Kit was surprised by the man who reached out from behind his desk to shake her hand. For a fleeting instant she thought she was in the wrong office. The doctor in the blue plaid shirt who motioned her into a chair looked nothing like her mental image of Cole. He had no trappings of a physician. No white coat, no stethoscope circling his neck. Because Cole and Jay were best friends, she had expected him to look like Jay—wild dark hair, a gently handsome face that was slow to register joy or sorrow. But Cole wore his dark brown hair short, and his expressions were quick and sharp. His pale eyes looked right through her, and his smile was so immediate that for a moment she was caught off guard. Maybe it had been a mistake to let Janni talk her into seeing him as a physician. He would have all the power in this first meeting.
“So you’re Kit Sheridan,” he said. “I’m glad to finally meet you.” He walked around his desk and sat in the chair across from her.
Nice touch, she thought. With one move he had equalized them, and she wondered if he allowed all his patients that degree of control.
She folded her hands in the lap of her beige skirt. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.
“I can imagine.” He smiled, a little crookedly. “I have to say that I’m envious of you, living in the house. What room are you in?”
“Right across the hall from yours.”
“Oh, that’s a great room.” He wore a pained expression as though he couldn’t bear to remember it. “I used to sit on the window seat in there to read or catch up on paperwork.”
She felt guilty, as if she’d stolen something from him. “The whole house is remarkable,” she said.
He nodded. “Magical. I’m looking forward to having dinner there tonight, but it’s going to be hard, being there without belonging there anymore.”
“I think you belong there more than I do.”
“I don’t know about that. When Janni wrote that you’d moved in, I thought, ‘well, I’ll just have to get used to the idea that somebody’s taken my place. I’ve been usurped.’”
She looked at him suspiciously. Would he really let himself be that transparent or was he playing some kind of game with her? He seemed genuine enough.
“I’ve been resenting you a bit, too,” she said, deciding to trust him. “I was afraid that when you came back they’d forget I existed.”
He grinned. “It’s a toss-up as to which of us is more neurotic.”
“We’ll have to get over that if we’re going to work together to get the Fetal Surgery Program funded.”
“Ah yes. I’ve heard that my professional future’s in your hands.” He looked more comfortable now. He was slightly slouched in the leather chair, his hands folded across his belt buckle. She noticed he was wearing jeans.
“Well, let’s just say I’ll share the responsibility with you,” she said, pleased by the strength in her voice. “Will you have a chance to work on the proposal for the Devlin Foundation in the next few weeks?”
“It’s nearly done. Just needs the finishing touches.”
He was going to push for this thing. A twinge of anxiety tried to latch on to her, but she ignored it. “I’ll time the first press release with the submission of the proposal,” she said. “That should generate public support that can make a big difference in Devlin’s decision.”
He sat up a little straighter, his hands moving to the arms of his chair. “But what about public criticism? I’ve heard there’s been some flak from religious groups already.”
He was as anxious as she was about the whole thing. When she spoke her voice was reassuring. “All the competing medical centers are facing that obstacle,” she said. “We’ll work closely with the media to get them in our corner.” For the first time she noticed he was very good-looking. “We’ll get you on TV. On the news and maybe the local wake-up show.”
His eyes were very wide now. “Wow,” he said.
She smiled and only then realized that her face had been a solemn mask. “It’ll be easy. You’ll see.”
He made notes on her chart as she spoke, slowing her when she tried to rush. She pictured the other women in the waiting room, tapping their feet impatiently and glancing at their watches. She told him about the infection. She’d had them before, but this one wouldn’t let go. Stress, he suggested. She nodded. She couldn’t remember a more stress-filled year.
“Are you using birth control?” he asked.
“I’ve used an IUD since I was first married.” She told him the brand and he nodded his approval. “I plan to get my tubes tied the next time I need it replaced.”
“You don’t want children.” It was a statement, not a question.
She shook her head. “There are too many other things I want to do,” she said, and then bit her lip, imagining he was thinking she was a hard, selfish bitch.
“Why put off the tubal ligation then?”
“Well,” she said slowly, not really sure how to answer. “I don’t have any problems with the IUD. And frankly, sex is the last thing on my mind.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I haven’t been interested since my divorce. Not at all. Work and running keep me totally occupied.”
“Have you tried any of those provocative novels Janni leaves around?”
She nodded with a grin. “No impact whatsoever.” It did worry her a little, that she never felt the longing anymore. “I haven’t even masturbated in months,” she said impulsively, startling herself with the words.
Cole looked unruffled. He laughed, a quiet laugh, barely more than a smile. “Did you ever stop to think what throwing yourself into your work is costing you?”
She wanted to defend herself, but his voice was so soft, so tentative that she felt closer to tears than anger. “It’s a matter of deciding what’s most important to me right now. And that’s work and running.”
He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
She undressed in the examining room and sat on the table, covering herself with a mass of crinkly paper sheeting. He walked in followed by a young nurse. He was frowning over her chart. “You wrote that your last period was in March. Is that a mistake?”
She tensed, wondering how he would handle this. Her periods had been unpredictable since she started running. She worried that some doctor would tell her to stop running, that being fat and asthmatic was preferable to skipping periods.
But Cole didn’t seem alarmed. He asked her what tests she’d had, told her to keep track of her cycle, and dropped the subject. She let out her breath in relief.
He listened to her heart for a very long time. She could feel the unfamiliar warmth of his face close to her own and see the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. He finally looked up.
“You’re either very healthy or near death,” he said. “Fifty-four.”
“I must be a little nervous.” She smiled.
He motioned her to lie down. “How much are you running?” He pressed gentle circles around her breasts.
“About sixty miles a week right now, but I want to start building it up so I can run in the Somerville Marathon in October. I’m hoping to qualify for Boston.”
“Sixty sounds overwhelming already. Do you run on the beach?”
“In the mornings. Then I usually run home from work.”
The nurse groaned.
“That’s got to be five miles,” Cole said.
“Only four. And all flat. I need some hills.”
“When was your last Pap?”
“About a year ago.” She held her breath as he slipped a speculum inside her.
“What about the bridges?”
“What?”
“As hills. They’re not like Boston but they’re better than nothing.”
She’d never thought of the bridges. “I could take Bridge Avenue home from work and run over the canal. I could go back and forth over it a few times. That would be a workout.”
“If you don’t mind that passersby will think you’re nuts. Your cervix looks beautiful, by the way.” He said it all in the same breath, and it made her laugh.
“Thanks, I guess. No one’s ever told me that before.” It was hard not to like him.
She nibbled the edge of her garlic bread. She had barely touched the spaghetti on her plate, but her second glass of wine was almost empty. The quivering in the pit of her stomach wouldn’t let her eat.
Maris sat queen-like at the head of the long cherry table in the formal dining room. She’d replaced the gold sphere in her nostril with a diamond chip sometime during the day. She wore one of her usual outfits, a long white skirt over a scoop-neck black leotard. She had the lithe look of a dancer, which she was by avocation if not by profession.
Kit sat next to Janni, caught between Janni’s steady chatter and the life returning to her own body. Jay and Cole sat across the table from them, looking entirely different from one another. Jay’s face calmed her like the wine, but she imagined that Cole could see into her, that somehow he knew that her blood was pumping faster and harder than it had been an hour earlier.
She had been the one to answer the door. Cole stood on the step holding a bottle of wine in one hand, a bunch of flowers upside down at his side in the other.
Those eyes. How had she missed their color during her appointment that morning? She stared at him as though she’d never seen him before, and he grinned back, long subtle dimples on either side of his lips.
“May I come in?”
“Of course.” She regained her composure. “Janni and Jay are in the kitchen.”
He walked past her with a nod, and she followed, dazed and jelly-kneed.
In the huge kitchen, Jay and Cole embraced while Janni leaned against the empty fieldstone fireplace, watching them with a smile. Kit walked uneasily into the pantry to hunt for some unneeded ingredient. When she returned to the kitchen, empty-handed, they were laughing at how Jay’s sauce-spattered apron had transferred a tomato stain onto Cole’s jeans.
Janni wet a kitchen towel and rubbed at the denim covering Cole’s right thigh, and Kit felt the pit of her stomach roll over.
Now, at the dining room table, her appetite was completely gone. Her head felt as if it were floating, and her teeth, when she touched them with her tongue, seemed strangely soft. She had to fight with herself to pay attention to the conversation. It was lively, the air in the room light and electric, as though the house itself had been waiting for Cole’s return to spring to life.
They were reminiscing, using her as an audience. Something about Jay and Cole’s first apartment near Columbia. Torturing roaches with water pistols. Eating cocaine? Had she heard that correctly? Maintaining a string of women and going to classes red-eyed from lack of sleep. She wrinkled her nose or smiled or laughed in what she hoped were the right places.
“. . . but when Jay first brought Janni to the apartment, I knew it was serious,” Cole said. He was talking to Kit, his eyes resting on her as though she were the eighth natural wonder of the world. “I thought to myself, oh God, a social worker. A vegetarian social worker.”
Jay laughed. “It was an adjustment,” he said.
She tried to picture Jay and Janni getting to know each other, a tentativeness in their relating that was hard to imagine.
“Well, Cole,” said Janni. “I thought you were a nice guy, great to look at, very sociable, but shallow.”
“Shallow?” He looked insulted.
“Every woman you brought home was gorgeous. Every one of them looked like they’d stepped off the cover of Vogue.”
“It was purely coincidental.” Cole gave Janni that completely attentive look. His charm was uncanny. “I was attracted to brains that just happened to belong to good-looking women.”
Kit tried to imagine what she looked like at that moment. No makeup, flyaway honey-colored hair, pale skin that was incapable of taking color from the sun. A runner’s tight body under her white short-sleeved shirt and khaki shorts. She sighed and took another swallow of wine.
“Do you remember the night the three of us moved in here?” Janni was talking to Cole and Jay. “The storm?” She turned to Kit with a shudder. “The lights went out. The wind was howling in the rooms upstairs, and the ocean was up to the beach heather. The three of us huddled in the library, straining our eyes to watch the water getting closer and closer in the dark. We thought it was a bad omen, as if moving in here had been a mistake.”
“Best mistake I ever made,” Cole said. “Wasn’t it five years ago this month?”
“You’re right!” Janni jumped out of her seat. “We should break out the champagne and celebrate.”
“Except for the fact that one of you is no longer living here,” said Maris.
Janni shot her a warning look. She had told them not to talk about his moving out.
“Sorry.” Maris bit her lip.
Cole cupped his hand around hers where it rested on the table. “And it must be about two years for you, Mar,” he said.
“Two years next month,” Maris said without a smile, but she turned her hand to latch her fingers with his.
Janni left the room and Kit stared at the two hands twined together on the embroidered tablecloth, one wide and square, the other dark and slender. The room was suddenly very quiet, and she was relieved when Janni returned with the champagne.
“We’ve been waiting all night to hear your news,” Janni said as she poured. They had asked him earlier in the evening but he’d put them off. “After dinner,” he’d said. “I don’t want to talk about it yet.”
He still looked reluctant, unsure of himself for the first time all evening. He sat back from the table. “Elliot’s taking a position at Stewart,” he said, “and I’ve been asked to replace him.” The room was so quiet that the waves seemed to be breaking just outside the back door. “I haven’t decided yet,” he added.
“Good lord.” Maris frowned. “You’re just a kid.”
Kit watched Jay’s face. It was hard to read. He had told her once about the competitiveness between them. “We didn’t want to outdo each other as much as we didn’t want to be outdone by each other,” he had said. What was he thinking now? When he finally spoke, everyone else was quiet.
“You’d be a fool if you turned it down,” he said.
Cole looked relieved. “I won’t then.”
They moved to the living room after dinner. Cole sat on the floor, leaning against Janni’s chair, and she stroked his hair lightly with the tips of her fingers. It was odd to see her touching a man other than Jay in that familiar way.
Jay stretched out on the blue sofa, and Maris and Kit sat on the floor in front of the fireplace. Kit watched the men, looking for a sign of friction between them. But they were laughing, talking about the Sweetwater—the motorboat they docked on the bay, a couple of blocks from the house. If there was tension in their faces, it was well hidden.
They talked for hours, finishing the champagne and switching to coffee, one by one. By that time Kit was lying on her back on the rug, wondering if Cole had any idea of the effect he was having on her. She liked what she could see of his body, the broad chest and shoulders, the flat line of his stomach under his jersey, even after a meal of pasta. She liked the way he carried himself—self-confidently but without a trace of arrogance. She watched him from the floor, staring at the patch of curly hair in the unbuttoned neck of his jersey. It was a few shades darker than the hair on his head, and she imagined running her lips over it. It was becoming an obsessive thought. She could almost feel it brushing against her mouth.
It was late. She’d had too much to drink.
Maris was the first to go to bed. She knelt in front of Cole, her hands on his knees, and kissed him lightly on the lips. “It’s wonderful to have you home,” she said.
“I’ll come up and tuck you in.”
Kit frowned at the ceiling as Maris and Cole headed up the stairs to Maris’s room. She sat up, a little dizzy.
“Are Maris and Cole . . .” she said. “Are they . . .”
Jay and Janni watched her struggle for words.
“Lovers?” Janni offered with a grin. “No way. Cole’s a one-woman man.” She stood up and stretched, held out a hand to Jay. “Bed?”
Jay nodded. “Tell Cole good night for us, Kit,” he said.
She thought of going up herself, but she wanted to see Cole one more time. She needed another look at those eyes, needed to feel that shock wave roll over her again. She wanted to take that feeling with her to bed.
She pulled the wide French doors of the living room shut and began collecting glasses and cups from the tables. Maybe he wouldn’t come downstairs after all. She wasn’t convinced that he and Maris were just chatting in Maris’s bedroom.
But within minutes he was back in the living room. He smiled at her but said nothing as he walked around the room, stroking a tabletop, looking out the window at the black water of the Atlantic, stopping to stare at the photograph of the house over the mantel.
She carried the last of the cups into the kitchen, and after a few minutes he joined her there.
“I want to sit out on the beach for a while,” he said. “Come with me?”
The beach was high and level close to the house and covered with beach heather that changed colors with the seasons. Beyond the heather, the sand began its gradual decline to the sea.
Tonight the beach was the color of moon glow, the heather a deep sea green. Four big white wooden chairs faced the water. Kit started to sit in one, but Cole stopped her. He grouped the chairs together, tipping the backrests of the two in front onto the seats of the two in back. He’d obviously done this many times before.
“It’s for stargazing,” he said, pointing to the sky.
Kit looked up. The stars were crisp little diamonds in a black sky.
“You have to be careful getting in,” he said, holding her arm as she slid into the seat. She felt the warmth of his fingers on her skin.
He slid into his own seat next to her. “Janni’s grandfather built these chairs,” he said.
“I didn’t know that.”
“If you look underneath, you can just make out the name ‘John Chapel’ where he carved it into the seat. But they’ve been painted so many times that his signature’s nearly disappeared.”
She’d noticed that about these chairs, that the paint was so thick she could dent it with her fingernail. She thought of how Janni struggled to preserve John Chapel’s mark on the house, keeping all his old furniture, never seeming to care that it didn’t fit in with the new, and for the first time she felt some of Janni’s sense of loss.
It was warm enough tonight to be out here in her shorts and shirt. This was new for her, these summer nights in New Jersey. She liked the salty air, the occasional breeze that slipped past her shoulders. She liked being barefoot in the dark with the thunder of the ocean so close she could feel it in her bones.
She could identify only the Big Dipper. She defended herself, telling him that astronomy had been incompatible with Seattle’s low ceiling. Cole outlined the constellations for her with an outstretched arm, describing the genesis of each. His favorite, he told her, was Scorpios.
“Orion was very egotistical and claimed he could kill all the poisonous reptiles on earth, so Diana sent the Scorpion to kill him. That’s why you never see Orion and Scorpios in the same sky.”
“Undone by a woman,” Kit sad. “Brains against brawn. Is that why you like it?”
She could see the glint of his teeth in the moonlight and knew he was smiling. “You’re reading way too much into it, Kit. I like the curved line of the stars. That’s all.”
Suddenly, two stars fell, long silver trails streaming into the sea.
Cole sighed. “Where else can you sit in your backyard and have a show like this?” he asked.
Kit remembered Janni’s warning how he’d get angry if anyone mentioned his moving out, how she never liked to be around when Cole got angry. But Kit felt safe. She thought she could ask him anything at all. “Do you want to move back into the house, Cole?”
“What I want doesn’t matter right now.” He told her that he and Estelle were tired of splitting their time between her condominium and the Chapel House. He wanted Estelle to move in with him, but she wanted privacy. “I can’t fault her for that,” he said. “So I’ll move into her condo.” He shrugged as if it were a solution to which he had no objection.
“Tell me about Estelle,” she said. When he had spoken about her at dinner, she sounded loving and vibrant. Did he know how other people—how his own friends—talked about her?
Cole leaned his head back and studied the constellations again. “Estelle means star, you know.”
Kit said nothing. He was moving away from her, out of reach.
“She’s exceptionally beautiful. She’s smarter than I am. Much smarter.” He lowered his head and looked at her. “We have a lot in common. But she hates the Jersey Shore.” He tightened his lips as if confronting a hard reality. “She belongs in the city, in Manhattan. She was even offered a job at the UN a few years ago. She’s here because of me, because I love it here, and I could never live in the heat and pace of New York. She’s sacrificed a lot for me, so it’s my turn now.”
“I can sympathize with her,” Kit said. “Mantoloking is not exactly cosmopolitan.” She knew that she wanted to be friends with Estelle, not just because she sounded like an extraordinary woman but because it was as close to Cole as she could hope to get.
Cole smiled at her. “I want to apologize for what I said to you in the office today, about you taking my place here. I think you fit in perfectly.”
She watched the lights of a boat slip across the dark horizon. “I feel so lucky,” she said. “I was afraid I’d never fit in anyplace again. I felt lost when I moved here.”
“How long had you been married?”
“Eight years.”
“What happened?”
She thought about how to answer that. Nothing had happened. That was the problem. They’d fallen into a monotonous routine. They never fought, rarely made love. It was her fault as much as it was Bill’s. She should have done something, tried to bring the spark back. But it hadn’t seemed worth the effort.
“I think our relationship bored itself to death,” she said.
“Is that when you lost interest in sex?”
“I guess so, but I think my interest has suddenly returned.” She immediately wished she could take back the words. Her ears burned with embarrassment.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “You mean . . . me?”
She felt his eyes on her. “I should have thought that through before I said it,” she said.
“Maybe you’re a little drunk.”
“Maybe.”
For a few seconds he said nothing.
“Listen, Kit, I’m flattered, but I think you understand how I feel about Estelle.”
“Oh, I know,” she said quickly. “Even if you weren’t involved with someone I wouldn’t pursue it because I really don’t want a relationship with anyone right now. Nothing serious anyway.” She was telling him the truth—she wouldn’t allow herself to be suffocated in a lifeless relationship again. “I’m just glad to know I’m still capable of feeling attracted to somebody.”
“I’m sure the feeling’s transferable,” he said. “Tonight Cole Perelle, tomorrow the entire male population at Blair.”
“That’s an exhausting thought,” she said, marveling at how safe it felt to talk to him.
She woke in the middle of the night on the verge of an orgasm. She was so close that she came just by rolling onto her stomach and pressing into the mattress. She tried to piece together the dream that had brought her to that pitch, but it was evasive, and she fell back to sleep with the hope of recapturing it.