Summer at the Shore Leave Cafe (15 page)

He kissed me deeply, cupping my face in his hands, then braced above me again.

“Joelle, I've wanted to make love to you since the first night I saw you,” he told me, his eyes pouring into mine from inches away.

“I still can't believe it,” I whispered back, so very moved by his words.

He shook his head as if he couldn't believe me, and I pulled him to me for another kiss, urging him with my hips. He cupped me gently, parting my legs even further, stroking until fireworks were exploding behind my eyelids and I was almost crying with need.

“Blythe, please, please,” I begged him, and at last he plunged into me deeply, taking me almost over the edge right there.

“Joelle, oh God, yes,” he groaned, crushing me to him and kissing me as we thrust together with so much vigor that I saw stars. But I craved it, needed it, didn't care if I would be slightly bruised tomorrow. It was so right. The world ceased to have any significance except for this glorious moment, and I rejoiced in it as Blythe plowed into me again and again, until my body was singing with the joy of it, and still he didn't stop. I was gasping, clinging to him, until a rocketing climax shuddered through me just seconds before he cried out and then tipped his head to my shoulder, both of us slick with sweat.

Long minutes later, he turned and shifted so that I was on top of his chest, cradled. He stroked my back from tailbone to nape in a gentle rhythm. I pressed my face against his chest, breathing him in, my right hand pressed flat to the steady beat of his heart. Lulled somewhere between waking and sleeping, I imagined I heard him murmur
I love you
, but by morning, back in my own bed and alone, I was sure it had just been part of a dream.

“Don't you have a girlfriend?” I asked
him the next night as we were curled together in the wee hours, same place, same truck. It was hardly a first choice for any lovers, unless you counted illicit ones, like us. And I didn't mind; I would have gone anywhere to be with him like this.

His chest bounced beneath my cheek as he laughed, and I braced on one elbow to study his face in the faint light. We were naked and tangled together, my breasts pressed flat against his torso. He was lying flat, staring up at the ceiling of his truck, and shifted slightly and caught one elbow beneath his head.

“I did, back in Oklahoma,” he told me, his voice deep and relaxed. “Her name is Cindy, but we broke up last year.”

“Darn that Jilly, I knew it,” I muttered, and Blythe peered at me, eyebrows raised in question.

“She told me you had a girlfriend here,” I explained, and he tucked a loose strand of hair behind my left ear.

“She must have misunderstood,” he said. “She's very protective of you, I can tell you that.”

“We try to take care of each other,” I said, thinking with an internal pang of what she'd said yesterday, before I'd actually made love with Blythe. My insides curled over on themselves as I imagined how soon I would have to end what we'd only just begun.

“Before you got here, all she could talk about was how worried she was about you, what a jerk you were married to,” he added.

“How long had you been here before us?” I asked, trying not to be annoyed at Jillian for spilling secrets about me to someone who'd been a stranger then.

“About a month, actually. Gramps called me around Easter and said he might have a job for me if I'd be willing to move to Landon. I thought about it a long time, I hated to leave Mom all alone, but she insisted I need a change of scenery. So I came up here around the end of April.”

I'm so happy you did
, I thought, stroking his chest. Again, falling deeper into this trench of feelings for him…

“So anyway, I feel like I kind of knew you before we even met,” he went on. “Jilly couldn't wait for you to get here, you should have heard her. Joan showed me a bunch of pictures of you guys—”

“What pictures?” I cried, cutting him off mid-sentence, and he laughed again.

“Pretty much from the time you were born,” he said, and I buried my face against his chest. “All the way to your wedding. God, you were just a kid when you got married.”

“That's what happens when you get knocked-up on prom night,” I responded, not intending to sound so flippant.

“When did you meet your husband?” he asked me, running his palm along my back, sending shivers along my ribs. It felt so good, I didn't want to talk about Jackson and ruin this moment.

“I always knew him,” I heard myself say. “We went to school together since kindergarten. We started dating around ninth grade, the summer just before actually.”

“I hate that he has the power to hurt you so much,” Blythe said, again stunning me with his words.

“You know, a lot of that has to do with our girls,” I said, sliding up his body and pressing a kiss against his neck. He was so warm and strong. I kissed him again. “Otherwise I wouldn't even care what he was doing back in Chicago.” Well, that was mostly true. I was still wounded by his picking another woman over me. But not mortally, not like I'd thought back in December.

“Before I actually met you, I felt like I'd known you a long time,” he said. “But still, when you walked around the corner into the bar that first night, I felt like you'd punched me in the chest.”

My heart was slamming against him, and I said, softly, since he was being so honest, “All I could think about was you, from that moment on.”

He circled me with both arms and I clung back, terrified again at how much he was making me feel for him…why now? Why after all this time did I meet someone like this, after I was divorced and only growing older, a mother of three…

“Blythe,” I whispered, aching again, and hating myself for saying it. “This can't be.”

“Why?” he whispered back, slightly defensive. “Why can't it? Don't tell me it's because I'm too young. I've seen a lot more in my life than you'd care to know, probably.”

I drowned again in his eyes, the planes and angles of his beautiful face, his full lips that had touched me everywhere now. At my silence, he continued, “I've never felt like this before, and it scares me, too.”

My chest seemed to cave in and I tipped my face back against his neck, feeling tears welling in my eyes. He brought a knuckle under my chin, lifted my face and kissed me, sweetly and with feeling.

“I want you so much,” he said.

“I want you too,” I told him, reaching down with one hand, and for the third time that night, we came together as close as two people can be.

***

Morning came, and
I had slept little after Blythe brought me back home. I got up but didn't want to shower, because that would wash his scent away, and I craved that scent all over my body. I was behaving like a woman deeply in love, or lust, or a startling combination of the two. And so, coward-like, I avoided the café for the first morning since we'd arrived over a month ago. Instead I pulled on jeans and a tattered Minnesota Twins t-shirt that had once belonged to my husband, and made my way into the woods, along the ancient path worn there by years of animal foot traffic. The pines and oaks stretched for miles away from the lake, and I was familiar with the way I headed now, a steep path that climbed in a roundabout fashion up the side of the bluff beyond Shore Leave. The sky was the gray of very early morning, the air sticky with humidity. From every direction birds were in chorus, heralding in the new day; the crickets were silent. I walked with long steps, breaking into a sweat within minutes despite the early hour. By the time I'd reached the summit I was breathing hard and felt trickles of moisture gliding down my neck, but I'd timed my climb pretty well; the sun was just cresting the horizon when I sat on a small outcropping of rock to watch.

I curled my arms around my knees and pressed my chin on top, able to admire the rose-tinted ripples of clouds in the eastern sky despite the churning within my soul. I watched as they seemed to glow from within, first a deep pink and then a rich gold. The air was still with the dawn, though thick with the promise of a hot day, and I sighed, and then sighed again. I was hiding out here, not just on the bluff. I was waiting at Shore Leave, waiting for something to happen, to change, to fix itself. Hiding from Jackson and my life, and then meeting someone unexpected.

Blythe
. Just the thought of his name made me hug myself, hard. I could not believe that a month ago I had no idea who he was, and now my whole world seemed about him. Which was absurd. My whole world was my children, not a twenty-three-year old ex-con…who I was now sleeping with and who I…

Shit, Joelle, shit, shit, shit.

I had only ever been in love with Jackson—unless you counted my girls, who had taught me all about a much different and fierce love that comes with motherhood. I had never dreamed that I would be without Jackie, truly, even when I had first suspected that he was cheating on me. I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I figured he would realize how much he really loved me, his wife and the mother of his daughters, and want me back. I realized now how pitiful that was, and that I would not ever take him back, even to salvage our family, not at this point. Aunt Ellen and Gran were right; Jackson the man was lacking, and I no longer believed that he deserved me, no matter what a good dad he was to my children.

Would I go back? What could I do when summer ended, as summer always did, and my girls needed to go back to school? What about my heart? I envisioned Blythe living with us somewhere in Chicago, Jackie providing child support and me getting a job to help support us. Chicago, the sharp-edged city I'd lived the past seventeen years…it seemed like a dream. A long, strange, townhouse-living dream in which I'd mothered my heart out and then been cheated on by my husband. I tried to picture Blythe as a surrogate father to three teenage girls. He didn't deserve that strain, that stress. He should be free to date, have fun, be carefree, find a girl his age and eventually have his own kids.

Tears welled up in my eyes again, stinging me, but I didn't give in to weeping. I brought my wrist to my nose and inhaled, smelling Blythe on my skin yet, and loving it. I cupped my breasts and then my belly, skimming my fingers over myself and imagining him. I still couldn't believe that he felt this way for me…that I had responded so much to him. It wasn't just making love, it was something in his eyes that caught and held me, and it was so right. But it could never work, not in any incarnation of my visions of the future.

I wandered back down the cliff a half hour later, jogged the last few hundred yards and emerged back on our property fully intending to spend a half an hour in the shower. It was about five minutes in reality, since the hot water ran out. I dressed in my jean shorts and a green-and-white striped tank, and snapped my hair into a rubber band before heading to the café, my thoughts somber. I worked lunch for Mom, a busy one as it was Friday, Blythe within touching distance and yet a million miles away with my family present. It wasn't until late afternoon that he managed to get me alone, as I emptied the garbage from lunch into our small green dumpster.

“Joelle,” he said, coming up behind me, slipping his hands over my back.

I dropped what I was doing, spun around and came up hard against him, wanting to take back what I'd said last night about us not working.

“I'm sorry,” I said against his neck, breathing him in like a drug. We'd parted with uncharacteristic silence last night, as he'd dropped me off in the parking lot.

“No, I hate this sneaking around,” he said against my hair, holding me tight to his chest. “And I didn't mean to scare you away with what I was saying last night. I just want to enjoy being with you.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and held him.

“Can we just have that, for now?” he whispered.

I thought about my first impression of him, the gorgeous, self-confident ladies' man I'd assumed he was, just based on his physical presence. I would never have guessed what a tender soul lived beneath that exterior.

“Yes,” I told him, pressing kisses along his neck, where it was bare above the pale blue Shore Leave work shirt he always wore. “Yes.”

“Good,” he said. “I have a plan for tonight. Can you get away around nine?”

***

“I'm going to
head into town and hang out with Leslie Gregerson,” I told Mom after the dinner rush, stifling the guilt of lying to her as an adult. As a teenager I'd lied with ease to ensure a night out with Jackson. I cringed internally at the thought.

“You mean Leslie Cooper, now,” Mom amended. “Gran is teaching the girls how to play poker tonight, doesn't that sound like fun?”

I rolled my eyes at my mother, but I was smiling. “Tish told me today. And Clint is having a sleepover? God, poor Jilly.”

“Naw, they're camping out in tents,” Mom said. “And we're having a bonfire. Dodge is bringing Liz's triplets. I can't keep their names straight, but Ruthann loves them.”

“Fern, Linnea and Hal,” I told her, proud for remembering.

“Bring Leslie out here,” Mom invited, tossing a dishtowel over her shoulder. “It'll be a fun night.”

“Maybe,” I hedged, feeling guilty as hell. I kissed her cheek and then found the girls lined up at the bar, watching as Aunt Ellen made a blender of grasshoppers, a minty ice cream drink that would taste just right when the humidity was up past ninety percent, as it was this evening.

“Hi, honey,” Ellen called over. “You want a drink?”

“Mom, it's called a grasshopper!” Ruthie told me.

“But there's no alcohol in ours,” Tish informed me.

Ellen and I exchanged a look, hers full of amusement.

“Mom, can Noah come to hang out tonight?” Camille asked, winding a lock of her lovely dark hair around her index finger. “Grandma said we're having a bonfire.”

“That's fine, as long as he doesn't stay over in the tents with Clint's friends,” I told my eldest, and she flushed.

“He won't, Mom, geez,” Camille said, spinning back around.

“Where are you going, Mom?” Tish asked, sounding like a prison guard. She'd let her hair grow this summer, and it was almost past her ears, no longer a regulation Peter Pan.

“Over to a friend's from high school,” I said, hating myself a little. I had never purposely lied to my children before, but I reminded myself what I would be giving up very soon, and his name was Blythe. I deserved every second with him until then, dammit.

“Have fun,” came my sister's voice from behind me, and again I cringed inside at the ironic lilt in her tone.

I turned and met her eyes, but she wasn't judging me, I knew. She was just worried.

“I will,” I told her, and then in an undertone, “Keep an eye on Camille and Ben's brother, will you?”

Jilly nodded, and then we turned as one when Dodge's booming voice came from the front of the café. “I've got firewood in the truck, heard we were having a bonfire out here tonight! Clint, get out there and help the boy unload.”

Which meant Justin was here. Jilly's whole posture changed, and I could tell she hadn't been expecting him. I smiled at her discomposure and said, “You have fun too, Jilly Bean.”