Jennifer Greene: Wild in the Moonlight

She was in the bathtub. No longer singing the blues, just sunken in the warm water to the tips of her nipples, her long hair twisted and clipped out of the way. Two cats sat on the porcelain rim, balanced precariously but acting the part of sentinels. The bathwater wasn’t sudsy. In fact, he could see clearly to her pale white skin under the surface, the long slim legs, the white curve of her hip, the plump breasts. And the tummy.

His gaze fell on her tummy and his heart stopped all over again.

“Hi,” she said, as if she regularly greeted strange men in her bathtub. Now, though, he knew her well. Doing the unpredictable, the ditsy, the flaky, was how she’d learned to protect herself-especially from men wanting to look too closely. He wasn’t fooled anymore. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice and see the gamut of emotions in her eyes. Pain. Longing. Love.

How could he have missed that the love was there?

“Smells great in here,” he murmured.

“It should. It’s my personal recipe for a bath to take away your cares, no matter how heavy your heart is. It’s got a little lavender, a little marjoram, a little peppermint and some secret ingredients I’ll never tell anyone.” She looked at him with those clear, soft, vulnerable eyes and then took a breath.

“Except you, Cam. I’ll tell you. I mix a little lily of the valley and jasmine in there. That’s my secret.”

“Aha,” he said. And heeled off his right shoe. Then his left. His black sweater peeled off by a miracle. It had to be a miracle, because he was too fumble-fingered to do it himself. “I like the tummy.”

She glanced down. “I’ve really been on a milkshake binge.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason for the tummy.”

“No?” She sucked in a breath when he peeled off his cords and shorts. “Um, Cameron. You’re going to smell like flowers if you come in here.”

“I’d care about that if I were a sissy. But I happen to be a tough guy. A tough guy always does what a tough guy has to do.” The cats scattered when he stepped in. The water whooshed up to the top of the tub and splashed over. She didn’t notice or look. She only looked at him, pulled her knees up.

“You couldn’t get a bath closer to home?”

“Well, that’s the problem, chére. It took me this long, not to take a bath, but to realize that this is home.”

Total silence fell for a moment. He sank in, knee to knee, eye to eye, and reached out a hand. She folded her fingers with his. “I didn’t think you wanted a home, Cameron Lachlan.”

“I don’t know if I ever told you about my dad. I loved him. He wasn’t a bad guy, nothing like that. But he built his whole life around possessions. Things owned him instead of the other way around. He was never home for us. He never had time for us.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry. I just needed you to understand how I turned into a vagabond. I just never wanted that to happen to me. I wanted people to matter, not things. I wanted the freedom to love people, not things.” He laved her feet, since they were easy to reach. And her knees. He got her knees really, really clean. “And then I met you. And lost you. And realized I was doing exactly what he did wrong. Putting a barrier between myself and who I wanted to spend time with, who I wanted to love. Who I needed in my life.”

He moved up from the knees, to those long, silky white thighs. Her phone rang. It seemed a measure of how well he knew her, and them, that neither even blinked or made any effort to answer it. Phones were always going to ring in this house. They’d wait.

“I quit Jeunnesse. Came back to my place in New York, saw my girls. But the whole time I kept thinking about making a whole different kind of life. I’ve got the money to buy the land, put in a big five-hundred acres of lavender. It’d be adventurous, challenging. Hard work, but still a lot of free traveling time in the winter. Time to be impulsive any way a couple might want to be. Of course, we have to find a house-sitter for the cats. And obviously it’s not your usual life-it’d only work for people who really liked the land, got a charge out of getting their hands dirty-”

“So…you came back for the land, did you?”

“Nope.” He could see that haunted look leaving her eyes. And she wasn’t backing away from him. But she didn’t move toward him.

“You always sounded so positive, Cam. That you didn’t want to settle down.”

“I don’t want to settle down. I want to live with you and be your lover. Forever. I don’t want to settle for anything. I want to create exactly the life that works for us. I was going to say for the two of us-but maybe for the three or four or five of us, if for any reason the family somehow grew.”

Again she went still, seemed to even stop breathing. “Daisy called you, didn’t she?”

He didn’t directly answer that, because this wasn’t about her sister or anything her sister had said to him. It was about the two of them. And to make sure he had her attention, he took her warm, slippery hands in his. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for a woman to marry a guy who has nearly grown children…at least until you’ve met the children. I’m totally positive you’d get on with them like a house afire, but they are teenagers, which means they stay up nights trying to think up new ways to make adults’ lives difficult. For myself, though, I’ve always liked kids. Nice kids, wild kids, difficult kids, doesn’t matter to me. I’d love more.”

“Lachlan, that isn’t at all what you said before.”

“I know, I know. I wasn’t exactly lying before. But I was trying to make sure you know I loved you for you. That you were what mattered to me, not whether you could have kids or not. I love you first. I want you first.”

Tears started to well up in her soft eyes, so he started talking faster.

“Violet, you’re probably ten times more woman than I can handle, but I’d like to try. But I want you to absolutely know that my loving you has nothing to do with kids. If you want some, we can adopt or foster, or try working with those skinny tubes…hell, maybe we can just take in more cats. I don’t know. I don’t care. I just care that we work together to find choices that are right for us.”

She took a long, shaky breath. “It’s possible that this tummy isn’t caused by too many milkshakes.”

“I thought the skinny tubes were pretty much a for-sure problem.”

“So did I. Every doctor I went to told me my chances of conception were minuscule.” Her fingertips caressed his. Her gaze seemed to caress his face at the same time. “You must have awfully determined little seeds in there, Lachlan.”

“I prefer to think of them as skillful. And smart enough to go after what they want.” He wanted to draw her into his arms, right there, right then. They had a lifetime to finish all this talking business, and the old-fashioned tub was big, but not necessarily big enough for the rest of the night he had planned. Yet he had to say gently, “You should have told me you were pregnant, chére.”

“I wanted to and I would have. But I had to think about how, Cam. I never wanted you to feel trapped. Nothing works when a person feels trapped. And I love you. Of everyone in the universe, Cameron Lachlan, I so want you to be happy. I want you to have what you need in your life.”

There, now. He drew her on top of him. Warm water sloshed on the floor, but still he finally had her, breast to breast, tummy to tummy. Heart to heart. “That’s easy, then, because what I need is you. In my life, all my life.”

“That’s a two-way street. I love you so much. And I want you in my life, all my life,” she whispered, and blessed him with an eyes-closed, drowning-defying, promise-invoking kiss. When they came up for air, his eyes were moist and hers were dry.