"Where's my son?" Gregory asked when he finally realized Bette was standing next to him on the balcony.
"He took my daughter and went to immigration in L.A." Bette rolled her neck across her shoulders. It hurt, as did everything else. "He's going to find out where Caitlin went and tell her. He wants her to hear it from him."
Gregory nodded once. He didn't look at her. "Caitlin might talk to him."
"That she might." Bette tried to smile and to her surprise she managed to twist her lips in a decent approximation of one. "Those two have always been so close. Your beauty and her sweet brother."
"In spite of their parents." He dropped his head to his hands and watched the stars twinkle quietly over the ocean.
"I think that's the most we can ask for as parents." Her hand ran tentatively across his shoulder but he didn't resist. "That our children turn out wonderfully in spite of everything we've done to the contrary."
Lifting his head and turning into her touch, Gregory acknowledged her for the first time since his life had been destroyed. "Caitlin and Sean are wonderful, aren't they?"
"They are." She dropped her head to his shoulder and snuggled closer. "They really are. You and Olivia did a good job-"
Olivia's name cut through the emptiness and brought a momentary flash of pain. It faded back into the void. "All we did was conceive them. I think they did the rest." He dropped his chin to the top of her head and pulled her into a desperate embrace. "Why did it take me so long to see what was right in front of me?"
The stars faded into the clouds as they blew in from the sea. Bette felt the first touch of rain against her face and pulled him back. "Come on Greggie, let's get out of the rain."
He let her pull him away from the balcony but he looked at her in confusion. "Is it raining?"
"It is." Bette shut the door and brought him in to the couch. "Just trust me this time."
He sat down because she gently forced him too. "I didn't trust anyone-" Gregory admitted from whatever dreamworld he had pulled away into. "I thought no one would ever be safe enough. That everyone would hurt me in the end. Like my father did." His eyes remained painfully dry and terribly bright as Bette sat down next to him. "But then I met her."
Bette reached into his lap and took his hands warmly. She snuggled closer on the couch, wanting to feel the warmth of a body against hers. The comfort of a human touch when she didn't even feel like one anymore.
"She was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." Gregory's fingers tightened around Bette's. "At first she wouldn't give me the time of a day. I'd look at her and she'd turn away. Smile that perfect little smile and pretend she hadn't seen me at all." The corner of his mouth turned upwards and the ghost of a smile haunted his face. "Then one day it changed. I know now it was because of Del's money- but then it was just like magic. I was watching her across the room at that party and she caught my eye and didn't look away. She put down her drink and took a step towards me."
Gregory closed his eyes as if he could hear the music from that night all over again. "I nearly tripped over my own feet to get to her. But somehow I made it. I stood in front of her and managed pathetically to introduce myself. She laughed."
Looking through her and seeing only his memories, Gregory fell into the past. "She laughed and told me her name." He ran his fingers up and down her hands, playing with the delicate bones. "I carried that name with me like a torch to light my way until I knew enough about her build my life around her."
"She made me feel like I could do anything." He shook his head and elaborated when he caught her confused expression. "She gave me a life Bette. Before her I had a career. I had cases, clients, presentations and paperwork. Then she waltzed in and suddenly I had dinner plans, opera tickets, and dreams. Beautiful dreams." Gregory fixed her with his bottomless gaze.
"I could see our children in her eyes." He cupped Bette's chin and ran his fingers up towards her hair. "I saw us walking down the beach when our hair was white, still holding hands like it was the first day we'd been together. She was the center of my universe and I was going to make sure she knew everything revolved around her."
"I wanted her life to be extraordinary."
Bette caught his face in both of her hands, feeling the stubble there. "It was Gregory. Trust me on this. You and Livie had your bad days, and God knows I heard enough about your faults to fill a whole set of encyclopedias on the subject."
Something flickered in his eyes and she kissed his cheek in a soft acknowledgment of his pain. "But hey, the good days were without number. And I can't tell you how many times she'd tell me something about you and I'd feel myself just turn green with envy. You had love Greggie. Real, deep passionate love. The kind of love that strikes like a bolt of lightning and changes everyone around you."
Bette let go of his face and folded her fingers in her lap. "You had something wonderful honey. Something the rest of us only dream about having when we try to explain the loneliness of our lives."
"I used to think being lonely only happened to the weak. That if I was strong enough, I'd never feel that way." Gregory ran one hand through his hair. When he found the traces of water from the rain on his fingers he stared at it in surprise.
"You don't have to be invincible." She wiped the dampness from his hand off with the edge of her sweater. "Sometimes it's all right just to be a man. And men can be lonely, destroyed or even angry when they lose the one person that made life worth living."
"I'm not angry." The lines on his palm seemed to disappear into the darkness.
Bette held on to his hand, tracing the calluses of a lifetime of pain. "Okay. Not angry."
He watched her move up to his wrist. "I don't feel anything." Gregory offered as she undid the buttons of his cuff. Bette moved to the other wrist as he watched her work.
"You will go on." She rested her hands on his shoulders and bared her heart. "I know it doesn't feel like it now. I know it's the last thing you want to hear, but you have to believe me."
He put a finger to her lips, hushing her as he traced the curve of her chin. "Stop." Gregory leaned closer, letting her feel the heat of his breathe on her face. "Just stop."
His lips were bitter, but no more so then her own. Kissing her didn't stir his emotions. A fire couldn't start where no tinder existed but that didn't matter. His hands remembered how to chase their way up her back and sink into her hair. His tongue knew how to enter her mouth. His legs brought him upstairs. Bette fumbled with the door to her old bedroom but when it opened it revealed an empty bed.
"Not here." He whispered as he removed her sweater with lazy hands.
Bette's eyebrows shot up as she let him lead her down the hallway. "Her room?"
Gregory opened the door and shoved her back towards the bed as if he hadn't heard the question. The bathrobe on the hook by the closet was her colors. Pale and beautiful in the darkness of Olivia's bedroom.
Her heart sank into her stomach as he pulled the black camisole over her head. She should tell him how wrong it was. How terrible it felt to think about sitting on Olivia's bed with Gregory kissing her neck. Bette sank into the bed and dug her hands into the bedspread. It was wrong.
But he wanted to have her. She'd been so afraid he wouldn't want anything anymore. No matter what she said or did, she hadn't gotten through. Bette wrapped her hands across his back and pulled him down to her. Olivia would understand that it wasn't about them. It wasn't making love.
Gregory wasn't even looking at her. When he breathed in, he smelled Olivia's perfume on the sheets. The sheets she'd brought from his house when they divorced. He remembered the touch of them, the kiss of silk against the bare skin of his back. In his dark, cold world, Bette was a momentary flash of warmth. A softness in a world of stone and mortar, and a last glimpse of life.
Olivia's name was the only one on his lips but she didn't care. He needed something from her and now was all the time they had. Their clothes fell to the floor by the side of the bed. By the time he joined them she was sobbing. Their union was wretched desolation turned to flesh and blood. Nothing was created, nothing sought. the ghosts of Gregory's life fluttered through his mind like the smell of Olivia's bed. The familiar had become the horrifying but he couldn't stop seeking it. This hell was his.
The emptiness was his to cherish because he had failed. He'd let her die. Gregory had promised she'd be all right and he had been wrong. He'd pulled her out of the car, saved her from the inferno it had become, and it was in vain. She was gone.
Olivia was dead and all of the light in the world had gone with her. His body and the body beneath him were shadows and dust.
Bette said nothing when he cried Olivia's name into her chest. Curling up in his arms, she sobbed with him. Grief eclipsed their guilt. Bette's gnawed at her heart like an open wound but his was soundless. She beat angry fists on his chest and released her self-hatred to the careless night. Crying until she was too tired to continue, Bette remained in his arms as the dawn turned gray in the window above them.