by Anna Burke
I’m the one who needs a distraction.
She also needed a cup of coffee. They’d worked late into the evening, thanks to a series of emergencies, and she and Shawna both were dragging.
“Want to grab some coffee before the next one?” she asked Shawna as they loaded the truck.
“Desperately.”
“My treat.”
Shawna flashed her a smile, and Ivy wished Lillian would react that positively to such an offer. She finished up her paperwork as they drove, her mind conjuring images of Lillian each time she blinked. Shawna kept the truck running as she ducked into Stormy’s for their order.
The smell of freshly brewed coffee replaced the damp chill off the winter ocean. She inhaled deeply, only to have her breath hitch as she took in the café’s occupants. Lillian stood at the register chatting with Claire, one of Stormy’s employees. Ivy let her eyes linger on Lillian’s ass before taking her place in line behind her.
Lillian didn’t turn around, but Claire glanced up, alerting Lillian to the presence of another customer with the shift in her attention. Lillian moved automatically to the side. “Sorry,” she said in the habitual way one apologized to a stranger in public. She still hadn’t looked up.
“No need to apologize, Dr. Lee.”
Ivy watched with satisfaction as Lillian realized exactly who waited behind her. Lillian’s cheeks pinked, and she chewed on her lower lip.
“How can I help you?” asked Claire.
“Two dark roasts. Large, with room.”
Claire turned to pour, leaving Lillian and Ivy to stare at each other. She remembered the feel of Lillian’s nails digging into her wrist and felt a blush spread across her own cheeks—and farther south.
Lillian recovered first. Nodding at the coffee streaming from the carafe, she said, “And here I took you for the latte type.”
“I like pumpkin spice just as much as the next girl, but Stormy’s coffee is good.”
“Everything Stormy serves is good. Her scones are the reason I run.” Lillian stroked the large glass jar holding the day’s remaining scones.
“Blueberry or cinnamon?”
“I don’t discriminate.”
“Good to know.” Ivy moved closer to the bar, ostensibly to pay for her coffees. Lillian didn’t pull away, and her dark eyes caught the sheen of the polished wood like cognac.
“If you start bringing me scones—”
“That’s awfully presumptuous, Lil.”
Lillian’s blush deepened, and her eyes narrowed the way they always did before she launched an attack.
“And I’ll take three scones,” Ivy said to Claire. “Whichever ones you grab.”
“Sure thing.” Claire scooped the scones with a pair of tongs and made to put them in the same bag. “Oh, that last one’s for Lil. You can bag it separately.”
Lillian looked, for a moment, like an artist’s rendition of frustration—mouth open, eyebrows contracted, face reddening by the second—and then she laughed. “You’re incorrigible. You do know that, right?”
Ivy touched Lillian’s elbow fleetingly and gave Lillian her best smile. She knew it was her best because her mother had instructed her daughters to practice smiling in front of a mirror in preparation for admissions interviews and dinners with important people. She and Madison had done as instructed, but they’d also worked on a few expressions not intended for members of congress. This smile was one of them, and Lillian’s pupils dilated in response. Ivy glanced at Lillian’s lips, remembered they were in a coffee shop, and scooped her order off the counter, sans one scone.
“See you later, Lee.”
• • •
Lillian replayed her encounter with Ivy as she scanned the page of her book that night, not taking in a word. Sighing, she started from the top of the page and tried again. The mystery novel was by one of her favorite authors, and the detective had just discovered she was being stalked by the killer. It should have gripped her; instead, all she could think about was Ivy.
Something had shifted. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact location, or what, if anything, had been dislodged, but she’d felt the tremor beneath her feet as her anger at Ivy for yet again using her wealth as a weapon had dissipated into amusement.
And what if Ivy wasn’t wielding wealth with the intent to harm? What if she had simply wanted to buy her a scone, knowing—and liking—how much it would irritate her? Logically, that made more sense than an Ivy who wanted to humiliate her by flaunting her privilege, especially considering the smile she’d given her right before she left. That smile had taken up residence in her body, and she found herself wondering if the batteries in her vibrator had enough charge to get it out of her system.
She shut her book. Muffin lay sprawled across her bed while Hermione curled up on her pillow, nose buried beneath her paws, and she’d drawn the curtains over her windows to trap the warm yellow light from her lamp. Houseplants hung from the ceiling in baskets. Their shadows cast strange shapes on the walls. She reached for her bedside drawer and removed the notepad and pen she kept there for emergencies like these.
“Pros,” she said to the room, making a column on one side of the paper. “And cons.” At the top, she drew a doodle of an ivy leaf, spiraling the vine down the dividing line until she felt like Angie with her comics.
Starting with the cons seemed easier. Getting involved with Ivy would reopen old wounds, had the potential to go catastrophically wrong, could make things awkward at work, and came too soon on the heels of her breakup with Brian. Plus, Ivy made her lose her cool, was insufferably privileged, and had already hurt her badly. She refused to think about just how badly, which was another con in itself. Satisfied she’d gotten the list off to a decent start, and jotting blond down for good measure, she turned to the pros.
The pen creaked beneath her teeth. She hadn’t even realized she’d been chewing on the end. Another habit she’d thought she’d broken herself of, revived thanks to Ivy Holden. She was lucky she’d never smoked, or she’d no doubt pick that up again, too.
Pros. There had to be at least one pro besides really fucking hot. Didn’t there?
The white space taunted her.
Hot, she wrote.
Really hot went beneath it. She refused to add smells amazing and has unfairly soft skin, because that would mean admitting she’d noticed.
I won’t have to worry about getting to know a stranger on a dating app. There. That was a solid pro, not that she had any intention of actually dating Ivy. Just . . . what? Fucking her?
Yes, said her body.
“I’m an adult,” she said aloud. Neither of her dogs offered comment.
She makes me feel dumb and talk to myself, she added to the cons.
Normally, lists made her feel better. More in control. She weighed the columns and bit the pen so hard it cracked. The problem, she knew, wasn’t the list itself. It was that no matter how many items she added to the con side, there was a part of her that didn’t care. She couldn’t think straight around Ivy.
We both know it’s a terrible idea. She wrote this slowly under both columns, because it was true, and because the fact that they each knew it was stupid hadn’t slowed them down. If anything, by unspoken agreement, it had made things easier. Getting involved with Ivy was like throwing a stone at a window to see what would happen. She knew the glass would shatter and there would be a price to pay, but hurling the rock felt so damn good.
Chapter Seven
“This is a very bad idea,” Ivy said to Darwin as she pulled his sweater on over his head. He licked her face, undaunted. Ivy considered the knapsack she’d packed with wine, bread and cheese, an extra sweater, water, and her medications. Going out to the island for a day hike was one thing. Going out to the island for a day hike with Lillian Lee was quite another. They’d be together for an entire day in the cold. Almost forgot. She shoved a box of hand warmers into the bag, too. The last thing she needed was her hands giving out on her. The challenge she’d issued in
a haze of wine was exactly the reason why people didn’t drink around their enemies—even enemies who were no longer enemies, precisely, but something much more insidious.
Lillian had dressed warmly in a winter jacket, scarf, hat, and gloves, a testimony to her familiarity with what happened the minute the wind came off a freezing ocean. A steaming thermos of coffee was clutched to her chest, and she also wore a day pack, along with a sturdy pair of hiking boots and thick warm socks over a pair of thermal leggings.
The handful of men and women queuing up at the ramp to board the ferry eyed them with interest. All were clearly headed to the island to work, along with a load of lumber, and they nodded without engaging Ivy in conversation. Clouds tumbled overhead, blown by a stiff late November wind. Snow was in the forecast; she burrowed her hands deeper into her down jacket and closed the distance between her and Lillian.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning.”
Awkward silence stretched while Darwin darted around the dock looking for crumbs and rodents. Ivy searched for something to say. “I should have asked earlier. Have you ever been to the island before?”
“No. Monhegan, yes, but not Rabbit or Mouse or any of the other Rodentia.”
“It won’t be as nice, obviously, with everything shut down and no leaves.”
“Ivy,” said Lillian with mock concern, “are you worried I won’t like your ancestral hive?”
“You’re hilarious.” She nudged her. “Now get on the boat.”
They stayed in the ferry’s sheltered lower deck along with the work crew, who chatted about the weather with a reverence she had once scorned and now understood. Weather was everything in a coastal town. Today, the wind had whipped the ocean into swells that sent the boat slamming down into each trough. Lillian grabbed the back of the seat in front of them and turned a startled face to her.
“If it was going to get really bad, they wouldn’t take the boat out. I’ve been on rougher seas than this.”
“’Been on rougher seas.’ Who are you?” Lillian shook her head and looked out the window, which was streaming with seawater, at the passing coast. The storm gray of the waves and the overcast sky reflected each other as the ferry surged forward. Along the shore, the evergreens looked nearly black, and the rising sun was nothing more than a hazy smudge of gold behind the clouds. Ivy’s heart caught in her throat at the bleak beauty of it. This was where she’d grown up; here, and at the private schools she’d attended. Her parents’ home in Connecticut, which they’d sold years ago, was just the place she’d spent the occasional holiday.
And she was taking Lillian here—the girl she’d once fantasized about mutilating with a scalpel. The dissonance of her thoughts hit her like a wave of nerve pain. Darwin wriggled in her arms. She loosened her grip on him, aware she’d been squeezing him too tightly. What the hell am I doing?
Lillian leaned closer to the window to study the boat’s wake. Her red scarf covered her chin but not her lips, and her hair stuck out from beneath her hat, trapped between hat and scarf in a tumult that might have been comical if it hadn’t made her want to tug the hat from Lillian’s head and smooth the strands behind her ears. She looked eager, almost excited as she watched spray slam into the pane. Ivy had never seen her look like that. Well, except for their first spay lab, but Ivy had cut that excitement short herself when she’d told Lillian she’d bet one thousand dollars she couldn’t find both ovaries.
She kept her mouth shut this time.
The ferry ride took twenty minutes compared to the half hour it filled in the summer, when it also doubled as a harbor tour, and the island loomed large and cold out of the fog. Ivy hadn’t ever seen it quite this bare of leaves. She’d been up late in the season before, but never at the end of November.
“I was joking about that horror novel,” said Lillian as she shot Ivy a look. “But can I just say that if you’re going to kill me, this is exactly the kind of evil-looking place I’d imagine you’d choose.”
“Rabbit isn’t evil,” Ivy said. “It’s winter.”
“It looks like the kind of place where things might come out of the mist and . . . I don’t know. Eat us.”
“The mist will clear,” Ivy said, irritated. “Will your brain?”
Lillian’s smile brought out the dimple in her left cheek—that was a look she was more familiar with. Getting under her skin had always made Lil smile like that.
The work crew let them disembark first. Darwin led the way up the ramp with Ivy close behind. His short legs blurred as he sped off up the sidewalk, pausing only to sniff the dry yellow grass along the side of the leaf strewn path. A snowflake drifted past.
“Snow won’t stop the boat from coming back, will it?” Lillian asked.
Ivy turned to see her staring at the retreating ferry. Its wake churned white against the blue-gray water.
“Depends.” She plucked Lillian’s sleeve and walked backward up the path. “Would that frighten you?”
“You,” said Lillian, whipping around and glaring before bursting into laughter, “are such an ass.”
“The ferry will come back for the work crew. As long as we’re down here by three thirty, we’ll be fine.”
“You said three. You said the boat leaves at seven and three.”
“From the harbor. It will get here at three thirty. Three twenty, more like. Here, I’ll set a timer on my phone if that will make you calm down.”
“Did you just tell me to calm down, Ivy Holden?” Lillian took a step toward her and Ivy backed up faster.
“Yeah, I think I did.”
“Take it back.”
She turned and broke into a jog, leaving Lillian to curse and chase after. Her backpack slammed against her spine, probably due to the bottle of wine, but she ignored the pain and sped up. Closed summer houses bordered the sidewalk as it wound around the cove. Plywood covered windows, and the chairs that usually dotted the porches were stored inside homes or beneath the porches themselves. The empty faces of the cottages watched impassively as she flew past.
She slowed when the incline increased and the wine bottle made a renewed effort to bypass her spine and batter its way through her ribcage. Lillian stumbled to a halt beside her and pulled her scarf down. Their mingling breath steamed in the air.
“This is where you spent your summers?”
They stood on a hill overlooking the cove where Ivy had grown up swimming and playing in the sand with Madison. The mist didn’t obscure their view of the ocean or the mainland to the south, and the whitecaps dotting the waves looked like drifting snow.
“I mean, it was a little warmer.”
“No wonder you grew up expecting the world.”
“What does that mean?” Ivy said, though she knew exactly what Lillian meant.
“Nothing. Which one of these houses is yours?”
“It’s on the other side.”
“Are you going to make me jog there, or can we walk?” Lillian tugged her hat off after the scarf and shook her hair out. Ivy stopped her from putting it back on with a hand to her wrist.
“We can walk,” she said. Her voice came out in a whisper.
Lillian looked up just as a snowflake settled on her lashes. They’d left the work crew far behind, along with everyone else they knew. This was the most alone they’d ever been.
“Good. Because you know I’m faster than you.”
“Are you, though?” said Ivy.
“I definitely am.” Lillian linked their hands together and nodded up the path. “But I’ll let you take the lead this once.”
“Really.” Ivy phrased it as a statement instead of a question.
“Since you’re planning to bury me out here? Sure. The shame won’t get back to my family.”
“Will you stop comparing my favorite place in the world to a mausoleum?”
“This is your favorite place?” Lillian’s voice lost its mocking edge.
“Yes.”
Lillian’s hand tightene
d around hers, and they both glanced down at their interlocking fingers.
Lillian pulled away first.
Crows shrieked overhead as they entered a short stretch of pine woods.
“I swear it isn’t usually this ominous,” said Ivy.
“They’re just startled to see people. Did you know crows are so smart researchers have to wear masks to run studies on wild specimens? Crows can pass facial information about humans to birds who’ve never seen them, which is more than we can do about them.”
“Bird nerd.”
“They have excellent problem-solving skills, too.”
“You’re not scared of crows, but you’re afraid of mist?”
“I am not afraid of mist. I have a healthy respect for setting. If I wander into a scene from a horror movie, I notice.” The pine tree nearest them swayed in the wind, and Lillian pointed at it.
“Fine. I will prove to you this is not the opening to whatever movie you’re playing in your mind.” Ivy pointed up the path. “Through here is the most spectacular view you’ve ever seen.”
“Like you know what I’ve seen,” said Lillian, but her hand brushed Ivy’s, and the corner of her mouth quirked in a smile.
Ivy turned them down a footpath slick with moss and icy rocks. “Careful,” she said as she navigated the trail. The pines overhead echoed the sound of the crashing surf. She inhaled the scent of pine and saltwater and felt some of the lassitude that clung to her body shred and blow away like fog. The path curved. She paused with her hand outstretched to stop Lillian.
“Oh.” Lillian breathed the word as she stared out over the cliff. The island formed a small inlet here, and the granite bluffs towered above it. They stared down at the waves crashing on the rocky shore. Shallow caves hollowed by countless millennia of surf were hung with icicles of frozen spray, and the sun chose that moment to peek through a thinning layer of cloud, illuminating a swirl of snow and an iridescent glimmer rising from the turning tide. Ivy took it in with a cursory glance before turning her attention back to Lillian. Her lips were parted slightly in awe, and the refracted sunlight sparkled in her eyes.
