If the Fates Allow

by Zoe Kane

  “Don’t be mad at Linnet,” she said hesitantly, still not quite able to coax herself into actually crossing the threshold until his face made whatever he was thinking a little bit clearer. He was just standing there in his kitchen, staring at her, his face wide-eyed with startled astonishment, but he still hadn’t said anything that wasn’t “Annie.”

  There were so many reasons for him to slam the door in her face, the way she had done to him, so many ways this could all still turn out to have been a terrible mistake.

  “Mad at her?” he finally said, his voice incredulous. “For this? Are you kidding me? I’ve never loved her meddling ass more in my life.” And a smile of joyous, giddy delight broke through the baffled blank expression on his face, like the sun breaking through clouds, and then he was there, and she was in his arms.

  “You’re here,” he murmured in a low voice, full of wonder, as he wrapped her in a bone-crushing embrace and pressed infinite kisses into her hair. “You’re here. What – how – “

  “The short answer is summer vacation, an airplane, Linnet, and dinosaurs,” she said into the crisp white cotton of his chest. “The long answer is – longer.”

  “Stay,” he said immediately, then stopped himself. “I mean I don’t know if there’s somewhere – if you have to – “

  “I don’t have to be anywhere until tomorrow,” she said, and felt her heart begin to race a little, wondering if he would see inside those words to understand what she really wanted. He beamed back at her, guiding her inside and closing the door behind her.

  “I just put a cassoulet in the oven,” he said. “It has to bake for an hour and a half.”

  Annie looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at Annie. She felt her skin begin to grow warm and flushed, felt a wild throb of excitement low and deep within her. What the hell, she thought to herself. Take the leap. For once in your life, Annabel Walter, ask for the thing you actually want.

  “An hour and a half, huh?” she said, hanging up her coat and purse on the brass hook next to the door and making her way with assured, purposeful steps, as though she lived there too, back to the blue and green panels with the winding golden vines. “Whatever will we do to fill up that time?”

  She stepped out of her heels, and he swallowed hard, moving towards her as if pulled by some immutable force.

  “You know, the recipe serves eight,” he said, following her to the bedroom and slowly unbuttoning his shirt as he watched her pull the pins out of her hair and shake it loose around her shoulders.

  “Does it?” she said archly. “We’d better work up an appetite, then.”

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he whispered, stepping in close to her and running his hands through her soft hair.

  And then he saw it.

  She was wearing his necklace.

  “You kept this?” he said wonderingly, tracing the silver frame of the pendant with his fingertips, feeling her chest rise and fall, feeling her pulse quicken as his skin touched hers. “After everything between us – you still have it.”

  “I put it away, for a long time,” she confessed. “It hurt too badly to look at it. It felt like it belonged to this other life, this other Annie, this person that I wasn’t anymore. But when I put it back on – the day I decided to come see you – it felt like it became a part of me. The way you are.”

  She stood there, so real and warm and alive, right in front of him, in her perfect wool dress, her honey-colored hair tumbling loose around her shoulders, her face tilted up towards his, and something was different, she was different, the thing that had made her tense and cold and frightened before, even on her best days, that thing was simply . . . gone. This was the Annie Walter she was always meant to be, he realized. Strong and loving and brave. This was always the real Annie, she just didn’t know it.

  It was impossible for him to hold out any longer without kissing her, so he didn’t even try. His mouth crashed into hers, and she made a soft sound of fierce delight that undid him completely. She was right here. She was so present. She was so happy.

  She kissed him back with abandon, her body melting into his, and his hands slipped behind her back to slide down the zipper of her dress as she began to unfasten his belt. They could not tear themselves apart from kissing long enough to concentrate, and so their hands were clumsy, and they fumbled, and “Goddamn this thing,” Marcus muttered at the stubborn zipper, and Annie burst out laughing.

  It was a laugh he’d never heard before. A laugh with no shadows inside it. A laugh that bubbled up from deep within her like water from a spring. He would go to hell and back for that laugh, he thought. He would chase that laugh the rest of his life.

  This was the real Annie Walter. The grief was still there, the losses still present – they always would be, carved in dark letters into her soft red heart – but something was different.

  She had decided to live.

  She had decided she was allowed to be happy.

  So she had put on his Christmas necklace and gotten on a plane and worked up some bait-and-switch with Linnet (Is Annie friends with Linnet now? a voice inside him asked in bafflement, before filing that away as a question for another time when she wasn’t standing in his bedroom stepping out of her dress), she had flown four thousand miles with his necklace around her throat and she had been wearing lacy red underthings beneath that tailored gray dress, the sexiest red underthings he’d ever seen, the kind you wear when you want someone to see them, she had made plans for this, which meant it was nothing like the last time, everything was different, and she was smiling like she finally knew, in the deepest corners of her heart, the thing he had known from the very first moment he kissed her.

  His mouth brushed the white skin of her shoulders and collarbone before sweeping across the soft curves of her breasts where the red lace met her skin, and she inhaled deeply at the feel of his mouth, and her giddy delight, her laughter, turned to something else entirely. Something deeper and hungrier, something that pulled him towards her like gravity and wouldn’t let him go.

  He scooped her up in his arms as though she weighed no more than Lucy, and carried her across the wide expanse of wood floor to his bed.

  “How long until dinner’s ready?” asked Annie as he set her down.

  “Eighty-two minutes.”

  “How many times do you think we can do it in eighty-two minutes?”

  “I’m more about quality over quantity,” he said, running a gently exploratory finger over the soft red lace between her thighs, making her gasp.

  “Marcus,” she whispered, her breath coming hard and fast as his fingers became more assertive. “Marcus.” He pulled his hand away only for a minute, to unhook her bra and toss it free so he could take her breasts in his mouth – but the second his fingers left her body her thighs rose desperately to meet them, to get them back. “No, don’t stop,” she moaned, before realizing what he was doing. When his hands returned, this time they were a little bolder, darting beneath the red fabric with light stroking caresses that made her breath catch in her throat every time.

  “Take them off,” she finally cried out hoarsely. “Marcus, take them off. I can’t – I need – “

  He seized her mouth with his own, hungry, desperate, and fumbled first his own underwear off and then hers. When he finally lay down beside her, their bodies pressed up against each other skin-to-skin, he felt her sigh with pleasure. Now, all preparations settled – and with seventy-eight minutes on the clock – he commenced in earnest.

  He kissed her mouth, over and over and over, as his fingers found her warm wet center, found her ready and open and half-frantic with want. He traced lazy circles around her clit, making her writhe against him to capture more, then slowly lowered himself beneath the gray sheets to take her in his mouth.

  The effect was electric.

  Annie had never done this before. Or, rather, she had only done it with Malcolm, which was worse than nothing. Oral sex was so vulnerable, it left you so exposed, and she had n
ever felt safe opening herself up to him that way.

  But Marcus’ mouth lit her entire body on fire. She was incandescent with desire. It burned through her like flames devouring paper. His tongue, his lips, his hot breath – the way he seemed to want her so badly, the way he savored how she tasted, the way he listened so carefully to the sounds she made to learn the places she most liked him to touch her, the way he seemed to derive such pleasure from giving pleasure to her. Her hips rose desperately, frantically from the mattress, sending his tongue deeper and deeper into her, and she came the first time almost without realizing it. The orgasm was already sweeping through her before she knew what was happening.

  “Marcus,” she whispered, unable to form any other words, but it was enough. He understood. He kissed his way back up her thighs, her hips, her stomach, her breasts, her throat and found her mouth again. She tangled her hands in his thick dark hair and kissed him wildly, the orgasm that ought to have sated her simply waking a deeper hunger, as she pressed him back against the mattress and climbed on top of him. “I’ve been wanting this again for so long,” she breathed into the warm, flushed skin of his chest, and then reached down and guided him inside her.

  It had been good the time before. Really good, in fact. So good that it had haunted both their dreams in troubling ways even though they had only done it the once, and that was months ago. But it was even better now. They noticed things about each other – about themselves – that they had never noticed before. Marcus had never known that his hands were this sensitive to touch, but as Annie traced her fingertip along the lines of his palm and drew circles around his wrist, he cried out from a pleasure that was so much more than just the way it felt to be inside her. And as Annie pressed hot, frantic little kisses against his chest, she felt her whole body go dizzy at the way he smelled – herbs and red wine and a faint salty tang of sweat and a light flicker of some subtle, spicy cologne layered over the rich deep Marcus scent of him. Neither of them had ever lost themselves like this. Neither of them had even known this was possible.

  He came deep inside her, he rose and rose and rose and rose and then the mounting pressure of desire burst within him, like fireworks in his veins, and he sank back down to earth, kissing and kissing and kissing her.

  “How much time do we have left?” she murmured against his mouth, and he looked at the clock.

  “Thirty-nine minutes,” he said. “Ready to go again?”

  “Let me catch my breath,” she said, laughing, but he shook his head.

  “Fun now,” he said, as a finger slipped inside her and made her gasp. “Breathing later.”

  “You’re relentless,” she panted, fingers clutching at the sheets beneath her, as she felt him disappear below the surface again.

  The first time he had devoured her, wolfish and hungry, but this time he was unbearably, agonizingly, magnificently slow. His tongue glided in long, lazy strokes and his mouth pressed little kisses against the hard, aching bud. Annie felt herself begin to melt and swell at the same time, like a warm river was running through her body and carrying her away. She closed her eyes, every sensation centered at this one place where her soft dampness met his hungry mouth. She felt his tongue move against her, tracing lines and swirls that woke up every nerve ending in her body. Then she realized what he was doing.

  The shapes his tongue was making weren’t random.

  He was writing her name.

  A – N – N – A – B – E – L.

  He was writing her name with his tongue, over and over and over.

  When she finally began to soar near climax again, it was the circling loops of the B that did it, making her cry out his name. “Marcus,” she gasped. “Marcus. Yes.” He responded by burying his face deeper, nuzzling into her like a wild animal as she clutched at his hair, pulling him closer and closer.

  This time, when she came, it was like being hit by a runaway freight train. Her whole body jolted with impact. Who would she be, she wondered dizzily, as the room began to spin, if she came home every night to a man who made her feel like this? Who would she become if he came home with her and shared her bed and it was like this forever? If she finally accepted the fact that all the things she wanted and needed were within her grasp?

  The timer rang just then, and he climbed up from beneath the sheets to look at her. “Cassoulet’s ready,” he said, and hopped out of the bed.

  “I’m trying to come up with a joke about how in God’s name you could still be hungry,” she said, “but it’s not quite there yet.”

  “You have a dirty mind,” he said approvingly. “I like it.”

  “You’re naked in the kitchen.”

  “Ow,” he exclaimed as he pulled the bubbling, sizzling stoneware dish out of the oven. “Yes. This might have been a questionable idea.”

  She sat up in the bed, inhaling the rich scents of thyme and garlic and roast duck and red wine, and she watched the naked man walking back towards her and she thought –

  Love.

  Not “I love him.” Not “this is love.” Just the one word, over and over and over. It was a complete sentence on its own. It was the only thing she needed. And it was hers, now. Hers forever.

  "It needs to sit for another fifteen minutes or you’ll burn the roof of your mouth off,” he said, pressing her down against the mattress beneath his body, then sliding into her so deeply that she cried out with pleasure so fierce it was almost pain. “Now. Where were we?”

  * * *

  He made her come again, and then ten minutes later he made her come again in the gleaming marble shower as the hot steaming water turned them both pink and fresh and clean, and then once he saw her walk over to the kitchen in nothing but her red satin underwear and the faded Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers t-shirt he pulled out of his bottom drawer, he began to worry he’d never be able to go anywhere in public with her ever again without wanting to throw her up against the wall and rip her clothes off her.

  But dinner was ready to eat, and they were both starving, and the sensible adults inside them knew there were things that needed to be said.

  So he scooped two heaping helpings of the sizzling stew into a pair of stoneware bowls, grabbed the forgotten glasses of wine he had been pouring when she walked in the door, and he sat down on the couch to eat Julia Child’s cassoulet in his underwear beside the only woman he had ever loved in his whole life, and who until ninety minutes ago he thought he’d lost forever.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” she asked. “This is amazing, by the way. I didn’t know you cooked.”

  “I didn’t used to,” he admitted. “It’s a new thing. And tomorrow I’m doing whatever you say I'm doing.”

  “Good,” she said, smiling. “Because we have someplace very important that we have to be.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The American Museum of Natural History. I brought some people with me who would very much like to see you. And I promised them dinosaurs.”

  “Annie Walter, are you asking me out on a date to come look at dinosaur bones with your entire family?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m asking you on a date to come look at dinosaur bones with your family,” and she meant it, she so clearly and plainly meant it, for the very first time, that it broke his heart open completely. “They need you,” she said softly, taking his hand in hers. “Please come back, Marcus. The kids need you.”

  “What about you?” he said, looking her straight in the eye – because, after all, it was time she said it.

  But she didn’t even flinch.

  “I need you too,” she said. “And I didn’t think I needed anybody.”

  * * *

  Nothing in Annie Walter's entire life had prepared her for the way it would feel when she walked up the stairs to the fourth floor dinosaur wing of the Natural History Museum at eleven the next morning, hand-in-hand with Marcus like they were just two ordinary people who belonged together, and watched those three tiny children spot them and zoom towards Marc
us with supersonic speed.

  "Uncle Marcus, Uncle Marcus!" Lucy cried out, burying her tiny face in his knee while Sophia wrapped her arms around his waist and snuggled in close. Isaac hesitated just the tiniest bit behind his sisters, until Marcus gently disentangled himself from the girls and knelt down to Isaac's level to look him in the eye.

  "I promised you I wouldn't leave," Marcus said to him soberly, "and I didn't keep my promise. I'm so sorry." He held out his arms and Isaac rushed into them, burying his face in Marcus' shirt. "I promise," he whispered, kissing the boy's head over and over again, "I'm not going anywhere this time. Not ever again. I promise, okay? I promise."

  When the children finally gave him some breathing room, he rose to his feet so he could come greet the rest of the family. "I was an idiot," he murmured in Vera's ear as he kissed her on the cheek, "but I'm done being an idiot now."

  "Good," she said, and her smile felt like a benediction, like a sign from the heavens that everything was going to be okay.

  Michael was a little more circumspect, and his protectiveness of Annie made him wary. But he shook Marcus' hand and his smile, though hesitant, was genuine.

  "It's so good to see you both," he said. "And . . . also Linnet."

  "What up, Rey," she said, sipping Diet Coke out of a giant dinosaur-shaped novelty cup. "How'd you make out last night?"

  "Why is she here?" he asked Vera, who laughed.

  "We invited Auntie Linnet to come see the dinosaurs with us," said Sophia. "She's never done it before."

  "Auntie Linnet?" Annie exclaimed. "Jesus Christ, how long was I gone?"

  "Don't worry," said Linnet, "they've still got a few more years yet before I start teaching them how to hotwire cars."

  "I accept responsibility for Michael and Vera's behavior," murmured Annie into Marcus' ear, "but that handful is all yours."

  "Oh God," he groaned, rubbing his temples. "And she's drinking sugar. It's going to be an unbearable day."

  “Uncle Marcus, Uncle Marcus,” said Sophia, tugging at his hand. “Are you gonna marry Aunt Annie?”