Our Last First Kiss KOBO

by Christie Ridgway

  “Some of them. We can’t see them all from here, but the ones you’re looking at make up the Channel Islands National Park and the waters surrounding them are a marine sanctuary.”

  “So the whales passing through are protected?”

  “In more ways than one,” Vic said. “The whales migrate to their birthing grounds in the waters off Baja, California, in the winter and then head back up to the Gulf of Alaska for the summer. It’s thought that the channel’s shallow waters and beach surf create enough background noise that it covers the sound of communication between whale mothers and calves, keeping them safer from predators.”

  “You must have been a professor in another life,” she said, recalling Alec saying he’d started the venture capital company.

  Vic laughed. “Certainly not what I was in the earlier part of this one. I didn’t concern myself with anything but making money until five years ago, when…well, when I retired and started thinking of other things.” His smile dimmed a moment, but then brightened again. “Now I take time to smell the roses and enjoy family, friends, and my wife.”

  “I don’t think I’ve congratulated you on thirty-five years of marriage.”

  “Thank you. It seems like just yesterday I met Miranda. She sat next to me in the dining commons at college one day and I was so struck by her beauty that I actually dropped the French fry I was holding. It landed in her lap.”

  “I don’t believe it for a minute,” Lilly said, grinning. “I can’t see you ever being clumsy.”

  “Believe it. But I don’t regret my awkwardness because Miranda didn’t bat an eye. She just picked up the fry, bit into it, and asked me if I wanted to go to a party with her that night.”

  Lilly laughed. She could imagine the older woman turning the moment into an opportunity with a handsome guy. As Vic continued regaling her with stories of their budding courtship, she knew exactly from whom his son had learned his charm.

  How easy life made it for some people, she mused. No wonder Alec walked around with such confidence and self-possession. Nothing ugly, no true hurt touched the Thatcher family.

  “Here you are,” another masculine voice said from behind her. This time it was Alec, bearing a glass of wine in each hand. “Dad, Mom’s looking for you,” he added, passing off one of the beverages to Lilly.

  With a jaunty salute to her, the older man hurried off.

  She smiled as she watched him go. “I need to be honest,” she told Alec, “and tell you I may have a bit of a thing for your father.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Uh-oh. Is that a sign of daddy issues? You’ll have to tell me—”

  A shout interrupted the rest of his thought and then everyone was rushing to the other side of the boat. Nature’s show, apparently, was on.

  An hour-and-a-half later, Lilly sighed as the vessel returned to the harbor. “I can’t believe we saw all of that.” A pod of dolphins had showed up to escort them on their outward-bound trip, wowing the spectators with their leaps and dives. Then they’d spied the distinctive plume from a whale’s blowhole, followed by a display of tail-slapping so loud—even from a distance—that she’d gripped the ship’s railing, her heart pounding.

  For the finale, they’d witnessed a humpback whale breaching.

  “I still don’t have my breath completely back,” Lilly said to Alec, who’d remained by her side. “Those creatures are so big.”

  “And we didn’t see any blue whales today, though we might have. They’re the largest animal ever known to have lived.” His shoulder brushed against hers.

  “Really?” She glanced over, cursing herself for how aware she was of him. The entire time they’d stood together, her skin had prickled like an incipient sunburn and she’d caught herself taking swift peeks at him, trying to memorize every expression on his face.

  “When they’re born they’re as big as full-grown hippos. The heart of an adult weighs 400 pounds.”

  “Okay, really big.”

  His gaze slid to her, a sly light in them. “They also have the largest penis of any living organism. Eight-to-ten feet long.”

  Hearing him say “penis” made her blush, that’s how silly she was. “Oh, how, um, interesting.” Lilly fought any even sillier shiver.

  “Hey, you’re cold,” Alec said. Sidestepping, he drew up behind her and put his arms around her body, bringing her back against his heat.

  This time she reacted with a full-body tremble. “I must have gotten chilled,” she said, breaking free of him. “I think I’ll go to the cabin until we dock.”

  Naturally, he came with her.

  But it was safer there, where almost all of the other sightseers now congregated, taking up hot or cold drinks and partaking of a buffet of appetizers and desserts. Alec snagged them both another glass of wine and then they found a small space to stand.

  Still too close, Lilly thought, grimacing. But she couldn’t really make a big fuss about it when it was she who had claimed there was no reason they couldn’t be friendly.

  Directing her attention away from him, she saw the same kids from earlier sitting at a nearby table, now drawing what she supposed might be dolphins and whales on blank sheets of paper. Her little friend glanced up and gave her a wave.

  Smiling, Lilly waved back, and the kid held up her artistic creation for her appraisal. Blue squiggles and a couple of enthusiastic but sloppy green circles. She put two thumbs up, now grinning.

  “Cute,” Alec said.

  She glanced at him, noting he was looking at her instead of the child. Flushing again, she stared into her glass of wine as if she found it fascinating.

  “I can see you as a mom. You’d be great.”

  Aghast, her chin shot up, her head swiveled, and she gawked at him. “You’ve got to be kidding. I have absolutely no maternal skills.”

  “You don’t need skills. I bet you can get skills from YouTube videos or a What to Expect book. You need instincts, Lilly. And you’ve got those in spades.”

  “Huh?” The notion that she’d be any good at all with small persons continued to flummox her.

  “You’re loyal. Sympathetic. And I bet you’re great with details.”

  “That’s motherly?” she questioned. “It sounds more like a dog who can also fill out tax forms.”

  “It’s a damn good start on motherly. Throw in an adorable infant with your sweet face and hopefully the daddy’s less thorny personality and you’ll be in family heaven.”

  She wanted to retort that most people didn’t find her particularly thorny, but that was a lie, and then she thought of the phrase “family heaven” and got sidetracked. Family had never meant heaven to her, but she could see why Alec would use that phrase, coming from Thatcher perfection.

  “It’s you who should have kids,” she replied. “Be a dad like the one you have, smart and also wise in the ways of living.” Raise two point five secure, sheltered-from-hard-knocks kids who would strut through life without chips on their shoulders or barbed wire around their hearts or danger in their DNA. This is how Durands love.

  Alec looked away this time. “My dad used to spend a lot of time at the office. He wasn’t always as…present as he is now. I don’t know that I’d do any better.”

  Suddenly Lilly hated the turn of this conversation. How had it come to this? Imagining Alec procreating with some woman to produce a nursery full of little Thatchers put her in a sour mood.

  “You know, Audra and Jacob were talking about having children right away,” she said, her bad temper evident in her voice. “He agreed with her they should start trying during the honeymoon. But that didn’t turn out to be, did it?”

  It felt good, in a weird way, to poke at the wound of the wedding-that-wasn’t. To remind them both they were here together in this moment because a romance had gone awry.

  Alec made a noise suspiciously like a snort. “And her walls rise up again,” he murmured.

  If her throat hadn’t tightened right then to the size of a straw, she might have ground ou
t some home truths to explain her bone-deep instinct for self-preservation. My mother abandoned me to people who never loved me. A man has never taken my side in anything. Every day I look in the mirror and I look at my best friend and I see object lessons in all the reasons not to get into a relationship and surely not to dream of a husband or something as impossible for Lilly Durand as family heaven.

  Chapter 5

  The next day, Audra wandered from her bedroom mid-afternoon. Lilly took a quick inventory, and stifled a sigh when she noted the wedding dress still covered her friend’s upper body. She wore it with jeans and she’d hacked at it again with something sharp. Now it met the waistband of her pants but the inches of fabric she’d removed looked to have been tied around her pale blonde hair like a headband.

  Not for the first time, Lilly worried her friend had not introduced said hair to shampoo since their arrival at the Heartbreak Hotel.

  And she was also starting to doubt the purported powers of the place because Audra didn’t seem to be any more lively than when they’d arrived. Lily had grave doubts that would change anytime soon.

  She hopped up to grab a cold bottle of water from the mini-fridge and delivered it to the other woman. “Hey,” she said, handing it over. “Long time no see. You okay?”

  “I’ve been reviewing important moments in my life,” Audra said.

  “Um…oh?”

  “Did you know I passed on having sex with the lead singer of Arrow our senior year?”

  Lilly felt her eyes bug out. “What? How?”

  “As chair of the Student Activities committee, I had a backstage pass and a responsibility to liaise.”

  Liaise. Only Audra would use that word. “Why’d you never tell me? He was hot. Like hawt hot,” Lilly said, using their college-era lingo to describe the member of a popular rock band. “And why didn’t you take the opportunity?”

  “Because I thought for sure I’d come out of the experience with an STD or at least a hickey.”

  “But it would have been a Dash Hickok hickey,” Lilly said, ignoring the prospect of disease. “You could have had him autograph it!”

  “I also had on boring cotton underwear, and worse, I wore my panties that said ‘Friday’ across the butt and the concert was on Saturday night. It was a simple mix-up on my part, but he might have thought I didn’t daily change my undies.” Audra shuddered. “What could be more humiliating?”

  Lilly neglected to mention being left at the altar. “Well, you could have taken your panties off before he had a chance to see them,” she pointed out, thinking of Dash Hickock’s signature scruff on his chiseled jaw and the tattoos crawling all over his lean body. Yeah. Hawt.

  Audra stared. “That never occurred to me. I, um, usually let the guy take charge of the disrobing.”

  Lilly didn’t laugh at her friend. If she could cast her mind that far back—ages and ages ago—she’d have to admit she’d never been particularly assertive when it came to intimacy either.

  “Anyway,” the other woman continued. “It seemed pointless to have sex with someone I never intended to see again.”

  “Didn’t the band play for two nights?”

  Audra gave her a look. “You get what I mean.”

  “I do, but—”

  “Then there was the time I refused the camel ride on that family trip to Morocco,” she said. “It was a two-day expedition and it included an overnight at an oasis.”

  “I remember that. Your cousin warned you against it—she said you’d be in pain during the journey and a long time afterward, right where no woman wants to hurt.”

  Audra nodded.

  Lilly couldn’t figure out where the other woman was going with these reminiscences. “So now you regret missing out?”

  Her friend shook her head. “Oh, no, not at all.”

  Confused, Lilly perched on the arm of the sofa and narrowed her gaze. “Okay. You’re not sorry for the hookup you didn’t have with a famous rocker. You’re not sorry you didn’t snatch the opportunity of a lifetime and get your tender parts bruised by a humped dromedary.”

  “Yes,” Audra said, rolling the plastic water bottle between her palms so that it crackled. “Isn’t that sad?”

  Lilly rubbed her forehead. It wasn’t sad, right? Because Audra hadn’t done things she didn’t want to do.

  “Don’t you get it?” her friend demanded. “It’s pitiful. I have no regrets! I always followed the rules, I always chose the sensible path. There’s not the memory of one hickey that I wish I could forget.”

  “What you regret,” Lilly said slowly, thinking she might be getting it now, “is that you have no regrets.”

  “Exactly,” Audra said, then strolled back to her room and shut the door.

  Preoccupied with that revelation, when Lilly’s phone rang, she absently pulled it from her pocket and accepted the call without first checking the caller ID.

  “There you are,” her aunt said in her Southern voice that still had Spanish moss dripping from it though she’d left New Orleans for Los Angeles thirty years before. “We’ve been wondering what happened to you.”

  Lilly stiffened. “I gave you money on the first of the month, like always.” A preemptive payment, she’d found, kept them at bay most of the time. During her first year of full-time employment, they’d guilted her for different cash amounts on an irregular basis. The unpredictability of their requests had left her edgy and anxious. Giving them a standard amount on the same day every month had solved at least some of the problem.

  “Your uncle Claude’s truck broke down last week.”

  But it hadn’t solved all of the problem.

  As her blood pressure began to rise, Lilly pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and tried reminding herself she didn’t need to respond.

  “And François…” Aunt Mariellen said her son’s first name with a flourish that the thirty-one-year-old wouldn’t appreciate, as he was known to his bar-mates as Frank. “Well, the poor boy broke a tooth and needs to get it fixed.”

  “How awful for him,” Lilly said. “How did that happen?”

  The ensuing silence told her what she needed to know. Frank had likely gotten in a fist fight over a beer tab, someone else’s woman, or the color of the sky at night.

  “I’m sure it doesn’t matter,” her aunt said, a hint of steel in her voice.

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Lilly heard herself hasten to say, the inner abandoned kid in her responding to any hint of censure from this woman.

  “I told François you are so grateful for all those years we kept you and cared for you, that you’d want to help a little more this month.”

  A mix of misery and frustration roiled in Lilly’s belly. She placed her palm there, rubbing in small circles to contain the bitterness. Now was not the time to debate the word “care” or mention the lump sum Lilly’s maternal grandmother had given her uncle and aunt for her upkeep when her mother had gone MIA.

  “He and your uncle Claude dropped by your offices this afternoon hoping to pick up a check. The people there said you were out for a few days.” Her aunt sounded affronted by the idea.

  Lilly fought the urge to appease her. Old habits die hard. “That’s right,” she said in a neutral voice. “I’m in Santa Barbara, at The Hathaway Hotel.” The instant the words left her mouth she wished them back. She’d only meant to make clear she was far enough away that she couldn’t drop what she was doing and rush them funds. Mentioning the resort, however, would be sure to catch the other woman’s avaricious interest.

  “The Hathaway Hotel,” she said. “Aren’t you fancy?”

  “Not really.” Lilly, however, made a mental note to increase her monthly payment to them by 10 percent, regardless of how that would disorder her personal budget. “Someone else is picking up the bill.”

  “Lilly.” Aunt Mariellen was practically purring now. “Have you finally snagged yourself a wealthy benefactor?”

  “No.” She raked her fingers t
hrough her hair. God. The other woman said “wealthy benefactor” like some character out of a Southern Gothic play. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “I wouldn’t look down on you, even if he’s married,” the older woman assured her. “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

  “This girl can take care of herself and her own bills,” Lilly said stiffly. Not to mention yours.

  The other woman clicked her tongue. “No reason to get defensive. I didn’t raise you to be so snappish.”

  “Yes, well.” Lilly took a long breath and decided it was time to end the call before she indulged in her new habit of throwing phones. “I have to go now. When I get back to LA, I’ll see about getting you some extra funds if you still need them.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she ended the call and powered off the device.

  “Who were you talking to?” Audra said, reentering the living area from her room.

  “Oh, just one of the reasons I can’t afford a therapist.” Because of the money Lilly paid the Durands each month and because no amount of time with a mental health professional would manage to loosen the barbed wire binding her heart.

  “Claude or Mariellen?” Audra asked, who knew nearly all of Lilly’s secrets.

  “Mariellen. Claude’s truck broke down. Frank broke a tooth.”

  “Let me guess. In a bar brawl over someone else’s girlfriend, the last buffalo wing on the platter, or what you do with grass when it gets too long.”

  Lilly sent her friend a smile. “This is why we’re BFFs. Our minds work in such similar ways.”

  “We are similar,” Audra agreed. “For different reasons, we’ve avoided taking risks and are over-anxious about the possibility of making mistakes.”

  “Um, thanks for that,” Lilly said, now uncomfortable.

  Audra shrugged. “I meant to ask before, have you heard anything from Alec? Anything about Jacob, I mean?”

  Fresh guilt poured into Lilly. Not only had she not asked Alec if he’d heard from the ex-groom, but she’d still not told the other woman that the Thatchers were vacationing at The Hathaway and that she’d spent some time with them. “Um…well…”