“There’s a car coming,” she said.
“Don’t let go.”
“Don’t you let go.” They drove past the other vehicle, Zoë’s arm vibrating with tension. “Are we through yet? Can I let go?”
He curled his right hand over hers, touching her for the second time that evening. “Not yet.” He waited until they had pulled up into Moira’s driveway, and then he killed the engine. They sat there for a moment in the dark, his hand still covering hers.
“She has to learn to sleep in her own bed again,” he said.
“I know.” She met his look with perfect frankness. For a moment, he wished he’d suggested taking a longer drive, parking somewhere. But he couldn’t imagine that was her style, and besides, he probably stank from the residue of fear and sweat.
“Hey, Mack?”
“Yeah?”
She leaned over, cupping his face in her hands, and kissed him, hard, on the lips. “I just thought it needed to be done,” she said, pulling back with a little smile. “What? Did I shock you?”
“Not yet,” Mack said, reaching over to pull her back. “Try again.”
This time, she slid her arms around his neck and kissed him openmouthed as he tangled his hands in the thick, curling mass of her hair. For the first time in the whole, long night, he felt himself relax, and then she made a little sound in the back of her throat and he felt a new, pleasurable tension in his stomach and thighs. They were both panting a little when she looked up. “Maya has to learn to sleep in her own bed again,” she said as he nuzzled her neck. “Oh, my God, that feels good.” She had a warm, musky smell, womanly and wonderful. He put his nose to her hair and inhaled her into his lungs.
“Come sit on my lap,” he suggested, all his earlier anger dissolved.
“I can’t.”
“Am I moving too quick?”
“No, this dress is too tight.”
“Pull it up.”
She glanced at him, then started to pull her dress up until he could see that she was wearing lacy black panties. “You know, I’m not entirely sure this is such a…”
He silenced her by pulling her onto his lap, making sure to lift her over the gearshift. She looked startled to find herself straddling him. “You’re stronger than you look,” she said.
“Uh-huh. Used to be helpful in bar fights,” he said, tangling his hands in her hair and pulling her down for another kiss. And brother, could she ever kiss. He’d never been the kind of guy who went straight from one girlfriend to another, figuring that you needed a bit of time to clear your head in between women, and he wouldn’t permit himself to compare her with Jess. But it surprised him to find that touching Zoë didn’t just feel good, it felt right. In some hard-to-define way, her body felt right, the way some cars felt right, as if the controls had been custom made to your specifications. He liked the sheer size of her, the uninhibited way she unzipped the front of his blue medical coveralls, shoving up the T-shirt underneath so she could slip her cool hands inside. When she touched the muscles of his stomach, he said, “Hang on, I need to rearrange things.”
“Oh, no, I must be crushing you,” she said, but he ran his hands down her hips, discovering the firm muscle underneath the generous curves as he prevented her from wriggling off.
“You are not crushing me,” he said, “but if you were, I’d die a happy man.”
“Very funny. I probably weigh twenty pounds more than you do.” She felt his stomach again. “Maybe thirty.”
He deliberately lifted her again, then brought her back down. “I may look weedy, but I promise you, I’m not some ninety-eight-pound weakling.”
“No, you’re well-muscled, unlike me.” She made a little face, and he thought how ridiculous it was that this fabulous Amazon of a woman shouldn’t know how incredible she was.
“You,” he said, looking up into her face, “are gorgeous.”
“ ‘Without your glasses, Miss Jones,’ ” she added. At his quizzical look, she added, “That’s the classic line, isn’t it? You know, when the librarian takes off her glasses?”
Mack reached out and touched the tip of her nose. “I like you with your glasses, too.” He traced her ear with his finger and she closed her eyes and arched her back. One of her breasts had almost come out the top of her dress and he stared at it, mesmerized. “I like all of you.” He leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top slope of her breast, then darted his tongue down beneath the fabric of the dress, reaching her nipple. When he looked up at her unguarded face, he found her watching him as if mesmerized. Something hushed and sharpened between them.
“I want to be inside you,” he said softly.
She gave a shaky laugh, and it felt as if someone had turned the lights on. “Me, too,” she said, the words a gentle withdrawal. “But I’m not sure that we should continue this in your sister’s driveway.”
He nodded, sliding his hands back down to the delectable curve of her hips, unable to prevent himself from squeezing. “We could go somewhere else.” Hopeless, he knew, even as he suggested it. Where were they going to go? A cheap motel? A field? The moment had passed, but he was still hard and she was still sitting on top of him, and one head wasn’t yet in agreement with the other.
Zoë squirmed off his lap, pulling the hem of her dress back down. “I have a better idea. How about tomorrow, when Maya’s in school, we can arrange to have you drive me…crazy.”
And just like that, Mack felt himself begin to deflate. Of course they needed to arrange things, but their current location and Maya’s penchant for climbing into her mother’s bed weren’t the only obstacles to overcome. Belatedly, he recalled another compelling reason why they couldn’t just tear off their clothes and have tomorrow-we-might-die sex.
Zoë was paying him by the hour.
Seventeen
I t was ridiculous. It was a power game. It was blackmail.
“What exactly are you saying?”
“You heard me.”
Zoë moved the phone to her other ear. “So what you’re saying is, you don’t want to see me anymore unless I take driving lessons?”
“Zoë, you’re paying me to drive you around.” He sounded pained when he said it, which made no sense.
“So?” She stared down at her toenails, which were half painted with gold polish. After getting Maya off to school, Zoë had shaved her legs, moisturized her elbows, applied a mud mask to her face, and attempted to use a do-it-yourself wax kit on her bikini area and upper lip. She’d also decided to remove the tiny tufts of hair under her arms, because she had no idea whether Mack would find them bohemian and sexy or downright appalling. Boy, did she ever wish she were back in the city where she could just walk around the corner and pay to get all this done. But then again, if she were back in the city, she wouldn’t be seeing Mack. Just thinking his name made her recall the feel of his hands and mouth on her skin. Dear God, he had the touch, she hadn’t felt anything like that since 1989, with Ian the radical Scots newspaperman. She’d always wondered if it had been the intellectual sparring or the physical chemistry that had made the affair so powerful, and now she was guessing the latter. After all, she was clearly not going to have a great meeting of the minds with Mack, but boy, did she want to get naked with him. “Mack? Are you still there?”
“I don’t know what else to say. You’re paying me.”
“So quit.”
Mack didn’t respond right away, and it slowly dawned on Zoë that he was having second thoughts.
“The thing is, Zoë, you still need a driver, and I…” his voice trailed off.
“And you aren’t that into it. Let’s cut the b.s., Mack, I get it. Last night, you were in the mood, but now that you’ve had some sleep, it just doesn’t seem right.” And here was where being forty-one really did make things better. Zoë knew better than to take this too much to heart. Maybe he usually went for pretty, little blondes. Maybe she intimidated him. Whatever it was, she wasn’t about to do what she’d have done at twenty-one or ev
en thirty-one: become plagued by self-doubt as to her own attractiveness. So he didn’t want her. She could live with it. She’d have to find a new driver, of course, but until she did, she’d have to put up with the minor humiliation of unreciprocated desire. She capped the bottle of nail polish and yanked off her best lacy underwear.
“Zoë, please don’t be angry at me. It’s not that I don’t want you, you know that.”
She snorted, rummaging in her underwear drawer for an old cotton pair. “Oh, please.”
“I got turned on when you held my hand! I nearly bit your head off when I realized that I couldn’t just take you home and jump into bed with you!”
Zoë paused in the act of pulling out a dingy gray brassiere. “You did seem a little testy.” Maybe, she thought, I’m going to need lace after all.
“I was mad because I wanted to go home with you, and it sounds like Maya keeps getting into your bed. To be frank, that’s all I was thinking about at first—how to get between the sheets with you. But then I had to stop and think, How’s this going to work? I come over, drive you around, you pay me fifteen dollars an hour, and then we have sex?”
Zoë pulled on an ancient pair of sweatpants, now fully prepared to give up on the man. “What is this, some kind of old-fashioned hang-up about a woman who makes more money than you? I was kind of assuming the sex would be off the clock.”
“I’d still feel like a kept man.” He waited. “Zoë, right now you are the only paying job I have. With Moroney and Pete out of commission, I figure I’m about to get some more work, but until then, I can’t even afford to just not work for you.” He sounded less certain of himself than usual.
It was Zoë’s turn to sigh. “All right. So what’s your solution? You give me driving lessons and what, my big reward for passing the road test is I get to have sex with you?”
Mack cleared his throat. “I was thinking more that it was my big reward for your passing the test. And it usually takes about twenty lessons; if we do two a week, that’s less than three months.”
“This seems like a lot of time and effort for what I was assuming was going to be a fairly casual, physical relationship.” Zoë stared at her newly shaved and moisturized leg, suddenly aware of all its imperfections, the cellulite padding her thighs, the places where she had discovered spider veins, tiny red or blue starbursts that she didn’t recall seeing at the start of summer.
“Maybe we can fool around a little after you pass your written test,” he suggested.
“Was that meant to be a joke?”
“More of a short-term goal.”
“Forget it.” For a moment, last night, she’d felt the kind of incontrovertible, impractical lust she’d felt in adolescence, and the thought of it had been making her ignore the obvious: Mack wasn’t bitten by the same bug.
“What do you mean? Listen, three months isn’t that long to wait, and wouldn’t it be good to have something to look forward to?” He sounded perfectly reasonable, without any hint of the desperation that always goes with a strong desire.
“Spoken like a true salesman. But as the saying goes, if you can resist passion, it’s because the passion’s weak, not because you’re strong.”
“What saying is that?”
“La Rochefoucauld. I’m paraphrasing.” She waited. “Mack? Are you still there?”
“How do you spell that?”
She expelled her breath. “That’s it. I’m hanging up now.”
“No, Zoë, wait. I’ve already said, it’s not that I’m not attracted…”
She hung up. What an idiot she was. Mack probably went around feeling attracted to all kinds of women. He was a physical person. He didn’t go around complicating things by trying to find some intellectual fit with a woman. And what was an intellectual fit for him, anyway—love of NASCAR racing? She deliberately squelched the memory of him in her living room, clearly delighted in the discovery of the concept of the macabre. For him, she was far more important as a client than as a lover.
Well, too bad, because he’d just lost her as both. There had to be someone else who could drive her to the store, for God’s sake. Preferably, a woman. Three months. Nice to have a goal. Yeah, he was really hot for her. For a moment, Zoë allowed herself to consider just how bleak the country was going to feel in November, when the days grew short and cold. And then she realized that she did have a goal. She picked up the phone again.
“Zoë? Did you change your mind? Because let me assure you…”
“No, Mack. This is about something else entirely.” Zoë turned on her computer. “I want to speak to your sister about the developers who’ve made her that offer on the farm.”
One of the few things that could have distracted Zoë from the blighted prospect of good sex was the ongoing promise of a good story. And the Amimi Mountain development project was starting to look like a very good story.
First of all, there was the distinct whiff of corruption, always appealing to a journalist. The main source of the smell seemed to be Jim Moroney, who did far more than run the local driving school. For all intents and purposes, Moroney was the town’s mayor, so it had interested Zoë a great deal to learn that he had accepted an incredibly inflated payment for a five-acre plot and a gingerbread Victorian from the developers. The local paper carried a quote from Moroney, stating that “This deal had nothing to do with my decision to approve the development project, which I’ve judged by its own merits.” She’d found this out from Mack’s sister, who had been surprisingly forthcoming, considering that she was still contemplating the sale of her farm.
“I don’t mind filling you in, so long as you don’t stick me in the middle of some fight,” Moira had told her. “Personally, I can see both sides of the issue. On the one hand, I hate to see the land get built up, but on the other hand, the local economy could use a boost.”
Moira had added that “Your daughter is free to come over and help out with the horses any time she likes.” When Zoë had explained that she didn’t drive and didn’t want to take up too much of Mack’s time, Moira had said “Oh, I know he won’t mind” in a way that made Zoë think she knew more than she was letting on.
“He’s been very helpful,” Zoë responded in a carefully neutral tone, “but I don’t think it’s good to depend too much on any one person.”
“You two ought to get along just fine,” Moira had responded. “That’s what he always says.”
But Zoë really didn’t want to keep calling Mack or his sister. In retrospect, she realized that when he’d said that he didn’t want to feel like a gigolo, it was because he was, in fact, vying for that position. And it made sense that a man who was younger and had less social status than she did would conflate sex with power. This understanding, however, did not reconcile Zoë to Mack. Quite the opposite; it made her feel mildly repulsed by the very thought of him.
Not that she spent too much time thinking about him. She had continued to research the proposed development on the internet, discovering that Arcadia was one of the few remaining towns that had absolutely no zoning. If you wanted to open a carwash or a dog-racing track or a strip mall smack dab in the middle of Arcadia’s quiet, tree-lined residential streets, there was no law preventing it.
So who could blame a bunch of developers from taking advantage of this freedom by snatching up nearly one hundred acres of untouched wilderness at the edge of town and pursuing their version of the American dream?
Well, there were at least two people actively casting blame—Frances and Gretchen, whose liquor store had a perfect view of Amimi Mountain and Starling Pond. The two women were so eager to tell their side of the story to a bona fide national journalist that they came over to Zoë’s house, bringing two excellent bottles of retsina, a homemade spanakopita, and most delicious of all, the real dish on Moroney. According to Frances, Moroney was strong-arming the town board and telling them to avoid any delay that might derail the proposed project. This meant that the board was ignoring the Arcadia Wetlands Founda
tion’s pleas that an environmental impact assessment be done. “We need to determine whether any rare wildlife would be adversely affected by this development,” said Frances. “But so far, we can’t get anyone in Albany to step in and demand a state environmental review.”
As far as Zoë could tell, Frances and Gretchen were the Arcadia Wetlands Foundation, although they claimed that most of their clientele were already outspoken in their opposition to the development.
City folks, it transpired, did not relish the prospect of their quiet weekend retreat becoming a bustling strip mall. Manhattanites had all the convenience and Starbucks and health clubs they needed during the workweek. On holidays, they wanted quaint little country shops filled with bric-a-brac, and charming cafés that sold homemade jam. And even if they didn’t actually get out and hike into the wilderness areas, city folk liked knowing they existed, and that wild things roamed there.
“The locals aren’t particularly moved by the plight of snapping turtles and timber rattlers, and they actively hunt the bear and coyote,” said Gretchen. “They’ll work to protect the bald eagles, though. But weekenders understand that once we lose this habitat, these species aren’t going to be coming back.”
Privately, Zoë thought there was something more than a little ironic about these ecologically minded city people, who gobbled up resources by owning two homes and didn’t count the cost in burned fossil fuels as they traveled back and forth between town and country. And, of course, part of what the weekenders were protecting so vehemently was their property value. This, in truth, was the other angle she was considering for her article—the vainglorious hypocrisy of weekend environmentalists, fighting the development that might improve the lives of the full-time locals.
But as she continued to dig, Zoë learned that things were not so simple. Not all the townies were in favor of the proposed development. In fact, according to Rudy the evangelical cabdriver, a lot of folks were strongly opposed.