Kisses Sweeter Than Wine

by Heather Heyford

I need you to rub my back. Feed me ice cream. Waltz with me in the dark.

  He had brushed Red’s words off without a second thought. It had taken a male stripper to make him listen.

  The song over, Lumber Jack lowered his lips to Red’s hand, thanking her, and led her back through the crowd like a bride to a smattering of polite applause and wet cheeks. All the way, hundreds of envious eyes remained glued to her.

  Sam blinked. How long had Manolo been shaking his arm?

  “They’re about to turn up the houselights. We gotta get out of here.”

  Chapter 28

  Back in Clarkston, Sam licked his wounds. Trying to sort out his emotions was like untangling skeins of Christmas lights without breaking any bulbs.

  First, lust. Lumber Jack’s axe handle had nothing on him after seeing what that epitome of manhood had done with his woman, even if it was all pantomime.

  Shame. If he really cared for Red, he should have been revolted by those erotic acts, not aroused. Yet more proof of how undeserving he was of her.

  Jealousy. No explanation needed.

  Finally, anger at himself for ruining their good thing. It had taken losing Red to realize—they almost had it all.

  The next few days passed in a haze of remorse and self-loathing. He holed up in his office, speaking only when spoken to.

  He missed Red. He thought of her buoyant personality. Her lush body, once his personal playground. Her logic, often the only thing that kept him grounded.

  He would never have that again. Red wasn’t the sort of woman who would be trampled on. She’d made that clear.

  He couldn’t sleep. He knew he should eat, but he wasn’t hungry. He stared into his kitchen cupboards looking for something that piqued his appetite. Turned over random jars and packages, searching for expiration dates, then, one by one, put them back, even one that had expired before he moved in.

  Finally, sheer loneliness forced him back to the light and warmth of Poppy’s Café. He ventured in at an odd hour between breakfast and lunch, when he knew Red would be at work.

  Poppy set a mug in front of him and poured him a coffee. “Where you been, stranger? Was getting ready to send out the National Guard.”

  He had almost forgotten that the women didn’t know they had been spied on.

  “The usual. Work.”

  Poppy rested her pot on the Formica. Lowering her voice so the few other patrons wouldn’t overhear them, she tipped her head and said, “Sorry about things with you and Red.”

  She knew that he’d lied by omission about the saltbox. He couldn’t bear to meet her eyes, to see the judgment in them.

  “Bad news travels fast.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, she’s as torn up over it as you are.”

  His eyes on the scratched tabletop, he sipped the hot liquid carefully. “Who says I’m torn up?”

  “Tell me the last meal you ate.”

  He thought back. “Half a canister of peanut butter-filled pretzels and a vending machine burrito?”

  Poppy slid into the padded bench across from him. “Why don’t you talk to her? Red’s one of the easiest persons there is to talk to. It’s what she does.”

  He looked up at Poppy’s perfectly symmetrical face, her imploring blue eyes, recalling when she was a knobby-kneed kid with pale eyelashes coming in from the playground with leaves tangled in her cottony blond hair. Only in rare moments like these did it occur to him how she must appear to someone seeing her now, for the first time.

  Stunningly good looks aside, how could she, of all people, know what it was like to be him? She was born into a loving, two-parent family, a family who cherished her and ultimately handed her this established business on a platter. Not a silver platter, but still. From where he sat, Poppy had it all.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, still gripping the coffeepot that by now had become like a natural extension of her arm.

  No sense in refuting her. She knew him, too. Or parts of him.

  “Now, you’re marrying a smart, successful brewer.” Heath. A noble man, unlike himself.

  “I’ve had my share of problems.”

  Of course. Caught up in his own ego, he had forgotten about the times the sadistic Ms. Baker made Poppy stand up at the whiteboard and struggle to parse sentences till she was in tears, and their classmates were shifting in their seats. If Poppy had truly had it all, that woman wouldn’t have been allowed within a mile of a classroom.

  “You’re a decent person, Poppy. I’m lucky to have you for a friend.”

  She smiled kindly. “I know what you need. How about a nice roast beef sandwich?”

  His frozen insides thawed a bit. “Is that what I smell back there?”

  Poppy slid out of her booth. “I marinated it in rosemary, thyme, and garlic. It’s been slow cooking since last night. Should be nice and tender. If you want, I’ll give you the end piece.” She lifted a brow.

  His mouth watered. “It does smell pretty good.”

  * * * *

  Sam stepped out of Poppy’s Café onto Main Street, his stomach pleasantly full. The three cups of coffee he’d downed helped cut through the fog. That, and a kind word from an old friend made him feel almost human again.

  In the window of The Radish Rose, he spotted one of the many signs plastered around town heralding Dr. Sophia McDonald as Clarkston’s Best Therapist.

  Though he’d seen it a hundred times, he stopped to stare.

  The first chuckle in days escaped his throat, and he found himself smiling. How many therapists did a town the size of Clarkston have, anyway? Five, at most.

  Still. Even if there were a thousand, he bet Doc would still be the best.

  It dawned on him, standing there in the middle of Main Street, what he had to do if he were ever to get back in her good graces…to salvage some remnant of what she had optimistically called their “relationship.”

  Talk.

  It sounded so simple. But it would be one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.

  Chapter 29

  Sam stepped into Red’s tiny receiving room. She didn’t employ an assistant, so there was no desk, just two second-hand slipper chairs atop a wrinkled throw rug with a round table wedged between them, issues of Wine Spectator scattered among some self-help brochures. Clearly, her fans weren’t deterred by a little untidiness.

  An “in session” sign hung askew on the door to her inner sanctum.

  It was a few minutes until the top of the hour. Sam took the time to straighten the rug and separate the brochures from the magazines.

  He rose when the door opened. A middle-aged woman concluded her business, and then it was only he and Red.

  Red’s face was arranged in a careful blank. “If this is about your father, I haven’t made a decision yet.”

  His heart clenched at the sight of her red-rimmed eyes. He scratched the back of his head. “It’s not about him. I got some things to get off my chest. Hear you’re a good listener.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and waited.

  She hesitated. Then, with a resigned sigh, stepped aside and gestured toward her office.

  Sam perched on the edge of a purple couch. Therapist or not, here on her turf she had the advantage. He looked around at potted plants and shelves full of hardbound volumes with titles like Games People Play and Emotional Blackmail.

  Red took a seat directly across from him.

  Sure felt like therapy to him.

  Both started talking at once.

  “Sam, I—”

  “Not really sure—”

  “Go ahead,” said Red. “You have the floor.”

  He rubbed damp palms down his thighs. Now that he was here, what the hell was he supposed to say?

  “Hard to know where to start.”

  “Try the beginning
.”

  He huffed a humorless laugh. “How much time do you have?”

  “My next appointment’s in a half hour. If you don’t want to start from the beginning, start wherever you feel comfortable.”

  The walls started closing in. His pulse thrummed. He stood up and took a step toward the door. “This was a mistake.”

  Red stood too. Her fingers on his wrist were warm and soft. “Just say what’s in your heart.”

  Reluctantly, he sat down again.

  “Maybe it would help if I told you what I already know, so you can fill in the blanks,” said Red. “I know you left Clarkston right after high school. After that, it gets kind of fuzzy.”

  Sam thought. “I’d been waiting for years until I could finally leave home. I was shocked when Dad agreed to fork out the tuition. I’ll never forget the train ride up to Seattle. UW was a chance at a new life.”

  The past came back in a haze of burnt orange leaves skittering across the quad.

  “Come Thanksgiving, I took the train back home. I was standing outside on the platform in Portland waiting for Dad and decided to light a cigarette. I knew I was taking a risk. Ever since Mom found cigarette butts with lipstick on them in his ashtray, Dad hated smoking.” He laughed drily. “Probably one of the reasons I took it up. But I was eighteen and out to break the rules.

  “So there I am, puffing away, keeping an eye on the road leading from my house. Next thing I know, someone’s tapping me on the opposite shoulder. I spin around, and it’s him.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “To this day, I don’t know what happened to that cigarette. I might have thrown it. I might have eaten it. I have no idea.”

  The corner of Red’s lips went up.

  “Thanksgiving came and went. I figured I’d gotten away with it. Forgot all about it. Until Sunday, when he drove me back to the train station. He knew spring tuition was due. I’d waited all weekend for him to give me a check. On top of that, I had no money for train fare. We got closer and closer to the station, and he still hadn’t given it to me. It was hard enough asking the first time. I hated to ask again.”

  “What happened?”

  “We got to the station. He stopped the truck, and I finally got up the nerve to ask him about my tuition. And he said, “If you think I’m going to give my hard-earned money to a cigarette smoker, you got another think coming.”

  Red didn’t blink.

  “I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ I had straight As. I’d already filled out my course selection for spring.

  “‘Guess you better figure out a way to pay for it yourself,’ he said.”

  Red’s smile disappeared. “What about your fare back to school?”

  “I wasn’t going to wait for him to tell me I had to get that myself, too. I grabbed my bag and got out of that truck. Dad drove off without so much as a backward glance.”

  “But how did you get back to finish the fall semester?”

  “Hoofed it across the Broadway Bridge to I-5. From there, I hitched a ride north.”

  Red released a breath.

  “That Christmas, I finagled an invite to my roommate’s house so I wouldn’t have to go home. By early January, I was in Fort Benning.”

  “You enlisted.”

  He nodded. “Sixteen weeks later, I was a scout in Iraq.”

  “That must have been quite an adjustment.”

  “You could say that. I went from writing term papers to—”

  “To what?”

  “Forget it.” Only those who had not seen war talked about it. Those who had, never did.

  “It’s okay. I don’t think you came here today to talk about the war. But I thought you had to have a degree to be an officer.”

  He sniffed. “You do. Wasn’t until I was twenty-two that I served my first tour and was able to go back and finish my poli sci degree, this time on Uncle Sam’s dime.

  “I still had no taste for coming back to Clarkston. The Army was as much my home as anywhere. I re-upped, this time as an officer. They took one look at my aptitude tests and shipped me straight to intelligence school.” He looked up at her. “If that doesn’t prove I’m crazy…”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I told you before. It’s the military’s job to figure out how best to use its personnel. One they’re damn good at.”

  “That’s when you became a spy.”

  He shook his head. “Nobody calls it that.”

  “Then, what?”

  “CTPT. Counter-terrorism Pursuit Team, tasked with dealing with high threat covert ops. We didn’t wear uniforms or carry anything on us that, if captured, would associate us with the United States government.”

  “Sounds awfully exotic,” she said, a touch of awe in her voice.

  “Most days, it’s anything but. It’s about getting into the head and guts of your source. Most days, it’s anything but exotic.”

  “What makes a good spy? Sorry—CTPT officer?”

  “Self-discipline. An analytical mind.” He shrugged. “A knack for languages doesn’t hurt. The ideal candidate is someone who’s morally upright, but able to suspend his morals for a cause.” He badly wanted to make her understand. It would be so freeing to share the specifics of the burden he could never set down. But he was bound by honor to settle for abstractions. “Someone who’s able to separate his values from his actions.” He searched her face. Surely, this was enough to make her realize that any relationship with him was doomed from the start.

  But no. Her eyes lit in recognition. “It’s called compartmentalizing. People isolate threats in their mind as a way of defending themselves against them.” She thought for a moment. “Actually, it makes perfect sense. When you recognize that your emotions aren’t relevant to your decisions, you’re able to take bigger risks. Being able to compartmentalize to some extent is considered a sign of high emotional intelligence.”

  Leave it to Red to put a positive spin on a major character defect.

  “Was your dad always passive abusive?”

  “Passive-what?” He laughed and before she could answer he said, “If you’re asking if I never knew where I stood with him, that’d be a big, fat yes.”

  “You didn’t feel like he valued you or your feelings.”

  “Valued?” Sam sniffed a dry laugh. “Mostly he just ignored me. By the time I came along he was in his forties. He was done raising kids. He didn’t care to know anything about me, and when I acted out to get him to listen, I got the message loud and clear that I wasn’t worth listening to. So I just stopped trying. Put my feelings on the shelf.”

  “And yet, he was willing to pay for your college, until you, in his opinion, messed up.”

  “Don’t get the wrong impression. We might have had some backward ways, living out where we did, but we weren’t complete yokels. Dad had a decent head for business. And I have to admit, he used to brag to his friends and customers about my grades and later on, getting into a decent school and my military honors.” He smiled wistfully. “It made him look good.”

  “But he never praised you directly.” Red sat back. “That explains why you buried that entire aspect of your life.”

  “Just easier. Wasn’t hurting anyone by not talking about it.”

  “Until I came along and showed an interest in your house.”

  “You don’t want that place,” he said, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Trust me, you don’t. That place is a world of hurt.”

  Red re-crossed her legs.“You took away bad memories from your home. But Sam, don’t you understand? Whatever those feelings are, they exist inside of you. You can project them onto the house, but in the end, it’s still just a building made from bricks and beams.”

  Shaking his head, Sam rose from his seat and tur
ned toward the slatted blinds that limited the interior view of Main Street passersby. “No.”

  “Sam.”

  He looked down at Red’s freckled hand on his forearm.

  “I have the answer. Let me buy the house.”

  He whirled around. “No!”

  Enough psychobabble. He headed to the door. No one, not even Red, was going to keep him from finally getting to the root of his pain and obliterating it.

  Red was close behind him. “Why not? I want it. You want to be rid of it. It’s perfect.”

  “You don’t get it. I want to fix it so that I never have to see that house again. Is that what you want? To live in a house I’ll never visit you in? Never set foot in?”

  Their eyes met while the meaning of his words registered.

  “You never visit me now,” said Red softly.

  “Because I didn’t want your grandmother to recognize me,” he said, palms outspread. “Who my old man is.”

  “Because you’d worked so hard to separate yourself from him.”

  “I wasn’t ready to go there yet, to lay it all out for you.” The edge had crept back into his voice. “God knows, there’s nobody else who could get me to do this. If it wasn’t for you badgering me...”

  “Does that mean that you would visit me if I had my own house somewhere else?”

  “Of course I would,” he scowled, as if she were blind not to have seen that already. “I want us to live together.”

  He couldn’t believe he’d said that.

  Red’s forehead creased in confusion. “But…”

  “I want us to be together. I’ve known that since you were the only one who ran to home plate when my nose got in the way of Stillman’s fastball.” None of his family was at the game. Red and her grandmother had taken him to the hospital in their beat-up minivan.

  “Then why—?”

  “Because it’s my job to protect you, you get it?” he said, louder than he’d intended.

  “Protect me? From what?”

  “From me.”

  From the other side of the door came the sound of someone entering the vestibule.

  “That’s my appointment,” Red said slowly.