“I know I don’t have to. I want to.” Now that she had decided, she was determined. Sara stood up and headed for the kitchen. “Which cabinet is it in?”
Gabriel got up and followed Sara, torn between letting her drink his absinthe and forbidding her. He suspected if he told her flat-out no, that she couldn’t have it, she wouldn’t pursue it, and that was what his first instinct was. To just haul her out of his kitchen, put himself between her and the cabinets, break the bottle, and dump the drink down the drain. He had a slight panic in his gut at the thought of her going into his bottle, taking herself to that place he had loved so much and still craved. But Sara wasn’t him, and she wasn’t doing it to escape, she was doing it to understand. And he also suspected she was still shaken from the packet of pictures she had seen. Drinking the absinthe was a grasp at control, ironically enough, a way for her to express defiance in the face of death and two murder cases that appeared to be unsolvable.
He wanted to tell her no. Even said, “Sara, this isn’t a good idea.”
But when she found the bottle by opening all his cabinets, and pulled it down, he didn’t yank it away from her.
“It
is
a good idea. I need to know, Gabriel. Don’t you understand that? I can’t do anything else . . . I can’t bring my mother back and I can’t . . . with you, but this I can do. I can do whatever it takes to solve Anne Donovan’s case, at least to our personal satisfaction.”
The defiant and desperate edge to her voice forced him to realize that she did absolutely need to do this. She needed to let go of her fear, move herself out of the corner she had backed into, and allow herself to be bold, angry. The feral expression on her face had him contemplating the other way she could let go. They could have hot and sweaty sex. He could lift her onto the kitchen counter and hike up her skirt and plunge into her the way he ached to.
She wanted him to. It was on her face, in her words, in her body language as she held the bottle up against her breasts. She licked her bottom lip, and he had a painful, throbbing erection that demanded release. There was no doubt in his mind it would be passionate, intense, fast, with grinding and pushing and gripping, a hot, hard slapping of their bodies together.
He wanted that.
He couldn’t take it. God help him, literally, but there was less danger from the absinthe than from sex.
“I’ll get you a glass.” He turned, away from that offer, away from that pleading, and opened his cabinet, pulling out a tumbler. They were supposed to be for juice, since he didn’t keep any glasses for alcohol, and no corkscrews, no ice buckets. No implements at all for alcohol. Except for his absinthe spoons.
“Thanks.” She was inspecting the bottle. “Do I just drink it straight? Is it like a shot?”
“You don’t want to drink it straight. It’s going to taste awful to you.” Gabriel set the glass down on the counter, right where he had pictured spreading Sara’s thighs. “We’ll dilute it with water and sugar, the traditional way. You can even pick one of my spoons to use if you want. Might as well have the full experience.” And if he sounded less than thrilled, it was because he was holding on to the edge of his own control. Not to drink. That wasn’t the temptation. He was struggling to prevent himself from touching Sara. He wanted to run his fingers down her shoulder, her arm, and grasp her hand in his. He wanted to lace their fingers together, draw her to him, and kiss her, better and longer than he had downstairs.
Instead, he unscrewed the cap and splashed two inches of absinthe into the bottom of the juice glass.
Sara leaned over and sniffed. She instantly recoiled. “Ugh. It smells like NyQuil.”
That almost made him laugh. “It has anise in it. That’s why I suggested diluting it.”
“I’ll go get a spoon.” She had her nose curled up and her arms tightly over her chest. “Though doesn’t diluting it just mean I’ll have to drink more of it?”
“You can try it both ways.” Gabriel went for the sugar and a glass of water.
Sara returned almost immediately, the most ornate of his spoons in her hand. It was carved with extensive curlicues on the handle, and it was elegant, had been expensive. She rinsed it off and dried it, then handed it to him. “I’ve always liked this one.”
Gabriel rested the spoon across the glass. A warm feeling of euphoric anticipation stole over him, an associative memory that this preparation was followed by a beautiful, impenetrable clarity. A confidence that he was brilliant and in control, achieving all his goals and all that had been asked of him.
It was all an illusion of course, and he was tempted to smack the spoon back down on to the table. Hurl the glass. Exercise his own mastery over life, destiny, emotion.
But the better way to express that control would be to pour for Sara and hand her the glass. To give it up, move it from his hand to hers, after seeing the water slide through the sugar and drag it down into the absinthe via the holes in the spoon. To watch water and absinthe blend in a beautiful cloud, to lift away the spoon, and hold the heavy glass in his hand, feel its weight, its promise.
Gabriel handed it to Sara, meeting her eyes head-on. She took it from him, wide-eyed, a question clearly in her expression. But all she said was “Thanks,” in a gravelly whisper.
“I recommend sipping it like wine or a beer. Don’t toss it all back at once. Why don’t we go sit down and watch TV or play cards or something. Do you play gin rummy?” He actually despised playing cards, because while he appreciated the logic of the games, he didn’t enjoy being subjected to chance, which was what pulling cards always was. But he would play cards with Sara if she wanted to. They couldn’t just sit there while she drank.
He
couldn’t just sit there while she drank.
“Cards would be fun. I was a card shark in my dorm in college.” She took a very tentative sip from her glass. Her face screwed up. “Well, it’s no margarita.”
He wouldn’t know. He’d never had a margarita. They hadn’t been on the menu in the nineteenth century and Gabriel hadn’t had a drink since Prohibition. “Lick some sugar if it’s that bad.”
She did, sticking the tip of her tongue onto the absinthe spoon and tasting the sugar that had remained behind, clumped from the water. Gabriel turned away, retreating to the living room in search of a deck of cards. He couldn’t watch her, couldn’t stare at the pink, wet tip of her tongue and not imagine touching it with his own, feeling it on his body, thrusting his own inside her mouth, her inner thighs.
It had been too long for him. He had stayed away from women entirely in the last eighty years. It had been easier in the early part of the twentieth century to visit a woman anonymously in Storyville and know she had no ability to track him down. He had made sure to have sex with women whose senses were dulled from drugs and alcohol, so they wouldn’t remember, wouldn’t respond to the interaction, wouldn’t want him irrationally and unnaturally. He could appease his physical urges and get the hell out before there were consequences.
But it wasn’t that easy anymore. There was no anonymity. Anyone could find another person if they really wanted to. And the thought of going to the lowest of the desperate low, the women who were strung out on crack and littered with disease, living on the streets, offended his aesthetics, not to mention his sense of right and wrong. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, use a woman like that for his base, physical satisfaction, and he wasn’t attracted to sex for the simple sake of release anymore. He could do that on his own.
And there was no way, absolutely no way, he would engage in a sexual relationship with a woman he knew, someone who would potentially fall for him, become addicted to him. He couldn’t subject any woman—like Sara—to that, not even for the most desperate sexual want. It was also true what he had told Sara, that sex was lifting the lid off of his control, and he wasn’t sure he could handle the consequences. So he had been celibate for nearly eight decades, and was feeling the effect of that acutely and painfully.
His hand could take the edge off, but it could never replace the feeling of burying himself inside a woman.
So he moved away from Sara, out of touching distance. After digging cards out of a drawer, he sat in a chair across from the couch, dragging it up to the coffee table. He busied himself packing up their Chinese food while Sara wandered in, sipping the absinthe.
“It gets better with each sip,” she said. “Maybe that’s because I’m actually killing my taste buds or something.”
“Maybe. Do you want to deal?”
“No, you go ahead.” She took another sip.
Gabriel found himself getting tenser as her glass emptied, while Sara got chattier, looser. With each sip, she relaxed her shoulders a little more, allowed her knees to gape apart another inch. While he gripped his playing cards, bending them in the tight fan he held, she waved hers carelessly around as she spoke.
And she talked about everything. Work. Housing. Him. On and on as he watched her get quickly and giddily intoxicated.
“I like my job,” she said. “I really should go back. Don’t you think? Except I’m afraid of screwing up. I don’t sleep at all anymore. Did I tell you that? Of course I told you that.”
He couldn’t even get a word in and she was onto her apartment. “My couch is purple. I hate purple. It’s a rich, syrupy color. It’s medicinal. And I would never wear purple. It’s like a cure for coughs on your clothes. The only time I like purple is when it’s a flower. Irises are beautiful.”
Gabriel discarded, not sure what the hell he was supposed to say to that.
But it didn’t matter because Sara was plowing through her second glass and speaking her thoughts out loud with confidence and clarity.
“Play the piano for me, Gabriel.”
“No.” The idea wasn’t even remotely appealing.
“Please. Pretty please?” She stuck out her bottom lip and pouted, her blue eyes glassy and bright from the alcohol. “I want to hear you play.”
“No. I told you I don’t hear music anymore.”
“You’re just being stubborn.” She tossed back the remainder of her glass. “How much am I supposed to drink? I don’t feel drunk at all. Just sort of relaxed, like everything is sharp and focused. I feel very logical, like all my thoughts are better organized. Am I acting different?”
“Yes.” She wasn’t a sloppy drunk—that wasn’t what the absinthe did. But it gave the illusion of intelligence to the drinker, like every thought one had was utterly brilliant. “You’re very chatty.”
“Oh.” She fanned herself with her five-card spread. “Am I bugging you?”
“No.” What she was doing was turning him on. Her legs were wide apart, her skirt hitching up past her knees. Her tank-top strap had fallen off her shoulder and she hadn’t bothered to pull it back up. “I like to hear you talk.”
Because if she stopped talking and decided to touch him, they were going to have a serious problem.
“You don’t talk enough.” Her finger came up and shook at him in reprimand. “You’re like Mystery Man.”
That made him smile. “Maybe I’m not worth listening to.”
“Or maybe you’re meant to express yourself through painting and music, not spoken words.”
That ripped the smile off his face. She might as well have kicked him in the groin. “Sara . . .” He meant it as a warning, to let it go, that she was too close, crossing a boundary, treading into something that was none of her business.
But either she was too drunk to realize his intent, or she was choosing to ignore it, because she said, “Play the piano for me. Right now.”
“No, damn it,” he said in frustration.
“You have a choice. You can play the piano or you can kiss me.”
Oh, yeah. She was drunk. He knew she would have never said that otherwise. Yet, it was clear she meant it. She was tossing down her cards and leaning across the coffee table, palms on the flat surface. She was going to kiss him, and he wasn’t going to be able to resist.
“Fine. I’ll play the fucking piano,” he said angrily, dropping his own cards onto the table and standing up, quickly, before she could touch him. Anything to keep her away from him.
“It wouldn’t hurt, you know,” she said. “You might even like it. A kiss, that is.”
Was she even serious? Gabriel stood with his feet apart, erection throbbing. “That’s not the problem. I know I would like it. But there are
issues
. I can’t.”
Before she could respond, argue, breathe on him, he moved across the room and flipped the piano lid open. The instrument was probably grossly out of tune and he was completely out of practice, but if she wanted to hear sour off-key notes, more power to her.
“What do you want me to play?” he asked, sitting down in total irritation. He didn’t want to do this, but he was already cracking his knuckles, relaxing his shoulders, giving in, feeling the pull of the keys.
“Whatever you want to play. Whatever you have music for.”
What he wanted to play was something dark, something frustrated, to express his feelings. Something yearning and intense. “I don’t need sheet music.” Once he learned a song, he always played from memory. It was all still there, he was sure of it. His fingers remembered, even if he no longer heard it. So he tested the scales, getting the feel of the instrument. He closed his eyes, letting his fingers guide him, sighing at the unexpected pleasure the first strains of Chopin’s Ballade in G Minor gave him.
Maybe he had missed it after all.
The music swelled in his soul, and he let it flow from his fingers, the rhythm of 6/4 suggesting an underlying waltz, a tender poignancy that was perfect for his mood, for the unexpected longing that arose from the feel of the keys beneath his fingers. For music, for beauty, for Sara.
Gabriel found his confidence as the ballade increased in musical intensity, swelling into one of Chopin’s spectacular embellishments of eighteenth notes against solid quarter-note chords, a flourish that pleased him. With two-note slurs, the music pushed forward, yearning, a keening cry that was perfect for his mood, echoing the frustration he felt, the anguish, the growing hope and desire that was being ground into the dirt by the unrelenting reality of murder. Crushed by his sins, his demon status, the bounds of his punishment.