Chapter 17: Both Sides Now
Five more minutes and I'll get the kids up for school. I sighed into the pillow and held Mort's arm closer to me as I felt him hugging my back like a perfect blanket. It made me smile and I kissed his hand where it was settled just under my chin. His hand ran through my hair and down my shoulder and arm, kissing lightly where it had touched. Can I just…never move again? Please?
I began to shift around in his arms, letting my eyes adjust to the dim morning light before finally opening them wide and looking up at his face. That's when I also remembered that I wasn't at home at all, that there were no kids here to wake up or drive to school, and that this wasn't my bed or my husband. This was someone else, the other man, the one that was temporary.
"Morning lovely."
Roux half smiled down at me and kissed my forehead.
"Good morning."
"Slept well, I ope'."
I nodded and curled into his warmth closer, not wanting to get up or leave or do anything but cling to the one good thing I could remember about yesterday. But then I thought about where my place was, whether I liked it or not, and I thought about the person who was probably waiting for me back in Positano, back at the villa. He screwed up, but I knew I had to go back eventually.
Eventually…how that one word can alter worlds.
"What time is it?"
As Roux shuffled around to reach over his head on a small shelf, I breathed him in, the salt and fish and sunshine that radiated from his skin. Then he pulled down his pocket watch, the one that had broken when he saved me, and opened it up in front of both our faces.
"I thought it didn't work anymore."
With a sideways glance, he smirked down at me, "I fixed it."
"Oh, you're a handyman too, huh?"
"If ye say so."
He examined the time more closely for a moment as I studied his facial expressions.
"Eleven ten."
I sighed and fell deep into the pillows and his arms again, exhausted just knowing I'd slept that late. Roux chuckled at me and tossed the watch aside, before half covering me on the lumpy, but comfortable bed, and kissing my nose, then each of my cheeks and finally my lips. I could sense in the way he did this though, just like the night before, that he had no intention of trying to steal me away from my life or Mort or anything really. He was only taking care of me, helping me to see some goodness in the evils of temptation.
It worked, I was healed.
"I need to go back."
"Yes," he agreed soundly, "You do."
I grumbled a little and rubbed my eyes, "What do I say to him? What do I do?"
"I think you'll figure it out when ye see im' again."
I shook my head, not sure he was right about that. But he insisted he was.
"You need t' hear his side o' the story, Roxanne."
"Oh, you mean all the juicy details of what they did together? No thanks."
"No…" he replied, sitting up and pulling me with him. I was still fully clothed in my sundress from the night before, still fully sheathed in innocence, to some degree. "Let im' explain. Ye might be surprised wot' you find out if you give him th' chance this time."
"I'm pretty sure I know the gist of it, Roux."
"All th' same, you need t' give him the opportunity, love."
He jumped out of the bed and I watched him change his shirt, thinking about how nothing had really happened between us at all. I wondered if Mort was thinking about me, about who or what or where I might have ended up at. I wondered if he thought I'd gotten revenge against him with some other man, or if he thought that man might have been Roux, based solely on his claim to jealously the morning before. Luckily for me though, there was no revenge to speak of. I didn't need it and Roux understood that.
Another moment passed and he suddenly leaned down with his fists planted into the mattress on either side of me, as his face and chest hovered to my height. He whispered on my lips soundly, making his point.
"You'll regret it if ye don't try t' fix this whole thing. Trust me."
I thought about his watch for a second, and how he'd somehow repaired the sideways turn of it. I had to do the same. I agreed with him and nodded quietly under his dark gaze.
"Okay. I am a beautiful listener after all, right?"
He brushed back my hair with both of his hands cupping my face as I stood to meet him, still limping a little.
"You are beautiful, yes. An' the best listener I've met before. He's a lucky man yer husband."
"Maybe you could remind him of that sometime."
Roux laughed softly and gently lifted me up to meet his waiting, wanting mouth. We kissed, only for the millionth time since the sunset the day before, and it never seemed to get old as much as it appeared to get sadder, knowing I had to go back to my life and he had to stay in his. He knew I loved Mort, I'd found myself saying it at least a half dozen times when I showed up here. He understood that I wasn't here with him to run away for good, or to travel the world with him, completely abandoning my children and my home.
No, that wasn't the point of this at all. If anything, I'd come to learn what I would be missing if I didn't go back and try to repair what was going all nutty. Especially since there was still someone out there who wanted me dead, someone closer than I really wanted to admit.
He carried me out to the deck of the boat, then up to the docks, and walked me slowly, as I hobbled along, back to where the Ferrari was parked on the street. I was teary eyed when he hugged me, kissed me longingly against the side of the car, trying to hang on for just a few more minutes. I knew this would most likely be the last time I saw Roux. I just sort of knew.
"Write me when ye get back home t' the states. Let me know how th' painting looks in yer house."
I smiled as he brushed away my tears one by one, "I will. I promise."
"An' make sure you take good care o' this baby, eh?"
"You have my word."
"Good," he wrapped his arms tight around me, lifting me off the ground in a swarming hug of laughter and crying and whispered promises. And then he helped me into the car with my things, watched as I shut the door, turned on the engine and buckled my seat belt. The last thing he said to me, before he patted the roof of the car and sent me on my way was, "Take care, Roxy Love."
I remember gasping briefly as he eyed me wickedly.
"How did you--?"
He cut me off with that same wild grin, "I'll explain it in a letter some time, ya?"
I shook my head, patted his stomach playfully from the open window of the car, and then took off down the street again, into the middle of Naples and beyond to the coastal road that would take me to the man who was somewhere waiting and wondering if I'd ever drive back at all.
Surprise, surprise.
The day before…
(Mort's POV)
I don't know why, but I couldn't stop smiling. When she ran out of the bathroom to get dressed and go to the drugstore, I felt a little piece of me burn out, like it always does when she leaves a room or closes her eyes at night. It's the not seeing her for however long that's always bothered me, in or out of danger.
I just hate not having her there.
After finishing the shower, rinsing off the excess pink and blue paint from places I could all but laugh at, I got out, dried and got dressed. I guess I didn't think she'd be gone too long, since I went straight down to the kitchen again. There was an old record player I'd found buried away on a shelf near the stove, with dozens of ancient cook books, half emptied bottles of wine, and every sort of music or foreign artist imaginable. I didn't recognize much, but there were some old Edith Piaf records in the mix and I knew how Roxanne had grown up listening to her stuff in her grandmother's house.
So I picked one and gently eased the needle onto the vinyl, letting it set into the scratches and tune. I knew the first song, her favorite surprisingly, Mon Dieu, a song about pleading, for love, for togetherness with the only person that means anything to you. My God, even if I'm wrong, leave him to me a while…Even if I'm wrong, leave him to me still…I understood why she liked it so much.
It was the only French either of us understood, in songs like those. And remembering that made me laugh and think of another time, another place when the topic had come up the same.
"We're having a baby. We need a place to be for that right? Somewhere safe, somewhere no one will know Ben Miller, Mort or Roxanne, or whoever the hell we are. Somewhere like..."
"Mexico?"
"Hmm…too cliché."
"Yeah, true. Paris?"
"Do you speak French?"
"No. How about Cinnamon Bay?"
"What the hell is that?"
"It's a place in the Caribbean…a secret place. White sand…the bluest water you've ever seen…and no one around for a hundred miles…"
The sensation of a sharp knife edge hitting the skin of my index finger brought me back with a wild grin. The record continued to play on, from one love song to the next, music that seemed out of place and at the same time completely appropriate for the mood that was set naturally in the kitchen. I worked over the stove constantly for what must have been twenty minutes or more, stirring pans of vegetables, bringing water to a boil with pasta, and fixing fresh garlic bread. Glass after glass of wine rolled into my stomach, since I assumed drinking myself to content before Roxy got back and had to sit and watch me jealousy over her one glass, would be smart.
I barely got the rim to my lips again or the pepper into the pan of sauce, when a knock at the front door stopped me and threw my attention from the music and the stove's heat. Roxanne wouldn't knock. I figured as much that it was one of our temporary neighbors, a curious local maybe, someone looking for something I probably wouldn't have any clue about.
I dropped the glass, the spoon and turned down all of the gas burners before going to answer it. The doorknob turned, the door flew back and standing there in the early drizzle of rain that I had hardly noticed before, was a girl. Well okay, I'll give the moment the benefit it deserves, she wasn't just a girl, she was a young woman, one that I'd had to convince myself of two other times prior, was a terrible threat to be ignored. This woman, with her pouty and rain sprinkled cherry lips, her flowery cheeks and smile, her violet eyes that were completely unfair on me…
"Catalina."
"Morton," her delicate accent changed the context of my name entirely. It's not right.
"What are you doing here?"
"I was uh…" she paused and shifted around in her damp sundress to point at the bike she had parked halfway under cover, against the pillar of the steps, "…caught in la pluie, the rain."
I nodded with a half dropped jaw, unaware of it really. She smiled up at me and wiped the drops of rain from her nose.
"Could I possibly--"
Her gesture toward the inside of the house made me jump into reality again. I felt like a real moron for not realizing what she was trying to ask of me.
"Oh God, I'm sorry," I stepped aside quick as she giggled, "Come in, please. I'll get you a towel."
She whispered and stepped in, "Grazi."
I directed her toward the kitchen where I knew it was more than warm enough and then I ran off toward the hall near the bathroom, where a cupboard was stocked with fresh towels. I grabbed one, purple, not because her eyes have that violet haze in them or anything, and made my way through the rooms back to where I could see her standing near the stovetop, trembling.
"Here, this should help."
She turned with that same simple smile and those wide eyes as I handed her the towel.
"Thank you."
"You're very welcome."
I stood there motionless to be quite honest, since she wouldn't let me go. Not physically, just mentally, with those serious eyes that seemed to say a million different things at once. I wanted to know what they were telling me for some reason, even though the entire time I kept telling myself, don't be stupid. This is stupid. You are stupid for letting this poor, wet little creature in here. Fool.
Finally I snapped out of it and moved around her to the pasta that was boiling over. I managed to strain it completely, rinse and reheat by the time she'd finished drying the excess rain from her hair and neck and arms.
"I'm sorry. Did I interrupt la cena? Your dinner, with your wife?"
"No, no of course not. She went to the store. I'm playing chef that's all."
"Ah," she replied with a teasing smirk as she leaned on the counter, watching me mix things together and spoke in that rich Tuscan tone, "Siete un chef delle cinque stelle. Five star restaurante, no?"
"Hardly. I'm still in the process of learning. See."
I pointed to the cookbooks stacked up on the other side of the counter and she laughed out.
"Macaroni and cheese is a stretch most days of the week."
"Macaroni and cheese, a true Americano dish." She scrunched her nose up and then moved a little closer as I dropped the pot of spaghetti to the burner, eyeing her. "And yet you seem so very comfortable here to me. In this place, Italia."
"Do I?"
"Si. You like it here don't you?"
With a tight, cautious smile, I dropped the spoon and moved back from her a little, whispering, "I love it here."
"Will you stay? You and your wife?"
At this, I shook my head regrettably and said, "This isn't home. Our children are waiting for us back in Chicago."
"Aha…" she sighed understandably, smiling still though. I hadn't mentioned having children to her at all, and I saw a small spark fade in her eyes. I think I knew why too. "So this is only an adventure for you, yes? A time for new experiences…?"
Catalina stood away from the counter then and came toward me, quietly looking me up and down, never touching but doing plenty more than that with her eyes and breathing on my neck.
"What have you experienced then, Morton Rainey? Good food, a trip to Naples with Roxanna, your girl? What else?"
It was a single second that passed by, one I couldn't close or ignore no matter how hard I tried, when I suddenly watched her hand come at me, touching the buttons on my white dress shirt, toying with them, smiling at me.
"Haven't you had fun, yet?"
"Catalina…" I warned her, but she wasn't having it.
"You look scared. Li spavento? I don't mean to scare you." She unhooked a few buttons before I even realized that she had me nearly pinned to the counter's ledge, leaning against me with the weight of a feather, a feather with sinful lips and fiery breath. "It's just, you are too handsome a man, don't you see? I cannot help but to be drawn to you, attached…curioso."
"Curious," I gulped and tried to move her hands from my chest as she tore open my shirt, "You can't be curious. You can't be here, Catalina."
"You invited me in, yes?"
"To dry off."
My eyes grew stern as I got back some control, but she just winked at me and let her lips glide over the skin on my chest, looking deeply up at me and whispering back, "Then help me dry off."
Before I could protest her request, one of my secrets, one I'd tried to hide, was discovered by her tiny hand as she rounded over the bulge in my jeans, forcing me to bite my lip to keep from revealing any emotion to her. I couldn't let her know. I couldn't let myself know just how much I wanted her then, how much she had done to tear away the truth of the perfect day I'd spent with Roxanne, and turn it upside down, inside out, into something completely unfair and pleading.
"She doesn't have to know."
I heard that whispered against my neck as she squeezed harder on the front of my jeans and began working with my belt, and I nearly died. Not because it was sexy or attractive to hear, but because I knew then, when those words were spoken, that I actually didn't want her.
"Catalina, come on. I won't do this to her. Stop."
But she didn't, because women never stop when they're told to. Not women like her anyway. She had my shirt off before I could breathe again, and she was ripping my belt from the loops of my jeans at about the same moment that I heard the front door slam shut.
Catalina gasped from surprise but didn't move away from me.
I turned my head as I heard the voice of a third party coming close, but of course, I couldn't move from pure shock, from guilt and regret and all those shitty feelings that I felt rising up.
"Honey I picked up a bottle of white wine for the sa--"
Sauce. I completed the statement for her in my mind. THE SAUCE. Sauce for this pasta I just spent an hour making for you, for me, for us. NOT for Catalina.
No more than a single second passed before I was facing not only her, but the bottle she spoke of, and the biggest mistake I'd ever made.
I wasn't really sure where my mind had wandered off to by the time I rounded the gravel corner of the narrow street, pulling into the vine hidden drive of the villa. I wasn't sure what I'd find, or how I would feel when I saw it again, or even if I would want to get out of the car once I made it. But making it there was half the effort. It was what I knew was right.
The car wasn't even in park when I noticed from the corner of my eye, Mort, sitting ten yards away on the front steps. His head was hung low and masked where it rested on his crossed arms, which were laid upon his propped knees, holding a half burned cigarette.
Oh wonderful, I debated as I let the car sit idly running, watching him, back to smoking.
He didn't move at all and neither did I for that matter. I sat there, with the radio playing softly, the air conditioner keeping me cooler than he looked in the boiling winter sun he was under, and my fingers tapping on the wheel I still held onto.
I thought about what Roux had said the day before. "If I had t' guess, I'd say he's nowhere near this Catalina girl right now. He's probably sitting alone, punishing himself over the guilt, missing ye…"
And so he was. Two points for the mediating gypsy.
I gave myself all of another minute, until the song that was playing and Damien Rice's voice died out peacefully, until I murmured a, "Fine" under my breath and shuffled to get out of the car. I came back the same way I went, in my sundress and bare feet, with only minor wrinkles from sleeping in the arms of another man.
I stepped onto the sandy gravel driveway, shut the door of the car, locked it, sighed, turned for the villa's front steps, and never kept Mort from of my peripheral vision. The surprising thing was, he never moved at all, as if he were set in stone, frozen in guilt for all of eternity. He was never like this when he felt bad about something, or meant to apologize to me, or hated himself for hurting me. He was always quick to rise up, like a shunned dog, tail between his legs and a panting smile on his face.
Not this time.
I scratched the hair off of my nose and walked steadily towards him, thinking and analyzing the slumped sitting position he was in. The last bit of smoke from his cigarette blew through his messy, unwashed hair, staining it. His bare feet were worn and dirty looking, as if he'd spent all night pacing this driveway in the dark, on these same wind-blown steps, waiting to see if I would come back.
Reaching down carefully as I stepped before him, I took the cigarette butt and crushed it on the tiled step beside him, noticing how he was slightly nudged awake by the action. His hair rustled under his hand as he held his head, most likely aching, and inched it higher and higher, veiled by the unruly locks of chestnut and gold, with a single eye open within, looking up at me.
"How long have you been out here?"
There was no remorse in my tone, just flat sarcasm.
"A while," he sighed with a tired grumble, wiping the hair from his face as I sat down beside him, but far enough down the step to make a point of it. "You actually came back."
I nodded quietly, staring at the random bits of grass under my bare toes.
"You've been out here all night haven't you?"
Mort turned his face towards mine and with hazy, understated eyes just nodded the same.
"That's stupid."
"Why?"
"Because it is," I snapped with an angry bite in my voice. "You look like death."
"I feel like death, honey."
Honey. I was surprised at how good that sounded, despite what I was ready to feel.
"Maybe you should," I finally chided.
"Can't argue with you there. I won't."
"Regret. Guilt. That's what this is?" I picked up the cigarette butt and threw it at him with a snarl.
"No." His eyes were fierce but soft, admitting, "That's fear."
"Fear of what?"
"Of you never coming back."
"Why wouldn't I come back, Mort? Do I look that predictable to you?"
He sighed with a microscopic grin and said simply, "No. You don't."
"So why smoke? Why sleep out here, waiting for headlights? Is that why you made love to another woman in the middle of the kitchen you were cooking our dinner in?"
"I didn't--"
"Right." I interrupted him clearly, rose from the step and walked off across the driveway, arms crossed and ears open to any responses that might come.
"Roxanne, you can hate me. Hell, I welcome the challenge. I deserve it."
Stopping in the middle of the drive, I stood looking out on the vines and forested growth surrounding the property, just listening to his voice in the breeze.
"You can hit me. Come here, take a swing."
I could hear him get up. I could hear his toes crunching on tiny stones and sand the same as mine. He was coming closer.
"But I'm not going to let you think for one more second, that what happened in there yesterday, was my idea. And I'm not going to let you think that I had any intention of knowing it would happen."
My fists gripped into tight balls at my sides as I shot a glance back at him over my shoulder.
"Half undressed and making the effort to stop it, huh?"
"Half undressed because she undressed me."
His voice was getting higher, but I kept mine level. I didn't want to yell. It solved very little.
"Catalina undressed you?"
I asked the question solemnly, steadily as I turned and walked back towards him, reaching his place on the drive and stopping when there was no more than an inch between us.
"She broke into the villa, held a gun to your head and took your clothes off?"
"No."
"Then what? How did it happen?"
I think I scared him, made him nervous, like I usual did when I was peaceable during a raging fit.
"It was raining."
"I know."
"She was on a bike. She came to the door and knocked. I offered her a towel and invited her to stay until it cleared up again."
"Assuming I would be back from the store any minute?"
"Yes," his shoulders slumped from lack of sleep, his eyes drooped under his glasses and he just looked down at me, pleadingly so.
"So," I leaned in even closer to him, pressing my body against his without hands and breathing on his neck as I asked, "When exactly did she decide to use you for a towel instead?"
"Probably somewhere between her finding out I wasn't staying in Italy to abandon my family…and the point where I told her no. She didn't seem to like that word."
"I bet she didn't."
Yeah, so I was taunting the situation, like a cat pawing at a mouse in a hole it can't catch. I had nothing to catch here, no one to blame except the girl who wasn't around apparently. But lord knows I kept trying.
There was a long moment of silence, where I attempted to contain my tears while he attempted to reach out and touch me. Only one of the two actually happened, and I didn't need his help to wipe away tears, not yet anyway.
"Tell me something then," I sniffled back the pain of the question that was on the tip of my tongue, looked him square in the eye and whispered, "Did she have you half undressed because she was finished with you, or because I interrupted her one chance?"
Mort steadied his feet, peering down into my eyes with sadness, a weakness I know I'd never seen before. It wasn't the way he looked when he'd been shot at, or nearly killed, or any of that. It was a lamenting depression.
His lips moved when the words began to form properly, and I was ready, ready to hear him tell me the truth. He took a firm, yet gentle hold of my arms and pulled me close to him, breathing down my brow, my nose, and to my mouth.
"Sweetheart, I ne--"
There, cut off. A ring from a pocket somewhere. He tried to ignore it, I did, as he brought his eyes back to mine, focused with words.
"Everything with Catalina yesterday, I di--"
The ringing was incessant, a tune that under any other circumstance would be ignored completely. If we weren't fighting, if we weren't on the verge of cracking in two, if I wasn't getting a confession or a denial or a something from my assumed-to-be cheating husband.
"Just answer it," I growled, still hugged to him with one arm as the other snaked around to his back pocket, pulling out the phone.
"It's my mom."
In all honesty, I thought nothing of it. She had called every day around this time to check on us, during her breakfast. But when Mort flipped the phone open and pressed it to his ear with a sweet sounding, "Morning Mom," the response I could hear from the other line, wasn't anywhere near what I was used to.
It was frightened sounding, horrified almost, anxious and uncertain. I stood there, clinging to him suddenly, unconcerned with the previous issue when I saw the color fall from his cheeks and heard the silent shake in his voice as he spoke back to her.
"Breathe, Mom. You have to breathe, I can't understand you."
"What is it?" I whispered at him anxiously, but of course I went unnoticed.
"Mom. Listen to me. What happened?"
There was deep but nervous breathing as Mort looked down at me, wordlessly apologizing for everything he'd ever done wrong in the world, and then the response came.
"She was here. Whoever she is, she was in the house. She came and tried to take the children, both of them."
We stared at one another and at the same split moment shouted back into the phone, "She?"
