The Perfect Letter Read online

  “Right,” she said, but it was all she could do to hide her disappointment, her overwhelming frustration. No hard feelings. The Honorable Jacob Rhodes, still clinging to his pride. Always trying to do the right thing, and hurting everyone in the process.

  “Take care, Leigh. I’ll leave you alone now. I promise.”

  At last she looked up into his eyes, the hurt so plain that she nearly wept—here was the Jake she remembered, the one who could undo her with a single glance, a single word. How had he managed to make her feel like she was eighteen again, eighteen and scared of disappointing her grandfather, scared of losing the man she loved, of losing her chance at happiness?

  But then she was angry, too, angry that he’d torpedoed it all.

  He was turning to go. His back was to her as she said, “You did leave me alone.”

  “What?” He whirled around.

  She’d started, and she wasn’t going to back down now. “I waited ten years to hear from you. Ten years without a word of any kind.” She wasn’t able to keep the hurt out of her voice any longer. “I think I was prepared to deal with you in prison, even me in prison. Almost anything except you cutting me out of your life.” She choked down a breath. “I mean, what was I supposed to think? And you give me the letters now? Why bother writing them if you never meant to send them?”

  He looked down at his feet, as if there were some answer there that would make everything all right between them. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought about it, thought about sending them, but I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea. I didn’t want to scare you. Then you were gone, off to college. It just seemed easier after that to leave you alone. I mean, how could I ask you to take time off from school and your friends to come all the way to Huntsville, to a place where you didn’t know anybody, to talk to a convicted murderer through a plastic wall?”

  “I would have. I would have done it gladly.”

  “That’s just it, Leigh. I didn’t want you to. I wanted you very far away from that place. Why do you think I told them I did it to begin with?”

  “But no letters, no calls? I wrote you every week, Jake. You must have read my letters. You must have known I was desperate to hear from you. Even after my grandfather died, I never got a single line from you. No sorry, no condolences. I mean, that was just cruel.”

  Jake took the four steps between them so quickly, and with so much force, that Leigh actually stepped back. He raised his voice. “I was ashamed, okay? I thought maybe you’d be happier if I left you alone.”

  “I wrote you all the time. I wrote you how unhappy I was. It was so hard—”

  Now he was practically shouting. “It was hard for me, too! I helped my father and . . . and Dale—”

  “All this time I figured you were angry with me, that you blamed me. I just . . . I don’t—” She squared her shoulders, blew out another breath. If this was how he wanted it, fine. He’d made his bed and now he could lie in it. “I moved on. I felt like I had to, that if I didn’t I might as well go ahead and die.”

  Jake looked stricken, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. “You can’t say that, Leigh. You can’t even think it.”

  “Why not? What did I have after my grandfather was dead and you were in prison? You don’t know what it was like for me in Boston, waiting every day for four years—four years, Jake—to hear from you. I still considered us engaged. I never dated. I never went out with friends or went on trips for spring break like everyone else. I had school and Chloe, and that was it. All you had to do was send me one word, one letter. It would have been enough to keep me going for years, I swear it. I would have waited for you forever, just like I said that day in court.”

  “I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I wanted for you. I wanted you to have fun, make new friends. You went away to college, like you were supposed to. You were supposed to be happy.”

  Leigh looked out over the water. The bats swooped over her head, and the sun on the hills and the water was dimly gold, growing dimmer, blurred by tears. She felt wrung out, utterly spent. She could hardly see.

  She whispered, “How could I be? How could you think I’d ever be happy without you?”

  He stepped closer to her now, blotting out the storm clouds that were building on the horizon, the lights of the town, the last of the sun. She couldn’t see straight; the world beyond Jake was a blur.

  “You said you were moving on. In your last letter to me, you said good-bye. I figured we were through.” He was reaching out for her now, his hand following the curve of her waist, down to her hips, his fingers burning her skin. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. “You mean to tell me we’re not?”

  She felt his warmth and the rhythm of his heartbeat as he bent his head to her, his mouth pressing against hers, warm and soft and right. This is what she had waited for, all those years—some sign that he loved her, that he still wanted her. That she didn’t need to be brave anymore, that she wasn’t alone.

  She meant to protest, she meant to pull away, but there was no point: this was what she had come home for. She stayed with him in that kiss, on that dock, with the bats flying around their heads, as long as she could. The feel of his mouth on hers, soft but searching, was the answer to a question her heart had been asking for a decade. What will we be to each other, Jake? When all this is over, what will have changed?

  From the clanging of her heart, she knew now: nothing. Nothing had changed between them.

  “Leigh,” he breathed into her dark hair. “My God, how long I’ve wanted to touch you again. It’s all I thought about.” He swallowed. “Tell me you thought about me, too.”

  He slid his hands up her back, smooth on her hot skin. She was aware of the smell of him, a peppery scent like leaves, along with soap and his own musky, leathery smell.

  “I did,” she said, truthfully. “I do. Every day. I hardly think about anything else.”

  His fingers reached up into her hair, his mouth firm and insistent, and with his other hand he pulled the small of her back until she was pressed against him knees to breasts. She was drowning in him. She was suffocating on a heady mixture of happiness and grief and longing. They’d lost ten years of their lives. They’d had, separately, to find ways of making it through those years alone. But now they were here together, and there was nothing keeping them apart any longer. They were free to pursue the path their hearts, and their bodies, chose for them.

  She could feel his heart thudding against his ribs, his breath deep. His desire, hard and urgent against her belly. “I still want you, Leigh,” he breathed. “Like nothing else I’ve ever wanted. I can’t—I don’t know if I can wait. Ten years is a very long time.”

  She pressed herself more firmly against him, as if by desire alone they could cross what little distance there was left between them. “It is,” she whispered. “Too long.”

  “Where—?” he started, but suddenly they were aware they were drawing a crowd—on the street, people had stopped to watch them. Maybe the middle of town wasn’t the best place to complete their long-awaited reunion.

  “Not here. Come on.”

  They hurried up the dock hand in hand, not speaking, back to Saundra’s Prius parked on Main Street. A storm was coming up, distant lightning and thunder coming closer, and Leigh fumbled with the keys nervously, succeeding in setting off the panic alarm before she got the doors unlocked. Finally they were able to get inside, laughing all the while.

  Before Leigh could put the keys in the ignition, Jake was leaning over toward her, taking her face in his hands, and kissing her again. In a moment, Leigh thought, they would simply end up tumbling into the backseat and making love in front of the entire town.

  “I just can’t believe I’m kissing you,” he murmured. “It’s like you’re not real, and this is some kind of dream, and in a few minutes I’m going to wake up back in my bunk in Huntsville.”

  Leigh wrapped her arms around his neck and said, “I’m real. I promise, I’m real if you are.” />
  Halfway back to the vineyard the sky opened up, and by the time they made it to the parking lot, it was a small lake. The air shuddered with lightning, and the wind picked up, sighing through the oaks and the grapevines, the bluebonnets dotting the hillside. The conference guests were running for cover, up the hill and into their cottages. Leigh and Jake made a mad dash to Leigh’s cottage hand in hand, the rain pelting their backs and faces, and by the time they got to the porch, they were both drenched to the bone and laughing like crazy people.

  On the porch they took stock of the damage. Leigh’s T-shirt was soaked through, her breasts clearly visible underneath, her whole body shivering with the sudden cold. Jake was equally soaked, water dripping off the brim of his Stetson and down his back, soaking the waistband of his jeans, his boots splattered with mud.

  Before she could get the key in the lock, Jake spun her around and kissed her hard, their mouths pressed together fiercely, his tongue firm and insistent in her mouth. He had a light layer of stubble around his jaw, and it rasped her cheeks and her mouth. He pulled her toward him again, like he had at the dock, and she felt every inch of him underneath his wet clothes—the hard, flat muscles of his chest and belly, the length of his long legs encased in wet jeans. Between them, the growing weight of ten years of lust and longing, the swell of want. Leigh reached down and touched him through the fabric of his jeans, and felt him recoil.

  “Don’t,” he said, his voice low and ragged. “Let me take it slow, or this will be over in under a minute. I’ve waited ten years to touch you again, and I have no intention of rushing things.”

  It was cold and damp in the cottage. Leigh wrapped her arms around herself and said, “I’m freezing.”

  Jake bent over the fireplace and in a minute had a soft little blaze going. Leigh stood back and watched him, pretending to warm herself, but instead watching his face lit by the firelight, the angle of his jaw, the golden light on the stubble there, the yellow flicker reflected in his dark blue eyes. If it was possible, he was even more handsome than he’d been as a kid, now more comfortable in his own skin maybe, less garrulous than he’d been when they were young, less jokey, more serious. Prison had taught him to say as little as possible, maybe, though at the moment there was nothing much to say, nothing to do except to bask in the presence of each other at last.

  He stood. Slowly he turned her around and stripped off her wet T-shirt, her sodden bra. He bent over her neck, her ears, his mouth tasting her skin, his hands reaching up for her wet and goosefleshed breasts. A shivering that had only a little to do with the cold rattled her teeth and limbs.

  “You’re so cold,” he said. “Come closer to the fire.”

  He stripped off his shirt and boots, leaving on his jeans. Then he wrapped both of them in the down comforter from the bed, his arms around her back, Leigh resting her head in the middle of his chest and looking into the fire, the shivering in her belly lessening. In the cottage on the hillside with the rain pouring down, they were completely alone for the first time, learning to be comfortable with each other again, with the idea of the other as a real and solid and physical presence. There was no grandfather to catch them, no father or job or jail cell to stand in their way. For the first time since the night Jake had left for Florida, there was only the bliss of the two of them, completely alone, completely free to take their time and do whatever they wished.

  When Leigh’s shivering lessened, she felt Jake’s fingers stroking her arm, gently at first, then more purposefully. He bent to tilt her mouth toward his. His mouth on her was electric—the scratch of his light beard, the pull of his lips on her skin, the low burning that started in her belly and spread all through her, feet to head, until she was glowing like the fire itself.

  Over their years apart she’d started to think it was all in her imagination, the way her body responded to Jake’s hands and mouth, but here it was again, both familiar and entirely, pleasurably new.

  He slid his hands down into the waistband of her jeans and pushed them off her hips. There was a kind of feverish desperation in his movements as he pressed her onto her back in front of the fire, as he pulled off her panties and left her naked in the white comforter, sitting back to look at her.

  “Leigh,” he said hoarsely, and the firelight was shining in his eyes. “My Leigh.”

  Her eyes were blurring as she reached up to pull him down to her. “So you didn’t forget about me after all?”

  “No,” he murmured. “I never could. I wanted to. I tried to forget about you, and I tried to make you forget about me. I thought it would be easier for both of us.”

  “You were wrong.”

  “Seems I was.”

  Then he was hovering over her, pinning her arms over her head while he pulled off his jeans with the other hand, his knee pushing her thighs apart.

  “Don’t make me wait anymore,” she said, and when Jake raised his hips to enter her, she grabbed him and pulled him into her with both hands, and he gave a long, low moan like a man who’d thought he was dead suddenly come back to life.

  They lay still, joined together, for several long seconds, Jake’s breath heavy in her ear. But then she twined her arms around his neck and bent his mouth first to her own, then to her breasts, as he began to move—gently, at first, like he was afraid of his own good luck, then more forcefully, the pressure between them building. She raised her hips higher to admit him, and grabbed his buttocks and pulled him into her, deep, deeper. She pulled him in until she thought her ribs would crack and her body would collapse with wanting.

  At last they both cried out and shattered against each other, first Jake, then Leigh a second later. They fell back in a wet and tangled heap of limbs and discarded clothing, Jake shivering against her, Leigh running her hands through his hair. Jake. Her Jake, at long last.

  “God, how I missed you, Jacob Rhodes,” she said.

  Jake looked over at her, grinned, and said, “So does this mean we aren’t through after all?”

  “Oh, babe,” said Leigh, pulling him toward her again, “not by a long shot.”

  JANUARY 26, 2006

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Dear Jake,

  I arrived on campus today. My grandfather put me on the plane in Austin and made me promise to call as soon as I got in, but I couldn’t. I think I cried the whole way. When I touched down, I could see the Atlantic, cold and gray under a low gray sky, and the city was gray and frozen solid. I cried the whole way to Cambridge, too, so that the taxi driver kept asking me if I was okay, if I needed to go to the hospital. No, I told him. Just homesickness. But it definitely made him nervous. He kept watching me in the rearview mirror as if he expected me to grab the car-door handle and jump out in the middle of the highway.

  I think you would have liked it here. Harvard looks pretty much like I expected, all red brick and ivy, but I don’t think I was quite ready for how cold it is in the winter. The coat I bought doesn’t even begin to cut the chill, and my shoes are all wrong—I think my feet have been frozen from the moment I stepped off the plane. My roommate has promised to take me shopping soon to get some better winter clothes. I don’t even know what stores are here and where to find them, much less what to buy. The snow is pretty, though. I wish you could see how beautiful the commons are when the snow is fresh and clean and white. It’s like a clean white page. The beginning of something new. I feel like I need that right now.

  Somehow the girls in my suite all know the story of why I’m starting school a year and a half late, and they’ve decided they feel sorry for me, I guess. The proctor came to see if I was getting settled in, and I could see her exchanging looks with some of the girls. At least I don’t have to explain the trial to them. They’ve been nice, but I’m such an outsider here, having to catch up on everything the other girls learned the first week of fall. They already have certain bars they like to go to and certain routines for studying and eating. I don’t like to intrude, so I tell them I can’t come, I have homework to
do.

  My accent draws attention, too. The first day, one of the girls in the opposite suite asked me a completely innocent question about my major, and when I answered, she started to develop this strange little smile on her face, and before I was done I had to stop and ask her what was so funny. And she said, “Your accent. It’s so cute.” Cute, she said, like she was talking to an eight-year-old.

  So now I’m self-conscious. I find myself sometimes trying to tone down the accent. I feel like an intruder in their midst, an impostor, putting on the costume of an East Coast prep-school girl and pretending to be one of them. What would they do, I wonder, if they knew the real truth about me?

  I wish you’d write me, Jake. I keep hoping these letters are finding you, that they mean as much to you as they do to me. Right now they’re the only thing keeping me sane. I hope that now that I’m not living at home, your letters will find me.

  Please write me, Jake. Without seeing you, hearing from you, it’s like you’ve died. I don’t care anymore about the drugs or why you didn’t tell me the truth. I just want to hear from you, how you’re getting through the days. Whether you still think of me at all. I need to believe you’re still thinking of me, that you still love me. That someday, when you’re out, we can be together again.

  Love,

  Leigh

  FEBRUARY 8, 2006

  Burnside County Jail, Burnside, TX

  Dear Leigh,

  I keep thinking about the snow. I was there, too, getting with you into the cab. Riding with you from the airport, my feet sloshing through the cold and wet. The flakes in your eyelashes, falling.

  How beautiful, to think of you there. Safe.

  I finally finished Anna Karenina yesterday. I kept putting it down, feeling sorry for myself for a few weeks, then coming back to it later. I can see why you love it. I was there with poor Anna when she threw herself under the train, just as I was with you on your way to Boston. Don’t know if I’ve ever read anything sadder. I keep thinking about it, in that good way you do with books that mean something to you.