The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [67]
“Maybe.”
“I don’t.”
His fingers tugged gently on my earlobe, firm, erotic pressure. I nestled closer to him, trying not to startle him, but having a harder and harder time sitting still. Who knew ears could be such an erogenous zone? But mine were, mine were.
“Why not?” he asked me, fingers moving from my earlobe, down the side of my neck, then back up again. A husband touching his wife. A wife snuggling with her husband. Normal. All perfectly normal.
So normal that some nights when I woke up alone in my marriage bed, my heart shattered into a thousand pieces. Yet I got up the next morning and did it all over again. Sometimes, I even heard my mother’s voice in my mind, “I know something you don’t know. I know something you don’t know….”
She was right, in the end. At the ripe old age of twenty-one, I was finally seeing all of life’s great truths: You can be in love and still feel incredibly lonely. You can have everything you ever wanted, only to realize that you wanted all the wrong things. You can have a husband as smart and sexy and compassionate as mine, and yet not really have him at all. And you can look at your own beautiful, precious daughter some days, and be genuinely jealous of how much he loves her, instead of you.
“Just don’t,” I said now. “Nobody wants to die, that’s all. So they make up pretty stories of an eternal afterlife, to take away the fear. If you think about it, however, it doesn’t make any sense. Without sadness, there can be no happiness, which means a state of eternal bliss really wouldn’t be that blissful. In fact, at a certain point, it would be mostly annoying. Nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to do.” I slid him a look. “You wouldn’t last a minute.”
He smiled, a lazy look on his dark features. He hadn’t shaved today. I liked the days he skipped the razor, his unkempt beard a nice compliment to his deep brown eyes and perpetually rumpled hair. I’d always appreciated the bad boy look.
I wished I could feel his beard, trace the line of his jaw until I could find his pulse point at the base of his throat. I wished I could know if his heart was beating as hard as mine.
“I saw a ghost once,” he said.
“You did? Where?” I didn’t believe him and he could tell.
He smiled again, unconcerned. “An old house near where I used to live. Everyone said it was haunted.”
“So you just stopped by to check it out? Test out your male prowess?”
“I was visiting the owner. Unfortunately, she had died the night before. I found her body on the sofa, with her brother sitting beside her, which was interesting since he had died fifty years earlier.”
I was still dubious. “What did you do?”
“I said thank you.”
“Why?”
“Because once upon a time, her brother saved my life.”
I scowled, agitated by the coyness of his reply, and worse, the ten thousand nerve endings he had now stroked to life.
“Is it always going to be like this between us?” I asked abruptly.
“Like what?” But his hand was retreating, his face shuttering up.
“Half answers. Semi-truths. I ask a simple question, you dole out one tidbit of information while hoarding the rest.”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Will it always be like this between us?”
“We’re married!” I said impatiently. “It’s been three years, for God’s sake. We should be able to trust each other. Tell each other our deepest darkest secrets, or at least the basics of where we come from. Isn’t marriage supposed to be a conversation that lasts a lifetime? Aren’t we supposed to take care of each other, trust one another to keep each other safe?”
“Says who?”
I startled, shook my head. “What do you mean, says who?”
“I mean, says who? Who makes up these rules, sets these expectations? A husband and wife should keep each other safe. A parent should take care of a child. A neighbor should look after a neighbor. Who sets these rules and what have they done for you lately?”
His voice was gentle, but I knew what he meant and the starkness of his words made me flinch.
He said softly, “Tell me about