But there was no going back. The wind took hold of the sails. Zach followed Nora into his bedroom. She struck a match and lit the single candle he’d left next to the bed.
“A bottle of wine and a candle…” Nora said. “You were looking forward to this night, weren’t you, Zach?”
“Yes,” he confessed.
She came over to him, unknotted her tie and took it off. She brought it over his eyes and tied it around his head, blindfolding him. He tensed at his loss of his sight.
“Relax.” Nora’s voice was calm and soothing as if she were talking to a child. “Trust me, please.”
“I do,” he said and knew he meant it.
He stood still as Nora unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it down his arms. But she didn’t take it off completely. She used the shirt to tie his hands behind his back.
Zach sensed her step away. He heard her soft laugh.
“Ecce homo.”
Zach remembered the painting in the church. “Behold the man.”
“Nora…” Zach said, worried he was about to get crucified.
“How do you feel?”
“Disoriented.”
“The blindfold will do that. Don’t breathe too deeply and don’t lock your knees.”
He nodded and tried to relax his legs.
“Do you know why I’ve done this, Zach?”
“No.”
“I could say it’s because I want you. I do want you. I have rarely been so attracted to someone in my life. But if I just wanted you I could have had you the day we met. Yes?”
Zach knew she expected an answer. He decided to save them both time and simply go with the truth.
“Yes.”
“Do you know why I didn’t let that happen? Why I stopped you before you could ask me up that night in the cab?”
Zach experienced a mild wave of vertigo. Nora moved as she spoke and the words seemed to come from everywhere at once.
“Why?” Nora had never made her attraction to him a secret. Why she’d turned him down the one time he’d come on to her was something he’d wondered about since that night.
“Because when you said Grace’s name you had so much pain in your eyes. I knew you didn’t really want me. You just wanted to not think and not feel for a few hours. Yes?”
“Yes,” Zach admitted.
“I do want you, Zach, but I also want to know you.”
“You do know me.”
“You’ve kept half your life from me,” she said. “I don’t want half. I want all. You know my secrets now. Time to tell me yours. It’s all or nothing tonight. Say ‘all’ and we go on. Say ‘nothing’ and this ends now and forever. You decide.”
He felt the floor rock underneath him. On the wood floor and in his bare feet, he imagined for a moment he was on a ship in a storm.
“All.”
“Good,” Nora said, sounding relieved and yet determined. “Now…tell me about Grace.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Then say your safe word and end it. But that will end it. It and us. But if you don’t want to end it, answer the question.”
For a terrible moment Zach considered his options. There were some things he simply did not talk about. But they’d come so far now…it would be a more difficult journey back than forward. Zach took a few short, shallow breaths and used the street sounds below to orient himself.
“Grace was eighteen when we met.” He gave up the words like precious possessions to a thief. “I was…older.”
“You were teaching at Cambridge then, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Grace was your student?”
Zach swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“That explains why my relationship with Wes made you so uncomfortable at first. Déjà vu, right? It seems so unlike you, getting involved with a student.”
“All teachers nurse attractions to the occasional student. I never intended to act upon it. Grace was lovely beyond words, twice as bright and talented as any student I’d ever taught. She wrote poetry, good poetry. No eighteen-year-old in history has ever written good poetry. But she did.”
“What else did she do?”
“She brought me her poetry sometimes and asked for my opinion, my help.”
“You were her editor.”
Zach laughed bitterly.
“I suppose I was.”
“She loved you.”
“As much as a girl of eighteen can love her thirty-one-year-old teacher. At the time, I simply assumed she cared only for her writing.”
“Eighteen means she couldn’t buy booze in the States. It doesn’t mean she couldn’t love you.”
“It does mean I shouldn’t have loved her back.”
“But you did.”
“Foolishly, yes.” His stomach churned as he relived that year, that nightmare of a year. “Or what passed for love at the time. But I never acted on it. I loved my work, loved teaching, loved my life.”
“What happened?” Nora’s questions were as relentless as any assault.
Zach took another breath. He never even allowed himself to think about that time, much less tell another soul about it. It was his burden alone.
“I was in my office late on a Friday night. I had a hundred exams to grade that weekend. I suppose I’d complained about this in class. Somehow she knew I’d be there.”
“She came to your office?”
“Yes. I was exhausted.” Suddenly Zach was back in that cramped third-floor office again. His sleeves were rolled up; his fingers were tinged with red ink. His head ached from the hours of reading, the endless concentration. He yawned, stretched, heard a noise in the hallway. “I heard footsteps in the hall and looked up. She was standing in my doorway.”
“She came to your office late at night. Shall I assume the inevitable happened?”
“It felt inevitable. She came inside without waiting for me to ask her. And then she closed the door behind her.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘I don’t have any poems tonight.’”
“And what did you say?”
Zach exhaled. “I didn’t say anything at all.”
“This shouldn’t be a bad memory for you. Tell me why it is.”
“She was…” Zach stopped and let the silence speak for itself. Behind the blindfold he closed his eyes. He remembered how easily Grace came to him, how her body relaxed against his, how his hands fit her thighs as if they’d been made to press them open again and again. And then he recalled her gasp of pain, that brief intake of breath that told him all.
“She was a virgin,” Nora said, filling in the blanks.
“Yes.”
“It’s not your fault that you didn’t know.”
“It was my fault…” Zach began and felt the guilt on him again like a knife pressed to his throat. “It was my fault I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.”
“Did she tell you to?”
“No. But I should have anyway. I had dozens of lovers before then…but never…” Zach said and though the memory was an agony, his body remembered that moment. He could still feel himself inside her tight passage. “I’d never taken such pleasure inside the body of a woman before that night.”
“Tell me what happened, Zach,” Nora demanded. She wouldn’t stop until he told her.
“No, it wasn’t my fault I didn’t know she was a virgin. But it was my fault she got pregnant.”
“Jesus Christ,” Nora said, sounding both shocked and sympathetic for the first time. Zach was almost afraid of the next question.
“You don’t have any children so I’ll assume it was one of three possibilities—adoption, abortion or miscarriage.”
“It was ectopic. Worse than a miscarriage.”
He heard Nora’s slight intake of breath, the wince of pain.
“How bad was it?”
“It almost killed her. She was so young she didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t. She ignored the pain for a month. We’d only been married two weeks when she woke up in a pool of blood. One in a million chance, the doctor said, that a girl so young and healthy would suffer that. So young, he said, and he looked at me like a criminal. I felt like one. Eighteen years old and she’s hemorrhaging in the emergency ward. Eighteen years old and she has to marry a man over a decade her senior, a man hardly more than a stranger to her.”
“What happened after?”
Zach shook his head. “She survived. But I wasn’t sure we would or even if we should. I waited every day for her to tell me she was leaving me. We married because she was pregnant. Then she wasn’t. But she never left me. Still, that year was hell for us. I had a nineteen-year-old wife I barely knew who had to transfer to King’s College in London after I left Cambridge, left before they could fire me.”
“But you stayed married.”
“We did. How or why, I don’t know.”
“Because she loved you, Zach. And because you loved her.”
“I did. Not that it matters.”
“Why doesn’t it?”
“Because we’re over. She’s made that perfectly clear.”
“How do you know it’s over?”
“Because she left me, Nora,” Zach said, letting irritation seep into his voice.
“She left you?” Nora seemed unfazed by his anger. “Aren’t you the one who packed up, boarded a plane and moved across an ocean?”
“She left me long before that.”
“Tell me.” Nora’s voice was insistent, hypnotic and musical. Unable to see, Zach felt uncoupled from the ground, unmoored. Nothing seemed real. It was easier to make his confession in this kind of darkness.
“Two years ago Grace told me she wanted us to try again. Try again—as if we were trying the first time.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she nearly died because of my mistake, and I would never let that happen again. After that, she started to fade out on me. First she stopped making our coffee in the morning. Another month passed and she stopped reading with me in the evenings. She didn’t leave all at once. Just room by room. She left the bedroom last. I told her about the job here. She told me to go if that’s what I wanted. But she was already gone. I did leave, but she left me first.”
“Can I tell you a secret, Zach?” Nora’s voice came from over his shoulder. “I would have left you, too.”
“Nora, I—”
“Shut up and listen,” she said with such cold, quiet authority that Zach fell silent at once. “You called the first night you spent with her a mistake. It was that night, that mistake that brought you two together. What should have been a one-night stand created a marriage. Can you imagine the guilt she’s been carrying for the past eleven years? Thinking that because of her you had to leave a job you loved, that you had to marry someone you didn’t, that she ruined your career, your life, your world. And you call the night that started it all a mistake? She didn’t leave you, Zach. You threw her out.”
“She nearly died because of me, Nora,” he said, nearly spitting the words. “You can’t even imagine what that was like.”
“She was eighteen, an adult. It was her decision as much as yours. She came to your office. You think she came for a cup of tea and a chat? She wanted you. She got you. And I can promise you even waking up in a puddle of her own blood it never once occurred to her that it was all a mistake. Making love to her a mistake? That’s a worse slap in the face than Søren ever laid on me.”
“Why…why are you saying all this, Nora?”
“Because you need to hear the truth. The truth that your guilt didn’t punish you. It punished her. You were so afraid to hurt Grace that everything you did ended up harming her. No more, Zach. No more fear. You will not be afraid anymore, afraid to hurt a woman with your own passion and desire. Remember that night at the 8th Circle?” Nora asked. “Do you remember what I told you I was?”
“A Switch.” As long as he lived he’d never forget that night.
“Yes. And that means I can give pain but I can also take it. Aren’t you tired of the pain?”
“Yes,” Zach breathed.
“Good,” Nora said and tore off the blindfold. She yanked his shirt down and freed his arms. “Give it to me then.”
Zach grabbed Nora, nearly tearing her clothes in his frenzy to get them off. He pushed her back against the wall and unzipped his jeans. She wrapped her legs around him, her arms wound around his shoulders. With a fierce, unforgiving thrust, he pushed inside her. He had never let himself be so brutal with a woman in his life.
“Hurt me, Zach. Better me than you.” He did as she instructed; he couldn’t do otherwise. He drove into her again and again, thrusting harder each time. He bit her neck and breasts, dug his fingers into the soft flesh of her hips and thighs. She submitted to his every merciless thrust without complaint. The more vicious he was with her, the more she responded with gasps and moans of her own. Nora’s body clenched around him and he came inside her with the ruthless force that only thirteen months of miserable celibacy could deliver.
Zach wasn’t finished with her, though. There seemed to be no end to his need. He pulled out of her and forced her to the floor. He pushed his hand into her body, needing to feel her wetness on his fingers. He knew that she was wet not only from her desire but from his own passion that he’d poured into her. She writhed underneath him. He pulled his hand out and moved to take her again. But Nora lifted her arms to shove him off. He grabbed her by the wrists and pinned her down, her arms by her head. She held her legs together tight and Zach pried them apart with his knees. Shocked by his violence he could only stare down at her.
“Good boy,” she said.
Zach let her hands go. He pushed her over onto her stomach and penetrated her from behind. She arched beneath him, taking him in deeper, goading him on with her hips, her cries. She came so hard that he felt the spasms in her stomach rip through him. He seized her by the wrists again and held her down. Over her, inside her, he pushed in so hard and so far she cried out. Still, he did not relent, could not relent. He was all force and no restraint. Nora had tied him up and set something else free.
With brutal, bruising strength, he impaled himself completely within her and came so hard even Nora flinched from the ferocity of it. He collapsed onto her prone body, resting inside her, not ready to leave her wet warmth. They lay coupled together, swallowing air and saying nothing. Zach brushed her hair over her shoulder and kissed the back of her neck. He closed his eyes and rested his head on her back. Her skin smelled so warm. He could stay here forever if he kept his eyes closed.
Zach pulled out of her slowly and rolled onto his back. He lay on the floor next to her and studied the play of candlelight on the ceiling and willed his thumping heart to settle. Nora moved to his side, leaned up on her elbow and looked at him.