Lightning Storm

by Anne McAllister

  ‘You been lying in wait all day?’ he asked sarcastically, rubbing a hand through salt-stiffened, tousled black hair. He looked irritable and harassed, his face sunburnt except where the zinc oxide covered his nose and cheekbones. Like a savage, Torey thought, with warpaint. And let sling her first arrow.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? Do you know how tired my grandmother is taking care of your son all day?’

  Jake’s jaw set in a hard line. ‘Where were you?’ he asked roughly.

  ‘Out.’ She hated it when he tried to put her on the defensive. ‘I was out. I was not hired to watch your child!’

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ Jake agreed wearily. ‘And you’d never lift a damned finger to help anyone else, would you? Not even your own grandmother?’

  ‘Me? So you could go out and play for two days? You must be out of your mind!’

  ‘I was working, damn it!’

  ‘Sure you were!’

  Jake’s eyes flashed fire, but he was silent, gritting his teeth in the face of her scorn. He turned abruptly towards Addie’s house. ‘If she’s as tired as you say, I’ll go get him right now.’

  ‘Not just yet.’ Torey grabbed his arm as he brushed past her and he spun around so they were scant inches apart. The heat from his sun-baked body warmed her and she stepped back instinctively. ‘I have more to say.’

  ‘Say it then,’ he said tersely, his body taut with restrained anger.

  ‘I don’t want you ever again to leave Scott over night at my grandmother’s while you entertain your women! What kind of father are you, anyway?’

  ‘A lousy one, according to you,’ Jake bit out, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

  ‘An irresponsible one at least,’ Torey agreed. ‘Don’t you care what kind of an example you set for that boy? Why don’t you give him to his mother?’

  ‘Because she doesn’t want him!’ There was fury in his voice.

  ‘Oh no?’ Torey said scornfully. ‘That’s not what she told me!’ She looked at him triumphantly.

  Jake stared, thunderstruck, his face paling. ‘You talked to Christy? When?’

  ‘Last night, while you were out with your latest lady love. Is that why she left you, Jake?’ she baited him. ‘Too many women?’

  ‘Damn you! What’d she want?’ he demanded, gripping her arm.

  ‘If you wanted to know, why didn’t you answer her letters?’ Torey jerked her arm away from him, rubbing it where his fingers had hurt. ‘She says she sent you four!’

  Jake shrugged, his eyes suddenly bleak. ‘Maybe she did. Did she say she wanted Scott?’ he asked, his voice threaded with anxiety.

  ‘I don’t know what she wanted,’ Torey snapped irritably. ‘She said she wanted to talk to you. About Scott among other things, I gather. She didn’t sound surprised when I said you were out. Did you spend a lot of nights away from home when you were married, too?’

  ‘Of course not!’ He kicked the brick patio in disgust. ‘And I wasn’t out with Lola either! Hell,’ he gave a snort of disgust. ‘Did you think I brought her home and called you up to babysit while I ravished her, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Well, I—’ Yes, that was precisely what she had thought he was doing, though she might have described it differently.

  Jake gave a bitter laugh. ‘What the hell kind of opinion of me do you have anyway?’

  ‘One based on experience!’ There, she was on safe ground now.

  Jake said a rude word. ‘You are unreal! Just because seven lousy years ago I made a pass at you when I thought you wanted to go to bed with me, you have me pegged as the world’s greatest villain!’

  ‘Seven years ago, nothing! Last night—’

  ‘Last night be damned! Everything you’ve been accusing me of is a product of your one measly experience with me seven years ago! That and a fertile imagination. You never forgave me for that night, did you? Why? Did you wish I had taken you to bed? Were you frustrated because I didn’t? And now, are you trying to make me out to be some sort of evil monster just because you were too young to know what you were doing then?’

  ‘No! I never—I—’

  ‘The hell you haven’t! All I’ve heard from you is how you were so young and immature then, and how you’ve changed, how you’ve grown up! Well, what makes you think I haven’t? What makes you think that I’m the same man you knew seven years ago? Don’t you think I might have grown up a bit too?’ He spun on his heel and strode away from her towards Addie’s back door, his shoulders set rigidly in anger.

  Torey closed her eyes and sank against the wall of the garage as she heard Addie’s screen door slam viciously behind him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  If Torey hadn’t expected Jake to take her dressing down to heart and promise faithfully to reform, neither had she expected him to go on the attack. But there was certainly no other word to describe what had just occurred between them. Of course everything he said was patently false.

  Wasn’t it?

  Torey shoved her hair back behind her ears wishing she’d had the sense to plait it so that it didn’t blow about and asked herself angrily again, It was false, wasn’t it? She chewed on her lip, wondering. What was it he had yelled?

  ‘Everything you’ve accused me of is based on your one measly experience with me seven years ago!’ Hardly. It was based on last night! And on all those previous days and nights when he had given her the come-on. Not to mention that summer when she was eighteen! She rocked backwards on her heels, deliberately remembering what had happened that summer. For years she had forced it out of her mind. Now, in the face of his fiery anger, she hesitantly decided to take another look.

  Stuffing her hands into the pockets of her shorts, she turned away from the house and went out the back gate to the alley and walked slowly down the hill towards the beach, her eyes on her toes and the badly cracked pavement. She had rarely watched the pavement when she was eighteen. She had been too busy watching Jake. She had never felt about anyone the way she felt about him from the very first time she saw him. The attraction was instantaneous.

  She had come down from her grandparents’ house the night of her arrival in California to enjoy her first walk along the shore. She had seen him then. He was standing with his back to her, his hands on his hips as he watched some surfers far out. Wearing nothing but khaki coloured swim trunks, he had looked like a bronze god, all muscle and sinew with a thatch of black hair ruffling the back of his neck. Her fingers curled into fists as she knew instinctively that she wanted to go up behind him and run her hands through his hair, then let them slide down over his shoulders and the ridge of his spine. Waves of heat had coursed through her as she stared. In eighteen years she had never felt anything like that before.

  Or since, she thought with an honesty that startled her. Perplexed, she wrinkled her nose. Was that really true? Hadn’t she felt such heat, such desire, for Paul? She stopped stock still on the edge of The Strand and considered this. She had loved Paul. She had felt warmth with him. Excitement. Passion. But flames? Spontaneous combustion?

  No, she thought slowly. There had never been anything quite like that. She could see Jake now, in her mind’s eye, as he had turned to see who had come up behind him. His light blue eyes were such a contrast to the rest of him that she was momentarily shocked, then even more attracted than ever. He had just looked at her, not speaking, his eyes saying more than her limited vocabulary could understand. They spoke of things that she, at eighteen was just beginning to comprehend.

  She stepped off the pavement into the sand, cool now that the sun had gone lower to spread an orange glow in the sky. Walking towards the pier she stopped to watch a doubles volleyball game in progress. Did Jake still play? That summer long ago she had watched him for hours, loving the way his muscles stretched and bunched as he leapt for the ball and spiked it into the opposing court, and the way the sun glinted off his sweat-drenched torso and the sand clung to the dark hairs of his chest and legs. Face it, she thought, ther
e’s nothing you didn’t like watching him do. In fact she kept her eyes on him all summer. She envied the women he dated, the board he surfed on, the food he ate. She kept a Pepsi can she knew he had drunk from until the day after their fateful date. It wasn’t just his looks that fascinated her, it was the faint aura of wickedness about him. He seemed to attract women like a magnet did metal shavings. She heard him joke with Mick about his escapades, though when he knew she was eavesdropping he said nothing at all. The bits she heard though brought both pain and pleasure. She hated that there were other women in his life. But what he did with them only fuelled her imagination for what someday he might do with her. The fantasies she had that summer were like none she’d had before or since!

  And finally there was the night Mick invited her along on their double date. She could hardly believe it. Talk about a dream-come-true! All day she had floated on a sea of nervous apprehension, dying to go, yet wondering if she dared, terrified of having to please J.B. But he had been pleasant during the concert, touching her back to guide her to her seat and slipping his arm around her shoulders on the way to the party. Exhilarated and tense, she had felt like a pressure cooker about to explode. The touch of his fingers made her shiver and, perhaps thinking she was cold, J.B. had drawn her more tightly against him. He liked her! She was sure he did! Perhaps he would take her out again, miss her when she went back east, write to her declaring his undying love! All the lovely possibilities had swum through her mind as they rode through the darkness to the party. And drowned shortly thereafter.

  Mortified, humiliated, all her dreams crushed by his precipitate lovemaking and her inability to handle it, Torey had turned him for a hero into a villain in one short night. By daybreak she had exaggerated his wickedness all out of proportion. She wanted him to be at fault so she didn’t need to recognise that she. might have truly led him on, however inadvertently, and that she might have been responsible for what happened because of the role she had cast him in all summer.

  The J.B. she had created was a fiction—the product of girlish imaginings and desires, fleshed out in Jake’s body and endowed with traits she had manufactured from overhearing snatches of conversation and gossip. She stopped and leaned against the cool roughness of a pier piling, looking back at Jake’s apartment. How much resemblance was there, she wondered, between the man who lived there and the one she had created? And why, if she had been so foolish at eighteen, was she compounding that foolishness now?

  Because, she thought, sinking down and wrapping her arms around her drawn-up knees, it made her feel more righteous that way. And more sure of her love for Paul.

  Paul. Her chin dropped on to her knees and she stared at the sand and bits .of broken shell beneath her feet. Everything she felt for Jake was so different than she had felt for Paul. Jake had been like summer lightning, slashing into her life, illuminating it for an instant. Then gone. And what was left was Paul.

  Paul was a hearth fire. Steady, dependable, there. Just as he had been that summer when she had come home from California. Singed by lightning, she had taken a new look at the young man with the wide grin and engaging sense of humour she had known all her life. He salved her badly damaged ego without even realising it, making her feel desirable, attractive, womanly. All the things that J.B. had not. She and Paul grew into adults together, loving and laughing, and their marriage had been good. Torey knew she would have been satisfied with it for the rest of her life. But it was not to be.

  And now, out of the blue, she was faced once more with Jake. To feel the same old attraction, the same foolish adolescent love she had felt years ago seemed absurd, almost like a repudiation for her love of Paul. And so, to defend it, and to protect herself from being hurt again, she had resurrected Jake’s old image. She had turned him into a womanising ne’er-do-well, all evidence aside.

  Hold on a minute, she told herself. What about Lola? What about Christy and the returned letters? Was that evidence or not? She wasn’t sure. On examination she had to admit that it didn’t seem likely he would have asked her to babysit while he ‘ravished’ that pretty young blonde. Scrupulous Jake who had hovered over her at the bar to defend her virtue from Tony hardly seemed likely to rush off and do some attacking of virtue on his own. In any case he seemed offended that she’d suggested it. She almost smiled recalling the look of outrage on his face. And Christy? Why had they got a divorce? There was no clear answer to that. Jake had never said. He hadn’t talked about her much other than to say she wasn’t a doting mother and wouldn’t want Scott. So why would he refuse to answer her? Unless ... she groaned, unless he still loved her and was afraid to let her back into his life. A pain somewhere in the region of her heart made her turn away from that idea. But she couldn’t erase it entirely. There was so much, too much, she didn’t know. And Jake was so very angry. She couldn’t actually even blame him.

  But what could she do about it? Even acknowledging their mutual attraction, did she dare try to get to know him better? Did she dare let herself fall in love?

  She lifted her head and watched as a surfer tried to ride a high rolling breaker. He teetered precariously seeming, any second, about to fall. Then, as Torey sucked in her breath, resigned to his disaster, he regained his balance and rode on. She let her breath out. He wobbled. Like me, she thought. If I dare.

  There would be no smooth ride with Jake. He had been a source of turbulence in her life since she had met him. To pursue a relationship with him now if indeed he would even talk to her now—meant expecting the waves to be rough. If she sat back and let him pass her by, she wouldn’t get hurt. But was that what she wanted? No, she decided. It was not.

  The surfer fell, sucked under the white foam, his board skittering across the line of breakers towards the beach. As Torey watched, he bobbed to the surface and swam in, grabbing the board and turning back into the surf again. Shaking water from his eyes, he flung himself down on the board and paddled directly into the oncoming waves. An object lesson, Torey thought wryly, getting to her feet and dusting off her shorts. Not every ride is a success. But you never became a surfer sitting on the beach. And you never got to know Jake Brosnan if you pretended you didn’t want to.

  Smiling, she recalled Addie’s words: ‘There’s a lot you don’t know.’ Too true, she thought as she headed towards the house. But I will know. I’m going to ask.

  ‘A lifeguard? What do you mean, he’s a lifeguard?’ Torey almost shrieked in the face of Addie’s complacent revelation. ‘You said he was an illustrator!’

  ‘He is. But he works part-time for the county as a lifeguard. A “recurrent” I think they call him. He’s a very good swimmer,’ Addie tacked on as though that explained everything.

  ‘I know he is. I know a lot of good swimmers, but that doesn’t mean they’re lifeguards!’ She couldn’t fathom it. Even though she had come home and asked immediately, ‘What was Jake working on today?’ she wasn’t prepared for the answer. She leapt out of the overstuffed chair and paced across the living room to stare unseeing out the bay window.

  ‘Well, Jake is. A good one, too. He got some sort of commendation last year for a rescue.’

  St. Jake again. But this time Torey didn’t reject that image out of hand. Before she had scorned anything good she had heard about him without stopping to consider whether she was justified. But now she remembered him, eyes blazing with fury as he shouted at her, his face almost as red as his trunks. Lifeguard trunks. She groaned. Damn, why hadn’t she noticed? She cracked her knuckles in frustration. ‘You mean he’s been out there being a lifeguard all weekend?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes. He usually gets calls on hot weekends and holidays. Whenever there are crowds at the beach.’ Addie lifted her shoulders gently. ‘I thought you knew that.’

  ‘No.’ Scott had babbled something about his dad working on the beach, but Jake painted on the beach, too. How was she supposed to know that this work was different? And she had accused him of playing all day! ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Addie
in a low voice. ‘I shouldn’t have gone sailing with Gino and left Scott with you. I should have stayed home or have taken him along.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Addie said briskly. ‘You didn’t promise to watch Scott. I normally do it without a thought. It’s a trade-off for Jake and me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Torey had a sinking feeling.

  ‘Poor boy, I impose on him dreadfully. He does all my grocery shopping, sees that the bills are paid, walks Maynard, takes him to the vet, keeps my car running. When I was in the hospital, he came to see me every day. When something breaks, Jake fixes it or knows someone who can!’ Addie smiled and Torey felt ill. So much for him taking advantage of her! ‘Besides, I like watching Scott. We have fun,’ Addie finished.

  ‘I know, but I should have helped you today,’ Torey wailed. ‘You weren’t ready for him for two full days!’ Not to mention last night, she thought. Nothing Addie had said so far absolved him of that. She licked her lips and dared to ask, ‘Who is this Lola?’

  ‘Oh, did you meet Lola?’ Addie asked, her face lighting with a smile. ‘Such a pretty girl.’

  Torey had registered that much. But that wasn’t what she wanted to know. She wanted to know who Lola was, more specifically, who she was to Jake! ‘Yes, she is. But who is she?’

  “Well, as I understand it, she’s from Jake’s home town. He sort of “keeps an eye on her”. At least that’s what he told me. Why?’ Torey thought she saw a twinkle in Addie’s eye. ‘Jealous?’ her grandmother asked.

  ‘No,’ she retorted quickly. Then, recalling her new resolution for honesty where Jake was concerned, she amended that to, ‘Curious mostly. I just wondered if she was his girlfriend.’

  ‘Hard to say,’ Addie replied, her eyes on the vegetables she was paring. ‘But I don’t really think so. That isn’t to say that he hasn’t dated her. I know he has. But mostly I think she’s just a family friend. She works as a cocktail waitress and sometimes things can get a little too rough for her on a Saturday night, Jake says. So he goes to pick her up.’