CHAPTER 50
I had the strangest dream in the half an hour of sleep I’d gotten. Well, I wasn’t sure if it had been a dream or not. It must have been, though, because these kinds of things don’t really happen in real life, do they?
That moment when someone is kissing you softly and slowly, when their fingers are gently tracing the length of your spine, when they’re inside you and your bodies are moving as one. Slow and purposeful. Each movement in perfect unison. Your breathing in perfect harmony, the small whimpers and moans escape your mouth at the same time, both moving slowly and steadily towards no finishing line at all, because it’s all about the journey. It’s all about what is happening now, about the way he’s staring into your eyes, looking deep inside you, and, suddenly, without any kind of explanation that makes any sense whatsoever, you feel completely and utterly in love with the person who’s telling you how beautiful you are.
Love at first sight?
Does it even exist? And, if it does, can it possibly be real? How can you feel something so strong for someone who you just don’t know? I knew next to nothing about the man I was making love to, in the true sense of the word. Not sex. Not fucking. Making love in that slow, intense way, when stars and fate and everything align. As if your bodies had been designed to do this from the start and had been going through life looking for each other, the last puzzle piece that slots in perfectly and completes the picture.
It went on for ages, like that. Me on his lap, him exploring every inch of my body with his eyes and lips and hands, making me feel things that I’d never felt before for any human being. Making my body feel things that it had never felt before. With words being communicated silently. And, when it was over, I collapsed on to his chest and he wrapped his arms around me and held me there, our sweaty bodies pressed together. I closed my eyes and breathed him in; the smell of him was intoxicating. And then, later, when he picked me up in his arms, walked me over to the bed and tucked me in, I was even more intoxicated by him. He climbed in next to me, wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close, as if this was something we did all the time. As if it was natural, as if this was the way it was meant to be and was how we’d done it a million times before. I fell asleep like that, but only for a short while, because something woke me up from my dream and sent me straight into a nightmare.
I opened my eyes. He was standing at the window with his back to me, completely naked. I appreciated the dimples at the bottom of his back for a few seconds before I felt the atmosphere in the room. Before I tasted it. It came at me like cool steel. It was like biting down on a piece of tinfoil, the smell of burnt hair and the iciness of a winter’s morning, all at once.
“Mike?” I whispered softly, my mouth dry. My heart was pounding.
But he didn’t turn around.
I climbed out of bed and stood on the floor, feet planted firmly, because my legs felt as if they were swaying.
“Mike?” I said again.
This time, he turned around. Slowly. He was holding something in his hands and I immediately looked down. In one hand, the burnt diary; in the other, the letters.
“I . . . I can explain,” I said.
“Really?” he asked, looking like he’d already made his mind up about me.
“It’s not what it looks like . . . Uh, well, it is, but it’s not . . . uh,” I stumbled and stuttered. I had no idea what to say. There was not really anything that could explain or justify this.
“I would recognize this writing anywhere.” He held the diary up and my heart sank. “Question is, what are you doing with it and where did you—?” And then he stopped talking, mid-sentence. He nodded his head and smiled to himself. “I see. I get it now. I should have seen this, but I guess I didn’t, or didn’t want to, or . . .”
“Get what?” I asked.
“Your research. Your new book. This has something to do with it, doesn’t it?” He waved the letters and the diary in the air now. “You’re not writing a private investigator book, set in some random small town, are you?”
I shook my head. “No, but—”
“Oh my God!” He cut me off with a loud gasp. “You’re researching my family! What about me? Is that why you booked into this place? Because you knew I was here?”
“I . . . I—” I tried to speak, but he cut me off again.
“And the library, this makes sense now, of course you were snooping around. You looked guilty when I found you.” He spoke rapidly, as if he was following a trail of bread crumbs, clues that his brain was throwing at him in logical succession. “What were you looking for in the library? Why do you have these letters and this diary? Where did you get them? Did you steal them? Did you steal them from someone in the eco estate? Is that why you broke in?”
“Uh . . .” My head was spinning. So, so many questions. No easy answers for any of them. So, I said the first thing that popped into my head: “I almost died in an elevator, a few days ago.”
He blinked at me several times. “Sorry, what? What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with this. As crazy as it sounds, that elevator has led me here—to this town, to the diary. To you. If I had gotten into a different elevator, a minute later, I wouldn’t be here.”
He shook his head rapidly and blinked at me.
“I know, it’s not making sense. It barely makes sense to me.”
“Try to make it make sense, please. I really want to understand,” he said.
“A few days ago, I got into this elevator in my building. I had my favorite bag with me—this beautiful old vintage bag I found in a charity store in Johannesburg. The lift plummeted and I grabbed on to it, but it ripped, and I found those letters inside this secret compartment in the bag. It looked like they had been sewn into it.”
“Who wrote them?” he asked, looking down at his hands.
