There was a time, my uncle Syl once told me, when gay men in Los Angeles lived as much, if not more, on the margins as black folks. But if things got too hot, white gays always had the option to go back into the closet, back to passing themselves off as masters of the universe. Not so their black counterparts, who at the end of the day were still black, still on the outside looking in.
Leo’s Lair was a club where a black gay man could have a drink, socialize freely, and not feel as if he would be looked down upon by some disapproving black homophobe or as if he were an extra-tasty treat for chocolate-addicted whites. Leo’s had been around for almost twenty years, operating profitably and quietly from a nondescript storefront in Venice, thanks to a liberal business community and owner Georgina White’s reputation for discretion. Uncle Syl said you might see anyone there, from the choir director at your church to the academic dean of a major university, but what went on at Leo’s was kept strictly confidential, strictly in the family.
Johnny Hartman’s rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” was playing on the club’s sound system. Through the crowd I could see Sidney Hairston standing with Billie at the bar. “Well, aren’t you a sight,” he called out and considered me with a slightly tipsy but appraising eye. He made a sour face at the outfit I had put on for my date with Aubrey. “That’s nice for an evening at home, but that drag will never do in Leo’s.”
He was right. The crowd that Saturday night was dressed and scented to the nines, even though there were still one or two men who were stuck in that seventies Village People leather rut. Hairston himself was wearing a gold-threaded white dashiki that accentuated his hair color and did an admirable job of hiding his middle-age paunch.
He pointed out an immaculately dressed, olive-skinned black male, his relaxed salt-and-pepper hair straighter than mine, who was whispering with an older woman in a booth marked “Private” in the back of the bar. “I bet you know him.”
It would have been hard not to recognize Brett Stewart, co-anchor of The Scene at Six, a nightly newscast that gave the network affiliates a run for their money and had earned him three local Emmys in five years. The last time I saw him—minus the Hollywood-style sunglasses—was on the tube Friday night after I got home from the hospital.
“I was just telling Miss Billie that Brett’s a regular, drops in almost every night after his newscast,” Hairston whispered. “Folks here assumed they hadn’t seen him this week because of the extended coverage during the uprising. But I overheard him say to Miss G there—she’s the owner—that he’s been home recuperating all week because he got roughed up by some trade he met in here on Monday.” He glanced around the bar and lowered his voice even more. “Seems Brett took a boy toy home and ended up being tied up with some kind of noose around his neck that was made from the cords of his own living-room window treatments.”
Hairston saw Billie and me exchange a look. “I was right, wasn’t I?” he breathed. “I told Miss G that somebody I knew had a similar experience and died from it! Well, that just about did her in—there’s never been that kind of trade in Leo’s—and it got me to thinking that maybe this is some kind of serial killer. That’s when I called Miss Billie.”
“I was just asking Sidney if he thinks Mr. Stewart will talk to us,” she said.
“He swore to Miss G he won’t talk if it means he’s got to come forward and testify in public or if it puts Leo’s Lair in jeopardy. But I’m sure if I put in a good word . . .”
Hairston craned his neck around the crush of bodies, zeroed in on Miss G’s table until he caught her eye. Georgina White, the owner of the club, a seventyish diva wearing a diamond ring big enough to have its own zip code, widened her eyes in a silent question, to which Hairston responded with a rapid nod. She spoke briefly to Stewart, patted his hand, then motioned us over to the booth.
Hairston ushered us over and gave Georgina a kiss on her heavily made-up cheek. “Darlings, these are the girls I was telling you about.”
“You won’t be showing your badges, will you, ladies?” Georgina White’s voice was a whiskey-weathered drawl. Her concerned frown quickly changed up to a smile when a patron walked by. “Badges scare the customers away,” she said out of the corner of her mouth and blew the man a kiss.
Hairston said, winking, “These girls have more class than that. They’re family.”
Billie didn’t flinch at the label this time, which I also noted had served to put both Georgina White and Brett Stewart a little bit more at ease. If Billie was cool about it, so was I; I’d discovered a long time ago that there were all kinds of ways to pass.
“It’s very important to us, Detectives, that you find whoever did this awful thing to Brett,” Georgina said emphatically, patting the newscaster’s hand again. “This is a reputable gentlemen’s club. I won’t have another of my children abused this way.”
I remembered Uncle Syl saying that Georgina White had started the club in tribute to her son, Leo Junior, who had been killed in a gay-bashing incident twenty years ago in a bar in Hollywood. After her only son’s death, Uncle Syl said, all of Leo’s customers had become Georgina White’s sons, one way or another.
After getting us some sodas, Georgina and Hairston excused themselves, although she had to practically drag our self-appointed deputy away from the table.
“I watch your show regularly, Mr. Stewart,” Billie said to the newscaster. “I always feel as if I can trust what you say.”
“Thank you,” he murmured, uneasy but flattered nonetheless.
“I guess the key word here is trust,” she continued. “What we’re about to share with you hasn’t even been released to the press yet. We’re trusting you to keep what we say to you confidential, and you’ve got to trust that we won’t reveal anything you say to us in confidence.”
“I can assure you, Detective, it’s not a story I’m interested in covering for my broadcast.” Brett Stewart’s smile was pained as he turned a margarita glass slowly in his hands. “If I tell your secrets, that would be like telling my own, wouldn’t it? And while I am ambitious, there are limits to what I’ll do for ratings. My agent is positioning me for a run at one of the networks this summer. I’m not about to upset that apple cart.”
Billie took a breath, then began to fill Stewart in on the relevant aspects of the Mitchell case. The newscaster listened intently, soaking up her every word and nuance. He seemed to be turning it all over in his mind, sizing us up before he spoke, his words coming slowly and cautiously, a real contrast to the rapid-fire, in-your-face style of the news program he anchored.
“Even after I got married, I kept my house in Baldwin Hills.” Stewart had started twisting his wedding band, a quadrillion-cut sparkler. Seeing it reminded me that Stewart had recently married an up-and-coming model in one of those lavish, People-reported weddings just a few months ago that had featured the rings. “My wife Evie’s in New York most of the time anyway, so we kept her place in the city, and I fly back and forth every other weekend or she comes out here.”
“So can you tell us what happened?” I asked.
“I usually don’t bring anyone home I meet in a bar,” he began. “It’s just too risky. But I was exhausted from the schedule we’d been keeping at the station, Evie was in Jamaica on a photo shoot, and I was lonely. I had stopped by to have a quick drink on Monday around nine when this young man walked in. All I could think of was that he looked like a Hershey bar—chocolate brown and sweet as he could be. Soft-spoken and so polite, he had the bartender send a drink to me at the bar before he even approached me. He bought the second round, too, even though he barely looked old enough to be drinking himself, and began to tell me how much he had appreciated my broadcasts during the riots, how much he admired me, blah-blah-blah. Soon he was telling me how confused he was about his feelings about men and how he believed I might be the one to help him understand.”
A halogen spotlight illuminated the slight bruising along Stewart’s jawline and under his left eye, concealed pretty much by the glasses and some expertly applied studio makeup. “It’s one of the oldest come-ons,” he said, “and I was fool enough to fall for it.”
Billie asked what Hersheyman looked like. “He was slender, skin color a deep, pure brown. Broad nose, beginnings of a beard. Cute. What else can I say?”
Hersheyman told Stewart he was twenty-three, but the newscaster thought he might be a “a few years” younger. Not that Stewart was going to card him. Not surprisingly, he didn’t ask the boy’s name, either.
Stewart removed the sunglasses. The spotlight caught little pinpricks of tears standing in his eyes. “If it hadn’t been for a neighbor who heard me calling for help, I could have been tied up in that house for days. I had no idea he was rough trade!”
When they got to Stewart’s house, the young man suggested they play a few dress-up games with Evie’s clothes. Soon he had bound the newscaster into his dining-room chair and began to shout obscenities and slap him around.
When Stewart looked at us, there was more than the memory of that night in his eyes. “My face is my business, Detectives. I would have done anything for him not to have hit me in the face.” He wiped his eyes with the back of an unsteady hand, put his sunglasses back on. “He took the rope from the drapes in the living room and made it into a noose. He put it around my neck and slung the other end over the bedroom door. He said he wouldn’t hurt me, but then he started pulling the noose from behind and . . .” Stewart’s voice hovered just above a whisper, “. . . jacking off to pictures of young boys in the magazines he brought with him.”
After the guy left, Stewart started yelling until a neighbor heard him and called the police. “A couple of patrolmen came out. But I wasn’t filing a report,” he said. “I know how the media scan those things, hoping for a celebrity to trash. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. But the cops took down his description and told me they would hold it and the evidence at the station in case I changed my mind and wanted to file a report later.”
“Could we stop by your house to see where all this happened?” Billie asked. “It would really help us determine if the cases are related.”
Another shaky breath rumbled through Stewart. He stood up and drained his glass. “Okay. You can follow me over.”
Brett Stewart’s house on Don Quixote was a study in contrasts. The exterior was a modern glass, steel, and concrete box, but inside the heavy wooden door was an ornately decorated, rococo-styled living room that looked as if it belonged more in the French Quarter than Baldwin Hills. The living-room walls were blood red with drapes at the window made of a heavy, Merlot-colored velvet, held back on one side with a long, swooping length of gold-colored rope. Billie extracted some gloves out of her pocket and untied the rope. She pulled the Polaroid that Alexander had given us out of her purse, compared it to the rope in her hand.
Whispered to me: “I’ll bet you that five I lost to you at the Mitchell scene that this is the same rope.” To the newscaster she said, “Can we take this with us, Mr. Stewart?”
“Might as well,” he said. “My young visitor and the cops took the ropes used for the other tieback and the valance. The window just doesn’t look right without them.”
Absent its golden ropes, the window treatment looked like the curtain at a theater. Stewart looked at it sadly and gingerly fingered his bruised face. “I’m supposed to fly down to Jamaica to meet Evie tomorrow. What am I supposed to tell her?”
The truth, I hoped.
It was almost ten. Billie and I sat in my Rabbit for a minute before going our separate ways. My head was spinning, and I could feel a headache gathering strength just beyond my field of vision. “You think Stewart’s playmate is the same guy who paid a visit to Mitchell on Tuesday?” I asked her. “The two men’s houses are only a few blocks apart. Our guy could be working the neighborhood, sort of a Kinky Sex Bandit.”
She nodded slowly. “You know, Stewart’s description of his assailant sounded a lot like that Peyton Bell kid.”
I had to agree. And as much as I hated the thought, I kept coming back to the way Mitchell hugged the boy at the exhibit and then got Aubrey to kick in the extra money for Peyton’s scholarship at the last minute. People don’t do things like that for no good reason. We just needed to figure out which reason was the truth.
I said to Billie, “Find out who rolled out to Stewart’s house Monday night.” I figured it had to be someone other than LeDoux and Wright; they would’ve said something if they’d taken a report on a similar scene just the night before Mitchell’s murder, whether they filed it or not. “Even if we assume for a minute that Peyton was involved in Mitchell’s murder, he’s still got an alibi for Lewis. If you’ll recall, Cortez said Peyton talked to someone from the party store at five. That was just a few minutes before we got to King Boulevard.”
“But do we know the employee at the party supply store actually talked to Peyton Bell? What if Peyton slipped out while Underwood was talking to the college, had Underwood place the call to establish his alibi, and went to that stand? Just because his mother doesn’t think he’s capable of murder doesn’t mean he didn’t overhear her talking to Mitchell about meeting Cinque and decide to take matters into his own hands.”
“He could have seen Mitchell and Lewis arguing at the taco stand and stepped in,” I agreed. Based on what I saw of Peyton’s outburst at the gallery Wednesday night, he damn sure was angry about something.
Remembering Peyton and his mother at the gallery that night triggered another memory—the shipping wire I’d seen in Reggie’s back room. “We should see about getting a warrant and going over there and picking it up,” she said when I mentioned it to her.
“You know,” I said, “this could fit. Maybe Mitchell wasn’t just supporting Peyton’s talent by arranging for that scholarship at the last minute—he was feeling guilty about what happened behind that stand and was thanking Peyton for saving his life.”
“And maybe the scholarship was also a little reminder of how valuable Mitchell could be to the boy long-term,” Billie added.
“Then why choke the goose laying the golden eggs?” I asked, feeling that familiar headache coming on.
“Knowing someone is out there who could tie you to a murder would weigh heavily on anybody’s mind,” Billie reminded me.
But enough to cancel your meal ticket?
We agreed we needed to interview Raziya and Peyton Bell sooner rather than later. Billie suggested we go there immediately.
I disagreed. “If he’s guilty and Raziya’s already told him we want to talk to him, he’s already in the wind. Nothing we can do about that.”
Billie could see my point. “But I can call her tonight, tell her I forgot my kid has a doctor’s appointment or something, and we need to see them tomorrow. She’ll buy that. And I can find out if Peyton’s still around.” Billie dropped her head on the dashboard of my car. “Damn, this day has worn me out. If you don’t mind, I’m going to go home and kiss my sleeping daughter.”
I checked my watch. “I don’t blame you. I’ve got to be somewhere myself.”
I didn’t think I had any expectations of where or how Aubrey lived, but as I headed toward Hollywood, away from the golden ghettos of the black middle class, I was a little thrown off. But I was cool—didn’t gawk too much at the houses as they got bigger and bigger, and had fewer and fewer bars on the windows. But when I followed the directions Aubrey had given me into the hills north of Los Feliz Boulevard, I was beside myself with curiosity.
After another five minutes of driving along the winding hill roads, I pulled up to a Tudor house just below the Griffith Park Observatory. I got out of my car and stood looking out on the view of life. The city lay at my feet, little grids of lights twinkling through the smoky haze, making a luminescent patchwork quilt of East Hollywood, Silverlake, and the city beyond. The downtown high-rises stood clustered in the distance, crowned by the blazing green lights of Library Tower. City Hall, the tallest structure in Los Angeles when it was built in the twenties, stood dwarfed in the shadows, a little apart from the rest of the downtown skyline. Despite all of its political intrigue and problems that loomed so large in my life, Parker Center wasn’t even visible from where I stood.
Aubrey met me at the front door and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Where’s your sling?”
“Special occasion,” I said, and flexed my arm. I stepped back to take in the view again. “God, this is gorgeous, Aubrey. Makes you want to drop your troubles at the door.”
“That’s the whole point.” He came up to stand with me on the front steps. “It’s very soothing, after a long day of blood, guts, and corporate shenanigans, to come home to peace and quiet. Although you should have seen the view with the fires from the uprising last week—it looked like Beirut.”
He led me down the front steps through a door so massive I thought it would take a battering ram to get it open. “Drink?” he asked as he took my purse.
“What have you got?”
“Pouilly-Fuissé, juice, iced tea, designer water.”
“The wine sounds good.”
“Would you like me to fix you a plate?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
While Aubrey was in the kitchen, I looked around his living room. It was as large as my living and dining rooms combined, with a massive stone fireplace on the left and a wall of French doors and windows leading to a deck and that breathtaking view on the right. A pair of forest-green sofas and a dark-green marble-topped coffee table sat in the middle of the room atop off-white Berber carpeting. Even the walls were white, soaring up to a magnificent coffered ceiling with gray-colored beams. The paleness of the walls made the black baby grand piano stand out in relief against the picture window and cityscape beyond.
When Aubrey returned, I was sitting at the piano, fiddling with the keys. “Do you still play?” I asked.
He set a platter of grilled vegetables and little slices of rare grilled tuna on the coffee table. “That’s what I was doing when you called.”
“When do you find the time?”
“I usually try to play for an hour when I come home and a few hours on the weekend,” he said. “It’s part of my personal prescription for relaxation.”
“Sounds wonderful. Do you still play in any nightclubs like you used to in college?”
“No, I’m too rusty—and too busy—to be on the club circuit. I just do this for my own amusement.” Aubrey sat down next to me on the mudcloth-upholstered piano bench. “Want to hear anything in particular?”
“Are you so good I get choices? I am impressed!”
He blushed a little, took a songbook off the top of the pile on the piano, and started to play. “This is what I was playing when you called earlier.”
It was a jazz piece, soft and lilting, flowing as effortlessly through his long fingers as prayers on the lips of the faithful. I moved over to the sofa, sat back in the pillows, and let the peacefulness of his playing carry me away. Eventually I came back to earth and nibbled on some grilled eggplant and tuna from the platter. “That’s beautiful. You wrote it?”
Aubrey’s face colored up, embarrassed. “I wish. I first heard it on a Dianne Reeves CD. I hunted all over town for the sheet music. Just got it today.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“ ‘Like a Lover.’ ”
A roasted asparagus spear called out to me from the platter. I dove for it, hoping the move hid the flush I could feel creeping up my neck to my cheeks. Oblivious, Aubrey continued to play. “The piano is one of the things that got me through the hard times in my life.”
Partially recovered, I leaned back on the sofa and sampled the wine. “I always loved the sound of it, but I rebelled when my mother tried to force lessons on me.”
“Most of us did,” Aubrey agreed. “But my mom was a singer, so I had no choice. She got the fever as a child after seeing Marian Anderson in concert.”
“Your mother actually saw Marian Anderson? That must have made quite an impression!”
“She had a tremendous influence on a whole generation of black women. Not just the opera divas like Leontyne or Jessye who came after her, but little black girls living in Missouri towns who first heard her sing on the radio. By the time my mother got to see Miss Anderson at a concert in Kansas City, Mom had been bitten by the singing bug so bad she traveled all through the South as a teenager, singing with a female evangelist on what she used to call ‘the chitlin’ and fried-chicken circuit.’ ”
His fingers hesitated over the keys, then curled up into a fist. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said and thunked the keyboard closed.
I joined him on the bench. “What’s wrong?”
Aubrey was staring at the closed keyboard. “Lance’s death is bringing up a lot of stuff, not just for the partners or the hospital, but for me personally, too.”
“What do you mean?”
He gazed out the window, whispered, “I really don’t want to burden you with my old baggage, Char. We’re just getting to know each other again, and you’ve got enough of your own stuff to deal with without weighing you down with mine.”
“I don’t know if you noticed when you examined me, but I’ve got strong shoulders,” I smiled and took his hand, “or at least one.”
I waited while Aubrey tried to form the words. Finally he said, “When we found my mom . . . she was . . . like Lance.”
“You mean she hung herself? I thought your mother died of breast cancer!”
“She did have cancer, but that isn’t what killed her. That’s just what Pop and I decided to tell everyone. It was . . . too painful otherwise.” The tears I had seen in Aubrey’s eyes the night Lance was killed were back, but this time they made sense.
“We didn’t know CPR in those days,” Aubrey’s voice came out in a shudder as he grasped my hand, “so even though she wasn’t quite gone, we couldn’t do anything. It’s one of the reasons I picked emergency medicine as a specialty. I wanted . . . I thought maybe I could save somebody else, even if I couldn’t save her.”
It was like listening to my own voice thirteen years ago, telling me why I wanted to be a cop. We sat on that piano bench quietly for a long time, holding hands and memories and long-buried pain between us.
Aubrey was the one to break the silence. “I feel like a real hypocrite, telling you the other night about living in the past and here I am confusing Lance’s death for my mother’s. I’m sorry,” he sighed and squeezed my fingers. “The funeral today just brought it all back to me. I haven’t even been able to bring the pictures I had developed from the TAGOUT exhibit into the house. Stupid, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “I understand completely.”
And I did. It’s so seldom that cops see the long-term consequences of violent death, even when they work homicide. You do the next-of-kin notification, see the disbelief on people’s faces when you tell them their loved one is gone, maybe even go to a funeral, but you hardly ever see how that loss can consume a person, year in and year out. For a homicide detective, no matter how much you care, the dead inevitably get reduced to case numbers, files to be closed, numbers to be added to other numbers that go into some departmental statistical report, a scorecard. Unless you have your own grief to bear, you don’t fully understand what those numbers mean to the people left behind, thousands of people whose lives and spirits implode, just crumple up and blow away like ash carried on a hot Santa Ana wind.
Aubrey had wandered over to the stereo and loaded up the CD changer. “I talked to your brother this evening,” he said, his voice a little brighter. “He’s coming over to shoot some hoops in the morning.”
“Is he going to meet you here?” If Perris was coming over, I wondered if Aubrey’s sly invitation to spend the night was even going to be a possibility.
“Yeah—I’ve got a court at the bottom of the property.” He held out his hand. “Come on and I’ll show you.”
If my house was a nickel tour, Aubrey’s was the ten-dollar, deluxe special. Tasteful, housekeeper-neat, and with a kitchen to die for, Aubrey’s house told me this was a man at ease with himself and his surroundings. I poured myself some more wine and sat sipping it at the kitchen table, enjoying the view of what looked like a Frank Lloyd Wright house across the canyon and Aubrey’s basketball court and lap pool below while he dished up some homemade blueberry cobbler to take downstairs.
Because the house was situated on a downhill grade, the three bedrooms and den, along with the pool and court, were on the level below us. The den, a long windowless room situated against the hillside, dominated the floor. An office and guest bedroom branched out from it. The closed door at the end of the hall I assumed led to Aubrey’s bedroom. Curious as I was, I didn’t dare ask to see it.
We sat on Aubrey’s leather sofa and talked about our activities since high school, our families, friends, and life in general while we ate dessert and listened to a CD of Dave Grusin playing Gershwin. By the time Shirley Horn’s seductive voice and piano began to play, I was leaning on Aubrey’s shoulder, as comfortable with my face in the soft cotton of his shirt as I’d ever been in my life, telling him how hard it was to play Top Cop all the time.
“You just need some TLC. Here.” Aubrey stretched out on the sofa and eased me down on top of him. His arms still around me, my head resting on his chest, he began to gently massage my shoulders and arms and caress the small of my back through my sweater, which sent little shivers dancing through me but made me hold myself very still, afraid to obey the insistent orders of my pelvis to shift and move.
Despite my own restraint, I could feel Aubrey stiffening beneath me anyway, the growing pressure making my own body begin to swell and ache. He reached down and undid his belt. I rose up a little while he pulled it from his pants and let it drop on the floor.
Aubrey’s long fingers worked their way under my sweater, then followed the straps of my bra like they were reading Braille until they came to the hooks in the back. He started to unsnap them, which made me squirm and kiss his blueberry-stained lips in response to the fire he was stoking inside me.
He opened his eyes, focused them on me. “What are you thinking?”
“I think I want to see your bedroom.”
“Come on,” he said and led me by the hand.
Aubrey’s bedroom was a deep green, a dark, comfortable cave that opened onto the hazy lights of Dodger Stadium, Silverlake, and the navy shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains.
I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Aubrey light votive candles for the nightstands and headboard, which gave the bed the appearance of a massive, linen-draped altar. The flicker of the candles made his body glow like copper as he removed his shirt, then took off his pants, exposing those impossibly long, delicious legs.
He moved to the bed and peeled off my outer garments leaving me in the black-lace-bra-and-thong set that had been languishing in the bottom of my lingerie drawer for the better part of a year, waiting for just the right occasion. Aubrey started humming along with a song Shirley Horn was singing—You won’t forget me—humming that sent me straight through the roof when he started kissing his way down the length of my body.
“Good God, Aubrey, what are you doing?” I managed to get out.
“Working my way to heaven,” he murmured as he slid the elastic from my waist.
I never knew a man to talk so much while making love.
He’d nibble the inside of my thigh and ask, “Does that feel good?”
“Girl, you need to quit!” he’d mutter as I let my nails trail over the length of his body and planted kisses from his collarbone to the cuticles of his toes.
There was no hurry, no rush, no case to discuss afterward or meeting to attend. Nothing but the slow, wonder-filled exploration of each other’s body and feelings and desires.
And after we had kissed, licked, and teased each other to distraction, after the protection was in place, after that one, breathless moment when he entered me—AHH!—after all that, the orgasms caught me by surprise. First just a softening, a warm, wide welcoming in the center of my being, they soon quickened, then shuddered, then raged over both of us like a storm. Mine first, then his jolting me again, rolling thunder between my legs, electric blue jolts starting low and snaking upward, getting trapped somewhere between my eyelids and the scalp on my head, making my hair crackle, making me move beneath, then on top of him, with every bump and grind I’d ever practiced in my adolescent fantasies (rescue me!), seen on the dance floor or at the lusting edge of that basketball court of memory. The man sweat dripping from him to me and back again, the man smell egging me on (ooh chi-i-ild!), churning turning floating soaring—THERE!—in that space, there it is, that makes-me-wanna-holler, slap-somebody-cause-it-feels-so-good passion I knew was there, from the moment he swept back into my life eight days ago.
Later, while Aubrey slept, I lay in astonished wonder, soaking up every detail of that room in the sputtering candlelight. The mahogany bed. Our colognes and body odors, rising up in fragrant waves from the soft linen sheets. Dog-eared copies of Care of the Soul and Love Is Letting Go of Fear on the nightstand beside me. The peace I felt being with this man, the first I’d known since . . .
Don’t even think it, I cautioned myself.
. . . the first I’d known in a long, long time.
The stereo system was finally sending that Dianne Reeves song Aubrey had played earlier our way. When I heard the lyrics to “Like a Lover,” I wondered if they might remind him of me. The thought made me afraid, afraid that by even thinking such a thing I’d be setting myself up more than I already had, packing my bags for some romantic fantasy trip I’d probably end up taking alone.
I tried to detach myself from my fantasies and fears long enough to hear Dianne sing:
Like a lover the velvet moon
Shares your pillow and watches while you sleep
Its light arrives on tiptoe
Gently taking you in its embrace
Oh how I dream I might be like
The velvet moon to you
I lay in the dark, listening and feeling the emotions within me make my eyes burn and my throat ache with the effort to keep them at bay. I had forgotten what this feeling was, was afraid to name it, afraid that naming it could mean it could be taken away. But here I was, lying next to a man with whom I’d locked hands and leaped into the blue, and he was still here, breathing and warm beside me.
Maybe it would be different this time.