Coming Home (54 page)

She needed to get away, to get some air.  To step out of his arms
and walk away.  But she had been overcome by an inexplicable lethargy, and a
soft, insistent voice inside her was telling her that it was, after all, just
dancing.  Could it possibly hurt, just this once, to relax and allow herself to
enjoy what she was feeling?

“Ah, Flash,” she whispered, adjusting the fit of her head against
his shoulder.  “You feel so good.”

With the tips of his fingers, he brushed the hair back from her
face.  “So do you, sweetheart.”

“Forgive me for making a fool of myself,” she said.  “It’s just
been so long since anybody held me like this.”

His cheek touched hers, the rasp of his whisker stubble sending
heat through her body in a fluid rush.  Gruffly, he said, “You were born to be
held.”

Suddenly the heat, the stuffy closeness of the room,
his
closeness, became too much for her.  “I need air,” she said, and like a coward
she fled, leaving him standing alone in the middle of the dance floor.

Outside, she leaned up against the building and took great,
gasping gulps of fresh air.  Eyes squeezed shut, she bent forward from the
waist, hands on her spread knees.  The door opened, then closed, and beside
her, in the darkness, Rob said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, straightening up.  “I just felt a little
queasy.”

His hand was cool and damp against her cheek.  “You don’t feel
feverish,” he said.

Beyond his shoulder, a dying star burned out and plummeted in a
streak of fire across the velvet blackness of the sky.  She reached up and
removed his hand.  He was standing far too close.  “I told you,” she said. 
“I’m fine.”

Still he didn’t retreat.  He ran the tip of his finger along her
jaw, and her breath caught in her throat at the curious combination of pain and
pleasure that was scrambling around inside her.  Then the door swung open wide
and a half-dozen boisterous voices broke the silence.  Music and loud male
laughter spilled out into the night, and Casey drew in a huge gulp of air.  “I’m
tired,” she said.  “Can we go home now?”

Rob was uncharacteristically silent as he maneuvered the sleek,
black Porsche through the darkened streets of Los Angeles.  He drove with the
top down, and she closed her eyes and reveled in the cool air kissing her face
and threading fingers through her hair as Percy Sledge crooned into the
darkness about a man loving a woman.

The Hotel California was dark, and somewhere in the shrubbery
beneath his landlady’s parlor window, a cicada chirped his solitary song.  They
went up the stairs together and Rob unlocked the apartment door.  He dropped
his leather portfolio on the kitchen table, and Casey put the pizza box into
the refrigerator.  He cleared his throat.  “Want a nightcap?” he said.

She closed the refrigerator door and leaned against it.  “I’m
tired,” she said.  “I think I’m just going to bed.”

He didn’t say anything, just propped those lanky hips against the
kitchen counter and folded his arms.  After a minute, she said, “Good night,”
and turned to walk away.

Softly, he said, “Babe?”

She paused, turned slowly to look at him.  “What?” she said.

He crossed his ankles.  Squared his shoulders.  His jaw.  “Never
mind,” he said.  “G’night.”

The bedroom was hot and sticky.  She hated taking his bed away
from him, but he’d insisted, the night she arrived, that she was a guest and
that he would be the one sleeping on the couch.  It was too hot to wear
pajamas, so she peeled off her damp clothes and stood naked at the window,
letting the night breeze cool her heated skin.

She cast aside the heavy bedding and lay between cool percale
sheets, but sleep was elusive.  The bed linens smelled of Rob, and she
floundered, sleepless, wondering what on earth had gotten into her.  It must
have been the dancing that had made her so jangly inside that she couldn’t lie
still.  Her breasts ached at the memory of being crushed up hard against him,
and she finally fell into a restless and troubled sleep filled with erotic
dreams in which a shadowy, faceless man subjected her to electrifying and
unspeakable pleasures.

She woke grainy-eyed and hung over.  Rob was still asleep on the
couch, and she showered and put on cut-offs and her
Sexy Senior Citizen
tee shirt and went outside.  In the deep shadows of morning, the grass was cool
and damp between her bare toes, and Mrs. Sullivan was on her knees, pruning the
peony bush that grew at the corner of the house.

“Good morning,” she said as she approached.  “Your peonies are
spectacular.”

At eighty, Rob’s landlady had blue eyes as sharp and clear as
those of a young girl.  “Your Mr. MacKenzie planted them for me,” she said. 
“Three summers ago.”

Casey didn’t bother to clarify that he wasn’t precisely
her
Mr. MacKenzie.  She knelt and began picking off dead leaves.  “He does a lot
for you, does he?”

 “I don’t know what I’d do without him,” Mrs. Sullivan said. 
“Why, just last week he fixed a leaky faucet in my kitchen.  Imagine if I’d had
to pay a plumber to do it.”  She moved on to intently examine the rosebush that
climbed up the trellis beside the bay window.  “Damn aphids,” she said.

Casey couldn’t help it; she laughed aloud.  It was so unexpected,
the profanity coming from that sweet, grandmotherly lady.  “They’re eating up
my garden,” the old woman explained.  She picked up a sprayer and began pumping
some noxious chemical onto the leaves of the rosebush.  “You know,” she said,
“I’ve seen a lot of women in and out of that apartment over the years.”

Casey picked up a waxy peony leaf and smoothed it against her bare
thigh.  “No doubt,” she said.

Mrs. Sullivan glanced at her, then back at her lethal task.  “But
it all stopped a while back.” 
Squirt.
  “You’re the only woman he’s had
up there—” 
Squirt, squirt.
  “—in nearly two years.”

She glanced up at the old woman in surprise, but before she could
say anything, Rob clomped down the front steps and loped across the lawn toward
them.  “Hey,” he said.

Casey sat back and smiled.  “Hey,” she said, wondering how any man
could look so appealing in wrinkled gray sweats. 

“Ready to run?”

“Just give me a second to run upstairs and get my sneakers.”

Rob’s neighborhood was flat as the proverbial pancake, so the
biggest challenge to running there was finding her way back home.  The streets
were a maze of trees and houses that all looked alike.  Every time they ran
there, she was dependent on his homing instinct to keep her from getting
hopelessly lost.

They skirted a parked Oldsmobile and gave a wide berth to a
barking Rottweiler.  “I’m going on tour next month,” he said.  “Want to come
with me?”

“Not hardly,” she said.  “Not in this lifetime.”

A dark-haired, dark-eyed child on a tricycle solemnly watched them
pass.  “Sing with me,” he coaxed, “and I’ll give you equal billing.”

“Hah!  I’d rather have my toenails yanked out, one by one.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure, Fiore?”

“I can tell you where it’s not:  crammed inside a bus, cruising
America’s scenic interstate highways.”

 “You’ve grown hard in your old age, woman.”

 “Wrong.  What I’ve grown is smart.”

They returned home aching, sweaty, and energized.  He showered
first, then made breakfast while she washed away the stickiness.  Whatever
demons she’d been chasing the night before had disappeared in the light of
day.  The shower revitalized her, and she sat down to breakfast with a
gargantuan appetite.

Rob stirred sugar into his coffee and said, “I thought since it’s
your last day here, we might do something touristy.”

She spread jelly on her raisin toast.  “Touristy?  As in
Disneyland touristy?”

“We could do Disneyland.  Or,” he said, “we could just go down to the
beach and hang out.”

“I vote for hanging out,” she said.

So they drove down to Venice and strolled the boardwalk.  Ate
greasy French fries and cotton candy, watched the surfers, the skaters, the
jugglers and the kids leaping and squealing in the swirling Pacific surf.  The
women were all tall and blond and gorgeous, spilling out of minuscule thong
bikinis that made the one she’d worn in Nassau look like a nun’s habit.  “Poor
thing,” she said, as one particularly ripe specimen skated by.  “I hope she doesn’t
catch cold.”

“It’s a hardship,” he said, his eyes following the skater with
obvious appreciation, “living here in California.  But somehow, we all muddle
through.”

“It must be a terrible tribulation,” she said, and remembered Mrs.
Sullivan’s words. 
You’re the only woman he’s had up there in nearly two
years
. 

He grunted and gazed out over the Pacific.  Beside him, she said, 
“Do you ever miss the East Coast?”

“Every day of my life.  Even more since you moved back east.”

A cloud skittered across the face of the sun, stealing some of the
day’s brilliance.  “I know,” she said softly.  “I miss you, too.”

He tucked his hands into his pockets.  “Did you really mean what
you said, about never getting married again?”

She looked out at the ocean, now a dark, tempestuous blue.  A
multicolored sail appeared as a speck on the horizon.  “I don’t see any benefit
to it,” she said.

“Aside from not drying up,” he said, “and dying old and alone.”

“We all die alone,” she said.

“You know what I meant.”

“I’ve been in the business too long to marry a civilian.  What
would we talk about at the supper table?  And if I married someone in the
business, it would be a disaster.  Two of us spending all our time on planes
headed in opposite directions.”

“Aren’t we just Little Miss Sunshine today,” he said.

“You asked.  I’m answering.”

“What about sex?”

She glanced sideways, but he was watching a volleyball game on the
beach.  “What about it?” she said.

“Do you plan to go the rest of your life without that, too?”

“I hadn’t really given it much thought.”  
Liar!
a tiny
voice inside her accused.
You’ve thought about it.  Last night, on the dance
floor.  And afterward.  Especially afterward.

“You told me once that celibacy was an unnatural condition,” he
said.  “Or did you forget?”

“Being married,” she said, “isn’t a prerequisite for sex.  But I
don’t have to tell you that, do I?  After all, you are the world’s expert on
recreational sex.”

He eyed her coolly.  “Are you trying to start a fight?”

“You started it,” she said.  “Not me.”

“Damn it, Casey, this is your last day here.  I don’t want to
fight.”

Ashamed, she plucked at the sleeve of his shirt.  Smoothed out a
wrinkle.  “Neither do I,” she said.

“Then why the hell are we fighting?”

She shrugged.  “I don’t know,” she said miserably.

He lifted his arm and she ducked her head beneath it, and he
looped it around her shoulders.  “Let’s try to be civil,” he said.  “I know it
goes against your nature, but we could at least try.”

“Insufferable ass,” she said, but without enthusiasm.

“Look,” he said.  “Look at the sailboat.”  It was racing toward
them, sails billowing with a strong tailwind, veering and tacking, tilting and
twisting in a riot of red and orange and yellow against a background of blue.

“It’s wonderful,” she said wistfully.  “I’ve never been sailing.”

“Me either.”  He folded both arms around her from behind and
tucked her head beneath his chin.  It was a perfect fit.  “Maybe we could rent
one sometime and try our hand at it.”

Just for curiosity’s sake, she allowed her fingers to explore his
slender, bony wrist.  The hair on his arms was soft and springy.  “We’d
probably drown ourselves,” she said.

“There you go again,” he said, “Little Miss Sunshine.” 

That night, they stayed up late watching an old Cary Grant movie.
They overslept the next morning, and had to rush to make her flight.  The line
at the check-in counter was a hundred miles long, and Rob held her carry-on
while she maneuvered in and out between people to check her suitcase just
minutes before the flight.  “Better hurry,” the ticket agent said.  “They just
started boarding.”

It was going to be close.  Boarding pass in hand, she sprinted
through the terminal with Rob at her side, past weary businessmen in rumpled
suits, past a statuesque blonde walking a black poodle, past a family of four
wearing white shorts and matching Mickey Mouse shirts.  They reached the gate
just as a nasal voice said over the intercom, “
This is the final boarding
call for Delta Flight 1300 to Boston.”

Rob slung Casey’s carry-on over her shoulder and spent a minute
fiddling with the strap.  His hand lingered, warm against her bare arm, as he
said,  “All set.  Got your boarding pass?”

“Right here.”  She held it up for him to see.