The phone rang at seven and the call itself consisted of only seven words…
She read to the end and pressed the pages, still warm from the printer, briefly to her chest. Reluctantly, she slid the pages under her desk and fed them one by one through the shredder. She highlighted the text on her computer screen and hit Delete, flinching as the text disappeared. She closed the document and let the words disappear into the ether. She hated to do it. But she knew The Rule. She obeyed the Ruler.
Nora stood up for the first time in an hour and left her office. When she saw Wesley standing at the kitchen counter she actually could see him now. He smiled at her. She smiled back.
“So what did you write today?” he asked as he expertly sliced through the skin of a ripe red tomato.
“A really hot sex scene with a lot of S&M between a girl and her true love,” she said and Wesley rolled his eyes at her, his usual response to her wickeder scenes. “But don’t worry, I deleted it.”
“How come?” he asked, popping a chunk of tomato into his mouth.
Nora leaned against Wesley, taking temporary comfort in his warm, strong chest. He wrapped his arm around her and rested his chin on top of her head.
“It wasn’t fiction.”
6
My Caroline,
I didn’t want to write this story any more than you want to read it. It’s us. Of course it’s us. A name changed here, a date changed there…but still us. You have always been my only muse. I cannot paint or sculpt. I have only my words to render your likeness. Sometimes I wish I were both God and Adam so I could tear out my rib and create you from my own flesh. I would say I’d create you from my heart, but I gave that to you when you left me. But that’s a cliché, isn’t it? Sadly, that’s all I have these days. The whole story is a cliché. I desired you. I ate of you. I lost you. That ancient story—older than the Garden, old as the Snake. I would have liked to call this story of ours The Temptation but the word temptation, once the province of pious theologians, has now been co-opted by every third second-rate romance novelist. And although I loved you, my beautiful girl, this is not a romance novel.
“Like it, Zach?”
Zach blinked at the interruption, lost as he was in Nora’s new words.
“It’s quite an improvement.”
“An improvement? Oh, I meant the cocoa.”
Zach sat in Nora’s bright kitchen, the winter sun turning everything white. Nora’s new draft of the first chapter sat in front of him and a cup of hot chocolate steamed at his elbow. He sipped the cocoa and felt like a lad again in his grandmother’s kitchen.
“Very good,” he said, inhaling the warm steam. “So is this.”
He tapped the pages in front of him. Nora had taken his advice and created a frame story for her book. It would be a letter her narrator, William, was writing to Caroline, the woman he loved and lost. It was working beautifully already—the book and the partnership with Nora. He’d rarely gone to his writers’ homes and certainly never sat with them at their kitchen table and drank cocoa. Nora was proving to be a different breed from any writer he’d ever before known. “‘This is not a romance novel…’” Zach read from her new first chapter. “Excellent line. Evocative and provocative. Ironic, as well.”
“Ironic?” Nora sipped at her own mug of hot cocoa. She sat across from him at the table and pulled one leg up to her chest. “It’s true. It isn’t a romance novel.”
“Not a traditional one, of course. Your protagonists don’t end up together, but it is a love story.”
“A love story is not the same as a romance novel. A romance novel is the story of two people falling in love against their will. This is a story of two people who leave each other against their will. It starts to end the minute they meet.”
“Why does it end? You seem like an optimist to me, but the end is heartrending. The last thing she wants to do is leave him, and yet in the end she goes.”
Nora left her chair and went to the kitchen cabinet by the refrigerator.
“I’m no optimist,” she said as she opened the cabinet door. “I’m just a realist who smiles too much. And the reason William and Caroline don’t stay together is that while he really is in the lifestyle, she’s not. She’s only in the relationship for him. It’s their sexuality that’s the problem, not the love. It’s like a gay man being married to a straight woman. No matter how much he loves her, it’s a sacrifice every moment they’re together. The sex is secondary to the sacrifice.”
“A very close second, I notice.”
Nora laughed. She closed the cabinet door and knelt on the floor. She opened the bottom door and gave a victorious laugh.
“Found them.” She pulled out a bag of marshmallows. “I have to hide the sugar from Wes.”
“Has a sweet tooth, does he?”
“He has type 1 diabetes. And a sweet tooth. Bad combination. He’s usually really good about what he eats, but I catch him staring pretty longingly when I have cocoa and marshmallows.”
Zach wondered if it was actually the sugar Wesley had been staring at and not Nora. He couldn’t take his own eyes off this woman. She’d been captivating in her signature red Monday night. And now in casual clothes she looked casually stunning. He watched her as she rolled back onto her toes and rose straight up off the floor with the well-trained grace of a geisha. He marveled at her offhand display of almost balletic agility while she leaned over the table and dropped a handful of marshmallows into his cocoa and hers.
“Zach, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re even more ridiculously handsome when you look happy,” she said, dropping back into her chair and popping a marshmallow into her mouth. “You aren’t, by any chance, enjoying working with me? The London Fog isn’t lifting, is it?”
Zach took a sip of his cocoa to cover his embarrassment. He was used to women hitting on him but never before had any woman been so shamelessly forward with him.
“As this is the first time we’ve actually sat down and worked on your book together,” Zach said and coughed uncomfortably, “I think a verdict on my meteorological conditions would be premature.”
“What’s the verdict on the book then?”
“The verdict is…you might actually pull this off. But not without some major revisions. Keep the letters at the beginning and end. But I want the body of the book in third, not first, person.”
Nora looked down at her notes. She picked up her pen and wrote something on a sheet of paper. She looked at it a moment before sliding it across the table.
The first time William saw Caroline was on Ash Wednesday. She still had the ashes on her forehead.
“Like that, Zach?”
Zach read and nodded his approval. “Perfect. That’s exactly what I want. Now rewrite the entire book like that.”
“Yes, sir,” she said and saluted. “What else? Since you’re being nice to me, I have the feeling you’re about to hit me with some more changes, yes?”
Zach grimaced, unnerved by how well this near stranger could read him.
“Just some minor ones—have you considered going a more mainstream route with your characters?”
“I like virgins, perverts and whores,” Nora said without apology. “I couldn’t care less about the people who just fuck for fun on weekends.”
“The sex shouldn’t be the story, Nora.”
“The sex isn’t the story, Zachary. The sacrifice is. Caroline is actually vanilla, not kink. So she sacrifices who she really is to be with the man she loves—she sacrifices the good for the better.”
“But they end it, yes?”
“That’s the point of the book—sacrifice can only get you so far. William and Caroline are just too different to make it work. And although two people can love each other deeply, sometimes love alone doesn’t cut it. We can only sacrifice so much of ourselves in a relationship before there’s nothing left to love or be loved.”
Zach’s stomach clenched. Even now he ached for Grace with an impotent fury. Zach could only raise his cup of cocoa.
“I’ll drink to that.”
He and Nora clinked their tea mugs together in a mock toast. Across the table their eyes met, and Zach could see the ghost of his pain reflected in hers.
Zach’s next question was cut off by Wesley’s sudden entrance in the kitchen.
“Hey, you,” Nora said to Wesley. “What’s up?”
“I’m not here,” Wesley said. “Keep working. I just need my coffee mug.” Wesley threw open the cabinets and took an aluminum travel mug from a shelf.
“Where are you going?” Nora asked.
“Study group at Josh’s. I’m helping him with calculus, and he’s giving me his history notes.”
“What are you majoring in, Wesley?” Zach asked politely, trying not to show how unnerving he found Nora’s relationship with her young intern—unnerving and familiar.
“Biochem. I’m premed.”
“That’s wonderful. Your parents must be very pleased.” Zach winced internally at how old he sounded.
“Not really.” Wesley shrugged. “My whole family has worked with horses for generations. They want me to come home and stay in the business. If I have to do medicine, at least it could be equine medicine.” He poured a mugful of coffee and screwed the lid on tightly. “I have this conversation with them every week.”
“I think he should just let me talk to them.” Nora batted her eyelashes at Wesley.
“You,” Wesley said, pointing his finger at her, “don’t exist. So don’t even think about it.”
Nora responded by wrinkling her nose at him in mock disgust.
“What?” Zach said. “Your parents don’t know you and Nora are living together?”
A faint blush suffused Wesley’s face. “There’s a lot they don’t know. They were going to pull me out of school and send me to the state school down there. It was money reasons, the usual, and Nora offered to let me live with her and work for my room and board. They just know I got a job to cover it and a place off-campus. They don’t know what I’m doing.”
“How did you two meet?”
“School,” Nora answered for Wesley. “His school was obviously a little desperate—they asked me to be their writer-in-residence that semester. Wes was in my class.”
“You were her student?” Zach asked, his hands going cold even as he said the words.
“The class met at one.” Wesley smiled at Nora. “I needed to meet my Humanities requirement, and I would have taken anything that let me sleep late on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“I’m very flattered.” Nora stuck her tongue out at him.
“I’m very leaving. Later,” Wesley said. He reached for Nora’s mug and she slapped his hand.
“What are your numbers?” she demanded.
“One-seventeen. I can have a sip,” Wesley protested.
“Not on my watch. Drink your coffee black, and keep your hands off my cocoa.”
Wesley feinted to the left and stuck his finger in her cocoa and licked it off as he disappeared through the kitchen door. Zach felt a pang at the easy intimacy between Nora and Wesley. He missed his play-fights with Grace in the kitchen and the bargains they struck to make up. He would cook dinner if she would wear the lingerie he’d gotten her for her birthday. She’d do the dishes if she could be on top tonight…amazing how they both came out victors in those battles.
“So he’s…nineteen?”
“You have a dirty mind, Zachary Easton. Wesley’s as pure as, well, I’m not.”
“You’re telling me that Wesley’s a virgin? The young attractive houseboy of an infamous erotica writer is a virgin?”
“Believe it or not, I do have some self-control. And even if I didn’t, Wes certainly does—apart from sticking his damn hand into my cocoa every now and then. He’s a good Christian kid and I respect him more than I can say for his decision to wait. Mark my words, Zach, I will put the first randy bitch who lays a hand on him in the hospital.”
“And he doesn’t mind what you write? What you do?”
Nora leaned back in her chair. “We made a deal. I can top, but not bottom.”
“Are you secretly a gay man?” Zach eyed her curiously.
“I’m not so secretly kinky. Top and bottom are S&M terms, too. Wes leaves me alone about my sex life as long as I’m not the one coming home with the bruises.”
Zach swallowed. “Did you ever come home with bruises?”
Nora bit her bottom lip.
“I won’t bore you with the whole story of me and Søren,” she said, glancing away. “Let’s just say we’ve got history and leave it at that. Last year, I went to see Søren on the day we consider our anniversary. I do it every year. Can’t stop myself for some reason. Anyway, I had a weak moment. I came home the next morning covered in welts and bruises and with a nice fat lip. Wes was horrified. He started packing.”
Zach winced. The thought of welts and bruises on Nora horrified him, too.
“So you made your deal?”
“Right. If I go back to Søren one more time, Wes is gone.”
“Moving out seems a rather extreme threat. Of course, moving in with you seems a rather odd decision.”
“He’s Methodist. I think he’s trying to save me. Methodists are always trying to save people.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t have feelings for you?”
“He does have feelings for me. Namely irritation, frustration and disgust mingled with amusement. But that’s not surprising since he’s not in the game.”
Zach sympathized with the boy. He had the same feeling for Nora, too. As well as intoxicated, amazed and aroused mingled with petrified.
“You said he was a virgin. How do you know he isn’t like you?”
“K-dar,” Nora said and tapped the side of her nose. “Kinksters can smell it on each other. And my Wesley smells like warm vanilla.”
“Wonder what I smell like.” Zach cursed himself for accidentally speaking the words aloud.
Nora cocked her head at him; Zach’s heart started to race. She rose up out of her chair and slid onto the top of the kitchen table. She stretched across it and put her nose at his neck. Slowly, she inhaled. A slight rush of air whispered over Zach’s skin and he immediately knew what every muscle in his body was doing.
“Not kink. But not vanilla, either. Smells like…curiosity. It killed the cat, you know.”
“Nora,” Zach said in a warning tone. J.P. would yank him off Nora’s book in a heartbeat if he saw them right now.
“S&M is as psychological as it is physical and sexual, Zach. Imagine being as deep inside a woman’s mind as you are inside her body.”
Zach’s hands gripped his mug, still warm from the steaming liquid inside.
“We’re working,” he reminded her, reminded himself. He remembered their photograph in the newspaper; her mouth had been at his ear just the way it was now. If he turned his head only a few inches their lips would meet.
“I write erotica. I am working. Want to earn some overtime?”
“Nora, we’ve got less than six weeks and more than four hundred pages to write. Now get off the table and stop wasting my time.”
“Oh, fine,” she said, sounding playfully disappointed. Zach exhaled with relief when she slid back and sat in her chair again. She reached under her notes and pulled out a copy of the trade newspaper that had their picture in it. She leaned back in her chair and threw her legs up on the table as she flipped through the paper. Zach stared at their picture again prominently displayed right in front of his face. The byline read Erotica Writer Nora Sutherlin Gets the Royal Treatment.
Nora turned another page and sighed. “And to think I thought the fog was finally lifting.”
* * *
Zach stared at his computer screen for the seventeenth straight minute in a row. The words of the book review he’d sworn he would start writing for the Times tonight simply would not come. He had words, the wrong words, Nora’s words, but not the words he needed.
Not kink, she’d purred into his ear, sending every nerve in his long neglected body firing. But not vanilla, either… Nora… Zach understood now why some people were afraid of her. He was afraid of her, of her power to take captive his every thought. He felt unmoored around her, unsafe, and yet of everyone he had met since coming to New York, he sensed only she could be trusted.