“You’re not talking about an actual squirrel, are you?” Mike wanted to know.
“What the hell is wrong with you? No. Pass me the torque wrench.”
“I’m just saying you’ve been single for a while. No one would blame you if you wanted to get a squirrel for company. They’re personable pets.”
Gabe lifted his head to stare at him for a long time. “Okay.”
“She pretty?” Bud wanted to know. Maybe it was his age, but Bud used words like pretty instead of hot, which Gabe kind of appreciated.
Gabe opened his mouth to answer.
Then closed it again.
And said nothing.
Because he felt like pretty did a disservice to Eden. The problem was that he couldn’t really think of her in terms of simple adjectives. He thought of her more in terms of how she made him feel, like want and soft and smile and like, the kinds of words Koko the gorilla would sign to indicate her needs. He experienced her on a very basic, very fundamental level.
“Ooooh, he’s got it bad,” Jordie crowed.
He scowled at them and twisted a screw on Jordie’s wheelchair. “I don’t know why I say anything to you people.”
“Listen, whoever she is, if she’s single . . . you got nothing to worry about,” Jordie soothed.
That was kind of sweet, actually.
“Of course she’s single. I’m not that kind of guy. Not gonna moon after another man’s woman.”
“Then the only kind of guy who could give you a run for your money is someone like . . . oh, someone like Jasper Townes.” Louis pointed at the flyer for Townes’s side project, Black & Blue, on the bulletin board for an upcoming Misty Cat gig. Those flyers were all over town. “Man, I’d even do Jasper Townes.”
“That guy from that stupid meme?” Lloyd scoffed. “Puhlease.”
Jasper Townes had indeed starred in a meme a couple of years ago. Something to do with John Mayer and an airport? Gabe couldn’t quite remember now.
There ensued a noisy verbal division between jeering, mock horror, and a rumble of assent.
Gabe didn’t think he’d be willing to do Jasper Townes, who admittedly did have something. But he did like Townes’s band, Blue Room, kind of a lot.
“He’s got that snaky-hipped thing going. Kinda like Jim Morrison or Jagger or Axl Rose. Like he’s not a man or a woman but a . . . sex creature,” Jordie claimed.
Gabe snorted. “What the hell is a ‘sex creature’?”
Much spirited discussion of what a sex creature might be ensued.
Eventually it tapered off into a companionable silence.
“Or, you know, I’d do Sting,” Bud Wallace said suddenly.
They all froze mid screw-twist and pivoted to stare at him, jaws unanimously dropped.
The silence stretched.
“He’s into that tantric whatnot,” Bud said with great dignity. “If this were a football pool, we’d want our guys to have skills. You want to have a deep bench.”
Not a thing interrupted the total silence or dumbstruck stares.
Until: “Then you’ll want to include a guy with a very long willy,” Louis said thoughtfully, finally.
“And who was that movie star fella who put a hamster up his rear?” This was from Mike.
“That’s an urban legend.”
“And I don’t know if that’s a skill.”
“Yeah, but he’s a risk taker. You’ll want one of those on your team.”
Gabe rolled his eyes. They were, to a man, unashamedly profane right down to the marrow, and not even a little bit prejudiced about anything, really. It was rather refreshing to listen to it now and again, given how tightly reined he kept his own id thanks to the requirements of his job. Cathartic in the way that cranking the occasional death-metal tune in his car was.
He cleared his throat. “Hey, you guys . . . so, I’m really sorry about this, I can’t make this week’s game. I have to stop into the Chamber of Commerce mixer at the Misty Cat.”
A stunned, frozen silence followed.
“What? You hate that kind of thing. You can drink bad wine any day of the week. We need you, man! You’re our power hitter!” Louis was distraught.
Gabe wasn’t taking it lightly, either.
He took softball just as seriously as they did, because if he was going to do something, he was going to go all in.
Which was exactly why he was going to the Chamber of Commerce mixer.
“It’s just that I feel like I haven’t been doing my duty as a representative of the school district.”
The quality of the following silence told him that not one of them believed him.
“She’s going to be there. That mystery woman.” Mike blurted it like a Jeopardy contestant.
“It’s Eden Harwood!” Louis guessed.
Gabe glared at him and resisted an impulse to look over his shoulder to see if Eden had appeared.
“Look at your face!” he crowed. “It is her, isn’t it? What do I win?”
Gabe slowly straightened to his full height and aimed his best stone face—and it was a real Medusa-quality stone face—at them.
Which effectively subdued them.
For a few seconds.
“C’mon, Gabe. You don’t have to worry about having game. Your résumé alone speaks for itself. It would wow anyone.” It was pretty funny when Lloyd tried to soothe him.
“This isn’t LinkedIn, Lloyd. She’s not hiring a vice president of sales. This is about that intangible stuff. Chemistry. All that . . .” He sighed. “All that crap’s sort of out of anyone’s control.”
“Oh, God. I know, right? Who knows what women want?” Louis complained.
“Obviously not you,” Mike said, because someone had to say it and it was too easy.
Much laughter.
“Oh, man,” Bud sighed. “Eden Harwood is so pretty. If I haven’t been married for a thousand years . . . but she’s kind of a wild card. Enigmatic women scare me a little. Beware of the enigmatic woman, Gabe.”
“Oh, brother, Bud,” Gabe said. Albeit kindly.
He wanted to say, She’s not enigmatic. She’s self-protective. I know her. I can feel her.
The sort of woo-woo stuff that would almost definitely get him laughed at and might not even be true. The combination of infatuation and lust could do the same kinds of things to a man’s brain as too much tequila did. That much he knew.
But he was older and wiser now. And he’d never felt this way before.
That alone was enough to try to see this thing through.
“You got this, Gabe,” Mike said, and thumped him on the back heartily. As if he was part of a SEAL team going in to rescue hostages. “You don’t need to worry about a plan.”
Gabe treated him to a faint scowl, albeit one without rancor. These scoundrels still treated him with a certain tenderness around the subject of women. Which was touching and kind of funny, but also irritating because it only reminded him of why they treated him with a certain tenderness about women. He was tougher than that, for Christ’s sake. Tough as a catcher’s mitt, as nails, tough as the outside of the Joe DiMaggio baseball his dad had given him just before he died eons ago and which lived on his desk now, tough as Bud’s ugly old toenail they all saw when he wore flip-flops.
“Oh, I have a plan,” Gabe said, and gave the screw one final, satisfying, decisive twist with the wrench, as he was locking it all into place even now. “I always have a plan.”
The plan was, in fact, already underway.
He’d launched it at 6:59 p.m. at Devil’s Leap yesterday.
Eden was shocked to find that she had to actually squeeze her way into the Misty Cat for the Chamber of Commerce mixer, but maybe she shouldn’t have been. The previous winter had worked over everyone’s nerves but good, what with Jamboree Street flooding into the music store, a giant redwood taking out Casey Carson’s chimney during a storm (she claimed skillful Feng Shui saved it from smashing the roof), and the short-lived threat of a nearby dam burstin
g and washing away neighboring towns.
Getting accidentally-on-purpose a little drunk at the mixer and calling it networking was the only logical response to all of that.
Eden always found the mixer worth her while—it was a great way to learn who was getting married or buried or having a Quinceañera or a Bat Mitzvah or was in the doghouse with a spouse, all traditional flower occasions—even if she had to pay Danny twenty bucks to hang with Annelise for a couple of hours while she socialized and did her homework about all of this stuff.
She maneuvered in past Dion Gomez from Allegro Music who was deep in avid conversation with Greta from the New Age Store, and waved to her dad, who was selling beer to the folks who just couldn’t bear to drink the wine. He was also managing the sound system, currently playing The Baby Owls, the band that had inadvertently given Glory Greenleaf a great big leg up in her career.
She arrived at the food table, helped herself to wine and one of the brownies stacked on the plate, and paused to admire a striking flyer taped to the wall above it—the paper divided into two rectangles, one black, one blue, the words Black & Blue in white across the middle. Beneath that was a date about a month from now. How dramatic. The Misty Cat hosted acoustic sets for a lot of rising bands on their way through from Oregon to the Bay Area.
At one time she would have known all of them. This band rang no bells at all. And that was life as a single mom.
Wine in one hand, brownie in the other, she turned around.
Her heart did a backflip so hard she nearly coughed. (“Hearts don’t backflip, Eden.”—Dr. Jude Harwood.)
Gabe Caldera was in the room.
Not only that, but he was wearing a suit and tie.
The impact was absurdly devastating. Maybe not better than a stripped-to-the-waist Gabe, but equivalently interesting.
He’d been principal at Hellcat Canyon Elementary for a few years, but she had literally never seen him at one of these events before.
She watched him weave through the crowd, smiling, lifting a hand in greeting at intervals—practically everyone had a kid or a grandkid in Hellcat Canyon Elementary—shaking hands, receiving and administering chummy back pats.
He was turning his head this way, scanning the place. Possibly looking, like all the reasonable adults present, for the wine.
Possibly looking for her.
Hope swept in like a riptide.
And it wasn’t until that very moment that she realized how desperately she’d feared, on a subterranean level, that she’d never get a chance to hear the end of a sentence begun two days ago at Devil’s Leap.
And how very, very much she wanted to hear it.
She’d had only two sips of wine, but as she watched him, she imagined him hurling aside all the people in his path like a linebacker to get to where she was faster. He probably totally could.
When he saw her, their eyes practically clinked together like wineglasses.
He made a beeline toward her, gracefully enough, not mowing anyone down.
She was pretty sure she didn’t breathe the entire twenty seconds.
He arrived in front of her and stood smiling.
And she was smiling.
They both seemed to need a second to adjust to each other’s presence.
“. . . a woman like me . . .” she prompted finally.
“. . . tough, but not as tough as she thinks she is. A little reserved, but that’s because the waters run deep, and she protects those waters fiercely. Passionate. Graceful.”
She stared at him, as dumbstruck as if he’d reached over and unhooked her bra.
He hadn’t missed a beat.
“But I’m only guessing.” His tiny, tilted smile was literally as sexy as a finger dragged slowly along the short hairs at her nape.
And from that particular recollection, memory spread like dawn over the land that her body was, in fact, a veritable map of pleasure. With little territories unexplored in what seemed like eons that could yield seismic jolts and electric currents of pleasure.
“Damn, Your Excellency, you don’t mess around,” she said finally.
His words were still kind of reverberating across her nerves. Shocking and delicious, like a strummed power chord. And just as invigorating.
She regarded him speculatively.
“I thought I’d cut to the chase,” he said, “as we both claimed to prefer it.”
“I guess I did say that.”
“And?”
She thought for a second.
“I guess I do like it.”
He smiled at that, slowly. The smile of a man whose risk had paid off in precisely the way he’d thought it would.
The crowd surged and heaved like a ball pit, and up popped the cheery face and body of Rhonda Grellman. “Hello, Eden! Oh, Gabe Caldera! Where have you been, you naughty man? It’s about time you showed your face at one of these events again. Come talk with us about the Hellcat Habitats fund-raiser. We have some amazing ideas.”
By “us” she meant her husband and a couple of the other board members.
Rhonda gave Gabe an encouraging tug, and off he went.
Eden would have watched him walk away just to savor that view, too, but she pivoted to a touch on her arm and found a smiling Ernie Digiulio, the best mechanic in Hellcat Canyon. “Eden, my wife and I want to talk to you about doing the flowers for my daughter’s wedding.”
Yay! A happy occasion. And lots more money!
“Oh, that’s fantastic, Ernie! Congratulations! Is it Paula or Emmy?”
Ernie had five daughters. This was the reason, he liked to declare, he’d never be able to retire: all those daughters, all those college educations, all those weddings. Eden was pretty sure Ernie never actually wanted to retire. Not as long as he was still able to hoist the hood of a car, rub his hands together and say, “What seems to be the problem?”
So Ernie plucked her from the crowd like a flower from a bouquet and delivered her to where his wife was standing, over by the front window, and soon she was lost in her favorite kind of conversation, one about flowers and celebration. She didn’t think about Gabe Caldera at all.
Except for wondering whether he was watching the back of her.
Or maybe her profile.
The entire back of her felt almost fuzzy with heat, as if she’d activated a heretofore unknown Gabe-sensing laser in her very cells.
About ten minutes—hereinafter her definition of eternity—they moved past each other on the way to the wine table.
And stopped in front of each other.
He said, “Forgot also insightful. Smart. Warm. Funny. Beautiful . . . scared yet?”
She looked up into his face searchingly.
His eyes glinted a wicked dare.
“You know that roller coaster at Frontier World that has a ninety-five-degree drop, and three loops?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I rode that thirteen times one summer.”
“Wow.”
“Got my name in the paper and everything.”
“That confirms practically everything I just said.”
“Didn’t scream or throw up even once.”
“You really can’t ask for anything more than that from a woman.”
She would have laughed, but the oxygen in the room had gone 100 proof, and she was kind of breathless. She knew for damn sure she couldn’t blame the wine.
And for about two seconds they stood, an island in the crowd, sort of smiling at each other, sort of basking in each other’s presence, and didn’t speak while a lot of invisible things seemed to be taking place between them. Conversation had reached shouting volumes, as it invariably did about an hour into these things. Eden could hear Casey Carson laughing uproariously over the murmur of the crowd. Glass of wine number three usually made Casey laugh that way. She deserved it tonight. She’d set the hair for twelve bridesmaids in a raucous octogenarian wedding today while Eden had done the flowers: calla lilies. Simple and beautiful, white as the bride
’s hair.
Badfinger’s “Day After Day” suddenly erupted from the speakers.
“Oh!” Eden said. It was an involuntary expulsion of delight. Her hand flew up to her heart and covered it.
“What’s the ‘oh’ for? Please say it’s because you just noticed and love my aftershave.”
“This song. I love this song,” she confessed. “It just gets me right here.” Which was similar to where Gabe “got” her, but with him points south, so to speak, were also engaged. “Dorky, maybe, but man.”
“Oh, yeah,” he agreed, loudly, given that was how anyone could be heard at the moment in the Misty Cat. “This one and ‘Baby Blue’ are a couple of the tunes I sing in the—”
“Gabe Caldera!” Meredith Blevins, head of the Hellcat Canyon Planning Commission, do-si-doed a few people to get to Gabe and lassoed him with a chummy hand through the elbow. “Come talk to Paul Stansfield. He’s thinking of running for school board next fall.”
He was steered away, and because that’s what people did at these things, he went, casting a wry glance over his shoulder.
Eden remained standing still.
Thoughtfully.
While all around her neighbors and friends milled.
She gave a start when her wineglass was gently removed from her hand by Casey.
“I hope you plan to replace that with a more interesting drink, Casey Carson. Otherwise you’re just stealing, and that’s not nice.”
Sometimes she forgot to use grown-up words when talking to adults.
“How many of those have you had?” Casey asked suspiciously. On a semishout. Pretty close to her ear.
“You know I can’t do more than one on a school night. Why?”
“Because you’re just kind of standing there by yourself staring into space with a sort of loopy smile on your face. I’ve never seen you stand still for longer than a second during one of these events. I was beginning to wonder whether Greta laced the brownies with pot again.”
Eden gave a guilty start. Where was Greta? She owned the New Age Store, which was thriving in this era of uncertainty for bookstores, which Eden thought must be due to some kind of magic spell and also because people will never not be willing to pay for a shot at hearing their futures predicted. But Greta had a way of reading auras at inconvenient times. She was a little worried hers might be pulsing red and pink, sporting long, vaporous cartoon arms looped around Gabe Caldera.
The First Time at Firelight Falls Page 7