“And eating. Not like this spring, that was extreme, but it seems Consuelo is enjoying having Loretta around. They’re always in the kitchen conspiring. I call Mom up and tell her what they made. It’s always a good conversation starter.”
“How is she doing?”
“Lonely. Sad. Missing Pop.” Andy wasn’t making eye contact. “I asked her if she wants me to come out and she said, not until Christmas, I need to get used to it. Her complex has all these activities. She’s doing everything.”
“Still seeing old friends?”
“Oh yeah. Well, you know. She’s lived in Miami all her life.” Andy leaned back against the wall, gazing at Dana. “There are times I think I should have gone back there to live.”
“You had a good relationship with him this way.”
“Yeah. Probably a better relationship than if I’d been there. He was a stubborn old goat.” He drank the rest of his coffee. “And I would have resented it. I know this was better.”
“Your life would have been smaller there. And you wouldn’t have met Victor.”
“God, I know. I look at him sometimes and think, what if. Who would I have settled for, so I wouldn’t be alone forever.”
Dana drank coffee, watching him over the rim of the mug. “Was there anyone here?”
“Not really. My best bet might have been Sergei. I could have moved to Las Vegas, if it got bad enough here.” If I didn’t have Victor, if I didn’t have a home. Surrounded by friends finding love while I didn’t. Dana might have seen all that. Andy shook himself a little. “Sergei and I were never together.
There wouldn’t have been any baggage. It was always this, well, maybe. You know?”
“Yeah, I know. There were a few well maybes back in the day.”
“Of course there fucking were. Little blonde hottie.” Dana did a ‘stop it’
thing, but she was smiling. “Anyway I did meet Victor, thank all the gods, as Tanith would say. So instead of becoming bitter and hateful in my lonely old age, I get to fuck like a tomcat and brag about it to all my happily-married friends.”
“And also, of course, live in a castle.” Andy performed a gesture saying
‘exactly.’ Dana offered a refill. He nodded. She poured. “I’m still jealous of that sunroom.”
“You should be.”
Victor stared at Robyn. As usual, she appeared totally relaxed. Attentive, calm, and nonjudgemental. “Doesn’t any of this get to you?”
“Victor, you’re not telling me you murdered someone and hid the body.
You have some issues, we’re talking about your issues, and you’re going to
solve those issues. Because you want to. What gets to me is if someone comes in here to talk about their issue but they don’t really want to solve it.”
He laughed under his breath. “Yeah, okay. So when Andy and I talked about this I’d already figured out part of the problem. Two parts of the problem. I mean, the source. Why I was resentful, why I was jealous. I still haven’t figured out why I would lash out at him like that. I spent so many years suppressing, why wouldn’t I … .” He trailed off. Thought for a minute.
“Because I don’t have to?”
Robyn did a ‘possibly?’ thing. “You trust him.”
“I do. I always did, even when it was potentially career suicide to trust him.” He didn’t say anything for a while. Robyn didn’t push. She never did.
Sometimes simply being in that room with someone who was waiting to hear what he had to say was enough to get him to the next words. Even though he always had that at home, especially now. Now that they had so much time.
“Our first night was eight hours long. We haven’t talked about that, have we?” She shook her head. She knew how he’d met Andy, and how he’d made the pass that took them to bed, and how he’d fucked things up almost immediately.
“Tell me if you want to,” she said after a while.
That was all he needed. “We had sex three times in those eight hours.
We slept together, we talked, we kissed so much my mouth was sore the whole next day.” I was sore all over, he thought. “We were naked. That was only the third time in my life I was naked with a lover, and the first time I spent a whole night with a man.”
Robyn had heard about Victor’s experiences with women. He’d told her he felt like the sex was the price for actually sleeping with someone. “That must have been profound.”
“I was almost crying when I walked out of there. I was like, how can I leave, I have to leave, this was the worst thing I’ve ever done. His face, my God.”
“When you told him you had to go?”
“When I told him I shouldn’t have been there.” Victor pinched the bridge of his nose, took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Sometimes I feel like all I’ve ever done is hurt him.”
“Victor.”
“I know. I know it’s not true. And he’s taken a swipe at me a few times.
But you know, he’s always so far out in front of me. He’s got those extra years, all that experience. He hears himself and he fixes it. I don’t always hear myself.”
“You’ll get there.”
“So the first time. Are you sure about this? I can’t talk about this without getting graphic. I don’t want to gross you out.”
“Victor, I do court-ordered counseling.”
Ugh, he thought. “Okay. I had him on his back on the couch and we were about to do it. He had one foot on the floor and the other up on the back of the couch. I was about to turn him over. He said, uh-uh, I want to see your face. For a second I was like, what? Because I never did that before. Not face to face. He told me where
