“Why are you sitting there, your head in your hands, looking miserable?” Calvin asks. “You of all people know what misery is. It’s not this.”
“I think I should be the one asking the questions.”
He glides a hand through the air, an invitation.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“I read about the exhibit.”
“So?”
“I watched you take some of these photos. I know what they mean to you.”
“That’s it?”
He sighs and after a moment, walks further into the room. “Tell me one thing.”
My hands drop into my lap. I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s just broken into my gallery after three years and is demanding answers from me.
“Are you happy?” he asks.
Years ago, I would’ve asked him what he cared if I was happy, or why it mattered to him. I would’ve asked him what right he had to know that about me. But all this time away from him, missing him, has loosened the angry knot that replaced my heart when I left. “I don’t know, Calvin. I don’t think I know how to be happy.”
“Do you still not love me?”
“That’s two things.”
His lip twitches into a half-smile. “Do you?”
The question dangles in silence as I look at him. He absentmindedly slicks hair away from his forehead and then burrows his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He’s not wearing his glasses, only a dark, pullover sweater with pushed up sleeves and he’s just Calvin.
“You broke me,” I say just above a whisper. “And nobody can put me back together but you.”
He inhales a deep breath.
The confusion I’ve always felt since the mansion throbs in my veins, heightened by his presence. “Why are you here? To torment me?”
“Because I love you. And I’m not a strong enough man to bow out like I should. After three years, that love hasn’t waned. Because I’ve always loved you, since you were a little girl, I just didn’t know I was allowed to.”
“Who says you are now? Who says you’re allowed to love me? After everything we’ve been through, how could we possibly be anything but what we were in the mansion?”
“I want to set you free. Let me heal what hurts.”
“You hurt,” I say, tearing up as I place my hand over my heart. “Here. You put the wounds here, and now you want to heal them. You’re the captor who wants to set me free.” I ask him the questions I haven’t stopped asking myself since the night I learned the truth. “How can you be evil and good? How can I love and hate you? How can you be both my savior and my enemy? How can I want both punishment and forgiveness for you?”
He latches onto the word immediately. “Forgiveness?”
“I forgive you,” I say.
“For what I did to you?”
“No. I forgive you for my parents.”
Unfiltered pain crosses his face in a way that I know he couldn’t have hidden if he tried. “How could you forgive me for that?”
I rise and walk from the desk to where he stands. “Because it was never your fault,” I say, holding his gaze. “You’re not responsible for their death, for my childhood, or for me.”
“I am,” he says. “I’ve failed you, over and over.”
I flatten my hands against his chest. “It’s not your fault,” I say with an unsteady voice. “But I know you need to hear that I forgive you.”
His hands circle my wrists, and he brings my palms to his lips to kiss each one. There is wetness at the corner of his eyes, and I wipe it away. “You’re so good,” he says.
“I don’t know why, but your pain is my pain. I’m impossibly connected with you.” When hope appears on his face, I wrest my arms from his grip. “But I have a life now, and a boyfriend who loves me.”
“A boyfriend you love?”
“I don’t know what love is either. I’ve been stripped of it too many times.”
“I’ll teach you how again.”
I can’t believe that here, surrounded by photographs of my hell and my sanctuary, the enemy is asking me to love him.
He touches my face so gently I’m sure I’m imagining it. My lids fall shut as he brushes his thumb along my cheekbone. “I’m nobody without you to care for.”
“Don’t do this,” I say. “Don’t you dare kiss me.”
The heat of his mouth is near my cheek, his body inching closer until it’s pressed up against me. It’s familiar in the best way. He kisses my forehead, the bridge of my nose, the corner of my mouth. My lips are parted to grasp at small breaths, and suddenly, silently, there’s nothing to breathe but each other. His arms circle around to pull me as close as I can get.
I touch the sides of his face, and our mouths meet. He tastes like Calvin, a taste I’ve wanted since the day I laid eyes on him. What I’ve been starving for since I left. My hands feel him, my lips touch his, yet I still ache for him.
His tongue is a warm plea, licking along the inside of my bottom lip, and then back across the edges of my teeth. Finally it connects with my tongue, and my arms squeeze around his neck, trying to pull him deeper, because I want us to fade into each other, merge into one. His fingers dig into my back, his erection into my stomach. Calvin my captor isn’t altogether gone.
He walks us backward until I hit the edge of my desk. He pulls his head away to watch as he slides his hands in my top, feeling me everywhere. They are calloused, memories burned into his palms, his fingertips brash as he runs them over my body. I’m panting up at the ceiling while his thumbs glide up the length of my throat and under my chin. He puts his mouth to my ear and whispers. My moans are soft with his hands around my throat, his teeth sharpening themselves along my jaw.
“Can you?” he asks.
“I already said I do,” I respond in a short breath.
My heart beats in my ears and between my legs. He touches the tip of his nose to mine. “For everything? Can I have your forgiveness?”
I see the word in the air, letters flashing in front of me like they’re spelled out in fire. They break off and fade all at once, and the room is spinning. The hairline cracks inside of me are shifting and widening, my blood spilling through them, turning everything red.
His touch is disappearing.
Was he ever here?
Forgiveness?
There’s complete silence, and it’s possible I’ve dreamed the whole thing. But I jerk back to reality where the world is a blur, and all I hear is, “No, no, no, no, no . . .”
“Cataline.”
Calvin’s back, and there’s fierceness in his green eyes. His features are sharp enough to scrape my skin open like shards of glass, and that’s what I want. I want to cut myself open with Calvin.
“Where’d you go?” he whispers hotly, my face in his hands. He looks into my eyes for so long, I think he’s counting the flecks of grey.
“Take me home,” I tell him.
We walk the five blocks to my building in silence. When we arrive, I take his hand and lead him up the stairs, our only contact the tips of our fingers. As I unlock the door to my apartment, he stands so close that I feel his nose against the back of my head.
The door slams shut behind him. I leave the lights out and walk to the bedroom knowing he’ll follow. The moonlight flooding the room reminds me of the mansion, the way it turns the comforter into rolling hills of light and shade. I never close the blinds.
At the foot of the bed, he gathers my hair in a fist and inhales. “You,” he says. “Your smell.” He turns me around and spreads his hands over my scalp.
His kiss is like a drug, feeding me, quenching my thirst, my never-ending thirst, my infinite void, and planting himself inside me again. He pulls my dress over my shoulders and strips it away so I’m in my bra and panties. We fall back on the bed where he covers my body with his. His lips leave shining circles of saliva over my collarbone and the mounds of my breasts. He stops in the valley between them and taunts me with the tip of his tongue. My back arches to meet his mouth when he sucks my nipples through my bra. He splays his hand over my belly, skating it down over the lace, the only kind of panties I wear now. He grabs my pussy as if to possess it and lets it go just as quickly.