Danielle Steel - Family Ties

It was nearly one o’clock when Liz walked into the apartment. She was wearing black leather pants, a white Chanel jacket, and towering high heels. Her blond hair was pulled back in a sleek bun, and she was wearing small diamond earrings that she had borrowed from the shoot, and they were glittering fiercely on her ears. The man who walked in behind her looked like a homeless person she had picked up on the street. He was wearing torn sneakers, jeans with holes in them, and a black hooded sweatshirt with holes in it too. His uncombed hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he had a beard. He was smiling and relaxed as he walked into the room, and he had brought flowers for Annie. His manners were impeccable, and his appearance was totally out of sync with Liz’s. She looked like one of the models from the magazine, and he looked like he had been shipwrecked for a year. And his French accent lent charm to his appearance. He kissed Annie and Katie on both cheeks and shook Ted’s hand. He was personable and friendly, and within minutes, they all forgot how he looked. He was one of the most successful young photographers in Paris, and in great demand in New York. He didn’t seem to care at all about what he wore, nor did Liz. She was obviously happy to be with him, as Annie silently wished her niece didn’t have a weakness for men who looked like that. They all stood around the kitchen while Ted carved the turkey, and then they sat down in the dining room, as Kate lit the candles, and Liz and Annie brought in the food. It was a feast. And by the time they got up from the table, they could hardly move.

“I think it was your best Thanksgiving ever,” Ted complimented Annie, and she beamed. The turkey had been perfect. She had improved her culinary skills over the years, mostly by trial and error.

Ted turned to Jean-Louis then and invited him to watch football with him. The young photographer was only a few years older than Ted but was far more sophisticated. He had talked about his five-year-old son at dinner. He had never been married to the boy’s mother but had lived with her for two years, and they had remained friends. And he said he saw the boy as often as he could. He was planning to spend Christmas with him. And Liz was meeting Jean-Louis in Paris the day after. She had a major jewelry shoot there after the first of the year, and she was going to spend a week with Jean-Louis between Christmas and New Year’s. Annie was intrigued to hear he had a son and wondered how Liz felt about it, but she didn’t seem to mind. It seemed so grown-up for Liz to be dating a man with a child. But she was old enough to take it on if that was what she wanted. Annie wasn’t quite sure. Liz seemed no more serious about Jean-Louis than she had about the look-alikes who came before him. And he seemed no more serious about her, although he was very flirtatious with her, and Annie found them kissing passionately in the kitchen. She suspected the relationship was about sex and enjoying each other’s company. It made her feel old to see it. And for a moment she wondered if Whitney was right. Annie had put that part of her life away on a shelf and forgotten all about it. But it seemed like too much trouble to remember. Those games belonged to youth. Watching Jean-Louis and Liz suddenly made her feel ancient. She had traded her own youth for surrogate motherhood to her sister’s children. Even now it seemed like the right thing to do, and a fair trade, and she didn’t regret it.

Ted and Jean-Louis went to watch TV in the living room, while Jean-Louis extolled the virtues of soccer, but he seemed to enjoy the American sport too. There was much hooting and cheering and yelling from in front of the TV, while the three women cleared the table, and Liz commented to her aunt and sister what a nice man Jean-Louis was. Kate was inclined to agree and liked his looks, and Annie admitted he was a little too scruffy for her, but she knew that was the desirable look of the moment. She had seen enough of Liz’s friends to be aware of it, and it no longer shocked her, but it didn’t appeal to her either. She preferred Ted’s clean-cut style to Jean-Louis’s.

The three women stood in the kitchen and talked while they cleaned up, and by the time they finished, the football game was over. Jean-Louis commented about what a fantastic meal it had been, the best he had ever eaten. And he won Katie’s heart by admiring her tattoos. They all agreed it had been a perfect Thanksgiving, and Jean-Louis seemed to revel in the warm atmosphere. And he touched Annie by saying what a wonderful woman Liz was. It was obvious that he was very taken with her, and he charmed everyone. After they left, Ted, Annie, and Kate watched a movie on a DVD, and it was midnight when they finally got up to go to bed.

Annie came in to say goodnight to Kate a few minutes later and was surprised to find her lying on her bed, still dressed, talking on the phone. She sounded animated and looked happy, and Annie discreetly left the room. She went to say goodnight to Ted, and he kissed her and thanked her for the wonderful Thanksgiving. He seemed grateful to be home. And when she went back to Kate’s room, she was off the phone, with a mysterious expression. She looked like the proverbial Cheshire cat.

“New romance?” Annie asked her. She didn’t like to pry, but she tried to keep abreast of what was happening in their lives. Kate nodded vaguely in answer and didn’t meet her eyes.

“Maybe.”

“Do I know him?”

“No. Just someone I know from school. It’s not a big deal.” But her eyes said something different. Kate had always been very private and somewhat secretive, and more inclined to serious relationships than casual ones. She had gone out with the same boy all through high school, but they broke up when he went to college on the West Coast. She hadn’t had a serious boyfriend in three years, but something told Annie that this one might be. Katie looked dreamy eyed as she kissed her aunt goodnight.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” Annie said as she kissed her niece, and Katie just smiled.

As it had been for several years now, it was an adjustment for Annie when her nieces and nephew left after the Thanksgiving weekend. Ted went back to his apartment, and Kate to her dorm on Sunday night. The house felt like a tomb, and the only thing that cheered her was knowing that they would stay with her again over Christmas, which was only a month away. After so many years of living with them, and as her main focus and only personal life, she lived for the times when they were together. She hated to admit it to anyone, even Whitney, but it was true.

It was a relief to get back to work on Monday morning. She had four client meetings set up in one day and visited two of her job sites during lunch. And she didn’t get back to the apartment until eight that night. She was so tired, she looked at some plans and notes she’d made during meetings with clients, and then took a bath and went to bed. She was almost too tired to miss the kids, never bothered to eat dinner, and barely noticed the darkened rooms and silence in the apartment. It was the drug she had always used to counter loneliness and pain, total immersion in work.

The Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend was a busy day for Liz too. She had an important jewelry shoot for the March issue, and she had pulled major pieces from all over the world. The theme was Spring, and all the jewelry she was using was in flower designs, leaves, and roots, from their most important jewelry advertisers, and some new designers that Liz had found herself. There were three armed guards at the shoot, and four of the currently most important models in the world. One of them had agreed to pose naked, literally covered in jewels. And the photographer they were using was major too. They were having fun on the set, trying things on and playing with them during breaks.

Jean-Louis stopped by when he finished his own shoot. Liz and her group were working late.

“Pretty shot,” he said admiringly from the sidelines, as he stood next to Liz. She was wearing black leggings and a T-shirt, her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, no makeup, and high-heeled Givenchy sandals they had made especially for her. She looked tired and stressed. They had been working since eight o’clock that morning, and she’d been at the photographer’s studio at six to set things up. Usually she would have had an assistant do it, but the pieces they were using were of such enormous value that she felt she should be there herself.

Jean-Louis put his arms around her and kissed her. They had been dating for months, with frequent breaks since they lived in separate cities, and they both traveled constantly for work. They tried to get together in Paris or New York once or twice a month. It seemed to work, and neither of them had time for more of a relationship. They were both rising stars in their fields.

Liz’s secret dream was to be editor of Vogue one day, and she knew that getting there was still years away. She had to make her mark as an outstanding editor first. And the stories she did now were key. Jean-Louis was successful but more relaxed about his work. He told her that she took life too seriously, but Liz always had. Life had gotten very serious for her on a September Sunday when she was twelve. And she had been intense about everything ever since. The one thing she never did was relax. She never took anything for granted, and she never got too attached. The only people she felt she couldn’t live without were her brother, sister, and aunt. The men in her life came and went. Jean-Louis had accused her several times of being cool and detached. The Ice Princess, he called her. She wasn’t, but she was standoffish with men. It was easy to understand why. She had told him she had lost her parents as a child, but she never went into detail. Her night terrors afterward, the nightmares she had had and sometimes still did, the years of therapy to get over the loss, were none of his business. All she wanted from Jean-Louis was to have fun, and she liked that they worked in the same field. The men she went out with were always related to fashion. Other people didn’t understand the crazy world in which she lived, and how passionate she was about her work. Her aunt Annie felt the same way about what she did and had been a role model for Liz as she grew up. Her directive to Liz had been to follow her dream and do whatever it took to do it well. Liz had always tried to live by those rules and was highly respected in the world of fashion as a result. Her ideas were innovative, bold, and fresh.

It was nearly midnight when they took the final shot. Jean-Louis had gone home to his loft by then, and Lizzie promised to come by when they finished. There was a cheer in the studio when the photographer shot the last roll and gave a war whoop of satisfaction with the last shot. The pictures they got were going to be great.

It took Liz and two assistants another hour to wrap up all the jewels and mark the boxes. The three armed guards accompanied her back to her office, where she put everything in the safe. She got to Jean-Louis’s place at two. He was listening to music and drinking a glass of wine as he waited for her. And he was standing naked in his living room, with his long, lean splendid body, when Liz helped herself to the key he kept behind the fire extinguisher outside his door and walked in. He hid it there because he was always losing it. Half the models in town knew where to find that key. But for now the key was only for her. She didn’t mind how little time they spent together, but the one thing she cared about was that they were exclusive to each other and slept with no one else. And Jean-Louis had agreed. He had no need for a long-term commitment. When he wanted a different woman, he left and found one. But neither of them had any desire to go elsewhere for now. However inadequate Annie thought he was for her, Lizzie was satisfied. Jean-Louis fit perfectly into her high-flying, fast-moving, glamorous world, and he was just as comfortable with her.

He smiled as she walked in, and silently held out a glass of wine. And as she came to him, and he stripped her thin layer of clothes off, he became rapidly aroused. He lowered her gently onto the couch, and they made love there. They were both breathless and sated when they were through.

“You drive me crazy,” he said happily, his head thrown back, as she ran a graceful finger along his beard, down his neck, and then let her fingers drift slowly down. “Don’t…,” he said, catching her hand and smiling at her. “If we make love again, I’ll die.”

“No, you won’t,” she whispered, and kissed him where it mattered most. They worked hard, played hard, and the sex was great. Better because they weren’t together all the time. There was still excitement and mystery and hunger between them, which fueled the fires of their passion. He had never told her that he loved her, and she never wondered if he did. She wasn’t ready for that, with anyone, and never had been. She cared about him and liked him and enjoyed him, but at twenty-eight she knew she had never been in love. Something always held her back. The fear of loss. This way she had nothing to lose if he ever left her, except great sex. She would have missed him, but she never wanted to experience the wrenching agony of real loss again, and she did everything to avoid it. She called the kind of relationship she wanted “intimacy without pain,” but her therapist said that there was no such thing. Not real intimacy, or love. There is no love without risk, she had said, which was precisely why Liz had never loved any man. She was committed but never owned. And when it no longer felt right, or got too close, she moved on. Her aloofness was a challenge to most men, and to Jean-Louis. They wanted to possess her and to make her fall in love. She never did. Or not yet. She wondered if one day she would, or if that part of her had died when her parents’ plane went down when she was twelve, the part of her that was willing to be vulnerable and take risk.