What was she avoiding so much? She stuffed her hands into her pockets and her father’s letter crinkled. That was it. The letter had said the same thing Russell had thrown at her.
What did she want to do? She’d walked her career path head down like some kind of bull dog.
Be the best food critic.
Know all the wines.
Be hurt when you don’t know about an obscure wine from an insignificant Italian village.
She’d dropped nearly four hundred dollars the day after their date ordering every wine she could find from the five villages of Cinque Terre. She’d cataloged over half of them, would never forget them, but most were mediocre wines you’d expect from small village wineries. Only a few surprises in the lot and the sciacchetrà was the best of those.
“You were right.”
He stumbled and looked back at her.
“What?”
“I said, you were right.”
“No, I screwed up with Melanie.”
“I meant about having no long-term plan.”
For a moment they blinked at each other, both lost on a straight trail with their two cars in clear sight a hundred yards away.
“Her name is Melanie?”
“I’m sorry I said that about you.”
Once again they were at a stop. Both too vulnerable. Both with their hearts out on the trail. She couldn’t do it. It was a cliff she just couldn’t climb. Not with this man.
“I, uh, are you going to the next lighthouse?”
He looked down and kicked at the dirt. “Next lighthouse?”
“There’s one a couple of hours south, called Destruction Island. It’s—” She almost said, ‘not on the calendar,’ but caught herself.
“It’s offshore a couple miles. They say it should be visible. On a clear day. Like today.”
He looked about the parking lot. Stared for a long moment at Jo’s car. Hers was in the shop and Jo had leant her the BMW roadster.
“Nice wheels.”
“Um, thanks.” What was it with men and fancy cars? It was too racy for her taste, though Russell’s car looked even lower and meaner than Jo’s. Porsche maybe? Jo had always been the fan of sports cars, the only weakness she’d admit to.
“I think I’ll head home. You?” He didn’t meet her gaze but continued to be fascinated by the dirt.
“Don’t know really. They say a bull lived there who hated the new fog horn. Kept charging the lighthouse whenever it went off. Thought it was a competing bull.” Why was she trying to talk him into coming?
His narrowed eyes indicated that he was certainly asking himself the same question. After a long moment, during which she forgot to breathe, he shrugged.
“Nah. I’m not really feeling up to it.” He turned toward his little black car, but turned back and returned to stand in front of her.
He held out a hand. She took it but rather than shaking it, he covered it with his other hand. Big, powerful, warm hands enfolded hers, warming away a chill she hadn’t noticed.
His sea-dark eyes looked down at her for a long moment. She could feel her knees going weak. Was he going to kiss her? What would she do if he did?
“Thanks. It was nice to spend some time with you. Perhaps we can do this again sometime. I mean that. I’m lousy company, but you’re nice.”
She nodded. He let go and walked back to his car. It started with a dull roar, but he didn’t disappear in a flurry of gravel as she’d expected. Instead he waited. Waited while she fished out first her keys, then Jo’s, got in and started the engine.
As soon as it came to life, he did roar off, fishtailing so wildly on the gravel parking lot that for a moment she thought he’d crash into the trees. Then he regained control and put his foot down, hard. His engine roared loudly over the quiet purr of the BMW’s engine even after he was out of sight.
# # #
Russell let the miles flow through him. He wasn’t even really aware of where he was until he pulled into Port Angeles.
“Good job, Russ. Real safe way to drive.” Eighty miles had rolled by since he’d left Cassidy in the parking lot without really saying goodbye.
He got off Highway 101 and threaded his way through town until he hit the waterfront in a pot-holed gravel parking lot. He stopped with the car’s nose pointed toward the water and Canada. He thumped his forehead against the steering wheel.
“Stood up by Melanie?”
Not even close.
“Right about Cassidy Knowles?”
Not a bit closer. She had more class in her little pinky than he’d had in his whole life. She’d forgiven him slashing at her yet again. Forgiven him being there to meet another woman and being so damn obvious about his disappointment that he totally shut her out.
He flopped back in his seat and looked at his hands. He could still feel the outline of her strong fingers imprinted on both his palms. Could still see all of the colors of autumn in her eyes. Had seen those lips, those lips that he longed to kiss since the first moment he saw them pursed above a glass of wine.
And that was a path right down the wrong road. Right back into a woman enveloped in a New York state of mind. She wanted to be Craig Claiborne reborn as a woman.
She was so wrong for him.
So why hadn’t he been able to stop thinking about her for the last twenty-six days?
# # #
“You really look like shit!” Angelo shouted over the serious cranking of the R&B band in the corner of the bar and everyone else’s shouting to be heard by their companions.
“Thanks, Buddy. Big help.” Russell looked up at the mirror behind the broad, wooden bar. Bottles of liquor were lined up and down the mirror’s length. He could see only one eye reflected between the silver spouts of a bottle of Johnny Red and the next of Jack Daniels black. The dark rings beneath the eye made it look more a ghost’s than his own.
“I’m serious, man. You look even worse than the night I told you what you did to Melanie.”
“Can’t you just drink in silence?”
Angelo licked the salt off the back of his hand, knocked back the Cuervo Reserva shooter, and sucked on a piece of lime.
“Nope, I’m a chatty drunk. You know that.”
Which usually made them so compatible. Tonight Russell wanted to just… He stared at the one eye in the mirror. He wanted… he didn’t know what. He knocked back his Tequila and reached for a chaser, but his beer was gone.
Angelo was leaning back against the bar, checking out the crowd, taking a slug from Russell’s pint. He reached for it just as Angelo looked at him and whispered in a quiet shout.
“Target acquired!”
Russell glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, a pair of women were sitting alone at a tiny table. Long dark hair, thin but in a Seattle-healthy way rather than a New York-anorexic fashion, halter top that revealed a nice expanse of shoulder and belly and enough curve beneath to be very pleasing. Friend, perky Japanese, denim shorts cut incredibly short. Her hair barely reached her ears, flat and cute as could be in her clingy tube top. They’d noted Angelo’s and his attention and were very carefully not looking in their direction, but it was clear he and Angelo were being assessed in sidelong glances that included nice smiles.
Russell turned back to the bar for another tequila, catching their disappointment as he did so.
“Oh shit,” Angelo knocked back the rest of Russell’s beer. “It’s going to be one of those nights?”
Russell punched Angelo’s arm but didn’t feel much better for it.
# # #
Several drinks later, Angelo had battered down Russell’s defenses and was now giving him worldly advice. Exactly what he didn’t need.
“You can no go sailing away from me, my friend. You are no ready. You boat, she is no ready either.” The drunker Angelo got, the thicker his accent grew. Half his mother’s Italian, half Brooklyn. It would be about three more drinks until he wouldn’t understand a word Angelo said. And that would be just fine with him.
In fact, he couldn’t wait.
“Look, amico della gioventù. Sailing off into the unknown, it is a plan. Maybe good. Maybe bad. But it is only sailing off into the unknown. You gonna take you problems with you. Youself, he is gon’ be dere.”
Russell’s one eye in the mirror was blearier, but he could still pick it out among the bottles. He definitely wasn’t drunk enough yet.
“Melanie is in the past, man. There isn’t shit you can do about that one. You go back, you open the studio, you go down on one knee, even if she say yes, your heart, she fold up and die. I’m Italian. I know this things.”
Down on two knees and bowing his head into the sand at Tatoosh. He hadn’t been thinking of Melanie. He was thinking of the way Cassidy Knowles looked, standing tall above him, scowling downward as the smile tugged at the corners of her generous mouth. Again, the line of jaw to neck, of cheek to eye made him want to caress, stroke, feel. The wind picking at her tightly controlled hair, but not breaking it free. Not a single strand out of control. She didn’t have the New York model look. But it was certainly what New York should want.
“Hey! You no listening to me.”
He wasn’t. “What?”
“I tell you how to fix your whole life and make a million dollars and you not even listening?”
“I already have a million, it’s just my life that’s fucked up.”
“Does that mean I should or shouldn’t give you my number?” The long dark one was standing beside him paying her tab.
”Shouldn’t.”
“Should!” Angelo insisted at the same moment.
“He’s really an okay guy when he isn’t drunk.”
“You know we’ve been waiting over an hour for you two to come over.” She looked him up and down, predator trying to decide if the meat was worth dealing with the brain.
“Lady, if you want my advice—”
“She don’t!”
He elbowed Angelo in the sternum, who gasped as he lost his breath.
“If the two of you want to jump someone’s bones tonight,” Angelo smacked him hard on the back of the head, “you should both take him home.” He nodded at Angelo.
“He’s a much nicer guy than me.”
The woman signed her credit slip, with a nice tip he noted, and studied the pen for a long moment before returning it to the bartender without scrawling a phone number on a napkin. She brushed past him, her perfume like a cat in heat.
“You,” she whispered loudly to Angelo, “can smack him again.”
Angelo did and the woman was gone.
# # #
Russell could breathe. Okay. That was a good sign.
He could open one eye. It was mostly dark except for streetlights reflecting off the ceiling. He placed his little boat among the shadow-shaped ceiling continents and began wending it around to distant shores, shadows with mysterious ports of call. There’d be tropical dark women, towering men, exotic foods. Leaving the beams of light rising from the dark streets, he sailed toward the great round continent of the ceiling lamp.
Just as his boat arrived, the light blazed on and drove twin balls of fire down his optic nerves and into his brain. Which then exploded as if the sun had gone nova within the confines of his skull.
He dragged a pillow over his face and cursed roundly. The afterimage on his retina included an outline of Angelo.
“I’m gonna kill you, you turkey.”
Angelo started throwing some extra sofa cushions on top of him. Each made his body shudder with pain.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
“Until I die? Fine. That’ll be fourteen minutes after I’ve killed you.” His pulse was pounding against the inside of his skull. Hard enough to crack the fragile bone.
“Oh, you really scare me, big man. All talk. No fight.”
Russell sat up, thinking he’d lunge at Angelo. It hurt so much that he let his momentum carry him right over to lie the other way around on the sofa.
“Just leave me in peace to die.”
“No, you made me promise.”
“Promise what? I was drunk. I release you from whatever foul deed I swore you to achieve.”
Angelo left him alone for a moment. He was almost back to sleep when a cold, wet towel was slapped against his face.
He let out a roar as he sat up but Angelo dodged back.
“You’re going to die, Angelo.”
“Someday, probably not today though. I doubt if a fly would be much scared of you in your present state. Here, drink this.” He shoved a glass into Russell’s hand.
“What is it?” He still kept his eyes closed against the painful light. He could still see every outline of Angelo’s living room from the tan walls and the vast array of family photographs, to the yellow and blue pottery, and the wall of cookbooks. The memory of every object was outlined in shimmering rings on his retina.
“Water. A tall glass of cold water.”
He knocked it back and nearly threw up. Three fingers of whiskey bored their way down his throat and spilled into his stomach to lie there and burn.
“Oops. Sorry. Wrong glass. That was the hair of the dog and brother did he ever bite you hard last night. Here’s orange juice and aspirin chaser.”
He forced open an eye to make sure it wasn’t sixteen ounces of vodka or gin. He sipped it carefully to get the aspirin down before setting it aside on the teak coffee table.
He opened the other eye. The room only spun a little. Even in his present state, it was cozy and comfortable.
“So. What was this damn promise you are so set on keeping?”
Angelo lounged back against a doorway, well out of harm’s reach.
“We’re going shopping.”
# # #
“Do you have any idea how hard this is to do with a hangover?”
“Easy as fish.” Angelo was holding a three-foot long salmon and bending it back and forth.
“How fresh is this one? It feels good.” He directed his question to the fish monger, a huge-armed man in his twenties. Someone Russell wouldn’t mess with hungover or in top shape. The man was shoveling buckets full of crushed ice and spreading them over his display counter as easily as Russell had tossed back shotglasses of tequila. Russell had seen this on one of those cute little news clips, but he’d never gotten up at five in the goddamn morning to watch it.
“I kept it aside for you from last night’s flight. Out of the water less than twenty-four hours.” The fish monger slapped the side of the fish like it was an old friend.
Angelo handed it back to him to add to the growing pile.
“And it will be on my dinner table in another twelve.”
He tuned them out as the other men, all equally biceped, began chucking more fish from the van. Twenty and thirty-pound salmon arced one after another through the air, so fast there was little room between them. They flew out of the back of the truck, arced high over the sidewalk, just skimming below the open eaves of the market. At the far end they were snatched from the air and dropped onto the ice in neat rows, sorted by type, slid deep into the waiting ice in a single smooth motion. Mesh bags of oysters, clams, squid, and worse followed, rapidly filling the iced tables. A four-foot shark flew by and the small crowd of hearty tourists who had braved the early morning air applauded. The sharp stench of raw fish not yet turning bad filled the air faster than the morning breeze could clear it.
Angelo was in position and took first pick of everything that landed.
Russell had seen enough and then some. If he’d had breakfast, he’d have lost it by now.
Angelo finally rescued him from the post he was slowly sliding down and shoved him farther into Pike Place Market.
“And I made you promise to abuse me this morning for what reason?” His head felt a little better, but his body felt as if he’d been in a brawl. Several brawls and all on the inside of his skin.
“You insisted that you wanted to change your life. See how the other half lived. Whatever that m
eant.”
“Sounds like a crock to me.”
“Me too. But you kept insisting you were a boat without a rudder. By the hundredth repetition I promised just to get you to shut up.”
He found a stool to sit on as Angelo attacked the produce stand. Clearly he was well known here, as once again the proprietor brought out a special stash.
“All organic. All fresh within the last two days.” Angelo sorted through the offering quickly and kept most of it. The few items he rejected were placed in the prime display spots of the lesser produce.
The market was starting to buzz. More restaurateurs were showing up and picking things over, but Angelo already had the best of it. The tourists, now that all the fish were thrown and their final flights videoed for the neighbors back in Wichita, had retreated to small cantinas perched on the outer edge of the market. There, they’d gather close around their lattes and cinnamon rolls and stare out at the rising sun lighting up the Seattle waterfront a hundred feet below.
All that were left were people living their lives. Fish and lettuce bought, they visited a butcher next. The baker across the street promised fresh bread that evening. Each going about their own life. He and Angelo wended their way between the vans and hurrying morning people. Later the slower tourists would reemerge and clog the market until it was faster to walk in the narrow street.
The funny thing was, all these sellers and buyers and observers, you couldn’t tell who was a mess and who had their life together. They all looked so certain and purposeful in their little wandering roles. Russell was half tempted to take a poll.
Was the young woman setting up the ice-cream stand looking tired because of a long night of amazing sex or because her two-year old had a toothache? Did the family in the Greek restaurant that filled the corner of a narrow, brick building always start the day with coffee that was so strong the airborne caffeine was enough to wake him up? Did the young Chinese couple know how odd their Mandarin sounded on American ears, pointing with long fingers at the end of outstretched arms to indicate each topic of interest and being a pedestrian hazard? What had drawn them here from whatever land they lived in, China, Taiwan, or San Francisco?
Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth) Page 15