by Clare Willis
“You didn’t,” Isabel gasped.
“I did. It was so weird. I got this burst of adrenaline, and then everything was moving really slowly, well, I was moving normally but everything else slowed down. It was so easy to take the guy down. It felt like I was made to do it. ”
“And your guardian angel? What was he doing?”
“Nothing. Just watching. ”
“He didn’t step in?”
Sunni shook her head. “No, but when it was over he tried to leave, so I grabbed him.”
“You actually had your hands on him? He’s a real, flesh and blood person?” Isabel asked.
Sunni’s jaw dropped. “Izzy! Did you think I made him up?”
Isabel looked guilty. “Not that you made him up, exactly, but that maybe you were exaggerating a little.”
Sunni thought about it. Had she been that extravagant in talking about the man? She thought she’d been entirely straightforward. She saw him a few times a year, and he seemed to be watching her. He’d saved her from a mugger once. He was extraordinarily handsome, and extremely tall. What had she exaggerated?
“Anyway,” Sunni said, a little huffily. “He said his name was Jacob Eddington.”
“He told you his name? So you have something to go on!”
Anger boiled in Sunni’s gut, filling her body with a tension that had no outlet. “No, I don’t. I’ve already looked him up, Googled him, what have you. Jacob Eddington doesn’t exist, at least not in California.”
Isabel watched a rowdy group of men in suits toast each other loudly. “Did you follow up on some of the ones in other states?”
Sunni pursed her lips. “Yes, Izzy, I called Iowa, Nevada, and Rhode Island. As you can imagine, no one said they’d spent the last ten years following me around San Francisco.”
Isabel sipped her wine, her eyes wide with amazement. “How did it end?”
“He tried to hypnotize me.”
Isabel choked, sending a spray of wine flying onto the table. “He did not!”
Sunni nodded. “That’s what I think it was. But it didn’t work.”
“Well, at least you know he means you no harm. Maybe you just have to take a religious-type attitude toward this. Just accept that he’s here for you, watching over you.” Isabel checked her watch. “I have to go, Sunni. I’m meeting Daddy for dinner at the Ritz. We’re wining and dining some clients from Japan.”
In the ten years since her mother died Isabel had slowly become Dennis LaForge’s surrogate wife, eventually performing all the spousal duties except conjugal ones. She lived with him, picked up his dry-cleaning, entertained the clients of his real estate development company, and attended his charity galas. It was a peculiar relationship, and probably one of the reasons Isabel was still single.
The LaForges had changed Sunni’s life. After her discharge from the Ashwood Institute, they moved her into their Russian Hill mansion and became her foster parents. They helped her to go to college, and when she decided she wanted to open an art gallery Dennis bankrolled it and became her first and best customer. She would always be grateful to them. It was weird to see your almost-sister essentially marry your almost-father, but they were both adults and it was their choice, so Sunni stayed out of it.
“Why don’t you come to the gallery tomorrow, and bring Dennis?” Sunni asked as Isabel slid her arms into her crutches. “A piece came in that I think he’d be interested in. We can have dim sum afterward at the Golden Dragon. ”
“What’s the piece?”
“A Qing dynasty porcelain vase with a garniture of Louis XV bronze mounts.”
“English, please,” Isabel said.
“A vase made in China in about 1750, brought to France and decorated with bronze handles in the shape of lions’ heads.”
Isabel frowned. “Doesn’t he already have a bunch of vases?”
“Yeah, he has a bunch of Impressionist paintings too, but does he stop buying them?”
Isabel laughed. “At least I like the Impressionists.”
“When you inherit you can sell everything you don’t like.”
“He’ll probably give it all to a museum for the tax write-off before he dies. Are you coming, Sunni?”
Sunni shook her head. “I’m going to have another drink.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Isabel maneuvered slowly through an obstacle course of tables and chairs. Sunni wondered, not for the first time, if public establishments had any idea how difficult they made it for people with mobility issues. Would it be so hard to put tables in a straight line?
She beckoned for the waiter with all the piercings and ordered another margarita. Normally she wasn’t much of a drinker, but her encounter with Jacob Eddington had left her agitated. When the waiter returned with her drink he leaned toward her ear.
“The gentleman over there would like to buy you a drink.” He indicated the table of rowdy men. Sunni would have assumed they were stockbrokers, except with the stock market in the toilet it had been a while since she’d seen any of those types celebrating.
“Those frat boys?” Sunni asked.
The waiter shook his head. “Past them. At the bar.”
Sunni looked again. A man in jeans and a black leather jacket lifted two fingers over his whiskey glass. His blond hair was fluffy with product. She couldn’t really tell if he was handsome, but she was feeling that familiar restless, diffuse anger, directed at everyone and no one. She wasn’t going to sleep tonight. She lifted her glass and gave the man a smile. He picked up his own drink and made his way over.
Chapter 3
The Sea Watch Bar was one of the oldest in the city. It was dark, dank, and smelled of stale beer. The low ceiling was papered with dollar bills and the bar itself was pockmarked and cigarette-burned. At one time the Sea Watch had actually been on the waterfront. The bar was still in the same location, but a hundred and fifty years of landfill had created six blocks of land between it and the bay. It was populated with old men, die-hard drinkers, who said little and glared at strangers. It was Jacob’s favorite bar, because it reminded him of the Fox and Hound in Providence, a pub that stood in the same location for two hundred years, until it was razed for a freeway overpass in the 1960s.
He came here late at night, when she was safely asleep, and returned before she woke up. On this night he had followed her from her friend’s wedding to her favorite bar, where she picked up a human man and brought him to her sailboat, presumably for sex. Jacob pushed away the uncomfortable feelings this brought to mind. She could do whatever she wanted, what did he care? He wasn’t her husband. It was her business if she wanted to bed wimpy little human men with coiffed hair. The wimp wasn’t a vampire, that was all that had to concern him.
Jacob swirled the Scotch and then smacked the glass down hard. It did concern him; it concerned him too much. He had handled the wedding very badly. He should never have let her get close enough to speak to him. But when that human man tried to violate her … a flush of anger came over him just thinking about it. He had lost his composure and gotten far too close to her. And then, instead of just eliminating the threat and leaving, he had stuck around to watch Sunni fight the man. Flush with pride, as if he’d trained her himself, he’d stood back and observed until it was too late. She’d put her hands on him, for God’s sake. If the Council knew they’d reassign him. He had to get a grip on himself.
“Another Scotch?”
The bartender wasn’t addressing Jacob. He knew Jacob only drank one, although he paid enough for five. The inquiry was directed at a very pretty young woman in a cashmere sweater and high-heeled boots who was sitting alone at the end of the bar. She looked entirely out of place, but perfectly content.
“Yeah, thanks.” The woman was watching the glass fishing weights that hung in nets behind the bartender’s head. From the way she was staring at them Jacob knew she was drunk. The fishing weights had a way of pulsating when you were drunk, like those lava lamps everybody loved in the 1970s.<
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“Thank you.” The woman turned to Jacob, startling him with the intensity of her gaze. Her eyes were blue and glassy.
“How do you date someone for five years without them knowing you at all?” she asked Jacob. “How does that happen?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jacob said.
“Last call, love,” the bartender said gently. “It’s two o’clock.”
“Last call, gents,” he called to the two old men huddled at the other end of the bar. They nodded and quaffed their beers.
The woman tossed back her drink and signaled for a final round.
The bartender pressed his lips together in disapproval, but poured her another drink. “How’re you getting back to wherever you’re going?”
The woman straightened up and brushed her long brown hair off her face. “What do you mean? I’m fine to drive.”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, love. You were three sheets to the wind when you walked in here and you’ve had three more whiskeys since you sat down. I can call you a cab. ”
“He’ll take me home.” Swaying on her bar stool, she waved toward Jacob. Then her confidence crumbled. Her mouth drew down at the corners and her lips quivered. “Will you?”
Jacob hesitated. Normally he avoided unnecessary contact with humans, but tonight he didn’t feel quite like himself. “Yes, I’ll accompany you, if you wish it.”
“All righty, then,” the bartender said drily.
Sunni’s thirty-foot ketch, the Wild Rose, bobbed in its berth at Yerba Buena Yacht Harbor like a puppy excited to see its master. Sunni thought of the boat more as a pet than a conveyance or a living space. The Rose behaved differently every time she took her out. She demanded constant care and attention. She made all kinds of noises. When Sunni was sailing her she didn’t feel alone, even though she often was.
Sunni jumped lightly from the pier onto the deck. Her companion paused for a moment, looking nervous.
“So this is your boat, huh?” the man, whose name was Alex Petrie, asked. “How long have you been sailing?”
“Since I was a teenager,” Sunni replied, as she wiped down the vinyl seats with a rag.
“Your parents taught you?”
As the smell of engine oil and salt air filled her nostrils, Sunni thought of the moment when she’d first seen the Wild Rose. It was her sixteenth birthday, and she’d been living with the LaForges for two years. Gloria LaForge had been unfailingly kind to Sunni, but it was obvious that she would never think of Sunni as a daughter. Isabel was Gloria’s raison d’être, and between the girl’s depression and her multiple sclerosis, there was no time in Gloria’s schedule or place in her heart for anyone else. Dennis, on the other hand, was open and accepting in a way Sunni had never encountered before, even from her own mother. But he was terribly busy. Between working, travelling, conferences, charity functions, and board meetings his daily schedule held enough events to keep three men running.
Sunni yearned for time alone with Dennis, and she found it on the azure waters of San Francisco Bay. Her foster father owned a boat and loved to sail, but Isabel and her mother didn’t. Navigating solid ground was enough of a challenge for Isabel, and Gloria didn’t want to leave her daughter. So Sunni asked to accompany Dennis on his next Sunday outing. Within six months she had learned her way around a boat and become Dennis’s indispensable first mate. It was out on the bay that Dennis found out that the vixens at the Aldridge Academy were hazing Sunni, that she was failing algebra and acing chemistry, that she had a crush on a junior named Dexter Elkins, and that she had always wanted to learn to play the guitar. It was where Sunni learned that Dennis’s true love, besides his family, was art, and where she learned, by reading his magazines and catalogues, to love it herself.
So on Sunni’s sixteenth birthday, instead of handing her the keys to a car, as he had with Isabel six months earlier, Dennis blindfolded her and drove her to Yerba Buena Yacht Harbor, where he presented her with her own sailboat.
Sunni looked at Alex Petrie on the pier and considered her response to his question. She could tell him the story of how she learned to sail, but she realized that Alex didn’t really want to know. He was probably just stalling for time because he was nervous about getting on the boat without looking awkward.
“Don’t worry, I’m a very good sailor,” Sunni assured him, but she wondered if she’d been too impulsive, allowing him to buy her a drink. Then Alex jumped lightly into the boat.
“Wow, it’s cold tonight.” He was hugging himself, rubbing his arms even though he had on a heavy leather jacket.
“Let’s go down below,” she said. The fog was so thick there was little to see besides the neighboring boats. The light poles of the baseball stadium drifted in and out of view like ghostly beanstalks waiting for Jack to climb.
“We’re not going out on the bay?” Alex asked, in what sounded like an intentionally ironic tone.
She shrugged. “I go out at night a lot. But not tonight, it’s too foggy.”
“Maybe some other time,” Alex said.
Sunni denied herself a sarcastic comeback.
He followed her down into the small, Spartan cabin. It was like a hobbit house, every miniature item tucked into its own little cubbyhole. Sunni loved the kind of planning that fit an entire house worth of conveniences into a closet-sized space. She turned on the propane heater and took two Pyramid Ales out of the refrigerator.
As Sunni handed him the beer, Alex’s cell phone rang. Even in the dim light she could see his face flush pink as he fumbled to turn it off. He had offered to take her to his place and she had refused, not just because she loved her boat, but also because there would be too many clues there. What if the closets were empty, and there were only three glasses in the cupboard? Then she would know it was a pied-a-terre, not a real home, and she really didn’t want to know anything about Alex beyond the obvious—he was healthy, young, and handsome. She wanted oblivion, not connection.
Alex scanned the tiny cabin for a place to hang his jacket. As she took it he smiled at her, in the way that men who know they’re attractive smile—cocky, flashing a lot of tooth.
“Why don’t you take off yours? It’s getting pretty warm in here. “ He held her beer as she took off her own leather jacket and hung them both on a hook in the wall.
“Your blouse is beautiful,” he murmured. “I love silk.”
Since he was standing behind her, Sunni allowed herself to roll her eyes.
She considered whether they should sit in the galley, finish their beers, and have some preliminary conversation, or if she should just take Alex into the tiny berth, with its soft bed and down comforter, and get down to what they’d come for. Sunni didn’t pick up men very often, but when she did she always found this part very awkward. She wasn’t good at pretending that she cared what the guy did for a living or what teams he liked, what kind of car he drove or who he’d voted for in the last election. The pretense that there would be something after the sex was exhausting, so she was happy when she found a man who was drunk or confident enough to just dispense with it.
Alex made the decision when he slid into the bench seat behind the table and put down his beer.
“So, I never asked what you do for a living, Sunni,” he said. His eyes drifted over her outfit. “Let me guess. You’re a …”
She sat down next to him and put her hand over his mouth. “Don’t guess.”
They were so close now that Sunni could smell the shaving cream he’d recently scraped off his face. He kissed her palm, then leaned in and kissed her on the lips, lightly at first and then more hungrily. He was trying to turn toward her and get his arms around her body but the table was jabbing them in the ribs.
“I have a bed right over there,” she whispered. He followed her into the dark, cozy womb of the berth and they both stretched out on the comforter. The rocking sensation was like being in a cradle, and the old wooden hull’s soft creaks sounded like an ancient lullaby. Sunni felt sleepy. Sh
e had to concentrate to keep her mind on the task at hand.
It had been a long time since Sunni had made love, and she was curious to know how she would react. She felt a slight stirring, especially as Alex expertly probed her mouth with his tongue, looping and circling like a stunt plane, but for the most part she felt calm, even distant from the procedure. Then, as she sometimes did when she was alone, she filled her mind with Jacob. She had more to work with in her fantasy now that she’d seen him up close: she knew the cleft in his chin and the particular slate gray of his eyes, the slope of his jaw and the fullness of his lips.
As she unbuttoned Alex’s shirt she imagined it was Jacob’s chest she was stroking, his tongue that was filling her mouth. She saw his eyes fill with passion as he pressed her down on the bed, heard him groan with desire as he put a knee between her thighs and roughly pushed them apart …
“Is this all right?” Alex asked politely, his fingers on the top button of her blouse.
Sunni sighed. She put both of Alex’s hands on her collar and ripped the delicate fabric down the center, revealing a lacy black bra. She grabbed Alex’s shoulders and with all the strength in her small frame, flipped him so that he was lying underneath her.
“You’re a wild one, aren’t you?” Alex chuckled.
“Shut up,” she said, and reached for his belt.
“Are you ready now, Jacob?” the woman asked, swaying on her heels like tall grass in a high wind.
“Sure, now’s fine.” He walked over.
Her head slowly craned upward. “You’re a tall one, aren’t you?”
Jacob pulled a worn leather wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. “How much is it, Owen?” he asked the bartender.
“Twenty-eight dollars. ”
The woman shook her head. “You don’t have to pay for me,” she said.
Jacob pushed his cap back and smiled at her. “It’s my pleasure.”
Her eyes widened and a slow smile crept onto her lips. She was really seeing him now for the first time, and he felt the heat of her interest like the sun coming up in the morning.
