She was a really good friend.
“Were you mad at me the whole summer?” he asked.
“No. Yes, in a way. I understood when you left that you meant it to be a permanent goodbye, but I didn’t want to just kiss you and have that be all there was.” I looked out at the water, trying to figure out how to say it. “We have different perspectives, I think. I tried to look at what happened between us from yours. We only went to dinner a few times and hung out a little and it wasn’t anything serious or permanent, not in any way. I made a big deal out of everything because I’m…me. I not like the yoga women, with lots of different guys and, um, kissing them all. I only kissed you.”
“Just me?” He paused. “Ever?”
The shame. “Yes. Sorry.”
“Why would you be sorry about that?” His fingers squeezed my knee.
“What Tatum was saying about being old and not accomplishing anything—that’s me, too. I haven’t accomplished stuff like other people my age, because I was set in something, like you said. Routines. But mine made me stuck, trapped. Changing things—changing myself, it was so hard, but I’m so glad that I was able to break out of my past.” Mostly.
His hand cupped the back of my head and tugged me gently until our foreheads touched. “On the field, I have to be able to read the play and adjust my rush. I want to adjust to this. I missed you,” he said simply. “I bought this house, and you were the person I wanted to show it to. If you hadn’t been there on Fan Day, I was going to have to see you somehow.”
I kissed him first, because I could read the play and adjust, too. I could try.
Knox kissed me back, turning more so that he could put his arms around my waist and hold me. He lifted me off the big boulder and sat me on his lap, facing him, my knees splayed around his hips, so that we were pressed together down there. “This ok?” he asked. He kissed my neck in a spot I didn’t know existed, a spot that made me shiver when his lips touched it. And then he touched it with his teeth, so that I bucked against him.
“Yes!” I gasped, and my movement made him groan. He lay me down on my back on the lawn, supporting his heavy weight so he didn’t crush me, but touching me in a way that made me move restlessly. I pulled him down closer, to feel him more. His chest against my breasts made them almost ache for something.
Knox moved to kiss my cheeks, my nose, my forehead. “Daisy, tell me if this is too much.”
“Not too much.” My words panted out of me. “I feel…” I felt like I was a volcano, or a tea pot. Like there was pressure building inside, and that it needed to escape. I tried to ease the feeling by moving my hips, rubbing against him, and Knox made a noise deep in his throat and kissed me ferociously. He circled his own hips against mine and I wrapped my legs around his broad back, wanting more. I needed more—but it was starting to scare me a little, how out of control I felt. “Knox.”
He picked up his head and looked into my face. “We’ll slow this down,” he said, and ran his hand up my thigh to loosen my legs from their grip around him. He rolled to his side and I automatically reached out, wanting him to stay. “I’m right here,” he murmured. He started to trace his fingertips across my skin, up and down my arms. Everywhere he touched, goosebumps rose up, and I shivered like I was cold.
Knox leaned over me more, shielding me from the breeze off the water. His fingers jumped to my stomach, drawing circles around my bellybutton that spiraled wider until he brushed my bikini top and bottom. “Just slowly,” he said, and kissed me. I put my hand on his cheek. “Your heart is beating bunny-style.” He rested his palm on my chest, then slid it down to cup my breast. He watched my face as he squeezed gently, then a little harder as I arched off the grass into his fingers. “Does that feel good?”
“Yes, really good,” I answered, still in a breathy, wispy voice. The wind blew through his hair, reminding me that we were outside. I glanced around as if someone could be watching.
“There’s no one here but us. No one for miles.” Knox’s fingers teased my nipple and I closed my eyes. “Does that feel even better?”
I just wanted his lips again, and I repeated the words, “Kiss me, kiss me,” until he leaned down and did, his tongue delving deeply into my mouth. His massive thigh moved between mine and the weight and pressure felt so good there, right there.
“Daisy?”
“Hm?”
“Bunny, how far do you want this to go right now?”
I fluttered open my eyes. His hand still manipulated my breast and I realized that I was pumping my hips, rubbing myself against the steely muscle of his leg. “Uh…maybe a little farther?” Because somebody had to do something. I couldn’t walk around for the rest of my life with this ache, this need.
He laughed and kissed me again. “A little farther. Ok.” Knox kissed down my neck, biting a little, and I buried my fingers in his thick hair, messing up the braid I’d done. And then he moved aside my bikini top and his mouth was on my breast.
“Knox!” My body lifted off the ground and pressed into his, and he moaned around my nipple, making it vibrate. He smoothed his big hand down my body, palming my hip, until he was moving a finger against my bikini, rubbing my…personal area. My very personal area.
“There?” he asked, and nipped at my nipple.
“There!” I confirmed, and my legs shook like they were made of jelly. So that was how you touched a clitoris. This was a lot better than reading about the wolf guys or the mafia kingpins and maybe doing some investigations myself. This was Knox stroking me through the nylon of my suit, carefully and gently, then harder and faster. My hips twitched back and forth and my legs shook and then—
“Ohhh,” I sighed, and “Knox!” My voice rose into almost a cry, and I felt everything in me clench in concentrated, pure pleasure, once, then twice, and again and again, and then it all relaxed. Oh, I had never felt so relaxed. I made my eyes open to find his silver ones looking down at me, and he was smiling.
“That was nice to see. Your face…”
Oh, God. How had I looked? “What? What face did I make?”
“You got all flushed and your mouth went in a funny smile, and now you look like you’re going to go to sleep.” He laughed a little. “I’d like to see that again. I’d like to watch you come, again.”
“Um, ok. Right now?”
He laughed more and lay on the grass on his back. I felt abandoned until he pulled me over until I was mostly on top of him, with my ear pressed to his heart. His one arm was under his head, but he put the other around me. His hand on my butt kneaded and squeezed.
“Thank you,” I said, and then hid my face on his chest, because it sounded so weird.
“That was my pleasure,” Knox said, and gave my butt a pat.
“Not completely. No, it was mostly mine, because that was the best thing I ever felt. Better than when I got my job at the library, or when I moved into the cottage by myself.”
“Better than if you found the Pisanello portrait?”
“Much better.” I paused. “You and I could, um, you know.” I cleared my throat now. “You and I could do it.” I hid even more.
“I think we’ll wait to do that until you can say it,” he answered. “Should we go have some dinner? We’re going to get cold in not too long.”
“In a minute.” I kissed his chest. A few long minutes, because I wasn’t ready to leave right at the moment—I thought this was perfect, just as we were. But we could get up in a while, and maybe Knox would be interested in the bra I had in my bag. I smiled against his skin and kissed him again.
Chapter 12
I heard Domenico singing as I walked up to the door of our main attic. I couldn’t understand the words, but he sang very, very loudly. I keyed in the alarm code, opened the door, and a cool breeze wafted over me.
“Che bella cosa na jurnata 'e sole,” the professor belted out. “Ah, Daisy! Do you feel it?”
I was wondering if he had gone out of his head. “It feels a lot cooler, Domenico. Did you
get some new portable air conditioners? I thought if we ran any more machines, we were going to blow a fuse or start a fire or something.” I watched him for a moment, concerned. “Do you need to sit down?” I asked, pulling out a chair. He was kind of swooping around the room. It was dancing, I realized.
“We no longer need the portables.” He pointed to the row of fans and other machines unplugged and lined up against the wall. “We’ll have a garage sale. An attic sale!”
“Domenico…”
“Your boyfriend called me yesterday after you had left for the library. He asked if he could have a crew come to try to run air conditioning up here, from the ducts in the offices below. And they could, and they did. He had them working late into the night and I had to stay to watch the art, but it was worth it. Do you feel the humidity? We can control that, too! 'O sole mio sta 'nfronte a te!” he sang.
“My boyfriend?” I repeated. “Do you mean Knox? Knox Lynch?” I held my hand above my head to indicate that I meant the huge guy.
“How many other boyfriends do you have? He said he didn’t like it to be so uncomfortable for us up here, and that you were worried about me in the heat.” The professor kissed both my cheeks. “It was very sweet, Daisy. Thank you.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it.” I sank down in the chair I had meant for him to relax in. “Seriously? Knox did this for us?”
“Unless you know another giant who is worried about the temperature in this attic. Have you seen the catalog?”
I found it eventually, down in the parking lot underneath the back seat of his car, with several pages of our latest work missing. Fortunately, I had brought the new sections down to the Modern Languages offices the day before and asked to use their department’s copier because Domenico had mentioned that he wanted to bring the binder home, and I’d been down that road before. Days of work had disappeared overnight when the binder left Butterfield Hall. We got the catalog back together in the lovely, cool air, and Domenico gave me a lecture on the history of air conditioning, from Roman aqueducts to Chinese hand fans. He really was a wealth of information on almost any topic, but I was not paying the best attention.
I wanted to talk to Knox, but he was busy all day at the stadium, lifting and doing some drills to prep for the upcoming game, so I couldn’t reach him to say thank you. Or to ask why he hadn’t mentioned this to me, or just to say that the cool, filtered air was the best thing ever and that Domenico was still dancing as he now talked about movie theaters on hot summer days and how he remembered going with his grandmother in Benevento, near Naples, and buying tickets for the equivalent in lira of a quarter.
“All right, Daisy? A new approach.” I looked up and the professor was nodding seriously at me.
“What?” I asked. Domenico had left off with the talk on air conditioning and had moved on to his main interest, the collection, but I had lost the thread of the conversation.
“We are changing tactics. Rather than opening more crates, exhausting ourselves physically…you exhausting yourself physically, that is, we’re going to look in the archives.”
I held in a groan. The professor meant opening up a whole other set of boxes, the part of the collection I had only lightly touched on when I had started working for him. Those boxes weren’t full of art, but brimming with piles of musty papers—that was what Domenico called the “archives.”
When Herbert Whitaker donated his art collection, he had also given over his personal documents relating to the art and his travels, reams of unsorted papers that represented decades of his life. According to the executor of his will (according to the notes someone from the college had taken at the time of the gift), anything related in any way to the art had gone into a drawer in his desk, and when that was full, the drawer had been emptied into a box in Herbert Whitaker’s garage. When that box had gotten full, someone had sealed it and stuffed it into his somewhat-moldy basement in Harbor Springs, and they started to fill a new one. The result was a mess of things ranging from important stuff, like bills of sale from galleries in Europe, to gross stuff that had nothing to do with the collection, like empty chewing tobacco envelopes.
Domenico had gone through a lot of it and pulled out things he had immediately seen as significant, like those bills of sale, auction catalogs, or any earlier appraisals that had been done on various pieces. “I want you to take another look at his papers,” the professor said. “His letters, his notes. Maybe there will be some mention of the portrait. Just some kind of confirmation that he actually bought it.”
Looking through those boxes definitely wouldn’t be as physical as dealing with the art, but the archives were a dirty mess in their own right. “I’ll start on them today, if it’s the way you want to go. Domenico, it sounds like you’re having doubts about this. You’ve always been so sure that it’s here. Somewhere,” I finished on a sigh, looking around the attic at what we had left to accomplish.
“Late last night, sitting here watching the air conditioning installation, I began to realize that we have ham over our eyes,” he said seriously.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a saying, isn’t it? Maybe it doesn’t translate very well, but I mean that we don’t see what’s in front of us. We’re missing the obvious. I should have been thrilled at some of the discoveries we’ve made in the last few months, but I’ve been so focused on the portrait, turning this job into a race. That’s ridiculous.” He pursed his lips. “And you, working so hard, coming in all these extra days, when you should be out having fun with that giant man who gave us the air conditioning. So, I will go back and review our notes on what we’ve already found, instead of pounding ahead, and you will look through the archives to see if there is any mention of Pisanello, Filippo Maria Visconti, Milan, anything. And I’ll also be happier with what we have, instead of worrying about what we haven’t yet found.”
“The air conditioning woke you up about this?” I asked.
“It did. I’ve written a formal letter of thanks to your boyfriend that you can present to him.” He bustled off to get another coffee, leaving me to think of Knox as my boyfriend. After the kissing and his mouth being other places, his fingers touching so many of my private issues, maybe he was. But the yoga women had done a lot of kissing and touching of issues also, and they counted none of those men as boyfriends. I thought about them, and Knox more, and then I texted Tatum. In a moment she answered back.
Tatum: Really? You really want to see them, or is this just so you can help me with my revenge plot against Amelia because she slept with Nico? Not that I care that she did that.
Oh! Cinderella was really named Amelia. Wait, revenge plot?
Me: I really want to go to a yoga class try it out and also to see the women behind the texts. And no, there will be no revenge plot!
Solomon was making up one of the shifts at the library that he had missed from his vacation by taking mine today, so I had the whole afternoon free. Free, I meant, after I did all the homework that had been mysteriously going by the wayside as I hadn’t looked at any of it since the semester began. If I didn’t buckle down, I’d be failing right alongside Tatum with her yoga class, which I couldn’t do to my brother.
When I was elbow deep in the mildewed documents, sneezing and coughing (and I had just touched something sticky that freaked me out), Knox called me back.
“Hi, bunny. I only have a minute. What’s up?” His voice sounded gruff. Gruffer, I meant, than the usual growl.
“I wanted to say thank you. Thank you, so much, for the air conditioning. It’s wonderful.” I sneezed.
“It’s making you sick?”
“No, that’s just dust from papers. I’m starting to go through stuff—”
“Can you tell me later?” he cut me off. “I have to go to a team meeting. I’ll call you when I get back to the condo.”
“Ok. Bye,” I said reluctantly, and he hung up.
It was fine, because I knew that he was busy. He had a full schedule, all kinds of
things before their game walk-through the next day. But I had wanted to tell him about some of the papers that I had found, like a very old, itemized receipt for ladies’ lingerie from a shop in Paris. I’d used my phone to translate the French words to see what Herbert Whitaker, the bachelor, had been buying. It wasn’t at all what I was supposed to be looking for as evidence that the Pisanello portrait existed, but it was pretty fun to read about him purchasing silk stockings and a black negligée with lace insets. And there was also a letter from a woman in Dublin who talked about a sculpture and also about Herbert’s body parts, using fruit euphemisms. Like she wanted to suck the “strawberries” between his legs. Herbert had been a sly dog. I fanned myself.
Tatum burst into the attic not too much later, with a cup of crème brûlée mocha for the professor and a bag of yoga stuff for me. Not surprisingly, she had already learned the alarm code and had a key to let herself in.
She kissed Domenico’s cheeks, but saw how dirty I was from the old documents and just gave me a wave. “I brought some clothes for you, but I don’t know, Daisy.” She looked me up and down. “They’re going to be pretty small.”
Tatum’s longest stretch pants, the ones that bunched around her ankles, did turn out to be knee length on me when I tried them on in the bathroom, and the tank top was plenty tight, but we didn’t have time to get back to my cottage before the class. I made Tatum sit at the desk and study, and I stopped the archive search too so that I could get some school work done and also keep Domenico company. “Domenico, are you sure you don’t want to come along?” Tatum cajoled him a few hours later, as I finished my braid in the reflection of the high window.
The Big Hit Page 18
