Maybe that’s his game, though,” I said. “The hunt for one soul, again and again.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“The other women lived with him for a long time too. Maybe he wants to wait until my defenses are down, and then-“
“Wow, Clea, you are so jaded. You found your soulmate. People wait their whole lives for this. It’s the most amazing thing in the world, and it’s happened to you. Can’t you just accept it and be happy?”
What she said made sense, but…
I flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Without looking at Rayna, I said, “He doesn’t act like he’s my soulmate. Sometimes I think maybe he liked the other women more. I think maybe he wishes I was one of them.”
Rayna was silent. This was something I’d never heard. “This is seriously, deep,” she finally said. “You’re feeling insecure because you’re jealous…of yourself.”
“I didn’t say I was jealous…”
“You’d rather think he’s a serial killer than risk being with him and finding out he doesn’t like you as much as he liked…you?” She scrunched her brow and thought, then tried again. “Yous? Anyway, you know what I mean-the other yous.”
“Forget the jealousy thing, okay? There are other reasons to doubt him too. Ben doesn’t trust him at all. He thinks Sage is some kind of demon. He said there’s a spirit called an incubus that comes to women in their sleep, and-“
“Of course Ben said that.” Rayna shrugged. “He’s jealous.”
“Of what?”
“Ben’s crazy in love with you, Clea. I’ve been saying that forever!”
“And I’ve been ignoring you forever, because it’s not true. You just want it to be true because it’s romantic.”
“Did you not see the pictures of you from Rio?”
I narrowed my eyes. “What are you talking about?”
Rayna pulled out her phone. “Honestly, I don’t know how you survive without Google Alerts on yourself. The paparazzi were out in full force for Carnival.”
She played with the phone for a minute, then handed it to me. It showed a close-up of Ben and me at the Sambadrome that could only have been taken with a serious zoom. I felt violated.
“I hate this,” I muttered.
“Why? You look cute!”
“I hate that people are sneaking around taking pictures of me!”
“I know you do. Ignore that for the moment. Just scroll through.”
There were five pictures of Ben and me. Four of them were moments I vividly remembered, pictures of the two of us facing each other, laughing as we did our best to imitate the dancers shimmying and strutting down the parade route.
The fifth one I didn’t remember. I wouldn’t have; in it I had my camera up to my face and was concentrating on lining up the perfect shot. Ben stood behind me, but he wasn’t wearing the goofy smile he’d had in the other pictures. He was staring right at me with those big puppydog eyes, and his smile wasn’t goofy at all, but…
“Uh-huh,” Rayna said triumphantly. She had climbed into my bed was looking at the picture over my shoulder. “Knew that one would stop you. There is only one word for the look on that boy’s face, Clea: love-struck. Which is probably why a bunch of websites are reporting he’s about to propose.”
“What?”
“Messenger. Don’t kill the messenger.”
I looked back at the picture. Ben did look love-struck. Very love-struck.
“It could just be the picture,” I said. “They caught him at a weird moment.”
“Yeah, a weird moment when he thought no one was looking so he showed how he really felt.”
I gave Rayna back the phone and shook my head. “Ben and I are like brother and sister. That’s gross.”
“Hey, I read Flowers in the Attic. It was kind of hot.”
“Shut up!” I laughed.
“I’m just saying, think about it. Really think about it. Is it that hard to believe that Ben’s in love with you?
In dreams and in love, there are no impossibilities.
Hilary DuffAnother quirk of Dad's was that although he could remember an infinite number of intricate surgical maneuvers and enough random details and trivia to run any Jeopardy! champion under the table, he found it patently impossible to remember basic things like phone numbers, appointments, or what in the world he had actually walked into the room to do. To mitigate this flaw, he wrote everything down, usually on whatever was handiest. This left his office looking like the heavens had opened and rained leaves of paper for forty days and forty nights.
Hilary DuffThere she was, bundled into sweats and a long wool coat five sizes too large for her, her curls hidden by a massive gray hat with earflaps-a look that could have been pulled off effectively only by someone in 1930s Siberia...or a supremely angular male model.
Hilary DuffSince George was at work, Dad ended up driving both women to the hospital. They clutched each other in the backseat-two huge-bellied, panting, moaning women, both of them freaking out about the work they were missing. Dad sped all the way to the hospital, sure he'd get pulled over and arrested for being a suspected polygamist with a taste for overachievers.
Hilary DuffApparently it was fine to believe in fate delivering you a soulmate every night, but crazy to believe fate might chafe at being told what to do. I believed Rayna gave fate far too much credit for benevolence.
Hilary DuffOkay, what do I do here?" he asked.
I didn't answer. I just danced.
"What are you doing? I can't do that. It's impossible. My hips don't go like that. How do your hips go like that?" He tried moving with frenzied baby steps, completely out of rhythm with the music.
I put my hands on his hips. "Slow down. It's okay. Just relax, and let your hips go."
"I am relaxed. My hips are very shy; they don't like to go off without the rest of my body.
Then a low voice murmured in my ear. "Clea."
I screamed and shot an immediate hammer punch to the side.
"Whoa!" cried Ben. He reeled back to avoid my fist and tripped over the rug, tumbling to the ground and spilling a fresh mug of coffee over his gray shawl-neck sweater.
"OH!" he gasped. "Hot. Very, very hot. Oh, not good."
"Ben! Oh my God, wait-" I darted into the bathroom and grabbed a hand towel, then raced back to him, knelt down, and sopped the spilled coffee from his chest. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know you were there! You didn't say anything!"
"I yelled from downstairs...I thought you'd heard me."
A strange smell tickled my nose, and I bent closer to Ben, just inches from his face. "What's that smell?" I asked.
"Cardamom clove coffee," he said, gesturing to the now empty mug on the floor beside us. "I thought you might like it."
"I like the smell. Maybe you should wear it as a cologne."
"Could work," he agreed. "You could give a testimonial that it makes women crazy."
"Not crazy-nimble. Ten years of Krav Maga gives you catlike reflexes. If you'd been an intruder...
He swung it open and presented me with a single red rose.
"For you," he said.
"Very gallant," I replied. "Of course you do realize I have the same cut flower in my room."
Ben glanced over his shoulder at the now empty bud vase sitting on his table. "Hmm. Didn't really think that out. Still gallant?"
"Very."
"You happen to look ravishing tonight." He said it with a British accent that made me laugh out loud.
"As do you, sir," I responded in kind.
"Excellent. Shall we go, then?" He extended his arm and I linked my own through it, first shifting my camera bag to my other shoulder so it wouldn't bang between us.
Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.”
“What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked.
“You do?” Ben sounded surprised.
“I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said.
“Really…because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said.
“I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something?
“I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.”
“Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said.
“Deal ‘em,” Ben said.
Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy.
“Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?”
“European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.”
Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?”
“I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did.”
Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions.
“So which of Shakespeare’s plays do you think was better served by the Globe Theatre: Henry VIII or Troilus and Cressida?” Ben asked, cracking his knuckles.
“Troilus and Cressida was never performed at the Globe,” Sage replied. “As for Henry VIII, the original Globe caught fire during the show and burned to the ground, so I’d say that’s the show that really brought down the house…wouldn’t you?”
“Nice…very nice.” Ben nodded. “Well done.”
It was the cerebral version of bamboo under the fingernails, and while they both tried to seem casual about their conversation, they were soon leaning forward with sweat beading on their brows. It was fascinating…and weird.
After several hours of this, Ben had to admit that he’d found a historical peer, and he gleefully involved Sage in all kinds of debates about the minutiae of eras I knew nothing about…except that I had the nagging sense I might have been there for some of them.
For his part, Sage seemed to relish talking about the past with someone who could truly appreciate the detailed anecdotes and stories he’d discovered in his “research.” By the time we started our descent to Miami, the two were leaning over my seat to chat and laugh together. On the very full flight from Miami to New York, Ben and Sage took the two seats next to each other and gabbed and giggled like middle-school girls. I sat across from them stuck next to an older woman wearing far too much perfume.
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