“Do you want him to suppress your true nature? Keep you on the leash you made for yourself?”
“Shut up.” My whispered tone contradicts the meaning of the words. I feel him behind me although he still isn’t touching me.
“Do you want him to confine you? Are you afraid you won’t be able to do that job all by yourself?”
His breath tickles my ear as he moves to my right. I wait for him to complete the circle but he doesn’t. He just stands there at my side, facing me. If I lean in, just a little, the top of my head will touch his chin. My shoulder will touch his chest; my hand, his thigh.
I continue to stare straight ahead, thankful for my dark glasses. They mute the colors that are just a little too bright today.
“Look at my hand,” I say quietly.
He pauses, perplexed by what seems like an odd request. But then he sees it, lifts it up so the light hits it just so.
“He bought me a ruby,” I say as he studies the stone. “Not a diamond ring, a ruby.”
“Whose idea was that?”
Again I don’t answer.
“It was yours.” He says the words with the tone of pleasant surprise. And now he does reach out. He moves my hair away from my face. I don’t turn to look at him.
“You let the woman you’re trying to destroy pick your ring.”
“This isn’t Sybil. There is only one me.”
“Oh I know . . . and it’s you, the only true you, that I want. Not the facade who smiles sweetly and pretends that she’s some white rose . . . delicate, bland, weak.”
“Did you call me here for a business meeting, Mr. Dade?”
“I want to tear that facade away.” He lifts his hands and clutches at the air around my body as if he could literally pull away some invisible force field. “I want to throw it in the ocean where you’ll never be able to get your hands on it again. I don’t want you on that leash, Kasie. I don’t want to confine you, I don’t want to control you. I want to set you free.”
“Says the man who practically blackmailed me into boarding this boat.”
“Ah, yes. But that’s different. For now it seems I have to practically blackmail you to do what you want to do. I want you to do those things on your own. I want you to indulge your desires the way you indulge your ambition.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“If you did, you would be unstoppable.”
“I love him.”
He hesitates. He hadn’t seen that coming.
“I love him,” I say, louder this time.
“Ah,” he murmurs. “That lie is less alluring.”
“You had sex with me.” My voice is even, cold. “You know my body, you even know how to make it sing . . . but that’s just chemistry. Dave knows my past, he knows how I think. . . . You know my body, Mr. Dade. Dave knows me.”
“I doubt that.”
“He knows where I come from.”
“I’m sure. Just as I’m sure he knows where he wants you to go.”
“No. He wants what I want. Not because he’s trying to accommodate me but because we really do want the same things. That’s what makes us compatible. You’re the one pushing me. What you and I have . . . it’s just . . . just . . .”
“Chemistry,” Robert finishes for me.
He steps away, takes a seat on one of his deck chairs. He drinks his wine a little too fast. Is he nervous? It’s not an emotion I’ve ever associated with him before.
“Do you know what chemistry is?” he asks.
I shrug but in my mind I answer the question.
Chemistry is the sparks that ignite inside me when Mr. Dade’s fingers brush against my neck. It’s the quickening of my pulse when he kisses that same spot, tasting my salt, licking that delicate patch of skin. It’s the throbbing I feel between my legs when his hands travel from my shoulders to my breasts, to my stomach . . . lower. . . .
“It’s the study of atomic matter,” Robert says, pulling me out of my thoughts. “It’s the description of how different chemical elements react. But more importantly it’s the study of the makeup of those elements.”
“I think I should go.”
“In order for two elements to react to one another, they have to meet,” he continues. “They quickly latch on to and, in some truly primitive way, recognize the details of the other element that will lead to a chemical reaction.”
“I have no idea what you’re getting at.”
“We wouldn’t react to one another the way we do if we weren’t able to sense something fundamental about one another’s nature. When I saw you . . . when I touched you, I sensed that there was something in the very makeup of who you are that would cause me to react in ways that I simply wouldn’t, couldn’t react to others. We’re baking soda and vinegar, Diet Coke and Mentos—”