The Original Sinners: The Red Years

Breathless and aroused, Zach sat next to her and panted a little.

She glanced at him and opened her book to the same page he was on.

“What’s next?” she asked.

Zach swallowed and glanced down at his screen.

“Page three hundred and eight,” he said still a little breathless. “We need to cut this scene down.”

“Swollen, is it?” Nora asked without the slightest hint of irony although he knew now nothing had a single meaning with Nora.

“Quite. We should take care of that.”

“Yes, sir,” she said and flipped to that page. “I’ll chop that scene right off.”

* * *

Zach yawned and checked his computer clock—

3:37 a.m. He blinked and stretched out his neck. Next to him on the sofa, Nora lay curled up and sleeping. Zach closed his laptop and reached for Nora’s hard copy of her book and flipped to the last page—William’s goodbye to Caroline—and read it for the first time.

My Caroline,

If you’re reading this endnote then I can assume you’ve suffered your way through the story, our story once again. I suppose having you relive our time together is the ultimate proof of my sadism, as if you of all people needed further proof.

At the end I find myself surprised by how easy it was to write this book about us. I found I missed you so much that a terrible vacuum had formed; all the words came and filled it and for a little while you were home with me again. I didn’t want it to end but a story must have an end, I suppose.

I have no secrets to reveal on this final page. I loved you. At least I tried to. And I failed you. I failed you with great success. Forgive me if you can. I will not apologize anymore.

I’m done writing now. I may go into the garden and read until evening. It isn’t quite the same without your head on my knee and your ill-informed criticisms of my reading material, but I shall carry on alone, page by page, until the end. And when evening comes and the sun is sitting on the edge of the earth, I will look out, searching for a break in the horizon as that father did once so many thousands of years ago…the father waiting for his prodigal child to return.

I hope you are happy. As for me, I…continue. If you ever miss me, miss… But some things are best left unwritten. Just know I have kept your room for you. I’ll say no more. I know I sent you away. I know it was the right thing to do. But I also know that perhaps not every story has to end.

Love,

Your William

Zach turned to look at Nora’s sleeping form. She looked so young right now, so defenseless. She looked like a child sleeping on her stomach, her arms tucked under her. What a fool he’d been. First he’d pushed her away out of grief for Grace. Then he’d pushed her away out of anger at himself. Adrift and unmoored, she had tried again and again to throw him a rope to save him from the raging waters. And now he no longer felt like a drowning man at sea. Nora…the siren and the goddess, the ship and the wine-dark sea. She would either save him or end him. Right now, with her words singing in his ears, he didn’t really care which.

Standing slowly so as not to wake her, Zach found his messenger bag and dug through it. He pulled out her contract and returned to the sofa. He knelt beside her sleeping form and flipped to the last page. Taking up his pen, he laid the contract on her back and with a sure hand and absolute certainty that the book would outsell anything Royal had ever published, he signed his name, Zechariah Easton.

Nora stirred and opened her eyes.

“Zach?”

“Here.” He handed her the pen. “Your turn.”

Nora took the pen and only stared at him for a moment. Then she rolled up, took the contract, laid it on his back and signed Eleanor Schreiber on the line.

“It’s done,” she said.

“It’s good. Nora—” Zach placed a hand on the side of her face “—it’s spectacular.”

Nora smiled. And then the smile was gone. They only looked at each other. Nora leaned forward and kissed him.

He didn’t think it was possible but their second kiss was even more intoxicating than their first. He was still on his knees, and she sat in front of him on the edge of the couch. He started to stand, started to push her onto her back.

“No.” She stood up abruptly. “I wrote the book your way. If we’re going to do this, we do it mine.”

Zach didn’t have to ask what she meant.

“Safe out and send me home, Zach. Or come with me. Those are your only two choices.”

Zach rose off the floor and made the most terrifying decision of his life.

“I’m with you.”

Nora headed to the bedroom.

He stood alone in his living room and breathed for a minute. Grace… Her name echoed hollowly in his heart like an unanswered prayer.

But there was no going back. The wind took hold of the sails. Zach followed Nora into his bedroom. She struck a match and lit the single candle he’d left next to the bed.

“A bottle of wine and a candle…” Nora said. “You were looking forward to this night, weren’t you, Zach?”

“Yes,” he confessed.

She came over to him, unknotted her tie and took it off. She brought it over his eyes and tied it around his head, blindfolding him. He tensed at his loss of his sight.

“Relax.” Nora’s voice was calm and soothing as if she were talking to a child. “Trust me, please.”

“I do,” he said and knew he meant it.

He stood still as Nora unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it down his arms. But she didn’t take it off completely. She used the shirt to tie his hands behind his back.

Zach sensed her step away. He heard her soft laugh.

“Ecce homo.” Zach remembered the painting in the church. “Behold the man.”

“Nora…” Zach said, worried he was about to get crucified.

“How do you feel?”

“Disoriented.”

“The blindfold will do that. Don’t breathe too deeply and don’t lock your knees.”

He nodded and tried to relax his legs.

“Do you know why I’ve done this, Zach?”

“No.”

“I could say it’s because I want you. I do want you. I have rarely been so attracted to someone in my life. But if I just wanted you I could have had you the day we met. Yes?”

Zach knew she expected an answer. He decided to save them both time and simply go with the truth.

“Yes.”

“Do you know why I didn’t let that happen? Why I stopped you before you could ask me up that night in the cab?”

Zach experienced a mild wave of vertigo. Nora moved as she spoke and the words seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“Why?” Nora had never made her attraction to him a secret. Why she’d turned him down the one time he’d come on to her was something he’d wondered about since that night.

“Because when you said Grace’s name you had so much pain in your eyes. I knew you didn’t really want me. You just wanted to not think and not feel for a few hours. Yes?”

“Yes,” Zach admitted.

“I do want you, Zach, but I also want to know you.”

“You do know me.”

“You’ve kept half your life from me,” she said. “I don’t want half. I want all. You know my secrets now. Time to tell me yours. It’s all or nothing tonight. Say ‘all’ and we go on. Say ‘nothing’ and this ends now and forever. You decide.”

He felt the floor rock underneath him. On the wood floor and in his bare feet, he imagined for a moment he was on a ship in a storm.

“All.”

“Good,” Nora said, sounding relieved and yet determined. “Now…tell me about Grace.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Then say your safe word and end it. But that will end it. It and us. But if you don’t want to end it, answer the question.”

For a terrible moment Zach considered his options. There were some things he simply did not talk about. But they’d come so far now…it would be a more difficult journey back than forward. Zach took a few short, shallow breaths and used the street sounds below to orient himself.

“Grace was eighteen when we met.” He gave up the words like precious possessions to a thief. “I was…older.”

“You were teaching at Cambridge then, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Grace was your student?”

Zach swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“That explains why my relationship with Wes made you so uncomfortable at first. Déjà vu, right? It seems so unlike you, getting involved with a student.”

“All teachers nurse attractions to the occasional student. I never intended to act upon it. Grace was lovely beyond words, twice as bright and talented as any student I’d ever taught. She wrote poetry, good poetry. No eighteen-year-old in history has ever written good poetry. But she did.”

“What else did she do?”

“She brought me her poetry sometimes and asked for my opinion, my help.”

“You were her editor.”

Zach laughed bitterly.

“I suppose I was.”

“She loved you.”

“As much as a girl of eighteen can love her thirty-one-year-old teacher. At the time, I simply assumed she cared only for her writing.”

“Eighteen means she couldn’t buy booze in the States. It doesn’t mean she couldn’t love you.”

“It does mean I shouldn’t have loved her back.”

“But you did.”

“Foolishly, yes.” His stomach churned as he relived that year, that nightmare of a year. “Or what passed for love at the time. But I never acted on it. I loved my work, loved teaching, loved my life.”

“What happened?” Nora’s questions were as relentless as any assault.

Zach took another breath. He never even allowed himself to think about that time, much less tell another soul about it. It was his burden alone.

“I was in my office late on a Friday night. I had a hundred exams to grade that weekend. I suppose I’d complained about this in class. Somehow she knew I’d be there.”

“She came to your office?”

“Yes. I was exhausted.” Suddenly Zach was back in that cramped third-floor office again. His sleeves were rolled up; his fingers were tinged with red ink. His head ached from the hours of reading, the endless concentration. He yawned, stretched, heard a noise in the hallway. “I heard footsteps in the hall and looked up. She was standing in my doorway.”

“She came to your office late at night. Shall I assume the inevitable happened?”

“It felt inevitable. She came inside without waiting for me to ask her. And then she closed the door behind her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘I don’t have any poems tonight.’”

“And what did you say?”

Zach exhaled. “I didn’t say anything at all.”

“This shouldn’t be a bad memory for you. Tell me why it is.”

“She was…” Zach stopped and let the silence speak for itself. Behind the blindfold he closed his eyes. He remembered how easily Grace came to him, how her body relaxed against his, how his hands fit her thighs as if they’d been made to press them open again and again. And then he recalled her gasp of pain, that brief intake of breath that told him all.

“She was a virgin,” Nora said, filling in the blanks.

“Yes.”

“It’s not your fault that you didn’t know.”

“It was my fault…” Zach began and felt the guilt on him again like a knife pressed to his throat. “It was my fault I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.”

“Did she tell you to?”

“No. But I should have anyway. I had dozens of lovers before then…but never…” Zach said and though the memory was an agony, his body remembered that moment. He could still feel himself inside her tight passage. “I’d never taken such pleasure inside the body of a woman before that night.”

“Tell me what happened, Zach,” Nora demanded. She wouldn’t stop until he told her.

“No, it wasn’t my fault I didn’t know she was a virgin. But it was my fault she got pregnant.”

“Jesus Christ,” Nora said, sounding both shocked and sympathetic for the first time. Zach was almost afraid of the next question.

“You don’t have any children so I’ll assume it was one of three possibilities—adoption, abortion or miscarriage.”

“It was ectopic. Worse than a miscarriage.”

He heard Nora’s slight intake of breath, the wince of pain.

“How bad was it?”

“It almost killed her. She was so young she didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t. She ignored the pain for a month. We’d only been married two weeks when she woke up in a pool of blood. One in a million chance, the doctor said, that a girl so young and healthy would suffer that. So young, he said, and he looked at me like a criminal. I felt like one. Eighteen years old and she’s hemorrhaging in the emergency ward. Eighteen years old and she has to marry a man over a decade her senior, a man hardly more than a stranger to her.”

“What happened after?”

Zach shook his head. “She survived. But I wasn’t sure we would or even if we should. I waited every day for her to tell me she was leaving me. We married because she was pregnant. Then she wasn’t. But she never left me. Still, that year was hell for us. I had a nineteen-year-old wife I barely knew who had to transfer to King’s College in London after I left Cambridge, left before they could fire me.”

“But you stayed married.”

“We did. How or why, I don’t know.”

“Because she loved you, Zach. And because you loved her.”

“I did. Not that it matters.”

“Why doesn’t it?”

“Because we’re over. She’s made that perfectly clear.”

“How do you know it’s over?”

“Because she left me, Nora,” Zach said, letting irritation seep into his voice.

“She left you?” Nora seemed unfazed by his anger. “Aren’t you the one who packed up, boarded a plane and moved across an ocean?”

“She left me long before that.”

“Tell me.” Nora’s voice was insistent, hypnotic and musical. Unable to see, Zach felt uncoupled from the ground, unmoored. Nothing seemed real. It was easier to make his confession in this kind of darkness.

“Two years ago Grace told me she wanted us to try again. Try again—as if we were trying the first time.”

“What did you say?”

“I said she nearly died because of my mistake, and I would never let that happen again. After that, she started to fade out on me. First she stopped making our coffee in the morning. Another month passed and she stopped reading with me in the evenings. She didn’t leave all at once. Just room by room. She left the bedroom last. I told her about the job here. She told me to go if that’s what I wanted. But she was already gone. I did leave, but she left me first.”

“Can I tell you a secret, Zach?” Nora’s voice came from over his shoulder. “I would have left you, too.”

“Nora, I—”

“Shut up and listen,” she said with such cold, quiet authority that Zach fell silent at once. “You called the first night you spent with her a mistake. It was that night, that mistake that brought you two together. What should have been a one-night stand created a marriage. Can you imagine the guilt she’s been carrying for the past eleven years? Thinking that because of her you had to leave a job you loved, that you had to marry someone you didn’t, that she ruined your career, your life, your world. And you call the night that started it all a mistake? She didn’t leave you, Zach. You threw her out.”

“She nearly died because of me, Nora,” he said, nearly spitting the words. “You can’t even imagine what that was like.”

“She was eighteen, an adult. It was her decision as much as yours. She came to your office. You think she came for a cup of tea and a chat? She wanted you. She got you. And I can promise you even waking up in a puddle of her own blood it never once occurred to her that it was all a mistake. Making love to her a mistake? That’s a worse slap in the face than Søren ever laid on me.”

“Why…why are you saying all this, Nora?”

“Because you need to hear the truth. The truth that your guilt didn’t punish you. It punished her. You were so afraid to hurt Grace that everything you did ended up harming her. No more, Zach. No more fear. You will not be afraid anymore, afraid to hurt a woman with your own passion and desire. Remember that night at the 8th Circle?” Nora asked. “Do you remember what I told you I was?”

“A Switch.” As long as he lived he’d never forget that night.

“Yes. And that means I can give pain but I can also take it. Aren’t you tired of the pain?”

“Yes,” Zach breathed.

“Good,” Nora said and tore off the blindfold. She yanked his shirt down and freed his arms. “Give it to me then.”

Zach grabbed Nora, nearly tearing her clothes in his frenzy to get them off. He pushed her back against the wall and unzipped his jeans. She wrapped her legs around him, her arms wound around his shoulders. With a fierce, unforgiving thrust, he pushed inside her. He had never let himself be so brutal with a woman in his life.

“Hurt me, Zach. Better me than you.” He did as she instructed; he couldn’t do otherwise. He drove into her again and again, thrusting harder each time. He bit her neck and breasts, dug his fingers into the soft flesh of her hips and thighs. She submitted to his every merciless thrust without complaint. The more vicious he was with her, the more she responded with gasps and moans of her own. Nora’s body clenched around him and he came inside her with the ruthless force that only thirteen months of miserable celibacy could deliver.

Zach wasn’t finished with her, though. There seemed to be no end to his need. He pulled out of her and forced her to the floor. He pushed his hand into her body, needing to feel her wetness on his fingers. He knew that she was wet not only from her desire but from his own passion that he’d poured into her. She writhed underneath him. He pulled his hand out and moved to take her again. But Nora lifted her arms to shove him off. He grabbed her by the wrists and pinned her down, her arms by her head. She held her legs together tight and Zach pried them apart with his knees. Shocked by his violence he could only stare down at her.

“Good boy,” she said.

Zach let her hands go. He pushed her over onto her stomach and penetrated her from behind. She arched beneath him, taking him in deeper, goading him on with her hips, her cries. She came so hard that he felt the spasms in her stomach rip through him. He seized her by the wrists again and held her down. Over her, inside her, he pushed in so hard and so far she cried out. Still, he did not relent, could not relent. He was all force and no restraint. Nora had tied him up and set something else free.

With brutal, bruising strength, he impaled himself completely within her and came so hard even Nora flinched from the ferocity of it. He collapsed onto her prone body, resting inside her, not ready to leave her wet warmth. They lay coupled together, swallowing air and saying nothing. Zach brushed her hair over her shoulder and kissed the back of her neck. He closed his eyes and rested his head on her back. Her skin smelled so warm. He could stay here forever if he kept his eyes closed.

Zach pulled out of her slowly and rolled onto his back. He lay on the floor next to her and studied the play of candlelight on the ceiling and willed his thumping heart to settle. Nora moved to his side, leaned up on her elbow and looked at him.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked after a long but strangely comfortable pause. He could see the faint red welts on her arm.

“Yes. A lot. I’m very impressed.”

Zach laughed but the laugh rang hollow even to his own ears.

“She left me, Nora,” he said, his throat tight as a fist. “God, she left me and it’s all my fault.”

He rubbed his forehead but Nora took his hand and pulled it away.

“I know she left you. But I’m here.”

Zach inhaled slowly, exhaled even slower. He turned and cupped Nora’s face in his palm.

“I don’t deserve either of you.”

Nora gave him a wicked smile.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Zach. That’s my job.” She came up on her hands and knees. “You’re still in charge. Tell me what to do.”

“Tell you what to do? Where to even begin?”

Nora grinned at him still on her hands and knees over him.

“Use your imagination.”

His imagination gave him a very good idea.

“Stay,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

Zach reached for the drawer of his nightstand and pulled out the lubricant that Nora had given him.

“Why, Zachary, you surprise me.”

Zach nearly groaned aloud as he pressed into her. She was so tight around him he could barely breathe.

He pushed hard and Nora flinched.

“Sorry,” he said, smiling at his own eagerness.

“No, you aren’t.” He heard the laughter in Nora’s voice.

“No,” he admitted. “Not this time.”

32

Shortly before dawn, Nora dragged herself out of Zach’s bed and dressed quietly in the dark. She found her tie that she’d used as a blindfold and hid it away where Zach would find it later. Last night certainly deserved a memento.

Nora gazed down at Zach’s still sleeping form. She could scarcely believe what had passed between them just two hours earlier. Someone, something, the real Zach who had been hiding for the past ten years and six weeks came out the moment she’d ripped off the blindfold. Last night she didn’t spend with Zach, her prim and proper editor. Last night she spent with the Zach who’d been a lady-killer as young as thirteen, had drunken threesomes during his university days and had taken the virginity of his eighteen-year-old student on his Cambridge office desk. Nora’s whole body ached from last night’s brutal sex. Without her toy bag they’d had to make do with just his hands to pin her down, his knees to hold her legs open, his hand over her mouth to gag her cries. It was some of the roughest, dirtiest sex she’d ever had in her life. She couldn’t stop smiling.

On her way out of his apartment she stopped and picked up her contract still lying on the sofa. She glanced through it, making sure all the i’s were dotted, all the t’s were crossed. The advance wasn’t going to make her rich, but it would keep her very comfortable for the next few years while she focused solely on her writing.

Nora drove home and dragged her exhausted body into the house. Although she longed for sleep, something nagged at her, something that told her that in her excitement over finishing her book with Zach, she’d forgotten something very important.

Nora entered the hallway that led to her room but stopped in midstep. Wesley stood outside her bedroom leaning back against the door. In his hands was a small box of Tiffany blue. From his stance it appeared he’d been waiting for hours, maybe all night. At first his eyes shone with relief; but then as he took in her tousled hair, her disheveled clothes, a terrible realization dawned on his face. His arm fell to his side, the box dangling by its ribbon from his slack fingers.

“Zach?” Wesley asked.

“Yes,” Nora said, cold with fear and shame.

Wesley only nodded. The box tumbled from his fingers and fell to the floor. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Wes—” Nora began, desperate to explain. Their date, their celebration, was supposed to have been last night. But she’d stayed with Zach instead, stayed and finished her book. She wanted to explain all this to him, but Wesley only brushed past her and disappeared into his bedroom. Nora tried to follow but found his door locked. She stared unbelieving at the knob for a tortured eternity. In all their time together Wesley had never once locked his door.

In quiet shock, she walked to her room but stopped to pick up the box from the floor. With trembling fingers she opened it. Inside the box she found two silver hair combs, delicate and ornate. Nora’s heart cracked like glass in her chest. Wesley’s innocence, his father’s watch, the only thing he had of value…this was his way of telling her he would sell it all to be with her. He’d been waiting all night to give himself to her, and she’d crawled home bruised and stained from a night with Zach.