“Like what?”
Her first instinct was to smile secretively, but she wanted to put that behind her.
“I think,” she said, “I’m ready to try everything.”
After a pause, during which she caught Chad holding back an ecstatic grin, she got to her elbows on the mattress, glancing around a room that resembled a strange imitation of Star Wars: the bed was like a spaceship, and since it had the capacity to vibrate, it could send the occupants to light-speed. There was a facsimile of a desert-planet bar in one corner, with booze and containers full of condoms, and in another was a space station, complete with toy laser blasters that did heaven-knew-what to a body.
When Sasha had suggested this tour at the beginning of their day, she’d thought Chad’s glasses might just about steam up. But she’d made it clear that this was for research purposes only. No funny stuff.
Little did he know, though, that with every hotel they visited, the more she reconsidered.
“What I’d give,” Sasha said, tucking her hands under her head, “to be able to see how a real Japanese couple acts in one of these rooms. Now, I’m not talking about being a voyeur,” she elaborated as Chad leaned on his elbow and raised his eyebrows at her. “I mean that this culture requires that they use two different ways of presenting themselves—one way is private and one way is public. It’d be enlightening to see how those ways vary.”
“Analytical to the end.”
She smiled, knowing that was true. But she hesitated to tell him that, since last night, she’d started seeing the world in another way, too.
She’d perceived that first bar they’d visited as a soft blue haven, the rose at the doorway as a burst of brilliant red.
But maybe that’s what happened when you started to trust again, she thought. When you started to hope.
“There’s a word for the differences in how they act,” she added, her voice light. “Honne and tatemae. Honne is a sincerely felt response. Tatemae is the socially required one.”
“There’d be lots of honne in here, I suspect,” Chad said.
Sasha gently slapped his arm, and he laughed, got up and figured out how to work the vibrating feature on the bed.
Sasha lay still, even when the wild lights on the ceiling began to flash to space music.
The cadence of them was hypnotic, making her eyelids heavy, especially since last night had gone late and they’d been doing nothing but running around today.
Thinking she might just close her eyes for a moment, she succumbed to the buzzing of the bed as Chad returned to lie beside her.
Even though they were in an odd place—the last place she would have ever pictured herself—she felt…
Sasha smiled. She felt comfortable, she supposed. But that might have been because Chad was here. She had spent so many nights remembering what it had been like that his presence seemed perfectly natural.
She must’ve even fallen asleep, because before she knew it, she was groggily opening her eyes again, finding herself reclining on her side with Chad cradling her.
The scent of him, the feel of him, was so familiar that she started to drift off again.
Until she realized that, just as in old times, his hand was covering her breast.
Her eyes widened, a shock of adrenaline shaking her.
Too soon, her mind shouted.
But, months ago, she’d woken up so many mornings with him in exactly this position that she didn’t want to move.
God help her, she’d missed this, and as he drew in a long breath, stirring the stray hair at her nape, she pressed his hand closer to her.
A lump burned in her throat. She loved him so much. Had never stopped.
As his breathing hushed over the back of her neck, desire charred her—starting in her belly, pushing outward until it pained.
Chad.
If not now, when? When would she stop blaming him—and herself—for what hadn’t worked the first time?
They’d learned from being apart, hadn’t they? And she’d even learned something within these past few days—to be more willing to step out of her marked borders, to go for it.
So what was stopping her from taking those lessons and applying them to the biggest leap of faith she could take?
Her breathing trembled as she shifted, feeling his body, long and lean, in back of her. His thighs, his groin, his torso, his arms that were still wrapped around her.
She’d wanted independence, but she wanted this, too.
Wanted him with all her heart.
Fingers clumsy, she tentatively undid the first button of her blouse, then continued on down until she could slip her hand inside to unhook the front of her bra.
Then she exhaled, her pulse choppy as she turned onto her back. Chad’s hand slipped to her ribs and, with a bit less caution this time, she hauled the rest of her shirt and bra away from her chest.
She closed her eyes once more.
No going back if you do this, she thought.
It was time. Damned time.
Opening her eyes, she took his hand and placed it on her naked breast. A soft groan wracked her—a wildness clawing to get out that she had never really allowed free before.
So long, too long without him.
His breathing had gone from long and rhythmic to a quicker pace, and she guessed he’d woken up.
When he cupped her breast and whispered her name, that only confirmed it.
He’d taken off his glasses, leaving him free to bury his entire face against her neck, his lips still shaping her name, repeating it between the kisses he pressed on her.
Body shimmering with heat, she rolled over to face him, to crush her mouth to his in a kiss she’d been dreaming about for months.
But the musky taste of him, the way their lips and tongues attacked and slipped and slid, was real.
Acute and real.
She pressed her sex to his, feeling him rising against his pants. Riding a crash of need, she lifted her leg to drape it over his. She pushed against him, getting him harder.
“I love you,” he said on a moan.
The words thundered into her, through her.
She’d always kept the confession back, taming it, but she let it out now.
“Me, too,” she said, the admission scratching her throat but sounding so right and good. “I love you, too, Chad.”
As he whisked off her blouse and bra entirely, then his own shirt, she reveled in the press of her breasts to his bare chest, her nipples hard against his hair-sprinkled skin. The peaks of her combed through that hair, sending keen screams of sensation through every cell of her body.
Her pants came next, then his, and soon they were fitted to each other, his erection prodding between her thighs.
She felt as if she were being split in two: the public side of her versus the sincerely felt. The fear versus the desire for love. The analytical Sasha against the one who really did want to see the world in bursts of colors.
“I’m on the way,” he said in a harsh whisper.
And she could feel that, because his head was already slick with beaded moisture.
“We’ve got time,” she answered. “As many times as we want.”
She touched his penis, the length of it so natural in her hand.
Then she circled her thumb over his tip, stroking into the wet slit at the very top.
He groaned, long and tortured, and Sasha slid her other hand down to his balls, where she knew the pleasure of touch would undo him.
Then she rolled him to moaning ecstasy.
But he had other plans.
“I want to be inside you for this,” he said, sitting up and straddling her while pinning her arms over her head. “I’ve been waiting a long time, and I don’t want to be on the outside when it happens, Sasha.”
She didn’t disagree with him, because the last place she wanted him ever to be again was on the outside.
He traveled one hand down, then over the sensitive crook of her underarm, and she j
erked, her sex giving a startling pulse of need.
Then he came to her breast, taking her nipple between his fingers and working it.
She arched her hips, his penis skimming her belly. That split she’d felt earlier was stronger now, wedging her apart, thrusting her into the sincerely felt side.
When he bent to take her other nipple into his mouth, a stab of pleasure tore into her so strongly that she shot to a climax there and then.
Her core spasmed, but he kept on sucking, manipulating, bringing her higher, urging her to the precipice of another orgasm.
He knew just what to do. He’d been the only one who’d ever known.
Almost subtly, he used his free hand to part her legs, then slipped his arousal right into her, smoothly, as if he belonged there.
And he did, she thought as she churned her hips, taking him in. It was as if he’d never left.
She was skating on thin ice now, cold and hot warring within her, pushing and pulling.
A rupture rattled her as Chad thrust into her harder, faster, and she knew she couldn’t hold together.
So she grabbed onto him, moving with him, her body coming apart inch by inch until—
—CRACK—
She came again so brutally that she cried out at the top of her lungs, digging her fingers into him.
As she was coming down, he was peaking, gushing into her, until he collapsed against her.
While they held each other, Sasha felt the separated side of her floating away as she clung to the other.
The honne side. The love.
The colors, she thought as she hugged Chad even tighter.
10
JULIANA AND TRISTAN merely looked at each other in the aftermath of reading.
They were both speechless, she thought, numbed, as if neither of them really knew how to proceed.
But maybe she was also still recovering from what he’d said to her beforehand, about how he’d wanted her to be with him when they were young instead of leaving him behind in solitude and secrecy. She’d always hoped he’d been wishing for that, and it ripped at her that neither of them had ever risked themselves to find out the truth.
That they had never taken the chance on the seed of what they’d had during those few summer nights.
Juliana finally spoke. “The journal pages—it’s clear that Terrence loved Emelie more than I’ve ever been told.”
“And she felt the same about him.” Tristan tossed down the copies. “Everything that happened between them after they broke up was needless. All the fighting, all the time they wasted…”
He was pissed, but she suspected it was a mask for sadness, too, because that’s what she was feeling.
Sadness for two people—and two families—who had truly misspent all these years being bitter.
Sadness for how things could’ve been mended so much earlier and how it would’ve allowed them to fall in love.
But had this really changed anything?
How did knowing the extent of Terrence and Emelie’s love for each other alter the competition for the painting—the token of a personal battle that had gotten way out of control?
A knock sounded on Tristan’s door, and Juliana knew it was the maid summoning them downstairs.
She busied herself by gathering Emelie’s letters and stuffing them in her sash.
“Hey,” Tristan said.
Don’t look at him, she thought. If you do, he’s going to see right through you. He’s going to know that you’re afraid of crashing and burning, just like Emelie and Terrence did. He’s going to know that you want more than anything to reach across the table to touch his hand, to connect to him, when you know you shouldn’t.
But she couldn’t help it.
He was watching her with something she’d never seen from anyone else—an emotion that wasn’t like the comfort from an aunt or the warmth of a good friend, although it had those qualities somewhere underneath the intensity.
No, this was a look that shook her with a deep, desperate longing.
He came over to her, and her belly quivered. Just having him near undid her, and she came this close to telling him that he could just have the painting, that she would endure the consequences of a hurt, betrayed family for him.
Then the reality of what that would feel like—the injured looks, the disbelief that she’d turned against them—smacked into Juliana.
She’d put her life on hold, sold her business, to aid and support her family. And even though a part of her resented that, a part of her had really wanted to do it, too, because you didn’t just desert the ones who’d dropped everything for you after your parents had died, when you’d needed help the most.
It was this part that won out now.
She took his hand in hers, the quavers in her tummy spiraling into whirls of heat. Her body seemed to fold into itself, pressing against her heart.
“I wish things could be different,” she said.
His hand fell out of hers. “I wish you saw that they could be.”
Averting his face, he left her, heading for the door as she fought the sharpness in her throat and chest. His blocked expression didn’t hide the slump of his otherwise strong shoulders.
But he wasn’t looking at everything realistically, she thought, her lungs feeling squeezed. He’d let the fairy-tale portion of Terrence and Emelie’s letters sway him and was ignoring all the tangles that had come afterward.
The maid led them downstairs, to a larger room that held a big, dark, square lacquered table that hovered over the tatami.
Jiro Mori and a yukata-wearing woman with a pleasant smile and short, bobbed hair were waiting for them. In the corner, Juliana also saw a covered easel through the blur of barely checked tears, and she knew that the painting was beneath the sheet.
Her heart twisted. Dream Rising.
The reason for all the pain.
But she called on her deepest strength to do business, engaging in greetings all around, pushing back those tears. Jiro introduced his female associate as Midori Sakai, who was here to authenticate Dream Rising. Then he motioned for Juliana and Tristan to sit in their floor-bound chairs while maids brought them tea.
Jiro and Midori walked to the painting, as if eager to unveil it.
“It’s quite a work,” the woman said in perfect, British-inflected English.
Juliana found herself glancing at Tristan, who looked back at her with eyes that had darkened to a troubled gray. She wished she could know what he was thinking without having to take the scary chance of responding to whatever he might put out there.
Best not say a word. Best get this painting business behind them so they could go home and…
Her chest felt as if it were caving in again.
Jiro’s voice jammed its way between her and Tristan’s shared gaze, and broke the link, leaving her with a hollow feeling that she couldn’t identify.
“Are you ready to see it?” the art dealer asked.
“Yes,” Juliana said too quickly.
Out of her peripheral vision, she could see Tristan give a slight nod, as if he wasn’t entirely focused on the art, either.
Jiro turned to his associate. “Midori-san?”
Carefully, the woman uncovered the painting, and a hush fell over the room as the rain on the roof faded into the background.
The colors, was the first thing Juliana thought, her hand coming up to her throat. She hadn’t expected the intensity of crimson at the bottom of the painting, hadn’t known she’d be so moved by how it turned into a violet mist as Emelie’s slim arms reached up and outward.
Juliana had expected Terrence to use a canvas of his usual blues, but this was a bleeding, naked admission of passion from Terrence’s brush, and it prodded Juliana’s heart, made her throat ache all over again.
Love. She had never seen such a joyous yet heartbreaking expression of it, and she wasn’t sure she could even have identified it before now.
She glanced down before she gave away the extreme
s of her agony. She didn’t know a thing about falling for someone so hard that you perceived the world in arresting hues.
Or did she?
Midori had launched into an explanation of how she knew the painting was the real thing, citing something about how Terrence Cole always included his initials in an intricate winding of letters near the bottom of his watercolors.
When she finished, Jiro watched Juliana and Tristan expectantly, but neither of them said anything.
There was silence until she heard herself talking about what she’d read in Terrence’s journal.
“So tragic,” she said, her voice sounding as if it were caught up in the mist of the painting itself. She wasn’t even sure who she was talking to—Tristan, Jiro…or herself. “I knew Emelie loved Terrence and had been hurt by his rejection, but now I know he was in anguish about letting her go, too.” Her throat rubbed against every word. “He hated that they had no future, hated that his family already had his bride chosen for him. He didn’t want to part with Emelie, but he was loyal to his family, and he tried to show her how much she meant to him with this painting. He intended always to keep it with him, thinking he could at least hold that much of her, that no one could ever take it away.” She swallowed. “But Emelie needed—wanted— more than that. She wanted all of him, and she should have had it. They just never got it together, Terrence and Emelie.”
She could feel Tristan watching her again.
It was all she could feel, really.
Her hand slid away from her throat, dropping to her lap. “He painted what he saw in her,” she added, talking to Tristan now. Only Tristan. “But at the same time, this watercolor was his soul, too. Emelie was his soul. And it’s no wonder your family never made Terrence’s journal public. It showed too much of him. It showed…” Don’t say it.
But she did.
“It showed all his hopes for what he and Emelie could have had together.”
Tristan’s voice eased into the gaping pause that hers had left. “They could still have it.”
His tone—low and emotional—rocked her.
She didn’t look at him. To do so would break her down, and she couldn’t have that.
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