Flushed

by Sally Felt

  Charlie offered her a pair of pink terrycloth scuffs she’d bought at a drug store on vacation years ago when desperate for something to wear to the hotel pool. He couldn’t have made a frumpier choice if he’d tried.

  Thanks a lot, Charlie.

  She reached for them, but Kim said, “That’s no good, Charlie. She needs something to protect her from the glass. Something that won’t leave so much of her foot exposed.”

  Good thing someone was thinking. She sure wasn’t. “Back of the cherry armoire, Charlie,” she said, hoping he’d hurry. She needed her feet back on the ground, and not just because her legs were starting to cramp.

  Charlie rolled his eyes and returned to the bedroom.

  Kim tugged at their still-joined hands. “Let’s talk,” he said. “Put your feet on mine.” He stood directly in front of her and looked from his feet to hers then to her face, clearly repeating his invitation.

  If she did it, they might be eye to eye, or at least closer than ever before. She’d be in his arms again. If they moved, they’d have to move together.

  But they weren’t dating. They weren’t. She couldn’t remember why, exactly. Not much was working in her brain, but she knew there was a reason and a good one. It would come to her.

  He had to leave—now. She couldn’t trust herself. If she put her arms around him again, she might not let go until morning.

  Charlie rescued her with sneakers. She thanked her brother and pulled on the ugly shoes. She and Kim crunched outside to the porch. The splintered doorjamb was going to have to be the first thing fixed if she was going to feel safe. She didn’t even want to think about how she’d be spending her day tomorrow.

  Kim put his coat around her shoulders while they stood on her dark porch. The smell of leather did more to warm her than the coat itself. His hands rested on her hips and his breath moved her hair as he said, “Stay at my place tonight.”

  Oh, it was tempting. Forget the house, her brother, herself. Spend the night with the man whose every kiss promised it’d be a night she’d never forget. How good a reason could she really have for saying no?

  The light spilling out around her busted front door was a pretty good one. Crap.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Charlie is here.”

  “Should I be jealous?” She heard the smile in Kim’s voice, making it easier to remember the other reason she shouldn’t say yes to a good-looking man, a man pawed by women and approached by ex-girlfriends. Any man this smooth and charming would be utterly confident she wouldn’t be the one straying. It was a pattern she knew all too well.

  “Of course not,” she said. Three words. She turned her shoulders so his jacket slid free, forcing him to let go of her to catch it. She just needed three more. She forced them from her throat.

  “We’re not dating.”

  * * * * *

  Not dating.

  Kim pulled into his assigned space beneath the mid-rise condo development and yanked on the Jeep’s parking brake.

  She could smile. Flirt. Completely lose her composure in anger. Isabelle Caine could kiss him and touch him as if she were seeking a way inside his skin—a quest in which she seemed to be succeeding—and yet…

  They weren’t dating. For a guy with plans to leave town, it sure bothered him a lot.

  She wanted him. He was pretty sure about that. Well, he’d had moments of being sure about that. No question they’d be great in bed together. Outstanding. And they’d seemed well on their way to finding out.

  He took the stairs from the basement garage to the lobby of his building, the concrete walls and industrial light fixtures made it seem like another garage level, albeit filled with funky, curving furniture rather than cars. He saluted the night security guard and continued up the stairs to his eighth-floor loft.

  He swiped his security card and burst out the stairwell door into his concrete breezeway, breathing hard. That was better. Running stairs might not bring the same clarity as a day on the rock face, but it helped. He could now see it might have been a bad idea to bed Isabelle the same night her house had been turned inside out. The same vulnerability that made him want to protect her might make her even more volatile than she’d been earlier tonight. What if she woke up hating him?

  And he hadn’t exactly gotten around to telling her about Austin, had he?

  She was right. They weren’t dating.

  Damn.

  At sunrise, Kim gave up trying to sleep and drove to Wall Werx. He used his key, locked the door behind him, and headed straight through the Big Top for the boulder garden. He wanted sweat and adrenaline, not altitude. Besides, he didn’t have a spot.

  The “garden” was actually one long, narrow room with wall partitions of up to sixteen feet high beneath the soaring, fifty-foot roof. Many wall partitions were two-sided, allowing climbers to crest and then downclimb without having to retrace a route, useful for building skills they’d need on actual rock.

  Endurance and hand strength were big on actual rock. But even bigger was versatility—the ability to change the plan, change directions, improvise at a moment’s notice. A good climber understood the rock’s mood and adapted.

  And when he failed, he learned to be a good jumper.

  Here in the garden, the floor was covered with shredded rubber tires Damon got from the dump. The room smelled like old Pontiacs, but every jump and fall was cushioned.

  Kim started at Slabtastic, a bulgy man-made island with the lowest angle climbs in the gym. He moved with feet and right hand only, all the way around. Then left hand only. Then in the other direction. His body warmed with the motion.

  Isabelle could do this, he thought. No heights involved whatsoever. He could imagine her laughing at the lingo as he urged her to find holds in pockets and cracks and to hang on to bulges. Actually no, he couldn’t. Isabelle had more class than that. He couldn’t even imagine her wearing shorts, though after having run his hand the full length of her leg, he knew how she’d look.

  Damn fine, that’s how.

  Enough of that.

  He toweled off and rechalked. He’d flash the Knife next, a fourteen-foot, two-sided wall with a graceless apex, just a meeting of two walls creating an knife-like edge.

  If he were Damon and Wall Werx were his, Kim would dump real money into upgrading the garden. The Big Top might be impressive to new climbers, but serious climbers spent most of their time in here, drilling, experimenting and honing skills. It should be larger, relative to the entire gym. There should be a greater variety of problems. It should be the place for climbers to train in the relatively flat terrain of the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex when they were between trips to real rock.

  Places like Austin.

  Kim wiped the fresh chalk off his hands and unclipped his phone, wondering if it was too early in the morning to call his realtors. According to a message left by his Dallas agent, the buyer who’d looked at his loft yesterday had made an offer.

  It was time to get serious.

  He dialed his Austin realtor. Either she was a fellow insomniac or a workaholic, as she picked up right away.

  “I’ve been working with your wish list,” she said, “and I have the cutest houses to show you! When are you going to be in Austin?”

  Kim thought about it. He wasn’t getting any younger, and there really was nothing holding him back now. Certainly not a translucent-skinned force of nature who seemed determined to deny herself—and him—the intense chemistry between them.

  Images of Isabelle had haunted his night, especially her face as she stood in the midst of her wonderful little house and registered the truth of the break-in.

  It made him ache. It made him angry.

  It made him helpless.

  Helpless led to breaking things, not fixing them. She’d had enough broken. Just as well she didn’t want him around.

  “How’s tomorrow?” he asked.

  He was just ending the call when, the house-flavored disco-esque electronic music Damon favored start
ing blaring from the loudspeakers.

  Kim rechalked and challenged himself to flash the Knife at least twice before his friend showed. One thing he could say for the music, it left little room for obsessing over Isabelle. Of course, it didn’t have to be this kind of stinky, dance cheese. Any music would probably work, if played at sufficient volume. He was throwing his legs over the Knife’s edge for the fourth time before the alleged proprietor of Wall Werx joined him.

  “Up early, slick,” Damon shouted to him over the music. He wore a lime-green belly shirt and white shorts, both a striking contrast to his rich brown skin.

  Rather than continue to the other side, Kim perched on the Knife’s edge, his heels tucked against the uppermost pinch holds on the wall. “Hell of an outfit,” he said, glad Damon didn’t dress like that when they went to Austin.

  Damon grinned, turning around. “Like? Trent said it made my butt look big.”

  Trent would say that. Kim suspected Damon’s opinionated boyfriend might be part of the reason Damon wasn’t at Wall Werx as much as he ought to be.

  “Your butt always looks big. Too much time sitting on it.”

  “Skinny, white-boy freak,” Damon said.

  Kim grinned. “You here to climb or just run that pretty mouth?”

  And so they were off. Kim gave his friend a chance to warm up before challenging him through a series of specific exercises that eventually moved them into the Big Top where they could race for lap after lap of low-to-the-ground horizontal traverse around the room’s perimeter until Kim was dripping and far too pumped to safely continue.

  He dropped off the wall, happy, breathing hard. Nothing like having a partner to turn a workout into an endurance test. Not something he liked to do every day, but once in a while, it was exactly what he needed.

  Damon may not be the most reliable guy in the world, but Kim owed him for showing him the end to years of searching. Biking. Blading. Running. Racquetball. Who knew how many team sports, rafting trips and assorted thrill rides. When he’d met Damon, Kim had finally found a sport where he could really let go.

  Two years. Incredible. It hadn’t occurred to him until he’d said it to Isabelle yesterday and it still filled him with wonder. Take that, Kerry, he thought. Not such a quitter.

  Damon was still working the wall, so Kim took a cool-down walk that led him to the office. He grabbed a handful of clean towels from the stash Jules had been keeping for the staff since she’d practically become part of it. Kim might have started as her teacher, but Jules had shown herself a gifted climber. He’d been urging her to fill in the holes in her experience and talk to Damon about becoming a teacher herself. So far, she seemed content to spend all her off hours here at the Werx, pulling plastic and doing what she could to make the place more livable. Like washing the towels.

  Kim was about to leave the office when he realized he needed to do one more thing. He navigated through the piles of junk in the office, punched his finger at the far end of the volume control and held it there until the music no longer made his fillings vibrate.

  Two years climbing was only the beginning, he knew. Two years of Damon’s god-awful music, on the other hand, was itself almost enough to push Kim to Austin.

  He returned to the Big Top where Damon had dropped off the wall and was already holding out his hand for towels. Like Kim, he’d pushed. Like Kim, he’d pumped. It was just more impressive on Damon, whose bulkier build and dark skin showed off gleaming, cut muscle.

  Kim threw himself at the faux leather sofa with a sigh.

  Damon squeezed a water bottle over his head and shook his hair. “How was the hot date?” he asked.

  “What date?”

  Damon grinned at him. “Short, curvy woman in a brown suit. Flapper hat. Dark hair. Name of Isadora.”

  Kim groaned. Naturally, any woman that gorgeous and out of place would raise gossip. “Isabelle.”

  “Whatever. I guess it didn’t go well or you wouldn’t be here, humping the walls this morning.” Evidently competitive workouts didn’t produce the kind of post-climbing telepathy he and Damon sometimes got on the rock.

  “It wasn’t a date, at least not according to her.” Kim sat up. He was still sweating too heavily to lie on the slick, hot sofa. He pulled off his shirt and mopped his back and belly and chest with a towel.

  “Oh, mama,” Damon said, staring at his chest. “Some kinda non-date.”

  Kim fingered one of several marks Isabelle had left on his skin, as if he needed a visible reminder of her passion. No danger he’d forget her any time soon.

  “Yeah,” Kim said.

  “Doesn’t that make her perfect for you?” Damon flopped into the wooden chair Isabelle had sat on yesterday.

  Kim scowled at him and took his friend’s water bottle, scrubbing the last of the water over his own hot scalp. It felt good.

  “I’m serious,” Damon said. “A sweet package who does that for you,” he waved at Kim’s hickey-marked chest, “and yet isn’t looking for commitment sounds like the first girl you’ve dated who might have staying power with a relationship-impaired loser like you.”

  “Gosh, Day Man, you’re right. What would I do without you as my personal love guru?”

  “Sarcasm. Nice.”

  It was the only weapon Kim had against the irony of it. How many times had he bailed on a relationship because he couldn’t handle it? Ginger. Jules. Too many to count, or even remember. In that light, it was only too perfect Isabelle should bail on him first.

  Weird, then, how badly he’d wanted to tell her about Austin after that earthquake of a kiss in the restaurant parking lot. There just hadn’t been a good time to bring it up, especially with her house freshly broken into and her brother asking to stay. Trying to help seemed more important than giving her one more thing to think about.

  One more reason to close the door in your face, you mean.

  “You okay, slick?” Damon asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Dandy.”

  * * * * *

  “You okay, Isabelle?” Charlie asked.

  “Of course,” she said, knowing there was no other answer to give. Her brother had helped half the morning. Mostly he’d been making coffee and keeping an eye on the repairman who fixed the front door, but she’d been glad to have him here. “You’ve got interviews. Go knock ‘em dead.”

  “I can call, reschedule. You can make me your shelf slave all afternoon.” He gestured to the hats and knickknacks and books that lay all over the floor. Shelves weren’t the problem. It was deciding how to organize the mess, and doing the insurance paperwork. She’d feel better once it was done. But right now she wanted to curl up and nap. With luck, she’d find everything back to normal when she woke, the whole thing a dream.

  She shook her head, shooing Charlie toward the door.

  “I’ll be back for dinner,” he said. “Save me some shelf stuff to do, ‘kay?”

  “Thank you, Charlie.”

  “Yeah.”

  She locked the door behind him and made herself choose the next task for the day. Her hats. They had been everywhere in the house. The most fragile ones had been on wooden stands before the break-in and most had miraculously stayed firmly on their head-shaped forms, undamaged, through the assault. But she’d found a straw cloche, originally displayed in the bedroom, on the dining room table. Presumably, it had been on the floor and Kim had picked it up. Its antique fabric had cracked along a new stress line unlikely to have been created striking the floor or being picked up. The hat had been stepped on.

  It wasn’t alone. Isabelle wrote down each transgression for her insurance claim. What a depressing inventory. All these irreplaceable beauties, filled with memories of the charity auctions and fun vintage stores where she’d found them along with the richly weird conversations that usually came with them—people who sold old hats tended to be great storytellers. But Isabelle’s greatest pleasure in the hats was imagining the delight of the women who had discovered and bought them when they we
re new and still smelling of fresh straw and linen, still blooming with crazy flowers, or vibrant in freshly dyed felt softened with velvet ribbons, a brand-new lining in buckram or horsehair to make it sit just so and hold its shape. She imagined someday designing a series of cubbyholes in which to display the hats properly, making her house feel like a homey haberdashery.

  That day was not today.

  She finished the inventory and made another pass through her house, grabbing all the towels from her topsy-turvy bathroom and taking them to the washer. Feeling normal was not going to happen today either.

  At least she hadn’t gone home with Kim last night. As hard as it had been waking up surrounded by reminders of what had happened to her house, it would have been worse to come home to it in the cold light of the morning after. That’s what she told herself, anyway. Her body wasn’t thrilled with the argument. Her inner child seconded the opinion, having desperately wanted to sleep in comforting arms.

  She’d known Kim a day. Under the circumstances, she’d merely have been using him anyway, if she’d gone home with him. She was starting to suspect he was too nice a guy to deserve that treatment.

  Drool-worthy, yes. And thoughtful. A gentleman in spite of his not-entirely-civilized kisses, which to be fair, she’d invited. And he had respected every boundary she’d set. Which, on review, had been quite a few. No wonder Charlie had taken to calling her Majesty of late.

  She took a break from what Stacey would call a four-Prozac morning—if Stacey weren’t happily head over heels in lust—to answer the phone. If there were any mercy in the world, it would be Kim. No such luck.

  “Isabelle. Give me the ring.”

  Perfect. Her day was complete. “Hello, Steven.”

  “Don’t play games with me.”

  “I wouldn’t presume. That’s always been your department. How interesting that it’s gone from a generic heirloom, to your box, to an actual ring. I wonder what it will be tomorrow?”

  “It will be over, Isabelle. I’m done asking.” His voice had lost its silkiness, becoming flat, even jaded, as if he no longer cared about persuading her. It scared her, which made her angry.