Doug approached Penny from behind and put his hands affectionately on her arms. “Get everything sorted out?”
“Please, Mom, please,” the boys continued to plead.
Penny rolled her eyes and reached out and touched Christina’s hand, “I’m glad we had a chance to meet and talk.”
“Mom! Please, please, please, please.”
“Thank you, Penny. I appreciate your sharing things with me. I feel…well…what can I say. Doug…” Christina extended her hand, “I am very happy to have met you.” Doug would never realize how much.
As she left Penny and Doug, Christina had to refrain from running the distance to the dive shop. She was simultaneously weak with apprehension and alive with a feeling of exhilaration. Drifting lazily beside the dock, the sight of Clay’s boat created music through Christina’s heart, a melody to which words were yet to be written. She stopped at the top of the marina, hesitation giving caution to her impulses. What could she say that would not sound stupid? How could she hope to recapture his trust? How could she prove that she was more than a foolish, suspicious school girl? So many thoughts were running through her mind, thoughts of both recrimination and doubt. If Clay cared, if her leaving had really mattered as Penny suggested, then… Christina’s thoughts broke and fell away as her feet began to mechanically move forward.
Her hand began to slowly trace the texture of the railing as she moved expectantly down the dock ramp but as she approached the weather bleached building the sight of the sign on the shop struck Christina’s hopes to the ground.
“Closed until September 22. Clay on assignment, Joe taking a nap. Keep all emergencies a secret until we either return or wake up.”
“September 22.” She would be gone again entrapped within her fall term responsibilities at the University far away in Seattle. She didn’t even know where Clay lived; where Joe lived. She felt dumb, very, very dumb and self-recrimination reclaimed her thinking.
Chapter 23
In an act of near desperation, Christina did not leave the dock but rather began to knock on the shop’s heavy door, its bamboo shade drawn against her view. The sound was hollow. The door rattled with an empty despair, a dilapidated wind chime playing in the breeze her only response. Touching one of the delicate glass pieces of the chime she stilled its movement for a moment between her fingers before releasing it back to the wind and turning to begin the long walk back to the Office of Registry where she had left the car.
Maybe Mr. Pennwalter knew about Clay’s whereabouts she speculated. Maybe Arthur would know. Of course, Arthur would know. Wouldn’t Clay have to be invited to the presentation ceremony? It only seemed logical to her. Her hope reignited, her steps quickened but doubt over Clay’s reported shunning of such events accompanied the promising thought.
…
Mr. Pennwalter gave Christina little encouragement when he said he had heard Clay was working on a new photographic assignment on the other side of the island, but he didn’t know where. “Or maybe I’m thinking of the one he mentioned last month…hum….” His doubt disclaimed his speculation and Christina left the office unsure of where to go. If she went home, she wouldn’t be able to get away from Agatha for the entire afternoon. Penny; maybe she could go by Penny’s house. She would feel foolish but Penny would understand.
Christina realized within minutes that she did not remember where Penny lived and that she was just driving without direction. The coast road was familiar to her but she could not locate the primitive side-road on which Clay had taken her the day she first saw Penny and Clay together. Looking for it became fruitless and realizing after a half of an hour that her driving was without purpose she began to look at the passing beaches. Being the off season, the beaches were largely deserted and Christina stopped the car for lack of knowing what to do next.
She had encountered Clay on a beach like the one she was now parked at and he had kissed her, held her, and pressed his needs against her for the first time in what now seemed to have been a different life. The water, the sea, her memories beckoned her from the car.
On the beach several couples were napping and some reading in the shade of trees and a young mother was patiently trying to organize a lunch break for her five active children. The woman humorously rolled her eyes as Christina passed. Her children were turning the event into a sandy epicurean adventure full of noise and activity.
Nearing the water Christina removed her sandals and let the surf wash its textured greeting across her feet and ankles. The sun warmed through her sundress and the soft roar of breakers rhythmically calmed her thoughts. Both she and Clay had participated in a confusing, misleading drama that led them to be overly defensive and guarded about their feelings. Hesitation and doubt had made them act like children rather than adults. As adults, however, if she could find Clay and talk to him, they would try to recapture some level of honesty and openness. They had found it in the early morning hours on the boat. Surely, if their crippling pride could be removed by truth, they could find it again.
Over the noise of the sea and the playful laughter of the children, Christina thought for a moment that she heard her name being called. She pulled herself from her thoughts and turned. The children up the beach ran back and forth like small birds escaped from a pet store owner. No one else was in sight. She smiled in empathy for the mother and turned back to the surf.
“Christina!” The sound of her name became clearer, stronger, its tone so familiar that she was afraid to turn and concede to her imagination. She stood frozen and shut her eyes as he called her name again. “Christina, wait….”
“It’s Clay, oh my god, please let this be true…” She whispered the words silently to the sea.
He reached her, his breathing strong with having run the distance from her car, his hands grasping her arms in powerful possession. “Christina…”
A sense of disbelief guiding her body and clouding her thinking Christina jerked herself around to face him.
“Clay, …I…” Words were lost in the sight of his face and she fought to marshal her emotions into some sense of order. The depths of Clay’s eyes had that speculative, wondering look that held the promise of a smile; the smile that could warm his entire face and rush reassurance and security across her inner doubt. His mouth in repose, he was waiting only for permission from her.
Her gaze flooding over his features, Christina ventured, “I talked with Penny…she…ah….”
“I saw Penny and Doug too, Christina,” Clay injected. “We’ve both made some….” His voice faltered as he was increasingly caught within her gaze, “…pretty….” His face began to lower to hers, “…stupid…”
Christina’s lips moved to greet Clay’s.
“…assumptions.” His lips fell silent as their mouths sought refuge from the loneliness they both felt.
“Clay, it’s important for me to tell….” Christina’s lips parted just enough to almost inaudibly mumble the words.
“You still talk too much,” his lips burned over hers, their embrace controlled only by their awareness of the sound of children up the beach.
Christina struggled against his vice-like hold. She sought air and inner control against the heat of his body.
“No Clay…no, I don’t talk enough…you don’t talk enough. That’s why all of this happened. I had a million questions I wanted to ask you, things I needed to know, that I still need to know.”
Clay was still holding her firmly. “What matters now Christina is now! You’re here and I’m here and I want you to promise me that you won’t ever leave me again. I need you Christina, I…love you. I’ve loved you from the first moment that I met you.”
Christina’s heart erupted and filled her with a feeling of emotion that promised to overtake her. She touched his face, a smile highlighting the tears that glimmered across her lashes.
“I love you too Clay…oh so very much and across so much time. Hold me, hold me, hold me.” Her face turned against the hardness of his che
st and her hands lay against the security of his upper arms. “I’ve been so foolish,” she murmured.
“Oh, Christina, don’t…please, there isn’t fault, there is only us now, us and tomorrow and all of the days after that.” Clay moved her away from him and looked deeply into her eyes, down across her mouth and into her neck where the antique locket caught the sun on its ivory surface.
His fingers reached towards the small pendant. “You’re wearing the locket.”
Christina nodded and touched it, almost self-consciously.
Clay’s fingers moved to grasp the small portrait of the young Spanish woman and his fingers brushed lightly over Christina’s breasts. His voice, burnished with emotion, Clay looked humbly at the delicate work of art and then back into Christina’s eyes. “I wanted to write to you a hundred times, send you something that would make you understand…but I couldn’t trust my heart to any courier.”
A tender smile gave Clay’s face an almost child-like sincerity and Christina realized, in that moment that she would indeed, never leave Clay again. Her hand moved to touch his and their bodies pressed into a union of commitment. As they joined in an embrace that spoke of a union far greater than she could have ever imagined, Christina could feel the locket that had now been warmed by Clay’s hand, being pressed hard into her skin as it was captured between their bodies.
In some abstract way she felt she and Clay had finished the young Spanish lovers’ quest and a 360 year old destiny had come to completion.
“Clay…I….”
“Christina, shhh, he hushed. I’ll have to take the rest of my life to convince you of that.”
They both laughed and Clay kissed her back into quietness.
About Della Kensington
Della Kensington is the survivor of multiple forms of cancer. She died several years ago from a cardiac arrest and after forty minutes of CPR was resuscitated in an event medical staff termed a "miracle"; She has raised seven children, has six grandchildren, and has had multiple careers which have included being family and child therapist, a human resource administrator, a cancer resource and support specialist, and she has been the vice president of a major construction company.
She attended several colleges, has a master's degree in Social Work, has traveled the world, backpacked the Pacific Northwest mountains, is a licensed pilot, a skilled sailor, has tutored at a college in England, physically built her own homes, has had showings of her art in West Coast galleries and is currently involved in works of charity and fund raising while, at the same time, becoming the director of a new art gallery in the riverport city of Portland, Oregon.
Throughout the creation of this rich tapestry of experience and skill she has been a spiritual link between the four people her pseudonym, Della Kensington, represents; four people—two couples—who, in the midst of childrearing and career growth, came together thirty-two years ago with a vision of writing a romance novel in a an era of a quickly growing genre market. After having been, at the time, married for over twenty years each and having been friends for a decade, the joint writing of a novel became a clandestine escape from the tasks of raising multiple teenagers, the pressures of disparate careers, and the challenges and demands involved with their own aging parents.
Their first romance novel, The Courier of Love became a blending of their senses of storytelling through a genre quite unlike their own separate reading interests in biographies, science, English history and nature. They came together weekly to write, compare their individual efforts, and to proceed with an endeavor they kept a secret from their children, extended family members and closest friends. The novel was finished within a year and as the four friends became increasingly involved in separate careers and the responsibilities and demands of life, the novel was put away on a shelf.
Over the next thirty years—as their separate lives presented a buffet of richness, sadness, joy, loss, adventures, and serious illnesses—the couples remained friends, using the names of their novel's characters in private jokes and pranks, and occasionally revisiting the idea of publishing their novel about a wild and youthful romance overlaid across a tapestry of archeological adventure.
One year ago, in 2015, the couples—now in their mid-seventies—met over dinner and made the decision to revisit their youthful vision of publishing their book and to at last set free their long held secret. In the process of revising their romance novel, a new story—story about the children borne of the loving and passionate couple in their first novel—came to life and is currently proceeding as a second novel by Della Kinsington titled The Painting—the sequel to The Courier of Love.
Together the two couples who comprise the collective mind of Della Kensington, have been married over 100 years. Who would be more qualified to write a story about love that transcends time?
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