The Affair: Week 2 - Soon

She laughed and shook her head.

“Is that normal for you?” he asked. “To be so even-tempered?”

“No,” Emma replied honestly. “Maybe that’s how I know for certain that we weren’t meant to be together. I’m not mad at him. I’m not jealous. I hate to admit it, but I’m actually relieved.”

“You seem awfully certain.”

&nbs

p; “I am,” she said. “About that, anyway.”

She hadn’t told him she’d found Colin with her sister. The inevitable shift in her relationship with Amanda was a source of vulnerability. She was too uncertain of Montand, unsure of his interest in her, to open up about that. She didn’t completely understand her own motivations concerning him, either. It was as if part of her understood the unprecedented, intense attraction to him all too well. Another part of her seemed clueless in her motivations. No . . . not clueless, necessarily, but her intentions seemed murky. Clouded.

“Colin and I were just too comfortable with each other,” she continued thoughtfully. “There was no . . .”

He paused at the turnoff to the country road. Her cheek felt warm and she knew he looked at her.

“. . . spark,” she finished quietly. The word seemed to hang in the area between them for a second, vibrating, charging the atmosphere.

He swung the little car onto the road.

“What does he do for a living?” Montand asked gruffly after a moment.

“Colin? He’s a computer programmer—a forensic science technician. He’s very, very smart. Most of what he says goes right over my head. Between him, my sister, and me, I’m definitely considered the slow one. Oh.”

He’d accelerated. The wind whipped her short hair against her cheeks and swirled around her body, giving her a weightless sensation.

She’d worried a little he’d drive superfast on the dark country road. Wasn’t he the scion of a car dynasty with roots in racing? Wasn’t it inevitable he’d speed? She realized, however, that while he drove faster than the speed limit, it wasn’t by a large amount. It was the sheer power of the car that had thrilled her. It couldn’t have been more obvious that he had complete control.

“Faster?” he asked her quietly after a moment, and she realized he’d been accustoming her to the sensation of forceful, precise acceleration.

“Yes,” she said, her voice vibrating with excitement.

The car accelerated smoothly. There was no sense of hurtling chaotically through space. Instead they glided. Zoomed. She felt like she flew along the road in a tight, fluid flight. The car responded to his slightest touch, as if all he had to do was to think a command and it followed his bidding, like machine and man were one. She realized after a moment that she was grinning broadly.

“Is it the car, or you . . . your driving, I mean?” she asked a few minutes later when he rounded a curve with effortless, pinpoint precision. Which is it that’s causing this feeling inside me?

He kept his eyes trained on the road.

“The car,” he replied shortly, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. His mastery over the machine was singular. He downshifted and they rounded a curve. She saw the lights of the city on the horizon.

“Where did you grow up?” he asked.

“In the city,” she said, nodding toward Chicago. “On the north side, the Rogers Park neighborhood. My mother was a nurse at an Edgewater nursing home.”

“Is that how you got interested in nursing?”

“We spent a lot of time at the nursing home after school. My mom worked the evening shift, and it was really the only time we could see her while school was in session.”

“They didn’t care about having little kids there?” he asked, his brows bunching slightly in consternation as he stared at the road. “The managers or administrators of the nursing home?”

“No. We made ourselves useful. We played games with the residents. Read to them. Visited with them. It wasn’t a wealthy nursing home,” she explained, familiar with the fact that many people thought it odd that children spent so much time in such a facility. “The residents were mostly low-income people. A lot of the time, they didn’t have family. None who visited, anyway.”

“So you and your sister became their family,” he stated rather than asked.

Emma shrugged. “For some of them.”

“They must have lit up every time they saw you,” he said thoughtfully after a pause. “It certainly sounds like a unique way to grow up.”