a scorching whisper.
Julia’s affirmation escaped her mouth as a strangled groan. Ga-
briel’s chest swelled with pride.
It was a long journey from her face to her knees, and he seemed to enjoy it, pausing slowly at different parts, his touch light but heated.
She felt warm beneath his gentle fingers, despite the coldness of the room. As soon as she thought of the cold, she flinched.
Gabriel stopped his explorations immediately, and moved aside
to allow her to crawl into bed, closest to the wall. He pressed his chest to her back, pulling the purple duvet over their naked bodies.
“I’ve missed making love with you. It was as if one of my limbs
was missing.”
“I missed you too.”
He smiled his relief. “I’m very glad to hear that. It was tortuous to go a week without being able to touch you like this.”
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“It was tortuous to go a week without being able to feel you
touching me.”
The stirrings of desire in her voice set fire to Gabriel’s blood.
He tightened his hold on her, squeezing gently. “Cuddling is a very important component to making love.”
“I would never have pegged you as a cuddler, Professor Emerson.”
He drew some skin from her neck into his mouth, sucking it
lightly. “I have become a great many things since you made me your lover.” He placed his face in her hair, inhaling her vanilla scent deeply.
“Sometimes I wonder if you realize how much you’ve changed me.
It’s no less than miraculous.”
“I’m no miracle worker. But I love you.”
“And I love you.” He was quiet for a moment or two, which sur-
prised her. She had expected him to begin making love immediately.
“You never told me what happened at Kinfolks restaurant the
day before Christmas.” Gabriel tried to sound relaxed, for he didn’t want her to think he was scolding her.
In the hope of ending the conversation quickly so they could
move on to other activities, Julia described her altercation with Natalie.
She left out the part where Natalie had mocked her sexual encounters with him in front of everyone. Gabriel rolled her onto her back so he could see her face.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was too late for you to do anything.”
“I love you, damn it! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Paulina was waiting for us when we returned to the house.”
He scowled. “Right. So you threatened your former roommate
with a newspaper article?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think she believed you?”
“She wants out of Selinsgrove. She wants to be Simon’s official
girlfriend and hang on his arm at political events in Washington. She isn’t going to do anything to jeopardize that.”
“Doesn’t she have all that now?”
“Natalie is Simon’s dirty little secret. Which is why it took me so long to figure out he was fucking her.”
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Gabriel winced. Julia didn’t use profanity often, and when she
did, it was jarring.
“Look at me.” He pressed his forearms into the mattress on either
side of her shoulders.
She looked up into concerned blue eyes.
“I’m sorry he hurt you. I’m also sorry I didn’t do more damage
to his face when I had the chance. But I can’t say I’m sorry he went after your roommate. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here with me.”
He kissed her, his hand tracing the curve of her neck until she
sighed contentedly into his mouth.
“You are my sticky little leaf. My beautiful, sad, sticky little leaf, and I want to see you happy and whole. I’m sorry for every tear I’ve made you shed. I hope that someday you’ll be able to forgive me.”
She hid her face in the crook of his shoulder as she clutched him
closer. Her hands explored his body until they were one. The silent air of her tiny studio was broken only by heavy breathing and muffled
pants and her own voice moaning to a fevered pitch.
It was a subtle language — this shared language of lovers: the
reciprocation of sigh and groan, anticipation growing and feeding
until groans became cries and cries became sighs once more. Gabriel’s body covered hers completely, a delicious weight of man and sweat
and naked skin upon naked skin.
This was the joy that the world sought — sacred and pagan all at
once. A union between two dissimilars into a seamless one. A picture of love and deep satisfaction. An ecstatic glimpse of the beatific vision.
Before Gabriel withdrew from her, he pressed one more kiss to
her cheek. “Will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Forgive me for deceiving you about Paulina. For taking advan-
tage of her.”
“I can’t forgive you on her behalf. Only she can do that.” Julia
chewed at her bottom lip. “Now, more than ever, you need to see
that she gets help so she can move on with her life. You owe her that.”
He wanted to say something, but somehow the strength of her
goodness silenced him.
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Chapter 14
As the semester unfolded, Julia was under tremendous pressure to
complete her thesis, and Katherine Picton was pushing her to
submit chapters more quickly. Quicker chapters would make it easier to speak more specifically about Julia’s abilities to Greg Matthews, the Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Harvard,
should he follow up on her reference letter.
Julia couldn’t concentrate when Gabriel was around. Her voice
grew soft when she told him why. Something about blue eyes and
sexual pyrotechnics and a chemistry that vibrated in the air between them, all of which kept her from focusing on the tasks at hand. Gabriel was extremely flattered.
So the happy couple worked out a compromise. There would be
telephone calls and texts and the occasional Gmail, but apart from a lunch or dinner during the week, Julia would stay at her apartment.
On Friday afternoons she would arrive at Gabriel’s in order to spend the weekend with him.
One Wednesday evening in mid-January, Julia called Gabriel
after her homework was done.
“I had a rough day,” she said, sounding tired.
“What happened?”
“Professor Picton is making me scrap about three-quarters of
one of my chapters because she thinks I’m offering a Romanticized
version of Dante.”
“Ouch.”
“She hates the Romantics, so you can imagine how annoyed she
was. She went on and on about it. She makes me feel stupid.”
Gabriel’s Rapture
“You aren’t stupid.” Gabriel chuckled into the phone. “Professor
Picton makes me feel stupid sometimes.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“You should have seen me the first time I was summoned to her
house. I was more nervous than I was on the day I defended my
dissertation. I almost forgot to wear pants.”
Julia laughed. “I can only imagine that a pantless Professor Em-
erson would be very well received.”
“Thankfully, I didn’t have to find out.”
“Professor Picton told me that ‘my strong work ethic makes up
for my occasional lapses in reasoning.’”
“That’s high praise coming from her. She thinks most people fail
to reason
at all. The way she describes the world today, most people are monkeys who happen to wear clothes. On occasion.”
Julia groaned, rolling onto her stomach. “Would it kill her to tell me that she likes my thesis? Or that I’m doing a good job?”
“Katherine will never tell you that she likes your thesis. She thinks positive feedback is patronizing. This is simply the way those old, pretentious Oxonians are.”
“You aren’t like that, Professor Emerson.”
Gabriel found himself twitching at the mere change in her tone.
“Oh, yes I am, Miss Mitchell. You’ve simply forgotten.”
“You’re sweet with me now.”
“I should hope so,” he whispered, his voice almost breaking. “But
remember, you’re my lover, not my student.” He grinned wickedly.
“Except in the ways of love.”
She laughed, and he found himself laughing with her.
“I finished the book you lent me, A Severe Mercy.”
“That was quick. How did you manage that?”
“I’m loneliest at night. I’ve been reading to help me fall asleep.”
“You have no reason to be lonely. Take a cab to my place. I’ll
keep you company.”
Julia rolled her eyes. “Yes, Professor.”
“Okay, Miss Mitchell. So how was the book?”
“I’m not sure why Grace liked it so much.”
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“Why?”
“Well, it’s a romantic love story. But when they became Christians, they decided their love for each other was pagan — that they’d made idols of one another. That made me sad.”
“I’m sorry it saddened you. I haven’t read it, although Grace used to talk about it.”
“How could love be pagan, Gabriel? I don’t understand.”
“You’re asking me that question? I thought I was the pagan in
this relationship.”
“You aren’t a pagan. You told me so yourself.”
He sighed thoughtfully. “So I did. You know as well as I that
Dante views God as the only thing in the universe who can satisfy
the longings of the soul. This is Dante’s implicit critique of Paolo and Francesca’s sin. They forego a higher good — the love of God — for the love of a human being. Of course, that’s a sin.”
“Paolo and Francesca were adulterers. They shouldn’t have fallen
in love with each other in the first place.”
“That’s true. But even if they were unmarried lovers, Dante’s criticism would be the same. If they love one another to the exclusion
of everything and everyone else, then their love is pagan. They’ve made idols of one another and their love. And they’re also very foolish, because no human being can ever make another human being
completely happy. Human beings are far too imperfect for that.”
Julia was stunned. Although there were aspects of Gabriel’s ex-
planation that she knew already, it truly surprised her to hear such words from his lips.
It appeared that she was a pagan about her love of Gabriel, and
she hadn’t even realized it. Moreover, if he actually believed what he was saying, then he had a much less exalted view of their attachment.
She was shocked.
“Julianne? Are you still there?”
She cleared her throat. “Yes.”
“It’s just a theory. It has nothing to do with us.”
He spoke the words, but the unease remained. He knew that he’d
made an idol of Julianne, his Beatrice, and no denial or sophisticated rhetoric could make that truth false. Given all the time he’d spent in a twelve-step program that encouraged him to focus on a higher
power and not himself, his lovers or his family, he knew better.
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“So why did Grace like this book? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know,” said Gabriel. “Maybe when Richard swept her off
her feet she viewed him as a savior. He married her, and they rode off into the sunset of Selinsgrove.”
“Richard is a good man,” Julia murmured.
“He is. But Richard is not a god. If Grace married him thinking
that all her troubles would disappear because of his perfection, their relationship would not have lasted. She would have become disil-lusioned eventually, and she would have left him in order to find
someone else to make her happy.
“Perhaps the reason why Richard and Grace were so happily mar-
ried was because they had realistic expectations; they didn’t expect one another to meet all their needs. It would also explain why a spiritual dimension was so important to each of them.”
“Maybe you’re right. My book is a lot different from the Graham
Greene novel you were reading.”
“They aren’t so different.”
“Your novel is about an affair and a man who hates God. I Wikied
it.”
Gabriel resisted the urge to growl. “Don’t Wiki things, Julianne.
You know that website is unreliable.”
“Yes, Professor Emerson,” she purred.
He groaned.
“Why do you think Greene’s protagonist hates God? Because
his lover gave him up for God. We both read a novel about pagans, Julianne. It’s just the endings that were different.”
“I’m not sure they were so different.”
Gabriel smiled in spite of himself. “I think it’s a bit late for us to be having this conversation. I’m sure you’re tired, and I have some paperwork I need to do.”
“I love you. Madly.”
Something about the way her voice sounded in his ear made
his heart quicken.
“I love you too. I love you far too much, I’m sure. But I don’t
know how to love you any other way.” His final words were a whisper, but they burned in the air.
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Sylvain Reynard
“I don’t know how to love you any other way, either,” she whis-
pered back.
“Then God have mercy on us both.”
P
If you were to ask Gabriel if he wanted to be in therapy, he would have said no. He didn’t relish the idea of talking about his feelings or his childhood, or being forced to relive what happened with Paulina.
He didn’t want to talk about his addictions or Professor Singer and the myriad other women he’d bedded.
But he wanted a future with Julia, and he wanted her to be
healthy — to bloom fully and not just partially. He privately worried that he was somehow impairing her ability to blossom, just because he was, well, Gabriel.
So he vowed to do everything in his power to support her, in-
cluding changing his behavior for the best and focusing more on her needs. In so doing, he recognized that he could do with an objective evaluation of his own selfishness and some practical advice as to
how to overcome it. Consequently, he was determined to brave the
discomfort and embarrassment of admitting he needed help and see
a therapist on a weekly basis.
As the days of January slipped by, it became abundantly clear
that both Gabriel and Julia were very fortunate in their choice of therapists. Drs. Nicole and Winston Nakamura were a married couple who sought to work with clients on their psychological and personal issues with a view to integrating those considerations with both
existential and spiritual pursuits.
Nicole was concerned about the nature of Julia’s relationship
with her boyfriend. She worried that the power differential between Julia and Gabriel, coupled with his strong personality and Julia’s diminished self-confidence, would make their romantic relationship more of a mental health hazard to Julia than a help.
>
But Julia claimed to be in love with Gabriel and to be very happy
with him, and it was clear that she derived a lot of pleasure and no small amount of security from their relationship. However, the strange account of how they met and then met again, when added to certain
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Gabriel’s Rapture
facts about Gabriel’s past and his addictive personality, raised all sorts of red flags in Nicole’s mind. The fact that Julia did not recognize these red flags showed more about her own psychological state than she could reasonably realize.
Winston pulled no punches, informing Gabriel that he was plac-
ing his recovery in jeopardy by continuing to drink alcohol and by failing to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. What was supposed
to be an introductory meeting exploded into an angry confrontation, which resulted in Gabriel storming out of the office.
Nevertheless, Gabriel returned to his next session, promising
that he would attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings. He attended
one or two and never returned.
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Chapter 15
S nowfall in the city is very different from snowfall in the country, thought Julia, as she and Gabriel walked through the cascading
flakes to his building so he could pick up his car. Tonight would be an evening of celebration at a fancy French restaurant, Auberge du Pommier.
Gabriel tugged on Julia’s arm and pulled her into the doorway
of a shop, kissing her firmly as he backed her into a wall of glass. She giggled breathlessly when he finished, and in return, dragged him
out to the sidewalk so they could admire the falling snow.
In the country, you can hear the snow whispering around you,
the large, fat flakes unfettered by skyscrapers and office buildings.
In the city, the wind drives the snow in between the tall buildings, but the snowfall is lessened considerably by the many obstacles. Or so Julia thought.
When they arrived at Gabriel’s building, she paused in front of
the large china shop that dominated the first floor. But Julia wasn’t interested in the great window of china that gazed out at her matrimonially. She was only interested in the handsome man beside her.
Gabriel wore a long black wool coat that boasted a black velvet
collar and a Burberry scarf wrapped like an ascot at his neck. The hand that clasped hers was clad in black leather gloves. But it was his hat that fascinated her.
Professor Emerson wore a beret.
She found his choice of haberdashery strangely appealing. Gabriel
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