“We can’t exactly go roll into your brother’s house for family Christmas smelling like sex, can we?”
He looked up at me, then down at his jeans, which were liberally smeared with my gushing orgasm. Then he laughed, reached up, and pulled me into his lap.
CHAPTER FOUR
We cleaned ourselves up as well as one can in an airplane bathroom and settled in for the rest of the long flight. After we ate a quick dinner—Neil surprised me with a vegan version of the ubiquitous Upper Peninsula pasties—the flight attendant assembled the berth so I could nap. Neil stayed up, claiming he intended to read, but I knew he would be working. Even going throu
gh chemotherapy, the man hadn’t been able to keep himself away from his job, and now that he was planning to go back to work, he seemed determined to sneak in the odd five hours here or there working from home. The most adorable part of this delusion that his companies couldn’t run without him was the fact that he thought he was hiding it from me.
I slept longer than I’d expected, something I found myself doing more and more after intense sex. Though Neil always took care of me after we played hard, I felt less of an obligation to be “on” the way I had earlier in our relationship. My need to sack-out post-sex worked for Neil, as he found he needed some alone time to decompress afterwards, too. He woke me for our landing, and I buckled in and snuggled up beside him in the forward compartment.
Reykjavik was absolutely nothing like I’d expected. I’d been picturing something like Paris, with old stone buildings standing majestically side-by-side with newer architecture. Instead, the plane windows had revealed a milk carton town from a second-grader’s school project. The bright colors of the houses stood in contrast to the blank white canvas of snow. The place reminded me more of my small UP town than a major city, no matter their disparate sizes. I fell immediately in love.
After we landed, a customs official boarded the jet to ask us questions and stamp our passports. We deplaned and I got my first breath of the cold air.
“Everything smells like the sea,” I said, still all dreamy and swoony from our mid-air activities. “What time is it?”
Neil checked his watch and did a quick mental calculation. With businesses that spanned continents, he had to be sharp about time zones, but that was a magic that completely eluded me. “Three-sixteen in the morning.”
“And what time were we supposed to get here?”
“Two o’clock in the afternoon.” He brightened up. “You’ll get to the see house first!”
Neil’s home in Reykjavik was a hip-looking three-story building of gray concrete and glass. The roof slanted like the top of a parallelogram, and plate windows of uniform size and shape dotted the exterior in a seemingly random pattern. The house had already been “opened,” a phrase I was getting used to; before we arrived at any of his residences, Neil’s people would give the house a good cleaning and airing out, run the taps, and stock the kitchen and other supplies. When we stepped through the front door, a gleaming black vase crowded with bright orange poppies greeted us on the glass and steel table in the entryway.
That was another thing I’d noticed about Neil in the past year. Everywhere we went, there were fresh flowers. At first, I’d assumed it was a holdover from Elizabeth, but I was starting to suspect otherwise.
Especially when he said, “Ooh, poppies!” in the same way some people would say, “Ooh, birthday cake!”
“This place is spectacular,” I said in a reverent hush as I looked up and up, all the way to the ceiling of the third story. In front of us, to my right, stood a freestanding staircase with a glass panel half-wall topped with a brushed steel railing. Open-backed concrete steps rose in a precise line to the second story; another set reached from the left of the second floor to the third, and both of the upper floors were open lofts with glass partitions. From the foyer, I could see a small grouping of a rust-colored couch and two matching armchairs on the second level.
“Thank you. I quite like it,” he agreed with me. “Let me take your bag upstairs.”
“By yourself?” I scoffed. “Hell no, I need to see what this place looks like.”
“Don’t become too attached,” he warned as we made our way up the truly freaky and vertigo-inducing staircase. “I don’t spend much time here. I’ve almost sold it a dozen times.”
“Don’t you dare!” My eyes boggled as the living room at the top of the stairs was revealed. A huge, sinfully plush white rug covered the dark polished concrete. The rust-colored sofa and chairs surrounded a low glass coffee table. The flat-screen television on the wall was easily over seventy inches, but I couldn’t imagine anyone actually watching it when a wall of two-story plate glass displayed a truly dazzling view of the bay and the snowcapped mountains beyond. A sliver of the city stretched off the right, and a blanket of white turned every streetlamp, taillight, and illuminated sign into a hazy sort of fairy glow.
He was right. The light was different here.
A short hall led off past the second staircase, the walls painted a lovely deep reddish orange.
“Down there are a bathroom and some guest bedrooms. I hardly ever use them now that Emma doesn’t stay with me as often,” Neil said as we started up the next flight. “I’ve thought of turning them into a fitness room. Running outdoors here can be quite brisk in the winter.”
“And you’re probably ten times more likely to bust your ass here, too.” Though I didn’t notice a huge difference in temperature between Calumet and Reykjavik, the cold was different seemed predatory and hostile because it affected the pavement and sidewalks differently than I was used to. I’d nearly slipped a dozen times just walking from the car to the front door.
“Why not turn it into a kinky sex room?” I suggested, and he laughed.
“Do we need a kinky sex room? I thought we made the most of our environs just a few hours ago.” He reached for a switch and flipped it on, and the upper floor flooded with light.
The bedroom was on a wide bridge of the same polished concrete as the floors below. The glass partition railings gave an unobstructed view of the water and mountains on one side and on the other, tall windows at the top of the open foyer displayed more dazzling city lights. The enormous bed had no head or footboards, and was made up with crisp white sheets and a black duvet. Two sleek, black nightstands stood beside it. A super modern, free-standing concrete fireplace and chimney rose in a tall rectangle to intersect with the sloped ceiling, and skylights on either side of the loft would light the entire house during the day.
It was absolutely beautiful.
“Oh, baby. I am begging you to never sell this place,” I said, wheeling my suitcase to rest against the wall. I unzipped my blue parka and shrugged out of it, then walked around the loft, pulling down my sweater and straightening my hair. The place wasn’t homey, by any stretch of the imagination. I couldn’t imagine living here full time; it would feel like living in an art museum. It was like a little oasis: we were away from our jobs, away from friends and family—not that we didn’t love our friends and family—and truly alone together, out of our usual element. I wished we had more time to spend together in it.
Neil was visibly taken aback. I usually never expressed an opinion on what he should do with his money or properties. At least, if it didn’t concern me. He wanted to retire at his country estate in England, for example, and while I thought it reminded me a little too much of a horror movie version of Downton Abbey, I wasn’t about to ask him to revise his plans. I’d just asked that he close the house to tourists when that time came, and warned that if ever an antique doll turned its head to look at me, I would burn the entire place to the ground.