He almost did. Once. On his darkest day, he sat on the floor of his lonely apartment with the phone in one hand and his Swiss army knife in the other. He started dialing and stopped a half-dozen times. Opened and closed the blade a half-dozen times, pressing it to his left wrist where the daisy was tattooed. Then stopped and closed the blade. Over and over, he dialed and stopped, opened the blade and stopped. Feeling he had to cut Daisy out of him or he would die. Feeling he’d rather die than cut her out of him.
Somehow his fingers had dialed one last time and not stopped. Help came and the knife was taken away from him.
“I never got it back,” he said.
Daisy’s eyebrows flickered. “What?”
“Nothing.” He touched the scar beneath her shoulder blade again. “I pick this one. It’s mine.”
“All right, then.” She rolled beneath his hand, turning to face him. “Hold me.”
He wrapped his arms around her. Their legs wove and twined and they yanked tight like a knot. Soon their mouths touched and they were melting together. Soft and hard. Vicious and tender.
“It will never be enough,” he whispered against her mouth, his hands coming up to cup her breasts. Pinky to thumb, he pulled his hands to their widest span, the most square inches he could lay on her skin, and he still couldn’t feel her. Skin to brain and back, the message was garbled with a surreal static. After twelve years of estrangement, she was live flesh and blood to be touched and held again.
“Never enough, ever again,” he said. “I’ll never be able to touch you enough.”
Her arms went up around his neck, her back arching. “Try,” she whispered.
The square of sun crept across the mattress and the frost on the window panes melted as they made love, frenetic and sloppy. And fast, because Daisy had to get to a rehearsal. Not even a reconciled love affair could stop the tide of Nutcracker crashing onto December’s shores.
He listened as Daisy splashed around in the bathroom. The scrub and spit of teeth being brushed. Faucets run, toilet flushed, towel rack rattling. Hating how she was wiping him off her skin and out of her mouth and he’d have to start all over again.
He watched with a tired arousal as she dressed. The flex of her leg muscles as she balanced on one foot and pulled a pant leg over the other. How she still hooked a bra backward around her waist then swiveled and pulled it into proper place. Drawing her hair back into a loose bun, she crouched by the edge of the bed and kissed him. Her sugar smell filled his head.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” she said.
“Hurry,” he mumbled against her neck, already getting sucked back down into sleep.
He woke again when the jingle bells on the front door rang out. Conditioned as a Pavlov dog, his erection stirred. The radiators were clinking and hissing and the room was warm. He moved the sheets and quilt off him, ready for another round. He felt the bit of desire settle between his teeth and a smug, itching need to prove himself.
Come and get it, woman.
She seemed to be puttering around downstairs. She was teasing him. Fine. He waited twelve years. He could wait another five minutes. Still…
“You’re killing me,” he said against the pillows.
Now she was coming up the stairs. Slowly. His toes curled.
The bedroom door creaked open, accompanied by a strange, mechanical-sounding roll.
“Oh. Bonjour, monsieur.”
Erik yanked the covers over his skin and rolled in a panic. A woman stood at the foot of the bed, grey and bosomy in leggings, T-shirt and a long apron, her hand on the handle of the vacuum cleaner. One of her eyebrows went up and the opposite corner of her mouth went down as they regarded each other and their place in the situation.
“Bonjour,” he said.
She set her bucket of cleaning supplies down and walked through the tossed and flung clothing on the floor, over to the windows to open the drapes.
“I regret,” she said through a thick French accent. “I not know Madame had company.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll just…”
“No, no,” she said, picking up a pair of jeans by the waist and giving the legs a brisk thwack in the air. “I begin downstairs today.”
She set the jeans on the dresser, sniffing deeply as she looked around the rest of the wardrobe on the floor. She brushed one