Overseas (28 page)

And then I emerged, sweating, with Julian’s arms around me and his voice murmuring in my ear. “Sweetheart, wake up. Kate, it’s all right.”

I turned blindly into his chest. “You’re here,” I said, between heaving gasps of air. “You’re still here.”

“Of course I’m here. Shh. Of course I’m here.”

He held me against his body, enfolding me with himself, and gradually the panic died down. I concentrated on breathing slowly, on grasping at the solid physical details around me, anchoring me to reality: the sheets, the faint glow from the nightlight, the cool air entering my nose. Julian’s skin pressed into mine.

“Better?” he asked, after a minute.

“Yes,” I said.

A low chuckle rumbled from his throat. “Your first nightmare already. Is it all so very dreadful?”

I snorted into his chest. “Terrible. A severe case of endorphin overload. I may not live through the night.”

“Rubbish,” he said. “
My
endorphins are jolly well singing in my ears, and I’m not moaning on about it.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I snaked my hand along his side and administered a sharp tickle. “I definitely heard moaning.”

“Look here.
Stop
that. Stop it, I say.
Kate!
” He doubled over and tried to roll away without falling off the bed.

I began laughing. “Oh my God. You’re
ticklish
. Come back here.”

“I am
not
… Kate, you’re
rubbish
… stop that
at once
!” His frantic hands manacled mine at last; he flipped me onto my back and held my wrists above my head. “Minx,” he muttered, kissing me. “You’ll pay for that.”

“You’re just…
full
of lovely… secrets… aren’t you?” I giggled around his kisses.

“Mmm.” His body began to transform, to mold itself to mine; his lips edged downward, damp and scorching, along my throat and breasts. He drawled: “But not nearly as many as you, sweetheart.”

What is it, really, that makes a man a good lover?
Beloved, I’ll do my best, but I’m rather a novice at all this
, he’d said last night, fumbling with the hooks of my bra, and yet he’d gone on as if he possessed the secret map to my body: discovering hidden points of sensitivity I never knew existed, touching my flesh with a preternatural sensual attunement, delivering himself to me with every stroke. He allowed no hiding under sheets, no closed eyes, no defense whatsoever. It was like falling backward into a pit of extraordinary depth, trusting him to catch me; the most exquisite, excruciating vulnerability, made bearable only by the certainty that he felt it, too.

We lay afterward in tranquility, in wordless communion, hardly able to move; I on my side, one leg buried between his, studying the pattern our woven fingers made against his chest. I could feel his other hand tangle through my hair. His flushed skin seemed to melt downward through mine, layer by layer. “So,” I heard myself say, dreamlike, “are you absolutely sure you haven’t had any lovers in twelve years?”

“Let me think a moment.” A dramatic pause, and then: “Yes. Yes, quite sure.”

“Hmm.”

“Kate!” His head tilted upward. “You’re
doubting
me?”

“I’m just saying, you seem to know your way around. How to please me.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, I
want
to please you. I want to maintain you in a state of perfect drunken bliss. A dizzy hormonal stupor. Anything at all, you see, to entice you to soldier on with a lonely benighted chap who can’t”—he kissed the tip of my nose—“
quite
seem to see his way without you anymore.”

“Idiot.” I curled a lock of his hair tenderly around my finger.

He drew his hand along the curve of my waist, his smile deepening as he went. “Besides, it seems to me, since
my
pleasure is more or less a foregone conclusion, the main object of the exercise ought to be
your
pleasure.”

“Hmm. I never thought of it that way.”

“A rather elusive creature, I’ve heard. Fascinating sort of quarry.”

“Wait a minute. You’re
hunting down
my orgasms?”

His laughter burst out like a rifle salute. “Kate. You damned magnificent creature.” He rolled onto his back, bringing me with him. “Yes, my darling. That’s exactly what I’d like to do, on and on until the end of my life.”

“Well, you’re off to a flying start, I have to admit.”

He said nothing to that, only tucked my hair behind one ear with a shadowed smile. His eyes had lost all color in the dimness, depthless and unreadable. “So do you mind telling me about it?” he asked at last. “Your dream?”

I folded my arms across his chest and rested my chin. “It’s stupid. Just an anxiety dream. I get them every so often. Kind of ridiculous, since you’re the war hero; I should be soothing away
your
nightmares.”

“What are you anxious about?”

“I don’t know. I usually only have them before a big meeting, some sort of performance.” I touched his lower lip. “I had one the night before we met.”

“You were nervous?”

“Oh my God. Was I
nervous
? Do you have any idea how intimidating you are?”

“I am? I thought I was rather a nice chap, actually.”

I shook my head, incredulous, and slid back down to rest against his side. “Julian, you have kind of a hard-ass reputation, in a business setting. No offense.”

“Oh.” I could hear the bafflement in his voice. “And I’m still giving you anxiety dreams?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s my subconscious, remember?”

“So I’ve managed to convince your conscious mind, but your subconscious still thinks I’m a bounder?”

I laughed. “Hold on.
I’m
the overanalyzer in this relationship, okay? Look, it’s no big deal.” I closed my eyes, forcing out the details. “I think it was like the one I had the night before our meeting. I can’t really recall it exactly. Just kind of panicky, trying to explain something to someone. Someone dear to me. You, maybe? And that person, that man, drifting slowly away from me, not understanding, and the panic sort of paralyzing me.”

“Explain what, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Something important. Something vital. Life or death.” I opened my eyes to Julian’s face, taut and intent beneath the shadows, and tried to push away the feeling of dread that insinuated itself into my brain as I spoke. “But it’s like we’re speaking two different languages, and the harder I try, the further away he floats. Bizarre, huh?”

He tucked my head under his chin and began to stroke my hair. “Kate,” he said hoarsely, “Kate.”

“Don’t,” I said, into the hollow of his throat. “It’s just my silly neurotic brain. Nothing to do with you. I
trust
you.”

He said nothing for a long time, only went on caressing my hair: long regular strokes to the very tips, letting the strands slip away from his fingertips to rest on my back and shoulders. I let my eyelids sink downward, savoring the tickle-soft sensation. Eventually I felt his voice stir the air above my head. “I won’t drift away, Kate. I won’t
fail
you.” He said it fiercely, as if he were trying to convince himself.

“I know that,” I said, more to comfort him than myself, and stretched luxuriously against the solid mass of his body. “You’re so hard on yourself.” I yawned. I was beginning to feel drowsy again, despite the clinging uneasiness.

“Am I?”

“Way too hard.” I put my arm across his chest and closed my eyes. “I
don’t need you to be perfect, you know. I just need you to be
you
. To be”—my brain was beginning to float—“to be mine.”

He made a noise of some kind; I couldn’t quite tell whether it was a chuckle or a groan. “Yours always, darling. Now go to sleep. No more nightmares. You’re safe, now. I’m here,” he said somewhere near my ear. It was the last thing I heard before drifting off, hoping sleep would dissolve the knot of foreboding in my belly.

H
E WASN’T THERE, THOUGH
, when I woke up. My new BlackBerry sat on the pillow in his place, with an e-mail at the top of my inbox.

16.

[via
e-mail]

I stared at the BlackBerry screen for a moment longer, and then glanced over at Professor Hollander’s biography, which sat next to me on the library sofa, bookmarked with a piece of paper from the notepad in the kitchen. Julian’s face, so familiar and yet so foreign, looked up at me with the grim detachment of a soldier in a portrait studio. The strangeness of it rolled over me again: I’m having an e-mail exchange with Captain Julian Ashford, iconic war poet, author of “Overseas.” About foxhunting and spats.

Julian Ashford, my lover.

I’d spotted the book this morning, after showering. It had slipped under the bed, dislodged from the nightstand at some point; the corner peeked out seductively from the shadows. I’d ignored it at first, making the bed and fluffing the pillows with great concentration, but eventually I couldn’t resist. I’d picked it up, carried it down to the library, and traced my thumbs over the dust cover for a moment or two.

It was somehow easier than I’d expected. The book was a biography, after all, and Julian didn’t exactly leap out in full living color from the thicket of passive constructions and vague rambling sentences. He stayed, thankfully, at arm’s length, a distant historical figure: no shocking revelations, no hint of abuse or dysfunction or obscure Oedipal motivations. Just, it seemed, a relentless desire to distinguish himself in everything he did, as if he couldn’t bear anything less than perfection. At Eton he won every prize in sight, academic and athletic, and led the school’s Officer
Training Corps as color sergeant. He went up to Cambridge in 1913, reading mathematics and plunging himself into a whirlwind of editorships and debating societies and athletics, until the outbreak of war the following year redirected that energy into obtaining a lieutenant’s commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He’d departed for the front a few months later.

Where had it come from? Parental pressure, or inner drive? Both, I supposed. An only son, with enormous natural gifts, being raised to take his place among the pantheon: he’d no doubt felt the weight of outsize expectations all his life. And to his credit, he’d risen to accept that burden. Had borne it with grace and a certain easy-going humility.

All this made good skimming, insightful and even endearing. More irritating was the regular appearance of Florence Hamilton’s name. Flora, Julian had called her, with unthinking intimacy. I’d tried to skip over those pages, but it wasn’t quite possible to avoid them all. My eyeballs kept dragging on certain words, certain passages. Such as on
page 302
:

I could imagine what it said, though. He’d admitted it himself.
Yes. One. During the war.
Point of climax, indeed.

I’d flipped to the photo section at that point. This was more fun: there was Julian as a perfectly angelic baby, as a mischievous towheaded toddler on some sort of Swiss holiday with his parents; performing his color-sergeant duties at Eton, in a top hat at Ascot with Winston freaking
Churchill. Another photo, captioned
June 1913: At Henley with Hamilton and her brother Arthur, after having stroked the eights to victory against Oxford
, showed him impossibly boyish and handsome, in laughing conversation with an extremely pretty young woman, dressed in white. She was dainty, elegant, rising barely to his shoulder; she looked like an exquisite china doll. She had her hand on his arm; his head bent attentively in her direction. Another man stood on Julian’s other side, watching them both with an amused expression. Florence’s brother. It looked like he approved.