Dream Lake

by Lisa Kleypas

  Alex rolled his head slowly against the arm of the couch. “Don’t want it to be easier.” His tongue felt too big for his mouth. “I want to remember exactly what this is like.”

  “You’re taking a risk, trying to do this on your own. You might fail.”

  “I won’t.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because if I do,” Alex said, “I’m going to end it.”

  The ghost gave him a sharp look. “End your life?”

  “Yeah.”

  The ghost was silent, but the air seethed with worry and anger.

  As Alex’s breathing slowed, memories slid around the headache. “By the time my brothers and sister left home,” he said after a while, his eyes closed, “both my parents were drinking nonstop. And when you live with a drunk, the sum total of your childhood is about thirty minutes. The good days were when they forgot I was there. But when either of them remembered they still had a kid in the house, that was when it sucked. It was a minefield, living with them. You never knew when you’d set your foot wrong. Sometimes asking my mom for food or trying to get her to sign a school permission slip would make her explode. One time I changed the TV channel when my dad was sleeping in the recliner, and he woke up just long enough to backhand me. I learned never to ask for anything. Never need anything.”

  It was the most that Alex had ever told anyone about the way he’d grown up. He’d never explained that much even to Darcy. He wasn’t sure why he’d wanted the ghost to understand.

  There was no sound or movement, but Alex had the impression of the ghost settling for the night, occupying a shadow in the corner. “What about your brothers or your sister? Did any of them try to help?”

  “They had their own problems. There’s no such thing as a healthy, normal family surrounding a drunk. The trouble belongs to everyone.”

  “Either of your parents ever take a shot at this?”

  “You mean quit drinking?” Alex let out a quiet breath of amusement. “No, they both rode that train off the tracks.”

  “While you were still on board.”

  Alex changed position on the sofa, but it didn’t help the feeling of being uncomfortable in his own skin. His nerves were raw, his senses smarting. The nightmares were ready to come creeping back as soon as he tried to sleep. He could feel them waiting nearby like a pack of wolves.

  “I dreamed I died,” he said abruptly.

  “Earlier tonight?”

  “Yeah. I was standing over my own body.”

  “Part of you is dying,” the ghost said pragmatically. At Alex’s shocked silence, the ghost added, “The part of you that drinks to avoid pain. But avoiding pain only makes it worse.”

  “Then what the hell am I supposed to do?” Alex asked in weary hostility.

  “At some point,” the ghost replied after a while, “you may have to stop running and let it catch up to you.”

  After a few hours of broken sleep on a couch that resembled a torture rack, Alex showered, dressed, and made his way to Artist’s Point like one of the walking dead. He hoped to hell that he wouldn’t have to see Justine—he wasn’t going to be able to tolerate her today.

  To his relief, Zoë was alone. She welcomed him into the kitchen, urging him to sit at the table immediately. “How are you this morning?”

  He gave her a sullen glance. “If you measure headaches using the Fujita scale, I just reached F-5.”

  “I’ll get you some coffee.”

  The vicious throb at the front of his skull made him want to gouge his eyes out. Carefully he lowered his forehead to his arms and tried to think past the jitters. “Why don’t you bring me a six-pack of Old Milwaukee tall boys to go with it,” he said in a muffled voice.

  Zoë set a cup on the table. “Try this first.”

  Alex fumbled for the coffee.

  “Let me—” Zoë began, reaching out to steady his hands.

  “I don’t need help,” he growled.

  “Okay,” she said calmly, backing off.

  Her patience annoyed him. The cherry-printed wallpaper hurt his eyes. His head was pounding like a thrash band concert.

  Once he got the cup to his mouth, he drank as if his life depended on it. He asked for another.

  “Have some of this first,” she said, placing a shallow bowl in front of him.

  The bowl contained a golden cakelike square spangled with candied fruit cut into strips no thicker than a cat’s whisker. Cinnamon-scented steam rose to his nostrils. Zoë poured a splash of whole milk into the bowl and gave Alex a spoon.

  The baked oatmeal was chewy and tender, crisp at the edges, the crumbly sweetness infused with a sunny citrus tang. As the milk soaked into the oatmeal, the texture loosened and each spoonful became more moist and delicious than the last. It was the farthest thing possible from the gray-slurry oatmeal of his youth.

  As he ate, the toxic feeling left him, and he relaxed and began to breathe deeply. Something like euphoria settled over him, a mellow warmth. Zoë moved around the kitchen, stirring contents of pots, pouring milk into pitchers, and chatting lightly without requiring a response. He had no idea what she was talking about—something that had to do with the difference between a cobbler and a brown Betty, none of which made any sense to him. But he wanted to wrap the sound of her voice around him like a clean cotton blanket.

  His days fell into a pattern: every morning before work he went to the kitchen at Artist’s Point and ate whatever Zoë put in front of him. The half hour he spent with her was the time around which everything else was structured. After he left, the sense of well-being faded hour by hour until he reached the raw and ragged evenings.

  His sleep was riddled with nightmares. Often he dreamed he was drinking again, and he awoke smothered in shame. Even the knowledge that it had only been a dream, that he hadn’t fallen off the wagon, failed to ease the panic. What got him through the nights was knowing that he would see Zoë soon.

  She always said “good morning” as if it actually were one. She set plates of beautiful food in front of him, every bite blooming with color and fragrance, flavors nudging each other forward in clever ways. Soufflés so light they seemed to have been inflated by a wish, eggs Benedict blanketed with hollandaise the color of sunflowers. She created symphonies of eggs and meat, poems of bread, melodies of fruit.

  The kitchen was more personal to Zoë than her bedroom. It was her artistic space, arranged exactly as she wanted it. The open pantry, lined floor to ceiling with shelving, held rows of deeply colored spices in glass cylinders, and huge old-fashioned penny candy jars filled with flour, sugar, oats, vivid yellow cornmeal, plump beige pecan halves. There were bottles of pale green olive oil from Spain, inky balsamic vinegar, Vermont maple syrup, wildflower honey, jars of homemade jam and preserves, bright as jewels. Zoë was as particular about the quality of her ingredients as Alex was about making angles plumb and square while framing a house, or using the right carpentry nail for a given task.

  Alex loved to watch Zoë work. She moved around the kitchen with a kind of clunky-ballerina quality, graceful movements often coming to the abrupt finish of a heavy pot being lifted with both hands, or an oven door closing decisively. She wielded a sauté pan as if it were a musical instrument, gripping the handle and jerking it back with a sharp elbow motion so that the contents appeared to jump and toss themselves.

  On the seventh morning that Alex ate breakfast at the inn, Zoë served him a plate of buttermilk grits sprinkled with cheese and spicy red crumbs of fried chorizo sausage. She had stirred some of the sausage renderings into the grits, charging them with salty, earthy richness.

  As he ate, Zoë came to the table and sat beside him, sipping her own coffee. Her nearness made him slightly uneasy. She usually worked while he had breakfast. He stole a glance at the finespun skin of her inner arm, noticing the healed-over burn mark. He wanted to press his lips to it.

  “The cabinets have come in,” he told her. “We’ll start installing them later this week, and
I’ll build the kitchen island.”

  “Build it? I assumed you would order a premade one.”

  “No, it’ll be a little cheaper—and look more custom—if we make one by trimming down some stock cabinets, finish the outside with beadboard, and add the countertop.” He smiled as he saw her expression. “It’ll look great. I promise.”

  “I wasn’t doubting you at all,” she said. “I’m just impressed.”

  Alex drowned his smile in the cup of coffee. “I’m not doing anything special,” he said. “Just basic carpentry.”

  “It’s special when it’s my house.”

  “In another week, I’ll need to know what paint colors you want.”

  “I’ve almost got them all picked out,” she said. “Soft white for the beadboard and trim, and butter yellow for the walls, and pink for the bathrooms.”

  Alex gave her a skeptical glance.

  “It’s a nice pink,” she said, laughing. “A blush tone. Lucy helped me pick it out. She says pink is a great color for bathrooms because the reflected glow is flattering.”

  The image jumped into his mind before he could stop it … Zoë, stepping out of the bath, surrounded by pink walls, tender wet curves gleaming in steam-misted mirrors.

  Rising to her feet, Zoë went to check on something in the oven. “Would you like some water?”

  He was hot from head to toe. “Yes, thanks.” Picking up his cell phone, he glued his gaze to it, reminding himself desperately to keep his distance from Zoë.

  She stopped beside him and set a glass of ice water by his plate. She was close enough that he could breathe in her fragrance, cottony and flowery, with hints of smoke from the chorizo, and all he could think of was how much he wanted to turn and press his face against her, and lock his arms around her hips. He stared at his phone, scrolling blindly through text messages he had already read.

  Zoë lingered beside him. “You need a haircut,” she murmured, a smile in her voice. He felt a light touch on the back of his neck … her fingers … sliding softly through the hair at his nape. His hand clamped on the phone until the casing threatened to crack.

  He managed a quick, irritable shrug that caused Zoë’s hand to fall away. She went back to the stove, and he heard the sound of something being whisked in a pot. She was speaking casually about her plans to go to the floating fish market attached to the main dock in Friday Harbor, they had just brought in a fresh catch of halibut. Struggling to clear away the haze of lust, Alex did math problems in his head. When that didn’t work, he resorted to gripping his fork so that the tines dug sharply into the heel of his hand. That settled his rampaging desire just enough that he could walk. He pushed back from the table and stood, muttering something about going to work.

  “Tomorrow, then,” Zoë said too brightly. “Pumpkin ginger pancakes.”

  “I can’t make it tomorrow.” Realizing how brusque he’d sounded, Alex added, “I’ve got to get to work earlier, now that we’re putting up Sheetrock.”

  “I’ll make you something to go,” Zoë said. “Stop by, and I’ll hand it through the doorway. You won’t even have to come in.”

  “No.” Exasperated, he couldn’t think of any way to soften the refusal.

  The ghost entered the kitchen. “Are we leaving?”

  “Yes,” Alex said reflexively.

  “So you will come by?” Zoë asked in confusion.

  “No,” he snapped.

  Zoë followed him to the back door, looking tense and miserable. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  The ghost looked perplexed and indignant. “What does she mean? What happened? I told you before—”

  “Don’t start,” Alex warned him wrathfully. Glancing down at Zoë’s worried face, he amended, “Don’t start jumping to conclusions. There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

  “There’s something to be sorry for,” the ghost insisted. “Because from what I can tell, hormones are flying through the air like a biblical plague.”

  Zoë stared up at Alex as if she were trying to read his thoughts. “Then why did you react like that when I touched you?”

  Alex shook his head in baffled annoyance.

  “Obviously you didn’t like it,” Zoë said, flushing deeply.

  “Damn it, Zoë.” The only way he could stop himself from grabbing her was to slam his hands on the counter, on either side of her. She jumped a little, her eyes turning round. “I liked it,” Alex told her gruffly. “If I liked it any more, I’d have you bent over the counter right now, and it wouldn’t be to help you roll out biscuit dough.”

  The ghost groaned. “Spare me,” he said, and made a fast exit.

  Zoë colored at his deliberate crudity. “Then why—” she began.

  “Don’t give me that,” Alex said testily. “You know why. I’m a drinker in the process of drying out. I’ve just been divorced, and I’m a paycheck away from being broke. I don’t know of any more damning combination of qualities a man could have. Except maybe being impotent on top of it.”

  “You’re not impotent,” she protested. After a brief hesitation, she asked, “Are you?”

  Alex covered his eyes with one hand and began to laugh. “Sweet Jesus,” he said feelingly, “I wish I were.” After a moment, seeing the hurt confusion on her face, he sobered and let out a sigh. “Zoë. I don’t do friendship with women. And the only other possibility is sex, which is not going to happen.” Alex paused, seeing a snowy dusting of flour on the crest of her cheek. Unable to resist, he reached out and brushed it off gently with his thumb. “Thank you for getting me through this past week. I owe you for that. So the best thing I can do for you in return is stay away long enough for you and me to get some distance from this.”

  Zoë was quiet, staring at him, weighing his words. An oven timer went off, and a hint of rueful amusement hitched the corners of her mouth into apostrophes. “Every moment of my life is measured by oven timers,” she said. “Please don’t go yet.”

  He stayed, watching as she went to pull a pan of biscuits from the oven. The smell of hot bread flooded the kitchen.

  Returning, Zoë stood very close to Alex. “I know you’re right,” she said. “And I know what I’ve got ahead of me. Probably more than I can handle. My grandmother will be here in a month, and after that …” She gave a helpless little shrug. “So I know my limits, and I think I know yours. But the problem is—” A nervous breath of laughter. “Sometimes you meet a really nice guy, but no matter how you try, you can’t seem to make yourself want him. But that’s not nearly as bad as when you meet the wrong guy, and you can’t make yourself not want him. You feel hollow inside, just waiting and wishing and dreaming. You feel like every moment is leading to something so amazing that there’s no name for it, and if you could just get there with him, it would be such a … relief. It would be all you’d ever need.” She let out a trembling sigh. “I don’t want distance from you. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but I have to let you know how I—”

  “I already know,” he said coldly, dying inside. “Give it a rest, Zoë. I’ve got to go.”

  Zoë nodded. She didn’t even look offended. Somehow she knew that it was the only way he could leave her, that some things couldn’t be seasoned to make them go down easier.

  Alex reached for the door handle, but she stopped him with a touch on his wrist.

  “Wait,” she said. “One more thing.”

  Even though she was no longer touching him, the skin of his wrist had come alive with craving. It was getting worse, he thought with something like despair, this need that threatened to turn him inside out.

  “From now on I’ll never mention anything about this again,” Zoë said, “or tell you about my feelings, or even try to be friends with you. But in return, I want one favor.”

  “The cat door,” Alex said in resignation.

  She shook her head. “I want you to kiss me. One time.”

  “What? No.” He was aghast. “No.”

  “You owe me a favo
r.”

  “Why the hell do you want that?”

  Zoë looked stubborn. “I just want to know what it feels like.”

  “I kissed you once before. Right here.”

  “That doesn’t count. You were holding back.”

  “You want me to hold back,” he assured her grimly.

  “No I don’t.”

  “Zoë, damn it, this is not going to change anything.”

  “I know that. I don’t expect anything to change.” She was practically vibrating with nerves. “I just want it as a sort of … amuse-bouche.”

  “What’s an amuse-bouche?” he managed to ask, afraid of the answer.

  “It’s a French term for a tidbit the waiter brings from the chef at the beginning of a meal. Nothing you order or pay for, it’s just … given.” At his stunned silence, she added helpfully, “The literal translation is ‘to please the mouth.’ ”

  Alex gave her a dark glance. “You want a favor from me, it’s going to involve crown molding or adding extra can lights. I draw the line at amusing your bouche.”

  “One kiss is impossible? Twenty seconds of putting your lips against mine scares you that much?”

  “Now you’re going to time it,” he said sardonically.

  “I’m not going to time it,” she protested. “That was just a suggestion.”

  “Well, you can forget it.”

  She looked offended. “I don’t understand why you’re angry.”

  “Like hell. We both know you’re trying to prove a point.”

  “What point is that?”

  “You want to make sure I know what I’m giving up. You want me to be sorry about not going after you.”

  She opened her mouth to deny it. But she hesitated.

  “If I did kiss you,” Alex said, “the only reason I’d do it would be to make you sorry as hell that you asked for it.” He gave her a hard look, willing her to back down. “Still want it?”

  “Yes,” Zoë said promptly, and closed her eyes and lifted her face.

  Alex was right, of course. Any kind of relationship between them was a bad idea, for many reasons. But she still wanted him to kiss her.