Zach turned to look at Nora’s sleeping form. She looked so young right now, so defenseless. She looked like a child sleeping on her stomach, her arms tucked under her. What a fool he’d been. First he’d pushed her away out of grief for Grace. Then he’d pushed her away out of anger at himself. Adrift and unmoored, she had tried again and again to throw him a rope to save him from the raging waters. And now he no longer felt like a drowning man at sea. Nora…the siren and the goddess, the ship and the wine-dark sea. She would either save him or end him. Right now, with her words singing in his ears, he didn’t really care which.
Standing slowly so as not to wake her, Zach found his messenger bag and dug through it. He pulled out her contract and returned to the sofa. He knelt beside her sleeping form and flipped to the last page. Taking up his pen, he laid the contract on her back and with a sure hand and absolute certainty that the book would outsell anything Royal had ever published, he signed his name, Zechariah Easton.
Nora stirred and opened her eyes.
“Zach?”
“Here.” He handed her the pen. “Your turn.”
Nora took the pen and only stared at him for a moment. Then she rolled up, took the contract, laid it on his back and signed Eleanor Schreiber on the line.
“It’s done,” she said.
“It’s good. Nora—” Zach placed a hand on the side of her face “—it’s spectacular.”
Nora smiled. And then the smile was gone. They only looked at each other. Nora leaned forward and kissed him.
He didn’t think it was possible but their second kiss was even more intoxicating than their first. He was still on his knees, and she sat in front of him on the edge of the couch. He started to stand, started to push her onto her back.
“No.” She stood up abruptly. “I wrote the book your way. If we’re going to do this, we do it mine.”
Zach didn’t have to ask what she meant.
“Safe out and send me home, Zach. Or come with me. Those are your only two choices.”
Zach rose off the floor and made the most terrifying decision of his life.
“I’m with you.”
Nora headed to the bedroom.
He stood alone in his living room and breathed for a minute. Grace… Her name echoed hollowly in his heart like an unanswered prayer.
But there was no going back. The wind took hold of the sails. Zach followed Nora into his bedroom. She struck a match and lit the single candle he’d left next to the bed.
“A bottle of wine and a candle…” Nora said. “You were looking forward to this night, weren’t you, Zach?”
“Yes,” he confessed.
She came over to him, unknotted her tie and took it off. She brought it over his eyes and tied it around his head, blindfolding him. He tensed at his loss of his sight.
“Relax.” Nora’s voice was calm and soothing as if she were talking to a child. “Trust me, please.”
“I do,” he said and knew he meant it.
He stood still as Nora unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it down his arms. But she didn’t take it off completely. She used the shirt to tie his hands behind his back.
Zach sensed her step away. He heard her soft laugh.
“Ecce homo.” Zach remembered the painting in the church. “Behold the man.”
“Nora…” Zach said, worried he was about to get crucified.
“How do you feel?”
“Disoriented.”
“The blindfold will do that. Don’t breathe too deeply and don’t lock your knees.”
He nodded and tried to relax his legs.
“Do you know why I’ve done this, Zach?”
“No.”
“I could say it’s because I want you. I do want you. I have rarely been so attracted to someone in my life. But if I just wanted you I could have had you the day we met. Yes?”
Zach knew she expected an answer. He decided to save them both time and simply go with the truth.
“Yes.”
“Do you know why I didn’t let that happen? Why I stopped you before you could ask me up that night in the cab?”
Zach experienced a mild wave of vertigo. Nora moved as she spoke and the words seemed to come from everywhere at once.
“Why?” Nora had never made her attraction to him a secret. Why she’d turned him down the one time he’d come on to her was something he’d wondered about since that night.
“Because when you said Grace’s name you had so much pain in your eyes. I knew you didn’t really want me. You just wanted to not think and not feel for a few hours. Yes?”
“Yes,” Zach admitted.
“I do want you, Zach, but I also want to know you.”
“You do know me.”
“You’ve kept half your life from me,” she said. “I don’t want half. I want all. You know my secrets now. Time to tell me yours. It’s all or nothing tonight. Say ‘all’ and we go on. Say ‘nothing’ and this ends now and forever. You decide.”
He felt the floor rock underneath him. On the wood floor and in his bare feet, he imagined for a moment he was on a ship in a storm.
“All.”
“Good,” Nora said, sounding relieved and yet determined. “Now…tell me about Grace.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Then say your safe word and end it. But that will end it. It and us. But if you don’t want to end it, answer the question.”
For a terrible moment Zach considered his options. There were some things he simply did not talk about. But they’d come so far now…it would be a more difficult journey back than forward. Zach took a few short, shallow breaths and used the street sounds below to orient himself.
“Grace was eighteen when we met.” He gave up the words like precious possessions to a thief. “I was…older.”
“You were teaching at Cambridge then, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Grace was your student?”
Zach swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“That explains why my relationship with Wes made you so uncomfortable at first. Déjà vu, right? It seems so unlike you, getting involved with a student.”
“All teachers nurse attractions to the occasional student. I never intended to act upon it. Grace was lovely beyond words, twice as bright and talented as any student I’d ever taught. She wrote poetry, good poetry. No eighteen-year-old in history has ever written good poetry. But she did.”
“What else did she do?”
“She brought me her poetry sometimes and asked for my opinion, my help.”
“You were her editor.”
Zach laughed bitterly.
“I suppose I was.”
“She loved you.”
“As much as a girl of eighteen can love her thirty-one-year-old teacher. At the time, I simply assumed she cared only for her writing.”
“Eighteen means she couldn’t buy booze in the States. It doesn’t mean she couldn’t love you.”