Going down the stairs to their apartment was like descending into another world.
When he opened the door, he was surprised to find Naomi still awake, sitting at her desk, staring out into the night. His voice floated back to him from the stereo. She hadn’t noticed him, and he stood for a moment, taking in the picture presented to him. It must have been like this when she had written all those lyrics. The hotel asleep and deserted, she had retreated here, into her sanctuary, to regain a small piece of that other life—the one without him in it—she had led for so long.
“Baby.”
“You’re wet! Look at you! You should know better than to run around without a jacket in this weather!”
He laughed in surprise at her outburst. She rose from her seat and came over to him, mumbling about male stupidity and how he would catch his death, or at the very least a terrible cold, and she would have to nurse him back to health with ginger tea and chicken broth if he did not get out of those wet clothes, unbuttoning his shirt while she talked, and pulling it out of his jeans.
“Alright! Let go! I’ll have a hot shower, and then I’ll be fine. Stop fussing, wife!”
Dropping his clothes on the floor, he stepped into the bathroom. It did feel good, he had to admit, as his muscles began to relax under the hot deluge. He stood, his hands resting on the wall, his eyes closed, letting the water run over him, warming his cold body.
“Let me scrub your back for you,” he heard Naomi’s voice from behind.
“You are in danger. I can imagine how you look, all wet and slippery, your hair plastered to your skin, like a proper selkie come to me out of curiosity. I will surely steal your pelt and make you stay with me and then ravish you every night until you can’t live without me anymore.”
“Ah.” A soft laugh. “And what makes you think I haven’t come to steal you away to my castle and make you mine and take your voice from you, and the only outlet for you would be to please me day and night?”
“Take away my voice? What a dire threat.” When he turned to her, she looked just as he had imagined. Wonderfully naked, her locks like black snakes over her shoulders and breasts. “Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll give away my voice for the privilege of being your consort in your cool abode. Maybe I’ll voluntarily languish there forever, without song, just for the joy of being around when you swim through the forest of algae and frolic with the little fishes.”
“Frolic with the little fishes?” Naomi toyed with the soap, producing fragrant suds, which she spread on his chest and stomach. “I think not. I think I would be frolicking with my obliging mermen while you floundered around on the bottom of the sea, watching helplessly how they move inside of—”
“Yeah, Baby, don’t take it too far. You’re on dangerous ground now.”
His muscles tightened under her caress, and he moved closer to her.
“Move inside of the algae forest, I was going to say.” She finished her sentence. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking. There would be some pretty mermaids to take care of you, of course, feeding you oysters and mussels and rubbing your—”
“Dangerous.” Delivered in a low growl. “Very, very dangerous now. Be careful, my sweet selkie. I’d be around when you returned from your games with the puny merguys, and then you would be caught for sure. I would show you how we do it on the surface, where we get our strength from the sun and hot food.”
“Overrated.” A slight, negligent shrug of her shoulder and insistent hands on his body. “Vastly overrated, your human lovemaking. A mere myth to draw unsuspecting girls from the ocean to do your cooking and cleaning. Our mermen now, they don’t hesitate to show some passion, and they don’t waste time talking when they find a maid willing enough. They—”
Driven beyond endurance by her touch and her scenario, he hoisted her up against the tiles.
“Mermen. Right, mermen. Cold-blooded, voiceless sushi eaters. Now you are going to get a sample of how we do it, and I assure you, I’m no mean ambassador for mankind. So take it, selkie, and don’t you dare refuse me.”
Gripping her harder, he pressed her tightly against the wall. “Give it up, my mermaid. Yield. Yield to me and be mine forever.”
“Those lyrics,” Jon said later when they had finally found their way into bed, “I just can’t get over it. They weren’t yours anymore; they were mine. You had written them for me, they were your cry to me, and you had no right to destroy them.”
Her hair was still damp from the shower. Her limbs moved languidly as she pulled up the quilt. He thought she truly looked like a selkie he had compelled away from her natural element, her eyes as large and dark as a seal’s, her body as smooth and white as a lustrous pearl, her long, dark tendrils in sharp contrast.
There was no reply, and Jon thought she had fallen asleep. He reached over to turn off the light, ready to settle down himself, when he heard her say very softly, “I have copies on my computer. You can have the damned things if you want them so badly.”
For a moment he could not believe his ears. Naomi seemed completely unconcerned as she snuggled into her pillow, drowsy eyes closing, her features relaxing into the softness of slumber.
“Are you serious?” Wide awake again, Jon shook her out of her torpor. She tried to shake him off, but he did not relent. “Tell me again! You kept copies, and you knew it the whole time?”
“Yes, now go to sleep.” It was little more than a sigh. She refused to open her eyes again.
“Naomi. Talk to me. You truly have copies on that damned laptop of yours, and you tossed those sheets away only to torture me?”
Her lids fluttered. “Tomorrow. Let me sleep now. I’m tired. Getting married is very, very exhausting.”
Her family was leaving. Her Uncle Carl held her hands in his. “Don’t be a stranger. When you cross the Atlantic again, stop and stay with us. The time for hiding here is over now. And Naomi, come for New Year’s. Come home to Kleinburg and bring your husband. Bring your friends. They should see where you come from.”
The tenderness in his words nearly made her weep. “We’ll come,” she said.
He kissed her forehead and climbed into the car where her parents were already waiting, and she watched them drive away into the wet morning.
Jon sighed in relief to see them go. He would be the first to admit that they frightened him a great deal. Carl and Olaf were so big and blond, like Vikings. He could see them roaming the wild countryside above the fjords clothed only in furs and leather, their legs wrapped up in rags and their hair in ragged braids, crude swords slung over their shoulders as they stood with their arrow notched in a wooden bow, ready to shoot at anything that moved among the trees.
“You watch too many bad movies,” Naomi told him.
It was fascinating to watch her at her desk again. Even now, with the house still full of people, she had retreated here, truly working, not just staring out the window and dreaming, waiting for inspiration to come to her.
Quietly he sat down at the piano and put his glasses on to take another look at the song he had begun that morning. She moved and he looked up expectantly.
She was clearly searching for the right words to say. “Jon, what do I do? I don’t know what to do.” Her shoulders moved in something like helplessness as she struggled to express herself, a trace of impatience in the fluttering of her fingers. “I need someone to sort out my thoughts.”
The outburst made him smile. “Do you think I’m the right person?”
“I don’t know.” She squirmed in her chair. “Since I don’t know what I want, I don’t know who the right person is.”
He did, though. It had always been like this, and he thought it was wildly funny that she did not realize it herself. There was only one person who could sort out her creative tangles for her, and it certainly wasn’t him.
“Well then, love, go find Sean. And take a walk with him.”
“Sean.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” Jon called after her. “You’re a ma
rried woman now, remember?”
A while later he saw them strolling along the pier, wrapped in warm sweaters, Sean with his hands stuffed in his pockets, listening closely to Naomi, who was once again gesturing as she talked, her wild mane blowing in the wind.
Jon pondered the lines of her newest song, trying to find the truth in them, the relevance to her own life, theirs, but he could not find a connection. These had come, he understood, when inspiration had struck her so suddenly at the dinner table that they had made a clear thought impossible.
It was part of her charm that she refused to accept credit for her work. On the other hand, she had possessed the audacity to drop that sheaf of lyrics into his hands like the bomb they had proven to be, accompanied only by the sassy, single phrase she had scribbled on a half sheet of paper: SING THIS. He still had that note stashed away with her originals in the safe at the Hollywood office. From time to time, when he was there alone, he had taken it out and gazed at it and recalled, over and over again, their very first days together in Geneva.
That first night was bright and clear in his mind, locked away in its own precious treasury. It had been so different, so intense, so intimate and sweet, a revelation. He had been giving love for the first time, all his senses centered on the girl in his arms, aware of her every moment, his own satisfaction defined by her bliss and her reaction to him. It had been very scary, this sudden strong urge to give instead of just taking what he needed the way he was accustomed to doing. She had demanded nothing of him, letting him lead her and introduce her to this new experience, and he had done it ever so gently, taking her along until she clasped him tightly, her breath coming in hitched sobs, and she shuddered against him, gasping his name.
It was as if a veil had been torn from his eyes that night, and a whole new world had opened for him. A world where the word love had a completely new meaning, and he wanted to keep it forever. Not even standing on stage surrounded by the roaring of ten thousand people could match it. This had been personal, direct, theirs.
And so, when he had stood with her in that lobby the next morning, pleading with her to join him in Amsterdam and then come away to California, he had trembled in panic that she might refuse, might disappear again into her life and this city among the mountains, and his newfound feelings would have no outlet but to haunt him like a mirage for the rest of his life.
As they had.
On the flight he had tried to step back from himself, to analyze the storm of his feelings, put some distance and reality into the thing, but the closer the time came when she was supposed to arrive, the stronger the certainty became that there was no other reality. Sal had gone to the airport, and he had hardly been able to concentrate on the soundcheck, fearing—back then when cell phones were still only an idea—that he would return alone, shrug at him, and say, “She didn’t show up.”
But she did. He had nearly lost his composure when she walked into the hall behind Sal, a tentative smile on her face. He had known then that she had gone through the same doubts and fears, and it had made him leap from the stage and run to meet her halfway until she was in his arms.
She was tired; there was no other way to put it.
Back at the apartment after her walk with Sean through the blustery weather she went straight to her bed and pulled the quilt up to her chin. It was quiet in her cozy nook, and for a moment she imagined she was back in the loneliness of her old life. But it did not last long, for the door opened and she could hear his steps, the soft query, and she replied.
Jon dropped onto the bed beside her, leaning on one elbow. “So tell me. What did you talk to Sean about?”
“You’ll laugh at me,” she prophesied moodily, “and then I’ll never talk to you again. Go away.”
“No. I won’t laugh and I won’t go. Promise. Come on. Talk to me.”
She looked up at his serious face, all the play gone from his expression.
“Tell me, Baby. Please. I know there is something brewing in you, and I get the feeling that I need to hear it.” He hesitated briefly. “We are on the verge of something new, yes? Only I can’t see where it is leading.”
There was an awful, tearing pain in Naomi’s chest that took her breath away and nearly made her cry. She felt the grief swell in her like the huge wave she had just written about, bitter, salty, inundating.
She had written those very first lyrics for him from a deep compulsion and sent them to him without thinking twice, utterly certain these were the words he was supposed to put to music and then perform. That voice, it had been the magic of the voice, it had been like the soft, warm blanket of love, the challenge of a bungee jump from a high bridge, a roller coaster ride and the wild, disturbing kiss of a stranger in the darkness of a summer night.
And here, a lifetime later, so many tears and lonely nights later, there was still the same powerful urge to give him what he wanted from her.
“Baby?” Jon asked tenderly. “Where are you? You look as if you want to cry. Why do I make you cry?”
“I never thought of loving you,” she said, “when I heard you sing. Your voice, it seemed to be talking directly to me. It seemed almost as if there was no barrier, no other listener, no radio, nothing. You, and me, and the way you sang to me. I stood there in my room, helpless, struck dumb as a beast, and as excited and trembling as a teenager getting her first kiss. It felt as if you were reaching out to me. I could feel your hand on my neck, forcing me to sit down right then and there and write those songs for you, as if I was not even writing them myself. And yet, at the same time, I felt provoked, almost angry. I don’t know. I wanted to smack you for disturbing me like that, invading my mind, ruining my life. Wherever I went, there was that stupid song, and that voice, calling, demanding, and yes, mocking me.”
Naomi moved against him.
“And then you appear. Out of the blue, the voice has a face. And a body. And God, it belongs to the most compelling man on Earth, and he is mine for the taking. The voice that drove me into sleepless madness belongs to the one man who makes me instantly weak with desire without even saying a word, who has eyes that kill me with one look and lips that need to be kissed so badly it drives any sane thought from my head.” She felt his arms tighten around her and his breath quicken against her face. “If you had pushed just a little harder, I would have been yours that first night. I ached for you; I wanted to feel you so badly. The car took me home and I cursed myself and my stupid pride, wondering if I would ever get a second chance. I did not sleep at all that night, imagining how it would be to make love to you, to lie in your arms. How you would take me to your room and steal my clothes, whispering to me in the darkness, so sure of yourself, and how you would come for me and make me yours, the first, the only one, ever. You were so decent, so very, very gentle and sweet.” She sat up, which made Jon stretch out and rest his hands under his head. “Promise not to laugh. And promise not to hold it against me.”
“Yeah, I promise. But I might make a little fun of you if it’s too outrageous.”
She slapped his arm. “Sean thinks we’re creating a musical. And Jon, if we go on, if we really put together a musical, then I would like to see it on stage. Live, not a movie. And Sean thinks it’s high time for your own stage production anyway.”
He did not reply for so long, Naomi thought he had drifted off into a doze.
“Such a terribly long way.”
It was delivered in a low, thoughtful voice, and she could not make out if there was sadness in it or only bemusement.
“Truly, Naomi, it has been such a long, long way for me to end up here in your bed and hear from you which fork in the road to take.”
His head turned in her direction and he looked straight at her, wide awake and very alert. “Seems to me you always knew exactly when to push or prod me, first with your lyrics, then when you ran away, stepping back into my life just before I was ready to jump in the sea with depression, and now…now you come up with this utterly outlandish idea.”
&
nbsp; “I’m not prodding you into anything.”
Disappointed, she moved to rise from the bed, but he held her back, laughing at her bristling defensiveness. “Silly girl. As if you had a chance against me. You know you can’t win. But if you want a lively tussle I’ll give you one, only I can’t promise you will be on time for dinner then.”
He brought her down and rolled on top of her, holding her wrists tightly above her head until she gave up.
“Oh yes. That’s much better, you greedy little thing. Now, will you hear the rest of my answer, or do you need to wrestle some more first? I’m all for wrestling, but I’m also rather keen to finish my little speech.”
“Then finish it.”
“Right away, ma’am. But since I have you so conveniently under control, I think I’ll do some serious kissing first, the kind that will give me pleasure. Come on, Baby, please your man.”
“No! Go away!” It was barely more than a sob.
Jon did not even bother to reply. His kiss was slow and deep, brutally sensual and intimate, filled with the promise of other things, and it got the desired response from her.
“Yeah, little beast,” he whispered when her body strained against his. “That’s it. Show me you want me. Let me feel your need.”
He let go of her, satisfied with the result of his gentle assault.
“And to think,” Jon said appreciatively, “you are my wife. You belong to me, and yet you are my greatest temptation, in every sense.”
“And you are my bane.” Her face was flushed, her hair wild around it. “My nightmare, the cross I have to bear. I’m never safe from you and your attacks, and I always end up on my back with you doing as you please.”
“Yes.” he agreed with relish, “I just love it. Don’t you? I know you do. Come on, get up! No more play before dinner.”
He rose and held out his hand to her. She glared at him but took the offered help and followed him downstairs to the piano.
“Look, Naomi, it’s all here. This is what we will do: when everyone is gone, when my mother and Joshua have left for New York, we will have the space and the quiet to work on this. We won’t even tell anyone. Just the two of us, we will develop this selkie thing. What do you think?” Expectantly he waited for her reaction. It was a dream; it was more than writing songs together, it was more than writing a movie score. This combined their talents in a way that had never before occurred to him, and if they managed to complete it they would pull everyone together again, and then, and then…he did not dare to think it through, but it was there, exciting, calling to him, the beast that had been hiding from him, finally allowing him more than a brief glimpse.
The Distant Shore (Stone Trilogy) Page 26
