by Radclyffe
When in doubt, revert to talking about the weather.
“I think the fog’s lifting,” Austin said.
“We’re on a roll, then. I’m catching a cell signal,” Gem said, staring at her phone. She flicked through a few screens. “NOAA predicts a chain of fronts moving through over the next few days.” She laughed a little mirthlessly. “I believe we’re about to experience the calm before the next storm.”
“I don’t mind if it gives us a shot at getting to the coast.” Grateful for any sign of normalcy, Austin leaned over and switched to an alternate route on the GPS. “What do you think? Shall we try to skirt around this and take the coast road south? If it doesn’t work out, it could end up taking us longer.”
“I don’t mind taking a chance,” Gem said quietly.
Trying to decipher some hidden meaning to that statement and deciding anything she guessed would be wishful thinking, Austin turned off onto a local road that would take them to the shore road on the ocean side of the peninsula. During the season the narrow two-lane was congested and traffic crawled for miles as the chain of tiny coastal towns strung along the shoreline filled with tourists, but in mid-September, they were preparing for the long off-season, when many of the local stores closed, the motels shuttered, and the year-round inhabitants scrambled to make a living or went on public assistance until the tourists returned in spring along with the birds.
Birds. Gem’s passion.
“Tell me about the birds,” Austin said.
“What about them?” Gem sounded slightly suspicious, as if she couldn’t fathom why Austin would ask.
“Anything.” Anything just so I can hear your voice. Austin glanced at her, wondering if her desperation showed in her eyes and not really caring. They had so little time. She just wanted them not to be strangers for a little while longer. “Why do they migrate in the first place?”
“We don’t really know—we can only surmise from their behavior.” Gem chuckled. “Like with so many things. Anyhow, something signals them to migrate. That cue isn’t necessarily the same for every species—sometimes it’s the shortening of the day, or the change in nighttime temperatures, or a reduction in their food supply. Certainly genetics plays a part. The exact combination of factors probably varies from species to species, but even first-time migrants know where to go when the time comes.”
Despite wishing the damn birds were flying anywhere but right toward them, Austin was fascinated. By the phenomenon all on its own, and by Gem’s enthusiasm most of all. “Do they always come back to the same places when they migrate?”
“Many do—especially the long-distance migrants that travel from Canada as far south as Central America. Some locations, like the area around Rock Hill Island, are what we call migrant traps. Popular stopovers for large numbers of birds.” Gem smiled. “And of course, favorite spots for researchers, conservationists, and amateur birdwatchers.”
“Migrant traps.” Austin winced inside. Perfect. Not only did she have to worry about shore contamination, she had to deal with a threat to a pivotal location for people and wildlife.
“Mmm. That’s part of the reason we study the flyways, so we can identify these areas of high species concentration and protect them. The island sanctuary is one of the stopping points along the Atlantic Flyway.” Gem hesitated. She loved talking about birds, and she didn’t mind skirting around the topic Austin obviously didn’t want to discuss any more than she did. Like the elephant sitting in the backseat leaning over their shoulders. The kiss neither one of them wanted to acknowledge. She was grateful for the surcease. Maybe in a few more hours she’d be able to sort out her own feelings about it, but right now she was as surprised by the kiss as Austin probably was. Other than that first insane kiss with Christie ages ago, she’d never done anything so uncontrolled. And this time, she’d done it with a clear head, absolutely for herself and no one else. Unlike that first time, when she’d done it more out of desperation to save things with Paul than anything else. This time she’d kissed a woman first because she wanted to. She’d wanted to touch Austin, taste her, delve inside her. The question was why, and she hadn’t an answer. “Do you really want to hear about all this?”
Austin nodded. “I do. So, this Atlantic Flyway—I’m assuming that’s not a euphemism.”
“Not at all. There are quite a number of flyways traversing North America, well-traveled migratory pathways with established stopovers for various species. It’s made it easier for conservation groups to protect endangered species by identifying and preserving sanctuaries.”
“Like Rock Hill Island.”
“Yes—the Audubon Society has been the big mover and shaker there, but plenty of smaller groups and institutions do the same thing.”
“I remember when I was a kid,” Austin said, “watching the geese fly south in huge V-shaped formations. The sound was so amazing. I always felt a little sad—I don’t know why.” She shrugged. “Maybe I just wanted to be somewhere else too.”
The melancholy in Austin’s voice tugged at Gem’s heart. “Where was that?”
“Vermont,” Austin said. “My mother is a trauma surgeon at UVM.”
“Is that where—” Gem trailed off.
“Where I had my surgeries? Yes.”
“And now?” Gem didn’t have the right to ask, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted—needed—to know in some deep primal place that Austin was safe.
“I’m good. Perfect health.”
Austin grinned and looked more like the charming rake she’d appeared when teasing Gem in the diner about the buxom and seductive waitress. Had that only been half a day ago? Time seemed to have fractured into before and after the kiss, and the universe had taken on a whole different color. Despite the fog, the before-kiss time had been suffused with sunlight and blue skies, at least in Gem’s imagination. The after-the-kiss was a deep purple morning sky on the edge of the sea as storm clouds rolled in. Reminding herself she loved both and never feared a gale, she went with her instincts. “It must have been really hard as a kid, though.”
The silence surged back and Gem held her breath. Their truce was so fragile, like a fledgling first attempting to fly.
“I didn’t have the stamina of other kids, so sports were out. In my family…that was tough.”
“A competitive lot?”
Austin’s laughter was sharp-edged and humorless. “About everything. My father was active Air Force and flew fighter jets in the Gulf. He met my mother there—she was Navy reserve and got called up as a medic. She got out between wars when my brother was born, but she never left the front lines. My brother’s some kind of athletic savant—he never met a sport he didn’t excel at. Got drafted to both a Major League Baseball team and the NFL. Played both for a while and finally settled on baseball. Plays for the Yankees.”
“Richie Germaine is your brother?” Now that she thought about it, she could see the resemblance. Germaine was a star on and off the field—smart, handsome, and mega-talented. He also had a world-famous model for a wife, and they were frequently the subject of media attention.
“Yep, that’s my big brother. I never could catch up in the physical arena—by the time I was finally done with the surgeries, it was too late for me and school sports.” Austin grimaced. “Or much of anything else my family valued.”
If they hadn’t been in the car and weren’t still mired in the after-kiss awkwardness, Gem would have hugged her. She could so easily see the child who, through no fault of her own, hadn’t fit in a highly aggressive, competitive, physical family. Austin seemed to be the last person in need of protecting, but Gem ached with a well of protectiveness all the same. “Well, you’ve made up for it now. You’re pretty damn famous yourself.”
Austin laughed, and this time her obvious pleasure softened her features, making her seem younger and far less cynical. “Yeah, that’s me—crowds follow me wherever I go.”
“Told you,” Gem said, inordinately happy just to have made her laugh. Mayb
e the after-kiss strangeness would fade away now too.
“So,” Austin said, “enough about my uninteresting past. Tell me what kind of birds you’re expecting, and when.”
“I’m mostly interested in waterfowl—ducks, geese, swans, pelicans—especially since many of them overnight on pastures en route where they might come into contact with domestic fowl. And of course, all the shorebirds are key to follow. Many of them endangered.” Gem stretched, beginning to feel the stiffness in her back and thighs from the long hours of inactivity. “The saltmarsh sparrow is a favorite of mine. And don’t try to tell me you’re dying to know more.”
“Come on,” Austin protested. “It’s interesting. Do you band them or something?”
“Some, yes. We also document the flocks through satellite tracking, geographics, and sometimes with little tracking devices called geotrackers. And we ask birdwatchers to call a hotline if they sight a banded bird.”
“I had no idea,” Austin muttered, and she really should have. She’d dealt with environmental rescue teams more than she’d like, but she’d never talked to the biologists—usually just the incident commanders. She needed to get a lot closer to the ground to understand the personalities involved and what was at risk. “How long do they stay?”
She hoped the answer was not very long. If the spill was ongoing but slow, even if they couldn’t contain it immediately, they might be able to set up enough blockades to stop or divert the movement of the surface contaminants to shore. Then if the birds were gone, the impact would be far less. Cleanup procedure would be a lot less complicated if they didn’t have to deal with wildlife salvage.
“They don’t all arrive at once, of course,” Gem said. “We’ll be seeing nesting flocks for the next few weeks.”
“I see.” Of course she couldn’t catch a break. But then, maybe she would. Maybe Ray Tatum would give her good news. And she needed to contact him soon to get a sit rep. “We’re still a good three hours from the island at the speed we’re going. If the weather clears a little more, I’ll be able to make better time, but I’m not counting on it.”
“Whenever you’re ready, I can eat,” Gem said.
“Let me know when you’ve got some kind of signal again too. I need to make some calls.”
“I’ll keep checking.” Gem remembered Austin had mentioned there was no one she was meeting, but she didn’t pry. It was none of her business who Austin needed to call, a stark reminder she didn’t really know anything about her. Or rather, what she did know were not the things one ordinarily learned on first meeting. Sure, she knew where Austin lived, more or less, and she knew what she did for a living, and she’d learned a couple of things about her family. But she didn’t know her age, she didn’t know her taste in music, or her favorite food, or her favorite color, or, God—if she had a girlfriend. Weren’t those the things you were supposed to talk about when first getting to know someone? Obviously, she was failing at Relationship 101. But she did know some things about her—she knew she was confident, capable, a good listener, protective, a little possessive, secretive at times, and, beneath the strength, plagued by sadness. Austin was fascinating, alluring, and a fabulous kisser. And about that kiss…
“What happened back there,” Gem said before she could second-guess herself, “was pretty unusual for me.”
Austin cut her a look. “The tire changing or the kiss?”
Gem smiled fleetingly. “I’ve done both a few times before. Actually the kiss more than the tire thing, but I usually wait until, you know, we’ve had a date or three or so to jump. So to speak.”
“We had breakfast at the diner. That’s kind of the date.”
“It was.” At a loss, Gem searched for exactly what she wanted to say. She didn’t want to apologize. She wasn’t sorry. The kiss had been everything she hadn’t realized she wanted—exquisitely sensual, passionate, a tangle of sensations that disengaged her mind and left her with nothing but feelings. Wonderful, wild feelings she wanted to recapture. Of course, she wasn’t about to mention she wanted to do it again. That and more. She needed to examine those emotions a lot more carefully before she found herself in way too deep. The kiss was one thing. Sex with a near stranger was something else again.
“It was a hell of a kiss,” Austin added. “Just saying.”
Gem laughed, exhilaration coursing through her. The heaviness and uncertainty that had weighed on her evaporated. She felt as light as a bird must, drifting on an air current. “That’s an understatement, Ace.”
Austin caught her breath. Ace. No one called her that. She liked it. “You okay with it, then?”
“Mostly. You?”
“Sure, yeah.” Austin slowed and pulled in to a small lot in front of a single-story building with a sign out front proclaiming Erma’s Family Diner. She turned in the seat and faced Gem. “I mean, I’m not usually taken by surprise that way. I…I liked it a lot.”
“So we’ll just agree it was good, and we’re okay.”
Austin wished it was that easy. What she hadn’t said, couldn’t say, hung in the air like a thundercloud only she could see. She couldn’t divert that storm, not yet, and she didn’t want to tarnish the memory of the kiss, not when it was likely to be the only one she had. “Absolutely. We’re great.”
Chapter Seven
“We might catch a break after all,” Austin said, looking out the window beside their table. Although the sky remained gray and heavily overcast, the rain had stopped while they’d looked at menus and ordered. Unlike the diner that morning, this restaurant was nearly empty at the height of the dinner hour. Although not large, the main dining room felt cavernous with only a few tables occupied, or perhaps it was the silence at their table creating the vast empty sensation in her chest. Austin resisted the urge to shake her shoulders to throw off the cloak of melancholy. The ominous weight wasn’t going to be dismissed with a casual gesture. The easy connection between her and Gem had disappeared, and the tension taking its place twisted in her middle like a giant claw.
So much for talking away the unease between them. She’d said everything was okay between them. So had Gem. But the awkwardness intensified with each passing minute. Gem toyed with the stem of her wineglass, her expression pensive. Austin wished again she could read her mind. She wished a lot of things, and wishing for what she couldn’t have was something she thought she’d given up a long time before. Apparently, she’d been wrong. She reached across the table and caught Gem’s free hand. “Hey.”
Gem looked up, her eyes widening. “Sorry? What?”
Just the sound of her voice eased the knot between Austin’s shoulder blades. “Are you really okay?”
“Yes and no. Mostly uncertain.” Gem smiled faintly. “Lousy company. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be. Anything I can do?” Austin grimaced. She might be a little too late for that. “Or am I the problem?”
“I hate to say it’s me and not you, but that’s the truth.” Running her thumb over the back of Austin’s hand, Gem shook her head. “I’m just trying to figure myself out, and believe me, that’s never been easy. When it really counts, I’m a mystery to myself. It’s hell when you keep secrets from yourself.”
Austin sat back, reluctantly releasing Gem’s hand. She wanted to keep holding it, but she couldn’t keep inviting that connection with all that went unsaid between them. All she hadn’t said. “I’m sure there’s a million things about you I don’t know, but you don’t seem secretive to me. In my experience, people with secrets to keep rarely talk about themselves—or when they do, they never say anything that matters.”
Gem’s brows rose. “What matters, do you think?”
“To you?” Austin smiled. “Your birds, your work, your love of solitude. You enjoy being alone, but you’re easy to talk to. You like people but you don’t need someone around twenty-four seven. You’re independent and comfortable with your own company.”
“Well, at least I’ve given a good first impression,” Gem said lightly
, but her expression remained contemplative. Her gaze was reflective, as if she was looking inward or somewhere far off into the distance.
Austin waited, her heart thumping, feeling like a fraud. She was the one keeping secrets, even though she’d been more open with Gem than anyone she could ever recall—at least once she’d learned not to expose her innermost thoughts to her family. Could Gem tell the disclosures were a little one-sided? They never seemed to have casual conversations. Every moment seemed so important. Maybe that was why she couldn’t pull back, didn’t want to let the silence—the distance—grow. Gem brought every fiber of her being to life. Could anyone blame her for not wanting to let that exhilaration fade away?
“The last few years,” Gem said at last, “my main goal has been to keep my life on an even keel, to be happy with what I have—the friendships, personal and professional, and my work. I thought I’d achieved a pretty good balance, all things considered.”
“And today changed all that?” Austin didn’t want to hear Gem regretted the intimacies they’d shared, but she wanted to hear Gem’s truth, whatever that might be.
“Well, some of it.” Gem reached for her wineglass, took a long, slow swallow, and cradled the glass in both hands. “I would characterize myself as being slightly unbalanced today.” She looked up, gave a rueful smile. “The kiss might have been a bit of a tilt.”
Austin grinned, happy to see even a little of the worry ebb from Gem’s eyes. “I have to admit I like you unbalanced.”
“I’m glad to hear that, because I think it’s all your fault.”
“Mine?” Austin kept her tone light, but she watched Gem’s face and read the seriousness there. She prepared herself, pretty sure she was guilty of whatever Gem was about to accuse her of. “What have I done?”