Love you, Ice Sweet
Vic
He turned the page over again. Still blank. He folded it carefully and tucked it back into her hand. She clenched it slowly into a fist, the paper’s crinkling the only sound other than the gentle slap of waves against the hull.
“When did he die?”
“Christmas Day.” Her voice was hoarse, barely a whisper. She found a Kleenex and blew her nose with a very unwomanly honk. She was really a mess.
“I hate crying. I haven’t wept like that since, I don’t know, ever. Maybe since Mama didn’t come home.”
“But it’s August. How… the letter?” She’d been reading a letter on the bow of the boat when his parents were there. And he’d noticed her reading one out at Cape Flattery while he poked around the rocks looking for his Lady of the Lights. For Cassidy.
“He gave you the calendar of lighthouses.”
She nodded against his chest.
“And… a series of letters.”
Again the smooth slickness of her hair rubbing back and forth under his chin.
“He’s taking a whole year to say goodbye.”
This time she was quiet, though he could feel the gentle warmth of her tears soak once more into his tee-shirt.
“He sounds like a wonderful man.”
“The best.”
It took her a while, but she told him about the letters. About his sunny California vineyard followed by the one in rainy Kingston. Of what it had felt like to stand on the soil that had once been his and to know the vines were gone, but his spirit was still there in that soil.
“You were right.” She was leaning back against the mast now. Her feet propped against his thigh as he lay on the curve of the inside of the hull.
“I was?” Wouldn’t that just shock the shit out of Angelo. “About what?”
“About my not really knowing a wine.”
“It was a stupid-ass remark made to a woman I didn’t even know. I thought you were—”
“What?”
He shook his head. It would make him sound even dumber than he was.
She poked one of her toes into his ribs. He tried to scoot away but there was nowhere to scoot. She started to wiggle them and he had to shove her leg away. She slid the other foot up the leg of his shorts and wiggled them there. He sat bolt upright and cracked his head on the underside of the deck.
Her laugh spilled out between her fingers even as she mumbled an apology and tried to reach for his head to check for bumps.
An attempt to push her away achieved nothing. Once she ascertained there was no bump, she kissed the spot.
“All better,” she declared.
He turned his head and kissed her. Time slowed, nearly ground to a halt as his blood hammered in his head. Without even thinking about it, he had one hand on her breast, no bra beneath the light dress shirt. She crawled into his lap and in moments they were sprawled back on the stateroom bed.
She pulled his tee-shirt out of his shorts and slid a cool hand across his chest.
“Oh. My.”
“You said that before.”
He had and it was just as true now. How could anything feel so wonderful?
Then she teased his nipples.
“Give.”
“Anything.”
“What were you going to say?”
He clamped his mouth shut. She ground her hips against his painfully hard erection.
“Give.”
Give? He could barely remember how to breathe.
“Give.”
“Okay,” he gasped for breath, but there wasn’t any air on the boat. “Okay, just stop that for a second so I can uncross my eyes.”
She stopped. Mostly. As if the slow motion of her hips in perfect rhythm with the ocean was one bit less distracting.
“Give. You thought I was…”
“A stuck-up, Upper East Side, rich bitch, spoiled brat.”
Her smile was beatific. “Not a self-made, Northwest island girl, who busted her ass for every inch she ever gained?”
“Uh. No.” He couldn’t believe this was the same woman who had frozen him out on that first date.
“Not one of the country’s leading wine tasters who studied how to be Upper East Side because she didn’t have the lazy-ass, Upper West Side fortune?”
With a quick grab at the back pocket of her shorts, he managed to get the leverage to flip her onto her back.
“I busted my ass too, I’ve earned every damn cent I’ve ever spent since junior year of high school.” Where did the sudden anger come from? It had soared like a flame inside of him. And now here he was pinning her to his bed. Taking advantage of his strength. He shoved away. Off the bed, into the main part of the cabin.
She caught up with him after he’d climbed into the cockpit. The boat was just too damned small.
“Sorry. I was just teasing. I know you earned it. Your dad told me about it when we had dinner in New York. About how proud he was of you for finding your own way.”
He stared aft. Looking at the sea, the sky, the island, trying to focus on anything.
“You wouldn’t joke about that?” Had he misjudged every single event in his life?
She slid her hands around his waist from behind and rested her head on his shoulder. Together they looked out at the lighthouse.
The day was fading. They’d made love all night, and slept most of the day. The sun was already westerning, though the long Northwest evening was far from over.
“We make a pretty sad pair of porcupines.” Her voice was kind, her hands strong, and gentle.
She pulled one of his hands free from where he’d jammed them into his pockets.
He opened his mouth. To explain. To apologize. To thank her for perhaps being the first woman in his life to not care about his money, or his past, or what he might do in the future. The first to like him as he was, a mortal mess.
She rested a finger gently across his lips to silence him.
Not releasing his hand, she led him back into the cabin.
# # #
In some ways it was the trickiest shoot Russell had ever done.
Perrin had loaded most of the contents of her store into his boat and he’d anchored off the Seattle waterfront. The three women had gotten over the self-consciousness that usually caused amateur shoots to look so stiff and miserable by the second or third clothing change.
The three women laughed more than any group he’d ever been with. They teased him mercilessly, starting with “hubba-hubba” noises and rapidly degenerating to incredibly raunchy, though Perrin definitely took the lead there. When, in an unthinking moment, he’d stripped off his shirt because of the sun’s heat, Perrin had started a series of catcalls and whistles that could be heard over most of Elliot Bay.
The technical challenges of lighting, background, and a shooting platform that was in constant motion occupied most of his mind. The sun would be right, but the background wrong. The background and light right, but the proper shooting position was a five yards off the beam. Some of Perrin’s more classic designs wanted the older part of Seattle in the background. The more outrageous outfits were accented, more vivid, alive with the mid-town skyscrapers as a setting.
Several times he clambered out onto the boom and swung himself over the side, snapping half-a-dozen images before he swung back inboard. He’d tried standing in the dinghy, but the water was a little too lively for him to keep his balance.
Then Cassidy got him. He was sitting in the dinghy, shooting up at the women on the boat. She was dressed in a skimpy summer beach outfit. His white dress shirt, the one she’d never returned, open and blowing in the gentle breeze. She grabbed one of the shrouds that soared up to hold up the mast. She leaned out over the water and, with a siren-like beauty used to tease sailors onto the rocks of despair, flashed one of her killer smiles.
His heart stumbled. His hands wielded the camera more out of habit than intent. He didn’t need the camera, smiling Cassidy was forever burned i
nto his mind. Moments later Perrin and Jo were with her.
The Three Sirens.
The Three Fates.
Three Sisters.
Jo, Perrin, and Cassidy.
Truth, Joy, and Beauty.
At some point they fed him a sandwich which he’d eaten without tasting. He had to change out the memory card in his camera three times.
As the sun set, he began to wish he’d rented the flash umbrellas. The changing light, just a few elegant accents, would set the stage for Perrin’s collection of eveningwear.
“Cassidy. Grab the stormsail,” he called down. He’d been banished from below, the women’s changing room.
Moments later, she tossed it out of the hatchway.
“You sure you never sailed before?”
All that answered was her bright laugh and it definitely did something racy to his heart. In the short last month, she’d inhaled the knowledge as if she’d been born to it. They’d anchored in quiet coves up in the Canadian Queen Charlottes, ridden out a forty-knot storm in the Straits when they’d decided to visit Destruction Island lighthouse by sail. And love. Holy Christ they’d made incredible love.
He hung the white stormsail from the main boom and the lifelines. Tied the excess off to the boom.
Jo came up first. A black sheath that followed every curve perfectly. That rode low enough to reveal the bounty of her breasts, but high enough to be pure class. Her long black hair was swept forward over one shoulder. As she turned, she revealed the bit of magic that was Perrin’s trademark, every piece had some surprise, some subtle, some blatant.
Jo’s dress didn’t reveal her whole back as might be expected. Rather, only a small, open area revealed her beautiful olive skin. Exactly the spot a man’s hand would rest during an intimate waltz or… he had to smile.
He had Jo swing back as if in the throes of tango, the reserved woman released by the dress and his request. Her hair swept back along the deck, her body arched in pleasure, passion, joy. The flash reflected off the sail covered her in a ballroom’s soft lighting, etching her against the oranges and golds of the sunset beyond the water and the sharply outlined peaks of the Olympic mountains.
Perrin slid into the picture, taking the man’s position in the dance. A pantsuit, but like none he’d ever seen in a dozen years of New York fashion. The slacks had seams that climbed in an iridescent spectrum from ankle to hip. The triple-layered jacket lapels shifted from traditional black to the shades of the rainbow depending on how she moved. But they weren’t heavy, rather they accented the plunging cleavage of the single-buttoned front. The cleavage of a woman wearing nothing but the jacket and pants. A perky hat that might have fit a sixties secret agent if not for the single peacock feather above the right ear. She was at once in control, powerful, and incredibly erotic.
She and Jo danced about the narrow deck, posed at the edge of the dance so that he could capture each alone, and then whirling together in a flurry of laughter and sensuality. And there was never a moment, despite all their fooling around, that there could be a doubt about the orientation of these two women. They were friends dancing together, to make the men wild.
Perrin had been very strict about that. She didn’t care what others thought about her, but she didn’t want to embarrass her two friends. Her love for them went as deep as his for Angelo, deeper.
In their various meetings preparing for this shoot, she’d slowly revealed how they had saved her from her parents’ past. The abuser and the whore who had no compunction about using their own daughter, selling her. How she’d surely have gotten herself killed, or killed herself, many times over if it hadn’t been for Cassidy and Jo. Her wild experiments with drugs, alcohol, and men had all been tempered by them. She loved her life and she attributed it all to her two best friends.
He’d fallen further in love with Cassidy as he heard of the interventions, sometimes in the middle of Vassar campus. Cassidy had brought Perrin home for every vacation so she’d never be alone where her parents could get her, or even alone with her own originally self-destructive tendencies.
Then Cassidy came up from below and he forgot about everything. She moved slowly, her dress shimmering in the golden light. No sequins, nor glitter. The threads of the material caught, reflected, and refracted light but appeared as plain and simple as a red evening gown. Not the red of a wild woman, but the dusky red of her chestnut hair. The dress wasn’t blatant, it wasn’t a slap in the face like Perrin’s pantsuit, or a sensual masterpiece like Jo’s. It spoke as much of the observer as of the wearer. High-necked, long-sleeved, her cascading hair the only adornment other than a small sailboat on a thin silver neck chain.
Not that she didn’t look absolutely incredible. But it invited him into the warm circle of the woman within. Almost of its own will, his camera raised to his eye. They moved in slow motion. Step, click, flash. Shift, click, flash. This time Russell and Cassidy were the two dancing.
The images of Cassidy shifted about him. The color rising to her cheeks made her that much more alive. The sparkle in her eyes as she relaxed made her that much more desirable.
He moved about the deck to different angles, heights, backgrounds, and still her smile dazzled him.
She bent out of one frame giving him a shot of the top of her head. When she stood straight once more, Nutcase, in all her calico disarray, cuddled against Cassidy’s chin. He came in closer. The camera never ceased its whirr-click, flash.
Nutcase looking at Cassidy, Cassidy looking directly at him. Whirr-click, flash. Beauty.
Cassidy looked down at the cat. Whirr-click, flash. The nurturer.
Cassidy and the cat both looking at him. Totally self-contained. Whirr-click, flash.
He stopped. Dropped the camera to his side. How could he not want to be with this woman when she looked at him that way? He wanted her in his life.
A loud pop startled him from his reverie.
Perrin laughed aloud and began pouring champagne into small glass tumblers.
He looked back at Cassidy, but she was facing away. Dropping Nutcase onto the cockpit cushions.
“I thought that last outfit would get you.” Perrin pushed a glass into his free hand and extracted the camera from his limp fingers, unwinding the strap from behind his elbow. She slid his camera into its case then dropped onto the bench seat next to Jo. She placed a big, sloppy, wet kiss on her friend’s cheek.
His knees finally buckled and he landed on the bench across from them. He’d never worked as hard or enjoyed himself so much. He knocked back the glass of bubbly and it scorched his throat as sharply as scalding coffee.
Cassidy still stood by the tiller. Her floor-length dress still invited him to be with her.
“God, you are so beautiful.”
That smile of hers lit the night more brightly than any flash. She slid down beside him, pulled his arm over her shoulders, cuddled in close against his side. The blood hammered so loudly in his ears he couldn’t hear a single word being said though he could see Perrin and Jo laughing at something Cassidy said.
They teased Nutcase and drank champagne. He sat outside. Not that they shut him out. Not that he didn’t belong.
No. He sat outside himself, observing, amazed. He truly did belong.
Admiralty Head Lighthouse
Whidbey Island
First lit: 1861
Extinguished: 1922
48.15702 -122.67943
High on the towering cliffs of Whidbey Island, this lighthouse didn’t survive the transition from sailing ships to those driven by steam. The lighthouse marked the farthest side of a wide channel, and ships powered by steam did not need to cross Puget Sound. They simply exited the Straits and turned south at the Point Wilson light to head for Seattle.
The dormant light served as a medical clinic and barracks for the Fort Casey gun emplacements during WWII. It was painted olive drab and the light room was removed. The Island County Historical Society eventually repainted it white and red and rebuilt a light roo
m.
SEPTEMBER 1
Dearest Ice Sweet,
It’s funny. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll have been dead for most of a year. Time is a strange thing. Life speeds up and slows down. Maddeningly slowly when there is pain and sorrow. A blur through the good times. It should be the other way around.
With your mother gone, I thought my life was over. Knowles Valley Vines was lost, both parents-in-law and my wife gone. Yet those years were so busy. They’d be hard to remember if they hadn’t been so full. The daughter I’d left in my wife’s care needed a father.
I’d thought about moving, you were young enough, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. But where? There had been so much heartbreak in the California soil, I couldn’t drag you back there. Besides, I didn’t want to work for someone else on “my” land. I had no family on either side, so I stayed where I was as much by default as anything else.
The vineyards needed my attention. The vines were finally producing. I mixed in Northwest flavors, strawberry, blackberry. I did some of the marketing your mother had suggested: Eagle White, Dugout Rose, Olympics Red were all hers.
They were full, wonderful years. Watching you grow was an education in itself. Your mother had left behind a huge collection of books. You started devouring them thinking they were mine, but that was your dead mother passing on her greatest joy to you. To us. I read like mad to keep up with you. I’m glad that we were able to share that part of our path.
If I could wish anything, it was that you had stayed in the vineyards with me. I think we could have had such a rich life there. I wanted to leave the vineyards to you, but you had your own plans. I sold them for a lot of money, from struggling to very comfortable in a single moment, a shock to an old man late in life. Enough to set you up for many years to come, but you know that by now, assuming my medical bills don’t wipe it out.
We’ve walked together a long way, let’s not stop just yet.
Love you, Ice Sweet
Vic
Cassidy folded the letter and slipped it back into her pocket.
Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth) Page 25
