Love on the Rocks: A Heartswell Harbour Romance

by Mavis Williams

  “I am not slow, Svendrick,” Dorian fingers stilled on they keyboard as he heard Lucy’s low murmur. “I am normal. You, however, move at the speed of light.”

  “Zoe, this is Lucy. Very slow loyal sidekick.”

  “It’s a pleasure, Lucy,” Zoe greeted her. Dorian turned his head to see Lucy standing with a tray of bread in her arms, nodding at the tall woman with a halo of red hair framing her smiling face. Lucy’s dark hair was tied in a loose bun on the top of her head and she wore a tank top and shorts. He watched as her long legs carried her behind the counter to disappear into the kitchen, followed by Sven, still expounding on the million baking items he was called upon to create.

  Dorian turned back to the keyboard.

  “What kind of person makes a bet regarding another person’s well-being?” he typed onto the screen, Rory’s words coming back to echo in the silence between his thoughts. He would prove Rory wrong, no matter how wrong it was to gamble on Lucy’s welfare.

  “The ends justify the means,” he typed. “Or something like that.”

  “Whatcha writing?”

  He jumped, hastily hitting delete as Lucy plopped onto the chair beside him. She smelled like fresh bread and cinnamon, her eyes crinkling in the corners as she grinned at him. Her smile looked haunted, as if even fleeting moments of happiness gave her a tooth ache.

  “Just… stuff,” he said, channeling his inner adolescent.

  “Shouldn’t you be out in the world, fighting bad guys and making the world safe for drunks and orphans?”

  He blinked. She certainly had a knack for being blunt.

  “I haven’t seen a single drunk yet today,” he said, hoping he wasn’t looking at one. “Just the ordinary run-of-the-mill good citizens of Heartswell Harbour, delivering bread and good cheer.”

  “You playing hooky?” she asked.

  “Just writing. It’s my lunch break.” He glanced at his watch.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” she started to rise but he put his hand on her arm and she sat back down, staring at his hand like it was shackling her to the table. He gently removed it.

  “Can I buy you lunch?” he asked gently, afraid she was about to leap away like a frightened rabbit.

  “I usually drink my lunch,” she said.

  “You should try a sandwich instead.”

  “Sandwiches, like sobriety, are overrated.”

  He studied her silently, sensing a deeper sorrow underlying her quick sarcasm. He longed to peel away the layers of her defences, and not just to win a stupid bet.

  “What are you writing?” She changed the subject, her eyes slipping away from his gaze. Before he could answer, she turned the laptop to face her, scanning the screen with a growing curiosity. Lots of people knew he wrote under the pen name of Vanessa Ryder, but it wasn’t something he advertised, especially not when he was in uniform.

  “This is… a novel?” she asked, frowning.

  “It is.”

  “It says Vanessa Ryder at the top…”

  “It does.”

  “What are you, some kind of closet romance novelist or something?” she smiled, pointedly looking at his uniform, badge, the gun at his hip.

  “I am.”

  Her eyes were the color of warm whiskey, but he didn’t tell her that. He simply drank her in, enjoying the surprise on her face.

  “I’m an incurable romantic,” he said.

  “With a gun.”

  “Only when I’m on duty. The rest of the time its all roses and slow dancing.” He winked at her, turning the laptop back around and closing it firmly. “Don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.”

  “Vanessa Ryder books are at Grim’s,” she said. “My mother reads them, and I’ve seen them at the Book Nook. I don’t think its much of a secret.”

  “I just like to be subtle,” he winked. “Keep a low profile. It’s tough being famous in a small town.”

  She looked around sceptically. “Hiding from your fans?”

  “I do have a small following,” he said, feigning affront. “It’s always weird at a book signing when readers find out I’m a man.”

  “I bet,” she laughed. “I thought all romance writers were women.”

  “Have you read any of them? Are you a closet Vanessa Ryder fan, shocked to find out the truth?” He couldn’t help being curious. He suddenly wished that she had read his books, that she would understand that part of himself through reading his fiction. It made him blush, even as he asked.

  She snorted. “I am not a romantic,” she said, brushing her hands at non-existent crumbs on the table. “I am the anti-Christ of romance.”

  He laughed.

  “Although, I have agreed to host a wedding in my soccer field, so I’ll have to gird up my loins in the matrimonial department.”

  “Tom and Jo?” he smiled. “I knew they would ask you, didn’t I?” She laughed as he mimicked Tom, complete with the shrug and question.

  “Do all your books end with a wedding?” She grimaced as she said it, like the word left a bad taste in her mouth.

  “Of course, Happily Ever After. That’s the incurable romantic’s dream.”

  She sat in silence, looking like she was about to cry. He touched her hand, wrapping his fingers around hers impulsively. Her eyes welled with tears and he could see her clench her jaw, fighting her emotions as he rubbed his thumb over her knuckles.

  “I know life isn’t a fairy tale, Lucy,” he said softly. “But there is always hope for something better.”

  “Like a knight in shining armour?” she sniffed. “Slaying dragons and rescuing damsels?”

  He was about to answer when Sven appeared beside the table, clapping a giant hand on Dorian’s shoulder.

  “Is zee policier writing zee naughty stories again?” Sven beamed at them both as Lucy pulled her hand away, blinking away the tears that make her eyes shine like bright pennies.

  “Have you read Dorian’s books, Sven?” Lucy stood, her voice rough. “Is that where you get your ideas for date night with Ruby?”

  “Reading zee English gives me headaches,” Sven shrugged his big shoulders like tectonic plates shifting. “Ruby gives me zee romance, no books needed.”

  Lucy shook her head as she ducked under Sven’s arm and headed toward the door. There was a lingering sadness in her eyes that Dorian wanted to erase, to delete the story that had put it there, but he merely waved as Sven and Lucy left the Lighthouse together, leaving him with the warmth of her hand in his palm.

  Eleven

  Jeff had never been good at anniversaries, not that they’d had many, but still. It seemed unfair to her that he remembered this one. Especially since he wasn’t around to celebrate it. He just chose to do it the only way Jeff could do anything anymore, by appearing behind her eyeballs and punching her in the brain stem. Or the hippocampus. Or wherever it was that she carried her guilt and sorrow and gut-wrenching shame.

  Yeah.

  Wham.

  Right there.

  At first, she didn’t really know what day it was, except of course that she knew it was spring, which was bad, and she knew it was after the first of May, which was worse, and then she realized, painfully, that it was May 10. The day her life as a drunken loser ended, and her life as a drunken murderer began.

  She spent the day trying to dodge him.

  Jeff.

  The dead guy punching her inside her head.

  The drinking began at noon.

  She was an utter failure at dodging that fist, mainly because she needed it. She needed the pain to keep her guilt alive. Without the guilt, she felt she would just dissolve and drift away into nothing.

  “Dog,” she said. “Today is the day… it’s May 10. It’s been two years. I wish I could die.”

  Dog gave her the exact amount of sympathy she deserved by wandering off and peeing on the fire escape. The sun was going down as she sprawled herself on the bottom of the slide. She had agreed to host a wedding in the soccer field. She imagined it would be j
ust like the wedding she never had, but she hadn’t been able to tell Tom and Jo that her fiancé was dead and it was her fault. That was yesterday. A lifetime ago, before today, which was the anniversary of the day Jeff died.

  It was her fault.

  She couldn’t believe that she had smiled yesterday. That she had somehow forgotten that today would arrive. That she’d had conversations with people, and agreed to a wedding, and had even looked at Dorian and felt an attraction she knew he would never return. What had she been thinking?

  She lay flat, prone, spread-eagled, waiting for … what? The bolt from the blue that would, should, finish her off?

  Cloudless sky. Just her luck.

  Her first indulgence in preserving her suffering was searching for and finding his photograph. The one they took in the photo booth at the mall, like happy people. Happy, young, carefree people who didn’t deserve to die.

  One of them still didn’t deserve to die, but it was too late for him.

  She left the playground and shuffled back into the school, shutting the door on the echo of children’s laughter she always heard in the crunch of playground gravel. She thought, briefly, of making a sign for the door to keep people away. Something like, “Day of the Dead. Go Fuck Yourself”, but she knew Ida would probably be the first to read it and she was already far enough on the road to hell that she didn’t need to be dragging any lonely six-year olds with her.

  She settled for simply closing the doors, hoping that would be enough of a barricade to ensure a tiny bit of privacy as she faced this day of days. She stopped in the girls’ washroom, reaching into the water tank behind the toilet the third stall from the door. The whiskey toilet. Slightly chilled. Mumsy would never find it there.

  She trudged, glass in hand, to her trunk of Misguided Memories and Horrible Harbingers of Doom…

  “It’s a good name, Dog,” she explained, lifting the lid and breathing in the musty aroma of old memories. “Items of great emotional import deserve to be named grandly, signifying their weightiness in the fabric of the universe.”

  Dog snuffled.

  She dug around in the trunk through photographs, jewellery, old journals. She lifted a small envelope, weighing it in her hand surprised that something so tiny could crush her so completely.

  She sniffed, wiping her hand across her eyes.

  The photo in the envelope was black and white, a long strip with four images of Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. His steady smile, a confidence in his mouth and his eyes and his tousled hair that allowed him to look simply… happy… all the time. She looked happy too, leaning over his shoulder with her cheek pressed against his.

  She ran her finger over the images. She could just see the dot of light that was her engagement ring on her hand. Such a tiny thing, reduced to a pixel of light on a photograph of two people who no longer existed.

  “I still exist,” she muttered to Dog. Dog pretended to care by diligently licking his privates, making snuffling noises that reminded her of plugged drains and sinus infections.

  She mixed another drink.

  The night wore on as she re-lived that last day.

  The party they went to, the guy who flirted with her, the argument on their way home. He was jealous, she was confused, it meant nothing, just some drunk guy who put his arm around her. They were both too drunk to make much sense.

  She remembered how she had raged at him. The sound of the car squealing out of the drive. The silence of the house rushing in like a vacuum.

  Until the police showed up at the door.

  Until it was too late.

  Her final indulgence into the well of despair in which she preserved her deceased fiancé was the Phone Call.

  Ah, the Phone Call.

  Ill-advised. Poorly timed. Cruel, even.

  The Phone Call had happened before.

  Birthday. Christmas. Thanksgiving. All the moments when Jeff’s sister would be thinking about Jeff. Thinking about Lucy. When she was sober she knew it was wrong, but when she was drunk she couldn’t help herself. She mostly didn’t even try.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. There was another human being on the other end of the phone, another human who knew what she had done.

  “It’s me. It’s…um…Lucy.”

  Silence.

  “It’s… um… I just wanted…”

  “I know what you want Lucy, and if you call again…” Sarah’s voice shivered down the line. “You just have to stop, okay?”

  “I don’t think I can.” Honesty seemed the best defence. She really, truly didn’t think she would ever be able to stop. “I just… it was today. And. I thought…”

  “What, Lu?” This is what she needed. She needed the heat of anger to stab her, to put her in her place, to pierce her where it hurt.

  It hurt all over.

  “What did you think? Or are you just drunk… again… and looking for a shoulder to cry on?” The voice was fuzzy. Or no, the phone, she was pressing the phone against her forehead. She took a swig of her drink, the ice clinking merrily in the glass like it used to do before she had destroyed everything.

  “I knew it. Drunk. And looking for forgiveness.”

  “Don’t hang up,” Lucy whispered, holding the phone at arm’s length.

  “OK, Lucy. Here goes. You didn’t kill him. You didn’t put him in the car that night. You didn’t make him die, okay?”

  “Sarah… please…”

  “You were both drunk. He’s the one who chose to drive.”

  “I should have stopped him,” she whispered. Please tell me its my fault, she screamed inside her head. Please hate me, blame me, see me.

  “Get over it,” the voice sounded tired, and distant, and not connected to anything real. “And don’t call again.”

  Lucy lowered the phone to the floor, sitting with her head against her knees.

  “Don’t hang up,” she whispered long after the dial tone cut off.

  Dog looked up as she started sobbing. He shuffled over and licked her hand, licked the phone that seemed to have nothing to offer. Dog liked the saltiness of her tears, even though he wasn’t crazy about how tightly she grasped him, or how she seemed to forget his very unforgettable name.

  “Sarah. I’m so, so sorry.”

  ✽✽✽

  Hours later, she picked herself stiffly off the floor and looked at the number on the phone. She had made The Phone Call… again… to Jeff’s sister. She stared at the phone, then decided to go outside.

  “Sarah is Jeff’s sister,” she told Dog, slurrily, as she grabbed a sweater and put the whiskey bottle in the bucket and pulled on her wellies… solid Irish footwear, courtesy of Mumsy… and staggered herself outside where she was surprised to find it was nighttime. “It’s nighttime, Dog. His sister. I shouldn’t call his sister.”

  Never mind that they had been best friends. Never mind that you should share your grief with your best friend. Never mind that your best friend hates you for killing her brother.

  Never mind.

  “Never mind, Dog. I didn’t kill him.” She looked up at the stars. It must be past midnight. The Day was over and The Phone Call had been made and nothing was any different. “I just didn’t stop him from dying. I need to make a garden.”

  She welcomed the sudden surge of purpose that invaded her already invaded blood stream. Where tears made no difference, surely digging would. She was seized by the intensity of focus. She would dig in the earth. She would reclaim her humanity with the creation of the Community Garden. She would plant and grow and reap and sow…

  “Or maybe the sowing has to come first,” she muttered, wondering belatedly why she wasn’t using a shovel. Her fingernails ached from the dirt compacted beneath them. Dog was nowhere to be seen. She sat back on her haunches and sighed mightily.

  “Sarah was his sister,” she said softly.

  “Jeff was her brother,” she whispered.

  “I killed everything,” she sighed.

  Dog suddenly appeared as a
darker blot on a dark landscape, loping toward her across the soccer field. Lights suddenly illuminated the field, coming from the direction of the parking lot. Lights illuminated Dog, jogging toward her, grinning. Illuminated several holes in the earth with small piles of dirt strewn randomly across the field. Illuminated the overturned bucket and empty whiskey bottle. Illuminated her hands, streaked with earth and blood and a missing sense of purpose.

  “How illuminating,” she said to Dog, wondering why her throat hurt and why her mouth was so dry and why her face felt like a week-old wet tea bag.

  “Lucy my dear, it’s a bit late for howling at the moon, don’t you think?” A nice voice. A deep, manly voice which surely came from a chest pleasingly furred with man-fur and a strongly thumping heart.

  Forget it, she thought. You’ll probably just kill him.

  She turned around, tippling off her haunches to land on her bum and throwing out her arm just in time to save herself from falling completely over. It was Ole Lazy Eye. Dorian. The handsome, if somewhat irksome, police office who kept showing up unannounced and uninvited.

  “Not howling,” she said. “I don’t want you here.”

  “You don’t have to want me, my dear. But you do have to stop yelling.” He crouched down beside her. He smelled like leather, and wood smoke and beard.

  “I doubt that I smell like beard,” he said. “Seeing as I don’t have one.”

  She smiled at him and began to sob.

  “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m so sorry you don’t have a beard.”

  He pulled her to her feet. She bumped against him and pressed her face against his chest. It was all uniform and buttons and badge. He wrapped his arms around her and she snuggled her head against him. She felt the beating of his heart against her ear, a fine quality in a man.

  “Wasn’t yelling,” she mumbled. Maybe Lazy Eye wasn’t so bad after all.