• • •
In the afternoon, I head onto campus. The undergrads have an essay due on Wednesday, which means my inbox is due to swell with requests for extensions, not to mention the reported deaths of a statistically unlikely number of grandmothers. As I walk in, Kip is on the phone, bartering what sounds like a deal to get our department a new copier. He gives me a wave—complete with blueberry-colored fingernails—which I return before going into my cramped little office. At least I’ve got it to myself for a while. I sign in to my university e-mail to see some of the expected excuses, a couple of campus announcements—
—and an e-mail from Jonah.
The subject line reads Re: Take Two.
He’s answering the e-mail I sent three weeks ago, like nothing ever happened.
His reply contains only two words: What changed?
Between my sending this e-mail and our encounter Saturday—that’s what he means. I know that much. But I don’t understand anything else.
I know what Doreen would tell me to do. What Carmen or Shay would tell me to do, if I’d confided in either of them about this. Any sane, rational person would say, Write back, tell him you’ve thought better of it, and leave it there.
Walk away.
My fingers tap out the message on the keyboard, and I hit send before I can think better of it. My reply: We need to talk.
I don’t know what happens next. But I’m going to see Jonah Marks again.
Ten
Three days later, just after sundown, I’m back in the same wine bar where Jonah and I first met for “negotiations.” I guess this is round two.
Tonight, however, the bar is less sultry, more rowdy. This is a home-game weekend, which means Longhorns football fans and UT alumni are already swarming into town. I didn’t put on anything special this time—I’m wearing the same fawn-colored cotton dress I put on this morning. Yet I feel overdressed anyway, because I’m surrounded by a sea of orange T-shirts and football jerseys. It’s like being trapped in a can of Fanta.
Somehow I know the moment Jonah walks in. I turn my head toward him even before he’s fully through the door. His shirt and jeans are black, his gaze sharp as he instantly focuses on me. He doesn’t smile as he comes closer, cutting through this raucous crowd like a knife.
“We can’t talk like this,” he says as he reaches me.
“Hello to you too.”
But Jonah’s right. Having an intimate conversation here is impossible. We’d have to shout to hear each other. Bad idea. “I think this place has a patio in back.”
It does. Of course, the patio is crowded too—but it’s not as awful, and at least here the talking and laughter around us isn’t deafening. I can even hear soft Spanish guitar music playing. The heat that lingers even after nightfall curls around me; my skin is already moist, and strands of hair that have escaped my ponytail stick to the nape of my neck.
Jonah reaches toward me, like he’s going to take me by the arm, but I don’t let him lead me. It’s not like I don’t see where we’re headed—the one empty corner. Strings of multicolored lights overhead sway in the breeze as we walk there together, to a small dark passage near the back door that leads into the alley. When I stop, Jonah does too, still a few steps between us.
“Let me repeat my question,” he says. “What changed?”
“You took off without a word! That’s what changed. How is that not obvious?”
I can see the muscles tense in his shoulders, his jaw. He’s so built, so aggressively masculine, that I first think he’s barely holding himself back from biting my head off. Yet his voice is steady, not angry. “I wasn’t aware we had to check in with each other about our daily schedule.”
“I didn’t ask for hourly reports. You left for weeks, and you never even told me you were going anywhere.”
“The point was to remain strangers. Wasn’t it? To keep it . . . raw.”
Something about the way he says that—raw—makes my breath catch in my chest. As angry as I am with Jonah, I can’t forget the way his touch makes me feel.
I can’t stop wanting him.
Jonah must sense my weakness. A slow smile begins to dawn on his face. Almost a smirk. “You can have neat, tidy, and safe. You can have tame. Or you can have what you really want. But you can’t have both, Vivienne. And I think we both know which one you’re going to choose.”
Somehow I still have a scrap of pride left. “Where were you, that you couldn’t send an e-mail or text or make a phone call even once in three weeks?”
“Antarctica.”
Smart-ass. I could slap him. Then I realize—he’s serious. Completely.
I repeat, “Antarctica?”
“Yes.” Then his expression softens slightly, becomes less savage, more . . . human. “Well, Patagonia mostly. I was based in Punta Arenas, Chile. But from there I was able to charter a plane south for some flyover photography.”
“Of Antarctica.”
Jonah smiles, and it’s not a smirk this time. “We discovered a dormant volcano beneath the Antarctic ice sheet a couple of years ago. I’m a research professor—I only teach a class once every two years or so. Mostly I analyze findings from all around the world, and sometimes I collect data myself. Like any other scientist. My data happens to be found near fault lines and volcanoes.”
The one place in the entire world that’s completely off the grid: That’s where he was. I tuck another loose strand of hair behind my ear. “I have to admit, that’s . . . a pretty solid excuse.”
He leans against the nearby brick wall as he studies me. After a long moment he says, “I should have let you know.”
“No, no, you’re right. I’m not your girlfriend; you’re not my boyfriend. You don’t owe me explanations.”
“No, I don’t. But I owe it to you to protect you. After that night, you were vulnerable. I should’ve realized.”
Just like that, Jonah’s no longer the remote figure I imagined rejecting me with contempt. He’s once again the man who asked how to make me feel safe, the one who brought me a glass of water afterward and kissed me as tenderly as any man ever has. I say, “You didn’t abuse my trust. We had—a failure of communication.”
“We’ll have to do better,” Jonah says. The smirk returns. “Besides, I had no idea you’d want to go again so soon. That e-mail came not even seventy-two hours after I left you.”
The wounds to my pride are still healing, so I’m not going to let him get away with that so easily. I lift my chin. “Didn’t you want it too?”
He laughs, low and rough. It’s just the way he laughed when he was inside me, glorying in having thrown me down. Wetness wells between my legs, and I want him to touch me so badly it makes me weak.
“I thought about you every night,” Jonah murmurs. “Most of the days. I dream about tearing that dress off your body. When I close my eyes I see you the way you were afterward. Wrecked. And what I want more than anything else is to wreck you all over again.”
So much for Jonah “having limits.”
Maybe I should feel powerful at this moment, when I realize that I affect him as much as he intoxicates me. Instead it’s all I can do to keep from trembling. I brace my hand against the fence behind me, the one that marks the boundary between this loud, brightly lit place and the darker alleys of the city beyond.
This is when a particularly enterprising member of the waitstaff appears. “What will you two be having tonight?”
“Whatever the lady wants.” Jonah’s eyes meet mine as he smiles. “It’s up to her.”
Not fair, Jonah. I manage to answer, “We’re still making up our minds.”
Within another second we’re alone again, and Jonah raises an eyebrow. “That just means he’s going to come back.”