Page 37 of Justice for Radar

Her soft utterance was a green light as far as I was concerned, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to move carefully where she was concerned. She’d been through a lot, and after watching Marlin with Faith and Charity with Galahad, I knew I needed to tread carefully. I didn’t know how shit was supposed to work – her being in Texas and me in Florida, but I had a will and where there was a will there was a way.

Was I crazy? Maybe, probably, but I felt something when it came to Justice. She was something different – a breath of fresh air, cool and sweet, fragrant with flowers and something like fruit.

I wanted to taste her so fuckin’ bad but I could hold back. Nothing got accomplished that was worth accomplishing by rushing.

We finished our drinks and talked softly for a few minutes about different directions our lives could have taken in order for us to meet much earlier and under different circumstances. Laughing at some of the ridiculousness, both agreeing it would have still had to have been after I’d had the girls and even after Marisol. I loved that woman, I missed her fiercely, and I wouldn’t trade my time with her for the world. I tread carefully around my feelings on that, but Justice picked up on it and she smiled gently, the serenity of an angel on her face and she got it. She understood and let me have it with no sign of jealousy.

She had a grace about her, a soothing and quiet way that was somber on the surface and I liked that. I liked that a lot. There was something just so damn appealing about it.

Probably because my life wasn’t anything remotely quiet, or soothing; but then again, I sort of thrived on chaos and dynamic situations.

There was another couple or two that slipped out of the tasting room and a pair that arrived only moments before the tour was set to begin, slipping into the tasting room and giftshop to get their tickets and right back out onto the porch as a young woman, skin smooth and perfect, dark and dusky, stepped onto the porch, her natural hair in glossy tight curls held back by a headband. She was dressed in a pair of tight jeans rolled at the cuff, her black distillery tee shirt tucked in and neat. She smiled at us and called out, “Good afternoon! And welcome to the Sugarland Distillery walking tour! I’m Aneesha Thomas, and my family owns the mansion, the grounds, and the distillery and boy do we have a history and tour for you!”

I slipped an arm around Jussy’s waist and gave her hip a gently squeeze and she looked over at me, her look one of surprise at first, then her expression settled into something like pleased before she turned her attention back to the tour guide.

I’d been here before, a while back with the rest of the club, and we’d taken the tour, so I knew what to expect.

Itwasa hell of a story. The history of the house was one thing, but it was the Thomas family’s history that made the story fantastic. It seemed that Mrs. Thomas senior, that would be Aneesha’s dad’s mother, did a bunch of genealogy research up there in Connecticut where they were from. She’d gone way, way, back and had discovered some family roots among the slaves of the Sugarland estates. Some of those ancestors having been part of the uprising and revolt that wiped out the landowners back in the day.

Her son was pretty successful in the distilling industry up in Connecticut and as a favor to his mother, when the Thomas family had come down to Florida on a family vacation, he’d swung by here to take pictures of the place whereupon he’d found that it was for sale and that the house – a historical landmark – was in dire need of proper repairs and the like.

He’d gone home, his wheels turning, went to his partners at the distillery up there and they’d hatched a plan to buy the place and thus Sugarland got its second wind.

There was a certain poetic justice to it. The descendants of the slaves of this place buying it, fixing it, and turning a more than tidy profit with it all these years later.

We went around the house, Aneesha telling the story, before we stopped at the hanging tree off the house’s back left corner. It was a great big gnarled old thing draped with Spanish moss that drifted ghostly in the light breeze out here.

From the house’s history, we were invited to come back for one of their ghost tours they held every night of October for Halloween, before we were led to the processing barn for the sugar cane.

There we were each handed a piece to suck and chew on and it was a treat watching Jussy’s face light up with surprise. Not a whole lot of people got to encounter raw sugar cane, and it was something else.

We were taken through the whole process; from the cane, past the copper kettles and how they worked all the way through to bottling and labeling. Justice took photos at every opportunity. Aneesha made sure we knew we could get a free drink with the cost of admission, hoped that we had a good time, said to come back and visit again, and departed.

“That was fantastic,” Justice declared, and I grinned.

“Thought you might like that,” I said.

We went back inside to retrieve our bag of purchases and then wandered back out to the bike. The sunset would be spectacular by the time we reached Ft. Royal. I could just feel it… so I got our things stashed in the saddlebags and got us underway headed back home.

I parked at the marina.

Justice sucked in a deep breath and let it out, taking her hands from around me and planting them atop her thighs as she stared out over the water.

“Come on, let’s stash some of what you got on – your purse and jacket, shoes and the like, with the bike and take a stroll. Get your toes in the sand.”

“That sounds lovely,” she said.

We made room and locked everything up tight. She left her purse but kept her phone in her back pocket, and we went down the nearby steps fingers linked.

The sunset was spectacular, the sky a golden color, fading into peach, up into pinks and lavenders, breathtaking, like her, as she stared out over the water and teased some loose hair blowing along one of her cheeks behind her ear.

I snapped a picture, and she took a second to snap out of her reverie to turn my direction.

“Did you just take my picture?”

I grinned. “Sure did. I want to remember you just like this,” I said.

She smiled and her cheeks flushed just the prettiest of pinks a near perfect match for the sky.

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