Julia followed him. “I look forward to wearing your Christmas gift.” She pointed toward the black corset and shoes that were still sitting in their box under the tree.
“You do?”
“I’ll have to give myself a pep talk first, but I think it’s feminine and very pretty. I love the shoes. Thank you.”
Gabriel’s shoulders relaxed. He wanted to ask her to try his gifts on. He wanted to see her in those shoes—perhaps perched atop the bathroom counter with him between her legs—but he kept his desires to himself.
“Um, I need to explain something.” Julia took his hand, weaving their fingers together. “I can’t wear it tonight.”
“I’m sure that after the past two days wearing something like that would be the last thing you’d want to do.” Gabriel stroked the back of her hand with his thumb. “Especially with me.”
“It will be a little while before I can wear it.”
“I understand.” He began to extricate his fingers.
“I tried to explain this to you last night but, uh, I didn’t quite finish.”
He stilled.
“Um, I’m having my period.”
Gabriel’s mouth dropped open slightly. Then he closed it. He pulled her into his arms, embracing her warmly.
“That wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.” Julia’s voice was muffled by his chest. “Maybe you didn’t hear me?”
“So last night—it wasn’t because you didn’t want me?”
She pulled back in surprise. “I’m still upset about what happened with Paulina, but of course I want you. You always make me feel special when we make love. Right now, I’m not going to go there. Or actually, have you go there. Uh, you know what I mean.” She grew flustered.
Heaving a sigh of relief, Gabriel kissed her forehead. “I have other plans for you.”
He led her by the hand to the spacious washroom, pausing to press play on the stereo. The strains of Sting’s “Until” began to fill the room as they disappeared through the door.
* * *
Paulina sat up, wide-awake in a strange bed in Toronto, covered in a cold sweat. No amount of repetition made the dream vary in its events or its terror. No amount of vodka or pills could remove the ache in her chest or the tears from her eyes.
She reached for the bottle by the bed, knocking the hotel’s alarm clock off the nightstand. A few shots and a few small, blue pills and she would fall asleep again, letting the darkness take her.
She could not be comforted. Other women could have a second child to assuage the loss of their first. But she would never bear a child. And the father of her lost baby no longer wanted her.
He was the only man she’d ever loved, and she’d loved him from afar and then she’d loved him close by, but he’d never loved her. Not really. But he was too noble to cast her off like the used piece of goods she was.
As she sobbed into her pillow, her head spinning, she mourned a double loss aloud—
Maia.
Gabriel…
Chapter 13
Professor Giuseppe Pacciani wasn’t virtuous, but he was clever. He didn’t believe Christa Peterson when she declared that she was willing to meet him for a sexual rendezvous. In order to ensure that their liaison actually happened, he withheld the name of Professor Emerson’s Canadian fidanzata on condition that Christa meet him in Madrid in February.
Christa was unwilling to wait that long or to sleep with him again in order to ferret out the information, so she didn’t respond to his last email. She decided to regroup and find an alternative way of discovering the name of Professor Emerson’s fiancée.
It could be said that she was jealous and that this was her primary reason for wondering who had successfully captured the Professor’s attention when she had failed (inexplicably). It could be said that she’d begun to nurse a suspicion about a certain doe-eyed brunette, ever since Professor Emerson had almost come to blows with that student over a mistress called Paulina.
But perhaps the most accurate explanation was her new and rather prurient fascination with the rumors she’d heard about Professor Singer and her not-so-secret lifestyle. When Professor Emerson embraced her after his lecture at the University of Toronto, it set a good number of tongues wagging. Christa’s tongue was among them.
Perhaps Giuseppe was wrong. Perhaps the Professor did not have a fidanzata after all. Perhaps he had a Mistress.
In order to solve this very juicy mystery, Christa contacted an old flame from Florence who wrote for La Nazione, hoping that he would provide her with information about Professor Emerson’s personal life. While she waited for a response, she focused on an information source closer to home. In the Vestibule, all sins would be revealed.
Professor Emerson’s marked absence from Lobby began the evening she tried to seduce him. So, she reasoned, his relationship with his fiancée must have begun around that time. Previously, he hadn’t cared who he hooked up with or when. Or perhaps he and his fiancée had been involved only causally until that fateful night. It was possible that the Professor was far from monogamous in his relationship and that he’d had a fiancée all along, although such an attachment would have likely made the rounds of the rumor mill.
(Toronto is, after all, a small town.)
Christa’s way forward was clear. It was likely that the Professor and his fiancée had visited Lobby sometime over the course of the winter semester, since it appeared to be his watering hole of choice. All she needed to do was to find someone who worked at the club and pump him for information.
Late on a Saturday night, Christa stalked the staff at Lobby, trying to discover the weakest link. She sat at the bar, absolutely ignoring the tall, blond American woman who was there for the same purpose, having just flown in from Harrisburg. Christa’s full, red lips curled back in disgust when the woman pulled out her iPhone and spoke very loudly in Italian to a maître d’ called Antonio.
As the night wore on, Christa soon realized her options were few. Ethan had a serious girlfriend, which meant that he wouldn’t be ripe for the picking. More than one of the bartenders were g*y, and all the servers were women. Which left Lucas.
Lucas was a computer geek (not that there’s anything wrong with that) who assisted Ethan with security at the club, in a technical capacity. Lucas had access to the video recordings from the security cameras, and it was he who rather enthusiastically agreed to let Christa into the club after hours so they could sift through CD upon CD of footage, starting with September 2009.
And that was how Christa found herself sitting on the vanity in the women’s washroom with Lucas pounding into her on a Sunday morning when she should have been in church.
* * *
Gabriel and Julia arrived back in Toronto late in the evening on January first. They went to Julia’s apartment so she could drop off some things and retrieve some clean clothes. Or so Gabriel thought. With the taxi waiting at the curb for them to return, he stood in the middle of her cold and shabby apartment expecting her to pack an overnight bag. She didn’t.
“This is my home, Gabriel. I’ve been gone for three weeks. I need to do laundry, and I need to work on my thesis tomorrow. Classes start on Monday.”
His expression grew very dark very quickly.
“Yes, I’m aware of when classes begin.” His tone was clipped. “But it’s freezing in here. You don’t have any food, and I don’t want to sleep without you. Come home with me, and you can return tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to go home with you.”
“I told you I’d have the master bedroom redone, and it has been. The bed, the furniture, it’s all new.” He grimaced. “They even painted the walls.”
“I’m still not ready.” She turned her back on him and began unpacking her suitcase. He took one look at her activities and strode through the apartment door, closing it somewhat loudly behind him.
Julia sighed.
He was trying, she knew. But his revelations had scorched holes in her already fragile self-confidence, a self-confidence that had only begun to be rebuilt during their time in Italy. She knew herself well enough to know that her fear of losing him was grounded in her parents’ divorce and in Simon’s betrayal. Although she knew all these things, it was very difficult to will herself to disregard them and to believe that Gabriel’s love would never wane.
She’d just walked to her door to bolt it when he walked in, suitcase in hand. “What are you doing?”
“Keeping you warm,” he said stiffly.
Gabriel placed his suitcase down and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He emerged a few minutes later with his shirt untucked and unbuttoned, muttering something about having successfully turned on her damned electric heater.
“Why did you come back?”
“I am not accustomed to sleeping without you. In fact, I’m about ready to sell the damn condo and all my furniture and buy something else.” He shook his head and proceeded to undress unashamedly without further conversation.
While Julia used the bathroom, Gabriel examined some of the items she’d displayed on her card table—the book containing the Botticelli reproductions he’d given her for her birthday, a pillar candle, a book of matches, and the photo album of pictures he’d taken of her.