She looked so good.
In some way Carlo couldn’t put his finger
on, Sabina had changed visibly, notably in the weeks since he’d
last seen her. She stood in the middle of Andi’s funky shop,
wearing slim white pants that stopped several inches above her
ankles—Rosa wore pants like that, too, and he knew there was a name
for them, but he had no idea what it was—and a deep pink top,
fitted nicely around her stunning curves. She should always wear
colors like that, tones of red and purple; they made the dark gold
of her skin glow. Her hair was long and wavy, the front pulled back
and caught in a pretty clip at the back of her head.
When she turned and saw him, she smiled and
lifted her left hand to her hair, a sweet and nervous gesture, and
he thought he knew what was different. She seemed
lighter
,
somehow. Not in size but in presence. And younger, too, maybe.
“Bina.” He took a step into the shop; she
took a step toward him. Then they both stopped, their eyes caught
together. His heart was racing.
“Well, come on. Do I have to do the pushing
thing? I’ll do the pushing thing if I have to.” Andi had stood up
from her spinning wheel and was coming toward them.
Carlo closed the distance and held out his
hand to Bina. She laid her hand in his, slender and strong, the
nails bare of polish, and he folded his fingers around it. “Hi,
Andi. No pushing required.”
“That’s good, then. Hi, Carlo. I’d love to
chat, but you two are late.”
Bina turned to Andi, a little wrinkle in her
brow. “Late?”
“Definitely. Get thee out. Now. And I don’t
want to see you in here tomorrow. You have the weekend off.”
“Andi! The weekend, it’s too busy!” Bina
shook her head and tried to pull her hand back, but Carlo held
fast.
“I’ll do what I did before you graced my
door, and call my sister to come in. We’ll be fine.” Andi waved
them toward the door with a flourish, her wide sleeves fluttering.
“Go! Get out!”
With a gentle tug, Carlo pulled Sabina
close, until they were almost hip to hip. “We’ve been thrown out.
Join me for dinner?”
She turned her face up to him, and again he
was struck by the difference in her. When she smiled, there was no
reserve at all in it, and her face lit up. “Yes. I would like
that.” She lifted her free hand and brushed her fingertips over his
cheekbone. “You’ve been hurt.”
One of Joey’s tweakers had managed a decent
swing—one of the women, about which Luca had still not let up—and
he’d had a pretty impressive black eye and needed a couple of
stitches. All that was left now was a pink line, about an inch
long, under his eye.
“It’s nothing.” He turned his head and
kissed her palm, and she dropped her hand.
He wanted to kiss her; the urge to pull her
into his arms, to enfold her, was almost insuperable, but he was
concerned that she might pull back if he came on that strong. When
she’d called him, she’d asked only if they could talk soon, when he
next came to Quiet Cove. He’d told her he’d come the very next day,
and here he was, but he still had no idea what it was she would
say.
No—now, he thought he might have a hint of
an idea. Her expression was so warm, so open, so sweetly shy that
he could not believe she had bad news for him. But he would not
push her, would not scare her.
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed
her knuckles. “Let’s go, then.”
She squeezed his hand, and he led her out of
Andi’s shop.
~oOo~
Carlo had intended to take her to Dominic’s,
the nicest restaurant in town, right on the harbor and built so
that the dining room was on stilts over the water. He wanted to
take her on a proper date. He thought maybe this night would be the
start of something between them. He hoped that it would.
Since Quiet Cove was a beach town, its
attitude was pretty laid back, and even this restaurant, with its
linen tablecloths and wine stewards, didn’t have much of a dress
code. Shoes and shirt were really its only requirements. Also a
bottom of some kind. He hoped she wouldn’t feel like she was
underdressed. He himself was wearing jeans and a faded chambray
shirt.
It was a small place and tended, especially
in the summer months, to be busy on weekends, like this Friday
night, but Carlo didn’t need a reservation. He wanted to surprise
her, so when she asked where they were going as he led her to his
car, he only smiled and helped her in.
They were both quiet on the short drive, but
when he pulled into the Dominic’s lot, Bina’s kind of quiet
changed. It thickened somehow, making Carlo a little worried. But
she got out with him and took his hand, and he led her to the door
of the restaurant. Though it was early for dinner, and the sun had
not yet set, there was a small cluster of people loitering outside
the building—diners without reservations, waiting for a table. When
Carlo started to push through them, Bina pulled him back.
He stepped away from the crowd. “Bina?
Okay?” Her expression had darkened considerably from that mystical
light she’d had at Andi’s, and Carlo began to worry that his little
sliver of hope about why she wanted to talk had been misplaced.
“No, I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “Can
we…this is not…to go somewhere else, would this be too much
trouble?”
Feeling a disconcerting mix of relief and
concern, he brushed his fingers over her furrowed brow and was glad
when she leaned into his touch. “Of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t
know you didn’t like Dominic’s.”
“It’s not that. The restaurant is good. I
enjoy the swordfish very much. But I have…I don’t know the way to
explain…”
“You don’t have to. We can go anywhere you
want. It’s fine.”
“I would like to explain, if I can.
With…with
him
, we go always to places like this. Very fancy.
All of them around, I think. I like that to be in the past.” She
sighed sharply and stomped her foot a little. She was wearing flats
that were almost the color of her skin; he hadn’t noticed them
before. “I’m nervous. My words aren’t good.”
Unable to resist, he slid his hand along her
jaw and into her hair and bent down to kiss her. His blood roared
in his ears at the touch of his lips on hers. He refrained from
taking it deeper, but she relaxed into him instantly, and he had
trouble breaking away from her surrender. At last, he pulled back
before he lost all impulse control. Still leaning on his chest, she
blinked up at him, looking as dazed as he suddenly felt. He let go
of her hand and snaked his arm around her waist, both supporting
her and holding her close. “I’m nervous, too. And your words are
beautiful. Where would you like to go instead?”
Her smile then was positively rapacious,
even as it kept its sheen of shyness. “Can we get take-out?”
He laughed, all at once completely at ease.
They were starting something, they were. But Trey was at the house
with Rosa and his father, and with the trouble Trey had been
having, bringing Bina home was not a good idea. Not yet—too
confusing. “We really can. Can we take it to your place?”
“I would like that.” She lifted her hand and
hooked it into the open throat of his shirt, her fingers scratching
lightly at his chest, and his balls clenched. “I would like you to
see
my place
.”
~oOo~
Her place turned out to be a small room
above Piccolo Flowers and Gifts. He smiled to see it—the room was
bright and cheerful and cozy for deeper reasons than simply its
small size. But the ceiling had a sharp pitch, and only about five
or six feet down the middle of the room was taller than he was—and
then only by a couple of inches. When Bina turned around and saw
how close he came to brushing the ceiling, she doubled over with
laughter.
She was so fucking amazing.
“Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry. I forget that you are
so tall to hit the ceiling.”
“Yeah, yeah. Yuk it up. I’ll probably end up
with a concussion tonight.”
She came back to stand against him, raised
up on her tiptoes, and lifted her arm high, so that she could pat
his head. “Poor Carlo. If you sit, then maybe we can save your
head.”
Thinking that lying down was another way to
save his head, he nodded and set the paper sack full of Thai food
on the scratched chest that seemed to serve as her kitchen
counter.
There was a small sofa—a loveseat,
really—facing one of the dormer windows, and Carlo realized that
she didn’t have a television. Out the window, though, from this
third-story room, between two buildings across the street—the town
pharmacy and laundromat—there was a decent view of the water. He
smiled, imagining her sitting on the old loveseat, of a red
material so faded it was pink, staring out across the sea. Better
than any reality show.
There was a narrow table under the dormer
window, and lined up in two rows across it were a few dozen
paperbacks. Curious, he walked over, ducking down as the ceiling
sloped. He was able to stand in the nook created by the dormer,
though, and he scanned the spines of the books. He was surprised at
the eclectic mix—old-fashioned whodunit murder stories from the
likes of Agatha Christie and P.D. James, the
Lord of the
Rings
trilogy, several non-fiction titles on religion, some
science fiction, four titles by Isabel Allende,
One Hundred
Years of Solitude
, several volumes of poetry,
War and
Peace
, a couple of self-help books that seemed to have a
self-actualization theme, and a volume of restoration drama. And
many others.
Carlo himself read fairly often. He’d
enjoyed English in school, and he’d read some of the books in front
of him for one class or another, but these days, his tastes ran to
spy novels, the Ludlums and the Clancys.
Holding
The Collected Poems of Sylvia
Plath
, in which a bookmark with a gold, silken tassel held a
place about midway through, Carlo turned. Sabina was regarding him
steadily, her expression warm but otherwise blank.
“Are these all yours?”
“Yes. The bookstore on the street is a
favorite place. There is a cat. He helps me find my books.”
Smiling at that statement but letting it
lie, he said, “Looking at this collection, I wouldn’t be able to
tell almost anything about you. Do you like all of these
books?”
“For some, I don’t know yet. That’s why I
bought them. To see. But others, yes. They are old favorites. I
like Allende. She writes about a world I would like to remember. I
think I can sometimes, when I read her. I like Gogol, too. And
Nabokov. Also Twain. But the books I read before were
his
,
so now I have mine.”
Before he’d even gone back to Providence,
Carlo had noticed that she had stopped saying Auberon’s first name.
Usually now, she simply called him by a pronoun, an audible sneer
in her voice. When she had no choice but to name him, she used his
surname.
He indicated the book in his hand. “It looks
like you’re reading Plath. I read some of her stuff in college. Do
you like her?” He remembered her poetry being mostly about suicide
and discontent.
She took the book out of his hands and
replaced it between
Sonnets from the Portuguese
and
Goblin Market and Other Poems
. “I do. I like the pictures
she makes with her words. She, too, was very unhappy.”
Her back was to him; she seemed to be
staring out at her view of the ocean. Dusk had arrived, and the sky
was thick with clouds. The night had the bruised look that
portended rain, and the golden light of Bina’s lamps made the
little attic all the cozier in comparison. Carlo took a step to
stand behind her, and he let his hands lie over her shoulders.
“Like you were?”
She tipped her head, laying her cheek on his
hand. “No. No. I think she was trapped in her mind. She was her own
captor. A sickness. I…no, I was unhappy in a different way.” She
laughed. “I sound like Tolstoy: ‘every unhappy family is unhappy in
its own way’.”
“What’s that from?” He bent down and kissed
her head, just above the silver clip in her hair.
“
Anna Karenina
. I read it again last
week.” She lifted a thick book from her collection. “The opening
line is famous. Have you read?”
“No. Should I?”
She shrugged. “I like it. But it is a sad
book about a sad woman. An unhappy family. Russians write sad
books.” She put the brick of a book back. “South Americans…we write
magical books. With ghosts who join us for dinner and talking
animals and time that does what it wants. We are not so much
trapped by the world.” She paused again, her hand resting across
the tops of her paperbacks.
“Sabina, I love you.” The words were out
before he’d known they were even in the vicinity of his mouth, but
he didn’t try to take them back. They were true.
She turned. Her hazel eyes, dancing with
color, met his. “How can you know this?”
He cradled her face in his hands, the silk
of her cheeks warm against his rough palms. “I’ve known you for two
months, Bina. I know that’s not long, and I know we’ve been apart
for almost half of it. But I’ve seen the strength in you. The
beauty in your heart. Your kindness. Your sense. Your
will
.
These weeks away from you have made me ache. I don’t expect you to
feel the same, but I need you to know. I love you.”