Chapter Thirty-Three
In unspoken agreement, individually and as part of teamwork, they clumsily freed themselves of their clothes, leaving a trail across the room back to the bed, whose covers Zach swept back with such haste the sumptuous linens billowed into the air before meeting the floor. This was recklessness, this was lunacy, this was asking not for a mere world of trouble but for an entire universe of it…and that possibility deterred Zach not at all. This wasn't meant to be anything more than it was: A momentary release of too many pent-up feelings, a temporary soothing of too much inner hurt, a few fleeting moments of fulfillment stolen from a dull and empty eternity.
Kendall was beneath him, urging him on, and who was he to say no after already saying yes? Her kisses were too persuasive and her touch too irresistible for a saint to ignore and Zach was no saint, nor ever claimed nor wanted to be. In indulging his senses to the fullest, it was his pleasure to give her exactly what he knew she wanted and more, and in return she gave him…that too, but something more, something unexpected he hadn't known for a long, long time, for such a long time he felt at a loss what to do about it…not physical release but an emotional connection that rocked him more than his climax.
As they clung together in the aftermath and he gazed down into her lovely face relaxing from the throes of their spent passion, into eyes whose blueness suddenly seemed infinite, he found himself sinking willingly into their depths. Then Kendall met his gaze with a matching intensity, seeming to seek something else from him, something only to be found in those windows to his own soul. Windows Zach was accustomed to keeping shuttered, the soul he tried to hide. This had been good on its own terms; couldn't that be enough?
Whatever else it was Kendall was looking for from him, either by design or by accident, he was wary of her finding and not wanting after all. That shouldn't be a complicating factor in this straightforward, truly enjoyable encounter. He didn't want it to be a factor. Nevertheless there it was.
Closing his eyes, Zach meant to bury his face in her neck, but the stubborn, demanding woman wouldn't let him. "No, Zach, don't zone out. Look at me," she murmured.
"Give me a break. You're insatiable," he grumbled lightly, trying to put her off.
Unsympathetic laughter bubbled up in her; he could feel it. "Too bad, big fella. You're not going to zone out on me now."
"What more do you want, woman?" Zach heard himself ask, and Kendall took the question as a challenge, showing him rather than telling him, pressing her lips to his and initiating another kiss. This kiss was slow and languid, making it somehow even more personal than their uninhibited lovemaking. He assumed it was the finale rather than another prelude, but he turned out to be wrong. Kendall had other ideas. When at last he fell back on the bed, eyeing nothing but a blank white ceiling instead of two knowing blue orbs, he felt drained and enervated but quite pleasurably so.
Kendall was lying quietly beside him, wriggling. "Brrr. Zach, I'm kind of chilly. All the blood must have flowed right out of my arms and legs to…well, you know," she managed to purr before adding with a shiver, "Can you reach the sheets and blanket?"
Grabbing the covers from the floor where they'd been so unceremoniously dumped, Zach pulled them up. "Here you go," he said, arranging them mostly over a huddling Kendall and leaving just enough to cover himself.
"Thanks." She executed a long, cat-like stretch beneath the covers.
When Zach slid beneath his share of them on the king-sized bed, a gap remained between him and Kendall of about eight inches. It didn't remain empty for long. She commenced wriggling once more, inching toward him while complaining about being cold in spite of the blanket.
"Brrr," she repeated. "Aren't we going to…you know?"
"Jesus. Let a man catch his breath, Kendall," Zach growled good-naturedly.
"I didn't mean that again, at least not right now. I meant, aren't we going to snuggle now?"
"Snuggle?" he nearly choked. So she was angling for less blatantly erotic attention, too. The type of attention he was so deeply conflicted about how to show or give. But it was rather a moot point when after all, hadn't it been he, not so very long ago, declaring to Kendall that she couldn't take no for an answer? He had long since become a living testimonial to that reality.
Without further comment, Zach turned on his left side, nudged Kendall over onto her left side, and drew her back against him so that his torso curved around her spine and his right arm curved about her waist. With her back to his front, her unselfconsciously stated need for warmth and contact, and his unstated, uninvited need for them too—plus some form of distance—were both satisfied. This way…she couldn't see into his eyes.
Feeling so surprisingly comfortable he was actually beginning to doze, Zach was roused before drifting off by Kendall shaking in his arms. The repressed, internal nature of her motion didn't indicate she was still shivering, or that she was laughing. She wouldn't have kept those actions to herself, in any event. That left only one thing more Zach could think of: She was crying. Fuck. So much for the peaceful afterglow. He gave up debating whether to acknowledge something she seemed to be hiding as useless; she would eventually make it impossible to ignore.
"Kendall? Do you want to tell me what's going on?"
She twisted herself around in his arms so that she was facing him…so much for his well thought-out bodily arrangements, too.
"How could we, Zach?" she burst out.
"How could we what?" he repeated, taken aback.
"How could we have done this? Well, maybe not you so much, but how could I do it? How could I forget about everything so much?" she wailed. "How could I have just had amazing sex with you like everything was normal, like it was all completely fine, like I'm just off on a little jaunt enjoying myself with some nookie on the side, when—when—nothing is fine—and—and even have the nerve to c–complain about being too cold! Too cold, when—Bianca—and Erica—they—"
"Kendall…shhh…don't do this. Please," was all he could say.
"I can't help it, Zach. All of a sudden I feel so selfish and guilty!"
"Don't. No second thoughts, remember? You needed this." The irony of Zach advising anyone else to not feel selfish and guilty was not lost on him.
"I wanted it. But that's no excuse," she insisted. "That makes it worse."
"Listen to me, Kendall. You needed it—and if you want to know, I needed it too," he admitted in a low voice.
Doubtfully, she asked, "Did you really?"
"Yes." To screen the bald admission, Zach added quickly, "You can't help your mother and sister by regretting it now." Realizing how callous that sounded, he went on, "You're doing all that you can do for them. Isn't that why we're here?"
Kendall continued disjointedly. "I know, I know, but…the way you made me feel, Zach. God, I've been feeling so cold and dead inside and I hated feeling that way, and you—you!—," she emphasized, almost in incredulity, "made me feel the way I wanted to feel, so free and alive all over and inside and out, more alive than I've ever felt before in my whole life, and I—I guess it got to me because it just doesn't seem fair. Everything is so different now and I just can't…I can't reconcile it…."
"Come here." Zach found himself reaching out to her without any encouragement, drawing her against him, wrapping his arms around her shaking body and stroking her back and shoulders until she calmed. "Then tell me something, Kendall," he asked of the air above her head, "are you sorry you did this, or sorry you did it with me? Or both?"
Without hesitation, she pulled away far enough to look him in the eye after all, and shook her head. "I don't know why, but I don't think I would have done or even wanted to do it with anyone else," she confessed.
For a moment Zach was silent. Then he lifted her left hand out from under the covers, holding it palm facing down. "It wasn't me. It was the ring," he tried to smile.
"You are such an ass sometimes!" she cried unexpectedly. "I wish I could say it was the ring, but since you're the one who give it to me, it wasn't the ring, it was you."
"All right, then, I'm the ass, no, make that the selfish swine who used reverse psychology to lure you into bed. Go ahead. Blame me for everything. That's what I'm used to."
"Oh, but Zach, I know I deserved that, but I can't blame—," Kendall began to protest, before it seemed to dawn on her that he was only partially serious. "Oh. It is nice of you to try to make me feel better."
"Nice?" Zach couldn't help but laugh, and not in amusement. "Do you think I don't understand? For god's sake, my own son…." The instant he said it he wished he could bite off his tongue, and looked away from her.
Removing her left hand from his grasp, Kendall used it to seize his chin, firmly repositioning his face back to where it was. "No, don't zone out on me now. Zach, I thought of Ethan, too," she said, bravely speaking the name. "I mean, how could I help but think of him? But do you want to know what I thought?"
Her eyes were like blue lasers. "I don't know. Do I?" he asked.
"I'm sure you don't, but you will anyway. When you and I were making love, I didn't think of Ethan for a single solitary second. But when it was over and I was feeling so good, I started thinking, 'I wish that bastard could see me now,' and I didn't feel bad about him at all. Are you shocked, Zach?"
"I don't know that you could shock me, Kendall," Zach hedged, although he knew that wasn't true. "Or whether 'shocked' would be the word for it." So what would be—grateful? Relieved? Ten times guiltier than he already felt about Ethan? Some things would never change, though. "For your sake, then, I'm not sorry."
"Good, because Ethan's the past and you're the future, Zach, as strange as that may sound to both of us. And I guess, well…" Her voice trailed off momentarily. "As long as things already suck as much as they do anyway, we need to make the best of them, don't we?"
"I've been telling you that," he pointed out. "You won't stop feeling the way you feel about your mother and sister overnight."
Just as pointedly, Kendall replied, "Like you won't stop feeling the way you feel about Ethan. Whatever that is."
"Touché. Telling me to take my own advice?"
"I'm just trying to understand you, too, Zach. You know, you could teach the Sphinx a thing or two. But—okay, one thing I'm not sorry about is how we ended up being quite so—compatible this way. I mean really, who knew?"
"Quite a bonus," Zach concurred. "You said you were starving. I assumed you were referring to food."
"Jerk." But the tears were gone, and Kendall conveyed some partiality along with the slight. "Now you mention it, though, after all this exercise I still have a really big appetite—for dinner, I mean. And after that, who knows?—depending on how hungry I still am you might even be able to interest me in some dessert."
Zach's low-pitched chuckle indicated he was also hungry now and he might be hungry later too. He read the time on the digital clock behind her on the nightstand. "It's not seven o'clock yet, Kendall. Do you still want to dress and go out?"
"Hmm. I'd rather call down for something. I'm afraid I don't have the stamina to move beyond this room right now. But I'll throw something on for room service. In fact I think I'll take a shower."
Voicing no objections, Zach climbed from the bed, donned one of the two thick terrycloth guest robes hanging in the armoire, and began searching for the room service menu. Jointly, they decided on a simple meal of grilled chicken Caesar salads, a cheese and fruit plate with fresh-baked baguettes and butter to share, and goblets of whipped cream and strawberries for dessert. To the food order, Zach added a bottle of the hotel's most expensive champagne.
Waiting for the delivery of their food, both he and Kendall took quick showers to refresh themselves following the long eventful day, the long road trip, and the unexpected and unexpectedly long session in bed. In tacit acknowledgement of their individual need for more cooling off than a joint shower might provide in light of the latter, she used the bathroom in their current room and Zach used the one in the adjoining room.
When he returned, clad in the black linen slacks and gray shirt he'd worn with her once before, Kendall had slipped into one of her flowing Grecian goddess-type dresses. She stood before the full-length mirror, tying back her damp brown ringlets from her face with a blue ribbon matching her eyes and her dress. She looked fresh and lovely…and as her slender hands tied the ribbon into a bow, he could see the ring on her finger winking brightly at him. How could putting their clothes back on seem just as intimate as taking them off?
For that matter, Zach found himself wondering again how he and Kendall had progressed so rapidly from the other's sworn antagonist to the other's lover, with this newfound but natural ease and relative openness, the friction between them transformed from something irritating to something eminently enjoyable. Yes, he and Kendall were physically compatible. He couldn't deny the pleasure she'd given him and he knew it was mutual, yet their rapport seemed to transcend the mere physical. Was it wise to let his emotional guard down so soon? Sexual compatibility was an added stimulus to their liaison…and he found her stimulating in other ways, but what if it was more than that, more than the sum total of its parts? Because even after his cool, solitary shower, his passions under control and his mind planning ahead to their calculated return to Pine Valley as husband and wife, Zach knew something fundamental had changed. Not just between him and Kendall, something deep within him, something so deep that wisdom had no say in it at all.
Where do we go from here, he'd asked Kendall before they'd made love. Where do we go indeed, he asked himself now. Or was the question really, Where is she going from here? Just so he'd have some idea where he might end up as well now their fortunes were tied together for the sake of Miranda. Not, Zach supposed, that it really made much of a difference. He could make love to Kendall anywhere. She could needle him anywhere… fill his emptiness anywhere…I'll put Miranda in her arms. That's the goal. Isn't it?
Kendall turned around, catching him in the act of staring at her. Zach cleared his throat and unsuccessfully tried to steer his thoughts toward a more pragmatic direction. He was rescued by the arrival at the door of three room service waiters, rolling in and setting up the elegantly appointed table holding their meal, along with a silver ice bucket containing the champagne he'd ordered.
Tipping the servers generously, Zach waited for them to leave before saying to Kendall, "I haven't checked my voice mail since we got here. I'll do that before we start eating."
She blinked as if returning to her own reality. "Oh, good idea! I haven't checked mine either. I'd better make sure nothing else has happened since I've been gone."
But something had already happened.