The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(26)

Erik and David stood apart with Daisy’s father.

“My mother kisses everybody,” Daisy had said. “But with my dad, approval is all in the handshake. First time meeting, it’s single hand.” She shook Erik’s hand, demonstrating. “But if he likes you, you graduate to a shake with the other hand on top, or better, on your upper arm. This is acceptance. If the other hand comes up like this—” She patted Erik’s face gently but heartily with her palm. “—you’re family. But here’s the carte blanche: handshake, palm pat and tug on the earlobe.” Her fingers gave Erik’s ear a single, brisk tug.

“Then I’m in?”

“Then you’re behind the velvet rope.”

Erik’s ears had gone untouched tonight but he had received the single handshake with upper arm grasp. He was satisfied.

Joseph Bianco had gained American citizenship by joining the Army and doing two tours in Vietnam as a combat engineer. Poised and observant, with a dry humor, Joe didn’t say much, yet he was fully present. His reticence wasn’t awkward or exclusionary. Rather he put out a companionable sort of silence, much like Daisy’s. Erik was instinctively drawn to it. And he couldn’t help but appreciate a man who could dismantle land mines. He suspected Joe Bianco had a plan K, minimum.

“Is it true sappers are the only ones in the army who can wear beards?” David asked.

“In the French Foreign Legion, yes,” Joe said. “And they’re allowed to carry an axe, too.”

“What did you carry in Vietnam?”

“An axe.” Joe winked at the boys. His blue eyes didn’t have Daisy’s green overtones, but the same dark rim was around the iris.

They filed back into the theater for the second act, sitting through all the candy divertissements before the climactic grand pas de deux for the Sugarplum and Cavalier.

It was the first tutu role Erik had ever seen Daisy dance. A role firmly entrenched in the classical vocabulary. Her technique was clean, polished, precise. She sparkled. He noticed her feet were especially controlled, defying gravity whenever she came down off her pointes.

Will dismissed the role of the Cavalier, calling it a mindless, hands-and-arms role. “It’s a snore. I never string two steps together, I just stand where she needs me to be and make her look good.”

But it was still Will and Daisy dancing, and they still put their own interpretation into the conventional partnering, making eye contact and smiling at each other. Real smiles. They didn’t make it romantic, they maintained a certain regal, storybook air, yet their natural human connection transformed them from an insipid dessert to a textured couple who ruled this make-believe land together.

“This is the first time I’ve seen a Sugar-Cavi couple who actually looked like a couple,” Kees said afterward.

“It’s pure Daisy and Will,” Marie said.

It’s generous partnering, Erik thought.

Joe and Francine took him and Daisy out for a late supper, where the wait staff brought Daisy a piece of cake with a candle. Back in her room, she unwrapped Erik’s present, a set of Russian nesting dolls. Matryoshka. Daisy had been collecting them since she was a child.

They locked the door, unfolded the night and spread it out like a blanket. They tumbled onto its softness, kissing, touching and undressing.

“Don’t move,” Erik whispered.

“What?”

“Don’t move. Stay still. This.”

“This?”

“This. This right here is like the greatest moment of my life.”

He was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder down the full length of her body, its curves and contours and shadows. One of his arms across her collar bones, above the swell of her breasts in the silver-grey bra he loved. His other forearm, darker against the skin of her stomach, and his hand slid halfway into her underwear, just on the verge of easing them down. He held still. Took a mental picture and framed it.

“This,” he said. He touched the heat coming off her, the heat he had created.

She pulled her breath in. He slid his hand under her bra, fingers curving around her breast. Opening the clasp, she tilted her head to look up at him.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you.”

“And I’m ready if you are.”

He turned her, held her head in his hands, their eyebrows together. “You’re supposed to get presents today, not give them,” he whispered.

She smiled. “It is my present.” She slid her arms out of the bra straps and brought them up around his neck, her hands gliding on his bare skin. Beneath them he trembled, hard and aching with the need to be inside her. He was pure, mouth-watering want. Dying to seize it all and swallow it whole and curbing himself to let the taste linger.

“You’re sure?” He felt compelled to ask one last time.

She kissed him. Her fingers curled around his earlobe and pulled slowly. “You’re in,” she said.



*



Her skin was amazing: burnished gold under twinkling light garlands. She was sitting on her bed, her long legs stretched out in the tangle they had made of the covers. They had kissed and touched and caressed and licked and explored each other until the sheets were a twisted and rumpled mess beneath their sweating, trembling bodies. Now Erik was kneeling between her calves and together, with shaking fingers, they were tearing open the condom packet and rolling it on him.