The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,111
they’ll bring to Earth when they come. Maybe it’ll be something like a raspberrystraw-berrylime. Or the most fantastically chocolate tequila.” He laughed softly, and realized Patrick was sitting there quietly next to him. He looked at him, and the same electric zing he always felt blazed through him, lighting up all of his nerves and the back of his throat, and he thought how much he wanted to bend in and kiss him.
Instead, it was Patrick who leaned over, and put his hand on Ivan’s face. Touched his hair. “I wish you knew how amazing you are,” he said, and shook his head sadly. “I’m not sure I can convince you.”
“Try,” Ivan rumbled, and bent in to kiss those pretty pouty lips. “Please try.”
Elena accepted the big goblet of wine Julian offered, and carried it downstairs, where she stripped out of her sweaty, food-drenched clothes and climbed into the hot tub. She sank down to her chin. It was absolutely dark except for the bars of light falling through the patio doors from the great room above. No moon. No sounds except the bubbling of the water. She sipped the cold, crisp Chardonnay and stared upward.
Into the nothingness of her exhaustion flashed a blip of noise—crashing, breaking, crunching metal—and a flash of sky. Like this one.
She sat up, splashing, and the sudden move, even in the heated water, made her cry out softly in pain. She had to stay in the water for a while, let the rock-tight muscles ease a little.
God what a night! The insanity poured through her, the constant Medusa’s head of tasks, weaving and waving together endlessly, the chaotic roar of voices and clattering dishes and the rush of her own heartbeat roaring through her ears.
—the cool chuckling of water in the utter silence of cold night and stars overhead and the click of cooling metal in the darkness and the vast, vast loneliness—
She sat up straighter, breathed in, breathed out, a therapist’s trick from years ago. Then she took a long swallow of wine. Her own trick.
—a hand wrapping around hers, the starry starry night, and whispered voice, it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay someone’s coming—
Elena stood up. Climbed out. Wrapped herself in a thick white robe and went inside. Upstairs. “I need to go to bed,” she announced. “Same room as before?”
In the darkness, Julian lay next to Elena. He’d talked her into sleeping with him, assuring her that Portia didn’t come to his room for any reason, never even came upstairs. They had not made love. She was too plainly, painfully exhausted, barely able to navigate the stairs when they arrived at the house, and even more haunted looking after the very short stint in the hot tub.
She had fallen asleep finally, but it was not a peaceful retreat—a foot twitched, a hand reached out. She shifted away from him, showing him the ancient scar on her back, cutting through her flesh in a long diagonal from shoulder to hip. When he held her, he found his fingers gravitating toward it, tracing the snake shape on the shoulder blade, the faintness over her ribs. It was just there. Part of her.
And yet in the faint pink light of clouds moving into the night sky, he could see the violence of it, the wrenching loss it represented. She had not spoken at all of the accident this morning, and he worried about that. How could you just absorb so much, over and over? He wanted her to let down her guard, maybe have a good cry, express her fury over losing her home, having a car come through her house, losing all of her best kitchen staff, all in a single day.
Instead, her face showed nothing. But in the darkness now, he heard little moans and expressions of protest. The scar seemed almost to writhe, a snake coming to life, rising out of the bed to reveal secrets to him that he should not know. He stretched out his fingers and very, very lightly touched the swoop of the snake into her hip, where it almost seemed to glow with fierce heat. And it wasn’t his imagination—the flesh was hotter here than elsewhere on her body—pain speaking what she could not.
Jesus, how could he help her?
She jolted awake suddenly, sitting up straight with a cry. Julian jerked his hand back, ashamed that he’d disturbed her. She had her hands to her face, covering her eyes, then she smoothed them down her cheekbones, her jaw.