They could have gone somewhere closer for dinner. Violet guessed that the drive to Bar Harbor was an excuse for Zach to jump-start her long-ignored musical education.

Once upon a time, before Yale, Violet’s heart had beat solely for folksy female troubadours like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and the Indigo Girls. Poetry to music. A soft guitar and a clear voice. The messages and meaning moved her. The simplicity made her heart swell.

When she met Zach, he’d introduced her to all different kinds of music. Blues, metal, jazz, rock, classical, ’50s, opera, New Age, and swing. He had only one condition: his room was a no-folk zone, so that Violet was forced to broaden her auditory horizons whenever she was there, which was all the time. And although he nicknamed her Vile when she exclaimed, “No more heavy metal, Zach! It’s vile!” the reality was that she appreciated the thorough education Zach offered her. She’d learned more about music in those precious weeks than in the previous nineteen years.

But old habits had reasserted their control without his continued attention, and in the years since their enchanted autumn, she’d fallen back into old patterns, listening exclusively to the folk music she loved so well, sometimes interspersed with the classical that Shep preferred. Her musical landscape had grown very narrow once again.

“So,” said Zach, pulling the SUV out of the driveway, “What do you want to listen to?”

“You know exactly what I want to listen to.”

He grinned. “Come on, Vile. I should make this SUV a no-folk zone.”

“And force me to listen to some vile metal, Z?”

“I should. Or zydeco. I’m really into that lately.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“So uneducated. It’s shameful.”

She watched as he fiddled with his iPhone. His brown hair, which was pulled away from his face in a neat ponytail, had red and gold highlights picked up by the setting sun shining through the car window. His cheekbones were high and angled, and his eyes had that perpetually heavy, sexy thing going on that made her toes curl and her tummy flutter. She glanced over at his hands on the wheel, her eyes zeroing in on the little violet tattoo on his wrist, which she loved and hated simultaneously.

“How many tattoos do you have? Total?”

“Total? Um, eleven. No, twelve.”

“Twelve! A dozen times you let someone stick needles in you and pour ink under your skin?”

He looked up at her as music came from the speakers.

“This is ‘Bonfire Heart’ by James Blunt. Then we’ll hear some Mumford & Sons, Joshua Radin, Vance Joy, and the Lumineers. If you want folk music, the least I can do is update your repertoire and balance it with some male folk.”

“Okay,” she said, noting the change from no-folk-zone Zach to now, then paused, listening. It’s nice. Really nice.

“And yes. Twelve times I let someone stick needles into my body and pour ink under my skin, although that’s a pretty dramatic way to describe it.”

“Sounds accurate to me.”

“Spoken like a true expert. Where are yours?”

“My what?’

“Your tattoos.”

She gave him a sour side-glance before looking ahead.

“Oh, right. You don’t have any. You’re talking out of your ass, Vile.”

“So enlighten me, genius. Why is your body all marked up? Why’d you do that to yourself?”

“There was this girl I met in college. This amazing girl who told me she was falling in love with me. And I freaked out and pushed her away because I couldn’t handle it. A few weeks later, I saw her kissing this rich, preppy frat dude. I went back to my dorm room, opened a bottle of whiskey, and I don’t remember the five or six hours after that, but when I woke up in a pool of vomit on my dorm room floor, where she used to sleep sometimes, I had a tattoo of a violet on my wrist. At first I was pissed with myself, but I’d look at it all the time, and I realized I liked it. I liked that I was wearing my regret. I liked it because it was your place on my body. It was your spot. It belonged to you.”

She stared at him as he paraphrased her poem, feeling a sharp frustration. They’d spent so many years apart, and all the while she’d believed in his indifference. She didn’t like rewriting history, but if he was being honest with her, she’d need to.

James Blunt phased out, and the lively banjos of Mumford & Sons rang out as they passionately sang, “And I will wait, I will wait for you. And I will wait, I will wait for you.”

He’d pushed her away, yes, but looked at in a different light, maybe she’d shared her intense feelings with him and hadn’t given him a chance to catch up. While she was emotionally extroverted, he’d been the exact opposite, cagey and enigmatic. He’d finally been able to make out with her, yes, but he’d never actually told her how he felt about her. At all.

For the first time since that Sunday night so long ago, she understood her complicity in the situation. That night? She didn’t tell Zach that she really liked him or thought he was great. She told him she was falling in love with him. And if she really and truly meant it, maybe she should have waited. Maybe she should have given him a chance to process and accept her feelings. Instead she’d gotten hurt and angry and thrown herself into Shep Smalley’s strong, kind arms.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“For what?” he said, glancing at her twice in quick succession before fixing his eyes back on the road. “No, Violet. No. I don’t accept your apology. You didn’t do anything wrong. I walked away from you.”

“I used the word love,” she said, wondering if it was possible after so many years if the word love could possibly surface between them again. “Not like. Love. I should have waited for you. At least a little longer.”

He reached up to rub his bottom lip with his thumb, then, without looking over at her, stretched his hand toward her. She clasped it, anchoring it to hers, lacing her fingers through his and drawing them to her lips.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know you cared for me.”

“There’s no way you could have known. I acted like a fucking asshole.”

And I will wait, I will wait for you. And I will wait, I will wait for you.

She took a deep, shaky breath, lowering their hands to her lap. “What about the rest? The other eleven?” Tattoos were, unimaginably, the safest topic of the moment.

“Huh. Um. Well, the one on the back of my neck is the last three bars of ‘Clair de Lune.’” He braked at a stop sign and leaned forward, pushing his hair up with his free hand to reveal musical notes and the words “Votre âme est un paysage choisi.”

“Your soul is a chosen landscape,” she whispered, reaching over to run her index finger over the words, wondering how he’d felt, what he was thinking, as the needles punctured the taut skin. His next words answered her unspoken question.

“It is,” he murmured, leaning back to catch her eyes. “Your soul . . . is my chosen landscape.”

She felt her cheeks flush hot and the muscles deep inside her body twitched under his gaze. He grinned, watching her face closely, then pulled up sharply on the emergency brake. He lifted his shirt a little to show a double spiral that spanned a four-inch area of his pelvis directly over his . . . She pressed her hands to her cheeks, and when she lifted her eyes, he laughed softly, as though he could read her mind.

“We just rolled around on my bed all aftern—”

“I know!” she exclaimed, laughing softly with him. She’d lived so modestly for so long, she wasn’t used to such blatant sensuality.

He must have decided not to tease her anymore, though his eyes twinkled with amusement. “Okay. You know my thing with the solstices and equinoxes? You remember that?”

She nodded. They’d spent the fall equinox together that year, drinking too much on September 21 while Zach drunkenly rhapsodized about the beauty of balance and harmony.

“So, this is the Celtic symbol for balance.”

She didn’t reach out to touch it as she had the other, its location making her ridiculously shy after sharing her body with him so recently, so intimately. But Zach reached across her body to take her free hand, pulling her fingers to the tattoo and laying them across it like a whisper, like he needed for her to touch him there, to accept him there.

She felt his breathing change as her fingers made contact with his skin, and her fingers slowly traced one spiral, following the circles, wider and wider, until her finger moved savoringly across his flesh to the other spiral, which she traced, around and around, until her finger rested.

Joshua Radin’s voice broke through the silence of the car as Mumford and Sons faded out: “So many moons have come and gone, all along I heard this song inside me . . .”

Zach looked up and down the deserted road, then, shifting in his seat to face her, he cupped her jaw with his hands and pulled her toward him. She closed her eyes as his lips found hers in the dim light. He brushed them gently once, twice, before he groaned softly, shifting closer to her. He fit his mouth, open and hot, over hers, as his tongue swept inside of her. Her hand pressed flat on the skin of his belly, her pinky and ring fingers slipping inside the waistband of his jeans, lightly stroking the wiry hairs under her fingertips.

His lips trailed down her cheek to her earlobe, which he took between his teeth, making her arch toward him, making her fingers curl reflexively, her knuckles grazing the hot, hard tip of his erection.

Even at that light contact, he groaned into her ear, his breath scorching and fast against the sensitive skin of her neck.

“Violet,” he gasped when she leaned forward, pressing her lips to his neck as her fingers moved lower, wrapping around his length in the snug confines of his jeans. “We can’t—”

She moved her hand up and down slowly, and he stopped arguing. He leaned back in his seat, his head against the headrest, his breathing fast and ragged as he covered his eyes with one arm.

She didn’t actually have a plan. They were stopped at a stop sign in a car on a lonely back road in rural Maine and it was mostly dark. But they couldn’t have sex. They were trapped in an inconvenient place with too much emotion, too much attraction between them, and not nearly enough privacy.

Yet the need to touch him, the power she felt as her touch affected him, the intense desire to pleasure him, was so great, it took all of her willpower to stroke him fleetingly one last time before withdrawing her hand.

“Oh, come on,” he muttered after several seconds, his eyes still covered.

She leaned back in her own seat, folding her hands on her lap, facing forward and trying not to smile. She could tell he was in a certain amount of pain by the way he winced. Finally, he adjusted in his seat, awkwardly, and looked over at her accusingly.

“I never pegged you for a tease, Vile. Thanks.”

She grinned then because he looked like a little boy, so disappointed and pouty in his long-sleeved, black Iron Maiden shirt. A fierce rocker, with his piercing holes and twelve tattoos, pouting because he couldn’t have Violet when he wanted her. She loved it. It made her rush hot and wet, her body petitioning her brain to reconsider its decision against being bareback with Zach until he’d gotten tested. She could unzip him right now and scoot across the seat to straddle him, her back against the steering wheel as he pounded up into her. Her face flushed at her thoughts, and she turned away from him.

Vance Joy’s catchy ukulele beat swam around them, cutting the tension as Zack sat up and released the emergency brake: “Taken away to the dark side, I wanna be your left-hand man . . .”

“Just wait till later, Violet-like-the-flower,” Zach growled as he released the brake and pressed the accelerator. “Guess who’s not going to get a single second of sleep tonight?”

“Is that right?” she asked as the muscles in her pelvis clutched, then released, in anticipation.

“You can take it to the bank. I have a few more tattoos for you to meet, and it’ll be much easier if I’m naked.”

Naked. Her mouth went dry, thinking about his naked body holding hers this afternoon. After the initial shock of seeing his colorful chest, she’d barely noticed his tattoos. She’d been so carried away by their lovemaking. She was surprised to find she wanted to meet them, too, after discovering they weren’t just arbitrary pieces of graffiti, but meaningful art that meant something to Zach. How could she have thought, even for a second, that brilliant, beautiful Zach Aubrey would be completely thoughtless when it came to art in any medium?

“Want to skip dinner?”

“Oh, Violet,” he deadpanned. “I’m not that easy.”

“Yeah, you are,” she said, winking at him.

“Okay, I am. But you compromise my virtue because I can’t help myself around you. You’re hot. You were always hot.”

She looked away as his words hit a specific mark in her heart, a tender, vulnerable mark that had always wondered if Zach had rejected her because she’d been overweight in college. She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat, talking herself out of tears, but they filled her eyes anyway as the smooth guitar riff over the speakers signaled the Lumineers’ song “Stubborn Love”: “When we were young, oh, oh, we did enough.”

He thought she was hot. He thought overweight, wacky-haired, bohemian-dressed College Violet was hot. And apparently he also thought uptight, preppy, every-hair-in-place Greenwich Violet was hot, too. Her heart beat a strange rhythm in her chest as words bubbled into her consciousness: No matter what. No matter what. Then. Now. Still.

“I never trusted my own eyes,” sang the Lumineers.

The sad thing is, I could have trusted his, she mused.

She pressed on her burning eyelids with her thumb and forefinger, propping her elbow on the windowsill. She felt his fingers slip gently around her hand, then lace back through her fingers as they drove the rest of the way in overwhelmed, yet perfect, silence.

***

Zach had looked up restaurants in the phone book he found on the kitchen counter and chose the Town Hill Bistro for its working fireplace. He hoped they’d have a long, warm, leisurely dinner, leading to a long, warm, leisurely night in his bed. After she’d touched him in the car, it had taken a few minutes for him to calm down, but it had put an edge on his hunger for her. Being patient throughout dinner was going to be challenging, but he was determined for them to get to know each other again, for her to see that they were possible.

He told the hostess they’d wait at the bar and have a drink until a fireside table was available. Violet sat on a barstool, and he stood beside her, leaning his back against the bar. She ordered a glass of merlot, and he asked for a Sam Adams, no glass.

He clinked his bottle against her glass, and she asked what they were toasting to.

“To Vile and Z,” he said, remembering her protest when he’d made the same toast on Friday night.

She smiled and took a sip of her wine as he drank from his bottle, holding her eyes, wondering about her. She was so fucking beautiful. He had promised to blow her mind this afternoon, but honest to God, she had blown his. The way she offered herself to him, the way she still welcomed him into her body when she knew what a dog he’d been. His heart pounded mercilessly, and he took another swig of his beer, willing himself to calm down.

“What?” she asked, cocking her head to the side.

“Do you love novel writing?” he blurted out. “You seem pretty stressed-out about it. What would you really do? If you could do anything?”

“Write poetry,” she answered, “of course. All day. Every day. Get a contract offer to write more. Make a living at it.” She took a small sip of wine. “If I was good enough.”

His eyes narrowed at her. “That’s the second or third time you’ve said something like that and it’s starting to make me angry.”

“If it was good enough, Zach, someone at Masterson’s would have followed up with me.”

“They couldn’t read your stuff and pass up the chance to publish it. It got lost. It’s in a deep pile and they just haven’t found it yet.”

She leaned forward unexpectedly and pressed her lips to his. It was only the slightest touch, but he felt it in his toes, which curled in his steel-toed boots.

“Thanks, Z.”

He cleared his throat, moving closer to her until the straining zipper on the front of his jeans grazed her thigh. “You don’t know what you do to me.”

“You do the same thing to me,” she murmured.

He took a deep, ragged breath, wondering if he should throw twenty bucks on the bar, grab her wrist and pull her back to the car. Find a secluded street somewhere and—

“Zach.” She barely breathed his name, her eyes wide and intensely focused on him. He clenched his jaw, so turned on by her it was fucking painful not to give into his yearning, but a resounding voice in his head stopped him.

No. Talk to her. You need to connect with her so she gives you a real chance, so she gives us a real chance, so she doesn’t just chalk us up to a fucking fling. He brought the beer bottle to his lips and took a long sip, forcing himself to calm down. Poetry. Poetry, poetry, poetry . . .

“So, poetry. Yours. Let’s just assume it’s good enough. Could you live like that? Writing poetry full-time? I’ve read your stuff, Vile. It’s intense. Wouldn’t that be a highly emotional state to maintain?”

She raised her eyebrows like he’d surprised her. “I don’t always write pain and suffering.”

“No?”

“No! I write silly, like Ogden Nash. I write satirical, like Dorothy Parker. I love simplicity, like E. E. Cummings. Haiku. Rhyme. The way you talk, I’m the next Sylvia Plath.”

“Okay. Fair enough. Tell me a sunny poem. Something cheerful.”

“On demand? Like, make one up?”

He picked up his beer and gestured with it. “Go for it, show off.”

“Okay. I’ll do it. And you will stand in awe of my skill.” She looked at his beer, brown eyes twinkling. “A beer down the gullet goes well with a mullet . . .”

She glanced at her glass of red wine. “A merlot that you sip looks fine with a flip.”

He toasted her, amused, but she held up a finger to indicate she wasn’t done.

“A kosher martini still honors a beanie.”

“I think it’s called a yarmulke.”

She rolled her eyes. “And a spiked lemonade’s just right with a . . . a braid.”

“Pulled that one out of your ass,” he said, laughing.

“O ye of little faith,” she said, then took up her poetess voice once again. “A tea brewed in Ceylon works well with a chignon, while a nice, chilled Peroni is great for a pony.”

“Do ponies drink Italian beer?”

She laughed, biting her lower lip in thought until she exclaimed, “Ha!” and finished with a flair: “Drink whatever you like, drink whatever you dare. Just be sure it’s the drink that goes well with your—”

“Hair!” he shouted, and she burst into giggles as he put his empty bottle on the bar, clapping. “That was amazing. Amazingly bad poetry.”

“Aw, come on! It’s not like you put me on the spot or anything. Write a song. Do it.”

“Right here?”

“I did it. You do it. Your turn.”

“I have a better idea.”

She raised her eyebrows, sipping her wine, waiting.

“Write one with me.”

“With you?”

“Like we used to do. At Yale.”

“That was just playing around.”

“No, Vile. They were good. I swear it. You write the words. I’ll put them to music. If you help me write four, I’ll share the forty with you. Right down the middle. You can return the advance you spent. You can tell your publisher to fuck off.”

“Zach, I’m not good enou—”

He pressed his lips to hers, hard, fast and punishing before she could finish the sentence. When he drew back her eyes were startled. He shook his head at her. “No more of that. I fucking mean it.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “Write a song?”

“Four. It’ll be all or nothing. Royalties later, too.”

She looked like she was seriously considering it, but then she shook her head. “Heavy metal, Zach? That’s not me. No offense, but it doesn’t sound like music to me.”

“We’ll do it our way. And if they don’t like it? We’ll sell it somewhere else.” The idea was taking off in his head, starting to feel exciting, possible. “But they will like it. Because your words are beautiful, and every rocker band needs a ballad or two. A crossover for the mainstream that shoots up the charts. ‘Patience’ by Guns N’ Roses. ‘Beth’ by Kiss. We can do this, Violet.”

“Does . . . what are they called?”

“Savage Sons.”

“Do the Savage Sons want a ballad?”

“They need a couple. John said so. Anyway, you heard Malcolm. He’ll take what I give him. And what my partner gives me will determine what that is.”

“Your partner?”

He shrugged. “If you’ll have me.”

“You’re doing this for me,” she murmured, reaching up to press her palm to his cheek. “You said you didn’t want to write for them anymore. You said you needed to get off the hamster wheel.”

“I also said I wanted a second chance to prove what you meant to me, and you said you’d give me two weeks. So this is me proving it in the little time I have with you.” He turned his face and pressed his lips to her palm. “It’s just four songs. Then I’ll move on and write something big and beautiful. The thing is, Vile? Whatever we write together will already be better than any of the shit I’ve written in the past few years. It’ll already be a step in the right direction.”

“You’re sure, Zach? You sure you want to do this? Spend your whole two weeks up here writing songs with me?”

He smiled and hoped it was convincing because as much as writing songs with Violet sounded like heaven, the idea of selling them to that asshole Malcolm Singer sat cold and hard in his belly. Maybe he could figure out a way around that without losing the money. Maybe John would buy them if they were really good.

“I’m sure,” he said softly, leaning down to brush her lips with his. “I’m sure.”

“Violet? Violet Smith?”

Violet eyes flew open in recognition and she dropped her hand from Zach’s face like it was on fire. She stood up abruptly, putting her back to him, stepping away from him.

“Mrs. Smalley,” she murmured, her voice breaking a little. “W-What are you doing here?”