Page 64 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
There would be booze on the beach, a lot of it, and weed, also a lot, and yeah, I was worried. It was the first time my little chick was jumping out of the nest. But he had a good head on his shoulders. Even if he did partake, there would be adults keeping an eye out, and Catherine’s was two short blocks from the beach. He’d be okay. I could trust the town to take care of my kid.
And thanks be to Bonfire Night, because Roman and I had the night to ourselves for the first time. Tonight I wouldn’t have to leave his warm bed and his warmer arms to get dressed and return to the Sea-Mist. I could wake up with him in the morning. We could have our first morning sex.
“Yes,” Roman answered and picked up my hand to kiss it, “wearealready celebrating. But now we need champagne to do it. Let’s stop by the market—I need to run in and grab the filets I set aside for us, anyway.”
We were cooking in, even for a celebratory dinner. We both enjoyed cooking, and we’d decided it was more romantic to make a meal together than to sit in a restaurant with an audience.
“Okay, sounds good. Let’s get strawberries for the champagne, too.”
Roman grinned his beautiful, warm, wholehearted grin. “I like the way you think.”
TWENTY-FIVE: A New Book
That night, after we dropped Wyatt off at Catherine’s for the bonfire, Roman and I made a beautiful meal for two. I baked a quick rustic bread in his Dutch oven and roasted fresh asparagus spears with a balsamic glaze, and he grilled two gorgeous, fat filets to perfection. Beforehand, Roman put an LP on his turntable: Sam Cooke. We both danced and sang while we worked—him at the grill and me in the kitchen, but still together, watching each other through the windows.
When dinner was ready, he opened a bottle of pinot noir, and I spread a linen cloth over his backyard table and lit two candles. Sam Cooke had finished crooning, and now the Platters played over our meal. I don’t know whether it was the music, or the delightful calm that had settled over us since we’d left the county treasurer’s office, or we were simply focused on the delicious meal, but we didn’t talk about serious or important things while we ate. We reminisced about long-ago Bonfire Nights, we talked about the ways Bluster had changed while I was away, and the ways it hadn’t. Just aimless, comfortable chat.
It was more than small talk. It was another of those tiny intimacies, a casual, seemingly inconsequential togetherness that means so much more below its surface. It was two people growing closer. Falling in love.
After dinner, when dark had fallen and the night’s cool swept in from the ocean, we blew out the candles and carried the remains of our meal into the kitchen. We’d decided to have our dessert of champagne and strawberries in the living room.
There is something about entering a brightly lit kitchen after a candlelit outdoor meal I find deeply cozy. A powerful contentment fills me as I step from the dark into the light. Even if I’m in a bad mental place, buried in worries and distractions,that moment is calming. When I’m already content, I’m flooded with the kind of serenity that demands a sigh like a purr.
That’s how I felt that night, as Roman took the linens to his laundry room and I stood at the sink and started rinsing dishes. Flooded with peace and purring like a milk-drunk kitten.
As I stood at his kitchen sink, preparing our dishes for the dishwasher, the window over the sink was open a few inches, enough to let in the fragrant waft of breeze without pulling too much chill into the room. A beautiful, elaborate suncatcher, made of stained glass, dangled from the ceiling, twisting in the breeze and sparkling in the soft gleam of the kitchen lights. Though this was larger and much more intricate, it reminded me of those little yarn things we made in grade-school art class, around second or third grade, where we wrapped different colors of yarn around crossed popsicle sticks. The name for them escaped me that night, as I watched the suncatcher throw the light around the room, but the memory of making them did not, and I smiled.
Those I’d made when I was seven had still been hanging in my bedroom window, all faded to grey, when Wyatt and I arrived at the Sea-Mist. I’d packed them away without a thought when I’d cleared out the room for Wyatt, but now I recalled how happy I’d been to be able to make something pretty with my own hands.
“You look happy,” Roman said, his voice a low rumble, as he came up behind me and slipped his arms around my waist.
I leaned back into his embrace, and he tucked in close to press his lips to my neck. Months and months of stress was slipping away, like a fog fading into new sunlight. “I am. I was watching this gorgeous suncatcher and remembering a little art project I did in grade school. It’s a good memory. The things I made weren’t anywhere near as beautiful as this, they were just yarn and popsicle sticks, but they looked a little similar.”
“Ojo de Dios,” he said, still kissing my neck. “God’s Eye.”
“That’s right!” It was difficult to focus on word-making when his mouth roamed the terrain behind my ear and his hands traveled over my hips, my belly, my ass. “This looks like a God’s Eye, but in glass.”
His arms still snug around me, he lifted his head and looked at the suncatcher. “That’s what it is. Carla made that about a year or so before she died.”
The mention of his dead wife cooled the moment. I turned in his embrace and faced him. “You don’t talk about Carla and Gabriel very much.”
He gazed down at me, swimming, as usual, in the deep end of my eyes. “Would you like me to?”
“Only if you want to. I feel like we talk about Micah, and my life with him, a lot. I hope not too much.”
He shook his head. “Not too much. As much as you need, and I’m interested to know. If you want to know more about my life with Carla and Gabriel, I can tell you.”
I repeated what I’d said moments before. “Only if you want to. I’m interested, but not desperate to know. I want to know you as much as I can. I want us to be as close as we can be. But I don’t need to have what’s private for you. I just don’t want you to be holding it back because you’re afraid I won’t be able to deal with it. I’m not jealous of Carla.”
“I know. And I’m not jealous of Micah.” His hand came up and brushed wisps of hair from my eyes. “I think I don’t talk about them much because my loss is older than yours. That part of my life is over, and I’ve closed the book.”
That seemed a shockingly cold thing for this warm-hearted man to say, or to do.
“Closed the book? You don’t think about them anymore?”
“That’s not what I said. I think about them all the time.” He nodded at the suncatcher. “Every time I stand at the sink, I seethat and think of Carla. Every photo I pass, I think of them. Every time I pass the door to the room that was Gabriel’s, I think of him. Every birthday, every Christmas. I think of them and miss them all the time. But I don’t live in my loss anymore. I live the life I have now.”
Now I understood. He wasn’t being cold, he washealed. There was a scar on his heart, a reminder of his pain, but what he felt was no longer pain.
