Authors: Lisa Jackson
Beach Season (6 page)
I stared at the roses and lilies, delicate, sweet, elegant.
“The note says,” Leoni said. “ ‘Looking forward to our survivor’s luncheon.’ ”
“What’s a survivor’s luncheon?” Estelle asked. “I think, at my age, I should go to one of those daily. But I don’t want to hang out with men my own age. They’re boring. They complain all the time about their aches and pains. They have bladder problems. They have intestinal problems. They’re fascinated by their bowels. I want to hang out with the younger men. I want to be a cougar.” She curled her hands into paws and made a cougarish sound.
I was not a cougar. Reece was not younger than me.
He sure was cute, though.
Estelle made another cougarish sound.
Leoni and I laughed.
Leoni pawed her hands in the air, too.
I growled back at both of them. “Grrrr ...”
“To cougars!” Leoni shouted, holding up an imaginary champagne glass.
“To cougars!” We clinked glasses.
“Thank you for the flowers.”
“You’re welcome.” Reece smiled at me, dwarfing his doorway, his blue buttondown shirt somehow making those piercing green eyes even brighter.
It had taken me hours of encouraging self-talk while I sewed my bridesmaid’s dress for August’s wedding—and an online Scrabble game where I spelled the words “fear,” “loathe,” and “prick,” and therapy-eating where I downed five warm chocolate chip cookies—before I could gather up enough nerve to slink next door to thank Reece.
And to tell him what he needed to know immediately.
On my way over, Estelle leaned out the studio’s window like an avenging gargoyle and yelled, “Don’t mess this up. It’s not like you’re going to get a lot of other chances to prove you can be nice to a man. You had to almost drown to meet this one.”
Leoni said, wringing her hands, “Be gentle, kind ... feminine. Do you know how to do that?”
Estelle said, “Don’t be a cougar, be a cougarette!”
“Grrrr,” Leoni called out. “Grrrr ...”
I was almost shaking with fear.
“They’re beautiful,” I said into Reece’s handsome, chiseled face. “Sexy.”
He blinked.
“I didn’t mean that.”
Not again, June. Focus, focus!
“I didn’t mean the flowers were sexy. I meant that they’re beautiful. The flowers. Not you.” He was a tall and broad specimen of a man. “Not that you aren’t, too. I mean! Aw.” I felt myself boil up like a furnace. “I have to go.”
Not again, June. Focus, focus!
“I didn’t mean the flowers were sexy. I meant that they’re beautiful. The flowers. Not you.” He was a tall and broad specimen of a man. “Not that you aren’t, too. I mean! Aw.” I felt myself boil up like a furnace. “I have to go.”
“Please don’t go,” he rumbled out, still smiling. “Come on in. I thought you might need some color after you took a tumble in the ocean.”
“I do. I did. I do need them. Yes, and color. That was nice. Well.” I ignored the fact that my knees were shaking. If only he was a temperamental green centaur, this would have been easier. “Thank you again.”
“You’re leaving already?”
“Yes and no. No and yes. No, no.” Sheesh.
“How about no? Come on in. I have lobster.”
Lobster was my favorite. I love lobster. Heaven is filled with lobster in tiny oceans where you can reach down and grab one at any time and they
want
you to eat them with a side order of coleslaw, thick, hot, white, buttered bread, and lemonade. They do. “You do?”
want
you to eat them with a side order of coleslaw, thick, hot, white, buttered bread, and lemonade. They do. “You do?”
“Bought it an hour ago. Come on in, June.”
I hesitated. That man pinned me down and shook me up. He turned me inside out. I berated myself, out loud. “Who’s the boss here?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” I waved a hand in front of my face.
He stepped back, welcoming, and opened the door.
I tripped a bit in the doorway as I bumbled on in. “Nice, June,” I muttered.
“What’s nice?”
I turned to him. I thought of him naked. I blushed. I thought of him in bed naked down the hall. I blushed further. I thought of us naked in the bed down the hall. I turned away and said, again, so ridiculously, “I love lobsters in bed naked.”
He laughed. I blushed further. “Stop blushing, June!” I muttered out loud.
Humiliated.
“So, you’re renting this home?” I took another bite of lobster, dipped in butter and garlic sauce. It was absolutely delicious.
We’d set up a table outside on his deck, the ocean panoramically displayed for 180 degrees in both directions, the summer air warm, the smell of salt wafting in and out.
“A friend of mine’s mother owns it. Her name is Frankie Schaeffer. Frankie fell in love with a man she met on a wild girls’ trip to France and stayed in Paris. Sixty-two years old and she said she’s found true love for the first time in her life and isn’t leaving.”
I laughed. “Good for her. So that’s what happened. I’ve never met the owner and no one is ever here.”
“She’s here in spirit.” Reece laughed.
“I doubt it. The woman fell in love with a Frenchman in Paris. She’s having the time of her life eating croissants and coffee in tiny white cups.”
“Okay, you win. Her spirit is in France. By the way, I like your hair.”
“You do?” I self-consciously pulled on it.
“Yes. I can only compare it to gold moving.”
Gold moving.
“With sunshine and sparkles thrown in.”
Sunshine and sparkles. “Are you a poet?”
He laughed. “Not quite. I say what I think.”
“So, you’re a flirt.” I ignored a stab in my heart. Darn it. Flirts were dangerous. Teasingly, attractively dangerous. Light and fluffy and you are one of a harem ...
“Not at all. You’re the first one in many years.”
He said it sincerely, so straight on. Could it possibly be true? I took a deep breath so I could spit out the truth. This was not gonna be fun. “Reece, I need to be completely honest with you.”
“Please do.”
I gathered my strength by studying the cliffs in the distance and the tide pools below it, then turned back to him. “I’m in the middle of a divorce.”
Reece’s eyes widened slightly and his expression froze, that hard jaw not moving.
“Or, I should say, I’m at what I hope will be the end of my divorce. It’s a mess. I’m a mess. I left him two years ago. He doesn’t want a divorce and he is fighting it with all he has, every loophole, every delay tactic.”
I hoped the sun, bright and bold in a deep blue sky, would warm up my scared-stiff and frozen body. “I should have told you at lunch, but I didn’t want to.”
“Why didn’t you want to tell me then?”
“Why?” I heard no judgment in his tone, only a question. “Because I wanted ...”
“You wanted what?”
“I wanted to go to lunch with you, to talk and laugh, and I didn’t want to discuss the black, frothing muck in my life, this constant sadness, this fight, this disaster.” For once I was not awash in lust while looking at him. My sadness was squashing the lust. “I didn’t even know if we would see each other again, and I wanted to take a break out of my life and just be with you.”
He thought for a while, watching the ocean.
Maybe I should leave now?
Maybe I should leave now?
“Within ten minutes of talking to you,” he said, “I knew we’d see each other again.”
“Because you knew we were living next door to each other?”
“No. Because I wanted to be with you again.”
I wanted to cry. I had so wanted to be with him, too.
“As far as your soon-to-be-ex-husband. Do you still love him? Do you hate him? Is the marriage over in your mind, or are there a whole bunch of things that are still upsetting you?”
“I have been through a mind-numbing range of emotions with this divorce, with the ending of my marriage, and I feel nothing for my ex-husband except this anger and frustration that he’s holding things up. There are no other emotions left from the marriage itself. I don’t love him, I don’t hate him, I don’t like him. I want him out of my life. He’s controlling this situation, as he did our marriage, because he can. I can’t stand that anyone is controlling me at all, especially him.”
“He’s on a power trip, then.”
“Always has been. But am I over him? Yes. Long ago I was over him.”
“Why did the marriage break up?”
“Definitely at least half my fault. I never should have married him. I was acting as someone I wasn’t, reaching for things I didn’t value, and I worked incessantly to build my career. I was part of an image that I thought, for years, I wanted. Grayson fit into the image. He was the perfect fiancé, and the perfect husband for about three months. We wanted the same things. We had the same interest in work. My mistake.”
“What did you used to do?”
“I was a lawyer in a law firm on a partnership track. He was a partner in another high-powered firm.”
“How’d that go?”
“I was unutterably miserable.”
“And your marriage was miserable.”
“Yes. I won’t get into the sordid details, but I will say that it was the criticism that killed it, an incessant onslaught of negative, until I shut down. Down and out.” I studied the break of the waves, the way the blue-gray water shot out in both directions. “That’s when you know you’re done with a marriage, I think, when there’s no fight in you anymore, no arguments. You acquiesce, you give up, you dive into self-protection mode, arms over your head, knees to chest.
“He went on a business trip once, for four weeks, to New York. That was when I understood, finally, that I had a problem. Sometimes the problem has to leave before you realize you’re in an emotional war zone, fighting to keep yourself together and constantly battling emotional manipulations. What is abnormal and not mentally healthy has become your normal, but you’re too mentally unhealthy to see it. Your normal isn’t normal. It’s not a place where you can grow and live and create. It’s a bad, bad spot.
“When he was gone and I wasn’t constantly ducking for cover around him, and could breathe, and think, and finally be brutally honest with myself, I started to recognize how much my marriage had smothered me.”
“What was the final moment, when you knew you were done with the marriage? Was there a last straw?”
“There was. I told you I loved sewing as a kid with my family. Even my father could sew. During college and law school and my years of building a career, I stopped sewing, I didn’t have time. In the midst of my misery, a year into my marriage, I started sewing again, at night, as soon as I could sneak away from Grayson. It was my only respite, I lost myself in whatever I was making. Soon my uptight lawyer suits had a rim of lace. The skirts had ruffles. The sleeves were embroidered down the sides. I made flowers out of dyed leather and attached them to the toes of my heels. And I sewed dresses, long and flowing or short and snazzy, mostly out of lace, which I love, as I had done with my mom and my sisters.
“Through waves of pain and loneliness living in that barren marriage, in that barren job, I sewed and sewed. In every stitch, every scissor cut, every piece of thread that passed through my fingers, every touch of lace or satin or velvet or leather, I felt myself coming back to me. As if I’d lost her and she’d been packed into a sewing box in my head and the box had been nailed down and hidden.
“To court one day I wore a pink skirt with a ruffle and a bit of taffeta underneath it with a pink lace shirt I’d lined with satin trim, and I knew I was done. Even the judge noted, ‘Hmm ... I think we’re feeling a bit pinkish today, Ms. MacKenzie.’ ”
I laughed out loud; so did Reece.
“I loved that judge. It was a woman and later she called me and asked where I’d bought my suit. That day I tore apart the lying witnesses, attacked the defense’s case with ferocity, nailed my opening and closing arguments, and won the case. It was a high-profile case.
“I headed back to my office and was stopped three times by women who wanted to know where I’d bought my clothes and the handbag I’d made out of leather and lace. I had an epiphany and I quit my job fifteen minutes later. I left with a check and decided that part of my life was over.”
“That was it?”
“That was it. It took a day in court with pink lace and satin trim.”
“That’s brave. I admire you. You were taking a new direction, didn’t know where it would lead, but it had to be better than what you were living with.”
“Exactly.” Man, he was so smart. “Sometimes ya gotta walk ...”
“And the walk may have no clear path ...”
“But you have to get on it anyhow.” We understood each other.
“Then what happened?”
Oh, those green eyes. I could feel the lust coming at me again, darn it.
I cleared my throat. “On my way out of the law firm, Grayson came tearing after me. He yelled, ‘What the hell did you do? What happened? Have you lost your friggin’ mind, June? Do you expect me to support you? Do you expect to sit around and eat chocolate all day while you sew your white-trash Halloween outfits? I’m not giving you a dime of my money, now get back in there and tell them you made a mistake, because you have, June, you have!’ ”
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