And as she walked away, a muscle throbbed along the edge of Nicholas’s jaw.
The next day Nicholas was still seething. He met Rachel after her anatomy class and suggested they go for coffee. He knew a place, he said, where they do portraits of you while you eat. It was a bit of a hike, all the way across the river, but it was relatively close to his apartment, for afterward. And then he walked beside her to the car, counting the stares of other men as they took notice of Rachel’s honey hair, her soft curves. At the door of the diner, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard.
“Well,” Rachel said, smiling. “Welcome back.”
He led her to the booth he always took, and she almost immediately disappeared to the bathroom. He couldn’t see Paige, which made him angry. After all, why else had he come? He was still questioning himself when she came up behind him. She was as quiet as a breeze, and he would not have sensed her if not for the clean scent of pears and willows he had come to know her by. When she stood in front of him, her eyes were wide and tired. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to piss you off.”
“Who’s pissed?” Nicholas said, grinning, but he distinctly felt the pinching of his heart, and he began to wonder if this was what cardiac patients always tried to describe.
At that point Rachel came out and slid into the booth across from Nicholas. “I’m sorry,” Paige said, “but this booth is taken.”
“Yes, I know,” Rachel said coolly. She looked at Nicholas and then glared at Paige. She reached across the table and took Nicholas’s hand, weaving her fingers through his with the quiet power of possession.
Nicholas couldn’t have planned it better, but he didn’t expect it to hurt see Qit to huquite so much. It wasn’t that Paige stood rooted before him, her lips parted, as if she hadn’t heard correctly. It was that when she turned, Nicholas did not see disappointment or betrayal. Instead, he realized she was looking at him, still, as if he were mythic. “What did you come here for?” she asked.
Nicholas cleared his throat, and Rachel kicked him under the table. “Rachel heard about the pictures and would like to have one done.”
Paige nodded and left to get a pad. She sat at the front of the booth on a little stool, holding the pad tilted up the way she always did so the picture would be a surprise when she was finished. She drew clean, quick strokes and blended with her thumb, and as she drew, other diners peeked over her shoulder and laughed and whispered. When she finished, she threw the pad in front of Nicholas and walked into the kitchen. Rachel turned it over. There was her hair, her glittering eyes, and even the gist of her lovely features, but quite clearly the picture was that of a lizard.
Although he was scheduled to be on call that night at the hospital, Nicholas did something he had never done before: he phoned in sick. Then he grabbed a bite at McDonald’s and walked through Harvard Square after the sun went down. He sat on a brick wall on the corner of Brattle and watched a juggler with flaming torches, wondering if the guy worried about what might happen. Nicholas put a faded dollar bill in the case of a jazz guitarist, and he stood at the window of a toy store, where stuffed alligators wearing rain slickers tumbled in tinfoil puddles. When it was five to eleven, he walked to Mercy, wondering what he would do if Doris or Marvela or anyone other than Paige was locking up that night. He realized that he would just keep walking, then, until he found her.
Paige was emptying the ketchup bottles when he came in. Over her head, taped to the wall, was the picture of Rachel as a lizard. “I like it,” he said, making her jump.
In spite of herself, Paige smiled a little. “I’m sure I’ve lost us one customer,” she said.
“So what,” Nicholas said. “You made
“And just what do I get?” Paige said.
Nicholas smiled. “Whatever you want.”
Many years later, when Nicholas thought of that exchange, he realized he shouldn’t have made promises he couldn’t have kept. But he did believe that no matter what Paige wanted, he could be it. He had a feeling about this, a feeling that all Paige really needed was him, not his trappings and not his success, and that was so new to Nicholas that he felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. He pulled Paige closer and saw her stiffen and then relax. He kissed her ear, her temple, the corner of her mouth. In her hair he smelled bacon and waffles, but also sunshine and September, and he wondered how he could be thinking the things he was.
When she put her arms around him, as if she was testing the water, he put his hands on her waist and felt the hint of her hips below. “Is Lionel still nt Qonel stihere?” he whispered, and when she shook her head he took the keys from her pocket and locked the front door, turned off the light. He sat on one of the counter stools and pulled Paige to stand between his legs, and he kissed her, letting his hands run from her neck to her breasts to her belly. Softly he kissed her, this child-woman, and when he stroked her thighs and she tensed, he had to smile.
chapter 3
When Nicholas was four years old, his mother taught him about trusting strangers. She sat him down and told him twenty times in a row not to speak to someone on the street unless it was a friend of the family; not to take the hand of just anyone to cross the street; never, under any circumstances, to get into someone’s car. Nicholas remembered fidgeting on the chair and wishing he could be outside; he’d wanted to check the tin of beer he’d left overnight on the porch to catch slugs. But his mother would not let him leave, would not let him even take a break for the bathroom-not until Nicholas could repeat, verbatim, her lesson. And by that time, Nicholas had conjured images of dark, stinking phantoms wearing ratty black capes, hiding in cars and in the creases of the sidewalk and in the alleys between stores, waiting to pounce on him. When his mother finally told him he could go outside to play, he’d chosen to remain indoors. For weeks after that, when the postman rang the doorbell, he had hidden beneath the couch.
Although he had got over his fear of strangers, he had never forgotten the consequences, which made Nicholas the one person in a group to stand off to the side. He could be charming if the situation called for it, but he was more likely to feign interest in a frieze on the ceiling than to be drawn into a conversation with people he didn’t know. In some individuals this was passed off as shyness; but in someone of Nicholas’s background and stature and classic features, it seemed more like aloof conceit. Nicholas found he didn’t mind the label. It gave him time to size up a situation and to respond more intelligently than those who spoke too quickly.
None of which explained why he impulsively asked Paige O’Toole to marry him, or why he gave her the spare key to his apartment even before hearing her answer.
They walked from Mercy to his apartment in total silence, and Nicholas was starting to hate himself. Paige wasn’t acting like Paige. He’d ruined it, whatever it was that he had liked about her. Nicholas was so nervous he couldn’t fit the key into the door, and he didn’t know what he was nervous about. When she stepped into the apartment he held his breath until he heard her say quietly, “My room was never this neat.” And then he relaxed and leaned against the wall. He answered, “I could learn to live messy.”
Conversations like that in the first hours after he proposed to Paige made Nicholas realize that there was a great deal he still did not know about her. He knew the big things, the sort of things that make up the talk at dinner parties: the name of her high school; how she became interested in drawing; the street she had lived on in Chicago. But he did not know the little details, the things only a lover would know-What had she named the mutt her father made her give back to the animal shelter? Who taught her to throw a sliding curve ball? Which constellations could
