“Then we’ll have a word. A safe word, like…Kingsley. And I’ll back off. But the rest should be straight-up.”
Kingsley. The ruins were anything but safe. Too many sun-splashed, reckless memories.
“That go two ways?”
Jonah shook his head slowly. “I don’t need a word.”
It was true. He was forever a get what you get, no games, heart-on-his-sleeve guy. The challenge aroused her. She crossed her legs to stem the rush of blood between her thighs. The color was also rising in his cheeks, seemingly with one reminder—Kingsley. Her refuge when life went to pot, and the reason she had sketched the ruins in her journal. She wanted to go there now, but she was in danger of wanting Jonah inside her, as he had been then. That made the word, the place, both safe and forbidden.
“I want to try to make it work with Michael,” Alex said.
“That what he wants?”
She considered the safe word, decided against it.
“No.” Her voice was discordant, hoarse. “I’m not sure. He’s seeing someone.”
“You seeing someone, too?”
Someone, as in one. Men she had screwed against the foyer wall, on the kitchen’s granite countertop, buried in her closet’s ivory shag rug—never in the bed she shared with Michael—paraded through her mind. Men, not just one.
“I want to make my marriage work.”
“Kingsley,” he whispered.
She echoed the word. Her eyes slid from his. Across the restaurant, karaoke began, two girls singing something she didn’t recognize. The waitress asked if she wanted another drink. Her belly was warm, and she felt like crying. She shook her head.
“Sometimes I think happiness is a puzzle that doesn’t really happen until you put together all the pieces,” said Alex. “Career, money, esteem, the things a life is supposed to have.”
“You didn’t mention family.”
“Until two weeks ago, I never thought much about them.”
Jonah winced. “Might have needed the safe word on that one.”
“I feel like I’ve led two lives.” Pre-miscarriage, everything after. “None of the pieces from one puzzle fit the other.”
“Maybe they’re not supposed to.”
He couldn’t know she lost his baby. He couldn’t know that she prayed for the baby to go away until tears streamed down her face, that she ran punishing sprints across the field behind her house, sometimes falling because decayed vines grabbed at her feet, then falling forward on purpose, that she scalded herself in baths and starved herself because pregnancy for a perfect girl was a most imperfect state to puzzle her way out of. Jonah couldn’t know that his baby did not fit into the plan she had committed to paper, even though his name was on page ten – her list of perfect days. She would never be worthy of that complete puzzle, no matter which life she chose.
“When’s the last time you made a fool out of yourself?”
“Five minutes ago count?”
Jonah smiled.
He convinced her to join him at the twin microphones. Told her she should spend energy wearing clothes that don’t match, spout opinions that were wrong, be decidedly un-Alex and embrace the temporary fallout—that her Boston life had skewed her too far away and her world needed to right itself. After another round of liquid courage, they laid out an imperfect duet of David Allen Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me By My Name” followed by Alex’s ribald, countrified solo of No Doubt’s “Just a Girl.” The room spun and Jonah walked her back to his place because he could no longer drive. He put her on his couch. She told him she might cry, after all this time.
The dark house of his childhood was drafty. He lit a fire in the hearth beside her. When he put a blanket on her, up to her shoulders, she leaned into him so that his hands skimmed her breasts. The rest were puzzle pieces: cool water sliding over her tongue and down her throat; Jonah sitting on the carpet, leaning his back against the couch, his broad shoulder inches from where her head spun against a pillow; lyrics—what I’ve succumbed to is making me numb—repeating against her pleasure centers.
Alex told him she’d lost her job, that she’d made a horrible mistake and no one would forgive her. Shame anchored her eyelids. She shook.
Night advanced. Jonah might have kissed her forehead, said something about strength and brilliant but she couldn’t be sure. Her eyes were leaden, and it was only one piece, but it seemed to fit.
* * *
Jonah fed her a strawberry he’d brought in his bag. Summer ripe, flush skin, wet enough to drizzle juice down her chin, he chased each wayward droplet with a kiss.
Alex lay on a blanket in the grass beside enormous stone columns, her nose to the moon. After dark, the ruins were off-limits. After midnight, taboo. Stories abounded about those who had died here, partygoers whose currency was opulence, slaves who had been tasked with keeping kitchen fires going and guests happy. And there was Madeline, daughter to one of the wealthiest cotton plantation owners in the Confederacy, rumored to have been trapped by a randy uncle seeking his pleasures in the cupola. Kingsley’s proximity to the Mississippi River had made it a prime locale for strategic advantage in the Civil War. Seventeen Greek revival columns and a grand, stone staircase to nowhere remained after Union soldiers torched the mansion, vaulted to a disorienting three-story elevation, made even more dizzying from a ground-level perspective and the play of Jonah’s tongue on her heated skin.
His hair circled the shadows of his face like a lion’s mane, dried in loose blond waves after a day of water sports and tanning in the sun. There had been others out that day, a group of graduates celebrating the freedom the final season of adolescence brought, but Jonah had been supremely attentive to her, abnormally so. She thought he wanted to break up with her after the day’s talk about moving on, changes August would bring, the way the Mississippi red clay slips through your fingers the harder you grasp it. Alex had gone home, to a meal of meatloaf and greens while her skin ripened from too much sun and her knee bounced impatient beneath the dinner table. She told Mama she was beat from the lake, to check on her once. If Daddy puzzled things out, he said nothing.
A tapeworm of worry wiggled behind her navel—what if Mama checked twice, what if Charlotte slipped up, what if Jonah didn’t show? Alex cleared the field in time to see his truck, barely more than a matchbox car, headlamps killed. They almost ignited a bonfire right there, a heady mixture of groping hands and flimsy summer clothes, but he pumped the brakes. Told her they had as long as they wanted because he intended to be with her when she was seventy but that they’d never get this back again, this summer before she headed north.
Alex felt history inside the ruins, as surely as the insects charged the humid air with the sounds of their segmented bodies, moving, rubbing, stroking. Jonah kissed her, the strokes of his lips practiced, the play of tongues uniquely theirs.
“What are you thinking?” he whispered.
“How am I ever gonna draw this in my journal? There aren’t enough pages.”
“Why you write in that thing so much?”
“I have thoughts, about everything, all at once. They go round and round and round and punch against my eardrums and drown out what’s happening outside my body. If I write them down, they leave me alone.”
“That happenin’ now?” His words, no more than a whisper against her neck, crawled in the drowsy heat.
Alex bit her bottom lip and nodded.
“Know why I brought you here?”
“Because its phallic?”
His lips twitched into a smile. A laugh rumbled in his throat.
“Look around you. They aren’t called ruins for nothing. Every year, they crumble more and more but they’re perfect, in their own way. Just like you.”
“Jonah Dufort, I am far from perfect.”
“Prove it.”
“Well, for one thing, my knees are ugly.”
This time, his laughter joined the night noises. “Knees can’t be ugly. They’re knees.”
He scooted dow
n the blanket and gave her knees the same attention he had given her belly moments earlier.
The stars swapped places.
“And I can’t drive your truck.”
“That’s true.”
He sat back on his heels, thighs wide. He might have launched into his favorite embellished recounting of her gunning and stalling his standard-shift truck across an empty field had she not teased the front swell of his jeans with her bare toes. All it took for him to stretch the length of her again.
“And I snore.”
Jonah nuzzled her ear and gave his own version of her snore, along with a side tickle.
She dissolved in the delicious assault, his hands on her, her body electrified and breathless.
“It’s cute. Like a grasshopper with a bandsaw.”
Her play-punch skimmed his shoulder.
“Don’t you see? Those are the things I love about you, about us. Those things you won’t show just anyone. Everyone else sees the valedictorian and the head of the debate team and the Ivy League acceptance letter, just like those plaques over there show Kingsley as it was in the Civil War. What’s left is what lasts, what’s real. The crumbling columns. The best part of you is what I see. You can write that in your journal.”
This time, the stars swam.
He nudged the hem of Alex’s sundress…up…up…then traced patterns around her belly, every languid stroke a cool and tender balm to her ripe skin. She might have thought what happened below as something else to add to her worries, a note in her journal—find a book on b—b short for burning—had the sensation not detoured to her fingers and toes, had Jonah not had the superpower to summon it each time he touched her.
Had he asked her something? For the first time, maybe ever, she didn’t know the answer. Any answer. Questions assaulting her brain slipped away, out of reach, and time that raced toward a cruel goodbye, stopped.
13
Alex
Alex woke sweaty, pasty-mouthed, abysmal in body and mind.
The ruins. She wanted to go back to the ruins, even closed her eyes and buried her head to make it happen, but Kingsley retreated, unreachable but for the sketch in her journal.
She sat up, regretted it. Someone had parked a bus on her skull, and she far preferred forks in her eyes to the direct sunlight slashing through Jonah’s living room. Water from the drinking glass on the coffee table was warm and tasted like old pipes.
“Morning, Miss Alex.”
A girl’s voice. Isabel. The sound that had summoned her from the depths of safety, the best Alex had felt in weeks, decades maybe.
“Are you sick?” Isabel flew around, flitting off surfaces, unsatisfied with landing in any one place.
“No. I was too sleepy to drive.” Funny how half-truths were just as difficult with Isabel as with her father, like some kind of blindingly pure genetic code.
“Good.”
Isabel took this as an invitation to commune on the sofa. Two low ponytails fastened from crazy braids and fuzzed out from sleep, whipped around in her jubilance.
Alex scooted over to make room. Normally, touch in the morning made Alex’s skin crawl. Touch on a hangover, even worse, like a glass vase that threatened to shatter on a breeze. But Isabel sat pressed beside her hip, sharing the blanket, both sporting bed head, tempted Alex to sink into Katherine’s role, if only for a moment. She closed her eyes to the sensation, found she didn’t hate it.
“You’re still wearing the bracelet.” Isabel rotated the bird charm, head tilted, as if time and distance had played havoc on her memory of crafting the piece and she was seeing it with fresh eyes.
“Of course. It gave me inspiration to hunt for patterns.”
Isabel beamed. “Did you find them?”
Did the pattern of self-flagellation count? “Not exactly.”
The girl’s expression shifted, a visible curtain. “I had a rough week in business, too.”
When faced with business woes, those belonging to Alex and those in the cutthroat enterprise of playground economics, Alex far preferred a recess. “What happened?”
“Sadie Sparks started selling necklaces.”
“Ah. Competition.”
“Not really. Her goods are subpar.”
A laugh trickled past Alex’s hangover defenses. The answering pang behind her eye took her breath away.
“She uses plastic that turns people’s skin red and smells like an old lady’s breath,” said Isabel. “But her sales are still neglecting my bottom line.”
Alex pressed her lips together to conceal a smile. Isabel’s precocious verbiage, keen business sense, and solvable problem was better for Alex’s mood than a hot pull of dark roast. She rearranged herself to face her.
“You might be looking at this wrong. Competition is the lightning rod of business. What drives companies to improve. What do you offer customers that Sadie doesn’t?”
“I don’t threaten to take their milk at lunch if they don’t buy one.”
“Wow. Guerilla marketing. What else?”
“Mine are handmade. Her mom buys hers, and she resells them.”
“Which forces her to anticipate what people want. Nearly impossible, right?”
Isabel tucked her legs beneath her on the sofa, mirroring Alex’s posture. “Right.”
“And leaves Sadie with excess inventory if she guesses wrong, which, in turn, neglects her bottom line.” Isabel’s phrasing had been too irresistible to correct.
“Right.”
“So what if there was a way you could make bracelets that are guaranteed sales?
“Like taking orders?”
“Exactly,” said Alex. “Your customers get the colors and charms they want, and Sadie is left holding necklaces that don’t sell because they’re not one-of-a-kind.”
“I could make a catalogue with pictures.”
“You could. But don’t make your product on a promise. Make them pay half now, half when it’s finished. Then you’re always paid for your time, which is just as valuable in business as the product.”
“You really should be a CEO.”
Before Alex had a chance to linger on the revolutions of her stomach, the thoughts gearing up, around and around and around, Robert and Aima, Alex’s next move, Isabel squirmed away and grabbed something off the table behind the couch. She settled beside her with an electronic tablet, closer than before.
“Want to see my photos?”
“Sure.”
Isabel tapped open a digital folder and handed Alex the tablet with instructions to swipe left.
“Those are my first photos. Totally boring now.”
Ladybugs. Flowers. Sidewalk chalk hearts. Alex paused on one of a man with salt and pepper hair and thick spectacles—presumably Katherine’s father—tying his shoe. A rush of grief, wholly unexpected, crashed into Alex’s chest. A mundane task she would never again see her father do. “I don’t know. I like this one. Sometimes simple is best.”
“Miss Charlotte says that about wedding dresses. The dress should be the glass to the bride’s display.”
Alex sank into the pocket of Charlotte’s wisdom. She found it a place she knew nothing about, Charlotte’s instincts. Her sister had always just done what was asked of her.
Some photographs were posed, family, friends; some were accidental. Alex continued to swipe, struck by the intangible depth of Isabel’s candid photos: Jonah holding Katherine’s hand, a golden retriever sleeping in the cemetery, a man in a wheelchair holding a heart-shaped balloon, a ballerina after a fall and the next one where she got back up.
“You have a special way of capturing people.”
“Dad says I should ask, but I like the ones when I don’t. As soon as people know you’re taking their picture, they change.”
“Change how?”
“They worry about fixing their hair or straightening their clothes. Miss Taffy will only let me get what she calls her Sophia Loren side, which is the right side.” A pause, then, “Who’s Sophia Loren?�
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“She was a beautiful actress when Taffy was a girl.”
Isabel put on her thinking face. She reached for the screen and swiped ahead a few photos to a picture of Taffy with a plate of blueberry pie in her hand, head tossed back, every one of her crooked teeth visible in laughter. “I think this one’s better than Sophia Loren.”
Alex looked at Isabel, the blur of color and images a fresh imprint on her thoughts. She was extraordinary, magnetic, completely Jonah and yet nothing like him at all. Alex had never met Katherine but she knew her, through Isabel. Had Alex had a son or a daughter, would the reflection of her been as kind?
“Me, too.”
Isabel zoomed ahead—past spider webs, a surprised Alex on the shop’s second floor, Alex cheekily posed with her new bracelet, Charlotte making a crazy face while talking on the phone, Freesia spinning in her beaded dress, her skirt like a cloud—until she paused on an outdoor photo.
She giggled. “This one’s my new favorite.”
The day of the flying squirrels. A candid photo of Alex: nostril shot, lips pursed like the first taste of a lemon drop, eye roll that looked more seizure than sarcasm.
Alex swallowed her protest. “Why?”
“Because the wind made your hair look like a bird. See the wings?” The girl’s fingertip traced the outline. Sure enough, a bird.
“I have photos of Miss Stella. Will they make you sad to see them?”
Alex’s throat tightened. “No.”
Isabel closed that folder and opened one next to it. “These are from when Dad filled in as a cook at Taffy’s diner.”
“He did that?”
“For a few months. He had to pay hospital bills, but mostly being around people made him less sad.”
Alex’s gaze painted Isabel’s face. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for—worry lines, pouted lips, a hint that her all-knowing burdens were too great. Katherine filled the house: pictures, romance novels crowding the bookshelves, a sun hat clinging to a mirror hook in the entryway that was too large for Isabel. The loss of her mother, at age four, necessitated a more intellectual, academic knowledge, a filter from Jonah through which Isabel’s discovery of her mother would pass, whereas Alex had taken her own mother for granted.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 11