For a Rainy Afternoon (6 page)

“I need a drink,” Jason announced when I went into the kitchen. He’d shut the laptop and sat back in the chair, rolling his shoulders and wincing. I gave a good massage, but there was no way I was volunteering. The day’s soul-searching had me concluding I was coming off as a creepy stalker the way I’d been staring at Jason.

I spoke before thinking. “We could go up to the Red Lion and get dinner and a beer.” Too late, I wished I could reword that whole sentence, but the words had left my mouth. I waited with bated breath that he would see right through my calm casual façade to the lusting guy beneath. The one who would kind of like to kiss Jason.
Now
.

“Sounds like a plan,” he said. He stood and patted his pockets in that age-old check for wallet and phone. Well, checking for the phone
is
a new phenomenon, I guess, but still it was kind of reassuring to see that he was more concerned about that than worrying that I had invited myself along for not only a beer, but dinner as well.

T
HE
R
ED
Lion is one of those beautiful English pubs that was once a coaching inn. Built in the sixteenth century, it was older than Apple Tree Cottage. The inside was tiny, more a bar with lots of small rooms down dark, narrow passages. I loved it here. There weren’t a lot of people inside, and we ordered food and carried beers through the pub and out into the back garden. Because this side of the village was on the hill, the views were stunning, add in the balmy late September evening and suddenly this was a place for romance.

Jason stood for a moment, simply staring out at the expanse of country before him, the greens meeting the sky in an undulating patchwork lined by hedges and dotted with distant houses.

“This is England,” he muttered profoundly before striding around the tables and grabbing me by the hand to drag me toward the gate that led to the field behind the house. “What do you see?” he asked quickly.

My hand in his had shorted a few circuits, and the intense, preacher-like focus of his gaze was doing a number on my head.

“What?”

“In your words. You live here, tell me what you see.”

“Marchant’s farm,” I replied, pointing at the nearest farmhouse four fields away. “They own everything you can see up to that red building, which is a private school. The school own everything to the west of here. Uhmmm.” I wracked my brains for something profound to say because he looked like he expected me to say something poetic and utterly perfect. I was doomed. I saw everything in color, so if he wanted history, then I was really fucked. “I can see the train line, or what’s left of it. See the rows of bushes? That is the abandoned line that used to run through Burton Hartshorn.”

“I get that,” Jason said. “But what do you see?” He glanced across at me and squeezed my hand. “What would Maggie have seen?”

“Green. A lot of green, umber mixed with white, cadmium green in the firs, and the sky, it meets the land on the horizon and there is a haze of mauve, and the sky itself is a beautiful azure today.” The words just tumbled out of me, and I felt impassioned by the end of it.

“There. That’s it. I wanted to know through an artist’s eyes.”

I did my usual self-deprecating thing in which I belittled myself and let my lack of self-esteem trickle through. “I’m not an artist.”

“You are so wrong. When I write England, I don’t have your vision. I can write the characters, but the place itself, it’s so different from where I live.”

He released my hand, and together we wandered back to the wooden bench where our beers were. It took until I got back there to get over the disappointment that he had stopped with the holding hands part. How shallow was that, he was getting serious and having an epiphany over his writing and all I could think was that he had a very nice firm grip and a soft hand?

We made small talk that was a whole lot less unsettling than the artistic highs I’d just experienced, and that was just as nice. I listened a lot because his voice was gorgeous, and suddenly I realized I didn’t actually know where he lived. I’d seen that envelope with a New York address on it, but that didn’t mean it was his address.

“Where in the US do you live?”

He shook his head and gave a rueful smile. “Twenty-three floors up with a view of Central Park in New York. Go on, say it….”

“Say what?”

“That I am a typical cliché American from New York.”

I recalled facts about New York, how it was always the first city to get destroyed by aliens or monsters or nuclear weapons in all the films I’d seen. Hell, even asteroids focused in on the small strip of land. I also somehow knew that the New York accent wasn’t slow and drawled, wasn’t it fast and clipped? Or was that Boston?

“You don’t talk….” Yep, I went there. And I had no idea how to finish that particular sentence. “Your voice… isn’t all posh and city, it’s all low and stuff.” And yes, I added that on, as if my embarrassment needed deepening. He took my idiocy in stride and laughed loudly. The laugh was sexy and deep, and it shook his whole body. Then he caught himself and looked at me seriously.

“What in tarnation did you expect? Y’all don’t reckon I’m an American?” he said all deep and sexy with even more drawl. I was hard in a millisecond, and if I could’ve seen myself, I would’ve bet I had my mouth open in a parody of shock. Christ. I wanted him to say that again, and I would have asked him if our dinner hadn’t arrived at that moment.
Thank fuck for steak and potatoes.

Conversation turned to Maggie as really that was the only thing we had in common that was guaranteed I would have something to say. Not that I was particularly shy, but Jason had this air about him that screamed unobtainable, and I always went to bits when I gave in to that “fancying a boy” mode.

“My uncle e-mailed me today. I should show you what he said. The upshot was that there’s more to this story than we will ever know. My great-grandfather had a twin brother who came over here in the same bomb squadron, his name was Evan. He dated Maggie, while it would seem that my great-grandfather dated Maggie’s sister. Two brothers, two sisters. Turns out the brother died during my great-grandfather’s last bombing run.”

“Maggie’s lover died,” I said softly. “This Evan, he died in the war.”

“And Maggie’s sister went to the US with her husband, the twin who survived.”

“That’s a sad story,” I offered in encouragement when Jason seemed lost in introspection.

“It’s the story I am going to write. I didn’t realize it, but after I read the e-mail, I knew there was a story there. Two sisters falling in love with young dashing Americans, one leaving with her husband for a new life overseas, the mother of three children, who dies young. The other losing her lover to death and it changing her life forever.”

I listened carefully. It sounded like the perfect story, but a kernel of worry balled in my chest. If this was going to be some great love story, then I didn’t want Maggie consigned to the sidelines. I wanted her to be the focus of the story. I know it was selfish, but he didn’t know Maggie. She wasn’t some old woman who had given up, she’d been strong and had experienced the world and had friends and a life and a garden she loved to sit in. I had to know he would treat her right.

“Don’t write Maggie wrong,” I blurted out.

Jason looked up in surprise, a fork full of steak nearing his mouth. He evidently saw something in my expression that I couldn’t hide and placed the cutlery on his plate.

“I won’t,” he promised me with sincerity in his eyes. “She’s a major part of my story. I want to know why she and my great-grandmother didn’t keep in touch, and why my great-grandfather didn’t mention her to me.”

Trust was something no person should give easily; especially not to a man I hadn’t known that long, but there was something about Jason that called to me. And I didn’t just mean to my libido, but to something way down inside me.

T
HE
DAYS
after that, four of them if I was counting—
which I was
—went fast, and somehow Jason and I had fallen into a routine of sorts. He would write and I would work, then we would go to the pub for dinner. We’d made it down most of the main meals list and took to sharing bits and pieces off each other’s plates when we had different mains. He discovered he had a fondness for great big thick chunky chips, and I teased him when he asked for fries. That was how it went, soft and slow and all kinds of wonderful. He hadn’t held my hand, but he gave out all the right signals. We would bump arms when we walked. He would smile at me like I brightened his day, and I knew damn well he brightened mine.

I made the cake again when the coffee group met next time. It just disintegrated into a huge glutinous mess, and that was even with Jason helping me out with the whole cup thing that formed part of the American ingredients list. He found me cursing in the kitchen and explained using a huge mug as my “cup” was not a good thing. No wonder the mixture was ballooning up and exploding over the sides of the tin. Still, nothing was quite right, and yet again I ended up giving the coffee group some of the other handmade cakes that Priscilla from the next village over baked for me to sell.

I could’ve copped out entirely and got her to see what she could’ve done with the recipe, but a large part of me felt that getting this cake right was my last connection to Maggie.

I poked at this failure like I did the last one, trying to learn why the damn thing hadn’t worked. And I opened the notebook Maggie left me and attempted to make sense of what was in there. Apple trees and love and all that kind of stuff were scribbled in the margin, and even though some of it was smudged, I liked to think there was something I was missing that meant my cake-making skills weren’t crap.

I scraped it in the bin and half listened as Jason talked to Andy about Apple Tree Cottage. Something about six weeks and scaffolding and boilers. Poor Jason sounded disappointed, but I knew damn well I wasn’t. I liked having him there in my home.

I spotted a recipe for beef stew with dumplings and decided there and then that tonight we would be eating in, with wine. At least two glasses. Then I could make it way more obvious that I found Jason attractive and that I wanted to take a step in the direction of kissing.

“Did you hear?” Jason asked from next to me. “Andy said it could be six weeks or more until I get into the cottage.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s me that should be sorry,” he said with a sigh. “I think I need to consider getting a place to rent or a hotel or something.”

“You don’t have to.”
Please don’t go. I like you being here.

“It’s wrong to impose on you like this.”

I pressed a hand to his chest and gently gripped at the material of his shirt. The move smacked of desperation, but I didn’t care. “You don’t need to go anywhere.” Then I did it. Like it wasn’t me at all, I leaned in and pressed a kiss to his lips. The move was quick, and I was back and away in seconds. He said nothing, simply touched his lips with the fingers of his right hand. Slowly I released my hold on his shirt and stepped back. This was where he told me that he didn’t want that kind of thing, that he wasn’t looking for this at the moment, that it wasn’t me, it was him. I’d heard it all before, as had every one of my single gay friends.

“I can’t do this,” he said softly.

Disappointment flooded me. In the space of a single second, I had fucked everything up to the point that no doubt Jason would be packing and leaving tonight.

“It’s okay,” I found myself reassuring him. That is what I do. I open myself up, get turned down, then find myself apologizing and trying to make the other guy feel better.

I took another step back and nudged the kitchen table.

Jason frowned. In one stride he was there, right up in my space. “I want to kiss you,” he said carefully. The words were measured and calm, which contradicted the intent in his eyes. “But I want more, and I’m not the person you need for fucking and moving on.” He cradled my face and stared right at me. “I love your eyes,” he whispered. “The brown of them is so beautiful, and your skin, all those tiny freckles, I want to taste them all, and hell, this could be more than just fucking. Tell me.”

He had me at the first time he used the word “fucking,” which led to me getting so damn hard; add in him cradling my face, one of my favorite things, then talking about my eyes, and I was lost.

“I want more than that,” I agreed, then swallowed to clear the huskiness in my voice. The words were sparse, but they were really all I could manage.

“There’s something about you and this place,” Jason murmured. “This could be everything to me.” I didn’t question or wonder at his words. He was the writer, and he evidently knew exactly what to say. I’m not sure if I leaned in then or he did, but somehow we were chastely kissing, his lips pressed to mine, and when he pulled back, he smiled that soft smile of his. “Okay?” he asked.

I rested my hands on his hips and tugged him a little closer. “Uh-huh.” This time the kiss was more: he pressed the tip of his tongue to my lower lip, and I opened my mouth and welcomed the taste of him. The kisses were lazy and long, and I didn’t move to grab at him or to grind up against him. This kiss wasn’t about that, it was about knowing and discovery and all kinds of writery-type things that I’d read in books over the years. I wished I could’ve painted this emotion, capture the newness of it and the utter simplicity that was so powerful. Just a kiss and I was a puddle on the floor melting into him and craving more.

He shifted a little when we parted for air, not to get away from me but to move me so I was pressed against the counter, and abruptly the kiss was more. The embrace was quickly passion and need and want, and I shifted my grip on him to link my hands at the small of his back. The movement pressed us closer, and even in thick jeans I could feel him against me, hard and ready. I unlinked my fingers and freed the shirt from his jeans before trailing a path up to his shoulders and down again to rest on the belt loops of his jeans. They were too tight for me to get my hands where I really wanted them, but that was okay, this wasn’t about sex or groping. It was heated, but it was only kissing.