At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(76)

"Why do they have to say things like that?" Gracie asked. "Don't they have anything better to do?"

His mother's late model Lincoln Town Car was parked in the first row in the spot marked "Owner." He fumbled around with the keyless entry system, almost dropping Gracie in the process, and managed to get the passenger door open and deposit her on the front seat. He ran around to the driver's side and slid behind the wheel.

They maintained an uneasy silence during the three-minute drive to her father's house. Everything seemed both strange and familiar, an odd blend of the past and present. He wondered if she sensed it too. How many times had they been alone together in a car, the two of them enclosed in a private hideaway of glass and steel. How small their world had been then: a stretch of beach, the front seat of a sports car. It was where he had learned that a man could hold the universe in his arms and want for nothing more.





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For the first time in her life, Gracie was afraid of him. The car seemed too small for the emotions it contained. Loud, ugly emotions that threatened to tear off the roof and kick out the windows. The kind of emotions that she'd been running from since the day she left Idle Point.

She had hurt him badly. She could see it in the way he held the wheel, the rhythm of his breathing, the thrust of his jaw. Simon Chase's revelation had shattered what sense of family she'd had, and come close to destroying her sense of self. She couldn't face Noah or Ben, knowing the truth but unable—or unwilling—to burden them with it too. And so she ran. She had thought she was setting him free of the memories but neither one of them was free, not in any way that mattered. They were still bound together by promises whispered in the dark a long time ago and nothing, neither time nor circumstance, had changed that fact.

He rounded a curve halfway between her house and town, took it too fast, and she turned to look at him. Their eyes met and she saw herself reflected back, saw the future as it could have been and she started to cry.

"I shouldn't have come back," she said. "I never thought you would be here."

"I wouldn't be if I'd known," he said. "I wanted to live the rest of my life without you in it."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry—"

He skidded to a stop along the side of the road.

"Noah—"

"Shut up."

He gathered her into his arms, his touch rough and sweet and filled with hunger. She could fight him, push him away, she knew that, knew she had the power, but the second his mouth found hers she was lost. Years of missing him, years of emptiness and longing, overwhelmed whatever reason she had left and she melted against him. Nothing mattered but his mouth on hers, the heat of his body beneath her hands, the smell of his skin, the taste of it beneath her tongue, the delicious ache building deep inside her. She was tired of being alone, tired of being lonely, of being far away from her home, from Noah, from everything she had ever loved and lost and longed for. He was her home, more than Idle Point, more than that stretch of beach near the lighthouse, more than the little cottage where she grew up, and nothing would ever change that.





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Noah was drunk on her scent, on the silky wet feel of her hair between his fingers, of the sounds she made when he touched her. She had always been so joyous, so responsive, so eager to give and receive pleasure as if it were a sacrament of the flesh. All of those sweetly carnal memories flooded his heart as he touched and kissed and tasted her. She was the other half of his soul. Time had changed nothing at all. He wasn't free of her, not even close. She was there inside his head, his heart, his blood, where she had been from the very beginning, where she would always be and he hated her for the power she still held over him.

He deepened the kiss, drawing her very breath into his soul. He cupped her face between his hands and memorized every plane and angle, the short straight nose, the generous mouth, the warm intelligent brown eyes glittering now with desire and then he remembered a note left propped on the kitchen table with the words "Goodbye" scrawled at the bottom and the anger and pain was as fresh and cutting now as it had been eight long years ago.

Cold water couldn't have worked any better.

He sat back against his seat and clutched the steering wheel. He was breathing hard.

She adjusted her jacket and smoothed her hair. Her hands were trembling.

They didn't say another word until he dropped her off at the front door of her father's house and then the only word they said was goodbye.