Amulet, p.25
Amulet, page 25
Toward the end of the meal, there was a lull in the conversation, and Alex worried for a moment that Val would resume his former distance. But before she could think of something to say, Val said, “You seem happy. I’m glad for you.” He paused, but only long enough to take a breath. “How are things—I mean, between you and Billy?”
Alex glanced down at her half-eaten plate of pasta and smiled, then looked back up at Val. She was hoping he would ask that question. Part of the reason Alex had wanted to have lunch with Val was to tell him, but she’d felt awkward bringing up her love life at lunch, unsolicited.
“Things with Billy have been—resolved.”
Alex had more to tell him, so much more, but before she could get the words out, Val pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. “I’m sorry, I have a meeting, and I need to get back to the office.”
The server came by with the check just then, and Val handed the woman two twenty-dollar bills, telling her to keep the change.
“I was going to pay for—”
“That’s okay,” Val interrupted. “You can get it next time.”
Confused, Alex tossed her napkin on the table and rose to follow Val to the front of the restaurant. She tried to keep up as Val pushed his way through the revolving door to the outside and waited. When Alex appeared a moment later, his hand flew up, stopping her mid-step. “It was good to see you, Alex. Keep in touch.”
She shook his hand. Without a word, he turned and walked away, leaving her standing there, watching him go.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It had been a mistake. He should never have agreed to have lunch with her. It was as if Val had just torn out his stitches with his teeth, dug his fingers into the wound, then spread it open for Alex to pour salt in.
Val had been doing fine before he saw her again. It had been over two months, and he had been fine. Now, here he was, sitting in his office with the door closed and the lights turned off, staring at a blank computer screen.
In addition to the pain and sadness he felt at the renewed realization that he would never be with Alex, Val was angry with himself. He had wanted Alex to be happy, above all else, and she was just that—happy. He could tell simply by looking at her. Alex was content and at peace with herself and the world. She had the job she had always wanted, and things had worked out for her and the man she had chosen to spend her life with. Val had made all that possible, with a phone call and an amulet, and, without a doubt, he would do it all over again.
Why couldn’t that be enough for him?
Val went through the rest of the day in a haze of self-pity and self-loathing. Judy encouraged him to leave when she peeked her head in his doorway at five o’clock that afternoon, on the way out herself. Val looked up at her just long enough to shake his head “no” and say goodbye before turning back to the contracts he was trying to review.
It was two hours later when he finally shut down the laptop and packed it up to go home. He would do more work later that evening. He needed to stay occupied to keep his thoughts and feelings at bay, especially tonight.
Throwing on a light jacket and slinging the laptop bag onto his shoulder, Val headed out the door. Everything was quiet as he walked down the hallway to the elevator. He was the last person in the office, as usual.
He stepped onto the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby. The doors closed, and he thought to himself how symbolic that was.
Getting off the elevator at the lobby level, Val turned toward the elevators that went down to the parking garage. After only a few steps in that direction, Val stopped short.
“Alex? What are you doing here? Are you okay?”
Alex’s hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, and her eyes looked red and puffy.
She took a few steps in his direction, then froze just an arm’s length away.
“Are you okay?” Val asked again, more gently this time.
Alex looked at him, as though trying to understand the meaning of what he’d just said, then stretched out a fist. She was holding something.
“I-I wanted to give this back to you,” she said finally. She turned her hand over and spread open her fingers, revealing the amulet. “Take it.”
Val looked around. There was no one in sight except for a security guard near the main bank of elevators. The guard was playing a game on his phone.
“Let’s go back up to my office,” said Val, touching her arm. “We can talk there.”
Alex nodded, shoving the hand holding the amulet into the pocket of her overcoat. They walked side-by-side to the elevator bay and waited for the doors to open.
When they were in the elevator, on their way up again, Val turned to Alex. “How long were you standing there, waiting for me?”
Alex shrugged. “I don’t know. An hour maybe. It doesn’t matter.”
Her voice was emotionless, her face expressionless. Val couldn’t remember ever having seen her without a smile of some sort on her lips, even if at times it was a sad one.
The doors slid open. Without a word, she stepped out, then followed him to the end of the hall, where his office was.
The floor was quiet, and, aside from the lights in the hallway, everything on either side was dark.
Val opened the door to his office and turned on the lights. Silently, Alex walked over to the leather chair in front of Val’s desk and lowered herself into it. Val followed her and sat in the other chair next to her. Perched on the edge of the seat, Alex refused to look at him, choosing instead to study the lovely hands clasped together in her lap.
Val shifted in his chair to face her. “Tell me what’s going on,” he implored. “Please, talk to me.”
As though she had just remembered why she had come to see him, Alex looked up, her lips parted slightly in surprise. Then she pulled the amulet out of her pocket and pushed it toward him again.
“I want to give this back to you,” she said, her voice cracking as she spoke.
“Why? It’s yours. I gave it to you as a gift.”
“I don’t want it,” Alex replied, raising her voice. “It doesn’t work. I don’t want it.”
Val reached out his hand, and Alex placed the amulet in his palm, her fingers innocently brushing his skin.
“Oh, Alex. It didn’t work? But I thought, I mean you said that things had worked out. Oh, I’m so sorry, Alex.”
And he was. For as much as Val hated the idea of Alex being with Billy, it broke his heart to see her so sad. Alex, who brought joy and happiness to everything she touched—she didn’t deserve this kind of pain.
“Maybe you didn’t do it right,” he offered.
Val’s fingers scooped up her hand, and the warmth of her skin on his almost made him forget the reason for the contact. Flipping over her hand, Val gently pressed the amulet into it, pushing her fingers closed around it.
“I’ll do it with you this time,” he said, still holding her closed hand in both of his. “If you want Billy to marry you, just say it, please. It will work this time, I promise you.”
Alex drew her eyebrows together into a frown and shook her head slowly from side to side. “That’s not what I want. That’s not what I wished for.”
“What?” Val couldn’t believe his ears. “But I thought you wanted him to marry you. I thought that was what you’ve wanted for a long time.”
Alex looked down in embarrassment and tried to pull away, but Val held her hand fast in his own. After a few moments of trying, her hand relaxed into his as she finally relented. She looked at him, eyes shining with unshed tears.
“I thought I wanted to marry Billy, I really did. I told him I loved him all the time.”
“You told me you loved him when we were walking along the beach in Israel, and I hadn’t even asked.”
Ignoring the joke, Alex continued. “I think all these years I loved the idea of being married to him. I had always thought that something wasn’t right between us, and I guess between Sunday school and my mom’s constant lectures I had convinced myself that it was the fact that we were living together, that we weren’t married. I just assumed that things would right themselves if he would just marry me. But when I finally stopped to think about it, when he finally did ask me to marry him…”
“Wait a second, he asked you to marry him?” Val was having a hard time keeping up.
She nodded shyly. “My first week of work at Farber, that Friday when I got home, I found that Billy had spent all day making dinner. I thought he had just been bored—he’s not used to sitting around all day at home. Then after dinner, Billy pulled out a ring and asked me to marry him. He said that when I was in Israel and away from him, he realized that he didn’t want to be without me, and if I needed the reassurance of having a ring on my finger, he was willing to do that.”
Val sighed. “Far be it for me to judge, but that doesn’t sound like the most romantic proposal ever.”
“Well, it meant a lot to me,” Alex was quick to reply, disregarding his teasing tone, “and I was going to say yes. I mean, it’s what I had wanted all along, just like you said. But then, when it came right down to it, I couldn’t say the words. Because I finally realized that it wasn’t being unmarried that I was unhappy with. It was us, Billy and me. Our relationship.”
Alex’s face clouded over as her brows knitted in thought, and she shook her head. “I think poor Billy just about had a heart attack when I told him I needed some time to think about it, after all the whining and complaining I had been doing all these years to get him to marry me. But he took it in stride, even when I said ‘no’ the next day.”
She paused to take a deep breath, then exhaled. “You can’t make something right that just isn’t. Sometimes, you just have to admit you’ve made a mistake and fix it, no matter how long you’ve been wrong.”
A lightness crept into Val’s chest, even as he was still processing the words she had spoken. “But, Alex, I don’t understand. I thought you loved him.”
“I thought so too, Val. But I didn’t love him the way I should have, the way he loved me. If I really had loved him, I would have been able to stop thinking about you.”
Val’s heart stopped beating for a moment as Alex’s words hit him, and his hand moved up slowly to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her gaze moved downward at his touch, as though she could not look at him, and when she spoke again, her voice was almost a whisper.
“I blamed it on the trip, at first,” she said, still avoiding his eyes, “the long trip over, the lack of sleep, the wine, the beach, all of it. I mean, you spend twenty hours on a plane with someone and you’re bound to feel like you know them. You get comfortable—too comfortable. You say things you shouldn’t, you lean in too close, you look at them, you touch them, and it all feels right. That’s how I always felt with you. Right. Like that was where I was supposed to be. The more time we spent together, the more we talked, the happier I became. I loved it, and I wanted more.”
“I wanted more, too,” replied Val, wishing she would just look at him.
“I shouldn’t have felt those things, and then that night outside my room, when we kissed…” Her voice trailed off, and she closed her eyes.
“Tell me,” he said, emboldened by her shyness, “if you didn’t wish for Billy to marry you, what did you wish for?”
Opening her eyes but still refusing to look at him, Alex replied in a voice so quiet he almost couldn’t hear it. “My wish was for you. For you to always have peace and joy in your heart, that same peace and joy that I felt when I was with you in Israel.”
Val should have been furious with her for wasting the wish on him. Of all the things she could have asked for—love, health, a long and prosperous career for herself—she had wished for Val to have the thing he should have asked for, half a lifetime ago. She had wished for his happiness.
“Then today,” she continued, “you were so different. You were annoyed, displeased, angry—I don’t know. It just felt like you didn’t want to be there, like it wasn’t even you. Like the wish hadn’t worked at all…”
Her voice trailed off as a tear rolled down her cheek, and Val’s throat tightened with emotion.
“Oh, Alex.”
Gently, Val pulled her chair closer to his, so that her knees fit between his own. Then, reaching up to cradle her face in both his hands, he wiped the tear aside with his thumb. “Don’t you know I could never be happy without you?”
Her eyes came up slowly to meet his, and the effect was magnetic. Continuing to stroke her soft cheeks with his thumbs, Val drew her face to his and kissed her.
Once their lips touched, Val knew he couldn’t be without her again. She was the fulfillment of everything he had ever wanted in his life. Love, companionship, acceptance, belonging. Home.
She sighed as he tilted his head, parting her lips in an invitation that he gladly accepted, and her hands came up between them to grasp at his jacket, tugging him closer.
Suddenly, Val was acutely aware of how far her body was from his, with both of them leaning forward in their chairs and meeting only at their lips. He rose from the chair slowly, never breaking the kiss, and took Alex up with him. His hands dropped from her face to her waist, and he pulled her against him. The feel of her thighs and chest pressing against him was both relief and torture. Then, when Alex reached around to stroke the back of Val’s head, her fingers moving through his hair, the last threads of his self-control began to unravel.
Not wanting Alex to misunderstand the root of his feelings for her, Val reluctantly raised his head, finally breaking contact with her lips, but still keeping her body held firmly against his.
“Do you know how long I’ve wanted to hold you like this?” he asked, his forehead resting against hers, his mouth poised and ready to kiss her again.
Alex rewarded him with the smile he loved.
Feeling her arms slide down from his neck to wrap around his midsection, Val lowered his mouth to hers once more. Her lips were soft, her kisses sweet and tender, even as their mutual desire grew. His hands moved up from her waist to her back, his fingers making small circles, reveling in their circuitous path. He wanted to touch every inch of her, to memorize the shape of her under his hands. Every curve of her form, every bone and muscle, and every smooth plane. The warmth of her body, the movement between them—it was the most fulfilling experience he’d ever known, and Val realized that this was what felt like to be complete.
He had no idea how it had happened, how it could be that she was here with him, choosing him. Was it truly the amulet granting Alex’s wish? Was this the universe’s way of making up for his abhorrent childhood? Or was it just dumb luck? In the end, it didn’t matter, as long as he could find a way to keep her there beside him, always.
Amid his delirious contemplations, Val felt Alex gently pull away from him. His arms still around her, chest rising and falling in time with hers, Val realized they were both out of breath. “I hope,” he began, trying to slow the rapid beating of his heart, “that you’re not going to tell me you just want to be friends.”
Alex laughed quietly and shook her head. In a voice that was steadier than he had expected, she replied, “No. I want much more than that.”
Breathing in the scent of tangerine that he thought they had left behind in Israel, Val dropped tender kisses in her hair as she rested her head upon his chest.
“You know,” he said, closing his eyes and rubbing his cheek against her soft locks, “I should have told you how I felt about you from the beginning, boyfriend or no boyfriend. I thought it would be unprofessional for me to tell you how wildly attracted I was to you—all of you. It wasn’t just your gorgeous exterior, but also the core of you, your soul.”
“Val.” Alex breathed his name in a way that made him want to capture her mouth once more, but he sensed she had more to say. “After all that I’ve told you, about me and Billy, would you believe me if I said I love you?”
Val’s breath caught in his chest, and he could have melted in her arms.
“Of course I would believe you,” he replied, his voice unwavering.
“Why?” she asked innocently.
“Because I know you, Alex. Somehow, I know you better than I’ve ever known anyone. From the first time I laid eyes on you, there was something so familiar about you. You’re like a piece of me that I lost a long time ago, that just now I’m finally remembering I had. More importantly, I would believe you—I do believe you—because I love you, too.”
Val reached for one of her hands and intertwined their fingers, amazed at how perfectly they fit together.
“It’s still a little hard for me to believe that you used your wish on me,” said Val, bringing her hand to his lips. “Why ask for my happiness when you could have had anything you wanted—anything at all?”
Alex pulled Val’s hand, still entangled with hers, from his lips to her cheek and closed her eyes for a moment, contentedly. “Everything was so different after Israel. When we came back to work, after New Year’s, you were distant from me. You hardly smiled anymore. I hated that. And I couldn’t help thinking it was my fault.”
“It was,” he teased.
“I love your smile. I couldn’t bear to see you without one.” Alex looked at him wistfully. “Your joy brings me joy. Seeing you smile, well, it makes my soul happy. How can anything else compare to that?”
Slowly, Val touched the caramel-colored hair that had fallen out of her ponytail to rest in soft, disheveled curls on either shoulder. “You make my soul happy, too.”
He drew her in for another kiss, and this time he was not so careful with her. He could have kissed her all night if she’d let him.
When they came up for air, the corners of Alex’s pretty mouth turned up in a coy smile. “So, it seems you were right,” she said, pulling her hand out of his grasp and putting it into the pocket of her overcoat.
