Read Online The Nicholas Linnear Novels by Eric Van Lustbader - Free Book Online Page A

thumb stroked the back of his hand, tracing the lines of the bones there. “A spark from a flame.” She looked down at her feet, at the damp black sand, at the rushing water. “I’m afraid to trust you.” Her head came up abruptly as if she had made some decision and was now determined to adhere to it. “My men have been such bastards and—I did the picking, after all….”
    “How can I be any different, is that it?”
    “But you are different, Nick. I can feel it.” Yet she took her hand away from his. “I can’t go through it again. I just can’t. This isn’t a movie. I don’t know that everything is going to turn out all right.”
    “When do you ever know that?”
    But she ignored him, continuing, “We’re brought up with a kind of romanticism that’s so false it leads us astray. Falling in love and marriage is forever. The movies, then TV told us that, even—especially—the commercials. We’re all electronic babies now. So then we pass out of ‘us’ and into ‘I’—what do you do when the ‘us’ doesn’t work and the ‘I’ is far too lonely?”
    “You keep searching, I suppose. That’s all life is anyway. It’s one great search for whatever it is we want: love, money, fame, recognition, security—all of those things. It’s the degrees of importance which vary in each individual.”
    “Except for me.” Justine’s voice was tinged with bitterness now. “I don’t know what I want anymore.”
    “What was it,” he said, “that you wanted in San Francisco?” He saw only her outline, an ebon figure in the darkness, blotting out the starlight where she stood.
    Her voice, when she answered, was like a wisp out of time, a cold tendril, slightly unearthly, so that he felt a brief shiver run through him.
    “I wanted,” she said, “to be dominated.”
    “I still can’t believe I said that to you.”
    They lay, naked, beneath the sheets in his bed. A beam of moonlight came in through the windows overlooking the sea like an ethereal bridge to another land.
    “Why?” Nicholas asked her.
    “Because I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed I ever felt that way. I don’t ever want to be like that again. I reject it.”
    “Is it so terrible, then, to want to be dominated?”
    “The way I wanted it…. Yes, it was—unnatural.”
    “How do you mean that?”
    She turned around and he felt the soft press of her breasts against his skin. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s just forget I ever said it.”
    He took her bare arms in his hands and looked her full in the face. “Let’s get one thing straight. I am who I am. I’m not—what was that guy’s name in San Francisco?”
    “Chris.”
    “I’m not Chris and I’m not anyone else who’s been in your life.” He paused, studying her eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying? If you’re fearful of the same things happening, then you’re bound to see me as Chris or someone else. We all do that at times, unconsciously because we all have archetypes. But you can’t do that now. If you fail, if you don’t break through now, you never will. And every man you meet will in some way be Chris and you’ll never be free of whatever it is you fear.”
    She broke away from him. “You’ve got no right to lecture me this way. Who the hell do you think you are? I say one thing to you and right away you think you know me.” She got up off the bed. “You don’t know shit about me. You never will. Who the fuck cares what you have to say anyway?”
    He saw her moving away and, a moment later, heard the bathroom door slam.
    He sat up swinging his legs over the side of the bed. The urge to smoke was strong so he turned his mind to other matters. He ran his fingers through his hair, staring sightlessly out at the sea. Even now, Japan lapped at his consciousness. There was a message there, he knew, but because he himself had forced it to be buried so deep, it was slow in working its way upward to the light.
    He stood up.