The Kiss Plot by Nicole French

Twenty-Two

Istretched like a cat, long enough that my toes brushed against the rusted metal bed rail at the end of the mattress. Outside, the bustle of Florence was audible. Whoever said Italians were lazy was a damn liar. The San Lorenzo neighborhood had been waking me up at seven a.m. on the dot every morning with the sounds of trucks and market stalls opening first thing.

The central market, just a few blocks away was probably already bustling after the local restaurateurs had scavenged the prime pickings. The heavy scent of espresso bubbled up from the cafe at the bottom of our building, and every so often, a shout of conversation snuck past the arched single-paned windows flooded with gray December light.

I turned over groggily. Eric’s side of the bed was empty. That in itself wasn’t particularly unusual. He didn’t sleep well—hadn’t since we’d left the States nearly four weeks ago—and usually went for a run or did some kind of exercise in the early morning hours while I continued sleeping. He didn’t like leaving me alone, but we both figured out quickly enough that he would start acting like a trapped rat if he didn’t get some outlet every day. Me, I was good with walking around museums or the market. My cardio back home was window shopping—there was no reason to change that here.

I found him on the other side of the room, checking the burner phone we’d been using for the last few days and fiddling with his god-awful hair. Despite the chilly December air—our rooms depended on an archaic heater that only worked occasionally—he was shirtless in a pair of leggings and running shoes, the sinewy lines of his back still covered with a sheen of sweat. I licked my lips.

“It’s no use. You still look ridiculous,” I said, pushing up onto my elbow while holding the sheet to my chest. I’d tried to sleep with clothes on, but Eric wasn’t having it. Even though we fell asleep apart, he tended to wrap around me in his sleep, like some part of his subconscious desperately needed skin-to-skin contact. I wasn’t one to argue. I missed him too.

Eric pulled at his hair once more. It wasn’t as bad as it had been at first, when the shock of black made him look like Edward Scissorhands. Now that the black had settled, he was more on the level of a low-level Cure groupie.

“I look like a local,” he said to the mirror, then turned around, giving me an impressive view of his blocked abs. He’d lost some weight since we left—his anxiety kept him from eating enough, despite all of the amazing food we’d enjoyed. It wasn’t too much. If anything, it made his already impressive physique that much more eye-searingly cut.

“You still look like a vampire,” I corrected him. “Absolutely no one anywhere would ever confuse you for an Italian.”

“What about now?” He popped on a pair of Ray Bans and struck a pose.

“Vampire Jack Nicholson.”

The sunglasses were hurled at me. I dodged them, giggling until Eric tackled me onto the bed.

“Ah! Get off me, you sweat factory!” I batted him ineffectively.

But my protests were lies, and Eric knew it. Once again, his lean body against mine felt less like a cage and more like an open door. I closed my eyes, enjoying his lips drifting over my neck. His hands pushed away the sheets, seeking the curves of my rib cage and waist like he was memorizing every inch of my body.

“I hated it so much,” he said for the tenth time, pausing to press his forehead to mine. “Not being able to touch you.” He pushed up. “It’s like breathing to me. You know?”

I nodded. I did know. I had felt the same way.

“Come here,” I said, pulling him back down for another kiss. His lips, firm, yet soft, molded to mine, sinking me even deeper into the feather bed. With this kind of ecstasy, it was almost possible to forget we were on the lam.

But on the lam we were, and after close to four weeks of it, I had to be honest: I was getting a little tired of pretending we were poor students. Money wasn’t an issue, of course, but the living in squalor was. Eric insisted we stay away from the places people would expect a de Vries to stay. Five, four, even three-star hotels were out. We rented cheap rooms in pensiones, but only because I drew the line at hostels. I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in sharing a room with a bunch of pimply teenagers trying to find their next score of molly. Eric and I needed space.

Eric sat back on his heels and fingered my wrists, noting the still-reddened skin there from the scarf he used last night to bind them behind my back.

“Sorry about that,” he murmured with a hint of a smirk.

I smacked him on the shoulder. “No, you’re not.”

“No,” he admitted as his right dimple made an appearance. “I’m not. And I’ll probably do it again.”

But instead of making good on his promise right then, Eric got up and meandered back to his duffel bag, which had accumulated a few changes of clothes during our trip. He pulled out a shirt and plugged in the decrepit old iron. Five-star hotels were a no go, but Eric wasn’t willing to forgo his tailored style.

“I booked us tickets on the next train to Genoa,” he said. He removed his running shoes, waiting for the iron to heat. “From there we can see what’s available and just go. We’ll send another telegram to Brandon before leaving.”

I flopped back into my pillows and sighed. This had become our new normal. New burner phones in every city to contact only each other. Brandon had set up an account at Western Union specifically to receive telegrams from Eric, who sent them only when we were about to leave places, to let them know we were okay. Meanwhile, he collected messages left for him over the course of each week. Brandon was the point of contact with the private investigators hired to dig into John Carson’s history. The idea was to figure out what he really wanted, or at least some weaknesses to exploit. Because no one believed for one second that this strange vendetta had anything to do with the man’s love for me.

Eric pulled out a pair of charcoal wool pants to press. “I know. I’m sick of it too.”

“I just want to go home,” I replied to the ceiling. “Not that our grand European caper hasn’t been lovely.”

And it had. It really had. Shitty accommodations aside, we’d seen all the stuff in Europe I’d never been able to see as an actual poor college student. Art and architecture I’d only seen in textbooks; more markets than I could shake a stick at. I would have been in heaven if it hadn’t been for the potential threat lingering around every corner.

“We haven’t even heard from Carson,” I continued. “Don’t you think there’s a possibility he just gave up?”

The wry look on Eric’s face told me he did not. “John Carson waited exactly ten years before contacting me again. I just ran off with his daughter, whom he forbade me to touch. I don’t think he’s just going to let it go.”

“I still think we should talk more to your family. Not Calvin. Nina. Even Violet.”

For that, I received no response at all. As far as the de Vries clan knew, we were just taking a delayed extended honeymoon over the holidays. The board of DVS hadn’t been happy about it, but since Eric didn’t hold an actual position in the company, and they wouldn’t vote him in as chairman until after he had officially assumed ownership of the family’s stockholdings, all there was to do was wait.

But Eric acted as though we had no allies within his family, and I wasn’t ready to concede the point. Nina, for instance. Or:

“Your grandmother—”

“Who is dead.” Eric’s tone was hollow.

I swallowed. “Who is passed, yes. But she knew, Eric. She knew something like this would happen.”

“Maybe.” He turned his pants over and started ironing the other side.

We’d had this conversation a few times already, debating the extent to which Celeste had really anticipated John Carson’s maneuvering, and why. At first, Eric had thought it had been part of some greater scheme, but now he wasn’t so sure. He thought the sudden change was just a simple gift to us—a marriage by choice, if that’s actually what we wanted.

“Why else would she have changed the terms of her will so last minute?” I argued.

“Maybe she just liked you, Jane. A lot, apparently.”

A hint of a smile fluttered over Eric’s face—he was so serious most of the time, especially since we’d left New York. I wanted more of that levity.

“I don’t mean that,” I said. “Celeste and I seemed to understand each other by the end. The gift to me was after the engagement, but the other one—the one requiring cohabitation—that one she made the morning of the ceremony. Why didn’t she care if we were married anymore?”

Eric stared at his empty left hand—neither of us wore our rings—for a very long time. Long enough for the answer to dawn on him as it had on me.

“She really did know he was going to show up, didn’t he?” he murmured. “She must have seen Jude and Faber when they showed up at the rehearsal dinner.”

I nodded. “She did see them. She was shouting for you, don’t you remember? And they had the same coins, you know. Eric, do you think there is any possibility she recognized them like my mom did?”

Eric swallowed thickly as he clearly followed my train of thought. “Fuck.”

“She knew there was a chance the wedding would be stopped somehow. That someone would show up and—” My eyes practically popped out of my head as another thought occurred to me. “Eric, you don’t think they had anything to do with her…” I couldn’t quite say it. Was that what all of this had come down to? Murder?

My mother’s story whispered from the back of my mind again:

He tell me not to say anything. He give me money if I stay quiet. Or else, he said, I would end up like her.

Dead. In a melon field.

I had scoffed at the idea that John Carson was an outright murderer at the time, but after learning at least some of what he had done to Eric, now I wasn’t so sure. This new hypothesis about Celeste wasn’t helping.

But Eric just shook his head. “I’ve known these guys a long time. They don’t take kindly when people don’t keep their secrets, but I’ve never known anyone to stoop to murder. Just, you know, cruel and unusual torture. The dead aren’t useful to them anymore.”

I sat back in the pillows, unconvinced.

“She was sick, Jane. Really sick. I’m not surprised the drama of the day took it out of her.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. People who were capable of kidnapping and torture didn’t seem to have a particularly strong moral compass. But I had to default to his judgement on the matter.

“So the catch-22 wasn’t to trap us,” Eric murmured as he hung his pants over the back of a chair and started on a shirt. “It was for Carson.”

“Sixty days,” I said. “Just enough time for us to do it on our own.” To do exactly what we’d done. Run away. Stand up to John Carson.

I looked down at my messenger bag, which, unbeknownst to Eric, held the unsigned marriage certificate. The sixty-day deadline was approaching. In another ten days, just after New Year’s, we wouldn’t be married at all. The license would expire, and everything we had done would be nulled.

I considered saying as much, but I didn’t think Eric really cared about the marriage at this point. I had no idea what his plans were for after that deadline. We said this was a honeymoon, but a part of me wondered if he would think it wasn’t worth the trouble after a while.

Maybe he was just biding his time until we could say goodbye for good.

With a deflated sigh, I rolled out of bed and rifled around the ground for the t-shirt I’d tried to wear to bed last night. One look in the mirror told me that I’d have to bear another cold shower in the tub in the corner of the room. I grimaced. It made me look and feel like a plucked chicken. Not hot.

Now finished with his ironing, Eric stripped off the rest of his sweaty clothes and jumped into said shower like the water wasn’t icy cold. I watched appreciatively through the translucent curtain. Eric glanced over and caught me staring. He pushed back the curtain so I had an unadulterated view of his ridiculously cut body.

“Like what you see?” he asked coyly.

I tapped my lip. “You look like an ad for an at-home gym.”

His face screwed up in mock confusion. “Is that a good thing?”

I didn’t reply, just kept ogling.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said with a sly arch of one darkened brow. “You’re welcome to join me, you know.”

I sighed. The bad dye job didn’t matter. After seeing the David in person just yesterday, I could definitively say that Eric was even better looking—and much better endowed—than Michelangelo’s famous statue.

“Jane,” he said. “Come on. The water is actually warm today. Get in here.”

His tone brooked no argument, and before I could think twice, I practically skipped across the room to join him. If thinking about the future wasn’t a viable possibility, then at least I could live in the moment.