Page 45 of Lucas & Melissa Falling in Love
“You think so?” She contemplates me with eyes that are dreamy and pensive for a few heartbeats. I’m not exactly anxious, but anticipating her conclusion, hoping it doesn’t disturb her that I let stand her self-confessed tendency to be superficial.
There’ll be plenty of fuel for a disturbance later. I need her to be happy and carefree now. The thought that I should wait and talk to her about the secrets I’ve held from her in the morning, after we’ve had a chance to make love all night, takes hold of my mind, shakes my resolve and won’t let go, even though I know it’s wrong.
She shuts her bag and pulls it from the bed. I take it from her and we walk to the door. Her face is a study in loving adoration, bliss, as if we’re a newlywed couple going off to our honeymoon rather than a couple starting out, still getting to know each other. That’s the measure of how optimistic she is, webothare, for our future together, how much we believe in our connection and our passion.
The shake of anxiety for the revelation to come shudders through me, but I withstand it like a minor quake on the Richter scale of life. I’ve been called a solid oak before, a brick, as immoveable as granite and just as stable. I’ll need to call on everything rocklike within me to withstand whatever shake-up the revelation of my family legacy brings.
Because however certain Melissa is now about the two of us, she will feel like she’s starting over with a different person, the man she didn’t know I was. The quake shakes me and I tense, my chest tightening as we walk back through the hall to the front door. Melissa opens the closet to get our coats, not waiting for Walter the butler to do his duty, thank God.
I spy Margo and George across the room, talking and laughing among their friends. I don’t see Will. Relief spreads through me, loosening some of the tension in my muscles. I hope he’s left the party. Even though I don’t feel guilt, I feel something, some responsibility, empathy, understanding for his plight. But I have my own plight to handle now.
Telling Melissa the truth, the whole truth about who I am is what’s taking up a big space in my head, and in my heart, and every molecule of my body.
After I help her into her coat and put on mine, we leave the party. I sweep Melissa out the door, allowing her only a distant wave goodbye to Margo.
“You’ll be back soon enough,” I say in response to the protest in her eyes and take her hand as we ride the elevator down to the lobby.
We drive in my Uber car to my small apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn on Star Street in the center of the arts district. I’m glad of the fact that I don’t have a roommate and she’s impressed.
“I didn’t realize Uber paid that well,” she says as I unlock the door.
“It doesn’t. I do other things.” I don’t want to get into it, but as soon as the door swings in and she steps across the threshold, she lets out an admiring whistle.
“Wowie. That’s some piece of art you got here.” She approaches the sculpture taking up all the space on top of the table and dominating the room. Running a delicate finger of the curves from the top to bottom, she studies it with surprising appreciation.
“Is this made of marble?”
I nod.
She lets out another whistle. “Where the hell did you—”
She stops abruptly and snaps her eyes to meet mine, taking them off the sculpture, her fingers still touching the spot, partially obscuring the artist’s signature.
A swell of something rises up, a pleasant expansion of my chest and roll in my gut as if we were fifteen and we’d just had our first kiss.
“It’s yours, isn’t it? Youmadethis,” she says reverently. She’s not asking. She realizes the sculpture is mine, that I created it from a hunk of Italian Carrara marble into a vision from my imagination. Even now I’m shocked at the resemblance to reality.
“My project from last semester in my favorite course. Meet my other passion.” I put a hand out and step to the table, waving my arm in the space surrounding my best work to date. “I call itHer.”
“She’s beautiful,” Melissa whispers. “And what abouthim?” she caresses the partner, separated by a space as thin as paper.
“I call itHim.HimandHer. Together they areThe Couple.”
She stares at me and looks closer atHim.
“It’s you.” Excitement lights her and it makes me hot to hear it in her voice, see it in her face. Remembering the last time I saw her excitement makes me squirm with need, impatient that we are spending time on my sculptures. The couple I spent hundreds of hours creating and slaving over, pounding and polishing and making my own, breathing my own life into them, my own blood and sweat and joy, I now have no patience for. I want Melissa, notHer.
Nodding, I tease the coat from her shoulders and slip it down her bare arms.
“I’m so impressed with you, Lucas. Your talent is astounding.The Coupleis simply beautiful.”
I throw her coat onto the nearby couch. Everything is nearby in the small confines of my studio, though it’s a loft with high ceilings, so it doesn’t feel too tight.
“Youare simply beautiful,” I say. “Inside and out. While I thought my sculpture was a thing of beauty,The Couplefades to a hunk of stone while you are soft flesh and hot blood.”
She stares at me as I slip my coat off and toss it next to hers. The subtle seductive pout, the lidded molten eyes kill me, make me her slave. Slipping my arms around her, I bring her in close for an embrace, feeling the soft skin of her arms and shoulders, her jaw and cheek, and breathing in the provocative scent of her neck and hair, the smooth pale skin of her jaw and cheek.
“Where do we . . . sleep?” she whispers.
