The Complete Where Dreams

by M. L. Buchman

  Constance had joked that she couldn’t argue; should the opportunity ever arise Melanie could easily top her own list. He fell asleep before the irony of that long-ago joke could make him break down completely.

  Chapter 3

  Josh woke up to an internal alarm clock, one still located on another coast, and couldn’t get back to sleep. He took a quick shower and donned fresh clothes before he slipped into the still-dark living room.

  No light under Melanie’s door. Of course it was barely five in the morning, no sane person would be awake yet.

  By the streetlight’s glow still coming through the large west-facing living room windows, he surveyed the space. It was mostly a great room made up of entryway, living, and dining all in one space with a generous kitchen in the corner. For that he had to turn on a light.

  The space was breathtaking. Angelo’s hand was clear here, a kitchen designed from scratch by a chef for a chef. All of the equipment top grade, cutting boards, and a second prep sink all perfectly placed. The solid cabinets of natural oak, the counter space broad, even a marble section for pastries.

  Then he discovered the massive pantry. Barren except for one rack which sported an awesome collection of kitchen machines, you could easily move a desk and chair into the space. If he could squeeze in a cot, he could happily live right here next to that kitchen. He already had a couple of ideas of what to cook; there was no way he could live here another day with this kitchen and not play in it. Except this was Melanie’s place first. Maybe she’d let him come by and cook.

  First thing it needed was coffee. An impressive home espresso machine sat in the corner of the main counter with a grinder standing right beside it, but he had no beans. He checked the freezer. Nope. Besides, the grinding would wake Melanie. And there was no way he could start his First Day, drum roll please, of his writing career without his morning boost.

  He shut off the light, took his computer in a sling-pack over his shoulder, and tip-toed out the door.

  Seattle wasn’t quiet at this hour, it was silent. Pioneer Square’s bars and restaurants had been vibrating with energy when he’d arrived last night. The warm May weather drawing crowds out onto the streets and the small tables set up outside hip bistros. Couples had wandered the art galleries arm-in-arm and small mobs of overdressed and overly-effervescent teens flashed fake IDs at anyone who even pretended any interest.

  Now the streets belonged to him and some tall guy going into the back entrance of a homeless shelter’s kitchen, based on the brief flash of bright lights and shining stainless steel. He wandered up First Avenue toward Pike Place Market looking for a place to go, not even the coffee places were open. He checked his watch, still too early for the first chefs to hit the Market’s stalls. The air was saltwater fresh, but after the traveling he’d done and the sleep he’d missed, he’d need the air to be highly caffeinated as well if it was going to make any difference.

  For ten years he’d been reviewing restaurants and food festivals all around the country. From the Bite of Seattle to the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen to the New Orleans Wine & Food Experience, he’d been to them all and written about them all. He had a press pass for the Experience next week, but he wouldn’t be headed to New Orleans to attend. He could hear people congratulating him on “getting out of the rat race” then shaking their heads sadly as soon as his back was turned. He knew it, for he’d done the same thing himself often enough.

  No. A fresh start was better. If he could just find some coffee.

  Pioneer Square gave way to a few unrestored blocks that had seen better days sixty or seventy years before, as he walked up First Ave. But then he hit the theaters and condo towers that had sprung up in the last decade. Still not a one of their ground-floor coffee shops was open yet.

  As he crossed Marion Street, he looked downhill. The day’s first ferries for Bainbridge Island and Bremerton on the far side of Puget Sound were pulling out of the docks, the deck lights blazing as they headed to fetch the first big loads of morning commuters. He’d bet they had coffee on board. The sky was brightening, the stars that had reached through the streetlights were slowly fading away.

  Even Pike Place Market at the top of the long First Avenue grade was still silent and unlit. The only vendor up and about was the fishmonger. He and his assistants were already pitching ice into the big display cases preparing for the arrival of the day’s catch. Their fish were always the freshest. Angelo or Manuel, the executive chef at his second restaurant, would be here right after the fish arrived to make sure they had the very best of the selection.

  They traded friendly waves, but Josh felt a little disconnected from the world around him and simply continued along the old brick street lit by the bright “Public Market” sign glowing bright red above the market. The hundreds of other shops were still shuttered.

  Then, up Post Alley, he spotted a single light. The back door leading into Angelo’s kitchen stood open to the morning air. As he approached, he smelled coffee. Rich coffee. Then he spotted Maria working over her baked goods, the patissier always had early hours to get the ovens up to temp and the breads just right.

  Coffee, he could just go begging; he’d need at least a lame excuse. It seemed only right that he should go in and apologize for missing her son’s wedding party for Bill and Perrin. Yeah, really lame, but he was desperate.

  He barely had time to blink before he was seated across the baking prep station from her with a cup of rich Italian roast and a cornetto filled with dark Venchi chocolate still so warm from the oven that the chocolate ran down his chin when he bit into it.

  “I ran into Melanie last night.”

  “Oh, where?” Mama Maria Amelia Avico Parrano Stanford was the short version of Sophia Loren: beautiful, very-nicely figured, and aging splendidly. Josh knew that her son Angelo was at least thirty, but it was difficult to equate that as being possible when observing the flour-spattered beauty working across from him.

  “Around midnight. At the apartment,” he kept his tone dry.

  Maria put her fingertips to her lips but they did nothing to hide her smile.

  “It’s not funny. The woman nearly Tasered me.”

  “As she should have, intruding on her in the middle of the night.”

  Well, clearly he was going to get no sympathy here. He’d have to try the guys later. But he’d bet it wouldn’t work there either. They’d have absolutely no pity for him once they heard just how scantily clad his assailant had been.

  Maybe he’d just keep his mouth shut; he had to protect her reputation after all. He sipped the coffee again and felt himself waken a little. By tonight his body would be shifting over to West Coast time.

  Maria slid another tray of cornetti into the oven before sitting on a stool across from him. He liked the restaurant’s kitchen at this time of day. It was dark outside. The only light came from the single overhead that cast its light on the stainless steel table, but not beyond. Maria was a shadowy figure except for her hands brightly lit as she tore off a corner of her own cornetto.

  “You must have loved her very much.”

  Joshua’s coffee cup slipped from his nerveless fingers, the black liquid cutting a dark river across the floured work surface. His attempts to apologize were waved off as Maria wiped the surface and poured him a fresh cup.

  At a loss for what else to do, he nodded. He still couldn’t see the chink in their marriage. Couldn’t find the place where they had gone their separate ways and their love had become a façade. Because it hadn’t. Their last night together hadn’t been filled with anger and biting words, they had simply sat all night on the couch and held each other and cried. Well, she had cried, he’d still been too numb.

  “Well,” Mama Maria re-dusted her table and began rolling out the next batch of dough, “it is good that you feel so much.”

  “So that it hurts this badly?” He sounded angry even to himself.

  “So that you could have loved so deeply. Your heart is shattered, but it is n
ot broken. It will heal as long as it continues to feel.” She brushed a long curl of dark brown hair, with just the slightest hint of gray, back into the kerchief she wore and began rolling out the next batch of dough with the confidence of decades of practice.

  He thought about what she was saying. His heart certainly hurt enough to believe it would never heal. Though it did hurt less than it had a month ago, even a week ago when he’d walked out of the New York condo and pointed his car west. As unimaginable as it seemed, maybe someday the pain would ease enough for him to take a breath without whimpering.

  Josh didn’t see it happening anytime soon, but just maybe it was possible.

  “You are either scary smart or just plain scary, Maria. I’m not sure which.”

  Her smile was radiant, “When you figure it out, could you let Hogan know? My husband often claims that he would very much like the answer to that question.”

  “Will do.” But he wasn’t ready for whatever other insight might be coming his way. “Would it be okay if I went out and worked on my computer in the dining area for a while?”

  “Of course, Joshua. If you take the small table to the left of the server’s station, that is always the last one we seat. You can sit there right through meals if you want to. Now go, do something to fix your heart; I suggest you spend the day pretending it is fine and work on a task that will distract you. I have breakfast to make and then desserts for today’s service. When I have the Pandolce Genovese ready, I will bring you a piece.”

  He gathered up his computer pack, coffee, and cornetto before turning for the swinging doors. Just before he crossed the threshold Maria called out after him.

  “And don’t give Melanie a thought. These things have a way of taking care of themselves.” She’d timed her comment perfectly so that he’d actually have to step out of the dark restaurant and back into the dimly lit kitchen if he wanted to ask what in creation she meant by that.

  And of course, the woman—who he’d barely given any thought to at all this morning—once again stood in the forefront of his thoughts. Stood there in a worn, too short t-shirt, watching him with the most amazing eyes in the world.

  “He was very cute,” Melanie admitted. Still at something of a loss as to what to do with herself, she’d returned to Perrin’s store. She felt some responsibility for helping Perrin choose the two seamstresses and she wanted to follow up on how that was working out. It was too little to repay the kindness of the lead on the condominium, but it was a deposit on account.

  Karissa was faster and Clem was more accurate, they complemented each other well.

  “I always liked Josh,” Perrin admitted as she sorted through a shipment of fabric. Colorful bolts of mid- to lightweight summer fabrics covered most of the cutting table.

  Melanie had ended up at a small desk in the corner that was buried in a storm of untended paperwork. For something to do with her hands, she began sorting and stacking it as they talked.

  “I never jumped him though. Happily married and all that.” Perrin clearly enjoyed her ability to shock, but such things didn’t faze Melanie. Instead she agreed, that was a line that she too would never cross.

  “No ring,” Melanie had noted that as he’d lain on the floor at her feet. “Just the tan line for one.”

  Perrin disappeared behind a stack of greens: Lime, Hemlock, Apple, and Loden. “Well, if that’s true, something major happened. He was one of those guys who never stopped going on once you got him on the subject of his wife.”

  “Well, he certainly didn’t mention her while I had my Taser aimed at him.”

  “You aimed a Taser at him?” Perrin popped back up to look at her. She looked like a mischievous modern-day angel wrapped in a tight, over-scale herringbone-print hoodie. “Did you shoot him?”

  “Non!” She’d never shot anyone except a training mannequin. “Though I came close, he did very much scare me.” And then this morning he’d been gone before she’d woken up. No note or anything, not that there was any reason he would leave one. She was nosy enough to peek in the other bedroom and see that his pack was still on the floor and the covers looked as if he’d slept on top of them and then not bothered to straighten it all up afterwards.

  Did she like or dislike the implication that he would be returning? She wasn’t sure. They would have to talk it over, she wasn’t exactly in the mood to cohabit with anyone. Especially not mere days after breaking it off with Carlo. She sighed to herself. After Carlo breaking it off with her. It might be nice to have a man-free zone while she re-gathered her self-esteem.

  Perrin turned back to her fabrics, testing the drape and lie of a couple of them.

  Melanie focused on the papers before her. There were bills to pay with completed but unsigned checks, probably prepared by Raquel. Good, that meant Perrin wasn’t letting others make her payments. Sign your own checks for your own business. None were over seven days old. Also good.

  There was a fair wad of fan letters. Melanie was used to these, but was surprised to see that a designer also received them. Most were harmless, only a few creepy ones, and no gross ones; her own mail had the reverse ratios.

  There was also a thin stack of general correspondence. She started reading without really thinking about it. Then she read another and a third.

  “Perrin?”

  “What do you think of this one?” she held up a swatch of Malachite Green.

  “Not with your skin, non. En réalité, I’m not sure any woman could get away with that unless they were going to a costume ball as a harlequin.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Perrin tossed it aside and continued her sorting. “Don’t know why I ordered it in the first place.”

  Karissa and Clem were conferring over whether they needed to hand roll the hem. When they decided that was what the fabric called for, Melanie relaxed. They did have a proper sense of what was required to execute Perrin’s effortless styles. She was also pleased to note that neither had to ask the other how to execute it.

  “Perrin,” then Melanie realized that she already had Perrin’s attention, the woman was just multi-tasking. “I hope you do not mind that I—”

  “If I did, I would have stopped you before you got to the fan mail.”

  Melanie had only seen a few times how sharp a person Perrin was, in addition to her design work. She wore a cloak of wild craziness that distracted like…ah. It distracted like Melanie’s accent. A revelation she’d regretted making to Joshua last night, but he’d scared her all the way down to her core.

  Whenever her childhood New Jersey accent slipped back to the fore it made her feel unclean. She’d had to take a shower to scrub it off before she’d been able to go back to bed. Still, she’d lain awake far into the night. She couldn’t write it off as adrenaline let-down, her heart rate was unexceptional. It was… She pictured the moment again. How Josh Harper had looked after getting over his surprise. No, not how he’d looked, how he’d looked at her.

  She knew that her legs were one of her best features. And while he had obviously noted them, he had spoken neither to her legs nor her chest. Disconcertingly, he had looked right at her. As if having heard her original, hated voice, he somehow saw the real her. No one did that, not Russell or Perrin. Maybe not even herself, but somehow Joshua did.

  “Some of that fan mail stuff is pretty weird,” Perrin shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know what to do with it.”

  Melanie waved at the thick stack of letters, “I send them a signed photo.” Except for the creepy and the scary ones. “You should use this pile to create a mailing list. Just give them to Raquel and she can use them to send out your season-line brochures.”

  Perrin suddenly became very interested in sorting a stack of reds. She set aside a Persimmon and a Cayenne, not a color combination Melanie would have expected, but she did like the way it felt to her eyes.

  She nodded when Perrin sent her a questioning glance.

  Taking up the two fabrics side by side, she walked over to the w
all of fabrics stacked on shelves down one of the studio’s long walls and began holding them up to different fabrics, both complementary and contrasting.

  Melanie read between the lines, “You have no season-line brochure.”

  “I barely have a season-line,” was Perrin’s whispered response.

  Melanie moved up beside her and rested a calming hand on Perrin’s arm. She was practically vibrating with nerves.

  “Perrin.”

  This time Perrin looked up at her and Melanie could see the incipient panic so close below the surface. That’s when she realized that Perrin’s success had already overwhelmed her and now she was losing control.

  That also would explain the letters that Melanie had sorted aside from all of the other untended business. Those were requests for major blocks of work. An Off-Broadway show, five society weddings—three of them complete ensembles from mother-of-the-bride on up, even a request from Shelley at Fashion Alive magazine. She was just a junior editor at the magazine, but she had a discerning eye and was looking to make her mark. She wanted to come for a visit and see a show.

  Perrin took one look at the letters in Melanie’s other hand and shied away toward a horrid Cyber Yellow that had nothing to do with two reds she was still holding.

  Melanie took the letters back to the desk, found a folder and tucked them inside. No wonder they’d been at the bottom of the pile of unfinished business, they were scaring the woman to death.

  “Come here,” Melanie called her over.

  Perrin came, still clutching her two pieces of red fabric and a swatch of the Cyber Yellow.

  Melanie knew when a little harsh therapy was needed and pushed her into the chair. She relieved Perrin of the reds with a bit of a tug, secured the yellow with an extra sharp tug, and then put a pen in her hand.

  “First, you sign these checks and pay all of your bills. Then we give the bills and the fan mail to Raquel to deal with.”

  Perrin nodded mechanically and began signing.