CHAPTER TWENTY
Olivia
February 12
“DEAN, IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE you are harboring a great deal of guilt and anger for things that have happened to Liv.” Dr. Gale studies Dean as she speaks. “Especially for circumstances beyond your control, like the miscarriage.”
Dean doesn’t respond. He’s wound so tight that even his jaw is clenched.
“And you’re angry about things that happened to Liv before you even met,” Dr. Gale continues, her voice gentle. “Like her relationship with her mother and the abuse. The way she was treated.”
Dean turns his head to stare out the window. His arms are folded across his chest, his fingers digging into his biceps.
I take a breath and exhale slowly, restraining myself from jumping in to fill the silence. This is our second meeting with Dr. Gale, the counselor whom my former therapist recommended. I like Dr. Gale—she’s on the granola side with curly hair, a flowing skirt, and an office filled with plants, low lighting, and comfortable furniture. A little rock garden fountain sits in a corner of the room.
The Zen-like atmosphere, however, has done nothing to put my husband at ease.
“Dean?” Dr. Gale prompts. “What do you think of that?”
“I think you’re right,” he says, his voice clipped.
“We need to look at how your anger and guilt are affecting your relationship with Liv now,” Dr. Gale says. She glances at me. “How do you feel about it, Liv?”
Sad. Also guilty.
If I admit that, Dean will be even more upset. But if I don’t admit that, we’ll still be locked in a thorny, hurtful secrecy that we only think is protective.
“Liv?” Dr. Gale is still looking at me.
I tighten my hands together. Dean and I are sitting on either end of the same sofa, and the distance between us suddenly seems as vast as an ocean.
“I don’t want him to be angry,” I finally say.
“That’s what you don’t want,” Dr. Gale says, “not how you do feel.”
Dean makes a noise of impatience. I try to focus on the doctor.
“I feel… like it’s my fault that he’s angry and guilty,” I admit.
“It’s not your fault,” Dean tells me.
I know that’s not true. I pleat the folds of my skirt, disliking the idea that my husband still views me as a blameless good girl. That he won’t hold me accountable.
“Dean, can you tell me what you liked about Liv when you first met her?” Dr. Gale asks.
Dean glances at her, faintly surprised. “I liked everything about her.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“She was determined, beautiful, intelligent, kind of shy, and…” His voice trails off.
“A maze,” I say.
“A maze,” Dr. Gale repeats.
“He knew it would take work to get to know me, and he liked the challenge.”
Dr. Gale looks at Dean. “Is that true?”
“To a degree, yes.”
“And then how did you feel when you did get to know Liv? When you reached the end of the maze, as it were?”
He stares out the window again. “I didn’t want to leave.”
We’re all silent for a moment. My throat aches. Dr. Gale gives me an encouraging smile.
“What about you, Liv?” she asks. “What did you like about Dean when you first met?”
“I trusted him instinctively. I liked his strength and confidence. The way he made me feel. The sense that he would protect me from anything.”
“And how have your feelings for him changed over the course of your marriage?”
“They’ve gotten stronger, except…”
“Except?” Dr. Gale prompts.
“Except sometimes now I think he’s too strong, too protective. That’s why he didn’t want me to go with him to California. That’s why he didn’t tell me about the OJA situation until he absolutely had to. He won’t let me in or give me bad news because he doesn’t want me to get upset.”
“What do you think of what Liv just said, Dean?”
“I think she’s right,” he replies shortly.
“What I’m hearing from Liv is that she doesn’t feel as if you always treat her like an equal partner,” Dr. Gale suggests, her voice gentle. “That perhaps your overprotectiveness is not allowing either of you to connect the way you should.”
“It’s not just him.” I still dislike the implication that I’m blameless. “I was happy to let him be that way. No one had ever protected me before, and it felt good that he wanted to. That he could. We… our marriage was so safe, like a fortress where nothing could hurt us. Except…”
“Except?”
“Except we… we ended up hurting each other.” The admission scrapes my soul raw.
Tension stiffens Dean’s entire body. I want to reach out and grab his hand, touch his arm, something. My fingers dig into my palms. A new pain fills me at the reminder of what happened to us last fall and the fact that we still haven’t fully dealt with it.
“Okay.” Sensing the thick tension in the room, Dr. Gale looks at her notepad. “So, for a long time your marriage has been a safe haven for both of you. What else has been good about it?”
I shift, embarrassed, though the answer comes without any thought.
“Sex,” I admit.
“Sex between you has been good?”
“It’s been great.” My face heats. I glance at Dean. He’s still staring out the window, unreadable.
“Dean?” Dr. Gale turns her gaze on him.
“She’s right,” he says.
“So you’ve always been able to connect on a sexual level.”
I nod. “Always.”
“Perhaps that’s part of the problem,” Dr. Gale suggests. “You might be using an intense sexual relationship as a substitute for connecting on emotional and intellectual levels.”
“Bullshit,” Dean mutters.
“Dean…”
“What, Liv?” He turns to look at me, irritation tightening his features. “You think we fuck good because we’re not emotionally connecting?”
My flush deepens. “No, but maybe we sometimes use sex as a way to avoid dealing with stuff.”
“What stuff?” he snaps.
“Like you feeling guilty and angry when bad things happen. Or the fact that we never really talked about what happened last fall.”
“We didn’t have time, Liv! We had to go to California and—”
“But we had plenty of time to fool around, didn’t we? We always made time for that.” Something clicks in my head. A rush of intensity pours through me.
“You can control sex, Dean,” I say. “You’re totally in command when it comes to fucking. You know exactly what to do and when to do it… you know how to… to orchestrate both my pleasure and yours… you make me so crazy with wanting you that I forget about everything else.”
“So why is that suddenly a problem?” he asks.
“Because everything else is important too! And you can’t control it all, no matter how much you want to. You can’t stop some things from happening.”
“I’m the one who got you pregnant when we hadn’t planned it,” he retorts.
“Oh, right, it was your fault, wasn’t it?”
“I didn’t use a condom! You got pregnant, you had all these doubts, you suffered a miscarriage… whose fault was that, if not mine?”
“I’m part of this marriage too, Dean! You’re not fucking a wind-up doll when we’re in bed together… you’re so damn good at sex because you know how to control it, but you’re doing it with me, not to me.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you don’t want to admit that I have an equal responsibility for everything that happens in this marriage, both good and bad.” A shudder ripples through me, and I’m suddenly cold. “If you admit that, then you have to accept that I’m also at fault.”
“None of this is your fault,” Dean mutters.
“It’s my fault that I kissed another man.” I almost wince when the words come out.
A wave of anger radiates off Dean. My heart seizes. Dr. Gale blinks.
“We should talk about that, Liv,” she suggests gently. “When did it happen?”
Before I can respond, Dean shoves off the sofa and goes to the door.
“Dean…”
He stalks out, slamming the door. I throw Dr. Gale a look of apology, then take my coat and satchel and hurry after him.
“Dean!”
He’s halfway to the parking lot when I catch up with him. I grab his arm. He yanks away and keeps walking, his boots crushing the packed snow and ice.
“Dean, please.” I come to a halt, watching his broad back as he gets farther away, his stride long, his whole body rigid with fury.
He stops by the car. I approach him. A cold wind blows his hair across his forehead. He shoves it back and turns to face me. His eyes are black as night.
“What, Liv?” He spreads his hands. He’s trembling. “What now?”
“I don’t know! I’m trying to figure it out. That’s why you need to come back in and talk to me.”
“I don’t want to do this in front of the doctor,” he snaps.
My breath comes out in hard puffs of white. Dean didn’t button his coat, and the lapels flap open in the wind. He must be freezing.
“Then come home and talk to me,” I say. “Please.”
He doesn’t respond, but he goes around to the passenger side and yanks open the door. I get inside. He slams the door and gets behind the wheel. We’re both silent as he drives back to Avalon Street. His frustration and anger are tangible.
I have a sudden memory of our first meeting. Of him crouching beside me on the sidewalk, his fingers brushing the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Of him standing by the street, hands in his pockets, all relaxed, masculine confidence. The breeze ruffling his thick hair, the way he gave me that easy smile, white and striking.
Now I can’t remember the last time he smiled.
He puts his hand on my lower back to guide me over patches of ice as we walk to our apartment. Inside, we shed our coats and I go to turn up the thermostat. I watch my husband as he paces to the window. He digs into his pocket for a loop of string.
Tenderness fills me. Only Professor Dean West has a habit of making complicated patterns when he doesn’t know what else to do. After another few twists, he unknots the pattern and wraps the frayed string around his fingers.
“I never…” He shakes his head. “I never thought you were less.”
“I know you didn’t.”
I brush at a stray tear. I haven’t thought about Tyler Wilkes, my former cooking instructor and the man I made the mistake of kissing, since long before Christmas. I think about him now, though. Not in a romantic way, but because I finally understand why I was drawn to him when for so long Dean was the only man I wanted.
Tyler believed I could do something when I didn’t think I could. Granted, he believed I could cook a soufflé, not climb Mount Everest, but he wanted me to try, fail, try again, fail again, and finally succeed. He didn’t try to shield me from disappointment because he wanted me to believe I could do it too. And he made me prove it when I was doubting everything about my life.
Dean has always loved me, always supported me, always tried to protect me. But he has never challenged me to rely on myself.
“You just always wanted to give me the safety I never had,” I tell him. “But life isn’t safe, no matter how hard you try to make it that way.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Dean, I… I spent a lot of years doing what my mother told me to do.” I have to push the words past my tight throat. “Being quiet, trying to cooperate. When I left her, I thought I’d finally be able to stand on my own. But living with Stella and Henry was so repressive. And even though I did well in high school, that whole mess at Fieldbrook…”
I feel Dean’s flash of rage. I don’t look at him. A jagged flashback threatens. I tear it apart, fling it aside. Breathe.
“I spent so much energy trying to deal with what happened,” I continue, rubbing my damp palms over my skirt. “Trying to forget. To stop blaming myself. And then when I first met you, I was still trying to figure out who I wanted to be. Who I could be.”
I lift my head to look at him. He’s watching me, his expression unreadable, his posture tense.
“You showed me so much of that,” I say. “So much more than I even knew existed. You showed me how to be free, and what it feels like to be safe and wanted and loved. You showed me how to love. How to stop being afraid. How to fight for what I want. Especially when what I wanted most was you.”
His eyes glitter. I press a hand to my aching chest.
“Then when… when things got so messy between us, I turned to another man.” I swipe at another tear, swallow the bile of guilt. “It was like… like I didn’t know what to do without you. If someone else had been the problem, you would have dealt with it. You would have been strong and protective and just… there.”
I take a breath. “But you weren’t there, Dean, because we were the problem. And I didn’t know how to handle it alone, so I… well. Then the pregnancy... I was conflicted about it, but I wanted to figure out how to be a good mother. I thought I could be, that it would be another way to prove myself, but then the… the miscarriage…”
“And I wasn’t there.” His voice is rough. “Again.”
“You couldn’t have been there! There was nothing you could have done. None of it was your fault.”
“Then why is it screwing us up again? It’s like I told you last December. I don’t know what it is I’m not giving you.”
“You have to let me fail, Dean, and you have to believe I can get back up on my own.”
“I know you can.”
My heart constricts. “But you have to let me prove it. You have to accept that I’m going to get hurt, but also that I can be self-reliant. You can’t always save me.”
“No. I can’t.”
It’s the first time he has ever admitted that. And I don’t want to imagine how much it cost him to finally do so.
A lengthy silence descends, taut with painful foreboding. I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know what will happen to us, to him, to our lives.
I can’t stand the thought of Dean being banned from the university. It will make him crazy not to be able to teach or lecture, especially with a spurious investigation going on. He’ll feel trapped, helpless, like a caged tiger leashed with rage.
And what if he sees his students and fellow professors in town, what if they start asking too many questions, what if Maggie makes an accusation that ends up in the university newspaper, and Dean is unable even to defend himself…
A sudden dizziness hits me. My heart is beating too fast.
Before I can think too much, I grab my cell phone from my satchel and scroll through email. I find the message Simon Fletcher CC’d to me.
Dean,
The Cambridge team will be here soon and specifically asked for funding to lure you as an advisor on the excavation of site 4000. Plans starting in Feb and continuing into summer. Lots of folks looking forward to seeing you again and correcting your abysmal Italian pronunciation.
Did I tell you James Fenton from the U. of Glasgow is here? Says he owes you a beer from some ancient bet. Apartments are basic but comfortable. Weather’s good. Food and wine excellent. Nice break from the arctic Midwest, I’m sure, and you ought to meet Dr. Billings. Make arrangements soon so we know when to expect you.
—SF
I read the message twice, aware of a strange feeling inside. A simultaneous breakage and flowering, like a green shoot pushing its way through a dry seed.
“Simon’s letter.” I look up at Dean.
He’s watching me, his expression suddenly wary. I force myself to say the only thing I can. The only solution.
“I want you to go to Altopascio.”
“No.”
In my entire life, there is not much I’ve been certain about. The ground has always shifted beneath my feet. I’ve had a hard time planting myself firmly on it, trying to figure out in which direction I should or even could grow. I’ve questioned everything—my mother, myself, my choices, my decisions.
But I got Dean right. From the beginning, I knew I could trust him, trust myself with him. I knew we were meant to be together. I knew our love would burn as bright as the stars, no matter how dark the night became.
I know that still.
“I want you to go.” My voice is stronger, more resolute.
“I’m not leaving you, Liv.”
“No, you’re not.” I approach him, reaching out to rest my palm on his chest. His heart beats steady and strong against my hand. “But you need to heal, and the only way you can start is to get away. You can’t stay in Mirror Lake. You can’t be near the university. You can’t be around me.”
“Liv, you just had a miscarriage!” He pulls away from me in frustration.
“We saw Dr. Nolan last week. She said everything is okay now.”
“The hell it is.” His eyes harden mutinously. “I’m not leaving you alone. No way.”
My thoughts are spinning, tumbling, but all centered around the growing conviction that this is what we both need.
“Dean, do you remember that trip we took to see the monarch butterflies in Pacific Grove? The monarchs had migrated back from Mexico for the winter. All those eucalyptus trees, alive with orange-and-black monarchs like tiny, stained-glass windows. The air was just filled with butterflies. One of them landed on your shoulder.”
“I remember.”
“And do you remember the guide told us that scientists don’t really know why so many generations of butterflies return to the same place every year?”
“I remember.”
“I think it’s because they instinctively know where home is.”
“So do I. And it’s with you. Not halfway across the world.”
“The butterflies migrate to survive,” I say. “They need to escape the cold. They need nourishment. And once they have that, they always return home.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
I take a breath, trying to find the strength to press forward. “Dean, I’m not asking you to go.”
“What?”
“I’m telling you to go.”
He stops. Turns to stare at me.
“I know you, Dean,” I remind him. “I know you’re burning with the need to defend yourself, to clear your name, to prove that girl is lying. You want to take action. You want to throw yourself into work, hire a legal team, get back into the classroom, host the huge conference… all while worrying about me and our marriage.
“And during all of that, not once will you acknowledge that you’re hurt too. You won’t even realize that you need to give yourself time and space to grieve. And you can’t do that if every day you’re confronted by the reminder of what you think is failure. You can’t do anything here. You can’t.”
He just looks at me. I can almost see every muscle in his body deflecting the truth of my words.
“I want you to do this,” I say. “You have to.”
I know this now too—he needs to be out in the open space of medieval ruins where he can find treasures and relics hidden in the soil. He needs to have discussions with fellow professors about medieval settlements and material culture. He needs to see old friends, drink good wine, visit the museums in Florence, eat fish that tastes like the sea. He needs to remember that life is both transitory and filled with permanence.
“If I go, then you’re coming with me,” he says.
For a moment, I feel myself waver, picturing the two of us escaping to Italy together. Then I shake my head.
“Allie already has my days scheduled for the rest of the month at the bookstore. I’m working ten hours a week at the museum helping organize a new exhibition, and I’m volunteering at the library on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I just took two weeks off from all of that without notice when we had to go to California. I can’t leave right away again. People are counting on me.”
It feels good to say that, so I say it again. “People are counting on me.”
I look down at my phone and hit the reply button on the email. I start typing. This is a tough tactic, but I’m up against both my husband’s stubbornness and his overprotectiveness. The only thing I can do is appeal to his professional reputation and career, both of which are in serious danger.
“What are you doing?” Dean asks.
“Emailing Simon. I’m telling him that you’re going. He’ll announce it to the team, and they’ll all be expecting you. The Cambridge people have applied for funding on your behalf already. You won’t let them down.”
“Liv—”
“Otherwise you’ll stay here stewing and growling, hating every minute that you can’t go to the university and can’t do anything. And you’ll hate it so much you might very well end up doing something to make things worse.”
I finish typing the message and send it to Simon. “Or you can go to Italy, Dean, and see old friends and do what you love to do. You need this. You need to get away.”
I look up at him. A tender ache fills me. My beautiful, strong husband is standing with his shoulders slumped and his face ashen, lines etched deep around his eyes and mouth. Tears sting my eyes.
“I can’t leave you,” he says, his voice a hollow echo.
“You’re not leaving me.” I struggle for a moment with the realization that when he goes, I’ll be alone. “I have things to do too, Dean. I’m going to help Allie come up with another way to save her bookstore. I’ll make Kelsey take me out for margaritas if I start to feel morose. I’ll read picture books to little kids at library story time. I’ll think about you and miss you and talk to you, all the while knowing we’re doing the right thing.”
Silence falls, pulsing with the truth of what I’ve learned and what Dean has yet to acknowledge. Our relationship, our love, cannot and will never be perfect. It will, however, always belong only to us in all its flawed, intense beauty. Perfect in its very imperfection.
“Kiss me,” I whisper.
His expression softens. He crosses the room and cups my face in his hands, tilting my head to exactly the right angle before lowering his lips to mine. I close my eyes and sink into the feel and taste of my husband, the warmth of his body burning away the lingering cold. I press my hand to his face and part my lips beneath his.
And there is us again, the familiar, lovely way that we fit together, the slide of his tongue across mine, the delicious way he kisses my lower lip. I feel him as part of me, his heart beating in time with mine, the center of his soul enclosing everything we have ever been to each other and all that we will ever be.
I move my hand to the back of his neck, drawing him into me, knowing, knowing that we are the same, that the differences and difficulties we’ve had will never have the power to destroy the very essence of us.
Dean lifts his head, resting his palm against the side of my neck.
“The semester after I first met you…” He brushes his thumb across my lips, then moves away from me. “After I knew I wanted to be with you, wanted to know everything about you… I taught a course on medieval cosmology.”
“I remember.” I swipe my damp eyes with my sleeve.
I cling to a memory of Dean stretched out on the old sofa in the university apartment he’d lived in during that first year. Jeans and a T-shirt, his standard attire on those long weekends when we’d hole up together to work, study, play, make love. He was reading a book about medieval philosophy, his reading glasses a sexy professorial contrast to his wavy, overlong hair and whiskered jaw.
I was sitting across from him, writing up a report on digital preservation. I thought we were both immersed in our studying, but when I snuck a glance at Dean from across the coffee table, I found him watching me with an intent gaze that sparked heat through my entire body.
Without a word, we both pushed our papers and books aside. He held out his arms. Smiling, I got to my feet and then fell against him as our mouths pressed together hot and deep.
Bliss followed. Pure and raw.
“You… you were teaching something about the constellations, I think.” I curl my hand around the back of a chair. “And celestial astronomy…”
“Music of the spheres.” Dean unwraps the loop of string again and twists it around his fingers. “That was part of the curriculum. It was based on Pythagoras’s discovery that a length of string produces the certain pitch of a musical note. The medieval concept is that the planets and stars are set on concentric spheres that rotate around the earth and are arranged in harmonic ratios. Each sphere produces a musical tone, and the revolution of the spheres together creates a kind of mystical symphony.”
“It’s a beautiful idea.”
“You know I’m not much of a romantic.” He looks at me. “But that semester, even I had to admit it was more than just a coincidence.”
“What was?”
“The fact that I was studying the perfect harmony of the stars and planets at the exact same time I was falling in love with you.”
I can only stare at him. I can’t even speak.
Until this moment, I didn’t know it was possible to love my husband even more than I have for the past five years. I didn’t know this kind of love existed, the kind that can both shatter you to pieces and make you whole.
Dean twists the string between his fingers a few more times. Then he pulls his hands apart and shows me the pattern stretched between his palms.
A heart.
I smile through my tears. For a long time, we just look at each other. A thousand emotions thread the air. Rather than sorrow, my soul fills with love and tenderness. With hope. With strength.
Fortune favors the brave.
“You became my world the minute I saw you, Olivia Rose.” He breaks our gaze first and drops the string onto the foyer table. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes. And it’s why I know you’ll do this for us.”
I move toward him. He meets me halfway. We stop a foot away from each other. He holds up his left hand. I put my palm against his. Our wedding bands make a familiar, soft click before I slide my hand over so we can weave our fingers together.
“I’ll be here, Dean, love of my life.” I tighten my hand around his. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
The first time I brought Dean to meet Aunt Stella, it was spring. Wisconsin bloomed with dandelions, green leaves, tulips. Even the town of Castleford seemed brighter, more colorful, although now I suspect that my perception had less to do with the season and more to do with Dean’s presence.
Aunt Stella and Henry lived in a little, two-story house that was a polar opposite from the West family’s beautiful villa. My aunt was a sour-faced woman who gave me a brief embrace and looked Dean over with a critical eye. Henry, thin and wiry, shook Dean’s hand and then disappeared into his garage workshop.
“Sit down.” Stella patted her short-cropped hair and gestured to the worn sofa. “Olivia, fetch your… guest something to drink.”
I scrounged through the rusted refrigerator and came up with a pitcher of lemonade. After pouring three glasses, I returned to the living room where Dean was complimenting Stella on her choice of circus-themed artwork.
“Heard anything from your mother?” Stella looked at me.
“No.” I handed her a glass and sat beside Dean on the sofa. “Have you?”
“Got a letter maybe a month ago. Said she was in New York, New Jersey. Something like that.”
A knot formed in my chest. Though Aunt Stella was my father’s sister, my mother occasionally dropped her a letter or note—and I could not help believing that was because she knew Stella was the only way she could reach me. If she ever wanted to.
“How is she?” I asked.
“All right, I guess. Living with a mechanic or a musician. Something like that.”
“Did she give you an address?”
“Nah. Likely she’s moved on already.”
Likely.
My glass was cold and slippery between my palms. I hated to ask the question, but couldn’t help it. “Did she ask about me?”
Stella shook her head and sipped her lemonade. Dean settled his hand on my thigh.
“Looks like you’ve had a warm spring, Stella,” he remarked. “I noticed the tulips along your front walk.”
Stella brightened a little and began chatting about her garden. I rubbed my shoe over the brown shag carpet and tried not to wonder where my mother was now. Tried not to wonder if she ever thought of me.
We stayed through a dinner of meatloaf and potatoes. Dean asked Stella what she put in the meatloaf to make it so moist (it wasn’t). He listened to Henry’s description of repairing a chain-link fence as if it were interesting (it wasn’t). He wondered if the serving spoon was an antique (it was).
He asked about the town, the local businesses, Henry’s electrician job, and Aunt Stella’s bridge club. He asked about the schools, their church, the last state election, the farmers’ market. He asked how much snow they’d gotten last winter.
When we returned to our room at the only motel in town, I watched Dean as he unbuttoned his shirt.
“I love you,” I said. It was the easiest confession I had ever made.
He stopped in the motion of pulling the shirt off his shoulders. My heart skipped a beat. For a frozen instant, he just looked at me.
Then he smiled—slow and beautiful.
“I’m really glad to hear that, beauty,” he said. “Because I love you too.”
The words sang through me, filling my whole being with light, hope, and happiness. I flew across the room into his open arms. He enclosed me in a hard embrace. I wrapped my legs around his waist and lowered my head for a kiss.
I love you. Love you. You.
Within seconds, our kiss was deepening with heat, our tongues sliding together. I ran my hands over his smooth shoulders, his skin so warm and taut with muscle. His breath brushed my cheek as he trailed his lips down to my neck and the hollow of my throat. I shivered, squirmed.
He lowered me to the bed, his eyes darkening as he undressed me. He eased my skirt off, pulled my shirt over my head, flicked open the front clasp of my bra.
Naked, I felt different, bared to the depths of my soul. I watched with a pounding heart as he kissed his way down my body, licking the peaks of my breasts, smoothing his hands over my hips, dipping his tongue into my belly button.
He slipped his hands between my thighs and eased them apart.
I lifted my head to stare down at him. “Dean…”
“Easy.” He stroked my thighs in a soothing motion, much the way he had the first time we made love. “Do you trust me?”
“I… of course.” I trusted him with everything—my heart, my soul, my life.
“I’ll make it good,” he promised.
And he did. He always made it good. He rubbed me through my underwear, pressing the damp cotton into my cleft. So smooth, so adept was his touch that I started twisting my hips and panting. Urgency spiraled through me.
Dean moved lower, his fingers tangling in the elastic as he pushed it aside. His hot breath contrasted deliciously with the sudden rush of cool air. My eyes drifted closed, my body strumming with excitement as he probed gently with his forefinger. Then he slipped his tongue into me. I gasped, bucking upward so hard that he settled his hands on my hips to keep me still.
“Oh, God… Dean… Dean.”
Pleasure cascaded over me, in me. I stretched my arms over my head and pushed toward him, trying to intensify the stroke of his tongue against every intimate crevice.
I shifted, reached down to grab a fistful of his hair. “Dean, please.”
My plea went unheeded as he continued to take his time. It was more than good. It was exquisite—a slow exploration of my sex, an increasing push toward rapture. He stroked, licked, sucked. I writhed, panted, moaned. Finally, when convulsions broke in waves over me, Dean held my thighs open and used his mouth to urge every last sensation from my body.
Gasping, I watched him rise and shed his trousers. He rolled a condom onto his thick erection, the shaft gleaming in the dim light. He pulled my panties off my legs and dropped them to the floor.
Then he came over me, bracing his hands on either side of my head, easing himself inside me. His lips captured mine, and the press of his body sparked renewed need through me.
I lifted my legs to hug his hips, and then we rocked and thrust together in a rhythm that felt so right, so natural, that I never wanted it to end. I came again, intense and sharp, tightening my muscles around him and feeling him convulse in response. He thrust deep, his own orgasm shuddering through him with a force that matched my own.
He rolled over and hauled me against him, his breath stirring the tendrils of my hair. I burrowed against his side, pressing my face to his shoulder.
And so it was there, lying entangled with Professor Dean West at an old motel in the only town I’d lived in for longer than a few months… that was the moment I finally knew I was home. I was loved.
Loved.
I hadn’t even realized how desperately I’d wanted love. How much we both needed to know that in a world of dark corners and sharp needles, there really is a place where kisses taste like apple pie and where stars spill like sugar across the sky.
A place where unknown roads no longer scare you because you have another hand to hold. A place where butterflies always flutter whenever you see each other, and a single touch tells you that you are not alone. A place where every kiss still feels like the first.
In that place of us, Liv and Dean, love has its own poetry and language. Allure, quatrefoil, fleur-de-lis. Right here. PR9199.3 R5115 Y68. My white knight. I’m yours. Give me a kiss. Pie love you. I remember. Professor. Beauty.
The sound of textbook pages turning as rain pours outside the window. The twist of a string around his long fingers. That tight, knotted ball inside me opening, flowering into pleasure for the first time ever. Papers about library collections, medieval architecture, database systems, and archeological surveys.
Quiet weekends, board games, take-out pizza, houseplants, and boring foreign films. The soft, gentle healing of old wounds. The glide of his palm over my skin, his deep voice whispering in my ear. The easing of my heart.
The way he smiles at me. The way I look at him. The way we can always just be us.
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