Tuesday afternoon, Manhattan
Taylor Robinson was so engrossed in her reading she almost didn’t hear the phone in her office buzz. On the third ring, she lifted the handset.
“Yes,” she said blankly, still staring at the contract in front of her.
Jennifer, the new receptionist, laughed. “Did I wake you up?”
“No,” Taylor said, smiling. “I was just off in the zone.”
“Well, come back to Earth. I’ve got Mr. Schiftmann holding for you on line three.”
“Oh, great,” Taylor said, punching the blinking button for line three. “Hello,” she continued.
“Hi, you,” Michael answered. “How are you?”
“Fine. I was just going over the last of the foreign contracts. Did you know you’re going to be published in Por-tuguese?”
Michael sounded surprised. “Really? Where?”
“Brazil. It’s not much money, only twenty-five thousand a book, but it’s a lot of money for foreign.”
“I can remember when I’d kill for a twenty-five-grand contract. Now it’s just side money. I think I see a Rio de Janeiro book tour in my future. What do you think?”
“I think that’s quite doable. And I think you’ll need a competent guide.”
“You’ve been to Rio?”
“Couple of times. One of my favorites. So where are you?”
“Cleveland,” Michael answered.
“Ah, Cleveland. Not one of my favorites.”
“Well, I won’t be here much longer. I closed on the condo today. The movers are coming first thing in the morning, and then I’m out of here.”
Taylor frowned, grateful that Michael couldn’t see the look on her face. “Are you sure this is what you want?” she asked. “Moving to Manhattan is a pretty big step.”
“Of course I’m sure,” he said. “Look, it’s a long way from the slums of Barberton to the Cleveland lakefront. And when I bought this place a year ago, I thought I’d use it as a base for the rest of my life. But things change. We’ve changed.
I want to be with you, and I certainly don’t expect you to move to Cleveland.”
There was a moment’s silence as Taylor tried once again to take all this in. “Okay, if you’re sure. I want us to have a chance, too, and I guess we need to at least be in the same zip code if we’re going to give it a go.”
“And that’s what we’re going to give it,” Michael said brightly. “Besides, I sold out just at the right time. I made a tidy little bundle off that condo.”
Taylor laughed. “Does everything you touch turn to money?”
“Everything I touch since I met you turns into money.”
“That’s sweet.”
“No, Taylor, I mean it. When I walked into your office that day, I had enough cash to my name for one more night’s stay in a fleabag hotel and a Greyhound bus ticket back home.
Meeting you turned everything around.”
Taylor smiled now and held the phone tightly to her ear.
“It’s pretty well rocked my world too, buster. So when’re you coming home?”
“I’m flying out tomorrow night after the movers leave. I’ll be at LaGuardia about ten. I’ll just take a cab in, if it’s okay for me to stay with you awhile longer.”
“I’d be heartbroken if you stayed anywhere else,” she teased.
“I’ve got an appointment with a broker Thursday morning. She’s got about six places for me to look at, including a house on Hudson Street.”
“Hudson Street?” Taylor asked, surprised. Hudson Street was prime Greenwich Village real estate. Very few co-ops ever came up for sale in that area, let alone a whole house.
“Great location. Very pricey, though.”
“More than I ever thought I’d be able to spend. But hey, who’s counting?”
“Wow, the Village. You’ll love living there, but it’s going to be an adjust-”
“I want you,” Michael interrupted.
“What?”
“I want you. Right now, this minute. I want to be inside you, as far as I can be. I want my mouth on you, my hands on you.”
Taylor felt her skin flush as a wave of energy went through her. “Yeah?” she whispered. “And then what would you do?”
“I’d roll you over onto your back and hold your legs up in the air and I’d pull almost all the way out of you, almost, and just stay there for a few seconds. And then I’d pull you onto me as hard as I could.”
Taylor moaned. “I miss you,” she said quietly, hoping no one else was listening in on line three.
“I miss you, too,” he said. “This’s driving me nuts. Will you wait up for me?”
“I think I can stay awake that long.”
“And when I get there, can we have a glass of wine and snuggle up on the couch for just a bit, just enough time to decompress, maybe? Talk, catch up …”
“Sure, I’d like that.”
“And then can we just go to bed and fuck our brains out?”
Taylor gasped. She’d never before been with a man who so freely and spontaneously and so naturally used the F-word.
Most of her other lovers, if they referred to the sex act by name at all, talked about “making love” and “being together” or some other new-age, sensitive-guy euphemism.
She had never talked about sex this way before with a lover.
There was something deliciously naughty about it.
“Only,” she whispered, “if you do me really hard.”
“Oh,” Michael laughed, “you keep talking like that, we might not make it to the bed.”
“And that would be a problem?”
“Not for me,” he said. There was a moment’s silence. “I really do miss you.”
“Me, too.”
“What’s the weather like over there?”
“Oh, God,” Taylor snapped. “Now we’re going to switch to the weather?”
“No, I’m asking for a reason.”
“Okay, you got it. It’s dark and gray and cold and icy. The wind’s picked up. They say it might snow. And how about Cleveland?”
“This is the Lake Erie snow belt in early March, baby. Use your imagination.”
“I’d prefer to save my imagination for other things. So why were you asking?”
“You packed?”
“Oh, that. Haven’t even started. But we don’t leave until Saturday morning.”
“Well, you just walk outside in the sleet and the cold and imagine yourself on a beach, the two of us alone, lying on the hot sand practically naked.”
“I won’t spend too much time on that one, as I have a lot more work to do today.”
“Clear everything with Joan?”
“Well,” Taylor answered, drawing the word out, “I don’t think she was real happy with my being gone for the whole week. But now that I’m representing a guy who’s probably going to have five books on The List at one time before it’s all over, I’ve got a little more juice than I used to.”
“That’s right,” Michael said. “You just tell her your star client insists on taking you to Bonaire for an entire seven days of sun, diving, and incredible sex, not necessarily in that order.”
Taylor groaned. She had never before thought of herself as-she could barely bring herself to say the word- horny, but ever since she and Michael got together, she thought about sex and needs and drives more than she ever had.
“You’ve got to stop talking that way,” she said breathily.
“You know how much I miss you.”
“If it’s anywhere near as much as I miss you, then we’re going to fry the entire northeastern power grid. It’ll be the next great blackout.”
“Will you please, please, please hurry home?”
“As fast as I can, my darling. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“Yeah,” Taylor said. “Yeah, you will.”
Michael hung up, and Taylor sat there for a moment holding the phone. She stared out the grimy window of her office to the top floor of the discount camera store across the street. Below her, the Manhattan street noises-taxis honking, brakes squealing, loud voices yelling in a hundred different languages, the squall of far-off sirens-seemed muted now, as if there were a fog between her and the rest of the world.
She had never felt this way before. She had been in love and she had been in lust, but never both at the same time. Her stomach knotted and her face flushed as she relived some of the past times in bed with Michael. She tightened her hips as she felt herself getting wet. He was the best lover she’d ever had, by far, and he had brought out something in her that she didn’t even know was there. Something deep within her had been freed, and she wondered just how wild and scary and crazy this was all going to get before it was over.
Four days later almost to the hour, Taylor gripped the armrest of her window seat on the starboard side of the ancient twin-engine DeHavilland Otter and squeezed until her knuckles turned white. Next to her, in the aisle seat, Michael sat calmly reading a book as the plane went into what felt like about an eighty-degree bank. Their side of the plane was on the downside of the turn, and Taylor, her throat tight and dry, squatted down to look out the tiny window.
All she saw was blue, the deepest blue she’d ever seen before. Water, she thought, wondering what it would feel like to drown.
And then it came into view, the green and browns of Bonaire, the next island over from Aruba just off the coast of Venezuela. The flight from JFK to Aruba had been on board a 757, a huge, comfortable, and what felt like rock-solid safe jet. When they had disembarked at the Aruba airport and the male flight attendant had smiled and pointed toward the DeHavilland Otter, Taylor had felt the blood drain out of her face.
“Oh no,” she whispered, grabbing Michael’s arm. “Not that. They’re not actually going to fly over water in that thing.”
Michael smiled, patted her arm. “It’ll be fine. It’s only about a twenty-minute flight.”
“Can that stay up for twenty minutes?”
But it had, and as the pilot lowered the flaps and set the plane up for final approach, Taylor felt herself relaxing even as her stomach rolled with the rapid loss of altitude. The plane was coming in awfully fast, she thought, but then before she knew it, the plane bumped the runway and began slowing. As they slowed to a stop in front of the single building that served as the Bonaire airport terminal, Taylor read the sign that said, WELCOME TO FLAMINGO AIRPORT.
“Okay,” she muttered. “Anyplace that calls its airport the Flamingo is going to be all right.”
The twenty or so tourists, most of them clearly divers, climbed down off the plane and were whisked through customs. The Bonaire economy was built on tourism, and everywhere, it seemed, the island was geared to make visitors comfortable. Taylor and Michael stood in line for a cab, and barely a half hour later were checked into their bungalow at the Divi Flamingo, staring out a window arm-in-arm as the sun fell slowly into the Caribbean.
“It’s stunning,” she said.
“Seven hours ago, we were freezing our asses off trying to get a cab in a snowstorm,” Michael offered.
“Hard to believe. It really is a different world, isn’t it?”
Michael turned and pointed toward the bottle of iced-down Roederer Cristal he’d arranged to be in their room when they arrived. “Thirsty?”
Taylor smiled. “Kind of early, isn’t it? It’s barely five.”
Michael walked over to the ice bucket and pulled the bottle out. “Hey, we’re on vacation. Besides, we’ve got a couple of hours before our dinner reservation.”
“Where are we eating tonight, kind sir?”
“Ah,” Michael said, gently pulling the foil off the top of the champagne bottle, then carefully unwinding the wire around the cork. “That’s a secret. But I will tell you this: this tiny li’l ol’ island here has over fifty restaurants on it, many of them world-class. And over the next seven days, we’re going to hit as many of them as we can.”
The champagne was wonderful, the sex afterward as powerful and as intense as anything Taylor had ever experienced in her life, and the dinner exquisite. The first few hours had taken them from a stressed-out midwinter Manhattan frame of mind and put them firmly on island time. It was nearly eleven by the time they left the restaurant, and just before midnight, they found themselves walking alone on a beach with their third bottle of wine of the evening and a couple of glasses. The Caribbean moon was nearly full and low off the horizon, throwing out bursts of silver onto the ocean’s surface that seemed to light up the whole sky.
Taylor slipped off her shoes and felt the warm sand under her feet. She was sleepy, exhausted, sated, but didn’t yet want to let go to sleep. Next to her, Michael walked silently, shuffling his feet in the sand. She took his free hand in hers and gently guided him toward the water’s edge. The tide was coming in, the water lapping softly against the sand. Taylor dipped her feet in the water and found it surprisingly warm.
She leaned over and put her head against his shoulders as they walked.
“Want to sit down and open this guy up?”
“Sure,” Taylor answered, smiling. “Although I’m not sure how much wine I’m up for. I’m a little tipsy now.”
Michael eased her over to a small mound of sand just ahead of the water and held her hand as she settled onto the ground. He eased down next to her and set the two glasses in the sand, then reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a corkscrew.
“It’s amazing,” Taylor said softly as Michael twisted the corkscrew into the neck of the bottle.
“What’s amazing?”
The cork came loose with a slight pop, and Michael poured two glasses of red wine.
“This, all of it. How can it get any better? I mean, this is perfect.”
Michael lifted a glass in each hand and handed one to her.
Taylor took it and stared at him over the top of the glass.
“I don’t know,” he answered after a moment. “I don’t know that it has to get any better. When you’ve reached perfection, that’s as good as it ever has to get.”
“Great,” she chided. “That means we’ve got no way to go but down.”
He reached over, clinked her glass gently. “No,” he said seriously. “Never. Never say that. It’s just going to get better in different ways.”
She lifted the glass and took small sip. The wine was as perfect as the evening had been.
“How’d I get so lucky?” she asked.
“I was just asking myself the same question.”
Michael leaned over and kissed her softly, sweetly, as a cool wind from the sea blew quietly over them.
The next morning, Taylor and Michael climbed out of bed about a half day earlier than she wanted, but they had an appointment with the dive master. At Michael’s urging, Taylor had signed up for scuba lessons in Manhattan, but had held off on taking her check dive until they got to Bonaire.
She went through the procedures, the equipment, and a test dive off the beach, followed by a quick quiz with the blond, sunburned Australian who ran the dive operation. The next thing she knew, she was standing in front of a passport camera having her picture taken for her “C” card, which certi-fied her as an open-water diver.
“Congratulations, love,” he said. “Now let’s do the real thing.”
She, Michael, and a dozen other divers hauled BCDs-the buoyancy-compensation devices that enabled divers to control the rate by which they ascended or descended-goggles, fins, regulators, and the heavy air tanks on board a thirty-foot dive boat. Taylor had eaten a light breakfast with a little juice and coffee, so was able to hold off the worst of the impending seasickness as the boat pushed through the swells toward open sea.
An hour later, they were farther north on the leeward side of the island, where the reefs were pristine and untouched, the water barely sixty feet deep and crystal clear. Michael had warned her that the first time she dived in open water, she might feel just a touch of anxiety, of drowning panic.
“Remember,” he told her as they sat on the side of the boat, preparing to roll backward into the ocean, “don’t forget to breathe, slowly and steadily. When we go in, let’s just float for a couple of minutes until we get adjusted.”
Taylor already had the regulator clenched firmly in her mouth. She nodded, pulled her goggles down over her eyes, held the regulator with her left hand and the mask with her right. Then she let go.
It was only a couple of feet from the gunwale to the water, but she felt as if she were falling forever. She hit the water, which suddenly seemed colder, and went completely under.
Her eyes widened, and for a moment she felt the surge of panic. She bit down hard on the regulator, trying to calm herself, to fight the urge to start paddling and fighting to the surface.
Then the BCD brought her to the surface and she bobbed there like a cork, her neck and face well out of the water, the heavy metal tank on her back now weightless. She looked around, and Michael was next to her a couple of feet away.
He brought his hands up like a referee calling a touchdown and then bent his arms into circles and tapped the top of his head with both hands. It was the universal scuba sign language for “I’m okay, how about you?”
Taylor forced herself to let go of the regulator, then brought her arms out of the water and mimicked his arm motion. She tried to loosen the muscles in her neck and to let her legs go limp beneath her. She looked down and realized it was almost like being suspended in air, sixty or seventy feet above the ocean floor. The water was warming now, her body adjusting, and she felt almost as if she were inside a womb.
The two floated there for what felt like at least a full minute, then Michael slowly paddled over to her and took the regulator out of his mouth and held it up out of the water.
“You ready to dive, lady?”
“I guess so,” Taylor tried to say, but she didn’t take the regulator out of her mouth and it came out as muffled gob-bledygook.
“I’ll take that at as a yes,” Michael said, slipping the regulator back into his mouth. Then he held up the dump tube off the BCD in his right hand, his thumb on the valve to release the air inside. He nodded. Taylor held her own tube up, her fingers tight, and nodded back. She watched as he pressed the button and his BCD began to hiss softly. As it deflated, Michael’s body sank slowly beneath the surface.
Taylor anxiously pressed her own valve and felt the BCD
around her begin to deflate. There was a hissing sound for her as well, and within, it seemed, half a second, her head was slipping beneath the surface into a silent, warm, thick world of blue.
As her head went under, she realized she’d closed her eyes tightly. Once under water, she forced herself to open them.
A small puddle of water had formed at the bottom of her mask. She tried to remember the procedure to clear it.
A few feet way, Michael had let go of his tube and was hovering just below her. He waved at her slowly, his hand fanning back and forth in the water. She waved back, forced a little more air out of her vest, and descended to his level.
He swam up to her, looked into her eyes through their masks, and reached out for her. He took her two hands in his, squeezed them slowly yet firmly, and she felt herself relax. She was with Michael; she could trust him and she was safe.
He reached for his relief valve again, held it over his head, held her hand with his free hand, then waited for her to lift her tube. He nodded. They both pushed the button and began sinking. Taylor felt the pressure rise in her ears, then let go of Michael’s hand, held her nose through the mask, and blew air into her ears to equalize the pressure.
She smiled; it worked. That was the first time she’d ever equalized perfectly the first time. She snaked her hand around and grabbed the lines that held her gauges. She held them up to her mask. They were descending through forty feet. She smiled behind the regulator and held it out to Michael. He looked at it and gave her a thumbs-up.
Taylor looked down and was surprised to find the coral-encrusted ocean floor coming up toward her. She and Michael put a small burst of air into their vests to keep them off the coral, a few feet above. Michael shifted himself into a prone position, hovering above the ocean floor in a Superman pose. She felt herself smile again, her lips hard on the regulator, trying to remember to breathe slowly and rhythmically. She swam up to him and flattened herself out, then reached over and took his hand. The two began slowly kicking their fins in a scissorlike motion, quietly moving over the seabed plants and coral. A school of bright yellow fish that Taylor didn’t recognize swarmed around them. In the distance, she caught a glimpse of the other divers and remembered that they weren’t alone.
They swam slowly along, alternating that movement with a still, relaxed drift. They swam in circles, never too far away from the anchor chain. Taylor relaxed, trusting Michael to take care of her, to watch over her. She was glad she’d done this, glad she’d met him, glad she’d taken the biggest chance of her life.
Taylor realized that at this moment, sixty feet below the surface of the Caribbean just off the coast of Venezuela, in the early part of March, with a man she’d been with barely a month, she was happier than she’d ever been in her life. For perhaps the first time in her life, she was completely happy.
The last night in Bonaire, Taylor and Michael went to a local place called the Island Cafe for dinner. Michael had done some research into where the locals went when they wanted to celebrate something away from the tourists. They took a cab into Kralendijk, the only real town on the island, and found themselves in a narrow alleyway near the town center.
The alleyway was dimly lit, crowded with locals, and had a different feel than anyplace else they’d been.
Michael held her hand and walked ahead of her down the winding alley, taking one wrong turn, backing up, then taking another. The Island Cafe was tiny compared to the other restaurants they’d been to, but the smells coming from the kitchen were exquisite. With all the diving and exploring, not to mention the staying up half the night locked in each other’s arms, they had both lost a couple of pounds. Taylor was ravenously hungry.
They drank the local beer and ate pastechis, the plump little pastries full of spicy shrimp and meat. They ordered giambo, the thick, spicy okra soup that was sort of like gumbo, only with a twist. They ordered steaks and fish and wine and ate like starved, caged animals for the next hour, almost without talking. When they finished, Taylor leaned back in her chair and stared across the table at Michael.
“I don’t want to go,” she said simply.
“I don’t, either. But we have to. We have to get back to the real world.”
“Why?” she complained. “Why can’t this be the real world?”
“Because it isn’t,” he said. “I have a book to write and I’m on deadline. You have clients that need you. Joan needs you.”
“She can’t need me that much. I haven’t had a single call from her.”
“That could have something to do with the fact that you didn’t tell her where you were going,” Michael said, smiling.
“Maybe. But she has ways of finding out.”
“You know she’s champing at the bit for you to get back.”
“Maybe.”
Michael leaned forward on the table and took her hands in his, then pulled her toward him.
“There is one thing we can take with us from the island.
Something that will make this an even more important week than it’s already been.”
Taylor looked at him, questioning. “What?”
Michael squeezed her hands and they suddenly felt cold.
Taylor looked down at their hands and realized his palms were sweating.
“What? What’s the matter?”
“Oh,” he said slowly, “nothing’s the matter. I guess I’m just a little new at this.”
“New at what?” she said, almost exasperated.
He let go of her right hand with his left and reached into his pocket. When his hand came back up to the table, it held a small, velvet-covered cube.
Taylor stared at his hand, stunned. “Wha-”
Michael let go of her left hand and raised his right index finger to his lips. “Ssshh,” he said.
“What are you-”
“Let me,” he said hurriedly. “Please.”
She was silent for a moment, uncomprehending. “Ever since I met you, Taylor, it’s been like my life has come together. The day I met you is the day I turned the corner. It was the day when everything started to make sense. Suddenly, I know what I want with my life, and I know who I want to spend it with.”
“Michael, I-”
Michael’s voice rose just a notch, and he looked directly into her eyes. “Now that you’re in my life, I don’t ever want to take a chance that something might happen and you won’t be. I love you, and I want to be with you and nobody else, ever. I’m through with everything I used to do and used to want. I know what’s important to me now, and now that it’s here, right next to me, I don’t want to ever let it slip away.
“Taylor, will you marry me?”
He opened the small ring box and held it toward her.
Shocked beyond recognition, she stared at it a second before realizing what it was-a beautiful European cut diamond that had to be pushing three carats. It was the largest diamond she’d ever seen up close, even larger than her grandmother’s.
“My God,” she whispered. And as she finally got what he was saying and asking, her eyes began to fill. She looked up from the box, into Michael’s eyes, and looked at him through a film of tears.
“Are you sure?” she whispered, her voice barely audible.
He nodded. “More sure than I can even begin to tell you.”
She laughed. “A writer at a loss for words. When’s the last time we saw that?”
She laughed again, louder this time. “Yes, Michael,” she said after a moment, taking the box from him and setting it on the table between them. She took his hands and squeezed them, hard.
“Yes, I’ll marry you.”
All around them, the other restaurant patrons began clap-ping and cheering.