He nodded as he said it. He became aware he was wearing only his boxer shorts. He folded his arms and raised one hand to rub his chin but he was really just trying to hide the ugly scar on his chest.
They looked at each other in silence for a moment. McCaleb realized he had been holding his hand to his chin too long. He dropped his arms to his sides and watched her as her eyes fell to his chest.
“Graciela…”
He didn’t finish. She had slowly opened the door and he could see she wore a pink silk sleep shirt cut high on her hips. She was beautiful in it. For a moment they just stood there and looked at each other. Graciela still held the door, as if to steady herself against the boat’s slight movements. After another moment she took a step into the hallway and he took a step to meet her. He reached forward and traced his hand gently up her side and then around to her back. With his other hand he caressed her throat and moved to the back of her neck. He pulled her into him.
“Can you do this?” she whispered, her face pressed into his neck.
“Nothing’s going to stop me,” he whispered back.
They moved into the stateroom and shut the door. He left his shorts on the floor and crawled onto the bed with her as she unbuttoned the nightshirt. The sheets and blanket already had her smell, the vanilla he had noticed once before. He moved on top of her and she pulled him down into a long kiss. He worked his face down to her chest and kissed her breasts. His nose found the spot just below her neck where she had touched the perfume to her skin. The deep musky vanilla filled him and he moved his lips back up to hers.
Graciela moved her hand in between their bodies and held her warm palm against his chest. He felt her body tense and he opened his eyes. In a whisper she said, “Wait. Terry, wait.”
He froze and lifted himself up with one arm. “What is it?” he whispered.
“I don’t think… It doesn’t feel right to me. I’m sorry.”
“What’s not right?”
“I’m not sure.”
She turned her body underneath him and he had no choice but to get off her.
“Graciela?”
“It’s not you, Terry. It’s me. I’m… I just don’t want to rush. I want to think about things.”
She was on her side, looking away from him.
“Is it because of your sister? Because I have her-”
“No, it’s not that… Well, maybe a little. I just think we should think about it more.”
She reached back and caressed his cheek.
“I’m sorry. I know it was wrong to invite you in and then do this.”
“It’s okay. I don’t want you to do something you might be unhappy about later. I’ll go back up.”
He made a move to slide toward the foot of the bed but she grabbed his arm.
“No, don’t leave. Not yet. Lie here with me. I don’t want you to leave yet.”
He moved back up the bed and put his head on the pillow next to hers. It was an odd feeling. Though obviously rejected, he felt no anxiety about it. He felt that the time would come for them and he could wait. McCaleb began wondering how long he could stay with her before having to return to his sleeping bag.
“Tell me about the girl,” she said.
“What?” he replied, confused.
“The girl in the yearbook picture on your desk.”
“It’s not a nice story, Graciela. Why do you want to know that story?”
“Because I want to know you.”
That was all she said. But McCaleb understood. He knew that if they were to become lovers, they had to share their secrets. It was part of the ritual. He remembered years before how on the night he first made love to the woman who would become his wife, she had told him that she had been sexually abused as a child. Her sharing of such a carefully held and guarded secret had touched him more deeply than the actual physical act of their making love. He always remembered that moment, cherished it, even after the marriage was over.
“All of this was put together from witnesses and physical evidence… and the video,” he began.
“What video?”
“I’ll get to that. It was a Florida case. This was before I was sent out here. A whole family… abducted. Mother, father, two daughters. The Showitz family. Aubrey-Lynn, the girl in the photo, she was the youngest.”
“How old?”
“She had just turned fifteen on the vacation. They were from the Midwest, a little town in Ohio. And it was their first family vacation. They didn’t have a lot of money. The father owned a little auto garage-there was still grease under his nails when they found him.”
McCaleb blew his air out in a short laugh-the kind a person makes when something isn’t funny but he wished it were.
“So they were on a cut-rate vacation and they did Disney World and all of that and they eventually got down to Fort Lauderdale, where they stayed in one room in this little shitty motel by the I-95 freeway. They had made the reservation from Ohio and thought because the place was called the Sea Breeze, it was near the ocean.”
His voice caught because he had never spoken the story out loud; every detail about it was pitiful and made him hurt inside.
