Anywhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories, #3)

by Susan Fanetti

  “Damn, Mac. That’s so pretty. You look ... damn.” It wasn’t a sexy skirt, not tight or short. It reached her ankles and flowed loosely, skimming down from her hips to flare at the hem. But it was beautiful. And then she kicked her leg to the side, through that long slit, and his cock surged up to full attention. Correction: it was an extremely sexy skirt. “Damn.”

  She checked herself in the mirror, twisting her hips to make the skirt swing. “It’s not really my style.”

  “I know. Thanks for trying it on, though.”

  “You really like it?”

  “I do.”

  She lifted her arms and set them on his shoulders. Her t-shirt rose up and showed her belly, smooth and firm, and Reese really wanted to be somewhere private with her. Immediately.

  “I gotta get outta here, baby, or I’m gonna embarrass us both.”

  Her sly grin became positively devilish, and she pressed herself close. “Do you want to do naughty things to me in this skirt?”

  “I always want to do naughty things to you. But let’s not get arrested on our first night in town.” He kissed her forehead and pushed her back. “Have a heart here, Mac. You’re killin’ me.”

  She took pity on him and stepped away. “I’m gonna need shoes, too. I don’t think my old combat boots or my sneakers are the right look.”

  “You’re gonna get it?”

  “If you like it, yeah. I like being pretty for you.”

  “You’re always pretty, for me or anybody.”

  A pleased blush colored her cheeks. “But you like it.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, I need shoes, then. Cute shoes I can walk in. I saw some ballet flats up front. They’ll do. Scoot.”

  He had no idea what a ballet flat was, but he knew how to scoot.

  *****

  She bought the skirt, and a pair of little black shoes—he now knew what a ballet flat was—and they went back into the Plaza, and stopped at a cart for churros con chocolate: cinnamony little tubes of pastry goodness and a hot cocoa that was twice as dark and rich as anything Hershey had concocted. Better for dipping than sipping.

  Then they decided they were done with Plaza Mayor, at least for this first night, and went out into the city. They held hands and walked along centuries-old sidewalks before centuries-old buildings. Reese relaxed into the comfortable chill of this February night in a more temperate part of the world and took everything in.

  “What are you thinking so hard?” Mac asked after several blocks of unburdened quiet.

  He hadn’t been thinking hard at all. “I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking how I never really paid much attention to anything outside Idaho. This is all so old, and beautiful, and different from anything at home, and ...” he tried to shape a way to say this feeling. “I guess I’m surprised how alive it all is. Does that makes sense?”

  “It does. I was like that, too. It’s like because we never see anywhere but our own town, except on television or in the movies, we don’t really think of anywhere else as real. In our heads, the whole world is Idaho, because it’s all that’s ever been real to us.”

  “Yeah. That’s a damn stupid thing for a forty-two-year-old man to think.”

  Mac stopped on the sidewalk and faced him. Fellow pedestrians moved around them, like a river around rocks. “You didn’t really think it. You knew up top there was more to the world than Jasper Ridge. But in here”—she patted his chest—“you never saw beyond home.”

  He laid his hand over hers and pressed it close. “Home’s where you are, Mac. Anywhere you are.”

  They stood in the middle of the busy sidewalk, alongside a busy Madrid street, and fell into each other’s eyes. Her hand came up and brushed over his cheek. Reese bent low, sweeping his arms around her, and kissed her, and when she coiled her arms snugly around his neck and rose onto her toes, he lifted her off the ground.

  There was nothing in the world like kissing this woman, his woman. Always, she kissed him with her whole body, with that eager, coiling clutch of her arms around him, her tongue avid, seeking to taste all of him, and her tiny, hungry moans, so quiet they barely reached his ears. She leapt into every kiss they shared.

  A man’s voice rattled off a line of Spanish words nearby, and Mac chuckled against Reese’s mouth and pulled back. She turned in the direction of the voice, and Reese looked, too. A man about his age, holding the hand of a woman about his age, was smiling at them.

  Grinning, Mac rattled off some Spanish back, and the man and woman both laughed. The man said something else, gave a little bow, and the couple walked away.

  “What was that?”

  “He said ‘love is blind, but the neighbors aren’t.’ I guess it’s the Spanish version of ‘get a room,’ but he said it like a joke, not a complaint.”

  “What did you say back?”

  “I said, ‘when your love is as big as ours, everybody should see it,’ and then he said we were lucky in love.”

  “I agree.” He kissed her again, and let the people of Madrid see how much he loved her, and how lucky they were.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “How’s your tummy?”

  At Mac’s question, Reese, his mouth full of chocolate gelato, put up his thumb. He’d made use of the Imodium she’d brought for the whole last half of their time in Spain; his Idahoan digestion had rebelled strenuously against Spanish food, and only the drugs Mac had known to bring saved him from wasting whole days in the hotel. But Italian food was going better, so far. Just more than a day in, he thought he might be okay here. Maybe his body was getting used to traveling. If not, he had more pills.

  Meanwhile, he had actual Italian chocolate gelato to enjoy, so he had no intention of giving up such amazing food, no matter what his body thought of it.

  He swallowed and gave her a real answer. “I’m okay, I think. What’s next?”

  She gestured with her cone of pistachio toward the plaza across the street. “Those are the Spanish Steps. We can’t eat there, but when we finish these, we can take a load off for a while and people watch. Then the Trevi is about a straight shot south, a few blocks. From there, it’s a few more blocks to the Pantheon, if you want. Or we can grab a taxi and go straight to the Colosseum.”

  He shoved the last of his cone in his mouth. Around it, he said, “I follow you. Take me where you want me.”

  In Spain, they’d spent the first couple days doing overtly touristy things, seeing the most famous sights in Madrid. Then, they’d taken the train to a couple other cities for day trips, returning in the evening to their hotel. The last two days, they’d stayed close again, wandering different parts of Madrid, what Mac called the ‘real city.’

  She told him about her time here—on her second visit, she’d stayed for a few months, starting out in a hostel and then moving in with somebody she’d found in a roommate ad. She’d waitressed at a dessert café. They’d gone looking for the shop, and she’d been disappointed that it was gone, but they’d wandered her old neighborhood, and she’d told him stories.

  He’d learned a bit more about her time away from him, and thus he’d learned a bit more about her.

  Here in Italy, she was just as much a tourist as he was, albeit a more knowledgeable one. She’d been in this country only a few weeks in all before this trip. They were starting in Rome, spending about a week and a half here, seeing the city and as much as they could reach around it, then taking the train north to Florence. After a few days there, they had reservations at a villa in the countryside, and a week of quiet and relaxation.

  Reese had wanted to drive from Florence into the countryside, but after a day or so in Rome, he was having second thoughts. The roads here were even narrower than in Spain, and the drivers were just outright crazy. He saw street signs and other indications that there were probably some laws and rules on the books, but nobody seemed to care.

  Finished with her cone, Mac took his trash and hers and tossed it in a bin. Then she grabbed his hand, and they began the d
eath-defying process of crossing a busy Roman street. The strategy seemed to be to cross with other people and sort of squeeze yourself in the middle, so somebody else would get hit first.

  They traversed yet another plaza—so far, European cities seemed primarily designed around plazas—and passed yet another fountain, to a set of stone stairs that seemed about as wide as a city block and rose high above them. Like all these plazas, it was full of tourists and locals, and rimmed with carts and kiosks selling touristy nonsense. Already, Reese had become blasé about the t-shirts and little replica figurines made in Taiwan. They’d picked up a few small things in Spain, and they’d left the Vatican yesterday with a detail print of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but less than two weeks into this adventure, his interest in souvenirs had already calcified to cynicism. They meant to bring some gifts back, but for the most part, their own souvenirs were in their phones, and their heads.

  Mac led him to sit on the old steps, near the very edge. He hooked his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him.

  “Okay, teach. Do your thing.”

  She chuckled. “Okay. This is the Spanish Steps. They were built in the 1700s, and they’re the widest staircase in Europe. It has something to do with the Spanish Embassy, I think, and this was Spanish territory once. Maybe it still is, I don’t know. That right over there”—she pointed at a building—“The poet John Keats lived there. If you’re interested, it’s a museum. And that fountain is called La Fontana della Barcaccia—the Fountain of the Old Boat.”

  “Rome sure likes its fountains.”

  She nodded. “There’s like two thousand of them in the city alone. More than anywhere else in the world. ”

  After these early days in his first experience of Europe, Reese found himself in two minds about it. The first was awe. These places were so incredibly old, the history here was so rich and deep, so significant. He lived in a historic building in a historic town, but hell, here, everywhere he stepped was hundreds, thousands of years older than the oldest manmade thing in Idaho, or anywhere else in America. His ‘historic’ hundred-fifty-year-old home had little more comparative staying power than a cardboard box in a city that had lasted almost three millennia so far. It was humbling.

  On the other hand, there was a sense here of ... arrogance, he supposed. Not in the people; so far, almost everyone they’d encountered had been polite and helpful. But in the place itself. The buildings, the very cobblestones on the streets, seemed to judge him as an ignorant, no-account hick. He was certainly projecting, but he felt it nonetheless.

  “You ready to get moving?” Mac asked after awhile.

  He liked sitting here on these old steps, with her resting in his arms. But there was still a lot of Rome to see. “Lead on, wise one.”

  *****

  They were one of the last tourists allowed into the Colosseum that afternoon. The sun slanted low in the sky, leaving long spears of shadows and washing the ancient ruin in gilt. This thing reset the scale on what was old.

  Mac leaned on the handrail, and Reese stood behind her, his hands on the rail on either side of hers. He looked over her head at the wonder spread out before them. Gladiators. Christians and lions. Some of the world’s first history, and he was standing in it.

  Except that wasn’t really true, was it? First recorded history, maybe. But there was a whole globe’s worth of history at least as old, most of which had been overrun by the Romans and what they’d wrought.

  “Can I ask you somethin’, baby?”

  She leaned back a bit, tucking herself more firmly into his relaxed embrace. “Sure.”

  “Why Europe?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean, of all the things you’ve seen, all the places you’ve been, why did you want to bring me here? Europe is where my people come from.” His specific people weren’t from Italy or Spain, but they’d make their way to the UK before they were done. “My ancestors are the ones that rolled over your ancestors and shoveled the survivors onto reservations.”

  His grandparents had come from Northern California to Idaho. He was descended from people who’d taken the idea of manifest destiny to its farthest limit, gone west until they ran out of west to go. “I’d think you’d hate it here.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I mean ... you’re right, but ... I think that’s why Europe is so important to me. It moved me, seeing the world the explorers and colonists came from. It helped me understand their history better. And mine, too.”

  He leaned to the side so he could see her face. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know if I can explain it, but ... my people’s history is almost totally erased. We lost everything. Even our names were taken from us. You know why we have Anglo names, right? I mean, I’m the only of my Mackenzies who’s been anywhere near Scotland.”

  Victor had given him that lesson, emphatically, long ago, while they were still boys, and he’d asked some questions that had seemed innocent to him but had offended the fuck out of his friend. One of those questions was why his name was Victor Thomas and not something Native. He’d learned then that Victor, in fact, had a Shoshone name as well.

  Reese nodded and answered Mac. “Because the government made a law about it, back in the 1800s, and sent men out to make rolls of Native people, giving them English Christian names and surnames.”

  “Yep. Because they wanted us to assimilate. So white men came and took my ancestors’ names away and just made up new ones for them. They used place names, names from English literature, inventors and important men in the white world. Some even used their own names. Native people had to use those names to do anything official. They had to name their children the Anglo way on birth certificates. By the time that law changed, there were generations of us with Anglo names. A lot of us have two names now, given a Native name as well, but few of us have only a Native name.” She laughed. “My family doesn’t give Shoshone names to girls, so I’m only Gigi.”

  She studied the ancient relic before them for a few pensive moments. Sensing that she was only beginning to build her story. Reese stood with her and let her think.

  “We were erased even at home,” she said after a minute or so. “Douglas Cahill is revered in town for saving my tribe from being forced to Fort Hall, but Sawtooth Jasper is still a reservation. A tiny patch of land. The Shoshone were wanderers. Hunter-gatherers, following the wild herds. But now we’re stuck in place, and the bison are branded and owned by rich ranchers, or cordoned off in national parks.”

  She went quiet again. Reese hadn’t yet made any connections between her musing and the question he’d asked—in fact, she was making a strong case for why she should hate Europe—but he knew she’d get there eventually.

  After a moment, she picked up again. “But we never would have had more history than what we could share with our mouths. Our people don’t experience the world like this. We see our lives as part of something great, but not a more important part than any other. We don’t build monuments to ourselves. We don’t even carve totems like the peoples in the north. Our stories, our language, our ways, we shared it from one to the next, with our mouths. My ancestors didn’t even build houses. They lived in hide tents, and when it was time to move on, they packed everything up and left no trace that the normal progress of a season wouldn’t erase. They didn’t even bury their dead, because they expected their travels to continue. We are ... transient. We were born to move on.”

  One of the stupid questions he’d asked Victor all those years ago was why the people on the reservation didn’t just leave if things were so bad there. Victor’s angry lecture in response was about what happened to a people and a culture when ninety percent of them, and all the strongest of them, had been wiped out, and how those who were left clung to every shred of community, identity, and autonomy they had left, no matter how bleak and frail.

  With Mac now, moved by her musing and remembering his friend’s old words, Reese stayed quiet and listened
.

  She stretched out her arms at the Colosseum. “Seeing all these monuments, all these buildings made to worship gods and kings and curry their favor, the way they’ve lasted throughout the ages and are still places people come to worship their story—it made me understand what happened to my people. Of course people raised in a world created in their own image would think every inch of the world existed for their pleasure. Rome is where manifest destiny started. Most of the Indigenous people of the world were doomed the second the first stone was set down to pave the first road from here. The white way of being is so completely different from the way of my people, it’s hard to believe we’re the same species.”

  Reese didn’t know what to say, and he wasn’t yet sure he fully understood, but he drew his arms closer, enclosed her more snugly.

  She took his hands and crossed his arms around her, making their closeness a true embrace. “When I first came to Europe, it wasn’t because of that. I know I told you I was looking for something in myself, and I thought I was. But now I understand I was just running. Europe was just the place that seemed least scary to me, because world history in school meant European history, so I knew it a little. I was trying to get as far away as I could, and Europe was as far as I could think—it was England I went to first. I was afraid my Spanish wouldn’t be good enough, so I went somewhere I knew they spoke English. But then I was wandering Europe with a hostel guide and a Eurail pass, and everywhere I went, I saw huge castles and ruins and statues, everything hundreds or thousands of years old. I felt this weird exhilaration. I didn’t know what it was at first. When I figured it out, I was here. In Rome. Standing right here, in fact.”

  “Exhilaration?”