Pictures of Us Read online

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. The words sounded inconsequential in my ears, useless and small, but Michael smiled at me. A real smile, his eyes going warm and even darker. I felt my cheeks heating up again and tried not to bite my bottom lip.

  “Well, I guess we’ll head down,” Lucy said abruptly, turning and marching for the worn wooden steps that loped over the dunes. “You guys coming?”

  She’d done her duty and satisfied her curiosity at the same time, and if I suspected that she wished Michael had given her the smile he’d given me, she would never say so. Cath was, as usual, oblivious to anything that wasn’t shouted, and she dawdled as we trudged across the hot sand, struggling to light another cigarette in the breeze.

  But she noticed when Michael spread his towel out next to mine, and arched a plucked eyebrow in reaction. The safety pin in her left ear gleamed in the sun, and she left on her shirt and the black leather collar around her neck when she lay back on her towel. She was going to have one strange tan, not that she would care.

  Michael seemed fascinated by a game of Frisbee farther down the beach, and for a minute I wondered if he’d realized where he’d chosen to sit. I pulled off my plain white T-shirt and pretended I didn’t know he was there, as I smoothed oil on my legs and stomach.

  It wasn’t until a half hour later, when I rolled onto my stomach to change the station on the radio, that he even moved.

  “Do you want some on your back?” he asked, picking up the greasy bottle of Hawaiian Tropic. He held up his other hand to shade his eyes, and I avoided his squint before I blushed again. It was so hot by then that I was probably bright red already, and I had to resist the impulse to dab sweat off my forehead and chest with the corner of my towel.

  “Sure.” I gave him a noncommittal shrug, and hoped I wasn’t trembling as his hands worked the oil into my back in long, firm strokes. His fingers were strong, but equally gentle, and everywhere he touched felt strangely alive, vibrating with a teasing echo of his hands. I was suddenly painfully unsure what my plain bikini bottom covered and what it didn’t, what the curve of my spine looked like and if my shoulder blades were anything more than bony wings.

  When he finished, I propped myself on my elbows to rummage in my bag for a piece of gum. My mouth had gone dry, and I was just unwrapping a piece of Juicy Fruit when he leaned closer still. My heart was already beating hard as he waited for me to return his gaze. And when I did, he licked a drop of sweat from my upper lip without any warning.

  “Hot,” he said.

  I blinked, and I think I nodded, riding out the potent combination of shock and arousal and curiosity. Michael Butterfield wasn’t like the few boys I’d gone out with so far, kids I’d known for years, as familiar and unsurprising as my own face. From them I could imagine a cheap grope, an attempt to untie my bikini top, a casual slap on the ass. This was different.

  Michael turned over and lay on his stomach, resting his head on his crossed arms so he could look at me. I knew even then that my life was going to change again, even if I couldn’t predict exactly how. One thing was sure, though. The summer I’d been dreading for weeks wasn’t going to be aimless or empty if Michael Butterfield had anything to do with it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MORNING AFTER SOPHIA KEATING’S surprise phone call there was little time for Michael and me to talk. He was late for his train into the city, where he was the executive editor for a small but prestigious publisher, and Emma was eyeing the two of us over her bowl of Frosted Flakes. We were rarely all together on weekday mornings.

  “Must be nice to get to sleep late whenever you want,” she complained, then set her bowl in the sink and zippered her backpack. She’d twisted her hair up behind her head with a black butterfly clip, and she looked at least two years older, which was unsettling, especially on this particular morning.

  “I still have to bring a note from home, though,” Michael teased her. His tone was light, but the restless night had left a deep gray smudge beneath each eye. He was puttering, too, pouring a second cup of coffee, returning upstairs for a different tie, idling over the morning paper.

  I refilled my mug of tea from the old china pot on the counter and said, “You’re going to miss the 7:50 if you don’t hurry.”

  “He’s not going.” Emma slung her backpack over one shoulder with a wry smile. “You two are going to play hooky, aren’t you?”

  Michael glanced at me, but I looked away, watching an enormous bumblebee hovering in the thick blue fists of wisteria outside the kitchen window. We’d taken plenty of days off while Emma was at school, spending the morning tangled in bed and later indulging in lunch out somewhere or window-shopping downtown. It was one of our rituals, a stolen day of reconnection we tried to make time for every six months or so, and we were due.

  But not today. Definitely not today.

  “You’re going to be late, too, miss,” I told Emma, shooing her out the front door with a kiss. “See you this afternoon.”

  Her hand lifted in a wave as she set out down the walk, and I paused at the screen door, as she ambled along the sidewalk, adjusting the volume of her iPod, her head swinging in time to the beat.

  Our gorgeous girl had a brother. Biologically, at least. What else he might be to her was still up in the air, but Emma would be fascinated by the news initially and then the questions would come, rapid-fire and endless. She knew full well what year we’d been married, and she’d always been too perceptive for her own good. After all, she’d picked up on the weird vibe between Michael and me this morning, even if she hadn’t interpreted its cause correctly.

  Michael touched my arm, and I turned to face him. Part of me wanted the comfort of burying my head in his shoulder, but another part of me longed to crawl into bed alone for a few days and hide.

  “We’ll talk to her tonight,” he said. His dark hair was sticking up in spikes over his forehead, and in my mind’s eye I could see him standing in the kitchen, running a hand through his hair restlessly, wondering if he should join me. I knew him inside and out. That hadn’t changed, either—so it was even more surprising that he didn’t understand how imperative it was that we talk first.

  “I’m not sure what there is to tell her yet,” I argued, slipping away from him and returning to the kitchen. The pale wood floor was warm; early sunlight had flooded the window over the sink.

  “I’m going to talk to him today.” Michael caught my wrist before I could pick up my mug. “I arranged to call him at lunchtime. There are things I want to hear from him, too.”

  I let him pull me against his chest, and I breathed in the clean scent of his shirt, and the spicier smell of his skin beneath it. With his arms around me, and his heartbeat the steady, comforting rhythm of a clock beneath my cheek, the rest of the world receded for a minute, as it always had.

  “I’ll call you after I speak to him,” he murmured into my hair, and I nodded. “And then we can decide what to tell Emma, and everyone else.”

  When he’d gone, gunning the old Volvo out of the driveway to make his train into Manhattan, I carried my tea onto the front porch, letting the screen door slam behind me once Walter, our aging beagle, had settled into a square of sunlight with a grunt. I had dozens of things to do, but my mind refused to focus on anything other than the fact of Drew Keating’s existence.

  My fingers itched to dial Lucy’s number at her office, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was nearly impossible to get her on the phone lately, and we resorted to brief, flying e-mails more often than not, but that wasn’t the reason for my hesitation. Since junior high, Lucy had been my willing ear, my shoulder to cry on, but spilling this particular story seemed like a betrayal when even Emma didn’t yet know about her half brother.

  As much as I would have welcomed Lucy’s voice on the other end of the line, what I really wanted was reassurance. Someone to reassure me that I had nothing to worry about, that I hadn’t taken Michael’s love for granted, that nothing about our life together was going to c
hange. The problem was, there was every chance that Lucy would disagree.

  DANCING BALLET PROFESSIONALLY requires an incredible amount of dedication, concentration and talent. I had all three, according to my teachers, but after ten years of training, and four summers spent at the New York City Ballet’s prestigious School of American Ballet, what I didn’t have was luck. I’d fallen during a rehearsal, thanks to an ill-timed jump into Jared Farmer’s arms, and smashed my right knee into pieces, quite literally, as I landed on the floor.

  Everything I’d dreamed of, everything I’d worked for, was over in that moment, and I realized it even as I lay sprawled on the gritty studio floor. The pain was a blinding starburst, hot and relentless, like nothing I’d ever felt. My knee wouldn’t move—what had once been solid seemed to be a handful of dust now, and my lower leg a useless length of bone, my foot dangling from it like an afterthought in its scuffed pointe shoe.

  Now, I barely remember the round of doctors’ appointments and consultations, the surgery and the recuperation. What I remember is the awful feeling of loss, and of being lost. I had nothing to focus on for the first time. For years, every free moment of my life had been occupied with dance. Studying my idols, training, practicing, living, eating and breathing ballet. It wasn’t a distant spot on the horizon; it was the here and now, packing lamb’s wool into my pointe shoes, washing my leotards, stretching my rebellious muscles every morning, absorbing Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky until I could hear the violins humming and swelling in my sleep.

  Meeting Michael was what saved me. From what, I’m not sure—depression doesn’t sound melodramatic even if self-destruction does. But as intently as I turned my eyes and my heart to him, I found that I was the focus of someone else’s fascination, and it felt good.

  By the end of that day at the beach, Michael had asked about everything from my family and friends to what I dreamed about at night. He wanted to know if I’d ever cut my hair, which fell halfway down my back, and if I liked white peaches. He was fascinated by my knowledge of classical music—at least, the ballet-appropriate pieces—and he’d made me list everywhere my family had ever been on vacation. He wanted to know what my room looked like, if I slept on my stomach or my back and what I ate first thing in the morning.

  As odd as it may seem, we didn’t have anything to do but talk that day and walk up and down the shoreline, our feet splashing in the salty tide. And it was incredibly freeing. In those hours, I didn’t have to think about the gaping hole in my life. Michael was filling it in with his interest in me.

  It didn’t escape Lucy’s notice, either. “You’re in love with being loved,” she said two weeks later, when I’d disentangled myself from Michael long enough to join her in Cath’s pool. She was hanging on to the side, kicking her feet out behind her in lazy swipes, and her wet hair was slicked back from her face.

  I swam away from her, stung. Michael was flipping through a magazine on a lounge chair just a dozen feet away, his eyes shaded behind a pair of dark sunglasses and his chest pink with sun.

  “That’s…well, mean. And not true,” I said, paddling over to the concrete lip and tossing back my own soaked hair.

  “Really?” She shook her head, shrugging. She was squinting in the fierce afternoon sun, her nose wrinkled in disapproval, each freckle standing out like a polka dot. “What is it you like about him other than how he’s completely obsessed with you?”

  “You’re out of line, Lucy.” I managed to keep my voice steady as I said it, but my heart had squeezed into a tight fist. I didn’t want to fight, but I wasn’t going to listen to her accuse me of something she understood nothing about.

  I was flattered by Michael’s interest, and I knew it even then, but I was also pleased by it because I’d fallen so hard for him. There were plenty of things I liked about him, not that I was about to spout off a list for Lucy’s benefit. He was smarter than any boy I’d ever dated, for one thing, and he was gentle and funny and kind, but there were a million little quirks that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone who wasn’t in love with him. The way his fingers were shaped. The way his left eyebrow was slightly crooked. The way he ate Oreos, around and around the edges until he swallowed the middle in one gulp. The fact that he was an awful swimmer but could run for miles without losing his breath. The short stories he’d written and collected in a plain spiral-bound notebook. The way he always carried a book with him wherever he went.

  That he liked me was only one reason among the dozens I mused over as I lay in bed at night, and the idea that he’d given me something to do other than brood all summer didn’t occur to me at all until Lucy mentioned it.

  It was rude and blunt of her to say it, but there are moments now when I wonder if she was wrong.

  That summer was gorgeous from the beginning, just hot enough, lush and sweet scented. The old trees that lined the streets were thick with leaves, gardens had bloomed early, and every few blocks you could smell the chemical tang of chlorine from a backyard pool. Michael had been anticipating boredom his first summer away from Manhattan, where a kid with two doctors for parents could do pretty much whatever he liked, but we kept busy in the way only teenagers seem to do, wandering the streets hand in hand, drifting lazily in friends’ pools, talking for hours on my front porch, counting fireflies at dusk and listening for the tinny jingle of the ice-cream truck.

  And kissing, of course. There was a lot of kissing.

  I’d kissed boys before, if not extensively. I was usually too wrapped up improving my port de bras or learning a new variation for performance, and most of the boys in my ballet classes weren’t particularly interested in girls. But I had made out with Tommy Giuditta during the second installment of Friday the 13th, and I’d fooled around with Brendan Hastings at Billy Caruso’s party over Christmas break.

  Michael tasted different, felt different from other boys. I couldn’t get enough of touching him. The wiry hair on his chest was fascinating. The smooth, firm muscles in his upper arms responded beneath my fingers. And his mouth was hot and faintly sweet, like nothing I’d ever tasted.

  When he touched me…well, that was different, too. I was so familiar with my own body, the strength of my legs, the jutting definition of my ribs and hipbones, the painful bunions and scabbed blisters on my feet, that I was convinced it couldn’t hold any surprises. But when Michael and I were kissing, tangled together in his bed or on the sofa in my deserted living room long after everyone had gone to sleep, I never failed to be awed. My body understood a whole host of things I didn’t, apparently, and Michael had been the one to introduce me to them. There was heat, a slow softening that blurred every edge when Michael touched me, but there was also an electric buzz, a new, urgent energy. Need, I know now.

  I was consumed with it those first weeks we were together, restless and irritable when he wasn’t within arm’s reach. To satisfy my parents—who had explained that although not dancing certainly wasn’t my choice, I would have to spend at least some of my vacation productively—I’d found a part-time job at the cinema downtown. Michael wasn’t working, since his mother felt that the loss of his father, moving out of his first and only home and preparing to leave for college were quite enough for him to deal with.

  I’d been heartbroken to learn that he had graduated already—he was only a few months older than I was, but he’d started kindergarten early or something like that. I was too shattered to listen to the explanation, and anyway, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was come September, he’d be leaving for Boston and Harvard.

  One afternoon when I didn’t have to work and Michael’s mother had taken his sister, Jane, into the city for the day to visit friends, we were sprawled upstairs on his bed, drinking iced tea and feeding each other potato chips. We’d been talking about Michael’s favorite bookstore in Greenwich Village and had drifted into a strange conversation about reading The Scarlet Letter for school, and then about what classes Michael would take at Harvard, where he was going to major in
literature.

  I could feel him pulling back, the muscles in his shoulders stiff and his eyebrows drawn together over those huge, dark eyes. He would make noises about putting off school for a year, finding a job in town and waiting for me to graduate. He’d done it before, and although I’d stopped him each time, I was learning that he had a stubborn streak as wide as the sky.

  I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t want him to stay, either—not with me as the cause. What if he stayed and hated me for it? What if he stayed and realized he didn’t really love me, even though he’d said it a million times already, like a prayer between kisses, whispered in my ear at the movies, written on scraps of paper he left in my shorts pockets or my bag. It was then that I’d realized that being the object of love gave you power. And I was desperate not to use it the wrong way.

  I pushed up on my elbows without warning, nudging the nearly empty chip bag to the floor. Michael looked up; he’d been lying beside me on the bed, his dark brown hair gleaming amber in the sun and one cheek flushed with heat.

  I sat up completely and peeled off my T-shirt and bra, then swung my legs over the side of the bed to shimmy out of my shorts and panties. Michael sat up, too, eyes wide, his mouth opening as if he was about to speak.

  I held out my hand as I lay back on the pillows, and he straddled me, his jeans rough against my naked thighs, his T-shirt warm and soft against my breasts. “Tess?” he said.

  I didn’t answer, but he let me tug off his shirt, and groaned as I ran my hands over his chest.

  “This was more romantic in my head,” he said as I fumbled with his zipper. “There were going to be, like, candles and stuff.”

  I smiled as he shrugged off his jeans. My blood was racing, but it felt good. We’d been giving ourselves to each other for weeks, fitting the smaller pieces into the bigger ones, revealing colors and shadings, creating a puzzle that was very definitely an “us” instead of the separate entities “me” and “him.” I wanted to finish this now, I wanted all of it, and I didn’t want to wait. “Doesn’t matter,” I told him, taking his face between my hands, studying the shadow his eyelashes made on his cheeks before he kissed me.