Hot and Bothered(79)

                “You did what?” Elisa asked.

                “It just happened,” Haven said.

                “Nothing just happens to you, Haven.”

                “This did.” Her eyes filled up again. Her heart filled up again. The pain she’d been trying to hold at bay by not thinking about him threatened to burst out, like water held back by an aging levy.

                Elisa was quiet so Haven went on with the story, and when she got to the dressing room in the department store, Elisa said, “No!”

                “Yes.”

                “You didn’t!”

                “I did. And it was so, so good.”

                Because there was no longer any point in denying it. She could see, from where she was, that it had only been a matter of time until everything she felt would overwhelm her, when she would have to pay the piper for what she had denied. Eventually she would have to admit to herself and to Elisa what she had probably known from the first time her eyes had met Mark’s in the barber shop mirror: that she loved him.

                “And then what?”

                “And then we went back to my apartment and had amazing sex. And then...and then I told him that we couldn’t be together in public.”

                “Why?” Elisa asked.

                “Because—”

                But she didn’t have the whole answer. She didn’t know how to answer.

                “Haven,” Elisa said. “It’s time for you to tell me about what happened with Porter Weir.”

                “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

                “Sweetheart. I don’t even know the story and I know it has everything to do with this.”

                “We just—we weren’t right for each other.”

                “I looked him up. Some people say he’s gonna be the next poet laureate. Serious guy, huh?”

                Haven’s chest got tight, the way it almost always did when she thought about Porter Weir. “Not my usual type.”

                “Your usual type isn’t your type, Haven.”

                “He was smart, deep, intellectual, angsty and emotional.”

                “And you were in love with him?”

                “I was. Not like—” She couldn’t quite say Mark’s name and she couldn’t quite link it together with that word, love. It hurt too much. But of course she didn’t have to say it, because this was Elisa, and Haven could feel the leading edge of what, exactly, Elisa knew. That knowledge was building along with tears in her throat, pounding in her chest, tightness all the way to her fingers and toes.

                “And then—?”

                “He broke up with me.”

                Elisa didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She was perched on the edge of the couch, waiting patiently as if she had all day to hear Haven admit what she had held back from herself.

                “He said that it didn’t matter what I did. He’d tried everything he could to get me to open up, and he said that he knew I’d tried, too, but it wasn’t something I could do. I’d spent too much time with surfaces. He said—”