Deep Surrendering: Episode Five (2 page)

“Well, good for her. She deserves to be happy,” I said.

“We all do.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said as the bartender handed over our drinks. I raised my glass and Chloe raised her bottle.

“To being happy,” she said with a grim smile.

Fin didn’t call again on the webcam until late that night, but I was waiting for him and I didn’t care if I lost sleep. He was worth it.

“Hey, Mari Cherry.” He looked even more tired than he had earlier, and his head was propped up on his hand as if he was too tired to hold it up anymore.

“Hey, Fin.” I smiled, a reflex of seeing his face. Even on the slightly pixelated video he was a glorious sight. His hair was all over the place, as if he’d been running his hands through it. “How was the rest of your day?” He raised his hand and tipped it to the left and the right, as if he didn’t even want to say anything.

“That great, huh?”

He nodded. “But I was thinking … I’m in Paris, and even though I’ve seen it, you haven’t. So I’m going to show you Paris.” There was his smile. “I’m going to call you on my phone so I don’t have to walk the streets with my laptop like a freak.” I agreed and waited for the video to pop up again. It did, just a few minutes later, and he was out on the street, the video shaking a bit as he walked.

“So, you ready?” he asked. I leaned closer to the screen to see and hear him. His voice layered over the background noise of cars and taxis and pedestrians on the street.

He started walking and narrating, telling me about the places I was seeing. The video was shaky and made me feel a little motion sick, but I didn’t stop watching.

“And there is Le Tour Eiffel,” he said in a perfect French accent. God, he was so damn sexy. The phone panned upward, showing the tower all decked out and blinking. He turned the camera back on his face. “What do you think, do you want to see the top?”

“You don’t have to do that. I know it’s a lot of steps,” I said. There was probably an elevator though.

“I’d walk miles for you, Marisol. A few steps is nothing. I’d walk to you if I could right now,” he said, his voice going serious again.

“I’d walk to you too. We could meet in the middle.”

If only that were possible, I’d put on hiking boots and grab a backpack and be on my way. But an ocean separated us. And that wasn’t the only thing. If it was just the distance, things would be much easier.

He kept walking, and soon he was buying a ticket. Apparently, you couldn’t just walk to the very top, so he had to get a ticket to ride the elevator. Fin talked to me the whole way, even though I’m sure the people around him were giving him funny looks. As he walked, his voice was interrupted by his breathing, but he didn’t sound like he was struggling. Of course Fin could climb a bunch of stairs and make it look like a piece of cake. His steps were steady, even near the top.

“I would be passing out about now,” I said, and he gave me a grim smile.

“No, I’d pick you up and carry you.” Knowing him, he would. And not get winded at all.

He held the phone up to the window, and I watched as the elevator took him all the way to the top. I could barely hear his voice over the chattering of tourists.

“And here we are,” he said, getting out of the elevator and panning the phone around three hundred and sixty degrees. It was breathtaking, even on his phone.

“Wow. Is it windy up there?” I asked. He trained the camera back on his face.

“A little bit,” he said as he pushed his hair out of his eyes. “What do you think?”

“I wish I was there,” I said. So much that my chest started to ache again like it had when he’d walked out and left me sitting on his bed.

“You are. You’re always with me.”

A
fter Fin rode the elevator back down he walked around some more and we talked.

“Hey, you should stop and get coffee somewhere, and I’ll make coffee and we can drink it at the same time,” I said, and he laughed. I loved that sound. So much. I also loved laying on his chest when he laughed, feeling the vibrations through his body.

Seven weeks.

“Let’s do it,” he said, and I took my computer with me into the kitchen and put on the coffeemaker as he walked into a café and ordered a coffee with a croissant. Crap. I didn’t have any croissants. All I had was a muffin that was a day or two old. Well, it would have to do.

After my coffee brewed, I went to the fridge and got the French vanilla creamer.

“Look, this is French,” I said, holding up the container. He shook his head as he carried his coffee and croissant in one hand and his phone in the other to a table outside the restaurant. It was quite late there, but the city didn’t seem to be slowing down at all. I liked that. A night owl myself, I couldn’t understand people who went to bed so early. All the best things happened under the cover of darkness.

I settled down on my couch and set the laptop on the coffee table, angling the screen and the camera.

Fin raised his cup. “To Paris,” he said.

“To the French,” I said, and we raised our cups at the same time and sipped. Despite being in my pajamas—my cutest pair that were a little bit sweet and a little bit naughty—I almost, sort of felt as if I was there with him.

We sipped our coffee and talked about this and that.

“So,” he said, setting his empty cup down, “do you want your secret now?”

I sipped the last of my coffee and gave him a look. “We’re still doing secrets? Even though I can’t reciprocate?”

He chuckled and I saw a flash of Dark Fin. God, I’d missed him.

“Oh, I think you might find a way.” He raised one eyebrow, and it didn’t take me long to get the gist. There were only a few options for long distance relationships to keep the sexy times going, but I wasn’t sure if I was up for any of them. But for Fin? I’d pretty much do anything.

“Is that so?” I said, raising my own eyebrow.

“So, what do you think?” he asked. “Is that an acceptable trade?”

“Maybe,” I said, drawing out the word. “Depends on how good the secret is.” His secrets were all good. Or bad, actually. Most of his secrets involved his twisted past. I’d known when I met him that he had a dark past, but I just didn’t know how dark. Or how much darker it could be.

“Let me get back to my hotel and then we’ll continue. I’ll talk to you in a little while.” I agreed, and we ended the video. For now.

Sure, I’d thought about how we would keep the sexual spark of our relationship going, and I’d flirted with the idea of phone sex and even doing something via the webcam. But both of those things gave me an icky feeling. Like they were shameful, or wrong.

It was ridiculous, given what we’d done already. Some people would consider getting tied up by their lover, or not being able to have sex face-to-face with someone as dirty or wrong. Things never felt that way with Fin. Everything felt right.

So I put on some more lip gloss and fluffed my hair and tried to arrange myself on the couch in a sexy way as I waited for Fin to pop up on my computer again. I waited for fifteen minutes before he popped back up, and I hoped I was ready for this.

“Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice as sexy as possible. Fin was back on his computer, in his bed. I probably should have gone to my bedroom. That would have been a better idea. Why didn’t I think of that? This couch had more than a few memories with Fin though. This was the couch he abandoned me on the first time we were naked together.

After that, I thought I was never going to see him again, but I gave him another chance. And then he did it again. We’d been through a lot of ups and downs so far, and I knew there were more to come. We were in one right now. But the highs? Those moments when we were at the top and we started racing downward, hands in the air, screaming our lungs out, those were the best. They were worth the downs.

“Secret first? Or secret after?” he asked, adjusting himself. He was on his side, curled around the laptop.

“Um, secret first,” I said, my voice shaking a little. I was suffering from a little bit of performance anxiety.

“That’s what I though you’d say.” He took a deep breath and pushed his hair back.

“You know about the first time I had sex, and the second. But you don’t know about the first date I went on.” No, I didn’t know about that. He’d told me that he didn’t have sex with girls he’d dated, and he didn’t date the girls he had sex with. Well, most of the women he’d had sex with were professionals. I was definitely still trying to get past that. It was going to take more than a little bit of time for me to process.

“Okay, tell me,” I said. He’d been waiting.

“Her name is Tara, and she was the daughter of one of my father’s business associates.” Naturally. “She was everything my parents wanted for me. Well, they wanted Rory for me, but you know how that worked out. And I know you’ve seen pictures of me in my younger years.” Yes, I had. He was absolutely gloriously beautiful now, but he hadn’t always been that way. Still, there was the sense in his youth that he’d someday turn into something greater. He wasn’t ugly back then by any means, just … awkward. Gangly limbs, a bad haircut, a sour face and a bit of a skin problem.

“I had interest in girls, of course.” He grinned at me. Most of the time when he told his stories, he went to another place and it was like I wasn’t there. He lost himself in the past for a little while.

“Of course,” I said, laughing. Things hadn’t changed.

“This was after my sixteenth birthday, and my father gave me some advice. He told me that I would marry a good woman and take care of her, and treat her the way a woman should be treated, and if I needed to work out my inner demons, I was to do it with a professional. That was what they were there for.” God, the more I heard about his father, the more I hated him. Yes, I hated him. For what he’d done to Fin. For how he’d treated his one and only son. What kind of father did that?

“So, he said it was time for me to lock down a good woman. He’d met my mother when they were both in high school, and they got married right after graduation. This was the path I was expected to follow. He had a list of eligible women to set me up with, and Tara was the first. She wasn’t the last.” I assumed. His father definitely wouldn’t give up after just one failed date.

“I had my license and my father had bought me a car, so I picked her up from her parents’ house. She had this pink dress on, and I remember thinking that she looked so young. I was seventeen, she was sixteen, and I already felt ancient. But I shoved that aside and opened the car door for her, made small talk when she got nervous, and tried to be a nice guy. She was much more into the date than I was, that much was obvious. I wasn’t sure if it was me, or if it was just the fact that she was out from under her parents’ watchful eye.” Probably a little bit of both, but I didn’t say that.