When Julia exited the bathroom, she found Gabriel still in his dress coat, kneeling in front of her radiator as if it were an altar. She giggled. “You’re on your knees more than the average professor.”
He shot her a look. “Very amusing, Julianne. This radiator is useless. Do you have a space heater?”
“There’s an electric baseboard heater in the bathroom. But I don’t use it.”
He shook his head as he got to his feet and strode past her. He cranked up the heat and made sure to leave the bathroom door wide open.
“Just let me warm the apartment up a little. Your hair is wet, and you’re going to catch cold. I should make you some tea,” he offered, hanging his coat up on the back of her front door.
“I could do that,” she said softly.
“Allow me.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead and picked up the electric kettle, filled it with water from the bathroom faucet, and got down on hands and knees to plug it in underneath the dresser.
Julia tried very hard not to stare at the way his black wool trousers clung to his really very fine derrière as he plugged in the kettle. To distract herself, she compared his current behavior with the way he had behaved during his last visit to her little hobbit hole. It was as if there were two Gabriels, and she was only now being visited by the nice one. This newer model is just as handsome but infinitely more attractive.
“Now,” he said, looking around. “I need to warm you up.”
Gabriel fixed his eyes on her and pulled her into a hug, rubbing his hands up and down her back. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you answer your phone?”
“I answer it. Just not while I’m asleep or in the shower.”
“I was worried. You didn’t answer last night, and you didn’t answer about an hour ago.”
“I was washing my hair.”
Gabriel buried his face against her neck, inhaling her scent. Vanilla.
“Julianne,” he began, bringing his left hand to touch her face.
She blinked rapidly. “Yes?”
He grew silent.
She looked at him in surprise. His eyes were dark, and he was staring at her intensely.
He leaned over and began feathering his lips up and down the left side of her neck, beginning just under her ear lobe and ending at her collarbone. A flash of want flared in Julia’s stomach and lower down. His lips were barely floating over the surface of her skin and making every drop of blood in her body rush to that space. His touch had never felt so erotic, so affectionate.
Up and down and up and down, he worshipped the curve of her neck, now and then darting his tongue out to taste her skin. Now and then he withdrew his lips so that he could nuzzle her gently with his nose or his chin, the slightest hint of stubble subtly scratching across her flesh. He fluttered his mouth with soft kisses down to the hollow at the center of her throat and pressed his lips there firmly, beginning his sojourn up and down the right side of her neck.
Julia moaned and closed her eyes, sliding her arms up his back to trail her hands in his hair. Her fingertips moved without conscious thought, stroking the edge of his hairline just above his shirt collar.
“Mmmmmmm,” she breathed.
“Does this please you?” he whispered, continuing his gentle kissing.
She murmured her appreciation.
“I want to bring you pleasure, Julianne. More than you know.”
He paid special attention to the skin around her ear and just under her jaw line, teasing her slightly with his tongue. “Tell me if I’m pleasing you.”
She barely heard the question, focused as she was on the myriad sensations that coursed through her body and the warmth that fanned across her flesh. She no longer felt cold. She no longer felt anything but him.
“You please me, Gabriel,” she whispered dazedly.
“This is a declaration of desire,” he breathed against her ear, making her quiver. “If we were lovers, I would kiss you like this to signal my intention to take you to bed. And you can only imagine the delights that await you there. But at this moment, I can only declare that I burn for you. I won’t let myself touch your lips for fear that I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
Julia moaned even louder, and Gabriel continued, moving her hair away from her shoulders so he could expand his exploration. He poured out the lightest of kisses, covering her neck until he finally took the edge of her earlobe in his mouth and drew on it slightly, tracing the edge delicately with his tongue.
“If I were to taste your mouth now, I couldn’t answer for the consequences. So I can only adore this beautiful neck. I know that in a few seconds I will have to pull away, before the temptation becomes too much. It’s too much already. You have no idea how much I want you.” Gabriel’s voice was raspy, and he seemed to be breathing rather fast.
Julia felt her legs grow weak, and she started to sway…And that’s when the electric kettle began to whistle at them. Gabriel pressed a chaste kiss to her cheeks and went to make tea, while Julia sat down shakily on one of the chairs. Her heart was thumping so loudly she thought she was having a heart attack. She leaned her head forward, holding it in her upturned hands.
If I’m this unglued while he’s kissing me, what am I going to be like when he…
“What kind of tea, darling?” Gabriel’s voice held only the smallest edge of amusement as he watched her try to catch her breath.
Of course, the only reason why he was able to catch his breath so quickly was because he’d walked away. And he was far more skilled than she at hiding his feelings, except upon visual inspection.
“Lady Grey. It’s in the tin by the teapot.” Julia’s voice was shaky.
“I’m not a tea drinker, so it won’t be as good as yours. But hopefully it will be potable.”
She arched an eyebrow at his choice of adjectives, but politely thanked him when he placed the pot of tea, teacup, and saucer in front of her.
“I bought a few things for dinner. Have you eaten yet?”
“I had soup.”
“Julianne.” He sat next to her and gave her a scolding look. “Soup isn’t a meal.”
“Yes, I believe I’ve heard that before.”
She rolled her eyes, and Gabriel laughed.
The first items he took from the bag were a bottle of wine and a Rabbit corkscrew.
“Do you have wineglasses?”
“Yes.” Julia stumbled over to her small kitchen area to fetch them. She still had questions about Gabriel’s relationship to alcohol, especially in light of his past. But she had decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, for the present.
When she returned to the table, she read the wine label: Serego Alighieri Vaio Armaron Amarone 2000.
“Is that who I think it is?” She extended a finger toward the bottle.
Gabriel took her hand and pressed his lips to her palm. “Yes. Dante’s son bought the vineyard in the fourteenth century, and the Masi family still produce wine from it.” He sat back in his folding chair and regarded her quietly. She seemed awestruck.
“I didn’t know his family had a vineyard.”
“It’s a very good wine. Although in light of our past, perhaps you find the choice overly sentimental?”
She shook her head. “No. No, I don’t.”
“I had to work late, but I wanted to have dinner with you, so I went to Pusateri’s and ordered take out. There’s manicotti, Caesar salad, and a loaf of bread. How’s that?”
Julia looked at the array of food set in front of her and immediately felt hungry. “What are these?” She pointed to a cellophane package of cookies that had a reindeer on the label.
Gabriel grinned. “Lime cookies from the Dancing Deer Baking Company. They’re my favorite. Why don’t you let me look after this while you dry your hair and drink your tea?”
He reached out his hand to run it through Julia’s long, wet curls.
“Why do you keep feeding me?”
His hand sti
lled. “I told you, I like giving you pleasure.” He withdrew his hand, his expression quizzical. “This is how a man acts when he is interested in a woman, Julianne. He’s attentive and anticipatory.” He flashed her a wicked grin. “Perhaps I’m trying to indicate that if I am this attentive with respect to sating your culinary longings, I’ll be even more attentive with respect to satisfying other—ah—appetites.”
Julia flushed immediately, and Gabriel touched her cheek with his hand. “Your skin is lovely,” he breathed. “Like a rose in first bloom.” He gazed at her admiringly. “Rachel stopped blushing when she started sleeping with Aaron.”
“How do you know?”
“As I recall, we all noticed it. One minute she was reading The Little Prince and the next she was buying lingerie.”
Julia chewed at her lip thoughtfully. “I loved that book.”
“We need to see with our hearts and not our eyes,” said Gabriel.
“Exactly,” she murmured. “I like the part when the fox talks to the prince about the process of taming. And the fox decides that he wants to be tamed, to be the prince’s fox, even though doing so will make him vulnerable.”
“Julianne, I think you should dry your hair now.”
He removed his hand from her face and stood up quickly, turning his back on her allegedly so that he could prepare dinner, leaving Julia to wonder what had so disquieted him.
***
After dinner, they found themselves sitting on her bed as if it were a sofa. Gabriel propped up some pillows against the wall and leaned back, putting his arm around her waist.
“I’m sorry it’s so uncomfortable,” she apologized meekly.
“It isn’t uncomfortable.”
“I know you hate this place. It’s small and cold and—” She gestured to the room with a wave of her hand.
“I will regret forever what I said to you when you were kind enough to invite me in. I don’t hate this place. How could I?” He interlaced his fingers with hers. “This is where you are.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you for making everything beautiful just by being.”
She smiled as he brought their hands up to his mouth and kissed each of her fingers tenderly, one by one.
“Now tell me about your meeting with Katherine.”
Julia had to wait a moment until her fingers stopped tingling before she began. “She was exactly as you described. But she was very happy I’d read Charles Williams. I think that warmed her up a little. She agreed to be my advisor.”
“And what did she think of your proposal?”
“Um, she thought it was derivative and so she suggested that rather than comparing courtly love and lust, I should compare aspects of the friendship between Virgil and Dante with the theme of courtly love. So rather than discussing lust and love, I’ll be discussing love and friendship.”
“Are you happy with that?”
“I think so. We decided that I should take Professor Leaming’s Aquinas seminar next semester because it’s going to be on love and friendship.”
Gabriel nodded. “I know Jennifer Leaming. She’s quite good.”
Julia fidgeted with the duvet.
He placed his hand over hers. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“No hiding, Julianne. What is it?”
“I e-mailed Professor Leaming a week ago to ask if she would be my director. That was before you and I had our, um, conversation.”
Gabriel’s eyes grew momentarily cold. “And what did she say?”
“She didn’t.”
“Jennifer is very busy. She’s untenured, and I doubt she has time to supervise graduate students outside of the Philosophy Department.” He paused. “When I told you I would find you another director, did you not believe me?”
Julia squirmed. “I believed you.”
“Then why did you feel the need to go behind my back?”
“I wanted to see if I could fix it on my own.”
Gabriel pressed his mouth into a hard line. “And how did that work out?”
“It didn’t.”
“Sooner or later you are going to have to trust me. Particularly about things having to do with the university. Or this isn’t going to work.”
She nodded, chewing the inside of her mouth slightly. “Tell me about your meeting with Christa.”
“I’d rather not. She’s a pest.”
Julia tried in vain to smother a smile.
“She’s far too busy trying to rescue her dissertation proposal to trouble us. I won’t accept her project as it is, which means she has to find another supervisor. And as you know, I’m the only professor supervising theses on Dante at the moment.”
“So Christa is out?”
“I told her today that I would give her until December eighteenth to turn in an acceptable proposal. And that was a gift. So don’t worry about her anymore. Her academic future hangs by a thread, and I’m holding the end of it.”
Good, thought Julia.
“I had an interesting conversation with my lawyer today.”
She took another sip of wine and waited for him to continue.
“He said that he’s going to look into the non-fraternization policy, but he strongly warned against any kind of romantic relationship with you while you’re in my class.”
She reddened. “Does that include kissing?”
“Assuredly, but he pointed out that the university is concerned primarily with sexual activity. So as long as we’re chaste and discreet this semester, I don’t think we’ll have a problem.”
Julia reddened even further and looked down into her wine glass.
“So you’ll have to keep your hands to yourself, Miss Mitchell, until I’ve turned your grade in. After that, well…” He grinned at her suggestively.
“You can’t be kissing me one minute and grading my essay the next.”
“At this point, I couldn’t be objective about your work even if I tried. I’ll have Katherine grade it.”
“Won’t she find that peculiar?”
He smiled. “I’ll make an excuse. And I’ll buy her a bottle of sixteen-year-old Lagavulin. It would resurrect the dead.”
“You’re still proposing fraternization—of a sort.”
Gabriel cupped her face in his hands. “But it’s less serious than an affair and therefore puts us at much lower risk with the administration. I have my lawyer looking at all the loopholes.”
“I don’t want to be a loophole.”
“I don’t view you as one. Do you want me to stay away for five weeks and not see you at all? Not hold your hand or put my arms about you? Is that what you want?”
Julia thought for a moment, and the idea made her ill. She shook her head.
“I’d like to continue to see you, as friends of course. You’re still deciding if you can trust me, and we’re still getting to know one another. What the university doesn’t know won’t hurt us.” Gabriel took her wine glass and placed it alongside his on the card table. When he returned, he pulled her so that she was almost sitting in his lap.
“We can pretend we’re both in high school and living in Selinsgrove. We’ve just begun dating, and because we’re good little teenagers and slightly old-fashioned, we’ve taken a vow of chastity.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“I have a vivid and detailed imagination when it comes to you,” he whispered. “And maybe I wish we’d been teenagers together.”
“So this is headed toward an affair?”
Gabriel was quiet for a moment.
“I had in mind something less tawdry. But Julianne, much of what our relationship will or won’t be rests entirely with you.”
She nodded to indicate that she’d heard him, and they both fell silent. Eventually she closed her eyes, breathing in his scent and feeling strangely calmed by the regular rhythm of his heartbeat. Gabriel stroked her hair and whispered to her in Italian.
“Julianne?”
Silence. r />
“Julia?” He leaned down only to discover that she’d fallen asleep. He didn’t want to wake her. But he also didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye, and he wanted her to lock the door behind him.
He lifted her carefully and placed her underneath the sheets and comforter, hoping that she would wake up. But she didn’t. Gabriel regarded her little form, the way her chest rose and fell with her gentle breathing, her lips slightly parted. She was pretty. She was sweet.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent a chaste evening with a beautiful woman who wasn’t a relative. A chaste evening that was fraught with desire and passion and an overwhelming need…He wanted her.
But the old interior conflict loomed large in his mind. He did not wish to corrupt her, to make her like him. He did not want to make her vulnerable or cause her to bleed in any sense. He seriously doubted his ability to be involved with her physically and not lose control, for the mere sight of her in a towel had almost shattered his resolve.
This is what comes of years of unbridled lust—now you don’t even have the ability to court her like a gentleman. You want to make love to this girl without lapsing into fucking, but can you? Can you be sexually involved with her without treating her like a pretty toy that has been constructed solely for your carnal satisfaction? Can you love without sin?
Gabriel’s thoughts troubled him as he stared at the rosy-cheeked lamb that trusted him enough to fall asleep in his arms, oblivious to the passion that boiled in his veins. He emptied his pockets and turned off his iPhone before heading to the washroom. He turned down the baseboard heater, as promised, and quickly stripped to his T-shirt and boxer briefs. He took a moment to inventory Julia’s shampoo and bath products, committing their names to memory so that he could be sure to stock his bathroom for her next visit. He definitely preferred vanilla to any other scent. Although vanilla and chocolate…
He turned out the lights and climbed into her twin bed. It was far too small for two persons; in truth, it made Gabriel almost nostalgic for the residence hall beds at Princeton or Magdalen College. Almost. Those beds were barely tolerable for sleeping and certainly far from ideal for any kind of sexual activity. It was fortunate that such activity was off the menu for this evening.