Kiss River

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  Now that she was here, she felt embarrassed and awkward, inspired by one contemplative moment in her room that he had not been a part of. Maybe she had misunderstood what had happened on the lighthouse stairs. Maybe she’d mistaken his need for confession for a real intimacy between them. But now she was here. She just needed to blurt it out and take the consequences.

  “I was wondering if I could get in bed with you?” she asked, her fingers deep in Sasha’s fur.

  He looked up at her, the moonlight playing in his pale eyes and on his lips. She saw the slightest hint of a smile there, and after a moment, he pulled back his sheet.

  “Get in,” he said, reaching for her hand.

  She took his hand and slid beneath the sheet, and when she wrapped an arm across his chest and breathed in the salty scent of his skin, she started to cry. For what, exactly, she could not have said.

  He wrapped both his arms around her then, holding her the way she had held him earlier on the lighthouse stairs. She felt him stroke her hair, kiss her head.

  “It’s all right,” he said, although he could not have known the source of her tears. “It’s all right.”

  After a while, he drew away from her, gazing into her eyes. Lowering his lips to hers, he kissed her.

  They moved deeper into the bed, and lying next to her, he tugged on the sash of her robe to open it, then reached inside to find her still well clothed in her nighttime T-shirt and shorts.

  He laughed, pushing her away from him a bit to get a better look. “What do you have on here?” he asked, running his hand over the T-shirt where it covered her ribs.

  “It’s not too elegant, sorry,” she said, giggling. “I didn’t know I was going to be doing this tonight.”

  He lifted his hand slowly, then smoothed his fingers over the side of her breast through the shirt, one small touch that made her hungry for more. “I can tell this is the final layer, though,” he said. His thumb grazed her nipple so softly it might have been a mistake, and she sucked in her breath. “Nothing under here but you,” he said. “And you feel so good.” He leaned over to kiss her again, one kiss that went on and on, and she felt her body open up to him.

  It had been months for him, years for her. She had not known she would ever want this again, but she did. She’d forgotten how it felt to be undressed slowly by someone else, to be touched delicately, intimately, to be suckled by a lover who made her remember how connected her lips and her breasts, her neck and her earlobes all were to that place low in her belly that wanted him inside her. How could she have thought she would never want this again?

  Once he was inside her, he moved slowly, saying her name, and she wrapped her arms tightly around his shoulders, loving the closeness. Loving him.

  There was no mistaking it when he came. Her husband had come so quietly that she was sometimes not sure, but Clay groaned loudly with release, his body rigid above hers. When he lay on top of her again, he was careful to keep his full weight from crushing her, and her eyes filled once more with sudden, unexpected tears.

  They lay that way for a while without speaking. Then he rolled onto his side, his arm and leg still circling her, as if he was not quite ready to let her go. Lifting his head to look down at her, he ran his fingertip over her lips. “You didn’t get a chance to come,” he said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t hold off any longer.”

  She laughed quietly. “I’m glad you didn’t, or you would have been holding off for a long, long time,” she said. “It’s not that easy for me. I’ve never come that way.” The words embarrassed her, but it seemed a night for honesty.

  “Ah,” he said. “You should have told me.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It was wonderful anyway. Being close to you was all I wanted.”

  “Maybe so,” he said, “but it’s not all you’re getting.”

  He kissed her gently, then moved down the bed until his head was between her legs. The first touch of his tongue made her catch her breath. The only man who had ever done this to her had been her husband, and then only a couple times. It took her “way too long,” he had complained, and the more he complained, of course, the longer it took. But it didn’t take her long tonight. Clay’s mouth was magic.

  Afterward, they lay together holding each other tightly, and his silence began to worry her. She knew it was possible to do things in the heat of passion that you would regret the moment that heat became lukewarm.

  “Don’t feel guilty about this, Clay,” she said, her hand on his chest. “Please don’t. I don’t want you to feel—”

  He leaned away from her and pressed two fingers to her lips. “I’m okay,” he said. “Actually—” he gave a slight laugh “—I feel pretty good. I like how you were able to tell me what you needed.”

  She returned his smile, then snuggled up against him again. If this was a night for honesty, she had far more to tell him. Even so, she knew she would be leaving things out.

  “You told me so much tonight out on the lighthouse,” she said. “Now I’d like to tell you about me. Something I’ve been keeping from you. From everyone.”

  He smoothed her hair away from her damp forehead. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”

  She pressed her lips to his shoulder. Where to begin?

  “My mother,” she said, “was adopted.”

  “Is that another reason you’re interested in adopting a child?” he asked.

  “Only in a small way,” she said. “My mother was adopted as an infant, practically a newborn, and she was the only child of a couple who lived here in North Carolina.”

  “North Carolina?” he asked in surprise.

  “Yes. Raleigh, I think. Anyhow, my mother didn’t remember much about her adoptive mother because she died when my mother was very young. But her father was…not abusive, really, but I guess he sort of fell apart after his wife died. He moved them to Bellingham, for some reason I don’t know. I guess he got a job there. I don’t remember the sort of work he did, but it was a blue-collar job. He was an alcoholic and he gambled away his earnings. Although he himself wasn’t abusive, some of his gambling buddies were, and he didn’t do anything to protect my mother from them.” She lifted her head to look at Clay, whose eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. “Are you following this?” she asked.

  “Completely.”

  “Well, her father ignored her for the most part,” she said, her head on his shoulder again. “He said she was in the way. So when my mother was seventeen, she got married to her high-school sweetheart, mostly to escape life with her father. But he was a drinker, too. That was all she knew, I guess. He wanted kids, and she had a couple of miscarriages, so he got fed up with her and divorced her.” She was beginning to feel the old anger toward the entire masculine sex creeping in again, and she hugged Clay tighter.

  “Then she was on her own for a few years,” she continued, “working as a custodian in an elementary school, when she met a guy named Damon. They moved in together and she got pregnant and had me. They never married. Damon, who I don’t remember at all, felt trapped by her and a baby, at least according to my mother. He took off when I was a year old, and he was killed when I was three in a motorcycle accident.”

  “I’m sorry,” Clay said.

  She shrugged away the sympathy. “My mother was wonderful,” she said. “She took the place of two parents. She was still a custodian as I was growing up, in the same elementary school I went to, and the kids loved her. I never felt embarrassed that she was just a custodian. I didn’t know any different, really. She was warm and friendly and funny. We lived in an apartment building that people would probably describe as seedy, but inside our apartment it was always clean and pretty. My mother would get fabric remnants and make nice curtains and things.”

  Gina took her hand from Clay’s chest for a moment to hug herself. God, she missed her mother!

  “You chilly?” Clay asked.

  “No,” she said, but she pul
led herself closer to him. “My mom spent most of her time and energy on me. She never got married or really had a boyfriend after my father. She’d given up on men by the time I was in school.”

  “Understandably,” Clay said.

  “Right,” Gina concurred. “So it was the two of us against the world, or at least that’s how it felt. We were each other’s best friends. And we were the only family either of us had. She pushed me in school. She didn’t want me to end up like she did. She was so proud of me for becoming a teacher.”

  Clay was quiet, but she felt certain he was listening.

  “I, um…I ended up marrying a guy I met in college,” she said. “His name was Bruce, and he was wonderful, or so I thought. Even my mother, the man-hater, liked him. I trusted him completely. I was dying to start a family. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Family. I only had my mom, ever. That’s one reason why I want Rani so badly. I’d like to think I’m going through with the adoption just to help her, but it’s for me, too. I want her.

  “We planned everything out, my husband and I. We decided to wait until we were thirty, when we’d be established in our careers and have some money put away. But then my mom got sick. That was two years ago. She was diagnosed with breast cancer that had already spread to her lungs. I knew she was dying.”

  Clay held her tighter and she pressed her lips to his neck. She could hear Sasha’s gentle snoring in the corner of the room. “My husband and I talked about having her move in with us so we could take care of her. There were no other relatives, and I didn’t want her to go into a nursing home. She was only fifty-seven. My husband was totally supportive of the idea. I thought I was so lucky to have found him. Then one day, one of my friends told me that she knew Bruce was having an affair with one of her friends, a woman I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, shit,” Clay said. “There’s your problem with infidelity.”

  “Right. The woman had told my friend what a terrible wife I was, how I’d brought my mother to live with us and everything. She’d said, ‘What twenty-eight-year-old man wants to live with his mother-in-law?’ But Bruce had never told me that it bothered him, so how could I know? That’s one reason why I admire you so much, Clay. The way you look after Henry.”

  Clay squeezed her hand where it rested on his chest.

  “I felt like I was hearing about some other man when she told me all this about Bruce. It was so hard to imagine him having an affair to begin with, and saying that sort of thing was just so out of character. But it all turned out to be true.” She remembered something else Bruce’s lover had told her friend, something she couldn’t share with Clay because the pain was still too great. The woman had said that Gina had never had an orgasm with Bruce, that she’d made him feel like “less of a man.”

  “So,” she continued, “I confronted Bruce, and he said that he no longer loved me, but he hadn’t known how to tell me that. He said the affair had been going on since the week after our wedding.”

  “Oh, Gina,” Clay said.

  “We split up, and that’s when I decided I would be better off without a man in my life.”

  “I don’t blame you a bit,” he said.

  “It got worse, though. It turned out that Bruce had bought all this stuff I didn’t know about. He’d bought the other woman jewelry, taken her on expensive vacations when I thought he was out of town on business, et cetera, et cetera. And half that debt became mine when we split up. I lost all my savings. I managed to pay off the debt before I applied to adopt Rani, but it left me broke.”

  “Couldn’t your lawyer have spared you from that?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” No more than her lawyer had been able to help her get Rani out of India. “So, while all that was going on, my mother was having chemotherapy and getting sicker. I took a leave of absence from my job to take care of her. Hospice helped a lot, but I did most of it, and I felt…” She tried to remember the hodgepodge of feelings she’d experienced back then. “I felt miserable that I was going to lose her, but so glad I could be there for her. That I could be the one to take care of her.”

  “I love your attitude,” Clay said, and Gina smiled. How could his wife have thought he wasn’t a good listener?

  “My mother had always had one wish,” she said. “She wanted to find her birth parents. I made up my mind I was going to find them for her before she died. It seemed like a good chance that they’d still be alive.”

  “Did you find them?” Clay asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I used one of those services on the Internet that can track down people for you, and I was able to find an original birth certificate for my mother. It named her parents as Elizabeth and Dennis Kittering.” She stopped for a moment and lifted her head to look at him. “Do those names mean anything to you?” she asked.

  Clay frowned. “No. Should they?”

  “Probably not,” she said, lowering her head to his chest again. “Anyway, I was able to find out that the last address for the Kitterings was in Charlotte, North Carolina. I hired someone to stay with my mother for a few days, and I flew there, to Charlotte. I went to the address I had for them. A woman lived there who turned out to be their grandniece. She told me that Dennis had died a very long time ago and that Elizabeth had died ten years earlier.” Gina had been so disappointed. Her fantasy of giving her mother the gift of her family before she died disintegrated. “I explained about my mother and asked her if she—the grandniece—could tell me about Dennis and Elizabeth so I’d have something to tell my mother. Like, for instance, why they had given her up for adoption.”

  “Was the niece shocked to know that her aunt and uncle had put a baby up for adoption?” Clay asked.

  “No,” Gina said. “She said that most people knew about it, although no one really knew why they did it. It wasn’t really talked about. She said that she had saved a box of things belonging to Elizabeth and Dennis because she’d always thought she’d try to find that baby one day. But she never got around to it. She seemed glad to get rid of the box, and glad that my mother would have the things, but not particularly interested in pursuing any kind of relationship with us.” Which had been fine with Gina. She hadn’t really liked the woman.

  “What was in the box?” Clay asked.

  “A bunch of odds and ends. Some pins, a couple of books. An old pink diary and a ruby necklace.” She lifted her hand, and the ruby ring on her finger caught the moonlight. “I had this made from the ruby,” she said.

  “Whose diary was it?” Clay asked.

  “Elizabeth’s,” she said. “And it was a real treasure trove.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, I started reading it to my mother.” They had moved a hospital bed into her mother’s bedroom, and Gina had sat at the side of the bed, reading to her. Her mother’s eyes would be closed, but she was listening. Sometimes she would ask Gina to repeat something she’d read. Gina took in a breath. “What we learned as we read the book was that Elizabeth had been the daughter of Caleb and Mary Poor. She grew up here, in this house. I’m a descendant. I’m Mary Poor’s great-granddaughter.”

  For a moment, the room was very quiet, only the rumble of the ocean filling the air. She was not certain Clay had understood what she’d said, and she was about to repeat it when he suddenly let go of her and sat up.

  “Gina.” He was frowning at her, deep lines carved into his forehead. “Why didn’t you tell us this?”

  He was angry. She hadn’t expected that, but perhaps she should have. “I came here just to see the lighthouse.” She struggled to find the words to explain herself and her actions. “I didn’t expect to meet anyone here. To make any friends. To get involved with people in any way. I wanted to keep my private life private. But I’ve come to care about you. To trust you. You’re such a good person. And after you told me about Terri, I wanted to tell you the truth. I wanted you to know.”

  “It’s just plain weird that you didn’t tell us this,” he said. “That you’ve been living in th
is house as though it meant nothing to you. That you’ve let us do things for you without telling us…It’s…” He got up and pulled on his shorts, then sat down on the edge of the bed again, far from where she was lying. Gina wished she hadn’t told him, or better yet, that she’d told him long ago. She felt the delicate thread of connection she’d had with him just moments ago slipping away from her.

  “I never meant to—”

  “Now I get why the lens is so important to you. It’s part of your heritage. Why didn’t you just say that in the first place? Why’d you give us that line about being a lighthouse historian? Which you’re not, are you?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “You’ve been manipulating Lacey and me. And trying to manipulate my father, too. Man, he had you figured out right. I should have listened to him.”

  She wondered what Alec had said to him, but she didn’t really care what his father thought about her. What mattered was what Clay was thinking.

  “No, I didn’t, Clay,” she said. “At least, not intentionally.” She knew even that was a lie.

  “Why did you just sleep with me?” he asked. “You’d sleep with the devil to get Rani out of India. I haven’t forgotten you said that. So you slept with me, hoping I’ll persuade my father to help you raise the lens, right?”

  “No, Clay.” She grabbed her robe and put it on, getting out of the bed herself. “That’s not it at all. I don’t want you to say a word to your father about it, all right? That’s not why I slept with you.”

  “Why then?” he demanded.

  “Because I love you,” she said, finding the truth after all. “I love you.” More quietly this time. “I’m sorry that I hurt you by keeping the truth from you. I didn’t intend that to happen. I’ve always been the one who got hurt in the past. I know what it feels like. I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel that way.”

  He turned away from her, facing the window. “Go back to your room, Gina,” he said.

  She didn’t budge. “I know keeping that information from you was wrong,” she said. “And I’m sorry. But please, Clay, don’t make it be unforgivable.”