“On Sunday?”
“Your massage. It remains therapeutic,” she said when she caught the look on his face. “Even if you stop stalling and kiss me good night.”
“I already left you a tip.”
She had an irresistible laugh, a sense of happy his system wanted to absorb like water. To prove he could, he moved in, taking his time, this time. He laid his hands on her shoulders, then slid them down her, feeling the warmth she still held from all the body heat pulsing inside the bar.
Then he leaned down, took her mouth.
Slow and smooth this time, she thought, soft and dreamy. A lovely contrast to the earlier shock and urgency. She slid her arms around his waist, let herself drift.
He had more to give than he believed, more wounds than he could admit. Both sides of him pulled at her.
When he eased back, she sighed. “Well, well, Eli, Maureen’s absolutely right. You have skills.”
“A little rusty.”
“Me, too. Won’t this be interesting?”
“Why are you rusty?”
“That’s a story that calls for a bottle of wine and a warm room. I have to get back in there.”
“I want to know the story. Your story.”
The words pleased her as much as a bouquet of roses. “Then I’ll tell you. Good night, Eli.”
She slipped back inside, to the music, the voices. And left him stirred, and wanting. Wanting her, he realized, more than he’d wanted anything but peace for much too long.
Eli worked through a rain-drenched Saturday. He let the story absorb him until, before he realized the connection, he’d written an entire scene with wind-driven rain splatting against the windows where the protagonist found the key, metaphorically and literally, to his dilemma while wandering his dead brother’s empty house.
Pleased with his progress, he ordered himself away from the keyboard and into his grandmother’s gym. He thought of the hours spent in his Boston fitness center, with its sleek machines, all those hard bodies, the pumping music.
Those days were done, he reminded himself.
It didn’t have to mean he was.
Maybe the jelly bean colors of his grandmother’s free weights struck him as mildly embarrassing. But ten pounds remained ten pounds. He was tired of feeling weak and thin and soft, tired of allowing himself to coast, or worse, just tread water.
If he could write—and he was proving that every day—he could pump and sweat and find the man he used to be. Maybe better, he mused as he picked up a set of purple dumbbells, he’d find the man he was meant to be.
He wasn’t ready to face the mirror, so he started his first set of biceps curls standing at the window, studying the storm-churned waves battering the shore. Watched water spume up against the rocks below the circling light of the white tower. Wondered what direction his hero might take now that he’d turned an important corner. Then wondered if he’d written his hero around that corner because he felt he’d turned, or at least approached a turn of his own.
Christ, he hoped so.
He switched from weights to cardio, managed twenty minutes before his lungs burned and his legs trembled. He stretched, guzzled water, then went back to another round of weights before he flopped, panting, onto the floor.
Better, he told himself. Maybe he hadn’t made it a full hour and felt as if he’d just completed a triathlon, but he’d done better this time.
And this time he made it to the shower without limping.
Very much.
He congratulated himself again on the way downstairs on a hunt for food. He actually wanted food. In fact, he was damn near starving, and that had to be a good sign.
Maybe he should start writing these small progressions down. Like daily invocations.
And that struck him as even more embarrassing than lifting purple weights.
When he stepped into the kitchen, the smell hit him seconds before he spotted the plate of cookies on the island. Any idea of slapping together a sandwich went out the rain-washed window.
He lifted the ubiquitous sticky note on the film of plastic wrap, read as he pulled the wrap up and snagged the first cookie.
Rainy day baking. I heard your keyboard clacking, so didn’t want to interrupt. Enjoy. See you tomorrow about five.
Abra
Should he reciprocate for all this food she kept making? Buy her flowers or something? One bite told him flowers wouldn’t make the grade. He grabbed another cookie, hit the coffeemaker. He decided he’d build a fire, pick a book at random out of the library and indulge himself.
He built the fire to roaring. Something about the light, the snap, the heat meshed perfectly with the rain-whipped Saturday. In the library with its coffered ceiling and dark chocolate leather couch, he scanned the shelves.
Novels, biographies, how-to’s, poetry, books on gardening, animal husbandry, yoga—apparently Gran really got into the practice—an old book on etiquette, and a section of books centered on Whiskey Beach. A couple of novels, he noted, which might be interesting, histories, lore, a scattering of those written about the Landons. And several referencing pirates and legends.