

Kevin groans. “You’re kidding, right? I’m stuffed. I don’t think I could take another bite if you put a gun to my head.”

Mar opens the microwave and removes the plate of brownies she has just reheated. “I’ve got vanilla ice cream,” she croons. “And chocolate sauce.”

“Do I have to?” he asks, all defenses shot.

“You do,” she grins.

Kevin tops off their glasses and makes a face, “Well, if I must, I guess I’ll suffer through it. My mother taught me never to insult the hostess.”

“Aye, Laddie, those good Irish manners’ll keep ye out of trouble, they will,” Mar drawls in a heavy brogue.

They laugh companionably as Mar scoops vanilla ice cream over the brownies. It begins to melt immediately. She pours chocolate sauce over the mess and then sprinkles a handful of walnuts on top for good measure. “Come on, let’s go up to the family room. You bring the wine, I’ve got this.”

It is a cozy room, its big bay window facing the street. The original wood plank floor shines in the warmth of the floor lamp. Mar, trying to act casual, sets the bowls down on the old wood hope chest she uses as a coffee table and lights several candles. They sit on an oversize, well-lived-in sofa. Just the sort you can sink into and get lost in. Mar curls up at one end facing him. She takes a bite and moans. “Oh, god, this is so good. They make this at The Outback, that’s where I copied it from. It’s called Thunder from Down Under. When I was a kid, my friends used to call me Thunder Thighs because I was obsessed with the idea that my thighs were fat. I’m sure they named this dessert after me.” She takes another bite, “Anyway, that’s where it’s all going to end up, on my thighs.”

“At the risk of sounding clichéd, you don’t have fat thighs.” Kevin smiles at her around a bite of brownie.

“I wasn’t fishing,” she smiles back. “But thanks.”

“I didn’t think you were, but in case you were, I thought I’d set you straight. And, you’re welcome.”

They are quiet for a few minutes, intent on eating. Or, rather, intent on appearing that they are intent on eating as each tries to figure out where to take the conversation next.

Mar struggles with her feelings. If she were being honest with herself, she’d put the brownie down and launch herself across the couch at him. She isn’t sure she is ready to be that honest, though. She isn’t sure she is even reading his reactions to her correctly. She is pretty sure he likes her, no she is sure he likes her. It’s just that she’d never really been in the dating game. Since the day she’d dragged him into the small Boston Whaler, Joaquin had been the only one she’d ever been interested in. And since his death, she’s turned down every offer that has come her way.  At what point does someone nowadays sleep with someone else? Diane told her she’s waited long enough and had even left her a small basket of multi-colored, multi-flavored and multi-textured condoms next to her bed that afternoon. Deeply embarrassed, Mar had shoved them into the bedside drawer beside her vibrator and shut it firmly. Later, she had sneaked back upstairs and hidden a couple of the more normal looking ones in the family room. Not because she was planning to seduce him, she’d told herself, but because a girl has to look out for herself.

Now she casts around for something to say that won’t reveal the real direction of her thoughts. “Um, I don’t usually eat like this, you know,” she falters.

Kevin picks it up right where she left it. “There’s no way you could and look as good as you do.”

Mar blushes, tongue-tied.  She thinks of several different answers, tries them out in her head. “Um, I don’t know what to do with that,” she finally admits, focusing intently on her bowl.

“Take it. Accept it. Listen, Mar,” he takes her bowl and sets it down next to his before reaching for her hands, “I don’t know where this is going, either. I have some idea where you’ve been, from what you’ve told me and from what I’ve heard from Dylan.”

“He shouldn’t be talking about me,” Mar says miserably.

“I don’t think it was any deep, dark secret, Mar. He just let me know that you’re kind of fragile and he tried to make sure I don’t hurt you in any way. He cares about you a lot.”

“I’m not fragile,” Mar insists. “I’m just not sure where I want this to go, is all.”

“How about this? How about we start with just this and you decide as we go? No hurt feelings if you want to back off at any point.” He moves to her end of the sofa and lifts her chin until she is looking into his eyes. “I like you very much, Mar, and I want to get to know you more.”

The first kiss, when it comes, is sweet and gentle. He probes her lips softly and, when his tongue does reach out to lick at the corners of her mouth, she panics. She backs away and grabs her glass, gulps it and swirls the wine around her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she mumbles, “my teeth, there was some brownie…don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” he laughs. “It’s just that you’re so precious.”

“Well, that’s OK, then.” And she sets her glass down and lifts her lips to meet his.

This kiss sears its way all the way down to the pit of her stomach, curls around her insides and then shoots through to her toes before spiking back up to her brain, zings around there awhile and leaves her dizzy and breathless. She puts her hands on his chest and pushes back, taking in huge lungfuls of air.

“What? Are you OK? I’m sorry, did that upset you?”

“OHMYGOD!” she gasps. She shakes out her hands, as if flinging demons from her fingertips.

“Are you OK?” he asks again, lifting her chin and searching her eyes.

“No, I’m fine, that was OK, fine, really great even. I’m just, it just, it’s just been such a long time and then you and I, well…”

“Mar? Mar, it’s OK. Sweetheart, it’s fine.” Kevin puts his arms around her and pulls her close and holds her until she stops shaking and slowly, as she calms and melts, she finds her own arms lifting until she is cupping his face between her palms. Slowly, she pulls his face down to meet hers.

This time, the kiss pools in her stomach, warms her from the inside out and then finds itself tingling up and down her spine. She begins to shake again, but less violently. A moan slips from between her lips, tickles his. Tentatively at first, and then with more passion, she begins to explore his mouth with her tongue. His lips, his teeth, his tongue. Without knowing quite how, she finds herself pressed into him, her breasts filling his hands to overflowing, her legs straddling his waist. And their mouths, delving, twisting, tasting deeply of one another, forming a communion of lust and desire, move relentlessly into one another.

Mar moans as Kevin’s hands find the buttons of her blouse and fumble with them. She pulls her own hands from around his neck and helps him with more nimble fingers. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, she makes a note to herself to use zippers in the future, then just as quickly loses the thought as his warm hands slip inside the bustier, releasing her breasts.