Your Heart Belongs to Me

once disarmed, and knifed by desire.
    He had recently spent so much time staring at her lost twin, whose looks were weathered by suffering, that his memory of her exceptional face had been clouded.
    As soon as Ryan put the deli bags on the kitchen counter, Sam came into his arms. She would have kissed him straightaway into the bedroom; and he almost allowed himself to be led there.
    Crazily, in memory, he heard the voice of the young woman who spoke for the navigation system in the Cadillac Escalade, leading him back to his Denver hotel and away from the park full of aspens. This bizarre association lowered the flame of his desire, and he regained control of himself.
    “I’m starving,” he said.
    “You’re kidding.”
    “Totally starving.”
    “You must be.”
    “Look,” he said, “corned beef sandwiches.”
    “I really thought this kimono made me irresistible.”
    “With that cheese you like and the special mustard.”
    “Next time I’ll wear corned beef and cheese.”
    “And the special mustard,” he said.
    “With pickles for earrings.”
    “That’s one fashion risk too many. Look, pepper slaw and potato salad and that three-bean-and-peppers-and-celery dish, whatever they call it.”
    “Pepper slaw would have been enough. What’s this—custard cake?”
    “And then, here, those fabulous cookies.”
    “What’re you fattening me up for?”
    “I just can’t control myself in that deli. I shouldn’t be allowed to go in there without a chaperone.”
    They transferred everything from bags and plastic containers to dishes and bowls, and then carried the feast to the table on the deck.
    “I’m surprised you didn’t bring a keg of beer,” she said.
    “You don’t drink beer.”
    “I don’t eat eight pounds of deli at one sitting, either, but that didn’t stop you.”
    “I brought wine,” he said, pointing to the bottle that he had left on the table on arrival, before he’d gone into the kitchen. “An excellent Meritage.”
    “I’ll get glasses.”
    After he poured, before they sat at the table, they clinked wine-glasses, and a note as sweet as that from a silver bell rang through the surrounding pepper tree.
    They sipped, they kissed, they sat, and Ryan was so instantly comfortable with her that he knew, whether this Sam was a lie or not, he loved her, and he would continue to love her even if there was another Sam who was a conniving bitch.
    “It’s been a whole week,” she said.
    If it turned out that he had been diagnosed with a bad ticker and this night discovered he was in love with Ms. Jekyll in spite of Ms. Hyde, it would perhaps be the most eventful week of his life.
    A web of shadows and late sunshine seemed not to overlay them but instead to entwine them, as if they were embedded in it and it in them, a matrix of light and dark, known and unknown, a warp and woof of mystery from which their future would take shape.
    “Why did we let a whole week go by?” she wondered.
    He said, “The novel’s going especially well, isn’t it?”
    “Good. I’ve had several good days in a row. How did you know?”
    Ryan had no intention of telling her that when she was swept up in her writing, she thought less about his proposal of marriage, and that when marriage was not on her mind, she was less chaste than when it was.
    Instead, he said, “Your eyes are shining with excitement, and your voice is full of delight.”
    “Maybe that’s because you’re here.”
    “No. If you were that glad to see me, you’d be wearing corned beef and cheese.”
    “Okay, the book. Hard to explain. But text and subtext are coming together in ways I never could have anticipated.”
    “That is exciting.”
    “Well, it is for me.”
    “How are you doing with the past participles?”
    “I’ve got them under control.”
    “And the semicolons, the gerunds, the whole who-whom thing?”
    “If this wine weren’t so good, I’d pour it over your head.”
    “Which is why I buy only the best. Self-defense.”
    Quick footsteps ascended the stairs from the courtyard.
    Ryan turned in time to see the ice-crown of white hair that, in the moonlight one week previous, had identified the tall man in the yard, conferring with Samantha, as Spencer Barghest.
    Without the moon, the identification did not hold. This man was Barghest’s body type, but he was a decade younger than Dr. Death, in his forties, and he lacked the rubbery facial features of a stand-up comic behind which Barghest hid.
    “Oh,” he said