Page 35 of So Close

For a moment, I’m arrested. Black silk pants hang low on your hips. Your torso and feet are bare. The dark shadow of meticulously groomed chest hair sweeps across hard pectorals before narrowing into a satiny trail that dips below your drawstring. Your biceps are thick and hard, tensed by the fisting of your hands at your sides. Your abs are laced tight in deeply defined rows that taper into the deep grooves of the Adonis belt and highlight the narrowness of your waist.

You are nearly abreast of me when I manage to stand in an anxious rush, my breath held with cowardice. Your head whips toward me as you draw to a startled halt. Your chest lifts and falls in an elevated rhythm.

Raising my chin, I settle my weight back onto my rear heel, the practiced movement adjusting my posture into a sinuous invitation. Your jaw tenses in response.

Your gaze bores into me, sharp with indictment. “Who are you?”

Your words are singed and smoky. Like an inferno, you’ve whipped heat into the room. I was chilled before, but now I’m uncomfortably warm.

“Does it matter?” My voice, too, is lower and huskier. My mouth is dry, my throat tight. “I’ll be anyone you want.”

Your incisive gaze pins me for long moments. Your hands clench and release, the restless movement flexing muscles all along your torso. You are an erotic work of art, simmering with passion.

Cursing under your breath, you start moving again, slower, more methodical. A predator’s honed, focused approach. You round the corner of the sofa, and an instinctual prey reflex urges me to turn and maintain sight of you. Instead, as you slip beyond my peripheral vision, I keep my back to you, feigning courage and control. I untie my sash and shrug so that the peignoir falls and hangs on the crooks of my elbows. Your breath hisses, sharply indrawn.

My pulse races. My lips part as I gasp. Expectation and fear skitter up and down my spine. I can feel you behind me. Hear you. Smell you – crisp and briskly clean, powerfully male. It’s the worst torture not to see you.

“There’s only one woman I want,” you say hoarsely as you lift a dark curl of hair from my shoulder and rub the natural strands between your fingertips. I feel you lift that lock to your nose and hear you inhale. Your hand falls away. “Take the wig off.”

Your tone is clipped and cold. The heat that was building against my skin abruptly dissipates.

My throat closes, blocking the air I need so badly. Am I not enough, even when I look like her? Are you offended by the attempt or disappointed by my failure?

“Take it off,Setareh,” you say, softer yet inflexible.

I make a sound, a soft cry of pained hope. Fate. Destiny. The meaning of the name you use as an endearment. My eyes burn, and I shut them, trying to manage the overwhelming surfeit of emotion.Yes, my love. I am your fate.The universe has cursed you with me.

“It’s not that simple,” I say. It would take time to loosen the adhesive and more time to restore my hair to the glossy bob.

With a sweep of one hand, you brush the heavy mass over my shoulder, exposing my back. Your fingertips trace the outline of the phoenix’s wings tattooed across my shoulder blades. I shiver in response, every muscle straining with anticipation and alarm. Your lips press firmly to my bared shoulder. The heat of your kiss radiates throughout my yearning body.

Then the warmth, the scent, the energy of you moves away. My head turns, and I watch, horrified and incredulous, as you walk back toward your room.

“Kane …?”

You stop midstride, your hands again in fists, your breaths fast and shallow like mine. You keep your back to me when you speak. “If you want me, come to me with the truth and leave your lies somewhere else. I’ve had enough of them.”

The door to your closet shuts. The click of the latch echoes like a gunshot.

24

LILY

I standon the corner of 5th and 47th, drenched in shadow, the warmth and light of the morning sun devoured by the crowded towers of Midtown Manhattan, a forest of glass, stone and steel. Goosebumps spread across my bare arms and legs. The chill originates inside me, then radiates outward. It isn’t far from here that I think I once spotted you. A glimpse, and then nothing, as if you vanished into thin air while I stood dizzy and petrified on the street. A nightmare I can’t forget or ignore.

Whenever I leave my apartment, I’m aware you can find me. In a borough whose population swells to nearly four million during business days, there remains the risk that facial recognition will betray my whereabouts.

Then again, am I even an afterthought? You discard people so easily but are enraged when others choose to distance themselves first. You’ve either discarded me altogether or are hyper-focused on finding me, with blindness to all else. You’ve never liked leaving anything to chance, and you covet wealth with a deadly hunger. Did you ever really love me? Maybe as much as you were able. Maybe insofar as I belonged to you. I was an accomplishment, after all.

Before me, grungy yellow taxis and black SUVs clog the city’s arteries. Behind me, New Yorkers converge into an impatient huddle on the sidewalk, waiting for the moment we can all scurry across the steaming asphalt like roaches. The traffic noise blares from all sides, but my heart is pounding louder. In just a few moments, I’ll walk right past the building entrance that lures me against all sense of self-preservation.

I could avoid that gleaming sapphire tower. Take the next street over. Leave the city, state, country. But the perversion of obsession drives me to risk. It’s simply irresistible. I’ve been hiding for years but am slowly becoming more careless. Fleeing hasn’t afforded me a new life. I’m dead in all the ways that matter, except for breathing.

Maybe I’m done waiting for that final farewell.

The light changes. I move without thought, my ridiculous heels finding every rut and dent in the street, keeping me literally on my toes. The other women around me are more sensible, wearing ballet flats or block-heeled mules. The odors of car exhausts and sidewalk food carts turn my stomach. No one makes eye contact. No smiles are exchanged. In a city so alive its pulse beats against our senses like a battering ram, we are all automatons.

My name explodes into the air like the crack of rifle fire. Shock floods me. I can’t breathe, can’t think.

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