Keith Ablow - Compulsion

She took my hand, moving her thumb along the inside of my wrist. "I appreciate your being here. I know it was asking a lot of you."

"You could ask for more," I whispered, drunk with her presence. Her black hair and green eyes, together with skin as smooth and radiant as I ever expect to see or touch, made me feel further than ever from the tenement house I grew up in. Add the chaser of feeling just a little outclassed by Julia's wealth, a little lucky to be smiled upon by a woman with so many options, and my balance was truly put to the test.

"Are you staying on the island?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"Where?"

I could feel myself falling. "The Breakers," I said. Letting go of her hand was an act of will, but I sensed that if we lingered any longer, it would raise eyebrows. I instinctively glanced at Garret and saw that he had already registered the emotional exchange between his mother and me. He shot me a look full of confusion and anger. "I hope I see you soon," I told Julia, and walked away, headed toward the back of the church.

I wasn't quite to the door when someone behind me grabbed my arm. I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with Darwin Bishop. His face had a look of fragile indulgence on it. "There's a part of me that likes your audacity," he said, still holding my arm.

Half of me wanted to share my condolences with him. The other half wanted to break his hand. "I don't think this is a good place to talk," I said.

"It's not the place I would have chosen, especially for you to romance my wife," Bishop said.

"That's not…" I started.

He let go of my arm. "You're in over your head," he said, in a tone that was almost fatherly. "Your instincts aren't serving you."

"Thanks for the advice," I said, and left it at that. I turned to go, but he grabbed hold of my arm again. I turned back to him.

"You know how you told me you have one skill?" Bishop said. "You're a burrower. Nothing more, nothing less."

"That's what I told you."

"I thought about that. And I realized I've really only got one skill myself."

"Which is?" I said.

"I pick winners from losers. In anything. It doesn't matter whether it's stocks, people, businesses, ideas. It's like a sixth sense with me."

I thought back to Bishop's bet on Acribat Software, down forty-five percent in a year. But that fact was a petty distraction; his billion-dollar fortune obviously meant he could see things other people would miss-in the markets, and perhaps elsewhere. "That's a valuable skill," I said.

"I rely on it," he said. "And my sixth sense tells me you're about to lose everything." He smiled. "I can smell it coming." He turned and walked away.

I watched him take his place again in the receiving line. My pulse was racing, and the muscles in my right arm were tense from holding back with the right cross I would have liked to deliver to his chin. But thinking about it now, what probably bothered me most was that I knew he was right, at least about one thing: I would have told anyone else in my place to stand back from the boundaries I was starting to cross.

I got back to my room at The Breakers at 9:40 p.m. I had grabbed takeout shrimp and arugula gourmet pizza for dinner-nothing being regular anything on Nantucket -and eaten it on my way back to the hotel. The night had turned windy and rainy, and that, together with the late hour, gave me a good excuse to bow out of spending the night at North Anderson 's. I called him at home and got the customary urgings toward safety that I would expect from a friend. Double-lock the door, no unexpected midnight repairs to the plumbing, and so forth. I sidestepped them, told him I'd be fine, that I was leaving the island in the morning and not returning for at least a day. I had business to attend to back in Boston, including another visit to Lilly at Mass General.

The management had left my bottle of wine back inside my room, on my nightstand. I smiled at its persistence, grabbed it, and was about to bring it far down the hall, where it couldn't find its way back to me, when the phone rang. I picked up. "Clevenger," I said.

"It's Julia."

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Downstairs."

I didn't know exactly how to respond. "In the lobby…" I said, for filler. Thinking of her just three floors away- alone-made me start to think what it would be like to hold her, without worrying that we might be seen.

"I need to be close to someone I trust," she said. "Just for a few minutes. I…" A moment of silence. "I want to tell you what it was like for me at the church tonight, what I really felt."

I knew the smart thing to do would be to join her in the lobby or meet her for coffee at the Brant Point Grill. But knowing what to do and actually doing it are different things. "I'm in room 307," I said.

When I heard a knock at my door, I resolved not to let things get too far, to keep some therapeutic distance between the two of us. I opened the door. Julia stood there in her black dress, her hair damp from the rain. She had been crying, but her eyes still glowed. I offered her my hand. She took it and walked into my arms. I pushed the door closed and let her cry as I held her. The feel of her delicate shoulder blade against my palm, the rising and falling of her chest against mine, a tear that ran off her cheek and down my neck were all intoxicating to me. No less so was the music playing in the background of our lives: her cruel husband, my cruel father, her need to escape a bad marriage, my boyhood fantasies of rescuing my mother.

Julia raised her head off my chest, turning her face up toward mine, with her eyes closed. And I did what might be forgiven, but not excused. I moved my hand to her cheek and kissed her, gently at first, then more passionately, sensing not the crossing of boundaries but the melting of them, their obliteration. Our mouths became one. And it seemed to me-and I believe to her-that our futures had also, mystically and immeasurably, been joined. My unconscious seemed to be saying that if these were the worst of circumstances in which to have found one another, they were, unavoidably and irretrievably, our circumstances. The rules of decorum that governed the great mass of relationships would have to yield. We were inevitable.

I have kissed many women in my life, but none of them made me feel the way Julia did. She ran her fingers up the back of my neck, then pulled me toward her, inside her, receiving all my passion, then pulling back, barely brushing her soft, full lips over mine, catching my lip between her teeth, gently pulling, making me feel she was hungry for me. Then her lips traveled up my cheek, and I heard her excited breathing louder than my own, felt her warm tongue slip inside my ear, move deeper, speaking about all the warm ways our bodies and souls could join into one.

Only after we had kissed a long time did I gather a fragile resolve to ease her away from me. "You wanted… to talk," I said.

She took a deep breath, let it out. She slowly opened her eyes and nodded. I took her by the hand and guided her to a couch that looked onto the harbor. The aluminum masts and gilded stems of a hundred or more sailboats caught the moonlight and swayed like a glittering crop of silver and gold on a field of blue. "Tell me," I said quietly, still holding her hand. "What was it like for you at St. Mary's tonight?"

She looked at our hands laced together, then placed her other hand on top of them. She looked back at me. "Like burying a piece of myself," she said. "I kept wishing it could have been me who died. Since the day she was born, I've had a feeling about Brooke-that she was someone extraordinary." Tears began streaming down her face. "It's horrible to say, but I felt much closer to her than I do to the boys. Even closer than I do to Tess."