Close Encounters (25 page)

Riverdale was considered a desirable community that Carol had been hearing about since she’d come to New York ten years ago, but she’d never been there. Lee inched his car through traffic and bad weather to the West Side Highway and headed north.

Twenty minutes later, after parking his car, they argued good-naturedly over where they should eat. There were more than a dozen ethnic restaurants in just a three-block radius of his building.

Lee wanted to try an Irish pub, and Carol was inclined toward a sushi bar. They finally settled on a tiny Italian café with no more than seven or eight tables.

The young owner and chef gave them a friendly greeting, and Lee watched Carol flirt with the man over the day’s specials.

“Do you have chicken piccata?” she asked.

“No, no… not today. But don’t worry, eh?” The man smiled charmingly. “For you I make it special. Whatever you want, I make.”

“Thank you,” Carol said wryly. “I wish everyone was as agreeable as you are.”

As Lee gave his attention to the menu, he recalled the last time he and Karen had attempted to have dinner together, the way she had openly flaunted herself around the male customers. Karen encouraged that kind of attention, expecting it as homage to her youth and beauty, but Carol seemed surprised by it. She accepted compliments somewhat shyly, as if she couldn’t credit that anyone could be paying attention to her.

They placed their orders. As Carol sipped her water, she realized that Lee was staring at her.

“What?” she asked, puzzled by his scrutiny.

“I have something for you,” he said. He reached for his coat, draped over the back of his chair, and searched for something in the pocket.

“Do you? What is it?”

“A beeper.” He opened his palm and presented it to her. It was in a bright-red casing. “Now they come in colors—”

“A beeper?” She took it, turning it over and over as she examined it. “I don’t really need one.”

“Yes, you do,” Lee countered. “You seem to screen your calls—a practice that I endorse, by the way—but it still annoys the hell out of me, so I’m giving you a beeper. The only message you’ll ever get on it is from me, okay? No muss, no fuss, no strangers.” Lee took it back for a moment, pointing out some of the features. “It vibrates. You’ll feel it when it receives a message. Wear it on a belt or carry it in a pocket. It’s already activated and ready to go.”

“Thanks,” Carol whispered. “But why?”

Because I worry about you,
went through Lee’s mind, but that seemed too presumptuous to say out loud. “It’s just a cheap precaution. If you need to reach me, you can. Call and leave your number. I’ll get back to you no matter where I am. I’ll show you how to use it later.”

Carol slipped it into her purse. She was going to flippantly ask, “What if you’re on a date with someone? Worse, what if you’re—?” She shook her head and drank more water. “I probably won’t ever have to use it,” she murmured, averting her gaze.

“Maybe not, but do me a favor? Carry it because I ask you to.”

Carol nodded, wondering what else she was committing herself to. “All right.”

The waiter returned with their salads and a basket of bread.

“Tell me about your family,” Lee said.

Carol was thrown off guard by the unexpected request. She pursed her lips and, taking a slice of bread, began to methodically crumble it on the bread plate.

“I thought you said you didn’t need to know.”

“I said it won’t make a difference, but I am curious. You can’t blame me for that.”

“No. I guess not. I’m adopted, as you guessed,” she said. “I was found at a bus depot, apparently abandoned, with nothing but the clothes on my back and a very soggy diaper. A young minister, James Taggart, and his wife, Rosemary, came forward after the newspaper reports about me and wanted to adopt me. No one else offered,” Carol smiled wryly. “My parents are do-gooders. Holdovers from the sixties and seventies protests and marches. They met in the Peace Corps and are among the few people I know who actually practice what they preach.

“There was quite a fight over me at the time, once the Taggarts made it clear that they wanted to legally adopt me and raise me as their own. Black child, white family—
everybody
objected.”

“Was there a black family who would have taken you?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know. By the time I was old enough to understand anything, to remember the reporters and cameras and crowds of people screaming at my parents, I had become James and Rosemary’s little girl.”

Lee stared thoughtfully at her. “And you didn’t much like it, did you?”

“I didn’t like being different. Everybody else had grandparents and cousins. Heirlooms and photo albums with family and relatives. I didn’t. I also didn’t
look
like anyone in my family. My father used to tell me that being different meant I was an extra-special gift from God.”

Lee lifted a corner of his mouth in an ironic grin. “You didn’t buy it.”

“Not then. I was a kid. I didn’t want to be different,” Carol confessed as she poked at her salad with her fork.

“What about your brother? What’s his story?”

“Wesley isn’t like me, gnawing over the past and wishing he could change things. Except… I don’t want to change anything, either. Maybe I wouldn’t be who I am if I’d been raised in a black family in a black community, maybe hating white folks,” she noted, staring at him. “I would probably not be living in New York.”

“And you probably wouldn’t have gotten shot.”

“That’s true,” Carol conceded. “But, then, I might never have met you. Under
any
circumstances.

“Wesley was in foster care when my parents first heard about him. He was the first to be adopted.”

“What if you’d been put in foster care for years, or adopted by a less loving family?” Lee suggested. “Your folks sound pretty special to me.”

“Every white person who’s ever heard my story says the same thing. I get a different reaction from blacks,” Carol admitted. “I know I’ve been fortunate, but I had to grow up—”

“And almost get killed—”

“—before I could see that.”

Their dinner arrived. Lee waited until they’d been served and the waiter left them alone.

“Anyone else?” he asked.

“There’s my sister, Ann. There’s only five months difference in our age, but Ann used to tell people that I was her twin sister.”

Lee laughed.

Carol shrugged. “I didn’t appreciate the humor until I started college.”

“Are you like twins in thought and feelings?”

“No! Exactly the opposite.”

“Maybe that’s why she said it.”

“Probably. She takes life a lot less seriously than I do. She said to me once, when we were teenagers, that she wished she could be black.” Lee raised his brows. “When I asked her why, she said because I had a truer sense of the world, that I was tougher than she was.”

“Are you?”

Carol thought about it for a moment and finally shrugged. “I don’t know. I used to think Ann was really tough because she didn’t let anything bother her. She was always calm. Wesley once said that she’s the only one of us who will make it to heaven without the need for prayers and exorcism.”

After they finished dinner Lee walked Carol to his building. She attempted to pack a wet snowball out of the slush she scraped together from the hood of a car. While Lee had his back to her to open the front door, she made a cockeyed pitch. She didn’t come close to hitting him, but the motion did manage to pull the still sensitive muscles and sinews across her chest.

She cried out and stood with her arms pressed to her chest. Lee rushed to her side.

“What’s the matter? What happened?” he asked.

“That’s… what I get for trying to be cute,” she said. She explained about the snowball.

Lee couldn’t suppress his amusement. He led her inside.

Waiting for the elevator brought Carol back to the reality of the moment. She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t know why they’d come to Lee’s apartment. Nor could she ignore what her acquiescence meant. That she approved. That she wanted to be alone with him. That she had been thinking ever since he’d first kissed her that it would come to this.

She was pleased that he didn’t feel the need to say anything. Their eyes seemed to communicate everything they were feeling. Words would have ruined the magic.

His apartment was a large, bright, one-bedroom with a terrace. He helped her off with her coat, and by then the pain in her chest had subsided.

She looked around briefly, for the moment less interested in Lee’s apartment than in the fact that they were alone together in it. A swift undercurrent of uncertainty came and went. One of the benefits of what had happened, Carol realized as Lee put her coat away, was that they seemed less inclined to worry about the consequences of their actions.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

Carol grimaced. “Dumb,” she replied, thinking of the snowball.

He put his arms around her in a light embrace. “Want to try again?”

“What do you mean?”

Lee pointed to the terrace doors. “There’s some snow out there. Want to throw another snowball at me?”

She shook her head. “You might want to get even, and I don’t have the strength to fight back. I have a favor to ask, though. Can you help me off with my boots?” She pulled free to sit on the arm of the sofa and extended one leg to him.

He chuckled as he squatted down before her. “What did you do before you met me?”

“I did it myself. I kind of like having you kneel at my feet,” she said, grinning.

While Lee worked on getting the boots off, Carol ran her hand through his hair. She wondered what he would look like if his hair was longer, then decided that she liked him fine just the way he was. Spontaneously she leaned forward and planted a kiss on top of his head. He glanced up at her with an expression of utter surprise as he removed the second boot.

“What was that for?”

“What a deal,” Carol murmured playfully. “You model for my class, take me to dinner, and kneel on command. I think I’ll keep you.”

Carol watched, surprised, as his expression changed from startled to puzzled. Finally his eyes seemed to sharpen with an emotion that she could only interpret as resentment or offense.

“Lee, I’m… sorry. I was only teasing.”

“
You’re
sorry,” he repeated in a strange tone.

Carol tried to understand what was happening, what he was thinking.

Slowly he stood up. He held out his hand and she placed hers on his. He pulled her to her feet and looked into her eyes for a long time. There
was
resentment in his face, but she didn’t think it was meant for her. In any case, it came and went quickly. She began to understand only when his eyes filled with a bewilderment that made him seem incredibly vulnerable. As if he was confused and didn’t know what to say. As if he was going to ask for forgiveness.

His hands settled on her waist and then slid around to her lower back, drawing her against him. That slow and tentative movement made Carol recognize that what had happened was happening to both of them.

They were connected for life.

By chance.

Or fate.

Or need.

The time to be frightened or to set boundaries had been the morning they’d met. The time to be angry was in the distant past. Blame and recrimination were beside the point. What really mattered was this moment. Right now might be all they’d ever have.

Carol’s heart began to pound as if it would fly out of her chest. When Lee began to bend toward her, she obliged by letting her eyes drift closed.

This kiss was different. The first kiss had seemed daring and forbidden. Exploratory. But the moment their lips met now she felt a surrender. The kiss was very gentle and sensual and deliberate. Lee’s tongue slipped into her mouth, and the sensation of being intimately invaded seemed like such an obvious prelude to another kind of penetration that she became dizzy and breathless.

He pulled her close, urging her to rest her hips and thighs against his, to press her stomach and chest against him. A rush of desire seized her loins. She could feel Lee’s arousal, and he leaned his hips against her so that there was no mistake.

Lee deepened the kiss, forcing her mouth open further. The spiraling of emotions tightened his arms around her, flattened her breasts against him.

Carol quivered and moaned. Lee held her fast, his tongue in control as it probed and coaxed. His right hand glided up her rib cage, over the thin cotton of her sweater, making Carol feel as if she had nothing on. She moaned again, and grabbed Lee’s wrist before he reached her breast, rising and falling in agitation. Finally she pulled her mouth free.

“No…” she whispered. She looked beseechingly at him. She didn’t want him to get the wrong idea.

“Don’t you want me to?” Lee asked just as softly.

She hesitated. Gnawing her lip, she nodded yes.

“What, then? Is it too soon?”

She tried to smile and failed. “How can it be too soon? I… know that… we both want to.”

Lee placed his fingertips on her cheek, and used his thumb to lift her chin. He gently kissed her mouth again, as if it would calm her down. “Yes, I do.”

“I don’t want you to see me,” Carol said quietly.

He frowned. “You don’t want me to…” And then he understood. “Don’t worry. I can take care of that.”

She watched in puzzlement as he turned out the lights, leaving them in a diffuse semidarkness. The only source of light was the neighborhood beyond the terrace. She had eyes only for him, watching as he returned silently to her and took her hand. She allowed herself to be led out of the living room and through an open door into his bedroom.

Carol went willingly into Lee’s arms, waiting for the touch of his mouth with an eagerness that dispelled her anxiety. She was easily seduced by his large, warm hands as he began to remove her clothing. It didn’t take long. He pulled back the coverlet and held it up for Carol to climb under. And then he took his own clothes off.

Carol lay under the cool sheets with her eyes closed. She didn’t need to watch Lee, finding it equally exciting to hear the sounds of preparation. When she finally opened her eyes, it was to find him placing his holstered gun on the bureau.