PURSUING FAITH, SOMETHING I’VE BEEN doing since I first learned she existed but she just doesn’t know it, I follow her into the living room. I find her snuggled under a cream-colored blanket I saw on one of the chairs, her ice cream already by the fire. I join her and sit down with my back against the stool I’d had her sprawled over earlier, and set my pint next to hers by the fire.
She gives me a thoughtful look. “You know,” she says. “I’ll believe you’re staying when you take your shoes off.”
I chuckle. “Is that the way you know a man’s staying the night?”
“It seems like a good marker,” she says. “Not that I’ve had to make that determination any time in recent history.”
I’m not sorry at all, nor am I chuckling anymore. “Do you want me to stay, Faith?”
“Hard limit,” she says, her voice a bit raspy. “I get tonight.” And when I arch my brow at the less than conclusive answer, she adds, “Yes. I do.” Definitive. No shyness to her.
I don’t even try to hide the satisfaction in my stare. I reach down and unlace one of my shoes. She unlaces the other for me, tugging it off. I toss the other one. “How’s that?”
“Better,” she says, giving me a once over. “It somehow makes you less assuming and down to earth.”
“Assuming,” I say dryly. “That’s right up there with arrogant.”
“But arrogant works for you,” she says. “You said so.” Her brow furrows. “And how are you here when you have a big case next week?”
“I do my best prep work locked away from the rest of the world,” I say. “And I’ve got another situation here. I actually rented a house for three months.”
“Three months,” she repeats, and this time she looks away, reaching for her ice cream, but I lay down beside her on my side, resting on my elbow. “Faith.”
She inhales and looks at me, her expression guarded. “Yes?”
“The ice cream hasn’t had time to thaw and what you’re really thinking about right now is the fact that I’m here for three months.”
She sets the ice cream back down. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“There’s a first. You usually snap right back.”
“I still don’t know what to say to that.”
“Well then, just remember this. You can hate me in the morning just as easily if I have a rental house here or if I don’t.”
“Am I going to hate you, Nick?”
“No, Faith. You are not.”
She studies me for several beats, and then says, “You owe me a story.”
“A story? I thought I owed you an orgasm.”
“I’m pretty sure you owe me three orgasms, but just one story.”
“What story are we talking about?” I ask, and it hits me then that she doesn’t blush when we’re talking sex, and yet, her art, her beauty…these things make her blush. She’s sterilized to sex, not so unlike myself. It’s physical. It’s not emotional.
“Your trial story,” she replies. “The one that made your opposing council on your new case your enemy. You said you had to throw out good evidence because he obtained it illegally, but you still won the case.”
“What interests you about that story?”
“Aside from the fact that I like stories where people beat the odds, how you handled that case seems to me to be a crossing road for you. You chose to go the hard road rather than the easy road, and still you’re a success.”
I narrow my eyes on her, certain this is a masked reference to herself, maybe even to her walking away from blackmail and murder.
“What kind of case was it?” she asks.
“Insider trading,” I say. “We were representing the CEO of a large tech company. I’ll spare you the dirty accusations against him, but he was set up by a competitor. I managed to find someone who not only testified to the set-up, she had documents and recordings to prove it. But I found her in the hundredth hour, let me tell you.”
“And you and your co-chair became eternal enemies.”
“Considering I went to the board afterward and reported him, yes.”
“After telling him you wouldn’t?”
“The devil is in the details, sweetheart. I didn’t lie to him. I never told him I wouldn’t go to the board. But he lied to me. He told me he’d destroy the illegally-obtained evidence, but he kept it until the day of closing. And I already told you. I can’t stand a damn liar, and I damn sure wasn’t giving him another chance to burn me or the firm.”
“And you got him fired,” she assumes.
“That’s the insanity of this story. The board chose to reprimand him instead of fire him.”
She blanches. “After he broke the law?”
“Yes. After he broke the law. They also offered me partner, and at twenty-eight that would have made me the youngest in their history.”
“And you declined.”
“In two flat seconds. If they felt his behavior was appropriate, I damn sure wasn’t signing up for a bigger piece of that liability.”
“And he’s still with them?”
“They gave him my partnership spot, which tells you, they’re born of his same cloth.”
“So this case is personal to you,” she adds.
“No case is personal to me,” I say, my own words an unfriendly reminder of the fact that I’ve made her personal. “When you get personal,” I add, a warning to myself as I speak it, “you end up on the bottom with everyone else on top.”
“Yes,” she agrees, and when she says nothing more, again reaching for her ice cream, that one word becomes loaded.
“Yes?” I prod, as she removes the lid to her ice cream and jabs her spoon inside.
“Yes,” she says, offering nothing more but my pint of ice cream, which she shoves into my hand. “It’s ready.” And then before I can press further, she moves on, “Did you leave and open your firm, or did that come later?”
I pull the lid off my pint. “I left and opened my firm. Ten years ago next month.”
She hands me a spoon. “Why San Francisco, and not LA?”
“I can do everything I can do there in San Francisco, with fewer assholes and less traffic.”
“Yes,” she says. “There are.”
“You’re very agreeable,” I say. “That’s different for you.”
“You haven’t said anything outrageous for me to call you on in at least fifteen minutes. But I’m sure you can remedy that if you try really hard.”
“That’s more like it,” I say, watching as she scoops up ice cream and takes a bite.
“Hmmm,” she sighs. “I love this stuff.” She motions to me with her spoon. “Try yours. I’m dying to know if you like it.”
I reach over and take a bite of hers. “Yes. It’s delicious.”
She smiles and sticks her spoon in my ice cream before taking a bite and then says, “A spoon for a spoon.”
“Like trust for trust?” I ask.
Her mood is instantly somber. “Trust does matter to me, Nick.”
I feel a punch in my chest with those words and my betrayal, but I have to know she’s innocent, and this is about murder. Evidence is everything. “No lies,” I say, hoping like hell mine are the only ones between us. “Tell me something about you.”
She settles back underneath her blanket, the withdrawal in the action easy to read, even before she says, “You already know about me. You researched me.”
“Tell me what documents and the internet can’t. The important parts. Who are you, Faith?”
She takes a bite of ice cream and I do the same times three, its sweetness easier to swallow than the idea that she might not be what she seems, what I want her to be. “Faith?” I press, when she doesn’t immediately reply.
“I’m just trying to figure out what there is to tell outside what you know. I mean the checklist is pretty obvious. My father died two years ago. My mother died two months ago.”
“That’s how you define yourself?”
“Death does a lot to define us.”
“I disagree,” I say. “Life defines us. And yes, before you ask. I’ve known death. My mother died in a car accident when I was thirteen. My father died a month ago.”
She stares at me, her expression remarkably impassive. “I’m not going to offer you awkward condolences.”
“I appreciate that, but most people don’t offer me condolences.”
“I guess that’s the difference for women than men, which is really pretty messed up.”
“The difference is, I not only wasn’t close to my father, but no one around me even knew him. And I’m an obvious hard-ass.”
“My mother was well-known in Sonoma,” she says. “You said you weren’t close to your father? Didn’t he raise you after your mother died?”
“The many versions of a nanny my father wanted to fuck raised me after I ended up back with him.”
“I see,” she says, and I sense she wants to ask, or say, something more, but she’s too busy rebuilding that wall to let it happen.
“Why’d you leave LA?” I ask, before she finishes shutting me out.
“My father died and my mother was struggling to handle the winery. I came back to help.”
“For two years?”
“It was supposed to be a few months. At six months, I figured out she just couldn’t handle it.”
“And you bought this house.”
“Yes. I spent my inheritance on it which, in hindsight, was a poor use of my cash. But at the time I needed something that was mine. I had it remodeled, actually. The entire top floor is my studio.”
“Because your art is everything to you.”
She sets her ice cream and her spoon down and I do the same and when she refocuses on me, she says, “You didn’t ask about why I might admire you.”
“I promised to stop pushing you before I got the chance.”
“All right then. I’ll tell you now. When I saw the tiger tattoo, and despite now knowing the meaning, even the ‘an eye for an eye’ tattoo, they told me a story about you. They told me that you know who you are. You own it. You claim it. You have the tattoos to prove it.”
“You’re an artist, Faith.”
She picks up her ice cream again. “I think I’ll eat the rest of this pint before I respond to that.”
“That statement was a fact. It doesn’t require an answer. Why black, white, and red?”
“Black and white is the purest form of any image to me. It lets the viewer create the story.”
“And the red?”
“The beginning of the story as I see it. A guide for the viewer’s imagination to flow. I know it sounds silly, but it’s how I think when I’m creating.”
The red isn’t blood. It isn’t death. It’s life. “You mentioned your new work to Josh.”
“It’s really six months to a year old,” she says. “He just thinks it’s new. I haven’t painted recently.”
“You paint about life.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you just defined yourself by death. No wonder you can’t paint.”
Her eyes go wide. “I…I hadn’t thought of it that way.” She glances away from me and back again. “I painted today. It was amazing.”
“And what music did you paint to today? Elvis?”
“No Elvis today. No music today. I was inspired before I picked up the brush.”
There is something in her eyes, in her voice, that I can’t read, but I want to understand. “By what, Faith?”
“Life,” she says, indicating my ice cream, her brow crinkling in worry, with the cutest dimple in the center. “You’ve hardly eaten that. Do you want the Doritos?”
“No.” I laugh. “I do not want the Doritos. I’ll stick with ice cream.” I set my pint down, spoon as well, and move closer to her, taking her spoon from her again. “I’ll share yours.”
“Okay,” she says, awareness spiking between us. “I’ll share.”
I take a bite of the ice cream, sweet cream and praline exploding in my mouth, and I cup Faith’s cheeks and pull her mouth to mine. My tongue licks into her mouth, and she sighs into the kiss the way I’ve come to know she will, as if it’s everything she’s been waiting on. And it is fucking hot as hell. I deepen the kiss, drinking her in like the drug she is, and then slowly pull back. “You taste good,” she whispers, stroking the edge of my lip.
“So do you, sweetheart.” I pull away the blanket, her robe parting, one rosy nipple peeking out of the silk, and I’m inspired. I take a bite of ice cream, set it aside, and with the cold sweetness in my mouth, pull Faith down to the ground with me, aligning our bodies, my mouth finding her exposed nipple.
I suckle it, while she sucks in air, her hands going to my head. “It’s cold,” she pants, arching her back.
“I’ll warm you up,” I promise, taking another bite of the ice cream and kissing her again, and damn, every moan and sigh she makes affects me. She affects me. For once, I’m with a woman and not thinking about tits and ass and fucking her to take the edge off before I get back to what’s important: work. I’m thinking about Faith’s next moan and sigh. And my mouth and hands are on a journey for more of everything Faith will give me. A journey that leads me to that sweet spot between her legs and a promise I made: Next time I won’t stop. And I don’t. I lick her clit. I lick into her sex. I fuck her with my mouth and pull back. Then I tenderly lick again, teasing both of us in the process. And do it all over again. I take pleasure in driving her to the edge, but this time, I take even more pleasure in that last desperate lift of her hips, and the way she trembles with my fingers inside her, right before she shatters under my tongue. And what I’m left with is a journey that hasn’t changed. It’s still the quest for more. I want more from this woman, who might just literally be the death of me if I’m not careful. And yet, that doesn’t matter.
I still want more.