to help me stand, offering his hand when my ankle wobbles on the pavement. Even in anger he won’t let me fall.
* * *
I’ve contemplated where Christopher Bardot lives more times than I care to admit. The depths of hell, I would have said once. Looking at the sterile high-rise condominium with its glass surfaces and its black leather, I think I had it right.
In the fridge I find old take-out containers and a bottle of champagne, unopened, that someone must have given him. It takes some searching to find a drawer with some medicine. I pour him a glass of tap water and hand him two Advils. “Take this.”
He swallows it without looking at it close or thinking too hard about it. This Christopher is a stranger, one who does what I ask and apologizes for being a bastard. “Thanks.”
And says thank you, apparently.
I study his dark eyes, wondering if he fell over the side of the balcony when I wasn’t looking and hit his head. “Are you sure you’re okay? Sutton didn’t knock something loose in the fight?”
He laughs, a little distant. “Deserved it, if he did.”
A curved leather couch takes up most of the living space. Christopher stumbles over to it and lies down, and I realize then that I probably won’t have much luck moving him. So I follow him over and sit down by his head, moving a lock of dark hair out of his eyes.
“You scared me,” I say, soft and serious.
He looks up at me. “Same.”
That shakes a silent laugh out of me. “Okay, but I wasn’t the one acting crazy.”
“No, you were the one holding his hand. The whole damn play, that’s all I could see. There could have been an explosion on that stage, and I wouldn’t have noticed.”
My cheeks feel hot. “That’s a shame, because it was an amazing play. About love and betrayal and redemption. About doing what’s right, and all the ways we pay for it.”
“That’s what I saw, too.”
He’s talking about Sutton holding my hand. Is that the love or the betrayal? Maybe it’s the redemption, being saved from the terrible pattern we were in.
“I didn’t come to your condo to have sex with you.”
He smiles a little, his eyes closed. “Didn’t think so. You restrained yourself plenty of other times when I didn’t smell like liquor and hadn’t just ruined your nice business deal.”
“You couldn’t hear that from the back.”
“No, but I saw the way Sutton looked. What did you have to promise them?”
“Some book restorations. Saving the carving behind the library. It doesn’t matter now. She looked pretty pissed about the fight.”
“We’ll push the deal through.”
“How?” I ask, almost soundless.
He hears me anyway. “I don’t know.”
“If you’re fighting the rich old ladies of the historical society, who’s going to buy the designer purses and overpriced shoes when your mall opens?”
He doesn’t answer, and I realize he’s fallen asleep. A lightweight, my Christopher. Or maybe he just drank his weight in vodka in that box.
The linen closet looks downright pathetic with only a spare sheet and a mismatched blanket. I take them both because I’m already shivering in the condo. The thermostat looks like it would require an airplane pilot to navigate, so I cover Christopher with both of them.
He snores. Not very loud, but enough that I notice. A rumble in his chest. That’s an intimate piece of knowledge I never had before, not even when we shared a bed that first night. I was too out of it after my dip in the bay to wake up. Or maybe I heard him and just didn’t remember.
It’s possible that I snore, that he heard me do it that night.
This was his fall into the ocean. Not a literal tumble with a splash in the salt water, but a fall nonetheless. The lowest I’ve ever seen him. How could I not help him back up?
Part of me wants to search his cabinets and drawers to ferret out his secrets. The other part of me realizes that there wouldn’t be any lying around. He’s a man who holds it all behind those dark eyes, locked behind a thousand doors, each as opaque as the next. What would it be like to get behind them? Maybe I’m only now resigned to the idea that I won’t ever know.
His bed is just as modern and impersonal as the rest of the condo, a low-slung floating platform that feels like a boat adrift on the ocean. That’s where I curl