“I take it you’re a chocolate person,” Nicholas said.
“Of course.”
Nicholas stepped forward and put his arms on either side of her, bracing her against the sink. “You can have my half of a Dixie cup anytime,” he said. “You can have anything you want.”
Nicholas had read once of a five-foot-three-inch woman who had lifted an overturned school bus off her seven-year-old daughter. He had watched a 60 Minutes segment about an unmarried soldier who threw himself on top of a grenade to protect the life of a fellow soldier who had a family waiting back home. Medically, Nicholas could credit this to the sudden adrenaline rush caused by crisis situations. Practically, he knew that some measure of emotional commitment was involved. And he realized, to his surprise, that he would have done such things for Paige. He would swim a channel, take a bullet, trade his life. The idea shook Nicholas, chilled his blood. Maybe it was only fierce protectiveness, but he was beginning to believe it was love.
In spite of himself, in spite of his hasty proposal, Nicholas did not believe in romantic love. He did not believe in being swept off your feet, or in love at first sight-either of which would have accounted for his near-immediate obsession with Paige. When he had lain awake in bed last night, he wondered if the attraction could be based on pity-the boy who had grown up with everything thinking he could light up the life of the girl who had not-but Nicholas had met women of less pedigreed backgrounds before, and none of them had ever affected him so strongly he forgot how to use his voice, how to breathe involuntarily. Those women, the ones Nicholas could win over with a bottle of house Chianti and a disarming smile, usually graced his bed for a week before he felt like moving on. He could have done that with Paige; he knew he could have if he’d wanted to. But whenever he looked at her, he wanted to stand beside her, to shield her from the world with the simple, strong heat of his body. She was so much more fragile than she let on.
Paige was sprawled in what was now his living room, thanks to her, reading Gray’s Anatomy as if it were a murder mystery. “I don’t know how you memorize all this stuff, Nicholas,” she said. “I couldn’t even do the bones.” She looked up at him. “I tried, you know. I thought if I remembered them all without peeking, I’d impress you.”
“You already impress me,” he said. “I don’t care about the bones.”
Paige shrugged. “I’m not impressive,” she said.
Nicholas, lying on the couch, rolled onto his side to look at her. “Are you kidding?” he said. “You left home and got yourself a job and survived in a city you knew nothing about. Christ, I couldn’t have done that at eighteen.” He paused. “vin ae pausedI don’t know if I could do that now.”
“You’ve never had to,” Paige said quietly.
Nicholas opened his mouth to speak but didn’t say anything. He never had to. But he had wanted to.
Both of Nicholas’s parents had, in some way, changed their circumstances. Astrid, who could trace her lineage to Plymouth Rock, had tried to downplay her Boston Brahmin ties. “I don’t see all the fuss about the Mayflower,” she had said. “For God’s sake, the Puritans were outcasts before they got here.” She grew up surrounded by wealth that was so old it had always just been there. Her objections were not to a life of privilege, really, only to the restrictions that came with it. She had no intention of becoming the kind of wife who blended into the walls of a house that defined her, and so, on the day she graduated from Vassar, she flew to Rome without telling a soul. She got drunk and danced at midnight in Trevi fountain, and she slept with as many different dark-haired men as she could until her Visa ran out. Months later, when she was introduced to Robert Prescott at a tailgate party, she almost dismissed him as one of those rich, have-it-all boys with whom her parents were forever throwing her together. But when their eyes met over a cup of spiked cider, she realized that Robert wasn’t what he appeared to be. He seethed below the surface with that hell-or-high-water pledge to escape that Astrid recognized running through her own blood. Here was her mirror image-someone trying to get in as badly as she was trying to get out.
Robert Prescott had been born without a dime and, apparently, without a father. He had sold magazines door to door to pay his way through Harvard. Now, thirty years later, he had honed his image to a point where he had such financial holdings no one dared remember if it was old money or new. He loved his acquired status; he liked the combination of his own glossy, crystalline tastes butted up against Astrid’s cluttered seventh-generation antiques. Robert understood the part well-acting stuffy and bored at dinner parties, cultivating a taste for port, obliterating the facts of his life that could incriminate. Nicholas knew that even if his father couldn’t convince himself he’d been to the manner born, he believed he rightfully belonged there, and that was just as good.
There had been a bitter argument once, when his father insisted Nicholas do something he had no inclination to do-the actual circumstances now forgotten: probably escorting someone’s sister to a debutante ball or giving up a Saturday game of neighborhood baseball for formal dancing lessons. Nicholas had stood his ground, certain his father would strike him, but in the end Robert had sunk into a wing chair, defeated, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You would play the game, Nicholas,” he had said, sighing, “if you knew there was something to lose.”
Now that he was older, Nicholas understood. Truth be told, as much as he fantasized about living the simple life of a lobster fisherman in Maine, he enjoyed the perks of his station too much to turn his back and walk away. He liked being on a first-name basis with the governor, having debutantes leave their lace bras on the back seat of his car, getting admitted to college and medical school without even a half second of self-doubt or worry about his chances. Paige might not have grown up the same way, but still, she’d left something behind. She was a study in contrasts: as fragile as she seemed/fo a she see on the outside, she still had the kind of confidence it took to make a clean break. Nicholas realized that he had less courage in his whole body than Paige had in her little finger.
Paige looked up from the anatomy book. “If I quizzed you, would you know every little thing?”
Nicholas laughed. “No. Yes. Well, it depends on what you ask me.” He leaned forward. “But don’t tell anyone, or I’ll never get my degree.”
Paige sat up, cross-legged. “Take my medical history,” she said. “Isn’t that good practice? Wouldn’t that help you?”
Nicholas groaned. “I do it about a hundred times a day,” he said. “I could do it in my sleep.” He rolled onto his back. “Name? Age? Date of birth? Place of birth? Do you smoke? Exercise? Do you or does anyone in your family have a history of heart disease… diabetes… breast cancer. Do you or does anyone in your family…” He let his words trail off, and then he slid off the couch to sit next to Paige. She was looking into her lap. “I’d have a little problem with a medical history, I guess,” she said. “If it’s my medical history, why do you focus on everyone else in my family?”