She dropped her gaze from his. “Perhaps. If you feel it won't jeopardize our working relationship.”
“We won't allow it to.”
“Are you sure? It often changes things.”
He kissed her under the pale lampposts of Blackfriar's Bridge. She eagerly kissed him back. It had been a long time since a man had made her feel light-headed, giddy, and wanted all at once.
“Let's go to my place,” he suggested. “I can make you breakfast there.”
“Why not enjoy the York? We'll order room service,” she countered.
“I have no other reply than… Yes, why not?” With Richard Sharpe's deep, rhythmic breathing a soothing anthem alongside her, Jessica studied his peacefully dozing countenance. Unfortunately with her evil friend insomnia also in bed with her, Jessica took only fitful breaths of air; at the same time, she brought back the images and the wonder of Sharpe's and her intermingling. They'd meshed effortlessly, naturally, intuitively in their lovemaking; the two of them in sync, in symbiosis. How truly free and extraordinary.
Unable to sleep, Jessica cautiously pulled herself up to a sitting position, not wishing to disturb Richard. She sat contemplating the feelings within her, stirrings which Richard had left rummaging about inside her. Jessica carefully brought her legs over the bed. She searched through her purse on the bedside table, and from it, she pulled forth the last letter she had received from James Perry.
Both she and James had tried to hold on to the unraveling shreds of a long-distance relationship. Trying to make love work from across oceans and continents was hard to do in any time zone, and in any historical era. Was it an impossibility in the late 1990s, she wondered, or simply an impossibility for the likes of Dr. Jessica Coran? At any rate, their long-nurtured, long-distance affair had proved impossible, no matter whose fault, hers or Jim's or theirs.
Perhaps, she simply hadn't the determination required to maintain any close relationship. “So what do I do?” she muttered to herself. “I intentionally seek out relationships divided by continents and pernicious seas. Ultimately, safer that way,” she finished with a disdainful moan. She then stared down at Richard, whose catlike serenity irked her; she so envied it. A part of her, a large part of her, wanted to simply cry her eyes out, here and now. She wanted to cry for James, cry for the death of their love, cry for the confusion she felt, cry for Richard and herself, for what they had now undertaken together, cry for the future of their obvious long-distance relationship-the one that could come of this night, if she let it. She wondered if it would simply be a great deal easier and wiser and cleaner and better if she told Richard they had no future whatever together. That he must immediately forget any thoughts along those lines. She wondered if she ought not to simply lie to him, tell him that she could never love him as she did James. “Would certainly make things simpler,” she mumbled aloud.
She wanted to bum Jim's last letter, bum it in effigy to their several “reconciliations” and get the anger out. Instead, she sat rereading it, reminding herself that her intuition, upon reading the letter the first time around, had told her the relationship was over. She'd stubbornly and foolishly ignored the information from within, denial being the predator of all reason, the predator of all who failed to heed their own inner voices.
Jessica realized now for the second time, that all the signals had been given her then, and they were vivid, huge signals, like billboards in the sky. Signs she had simply chosen to ignore; signs she unconsciously shunned, like an insistent dream that one ignored only to find it coming to full-blown life.
“And me with my handwriting expertise, learned the hard way on the job,” she muttered in a whisper. “If only I'd subjected this letter to the same analysis I would a criminal's letter.” If only I had paid attention to the handwriting, the hesitation marks that skitter between the lines, she thought now. But like a motorist on an interstate, she'd been moving too fast to read the fine print on the billboard.
She imagined that if she closely examined his last several letters, she would find signs of the impending doom that had befallen the two of them. Love makes you blind, she told herself. She told her shadow self, the one keeping her awake, something altogether different. “Love's a war, a battle for one's soul, and in the battle pieces are lost, scars won, mostly scars bearing the appearance of defensive wounds. Love's poison. Love's a bitch. Love's a killing offense.”
Richard-half asleep and in what appeared a muddled nightmare-crinkled his forehead and mumbled something about a bastard, stakes, and crosses. Jessica imagined his personal nightmare of the moment filled to overflowing with the spirits of menace in a place thickly populated by demons. A pained gasp for air made her wonder if he were dreaming of his own crucifixion death, pinned to a cross, unable to move or to fight back. Then as suddenly as the darkness had swept over his brow, the dreamer smiled a grin similar to those she'd seen on Coibby and Burton, one of contentment, peace.
Obviously, Sharpe lives, breathes, and sleeps his work, she thought. Just as I do. The conviction grew the longer she stared down at his prone figure. Still, he was older than James, and retirement for him loomed on the near horizon. He'd be free to come to America. They could both live in the Quantico area where he might buy a large farm-no, a ranch with horses. She loved horses and horseback riding, and when he would call for her to come out on a weekend, she'd drop everything and be there and… Her dreams ran a bit rampant for a half second, her eyes fixed on Richard Sharpe lying alongside her, her “alongsider” friend and lover.
Their lovemaking rivaled any lovemaking she'd ever known, and she sensed it the tip of the iceberg with this man. They had been cautious, yet passionate with one another, halting yet fulfilling each other's needs. Jessica knew that she could grow to love this man.
She reread the letter for the eleventh time. James had desperately tried to make it come clear to her, clear that she either choose her career or him, clear that he could no longer accept the status quo: the burden of the long-distance love affair they'd established had fallen squarely on her shoulders-typical of the male of the species.
Checking the time, realizing it is after twelve noon in Hawaii, Jessica impulsively telephones James. She checks the digital figures on her bedside clock and while she realizes the hour puts him at work, she calls nonetheless. Her toe begins tapping at the air where it dangles alongside the bed, and she mentally taps her thoughts: He will be at his desk, she assures herself, pacing, wondering if he'd done the right thing, calling off their relationship, worried sick about her. On the fourth ring, he answers, acting surprised to hear from her again, when in fact he is not in the least surprised. When he speaks, he spews forth venom, telling her, “Jess, damnit, it's over now! Now, please never call here again!”
In the background, she hears someone softly asking if everything is all right: a female associate. Jessica throws the telephone through a nearby mirror where it is swallowed up. Her eyes open, and she finds, found, located herself in time and place, found herself being held against Richard Sharpe's powerful chest, listening to the beating drum of his heart, feeling the power of his grip on her back where his hands and fingers massaged while his voice soothed her pain.
Sharpe had grabbed her, holding on, telling her, “You're all right, Jessica. Your nightmare is just that, a nightmare.” His voice flowed like fine wine, strong, firm, reassuring, solid.
“Sorry,” she softly apologized, awake enough now to distinguish dream from reality, to assure him that she was no infant in need of coddling.
“Lamenting the death of an old relationship is never easy,” he replied, holding up the letter from Jim Parry.
She snatched at the paper, tearing it even as he welcomed her taking it. “That's private!” she shouted, realizing that this moment could end their relationship with one stroke, that it represented one of those escape exits from a relationship that Dr. Donna LeMonte, her psychiatrist and friend, had so often told Jessica she grasped at like straws. She could so easily overreact, sending Richard out into the night, screaming at him for daring to touch her letter from Jim. She could easily accuse him of having read her private correspondence, of finding the act vile. Or she could hold on. Hold to the moment, hold to Richard, hold.
“I quite well know and understand the depression and horror of a long-term relationship falling apart,” he calmly said, his hands still massaging her back.
“None of my relationships have any chance whatsoever, thanks to my
… This obsessive drive to be the best forensic scientist I can be.” She found herself confessing and not knowing why. Sharpe brought it out in her. She wanted to share everything with him, including her darkest moments and her every mole.
'To be the best at something. No better desire or goal on the planet. And you are, you know, the best M.E. I've ever seen at work. You don't have to keep proving yourself to me. Boulte, yes. Me, no.” He said it with the rich, lusty laugh which he'd trumpeted at the theater.
