The Other Man. Karen Van Der Zee

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СКАЧАТЬ splashing water on her silk dress. Periwinkle blue, matching her eyes.

      She looked at her face in the mirror. She was ashen and her eyes had a wild, desperate look in them. She closed her eyes and moaned, seeing the man’s face in front of her lids. He looked strange with that dark stubble on his chin, but his eyes she would have recognized in a crowd.

      Aidan.

      Tears flooded her eyes. “Aidan,” she whispered, wanting to hear his name. “Aidan.”

      She didn’t want to feel this way, this terrible pain—a pain full of longing and regret. Where had all that come from so suddenly? So intensely? These feelings shouldn’t have been there anymore; they should have been long gone, fled with time, buried in forgetting.

      She had to get back to the table. She couldn’t stay here forever and hide. Swiftly, she pulled a comb through her hair, remembering it had been much longer twelve years ago, remembering Aidan playing with it. In the sun it looks like polished mahogany, he’d once told her, which to her had seemed a wonderfully exotic name for brown. Oh, please, she told herself, stop remembering things! Putting on some fresh lipstick, she willed herself to be calm. Smoothing the long, slim skirt of her dress, she walked out of the ladies’ room, head high.

      Aidan. Looking at her. Oh, God. All her fragile control vanished.

      He lounged by the large potted palm, hands in his cotton Dockers, looking tall and imposing in the small entryway. Familiar yet alien. Overpow-ering. Dangerous.

      He didn’t even look like the man she remem-bered. The beard stubble gave his face something faintly sinister. His clothes were new, but were just the standard cotton trousers and striped, short-sleeved shirt available everywhere. The man she re-membered had worn expensive, designer clothes, had had immaculate haircuts and a clean shaven chin. And a smile in his eyes. There was no smile now. His eyes were a disturbing gray that shrouded darker emotions.

      “Hello, Gwen,” he said evenly. “I thought it was you.” His voice, deep, masculine and intimately familiar, slid like expensive brandy through her system—smooth and fiery, spreading a treacherous heat.

      It took a moment before she could make her tongue move. “Hello, Aidan,” she returned, hearing the odd, husky tone in her own voice.

      For a timeless moment they stared at each other, the heavy silence ripe with old memories and new emotion.

      “How have you been?” he asked at last, his tone cool and polite. Yet deep in his eyes she saw a dark turbulence that contradicted the calmness of his face and voice.

      “Fine.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, hugging herself. Cooking smells wafted in from the kitchen—garlic, grilled seafood, some-thing fruity. “I didn’t know you were back.” Of course she didn’t. There was no reason for her to know, no way she could have known. Twelve years had gone by since she’d last seen him and the only information she’d had about him she had found in a newspaper article. As a doctor he’d made an in-ternational name for himself in tropical pediatrics, working with children in hospitals in poor, Third World countries. At the time of the article, he and his wife, also a physician, were heading up an im-pressive medical research project in Asia.

      And now he was back in Oregon.

      “Just for a few months,” he said. “I’m staying at the summer house.”

      His parents’ summer house by the beach, a few miles to the south. Not your average, simple summer cottage, but a luxury beach house high on a cliff with lots of glass affording magnificent views. She’d stayed there, slept in the big bed with him. Was he sleeping in the same bed now with his wife? Don’t think, don’t think.

      “How are your parents?” she asked, putting herself on automatic pilot, trying to be polite, steering away from the personal.

      “They’re doing well. Just embarked on a cruise around the world.” A small pause. He rubbed his chin, something dark and unfathomable in his eyes. “I understand your mother died.”

      He hadn’t liked her mother. She swallowed. “Yes.” She’d become seriously ill a month after Aidan had left the country twelve years ago and had died three months later. “It’s a long time ago,” she added.

      Only it didn’t seem like it, not now, standing here, seeing him again. All the feelings were still there, all the anguish, as if it had been days instead of years. How could that be, how could that be?

      “Yes,” he said. His gaze swept over her with cool appraisal, taking in her silk dress, the jewelry, her expensive shoes. “Life appears to have treated you well,” he stated. There was no inflection in his voice—his words just a simple, clinical obser-vation, yet the slight, downward tilt of the corners of his mouth gave him away.

      “Yes.” It was the truth, yet she could well im-agine the things he was thinking, seeing her like this, knowing what he knew. She swallowed hard, not knowing what else to say, wanting desperately to get away. She felt young again, and awkward and confused and she hated herself for it. She was almost thirty years old, not eighteen.

      “I have to go,” she said.

      He made a gesture with his hand, indicating the dining room. “Is he your husband?”

      So he had known. Somebody had told him she’d married. But obviously his information wasn’t up to date.

      She shook her head. “No. Marc…my husband died a year and a half ago.” Her voice trembled. “I’ve got to go.” She didn’t want some polite platitude he’d utter for the occasion. She fled back into the dining room and sat down across from Joe, almost tipping over the wineglass as she reached for it clumsily. From the corner of her eyes she noticed Aidan sitting down again at his own table across from his wife.

      “I was about to send out a search party,” Joe commented, his brown eyes searching her face. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

      “I’m fine now,” she lied.

      “Your soup’s cold.”

      “It doesn’t matter. I had most of it. It was de-licious. Now tell me more about your ideas for another book.” She sat back, determined to give him her full attention, determined not to look again in Aidan’s direction.

      In August their first book would come out. She had collected the migrant children’s stories and drawings, he had taken the photographs. It was a beautiful, poignant collection eliciting smiles, laughter, anger and tears: the stories of forgotten children.

      No matter how hard she tried, her mind was not on the book. She was acutely aware of Aidan sitting only feet away, afraid to look up and see his face, see the woman sitting across from him. Afraid to see some small intimacy—a smile, a hand touching the other’s. Private gestures that had once be-longed to her.

      She felt as if she were suffocating. She had to get out of the place, away from Aidan.

      She looked up into Joe’s face. “Would you mind terribly if we left? I don’t feel right being gone. I need to get back to the baby.”

      It was an excuse, and she felt vaguely guilty. Alice, the baby-sitter, was a nurse and the mother of three healthy grown children. The baby couldn’t be in safer hands.

      She managed to leave the restaurant without СКАЧАТЬ