you like this.” Not knowing what else to do, she turned away and shut her eyes.
The sounds of him getting dressed—the soft rustle of denim, his nervous breathing—seemed very loud to her and she held her breath until he said “all right,” then opened her eyes to find him wearing jeans and a cashmere sweater, his feet still bare. They were pleasantly slender, the tops of his toes lightly furred, his arches pronounced, the skin pale, like the underbelly of a fish.
He reached past her to hang the damp robe up on a hook next to the door and when his hand brushed her shoulder, she stepped back so quickly she almost fell into the bed.
“I didn’t follow you. I swear it. I had some business in Boston and I was about to tell everyone that I was going down yesterday when you came out with your own announcement. I couldn’t say then that I was going as well because you would have thought I was following you. I had to go to an auction house. Skinner’s. You can call them and check it out if you want.”
He went on. “Bloody hell, it’s so hard to explain. I don’t know what it is, but I feel like you’re afraid of me, like you think I’m up to no good. And then I put my foot in it the other night and I just felt like you couldn’t stand to have me around. So I decided it was easier to say I had things to do in Vermont than to explain why I was gone all day.”
“That’s a very neat explanation, Ian. But why did you go to my house? What business could you possibly have had on my street, for godsakes?” She could feel perspiration running down her back despite the fact that it was cold in his room.
He turned away and went to sit down on the bed, pulling a hand roughly through his hair. For a matter of minutes, he seemed about to speak, as though he were wrestling with a pronouncement or a speech, shaping the words in his head, trying them out to see how they worked. Finally, she could see that he had given it up.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly, meeting her eyes. “I wanted to see where you lived. I looked you up in the phone book.”
“Come on, you can’t expect me to believe that crap. I saw you. You followed me to Boston.”
She was furious with him, because she felt somewhere deep in her bones that he was lying, that he knew more about this whole thing than he was letting on, and because she realized in that moment that he had gotten to her, that she was very attracted to him and that if he were to stand up and walk over and kiss her, it might possibly be the most thrilling thing she could imagine. And then she did imagine it.
Suddenly, Ian was standing directly in front of her. She could feel a kind of vibrating warmth emanating from his body, a warmth that she wanted to step into, let wash over her like rainwater.
But he kept talking, smiling down at her. “You can’t imagine how embarrassing this is. When I was in primary school I used to walk by the home of a little girl named Harriet. She was lovely, Harriet. One day she caught me and I made up a story about how my dog had run away and I was looking for him and she spent a half hour helping me look for my nonexistent dog. She felt so sorry for me. Do you feel sorry for me?”
She looked up into his eyes and he leaned forward and pressed his mouth lightly to hers, just for a second, testing her response, then looking more urgently for her lips. She leaned into the kiss, thrilled and terrified.
“No,” Sweeney whispered into his mouth, normal breath gone to her.
“Good.” He lifted her hair away from her neck and held it lovingly, weighing it in his hands like something very precious, then laying it back down on her shoulders.
And that was what broke the spell, for it was something that Colm had always done when he wanted to make love or when he was feeling sentimental, and she stumbled backward toward the door, mumbling that she was sorry but that she had to go.
TWENTY-FIVE
DECEMBER 21
Winter in the colony was a time of hunkering down, of keeping the houses warm with wood