Just Like Heaven Read online

  They kissed with eyes wide open, intimate, probing, with nothing held back. They brought everything they were to the moment, all of their hopes and dreams and disappointments.

  They dropped to their knees, half on the rag rug, half on the polished oak floor, then fell the rest of the way, limbs entwined. He rolled over onto his back, pulling her on top of him.

  For a second she froze, suddenly aware of where she was, the man she was with, the enormity of what was about to happen between them. There was nothing casual about it, nothing simple. Her life would never be the same. They would never be the same.

  He was big, wonderfully hard. She loved the way he felt pressing against her belly. She loved his broad chest and muscular shoulders, the way his thick dark hair fell across his forehead. She loved the anticipation building between her legs, the way he stroked her with his fingers, long voluptuous strokes that made her wetter and hotter than she had ever been before. She almost came just from the excitement of knowing that any moment he would be inside her while she rode him until they were out of their heads with pleasure.

  She leaned over him, breasts brushing against his chest, laughing softly at the tickle of hair against her skin. He found a nipple with his mouth, circling it with his tongue, sucking hard until she cried out from the jolt of electricity that shot through her body at his touch. He gripped her hips and positioned her over his rock-hard erection. He watched her as she lowered herself slowly slowly onto him, watched her as she cried out again from the sheer joy of it, never once took his eyes from her as she leaned back and began to move against him.

  They were there together in every way that mattered. Her skin was exquisitely sensitive to the touch. Her mind was an erogenous zone. She was fully there, more completely herself than she had ever been before, and she knew without asking that it was the same for him.

  He rolled her onto her back, covering her with the delicious weight of his body. He was gentle and strong, wild and powerful, everything she had ever wanted in a man.

  She wrapped her legs around his waist and he gasped into her mouth, drawn even more deeply into her body. She felt his heat building, caught the flame and fanned it into a raging fire that burned away everything that had come before.

  “Wow,” she said later, after they had napped in each other’s arms. “That wasn’t the way I remembered it.”

  You’re in love, Kate. That’s the difference.

  He pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. “This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

  Was this how it was with your wife? Was this what you had and lost?

  What she had had with Ed didn’t come close to this, and now she knew why.

  They were wrapped in a soft blanket, curled up together on the lemon-yellow sofa.

  “How did we get here?” She glanced around the darkened room. “The last thing I remember was lying on the floor in the hallway.”

  “Astral projection?”

  “Maybe we dreamed the whole thing.”

  “Don’t move.” He slid under the blanket toward the end of the couch and threw her legs over his shoulders. She tensed and he murmured soft words against her belly until she sank deeper into the soft cushions. His breath against her heated skin was warm and moist. He drew a line with his tongue from her belly to her navel to the cleft at the top of her thighs and her last bit of resistance vanished at his touch. When he found her center, logic, reason, and sanity vanished along with it.

  For the first time in her life, Kate was well and truly lost.

  Much later

  “Are you hungry?” Kate leaned up on one elbow and smiled at him. “I make a great fake-egg omelet.”

  She wore nothing but the creamy pink sheet draped around her creamy pink shoulders and if God decided to end things now, Mark would have no regrets. He had already had a glimpse of heaven.

  “Fake eggs?” he answered, brushing a lock of shiny auburn hair back from her face. “Should I be afraid?”

  “I was at first,” she admitted with a roll of her big hazel eyes, “but they’re really not too terrible.”

  “I’ll give ’em a try.”

  “Don’t think you’re just going to lie here like a sultan awaiting his handmaiden,” she said, laughing. “I need a sous chef and you’re elected.”

  “How long have we been up here?”

  “A long time,” she said as she slipped into a short cotton robe and belted it around her waist. “A very long time and I’m very hungry.”

  He sat up and looked across the expanse of bed to the clock on her nightstand. “It’s two in the morning.”

  “Very good,” she said, pretending to clap her hands. “Do you know the alphabet too?”

  He leaped from the bed before she had the chance to run, tossed her over his shoulder in a fireman’s hold, and then carried her downstairs to the kitchen.

  He loved her laughter. There was nothing guarded about her laughter. It was slightly bawdy, slightly goofy, completely irresistible. He set her on her feet and she playfully made to swat him with a dish towel.

  She put him to work chopping onions and green peppers while she wiped some tiny white mushrooms with a damp towel and sliced them paper-thin.

  “I have fake cheese to go with the fake eggs,” she said, “or, if you like, we could add cubes of fake ham or fake turkey.”

  “You make it sound so . . . edible.”

  “What can I tell you?” She plucked a container of cholesterol-free spread from the fridge. “Once you have a heart attack, fake becomes the new natural.”

  She was clearly at ease in the kitchen. She moved from task to task smoothly, keeping up a line of chatter as she did. He was still working on the peppers while she had moved on to setting the table and pouring orange juice into heavy crystal glasses.

  The room was a feast for the eyes. A trio of china chickens watched from the top of the refrigerator. A three-foot-high anatomically correct Holstein stood guard at the French doors that opened out into the yard. A spinning wheel in the far corner was draped with bunches of fragrant herbs hung there to dry. Color was everywhere: flowers bloomed where he least expected them in bursts of yellow and orange and cherry red. The counter boasted a pale ivory wicker basket piled high with golden Spanish and eye-popping purple onions. A braid of garlic hung from a peg over the counter near the well-worn wooden block that held her knives.

  This was a real working kitchen and he enjoyed watching as she glided effortlessly between tasks.

  “Did you toast the muffins?” she asked as she slid the omelet onto a platter.

  “Almost,” he said. “Where do you keep the jelly?”

  “Top shelf.” She pointed toward the fridge. “Raspberry preserves, orange marmalade, grape jam.”

  “Grape jam? No contest.”

  The omelet was huge, bursting with green peppers, red onion, mushrooms, crushed red peppers, and herbs. She served it on one enormous platter and was about to divide it onto two separate plates when they looked at each other and started to laugh.

  “Grab a fork,” she said. “I’ll start on the right side. You start on the left. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  They toasted each other with orange juice. He slathered the crispy muffins with jam and fed her bites with his fingers. They polished off the omelet, toasted an extra muffin, and washed everything down with a big pot of herbal tea.

  By the time they loaded the dishwasher, the sun was coming up and they stumbled upstairs and fell into bed.

  “Do you have a favorite side?” she asked around a yawn.

  “The side next to you,” he said.

  And then they slept.

  TO: [email protected]

  CC: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: FYI

  I’m fine. The cell’s turned off. DON’T WORRY! Mark leaves on Saturday. I’ll call you Sunday, ok? XOXOXOXO

  Sometimes the best thing you can do is lock out the world.

>   Kate’s home became their sanctuary, their hiding place from the reality that was waiting right outside the door. Being together was the only reality that mattered. They slept, made love, ate, laughed, and talked and never once looked at a clock, but time was slipping away from them just the same.

  In some ways it was probably too easy. Too perfect. There was no period of adjustment. The sex was both sweet and incendiary, intensifying a connection that seemed to run straight to the center of their souls. Their habits meshed perfectly. She liked the window side of the bed, while he preferred being closer to the door. They were open and at ease with each other. She didn’t feel as if he had invaded her home. He never felt anything but welcome.

  He had spent years blaming God for Suzanne’s death and the ruin his life had become, but there with Kate in his arms, he was finally able to see where the journey had been headed all along. He was finally at peace.

  If only it didn’t have to end in less than seven hours.

  They were curled up on her squashy yellow sofa eating ice cream and watching a Sopranos rerun, both trying to ignore the fact that by this time tomorrow their idyll would be over. The Sopranos turned into Sex and the City, which became Entourage. Neither one noticed. They were lost in a world of their own creation.

  “I want you to do something for me, Kate,” he said as they slowly climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

  She would do anything for him. Didn’t he know that by now?

  He didn’t want to say good-bye. When it was time to leave in the morning, he would just leave. No tearful good-bye in the driveway. No Lifetime for Women drama on the front porch. Anything that needed to be said they would say in her bed, with their bodies and with their hearts.

  Moonlight streamed through the open window and pooled on the floor near the bed. A gentle breeze ruffled the curtains. Spring in all of her painful beauty managed to work her magic even in the dark.

  Too bad spring didn’t have any magic up her sleeve that could make paradise last a little bit longer.

  Kate awoke to the sound of a car in her driveway. She stretched and buried her face deeper into her pillow. The mail carrier, most likely. Or maybe UPS. It didn’t matter. They were part of the real world and the real world didn’t exist here in paradise.

  She opened one eye and peered across the bed. His side was empty. He had said this was the way he would do it and, true to form, he hadn’t lied.

  She leaped up, wrapped the pale yellow sheet around her, and dashed to the window in time to see the beat-up Honda moving slowly down Indigo Lane.

  Six weeks from beginning to end, like the story arc on a prime-time television show. They meet. They fall into something that may or may not be love. They part. You turn off your television set and move on to the next thing while the fictional stars of the romance live on in some happily-ever-after dreamworld.

  Reality wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.

  She sat near the window for a long time. It wasn’t that she expected him to turn around and come roaring back up Indigo, so much in love with her that he would turn away from his dreams and responsibilities to be with her forever. She didn’t know what she expected, but this flat echoing emptiness inside her heart couldn’t possibly be all that remained of the happiest weeks of her entire life.

  If only she could cry. For weeks she had been able to weep buckets of tears over parking spots, baby ducks, the theme song from Cheers, but now she was desert dry.

  They were two consenting adults who had known where they were headed from the first moment they met. So why did it feel like a surprise? She felt as if fate had pulled a fast one on her, shown her a glimpse of what life could be like, how love could feel, and then snatched it away from her the second she began to believe it could last.

  Had she really believed he was going to abandon his plans, the people he cared about, to stay in New Jersey with a divorced agnostic he barely knew? That wasn’t the way things worked, and the old Kate, the pre-Mark Kate, understood that better than most.

  Follow your heart, they all said. Life is short. What are you waiting for? Choose happiness. The advice was the same whether it came from Maeve or Charlotte Petruzzo. It sounded wonderful and maybe there really were romantic souls out there who could do exactly that but apparently, for very different reasons, she and the good Father weren’t among their number.

  She had already experienced more happiness in a shorter period of time than she’d ever expected to feel in her life. She should be happy with that and move on.

  Same as he had.

  He made good time through New Jersey, crossed the Tap-pan Zee around eight o’clock, then barreled north on the New England Thruway. Around ten-thirty he pulled off the road in search of an Egg McMuffin and cell reception.

  She picked up on the first ring.

  “Did I wake you?” He knew what she looked like when she slept, how she sounded and smelled.

  “I heard you leave,” she said. “I kept hoping you would turn back.”

  “I wanted to.” He cradled the phone closer to his ear and tried to block out the traffic noise all around him. “I almost turned around.”

  “I wish you had.”

  “I wish—” There was no point to any of it. The next year belonged to the good parishioners of St. Stephen’s, and after that it was anybody’s guess.

  “Finish the sentence.”

  “I wish things could have been different.”

  “I wish we’d met ten years ago,” she said and he heard her sharp intake of breath as she realized exactly what she was saying. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “I know.” She had done the math. If Suzanne had lived, they wouldn’t be having this conversation. If her marriage hadn’t fallen apart . . . if he hadn’t started driving . . . moved to New Jersey . . . if God hadn’t put them in that Princeton parking lot on that sunny morning—

  “I miss you,” he said.

  “It’s only been a few hours.” She tried to laugh but the sound was false and strained. Then, “I miss you too.”

  “Three hundred miles isn’t so much.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” she said. “Just a long commute.”

  “We’ll figure this out, Kate.”

  “I know we will.”

  What they didn’t know was how.

  Twenty-three

  French Kiss—two weeks later

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Sonia whispered to Kate as they finished unpacking a shipment of eighteenth-century salt cellars from an estate sale in Virginia.

  “I really wish people would stop asking me that question,” Kate said, popping her thumb along a strip of bubble wrap. “Blood pressure, EKG, CBC, everything’s just fine.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Sonia said, “but that’s not what I’m talking about.” She paused a second, but Kate refused to fill the silence with information. “Have you heard from him?”

  “I had an e-mail just last night.” A hurried note long on work minutiae and short on sentiment. A fine point the old Kate wouldn’t have noticed.

  “And you’ve talked on the phone?”

  “What is this, the Second Inquisition? Of course we’ve talked. Would you like me to bring in the tapes?”

  “So when are you going to see him?”

  “Sonia, really. Now you’re going too far.”

  “It’s important,” Sonia said. “Don’t believe absence makes the heart grow fonder. The only thing absence does is screw up a good thing.”

  Kate excused herself and stepped out onto the back porch so her assistant wouldn’t see her cry. Better Sonia thought she was annoyed than for Kate to admit to the world that she missed Mark so much that each day without him felt like a lifetime.

  He had phoned her twenty-three times that first day, pulling over at every rest stop between New Jersey and New Hampshire to hear the sound of her voice. He had left no doubt about the way he felt.

  And Kate hadn’t made the slightest attempt to shield her heart
from danger. When he turned on his laptop that first night to download his e-mail, she had made sure there were twelve silly animated greetings waiting for him and four long mushy high-school-girl-in-the-throes-of-first-love letters.

  Those first few days apart had been excruciatingly lonely and so painfully sweetly romantic that she finally understood the crazy things women and men did in the name of love.

  Like believe that a lapsed Catholic in New Jersey and an Episcopal priest from New Hampshire have a chance in hell?

  Geography, religion, and life experience were all stacked against them, and that was just for starters. He was deeply committed to his responsibilities in New Hampshire. Her roots extended deep and wide in the fertile soil of the Garden State. Long-distance relationships worked for some couples, but she knew in her heart that she and Mark weren’t one of them. She missed the dailiness of their time together. The phone calls, the quick trips down the shore, watching him talking to Maeve at the kitchen table.

  Extreme circumstances begot extreme reactions. She had a heart attack and he saved her life. It didn’t get much more emotionally extreme than that. Was it any wonder that they had been drawn together?

  Of course that didn’t explain the heat, the need, the deep well of affection and respect and understanding that in the real world, her old world, took years to build. If you ever found it at all.

  Sonia was right. A year was a very long time. And a year in a brand-new relationship was longer still. Maybe young love thrived on separation, but it had taken her forty-one years to discover what falling in love was all about, and it would have been wonderful if the object of her affections weren’t three hundred miles away rebuilding a life that had nothing to do with her.

  Greenwood, New Hampshire

  “You’ve been here three weeks,” Maggy said, “and you’re still staying at the Motel 6. That’s really not acceptable for the rector of St. Stephen’s. People are starting to talk, pal.”

  Mark made a left on Sprucewood and headed toward the open-house flags waving at the end of the block. “I’ve looked at a lot of places, Maggy, but I haven’t found the right one yet.”