“You sure you never sailed before?”
All that answered was her bright laugh and it definitely did something racy to his heart. Just in one short month, she’d inhaled the knowledge as if she’d been born to it. They’d anchored in quiet coves up in the Canadian Queen Charlottes, ridden out a forty-knot storm in the Straits when they’d decided to visit Destruction Island lighthouse by sail. And love. They had made incredible love.
He hung the white stormsail from the main boom and the lifelines, then tied the excess off to the boom.
Jo came up first. A black sheath that followed every curve perfectly. It rode low enough to reveal her bounty, but high enough to be pure class. Her long black hair was swept forward over one shoulder. As she turned, she revealed the bit of magic that was Perrin’s trademark—every piece had some surprise: often subtle, occasionally blatant.
Jo’s dress didn’t reveal her whole back as might be expected. Rather, only a small, open area revealed her beautiful olive skin. Exactly the spot a man’s hand would rest during an intimate waltz or… He had to smile.
He had Jo swing back as if in the throes of a tango, the reserved woman released by the dress and his request. Her hair swept back along the deck and her body arched in pleasure, passion, and joy. The flash reflected off the sail covered her in a ballroom’s soft lighting, etching her against the oranges and golds of the sunset beyond the water and the sharply outlined peaks of the Olympic Mountains.
Perrin slid into the picture, taking the man’s position in the dance. A pantsuit, but like none he’d ever seen in a dozen years of New York fashion. The slacks had seams that climbed in an iridescent spectrum from ankle to hip. The triple-layered jacket lapels shifted from traditional black to the shades of the rainbow depending on how she moved. But they weren’t heavy, rather they accented the plunging cleavage of the single-buttoned front. The cleavage of a woman wearing nothing but the jacket and pants. A perky hat that might have fit a sixties secret agent if not for the single peacock feather above the right ear. She was at once in control, powerful, and incredibly erotic.
She and Jo danced about the narrow deck, posed at the edge of the dance so that he could capture each alone, and then whirled together in a flurry of laughter and sensuality. And there was never a moment, despite all their fooling around, that there could be a doubt about the orientation of these two women. They were friends dancing together, to make the men wild.
In their various meetings preparing for this shoot, she’d revealed tiny glimpses of how they had saved her from her parents’ past. The abuser and the whore who had no compunction about using their own daughter, selling her. How she’d surely have gotten herself killed, or killed herself, many times over if it hadn’t been for Cassidy and Jo. Her wild experiments with drugs, alcohol, and men had all been tempered by them. She loved her life and she attributed it entirely to her two best friends.
He’d fallen further in love with Cassidy as he heard of the interventions, sometimes in the middle of Vassar campus. Cassidy had brought Perrin home for every vacation so she’d never be alone where her parents could get at her, or even alone with her own originally self-destructive tendencies.
Then Cassidy came up from below and he forgot about everything. She moved slowly, her dress shimmering in the golden light. No sequins, nor glitter. The threads of the material caught, reflected, and refracted light but appeared as plain and simple as a red evening gown. Not the red of a wild woman, but the dusky red of her chestnut hair. The dress wasn’t blatant, it wasn’t a slap in the face like Perrin’s pantsuit, or a sensual masterpiece like Jo’s. It spoke as much of the observer as of the wearer. High-necked, long-sleeved, her cascading hair the only adornment other than a small sailboat on a thin gold neck chain.
It was a look that invited him into the warm circle of the woman within. Almost of its own will, his camera raised to his eye. They moved in slow motion. Step, click, flash. Shift, click, flash. This time Russell and Cassidy were the two dancing.
The images of Cassidy shifted about him. The color rising to her cheeks made her that much more alive. The sparkle in her eyes as she relaxed made her that much more desirable.
He moved about the deck to capture different angles, heights, backgrounds, and still her smile dazzled him.
She bent out of one frame giving him a shot of the top of her head. When she stood straight once more, Nutcase, in all her fuzzy disarray, cuddled against Cassidy’s chin. He came in closer. The camera never ceased its whirr-click, flash.
Nutcase looking at Cassidy, Cassidy looking directly at him. Whirr-click, flash. Beauty.
Cassidy looked down at the cat. Whirr-click, flash. The nurturer.
Cassidy and the cat both looking at him. Totally self-contained. Whirr-click, flash.
He stopped. Dropped the camera to his side. How could he not want to be with this woman when she looked at him that way? He wanted her in his life.
A loud pop startled him from his reverie.
Perrin laughed aloud and began pouring champagne into small glass tumblers.
He looked back at Cassidy, but she was facing away. Dropping Nutcase onto the cockpit cushions.
“I thought that last outfit would get you.” Perrin pushed a glass into his free hand and extracted the camera from his limp fingers, unwinding the strap from behind his elbow. She slid his camera into its case then dropped onto the bench seat next to Jo. She planted a big, sloppy kiss on her friend’s cheek.
His knees finally buckled and he landed on the bench across from them. He’d never worked as hard or enjoyed himself so much. He knocked back the glass of bubbly and it scorched his throat as sharply as scalding coffee.
Cassidy still stood by the tiller. Her floor-length dress made her look like some fantasy being, inviting him to be with her forever.
“God, you are so beautiful.”
That smile of hers lit the night more brightly than any flash. She slid down beside him, pulled his arm over her shoulders, cuddled in close against his side. The blood hammered so loudly in his ears he couldn’t hear a single word being said though he could see Perrin and Jo laughing at something Cassidy said.
They teased Nutcase and drank champagne. He sat outside. They didn’t shut him out and it wasn’t that he didn’t belong.
No. He sat outside himself, observing and amazed. The shock was that he truly did belong.
Admiralty Head Lighthouse
Whidbey Island
First lit: 1861
Extinguished: 1922
48.15702 -122.67943
High on the towering cliffs of Whidbey Island, this lighthouse didn’t survive the transition from sailing ships to those driven by steam. The lighthouse marked the farthest side of a wide channel, and ships powered by steam did not need to cross Puget Sound before turning South for Seattle or north for Vancouver. They simply exited the Straits and turned at the Point Wilson light.
The dormant light served as a medical clinic and barracks for the Fort Casey gun emplacements during WWII. At that time it was painted olive-drab and the light room was removed. The Island County Historical Society eventually repainted it white and red and rebuilt a light room.
SEPTEMBER 1
Dearest Ice Sweet,
It’s funny. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll have been dead for most of a year. Time is a strange thing. Life speeds up and slows down—maddeningly slowly when there is pain and sorrow. And it’s a blur through the good times. It should be the other way around.
With your mother gone, I thought my life was over. Knowles Valley Vines was lost, and both parents-in-law and my wife were gone. Yet those years were so busy that they’d be hard to remember if they also hadn’t been so full. The daughter I’d left in my wife’s care needed a father.
I’d thought about moving, you were young enough, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. But where? There had been so much heartbreak in the California soil, that I couldn’t drag you or myself back there. I didn’t want to work for so
meone else on “my” land and I had no family on either side, so I stayed where I was as much by default as anything else.
The Bainbridge vineyard needed my attention because the vines were finally producing. I mixed in Northwest flavors: strawberry, blackberry, huckleberry. I did some of the marketing your mother had suggested: Eagle White, Dugout Rose, and Olympics Red were all hers.
They were hectic, wonderful years; watching you grow was an education in itself. Your mother had left behind a huge collection of books. You started devouring them thinking they were mine, but that was your dead mother passing on her greatest joy to you. To us. I read like mad to keep up with you. I’m glad that we were able to share that part of our path.
If I could wish anything, it was that you had stayed in the vineyards with me. I think we could have had such a rich life there. I wanted to leave the vineyards to you, but you had your own plans. I sold them for a lot of money, from struggling my whole life to very comfortable in a single moment—a shock to an old man. Enough to set you up for many years to come, but you know that by now, assuming my medical bills don’t wipe it out.
We’ve walked together a long way, let’s not stop just yet.
Love you, Ice Sweet
Vic
Cassidy folded the letter and slipped it back into her pocket and looked out at the water from atop Admiralty Head’s high perch.
“A long way, Daddy.” This year had been both slow and fast. It had been such a mix that she barely knew what to make of it. The loss of her father, enough money to live off for a decade without any other income, her increasing fame as a columnist, and Russell.
Dear Russell. He sat a dozen yards away facing Puget Sound, carefully not looking in her direction. The water stretched from here to the Port Townsend light ten miles away on the Olympic Peninsula. His unease showed in the way he plucked strands of grass from the high bluff edge, then worried them into thin strips with his fingernails before pitching them off the edge. Did he even notice that the sea breeze up the cliff face was lifting his offerings and dumping them behind him?
“Hey there.”
He jerked around at her call. Hustling over he almost sat, then stood again. She patted the grass and he thudded down beside her.
“You okay?” His first thought was always for her and she still wasn’t used to it.
“Yeah, no gut wrencher this time. Just about my growing up and how much he enjoyed those years.”
He pulled her over and kissed the top of her head. “I’m glad. You didn’t need another like the last one. I’m still angry about that. Hell of a bomb to leave in a letter; he took the coward’s way out.”
That was her Russell. He was all straight-ahead and forthright, as strong and straight as the lighthouse that rose three-stories high behind them. Her father’s choice had made perfect sense to her, but she’d never been able to explain it to Russell’s satisfaction.
Her father was gentle and considerate. He wouldn’t risk their last weeks together with a fight. If he’d blamed her or been angry, he’d have put it in the first letter—not waited until August. She was glad she’d opened the letters one a month. If she’d read some of this right after his death, she’d have been hurt much more. And really pissed.
“I hear that you’ve got more business.” Some things it was simply better not to talk about.
He pulled another grass blade and started his inattentive dissection.
“The head of a small consortium of stores were eating at Angelo’s—attracted there by my ads. He told them about Perrin’s. Turns out she shops there…because of the ads.” He shrugged, those big shoulders rising unevenly then settling only part way back.
“Then why did you say yes?”
Again the shrug. “Well, I’m still a month or so from getting the boat ready. And I want to take another navigation class or two. Gives me something to do.”
She nodded, not wanting to push. She had enough worries of her own. But she was worried about that hunch as he sat. And she was worried about him sailing off into the sunset and what that might mean to them, though they’d agreed to not discuss such things.
“I got an interesting phone call this morning.”
He half turned his head to show he was listening, but he didn’t stop his botanical experiments. The scent of new-mown grass escaped from his little cuttings.
“From Italy.”
Another blade went flying only to be grabbed by the breeze up the face of the eighty-foot cliff and tossed behind him. Another tiny offering at the base of the lighthouse.
“Sienna.”
“What’s there?”
“Montalcino wines.”
“And this means?” He still wasn’t looking at her.
“The Italians heard I was talking to Mondavi and they want a shot at me.” It was kind of nice to be wanted. Even though her mind was made up, at least if she were going to make the change. She’d thought Mondavi’s stellar treatment of her in June had been nothing more than them wooing a wine reviewer.
Last week they called with a much more serious offer. They offered to create a new position specifically for her, wine director. She was invited to bring her palate to the vintner’s aid, her writing to marketing’s aid, and her insights to the winery’s aid. A hand in shaping one of the finest wineries in America. They even had invited her down for the harvest as a “get to know each other”—all expenses paid, first class of course.
The wine-column world was great, but it was limited. She saw that now. Russell had been onto it way back at the beginning and her dad agreed with him. Wine reviewers lived on the outside looking in and—now that she was aware of it—she hated that feeling. She wanted to be in the game, affecting decisions, shaping flavors, accentuating the superb, and casting out the ordinary.
“Sienna?” His attention shifted at last to her face.
“I’m not really interested, but they were very persuasive. I’m going to California during the harvest in a couple of weeks, so I’ll just fly to Italy from there, maybe catch their harvest time as well.”
“Sounds good.”
But it wasn’t. Russell couldn’t think of a thing to say for the whole drive home. Neither of them was grumpy. Cassidy had tried to start the conversation a couple of times, but it always fizzled out. As much her doing as his. It wasn’t a comfortable silence, but it was a companionable one; both lost in their own thoughts.
He’d dropped her at the condo to write her next column.
She might come by the boat later.
They spent most nights together, as often as not on the boat. They both claimed it was to keep Nutcase company, but Russell didn’t sleep well in high-rise condos—though being with Cassidy in that big bed or sitting before that amazing view from her balcony had already gone a long way toward changing his mind.
California. Italy. Even if she stayed in Seattle or went back to New York, her life was on the land, attached to root and vine.
His future was on the ocean.
The more he thought about that though, the less comfortable it was. He enjoyed the photography. He’d really liked working with Angelo and Perrin. They’d been fun and made him feel good about himself and about what he could do. The boat would be done soon, as done as wooden sailboats ever were. And he liked knowing the local waters. They too were becoming familiar and comfortable without any sign of growing dull.
The consortium of little stores might be fun. But he hadn’t told her about the Seattle City Trade Association that had approached him about a national campaign. He’d turned them down cold despite the vast sums in their advertising budget. He didn’t do the ads for Angelo or Perrin for the money. The SCTA was maybe a little more personal than a BMW or a Rolex, but maybe not. Maybe it was the same thing, just wrapped up in the softer, kinder style of the Pacific Northwest.
Was the sailing just another escape? Another way to not have to truly make a decision about his life? But that didn’t feel right either. He was far happier on the boat than he’d ev
er been on dry land.
After dropping off Cassidy, he wandered down the dock, and the moment he stepped aboard he felt…home. He fed Nutcase out in the cockpit, grabbed at a beer, and cracked open a fresh tube of Ritz crackers.
Perry strolled by and Russell called him over. “Got something I’ve been meaning to give you.”
He ducked below and grabbed the small album and another beer.
Perry came aboard and was trying to feed a cracker to Nutcase.
“Don’t get her started on my private stash.”
“Not interested anyway.” He ate the cracker himself and opened the beer with a nod of thanks.
“Finally figured out what you were talking about. Made this for you to say thanks.” He handed the album to him. It was a small one, one picture on each facing page, forty photos in all.
Perry opened to the first page. A photo of Nutcase, curled up in her cardboard box, not much bigger than the lens cap he’d tucked beside her for scale.
The next pages were her discovering the boat…and him discovering his companion. He knew the rest by heart as Perry paged through the book.
Nutcase sleeping on the boom, another looking out at the lighthouses. A look of fascination, then of terror at a breaching orca. Arguing with a seagull twice her size at close enough range that Russell hadn’t been sure whether or not to run to her aid. But she’d won handily, protecting their boat like a hissing hellcat, the seagull flapping off his bowsprit perch in disgust.
The final picture hadn’t been his, but it was arguably the best of the lot. Cassidy had been behind the camera. He’d been asleep on the deck with Nutcase asleep on his chest. The high cliffs and towering Destruction Island lighthouse were visible as a soft background. A blow-up of that one hung in his cabin, right next to the final one of Cassidy and Nutcase from Perrin’s photoshoot.
Perry stood and went below without asking permission. It was just the way the old man was. He was harmless, so it was easy to ignore his eccentricities. Maybe he needed to use the head.
The Complete Where Dreams Page 26