to, as Scott had put it, screw anything female and attractive.
Julianne had changed him. He loved her. And even if she begged
him, he couldn’t become aroused while seeing her in pain.
She was still staring up at him, her fingers tracing up and down
his naked back. He decided to give her part of what she wanted, to touch and caress her, focusing on distracting her with pleasurable feelings and sensations, hoping that it would be enough. He kissed her, slowing their pace to a gentle exploration. She ran her fingers 174
Gabriel’s Rapture
through his hair, anchoring him to her as she softly scratched his scalp. Even in the midst of her sorrow and need, she was kind.
He feathered his lips to her neck and her ear where he whispered
about how much she’d changed him. How much happier he was
now that she was his.
She began to sigh as he adored her neck, dipping a playful tongue
into the hollow at the base of her throat before kissing it chastely. He nipped at her collarbones, gently pulling aside the thin strap of her tank top so the white slope of her shoulder was bare to his mouth.
She would have removed her tank top for him, exposing her
breasts, but he stopped her.
“Patience,” he whispered.
He wound their fingers together and kissed the back of her hand,
extending her arm so he could draw the flesh of her inner elbow into his mouth, pausing when she began to moan. He kissed every inch
of her, gliding strong hands across soft skin, taking his cue from the heat that shot across her flesh and the sounds that escaped her lips.
When he was satisfied that her tears had stopped and she was
asking him for more, he cast their clothes aside and knelt between her legs.
Soon she was shaking and crying out his name. In itself, this
was the moment he craved most, even beyond his own climax — the
sound of his name tripping from her lips amidst the waves of her
satisfaction. She’d been so shy the first few times they made love.
Every time she said Gabriel in that ecstatic, breathy whisper, a precious warmth overtook him.
This is what love is, he thought. Being naked and bare before one’s lover and unashamedly calling her name in need.
In his own orgasm, he reciprocated, telling her that he loved her.
It was inextricably linked in his mind and experience — sex and love and Julianne. The holy three.
He held her tightly while they caught their breath, smiling to
himself. He was so proud of her, so happy she could give voice to her desires, even when she was sad. He kissed her softly and was grateful to see that her smile had returned.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Thank you, Julianne, for teaching me how to love.”
175
Sylvain Reynard
P
Paul walked into the departmental office on Wednesday and was
shocked by what he saw.
Julia was standing in front of the mailboxes, her skin pale and dull, with dark circles under her eyes. As he made his way over to her, she lifted her head and smiled at him thinly. Her smile alone pained him.
Before he could ask her what was wrong, Christa Peterson breezed
in, her large Michael Kors bag dangling from her wrist. She looked remarkably well rested, and her eyes were bright. She was wearing
red. Not cherry red or blood red, but scarlet. The color of triumph and power.
She saw Paul and Julia together and cackled quietly.
Paul’s dark eyes shifted from Julia to Christa and back again. He
watched as Julia hid her face while she checked her mailbox.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“Nothing. I think I’m coming down with a cold.”
Paul shook his head. He would have pressed her, gently this time,
but Professor Martin entered the office at that moment.
Julia took one look at him and quickly picked up her messenger
bag and her coat, hoping to make a break for the door.
Paul stopped her. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I was going
to walk over to Starbucks.”
Julia shook her head. “I’m pretty tired. I think I need to go home.”
Paul’s eyes glanced down at her bare neck, her bare unmarked
neck, and moved back to her face.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
“No. Thanks, Paul. I’m fine, really.”
He nodded and watched her turn to leave, but before she could
enter the hallway, he followed her. “On second thought, I should
head home now too. I can walk with you, if you want.”
Julia bit her lip but nodded, and the two friends exited the building into the bone chilling winter air. She wrapped her Magdalen
College scarf around her neck, shivering against the wind.
176
Gabriel’s Rapture
“That’s an Oxford scarf,” Paul observed.
“Yes.”
“Did you buy it in Oxford?”
“Um, no. It was a gift.”
Owen, he thought. I guess he can’t be a complete bonehead if he went to Oxford. Then again, Emerson went to Oxford…
“I really like the Phillies cap you gave me. I’m a Red Sox fan, but I’ll wear it with pride, except when I’m in Vermont. My dad would
burn it if I wore it on the farm.”
Julia couldn’t help but smile, and Paul mirrored her expression.
“How long have you been sick?”
“Um, a few days.” She shrugged uncomfortably.
“Have you been to the doctor?”
“It’s just a cold. They wouldn’t be able to do anything for me.”
Paul stole glances at her while they walked past the Royal Ontario Museum, snowflakes swirling around them and the crystal monstros-ity that was the north wall.
“Has Christa been hassling you? You seemed upset when she
walked into the office.”
Julia stumbled in the ankle-deep snow, and Paul quickly reached
out one of his large paws to steady her.
“Careful. There could be black ice under there.”
She thanked him and began to walk a little more slowly after
he released her.
“If you slip again, grab hold of me. I don’t go down. Ever.”
She glanced at him sideways, completely innocently, only to see
him blush. Julia had never seen a rugby player blush before.
(It was rumored to be impossible.)
“Um, what I meant is that I’m too heavy. You wouldn’t be able
to pull me over.”
She shook her head. “You aren’t that heavy.”
Paul smiled to himself at the perceived compliment.
“Has Christa been rude to you?”
Julia looked down at the snow-covered sidewalk in front of them.
“I’ve been staying up late every night working on my thesis. Professor 177
Sylvain Reynard
Picton is very demanding. Last week she rejected several pages of my Purgatorio translation. I’ve been redoing it, and it just takes so long.”
“I could help you. I mean, you could email your translations to
me before you give them to her so I could check them.”
“Thanks, but you’re busy with your own stuff. You don’t have
time for my problems.”
He stopped walking and placed a light hand on her arm. “Of
course I have time for you. You’re working on love and lust, and I’m working on pleasure. Some of our translations will overlap. It would be good practice for me.”
“I’m not working on love and lust anymore. Professor Picton
made me change my topic to a comparison between
courtly love
and the friendship between Virgil and Dante.”
Paul shrugged. “Some of the translations will still overlap.”
“If we’re working on the same passage we could compare transla-
tions. I don’t want to bother you with stuff that’s unrelated to your project.” She looked over at him tentatively.
“Send me what you have and what your deadlines are, and I’ll
look at it. No problem.”
“Thank you.” She appeared relieved.
He withdrew his hand, and they began walking again. “Did you
know that the Chair of Italian Studies sent out an email announce-
ment about your admission to Harvard? He said that you won a
pretty big fellowship.”
Julia’s eyes went wide. “Um, no. I didn’t know that. I didn’t get
that email.”
“Well, it was sent to everyone else. Emerson made me print out
the email and post it on the bulletin board next to his office, after he insisted that I highlight all the important information, including your name, with a bright yellow marker. Figures. He was nothing
but rude to you while you were in his seminar, and now he’s prob-
ably going to take credit for your admission to Harvard. Asshole.”
Julia’s eyebrows furrowed, but she didn’t comment.
“What?”
She flushed slightly under his scrutiny. “Nothing.”
“Julia, spit it out. What were you thinking just now?”
178
Gabriel’s Rapture
“Um, I was just wondering if you’d seen Christa hovering around
the department? Or Professor Emerson’s office?”
“No, thank God. It looks as if she’s moved on to someone else.
She knows better than to talk to me. I’m just waiting for her to give me a chance to tell her off.” Paul winked and patted her shoulder
fraternally. “She better not give you a hard time. Or I have a few stories I could tell.”
P
On Thursday, Julia met with her therapist in preparation for her
meeting with the Dean, which was scheduled for Friday morning.
Recognizing that Julia needed to discuss what was happening,
Nicole set aside her goals for that session and listened patiently before offering her opinion. “Stress can be very destructive to our health, so it’s important to deal with it adequately. Some people prefer to talk about their problems, while others prefer to think about them.
How have you dealt with stress in the past?”
Julia fidgeted with her hands. “I’ve kept quiet.”
“Can you share your concerns with your boyfriend?”
“I can. But I don’t want to upset him. He’s worried about me
as it is.”
Nicole nodded sagely. “When you care about someone, it’s un-
derstandable that you would want to protect them from pain. And
that’s perfectly appropriate on some occasions. But on others, you run the risk of shouldering more than your fair share of stress or responsibility. Can you see why that might be a problem?”
“Well, I don’t like it when Gabriel keeps things from me. I feel
like a child. I’d rather have him share things than shut me out.”
“It’s possible that Gabriel feels the same way, that he worries about you shutting him out. Have you discussed this with him?”
“I’ve tried to. I’ve told him I want to be equals, that I don’t want to keep secrets.”
“Good. And what was his response?”
“He either wants to take care of me or he’s worried about disap-
pointing me.”
179
Sylvain Reynard
“And how does that make you feel?”
Julia gestured with her hands as she tried to find the words.
“I don’t want his money. It makes me feel poor and dependent
and — and helpless.”
“And why is that?”
“He gives me so much already, and I can’t reciprocate.”
“Is it important to you that your relationship be reciprocal?”
“Yes.”
Nicole smiled kindly. “No relationship is absolutely reciprocal.
Sometimes, when couples try to split everything in half, they discover that the relationship is not a partnership but a bean counting exercise.
Striving for reciprocity in a relationship can be unhealthy.
“On the other hand, striving to have a partnership in which each
partner is valued equally and shares both burdens and responsibilities can be healthy. In other words, it isn’t a problem if he makes more money than you. But he needs to understand that you want to
contribute to the relationship, perhaps not financially but in other ways, and that those ways should be respected just as much as the
money. Does that make sense?”
“Yes. I like that idea. A lot.”
“As for protecting one another…” She smiled.
“You could make a biological argument as to why men feel the
need to protect their women and children. Whatever the reason, it’s a fact. Men tend to find their self-worth in actions and accomplishments. If you refuse to let him do things for you, he’ll feel useless and superfluous. He wants to know that he can take care of you and protect you, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Partners should want to protect one another. But like any view, it has its extremes and it has its middle.
“What you and your boyfriend should do is to strive for the
middle. Allow him to take care of you in some ways, while exerting your independence in others. And you should impress upon him the
need for you to take care of him too.”
Julia nodded. The concept of moderation appealed to her. She
wanted to care for Gabriel, and she wanted him to care for her, but she didn’t want to be a burden, and she didn’t want him to look at her as if she was broken. But sorting all of that out practically was a different matter.
180
Gabriel’s Rapture
“Some men have what I call chivalry syndrome — they want to protect their women as if they were absolutely helpless. And this might be romantic and exciting for a time, but eventually reality will set in and it will become stifling and patronizing. When one partner does all the protecting and the other does all the receiving, it’s unhealthy.
“Of course, some women have the feminine equivalent of chivalry
syndrome — wounded duck attachment. They seek out men who are bad boys or broken and afflicted and attempt to fix them. But we’ll table that discussion for another day.
“At his extreme, a chivalrous male can do all kinds of rash things to protect his woman, including riding into battle on his horse, or taking up arms against thousands of Persians, when he should be
running in the opposite direction. Discretion is the better part of valor. ”
She chuckled slightly. “Did you see the film 300?”
Julia shook her head.
“It’s about the Battle of Thermopylae, when three hundred Spar-
tans held off two hundred and fifty thousand Persians before being defeated. Herodotus writes about it.”
Julia regarded Nicole with no little interest. How many psycholo-
gists could cite Herodotus?
“King Leonidas was an extreme case. One could argue that his
last stand was precipitated by political concerns rather than chivalry.
But my point is that sometimes the chivalrous man ends up doing
more damage through his protection than can be done by the force
threatening his partner. Spartan women used to tell their husbands and sons to come home carrying their shields or on them. If you
found yourself in that situation, you’d probably prefer that Gabriel didn’t die hol
ding the line against thousands of Persians and came home to you, instead.”
Julia nodded in absolute agreement.
“In your conversations with Gabriel, you might want to talk about
that — how you feel about being protected to his own detriment,
how you should share your risks and responsibilities, why you want to be a partner rather than a child or a helpless female.
“Perhaps Gabriel would be willing to attend joint sessions with
us even though he isn’t coming in privately.”
Julia wasn’t quite sure that she’d heard Nicole correctly. “Pardon?”
181
Sylvain Reynard
Nicole smiled. “I said that in your conversations with Gabriel,
you might want to talk about how you feel protected — ”
“No,” Julia interrupted. “I meant the last part. You said that
Gabriel isn’t coming in anymore?”
Nicole froze. “Um, that was very unprofessional of me. I shouldn’t speak to you about another client and his counselor.”
“When did he stop seeing Winston?”
“I really can’t say.” Nicole shifted in her seat. “Now, we should
probably discuss some ways in which you can deal with stress before your meeting tomorrow…” P
The Dean of Graduate Studies favored formality and refinement.
For these reasons, he always conducted meetings in a large, wood-
paneled conference room adjacent to his office on St. George Street.
Professor Jeremy Martin, the Chair of Italian Studies, sat at his right in a large, high-backed chair that was vaguely medieval in style, behind an imposing, dark wood table that ran almost the width of the room.
Two small folding chairs were centered before the table, and
that is where Soraya and her client sat most uncomfortably at the
beginning of their meeting.
“A moment for introductions.” The Dean’s rich, baritone voice
rang out in the room.
“Miss Julianne Mitchell?”
Julia nodded, but said nothing.
“And who is your representative?” His pale, cold blue eyes gave
away nothing, but it was clear that he recognized the dark haired
Gabriel's Rapture gi-2 Page 21
