ALTHOUGH IT WAS SATURDAY, Mia went into the office early in the morning. She had gotten little work accomplished that week and thought she should take advantage of the fact that both Jeff and Chris were in San Diego and she’d be able to work undisturbed by either of them. Her desk was piled high with the letters Jeff’s experiment had inspired. As she inserted a piece of paper into the typewriter to respond to the first letter, however, she knew her concentration would be no better today than it had been during the week. No matter how she tried to shift her thoughts to the task at hand, they slipped back again and again to Jeff and the magical turn her life seemed to have taken.
Even Chris was treating her with a new awareness, a new affection. He seemed pleased by her link to Jeff. “I know you don’t need any lectures, Mia,” he said, in what sounded like a fatherly tone, “but be careful, okay?” He said it with such genuine worry that she felt herself tearing up at his concern.
“Maybe you can make him stay?” she had asked him, hoping Chris knew something about Jeff’s plans which she did not.
“No one can make him do anything,” he’d replied, and she knew he was absolutely right.
The week since she and Jeff had become lovers had been one of the best in her life—at least when she could prevent herself from thinking into the treacherous future. Jeff made it easy for her. He had stopped talking about leaving and in that way had fed her fantasy that he might not.
Not only had her work at the office suffered, but she’d gotten nothing done on the sculpture or the fountain either. Her evenings were spent with Jeff, her nights in his bed or hers. It looked as if the year she had planned to be alone and sexless might turn out to be quite the opposite. “You’ve been sublimating your sexual needs in your clay,” he’d said to her the other night. “Sublimate them in me instead. Really, it’s all right. I volunteer to take them on.”
He cooked her pasta with roasted vegetables and bought heavy whole grain breads for her. “You’re all bones, girl,” he’d say, watching her eat. He told her regularly, with a twist in his voice each time, that he loved her. He told her often enough that she was beginning to believe him. And yet, no matter how close she got to him, there was always a part of him she couldn’t touch.
She left the office around two. Back at Sugarbush, she did Jeff’s laundry as well as her own in Carmen’s washer and dryer. She had folded his clean T-shirts and was slipping them into his dresser drawer when her fingers caught on something hard. She drew it out from the back of the drawer and set it on the dresser. It was a jewelry box, a black ring box. She opened the lid slowly to reveal a worn gold band. She took the ring out of the box and held it in her palm. It was heavy. Plain. The gold was scratched in a few places. She slipped it on her finger and it hung loosely, like a gold bangle bracelet might hang from her wrist. It had to be his. Either he was married now, or he had been married, or… or what? Could she ask him? Who was the woman? Was she waiting for him? Was she the reason he would have to leave Valle Rosa? Leave her?
A sudden flame of jealousy burned inside her, and it hadn’t subsided by the time Jeff returned from San Diego late that afternoon. She was sitting in her living room, her hands slipping idly over the clay she would use for the fountain, when he walked in the front door. He was wearing the red-and-brown Hawaiian shirt he’d had on that first day in Chris’s office. All she’d wanted from him that day was a chance to sculpt a lure. He had given her far more than that.
He was carrying a box wrapped in green paper. If he said hello, she didn’t hear him. As he sat down on her sofa, she felt a distance slip between them that she hadn’t known this past week.
He let out a long sigh, resting his head against the back of the couch, and closed his eyes.
“Jeff?” she asked, “are you all right?”
“Hmm?” He opened his eyes to look at her. “Yes. I’m fine.” His smile was weak and distracted, and she wasn’t reassured. “Oh.” He suddenly leaned forward to rest the box on the coffee table. “This is for you.”
She covered the clay and went into the kitchen to wash her hands. Back in the living room, she sat next to him on the sofa, careful to leave a space between them. He wanted that distance, she thought. He barely seemed to be in the room with her at all.
She unwrapped the box. Inside, was a jade green satin chemise. She lifted it up by the delicate shoulder straps.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, although she felt the color creeping into her cheeks. The chemise was blatantly sexy. She would look ridiculous in it right now.
“I thought the green would be good on you.”
“I love it. Thank you.” She lowered it back into the box in a pile of green satin.
Jeff grew quiet again, his head resting against the back of the sofa, his eyes staring into space.
“Did you get what you needed in San Diego?” she asked.
He smiled again, this time ruefully. “I got more than I needed, thank you.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “Nothing, really.” He stood up and walked toward the door. “I’m afraid I’ve got some work to do, Mia. I’ve spent the whole day riding all over the county. Have to make up for it now.”
She frowned at him. “What about dinner? I could make us something.”
“What?” He looked puzzled by the question. “Oh. No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
She couldn’t bring herself to ask if she would see him at all that night. She couldn’t ask him if, for the first time in a week, they would be sleeping separately. She was afraid to hear his answers.
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT, and she was in bed, crying softly, when she heard him open the door to her living room. She quickly dried her eyes in the darkness, and she lay still as he undressed and slipped into the bed next to her. He put his arms around her, rested his head in the crook of her shoulder, and she could feel the exhaustion in his body. He would want to sleep, not talk, not make love. That was all right. He was here.
“I was afraid you didn’t want to sleep with me tonight,” she whispered, and he whispered something in return, something muffled inaudibly by her shoulder, but which she thought sounded very much like “I love you.”
She woke up sometime during the night. Her room was dark and still, but the coyotes were howling so loudly she thought they must be just outside her window. She rolled over to reach for Jeff, but her hand felt only the empty expanse of sheet next to her.
She got out of bed, pulling on her robe, and walked through the cottage. He wasn’t in the bathroom, and the living room was dark except for the small, white squares of moonlight thrown across the carpet from the windows. The front door was open, though. She walked out onto the porch.
He was sitting on the steps, and he didn’t even glance at her when she sat down next to him. The coyotes howled from the canyon, and she shivered. Jeff’s face was turned away from her, but she could see the grim set of his jaw, and on his cheek, the shine of perspiration. Or perhaps, tears.
She tentatively put her arm around him, resting her cheek against his shoulder. “Do you want to talk?”
She felt him shake his head.
“No,” he said, but he reached for her arm and clutched the sleeve of her robe in his fist. She relaxed. He wanted her there.
The coyotes howled again, and when they had finished he spoke.
“It was a dream,” he said. “A nightmare. I saw the faces of those children who died in the fire. I saw them burning. I could hear them crying. Screaming.”
“The coyotes,” she said.
“Maybe. Yes, maybe that’s what made me dream it.”
He pressed his lips to her temple and she closed her eyes. She wouldn’t ask him about his wife. Not now. Not ever. He was with her now. Nothing else mattered.