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“Suppose I'd better. Unless you'd consider doing it.”
“Hell, no. I'm going to bed.”
Skeet turned to walk out the gate, and Dallie sat down on the edge of a lounge chair to pull off his boots. He watched for a moment to see how much struggle she had left, and when he judged the time to be about right, he wandered over to the edge and dived in.
Francesca had just realized how much she didn't want to die. Despite the movie, her poverty, the loss of all her possessions, she was too young. Her whole life stretched before her. But as the awful weight of the water pressed down on her, she understood that it was happening. Her lungs burned and her limbs no longer responded to any command. She was dying, and she hadn't even lived yet.
Suddenly something caught her around the chest and began dragging her upward, holding her close, not letting her go, pulling her to the surface, saving her! Her head burst through the water and her lungs grabbed the air. She sucked it in, coughing and choking, grabbing at the arms around her for fear they would let her go, sobbing and cryin
g with the pure joy of still being alive.
Without quite being aware how it had happened, she found herself being pulled up on the deck, the last shreds of her greige silk blouse staying in the water. But even when she felt the solid concrete surface beneath her, she wouldn't let Dallie go.
When she could finally speak, her words came out in small choked gasps. “I'll never forgive you... I hate you....” She clung to his body, painted herself on his bare chest, threw her arms around his shoulders, held him as tight as she had ever held anything in her life. “I hate you,” she choked out. “Don't let me go.”
“You really did get shook up there, didn't you, Francie?”
But she was beyond replying. All she could do was hold on for dear life. She held on to him as he carried her back into the motel room, held on to him while he talked to the motel manager who was waiting for them, held on as he pulled her case from the rubble, fumbled through it, and carried her to another room.
He leaned over to lay her on the bed. “You can sleep here for the—”
“No!” The now-familiar wave of panic returned.
He tried to pry her arms from his neck. “Aw, come on, Francie, it's almost two in the morning. I want to get at least a few hours’ sleep before I have to wake up.”
“No, Dallie!” She was crying now, gazing straight into those Newman-blue eyes and crying her heart out. “Don't leave me. I know you'll drive away if I let you go. I'll wake up tomorrow and you'll be gone and I won't know what to do.”
“I won't drive away until I talk to you,” he said finally, pulling her arms free.
“Promise?”
He pulled off the sodden Bottega Veneta sandals, which had miraculously stayed on her feet, and pitched them to the floor, along with the dry T-shirt he'd brought with him. “Yeah, I promise.”
Even though he'd given his word, he sounded reluctant, and she made a small inarticulate sound of protest as he went out the door. Didn't she promise all sorts of things and then promptly forget about them? How did she know he wouldn't do the same? “Dallie?”
But he was gone.
Somewhere she found the energy to pull off her wet jeans and underwear, letting them fall in a heap beside the bed before she slid under the covers. She pushed her wet head into the pillow, closed her eyes, and in the instant before she fell asleep, wondered whether she might not have been better off if Dallie had left her on the bottom of the swimming pool.
Her sleep was deep and hard, but she still jolted awake barely four hours later when the first trickle of light seeped through the heavy draperies. Throwing off the covers, she jumped unsteadily from the bed and stumbled naked toward the window, every muscle in her body aching. Only after she'd pushed back the drapery and looked outside at the dreary, rain-soaked day did her stomach steady. The Riviera was still there.
Her heartbeat resumed its normal rhythm, and she slowly made her way toward the mirror, instinctively doing what she had done every morning of her life for as long as she could remember, greeting her reflection to assure herself that the world had not changed during the night, that it still orbited in a predestined pattern around the sun of her own beauty.
She let out a strangled cry of despair.
If she'd had more sleep, she might have handled the shock better, but as it was, she could barely comprehend what she saw. Her beautiful hair hung in tangled mats around her face, a long scratch marred the graceful curve of her neck, bruises had popped out on her flesh, and her bottom lip—her perfect bottom lip—was puffed up like a pastry shell.
Panic-stricken, she rushed to her case and inventoried her remaining possessions: a travel-size bottle of René Garraud bath gel, toothpaste (no sign of a toothbrush), three lipsticks, her peach eye shadow, and the useless dispenser of birth control pills Cissy's maid had packed. Her handbag yielded up two shades of blusher, her lizard-skin wallet, and an atomizer of Femme. Those, along with the faded navy T-shirt Dallie had thrown at her the night before and the small pile of soggy clothes on the floor, were her possessions... all she had left in the world.
The enormity of her losses was too devastating to comprehend, so she rushed to the shower where she did as much as she could with a brown bottle of motel shampoo. She then used the few cosmetics she had left to try to reconstruct the person she'd been. After pulling on her uncomfortably soggy jeans and struggling into her wet sandals, she spritzed Femme under her arms and then slid on Dallie's T-shirt. She looked down at the word written in white on her left breast and wondered what an AGGIES was. Another mystery, another unknown to make her feel like an intruder in a strange land. Why had she never felt like this in New York? Without shutting her eyes, she could see herself rushing along Fifth Avenue, dining at La Caravelle, walking through the lobby of the Pierre, and the more she thought about the world she'd left behind, the more disconnected she felt from the world she'd entered. A knock sounded, and she quickly combed her hair with her fingers, not quite daring to risk another peek in the mirror.
Dallie stood leaning against the door frame wearing a sky blue windbreaker beaded with rainwater and bleached-out jeans that had a frayed hole at the side of one knee. His hair was damp and curled up at the ends. Dishwater blond, she thought disparagingly, not true blond. And he needed a really good cut. He also needed a new wardrobe. His shoulders pulled at the seams of his jacket; his jeans would have disgraced a Calcutta beggar.
It was no use. No matter how clearly she saw his flaws, no matter how much she needed to reduce him to the ordinary in her own eyes, he was still the most impossibly gorgeous man she had ever seen.
He leaned one hand against the door frame and looked down at her. “Francie, ever since last night, I've been trying to make it obvious to you in as many ways as I could that I don't want to hear your story, but since you're hell-bent on telling it and since I'm getting pretty close to desperate to get rid of you, let's do it right now.” With that, he walked into her room, slumped down in a straight-backed chair, and put his boots up on the edge of the desk. “You owe me someplace in the neighborhood of two hundred bucks.”
“Two hundred—”
