by Lane, Nina
He slips his hands around my waist and we move to the sofa. I push him backward and tumble on top of him, stretching myself over his strong body as our mouths join once again. He rubs his warm hands over my back. I ease my leg between his and fall into a swirl of pleasure.
There are no fireworks, no bells ringing, no collision of stars. The earth doesn’t move. It’s just us, Liv and Dean, kissing long and deep with our bodies pressed together and our hearts beating in unison. My curves yield to the hard planes of his chest, my hair falling on either side of his face to curtain us in our own private world.
Our lips move seamlessly, tongues stroking, breath mingling. I shift to kiss his cheek, his chin, my hands flexing on his arms. He tightens his fingers on the nape of my neck as he trails his lips to the hot hollow of my throat where my pulse flutters.
Everything inside me softens in response to his strength, his absolute, unwavering conviction that our marriage is worth any risk, any battle, any sacrifice. And I now know that all these years, my husband hasn’t only been protecting me. He’s been protecting this intense, precious bond we share that is more than desire, more than tenderness, more than adoration, more than love.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Olivia
nce upon a time, I lost sight of what it means to be brave. I forgot that’s what Dean loves and admires about me, that he’d once said I was the one who showed him how to start a new life. I forgot about the thirteen-year-old girl who walked away from her mother. About the nineteen-year-old woman who braced herself against the world yet again after seeking safety at Twelve Oaks.
I had no plans when I dropped out of Fieldbrook College halfway through my first year, broken in the aftermath of a forced sexual encounter and horrible rumors. I’d lost everything I’d worked so hard for—my merit scholarship, my reputation, my future, my sense of self.
I only knew I needed to leave, to get on the road, and for a while I didn’t care that I might end up like my mother.
I packed up my old hatchback and told Aunt Stella I was going to visit some friends. Though I had no destination in mind, I headed west, in the direction of the ocean, mountains, and sunsets. Only as I was driving did I remember there was one safe place in the world, so I kept going for two thousand miles until I reached Northern California.
I didn’t even know who was at Twelve Oaks anymore, or if North was still there. In my effort to put my mother behind me, I’d cut all ties with my past. Yet as I drove through the winding roads of the Santa Cruz mountains, I knew I’d be welcomed by whoever lived at Twelve Oaks now.
The valley looked the same as it had when I was thirteen—low, rolling hills covered with thickets of grass and trees, the sloping cliffs that led to the half-moon curve of the beach. I walked down the drive leading to the big, central farmhouse of the commune.
My stomach knotted. Surrounded by benches, the fire-pit sat near the barn. I wondered if they all still gathered there after supper for conversation and guitar-playing.
“Help you, miss?” An older woman with short gray hair approached me from the garden.
“My name is Liv,” I said, suddenly nervous. “I was… I stayed here once with my mother years ago.”
“Oh.” The wrinkles on her forehead eased a bit. “You need to talk to someone?”
“Yes.” I wiped my palms on my jeans. “There was… when I was here, a man named North used to run the place. Is he still here?”
“Oh, sure. North’s been around forever. Likely he’s in his workshop now. You know where that is?”
“I remember. Thanks.”
My nerves intensified as I walked toward the wooden building. I knocked on the door, then pulled it open when there was no response. The smells of sawdust and burnt wood filled my nose. I blinked to adjust my eyes. A big, male figure sat beside the window, his head bent as he chiseled a plank of wood.
He looked up as the sunlight lanced into the room.
“Hi, North. It’s Liv. Liv Winter. I was—”
“Liv Winter? I’ll be doggone.” A smile split across his bearded face as he got up from the stool and approached me. “How many years has it been?”
“Six or seven,” I said.
“I thought I’d never hear from you again.”
Relief filled me, so swift and sudden that I was caught off guard. I hadn’t realized until that instant how much I hoped he’d remember me. That I hadn’t been forgotten.
He stopped in front of me, studying me in the dim light. “How are you, Liv?”
“I’m… I’m okay.”
“Your mama with you?”
“No.” My voice cracked. A wave of dizziness washed over me.
North’s smile faded. He put a hand on my shoulder and steered me back outside, into the sunlight that smelled like the ocean. We sat on a wooden bench alongside the door of the workshop. I rested my elbows on my knees and breathed the cold, fresh air.
North didn’t speak. We sat there for a long time. Finally I glanced at him. Sawdust coated his baggy shorts and T-shirt. Gray streaks speared through his tangle of brown hair and bushy beard, and weathered lines radiated from the corners of his eyes. He still had a tiny braid on the left side of his beard, the strands knotted and tied at the end with a frayed, red ribbon.
I gestured to it. “You still have that.”
He tugged at the braid. “Some things you keep.”
“Why?” I’d never asked him before.
“Memories. Reminders of the good stuff. I had a daughter. She died when she was a baby.” He rubbed the braid between his thumb and forefinger. “She had just enough hair to wear a red ribbon.”
“I’m sorry.” My throat tightened. “How is that the good stuff?”
“I had her for nine months. She’d hold my thumb. She always stopped crying when I picked her up. Bluest eyes you’ve ever seen. Some people don’t get even that. If I don’t look at it that way, it would have killed me years ago.”
“Is that why you quit MIT?” I asked, knowing his daughter’s death was the catalyst for his descent into hard living before he found Twelve Oaks.
“Yeah.” North tugged at the braid again. “Sometimes it takes a while, but eventually you learn which way is up, you know?”
I didn’t know, but I wanted to. I hoped maybe one day I would.
We fell silent again. I stared at the ground and clasped my hands together.
“You finish school?” he asked.
“Graduated from high school.”
“Good for you. Any plans?”
“Not yet. I… I was in college, but had to leave.” Words crowded my throat. I took a breath. “Some… some bad stuff happened to me, North.”
He didn’t ask what. Didn’t seem to expect a confession. Instead he rubbed his braid again and stared out at the artichoke field.
“You want to stay here?” he asked.
Tears stung my eyes. “Can I?”
“We keep a couple of rooms open for visitors. They’re unoccupied now. One of them’s yours, if you want it.”
“I want it.”
“Okay, then. You remember Asha? She writes up the work schedule, so talk to her and figure out where you can help. She’s probably in the kitchen.”
He pushed to his feet. “Welcome back, Liv.”
I thought I would leave Twelve Oaks in a few weeks, but I stayed for over a year. I lived in a small bedroom at the back of the main house and spent my mornings working in the vegetable garden and my afternoons learning how to make soap or helping North with his woodwork. I boxed up herbs and vegetables for the weekly farmer’s market and spent ten hours a week in the commune’s library cataloging their collection.
I spent as much time as I could in the garden, digging my bare hands into the dirt, killing insects, picking tomatoes. I started a flower garden in a little patch of earth between th
e main house and the barn, and within a couple of months I’d created a colorful blanket of geraniums, petunias, pansies, and lantanas. I began to think I might stay at Twelve Oaks forever.
One day I was working at the downtown Santa Cruz farmer’s market. North and I were at the Twelve Oaks booth selling our home-grown, organic produce. Vegetable stands, food trucks, bakeries, and florists all lined the street, and crowds of people strolled around sampling strawberries, peaches, honey, cinnamon rolls.
Stepping out of the flow of traffic, two young women stopped beside the Twelve Oaks booth. Both were slender and pretty, one with straight blond hair and the other with a short ponytail. They had backpacks around their shoulders and held little cups of sorbet.
“If I declare a major now, I’ll be able to do the education abroad program my junior year,” the girl with the ponytail remarked.
“The tropical biology project is in Costa Rica,” the blonde said. “I’d love to do that. Don’t you also have to do a field study abroad?”
I moved closer, listening to them talk about sociology majors and curricula before they shifted into a conversation about a mutual friend who had a new boyfriend. The ponytail girl glanced up to where I was standing.
“Hi.” I cleared my throat. “Would you like to try a sample of our vine-ripened tomatoes?”
“Sure.” The girl took a tomato from the basket I extended. “What’s your major?”
The question startled me until I remembered I was wearing a UCSC T-shirt that had once belonged to a Twelve Oaks resident.
“I’m not a student,” I admitted.
“Oh. Wow, these tomatoes are really good.” She reached for another one. “We should get some and make a salad for Emily’s dinner party tomorrow night.”
They conferred over the vegetables and bought a few baskets. After handing them their change, I watched them disappear into the crowd with their backpacks and cloth shopping bags.
I looked at North. He was sitting behind the lettuce bins, munching on a samosa.
“You could go back,” he said.
I shook my head. “Not to Fieldbrook. And I can’t afford tuition anywhere else.”
“So you go to community college for a few years. Get your general ed out of the way, then transfer to a university.”
It was a scary thought. Any thought beyond staying at Twelve Oaks forever was scary.
“Liv.”
I looked at him.
“Don’t hide,” North said.
“I’m not.”
“You remember I told you once you were like a turtle?” North asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t think turtles have very interesting lives.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s okay to have a hard shell,” North said. “Not okay to hide in it when you’re so young.”
“You’ve been at Twelve Oaks for twenty years now,” I reminded him, my tone defensive. “Isn’t that hiding?”
“I lived a lot before I came here,” he said.
“So have I.” Pain tightened my throat.
North settled a hand on my shoulder. “Sometimes you have to go through the crap to find the good stuff, you know? Shit makes the flowers grow.”
I couldn’t help smiling past a wash of tears.
“And based on that garden of yours, Liv,” North continued, “you do know how to make flowers grow.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thank you, O Wise and Profound One.”
He gave me one of his rare grins and tweaked my earlobe. “Find out who you are and what you want, Liv. That’s all I’m saying. Now go restock the tomatoes.”
I did. And I thought about what he said. I didn’t come to any immediate conclusions or make any plans, but as summer eased into fall and the commune’s children began returning to school, with some of the older teenagers going off to college, I had that old, all-too-familiar sense of getting left behind.
I wrote to Aunt Stella and asked if I could come back for a few months while I got enrolled at a community college. Maybe, just maybe, I could try again.
One afternoon North and I went to the deserted beach. We sat on the coarse sand, cold salty wind whipping around us, low waves spilling against the shore. North looked out at the ocean, the sand peppered with driftwood and seaweed.
“Try not to come back,” he said. “I want to hear from you, but don’t write too often.”
I didn’t have to ask why North wanted me to make a clean break. He knew that the only way I’d move forward again was if I no longer had a place to hide. I knew that too, even though my heart constricted at the thought of never seeing Twelve Oaks again.
“I’m scared,” I confessed.
“Yeah.”
I picked up a piece of driftwood and brushed the bits of sand from it. We sat in silence for a long time.
“You’re lucky, you know,” North said.
“How?”
“It’s your name, a part of you. The reminder of what you should do. What we all should do. It’s both the easiest and hardest thing in the world.”
I shrugged, chalking that statement up to another of North’s weird philosophical remarks. Two weeks later, after I’d packed up my car and said goodbye to everyone at Twelve Oaks, I hugged North and tried not to cry.
“I’m going to miss you,” I said.
“Nah.” He patted the back of my head. “Go on.”
Even so, his voice got a little choked up as he gave me directions to get back on the highway. He stepped away, watching me start the car and drive toward the gate surrounding the property. When I looked into the rearview mirror, I saw him raise both his hands in farewell.
I drove away from Twelve Oaks past fog-shrouded hills, the blue-gray swath of the ocean, gnarled cypress trees. Toward the highway, the unknown, my future once again. And then I finally understood.
Olivia… Liv… Live.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Dean
May 15
m so mad I could spit.” Frances Hunter glares at me from the doorway of my office, her arms crossed and her eyes blazing.
I take a few more books from the shelf and put them in a box. Because my home office is small, I’ve kept most of my academic stuff at King’s for the past few years. Books line the walls, the filing cabinet is stuffed with papers, and there are a million articles, office supplies, souvenirs. Even a plant that Liv once gave me to “liven up the place because really, Dean, it’s like a mausoleum in here.”
“Would you please reconsider this foolishness?” Frances snaps.
I take the framed photo of Liv from my desk and put it in the box along with a few of her drawings that I’d stuck to my computer.
“The chancellor has my resignation letter, Frances.”
“I’ll tell him it was a horrible mistake, that you were hit on the head and wrote that letter when you weren’t thinking straight.”
I stop to look at her. Affection and regret both twist inside me.
“I’m sorry, Frances. I had to end it.”
“Along with your career?”
I shrug. “I’ll find something else. You’ll give me a great recommendation, right?”
Frances glowers at me. “I’m not giving you any recommendation. I’ll be damned if some other university gets to have you when I can’t.”
“Now you just sound jealous.”
“I am jealous. I hired you. If I hadn’t, King’s would never have gotten the benefit of all your renown. You started the Medieval Studies program! I knew I should have pushed harder to get you fast-tracked for tenure.”
“Not even tenure could have saved me from this,” I tell her, which is the plain truth. I’m not sure anything could have saved me from this.
“Stop clearing out your office,” Frances orders. “You’re
on faculty until your resignation goes into effect.”
“I said it was effective immediately.”
“You need to give me a chance to explain things to the board,” Frances says. “They’re upset that King’s is losing the prestige of having you on faculty, but I want to tell them that this isn’t your choice, that—”
I hold up a hand to stop her. “It is my choice. And I’d make the same choice again, if I had to. Maggie Hamilton withdrew the complaint, and Stafford is writing his final report. He doesn’t have to make any recommendation to the board. It’s over.”
“And one of the best historians in the country is out of a job based on a lie,” Frances says.
I heft the box onto the floor and look at her again. “You never told me you knew it was a lie.”
“Of course it was a lie, for God’s sake, Dean,” she replies tartly. “I’m not stupid. I have to be the voice of reason when there’s a conflict between a student and a professor, but I know Maggie Hamilton doesn’t deserve to be here. I’ve never approved of the way she was admitted to King’s. The only reason she’s lasted this long is that Jeffrey Butler went easy on her. If he hadn’t retired, she might even have finished her thesis by now.”
Something flickers in the back of my mind. I replay that last conversation with Maggie in my office. “Your predecessor wasn’t above allowing a student a little extra credit,” she’d said. “I’m sure you’re not either.”
“Why did Jeffrey Butler retire?” I ask.
“He wanted to spend his time on research and consulting rather than teaching.”
“But he wasn’t at retirement age.”
“No, he took early retirement.” Frances frowns. “Why?”
I shake my head. “No reason.”
“That wasn’t a no reason question.”
“Just wondering why he went easy on Maggie.”
“Jeffrey was always more interested in his own work than that of his students,” Frances says. “And now Susan Chalmers is stuck with Maggie Hamilton. And I’ll tell you, Susan is not happy about it. Don’t be surprised if she throws rotten eggs at your car.”
