FOUR
Allie Schapiro lay in bed with Niko, watching him sleep. The candle on her nightstand had burned down nearly to the bottom and begun to dim, but the flame endured. In the flicker and gutter of the candlelight, he looked so handsome that her heart swelled and she could barely breathe. The windows rattled in their frames and the storm blew so hard that the house shook with its fury. She'd never taken the wind chimes off the back deck when winter arrived and now she strained to listen for their frantic music. Earlier she had heard the chimes clearly but now they had been silenced; the wind had blown them down.
Beneath the comforter she was warm, so she knew that the goose bumps that kept prickling her flesh came not from the cold but from the memory of making love with Niko earlier in the night. Just the thought sent a delicious shiver through her that hardened her nipples and ignited a fresh yearning at her core. She reached out under the covers and ran a hand along his thigh.
Gazing at him, her heart so full, she slid her hand out from beneath the comforter and touched his face, caressing the contours and shadows of his deep, olive skin and feeling the stubble on his chin. He had long, beautiful eyelashes that she envied.
As she studied him, Niko opened his eyes. A tired smile touched his lips.
"You should be sleeping," he said.
Allie cupped his cheek with her hand, bent in, and brushed his lips with hers.
"It was a good night, wasn't it?" she said.
"The beginning or the end?"
She glanced away, blushing a little, surprised that he could make her feel shy after all that they had shared, and all that they had done together.
"Both," she admitted. "But I meant earlier, with the kids."
Under the sheets, Niko placed a hand on the curve of her hip, trailing his fingers along her skin.
"It was perfect, Allie. Dinner was wonderful. And it was great to see the kids relax around each other, and with the two of us together. It all seemed so … normal."
"Normal is nice," she said.
"Normal is very nice," Niko replied.
Once the power had gone out, Jake and Isaac had insisted that they had to eat all the ice cream in the freezer to keep it from melting, even though they'd had no idea how long they would be without electricity. Another night Allie would have refused, but she had not wanted to disrupt the playful atmosphere. While she and Niko had poured glasses of Shiraz and watched the storm through the slider that led to the deck, the kids had sat at the kitchen table and polished off whatever had been left of three different pints of Ben & Jerry's. Fortunately, even that sugar had not kept them awake terribly late. Without lights or television, they were all asleep by eleven o'clock. Allie and Niko had given it forty minutes to make sure they weren't going to stir and then he had taken her to bed.
Skittish and paranoid, worried that one of the kids would come to the door and find it locked and know what was going on inside, it had taken her a while to relax. Niko had been patient with her, had used his hands and his tongue and his words to wonderful effect, and in time she had forgotten all about Jake and Isaac and Miri. Other than Isaac, they were old enough to know what it meant for an adult couple to sleep in the same bed-or what it could mean. Niko assured her that they wouldn't want to think about it, and she hoped he was right.
"You know what this means," he said now, still tracing his fingers along her leg, and then moving his hand up, slipping it beneath the soft cotton of her T-shirt.
"No." She searched his dark eyes. "What does it mean?"
"We can't pretend this is just dating anymore," he said, his voice a low rumble. "We're all here together. A couple. With the kids under one roof, it feels like a family. They may not put labels on it, but they'll feel it."
Allie smiled, becoming shy again. The night had given them both a glimpse into what life would be like in the future, with all their children together in one house, and maybe another child that would be theirs together.
"What about school?" she asked. "People are going to talk. And what about Angie? You know she's going to be a total bitch when she-"
"She's already a bitch," Niko said. "If she tries to make life difficult, I'll handle it. I just didn't want to deal with the fallout until I knew what this was."
"So what is it, then?" she ventured, gazing boldly into his eyes.
"This?" he said. "This is the real thing."
Cradled in dreams of summer, Jake tried to cling to sleep. But he heard his name whispered again and again and felt himself being jostled and even before he opened his eyes he knew Isaac must have had a nightmare. He reached out and slapped his brother's hands away.
"Go back to sleep," he murmured.
"Jake, please … get up," Isaac whined. "I'm scared. Jake, come on."
More than anything, it was the way Isaac's voice broke on that last word that made Jake open his eyes. The brothers had shared a room ever since Isaac had been big enough to sleep in a bed instead of a crib and there had been many times when his little brother had woken him after a nightmare, needing to pee but afraid to go out into the hallway by himself. More than a year ago, Jake had stopped accompanying Isaac into the corridor, forcing him to brave the trip on his own, but after the first couple of times Isaac had stopped asking; but even on the worst of those evenings, when the nightmares had been particularly terrifying, Jake had never heard this tone in his brother's voice.
Something was wrong.
"Jake, they're out there."
Troubled, Jake rubbed sleep from his eyes and looked up at his brother. The power was still out so he didn't have the familiar glow of his clock to tell him just how late it was, but not a hint of daylight showed outside the windows and the blizzard still raged, so he knew it wasn't even close to morning.
"What are you talking about?"
Isaac tugged on his shirt, urgency in his blue eyes. "Come see."
Huffing his frustration, Jake threw back his covers and dragged himself out of bed.
"I heard scratching at the window," Isaac began. "I know you'll say it's just the tree and that's what I thought first, too. It creeped me out but I knew it was the branches. The wind's so strong and I knew it was just scratch-scratch, y'know? Only then I started really listening to the wind and it was mostly going in the other direction and the scratching kept going and so I looked up and … I saw something."
His voice dropped low, quiet and scared.
"Like what?" Jake asked, yawning, shuffling across the floor in his socks. He always wore socks to bed; they made him feel safe.
"Like a face," Isaac said, unwilling to look at him.
"Oh, bullshit," Jake muttered. "Ike, you know better than that."
"Don't swear," Isaac said, concerned about the profanity despite his fear. It always got under his skin when Jake cursed, which was half the reason Jake did so.
Jake went to the window but could barely see anything through the snow that had accumulated on the screen. A tiny drift had formed on the sill, building up against the outside of the glass. No way Isaac could have seen anything through this, he thought, although as he looked more closely he realized that the visible part of the screen-between the snow-clotted portion below and the shade that blocked the upper half of the window-was only frosted with snow. He could make out the storm outside and saw that it had begun at last to wane. The wind had lessened and the snow fell more or less straight down instead of being driven sideways.
"I don't see anything," he said.
He almost added that he was going back to bed, but then he saw that Isaac wouldn't come any closer to the glass and he understood that his brother would not let him sleep until he had been more thoroughly reassured.
Jake tugged on the shade and it rattled upward. With a soft cry, Isaac jumped back from the window, staring as if he expected that same face to be staring in at them.
"Nothing," Jake said. "There's nothing out there, Isaac. Now go back to bed."
Dissatisfied, Isaac stared at the carpet. "I won't be able to fall asleep."
"I don't care," Jake said curtly. "Seriously. You just lie there if you have to, but there's nothing out there, little brother. Don't wake me up again."
He went back and flopped into his bed, dragging the covers over himself as Isaac stood there and kept staring at the window.
"Go to bed, Ike."
Isaac said nothing. He glanced over at Jake once, twice, a third time, but it was clear that his big brother had no intention of doing anything. And maybe there was nothing to be done, nothing out there in the storm at all, but he knew what he had seen, and whatever was or wasn't there now, something had been there before. He'd seen that face.
Mustering up his courage, holding his breath, Isaac went to the window and looked out into the falling snow, searching the stormy sky for any sign of the owner of the white eyes that had peered through his window. He looked into the snow-laden branches of the tree that stood off to the right, but he saw no sign of anyone hiding among those bare, skeletal sticks.
Then he glanced down at the yard and saw them-a trio of figures darting around in the falling snow, several feet off the ground, as if they were dancing on the wind. They seemed to vanish and reappear with each gust, hiding behind the veil of falling snow and then emerging once more.