When the Sun Goes Down...

by Crystal Green

  His response sent a spike of desire right down the middle of her, and she shivered.

  “Since we’re all about wiping the slates clean,” she said, “I apologize for being so difficult.”

  “Don’t.”

  “No, I really should.” She traveled her fingers up his chest, fidgeting with a button. “Until today, you were the one who had enough guts to come out with what we felt for one another. I didn’t.”

  “Well, I don’t have to live with Aunt Katrina’s fake anxiety attacks.” He coaxed his finger underneath her chin and guided her gaze to his. “Besides, you ended up coming out like a warrior.”

  The next thing she knew, he was kissing her, long, soft and hard all at once.

  It seemed to last for hours, with them sipping and drawing at each other, with her sliding a leg onto his lap so they could get even nearer to each other.

  She gave herself over to the sensations—to him—completely, going pliant in his arms as the outside breezes warmed them.

  Outside, she thought. For anyone to see.

  Then he did something that rocked her: he sucked her upper lip into his mouth and ran his tongue along the inside of it.

  She jumped, just as if she’d been zapped between the legs.

  He laughed softly, then kept stroking her with his tongue.

  It felt as if she were being lifted off the glider, into the air as the ache in her turned into sharp, compressed agony.

  He used his tongue to stroke her again, and with a thrust of daggered need, she went wet, nearing an explosion.

  Panting, she clung to him, and he took that as his cue to scoop her into his arms, right off the glider. He held her tightly to compensate for the fact that she’d gone downright buttery.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think things are going to go pretty smoothly after all.”

  He carried her toward the front door, looking into her eyes the whole way.

  “But what if I still turn out to be a lot of work?” she asked.

  “I love to work you.”

  All she heard was the word love, and it ricocheted all around her.

  “I love it, too,” she said. “But not as much as I love you, danger boy.”

  Smiling and whispering, “I love you, too,” he brought her inside, kicking the door shut on the rest of the world.

  Epilogue

  WEEKS LATER, Tristan was going through some boxes he’d stored in a closet in his cabin years ago. Some of them had belonged to his dad, but he’d never been able to open them until now.

  He hadn’t wanted to catch the scent of his dad’s clothes and see old pictures, but Juliana, who was helping him move to a big apartment in town where they would both live, was making this a far less excruciating experience than he’d imagined.

  At the moment, she was asking questions about his dad’s high-school photos, in one of which he was posing next to a flame-painted hot rod.

  “Is this where you get your vintage-car genes?” she asked. “From Papa Cole?”

  Tristan nodded, wiping at a dirt smudge on her face. It made her look just so cute—like an idealized Dickens street urchin—that he thought better about cleaning it all the way off.

  “I caught the fever from him, all right.” He dug some books out of his box. “He used to court my mom in that souped-up vehicle. He said she’d squeal when he sped around the country lanes.”

  “I can imagine your mom having the time of her life.”

  Juliana and his mother had bonded quickly. In fact, she was doing pretty well with the rest of his family, too, even Gramps, who’d read Terrence’s and Emelie’s writings and realized the extent of what they’d lost…and what Gramps didn’t want the grandson he loved so dearly to lose.

  Tristan looked up toward the wall in the other room, where he could see Dream Rising, perched there because Gramps had thought it might be a decent gesture.

  An opening for two families who were working on ironing out their differences and uniting.

  Aunt Katrina had been here the day they’d hung the watercolor, and she and Gramps had even gone so far as to share a meal with Tristan’s mom and the new couple.

  But it hadn’t been very hard to persuade Katrina after she’d read Terrence’s side of the story and realized, too, that Juliana wasn’t going to surrender Tristan.

  The rest of the family had followed their lead, even though there was still the odd dust-up from the younger ones every now and then. It’d be a while until everyone could fully swallow their pride, yet there was definite hope that they’d all settle matters some day.

  As Juliana continued exploring the pictures, Tristan went through the books, using a work towel to wipe them down.

  What did they have here? A collected work of American literature from the 1800s.

  A volume of Southern California history.

  And…

  Tristan inspected a slim book with tattered binding wrapped in plastic. He opened it to find handwritten words on brittle, yellowed pages.

  “Well, damn me,” Tristan said.

  At his surprised tone, Juliana scooted over to him, gasping when she saw the state of the book, too.

  Tristan read the first page, then stopped. “Another journal of Terrence’s. I’ve never seen this one before.”

  “Why don’t you read it while I finish with some of these boxes,” she said, leaving him alone.

  But not before she ran her fingers over his cheek. Maybe he had a cute dirt smudge, too, but from the affectionate look on her face, he thought the gesture came more from her heart than from wanting to clean him off.

  “But—”

  “Go ahead.” She smiled. “Take some time with him.”

  She kissed his cheek, then carried one of the boxes outside, where she would load it into his pickup.

  As he began to read—quickly and eagerly—he was barely aware of Juliana continuing to work around him.

  Over an hour later, he was done, and he extended an arm to her, summoning her over.

  Her eyes were wide with curiosity and maybe even a feeling that Terrence’s journal would drop a bombshell, so Tristan put her mind at ease right away.

  “I don’t know why my dad kept this particular journal to himself—there are no big secrets, nothing mind-blowing. Maybe it was just lost among all his books.”

  Juliana motioned to the boxes they’d pulled out of storage. “Not an impossibility. What was in the journal?”

  “Mostly reflections on Emelie. Terrence wrote this when he got sick—tuberculosis. It ended up leading to his death, and he must’ve known it was the end of the road when he started this book.”

  “Sad.”

  He nodded, his words scraping out of him. “There’s one part though…”

  She was so attuned to him by now that she knew what to do, smoothing back his hair tenderly, making his throat go even tighter with heat.

  “What part?” she asked.

  “He and Emelie hadn’t seen each other for years after she married Klaus Thomsen, and he built her that house on the property where Aunt Katrina and some of the others live now.”

  The old place had burned down fifty years ago, but pictures of it were amazing. Klaus had gotten rich with a gold strike, and by the time he met Emelie, he’d worked his money into a fortune.

  “They never ran into each other much,” Tristan added, imagining how Emelie might have spent her days looking out one of the windows across town, in the direction of the Cole ranch, where Terrence lived. Tristan had done the same with Juliana once. “But one day, when she attended a daughter’s wedding at the church on Main Street, Terrence came face-to-face with her. Both had grandchildren with them.”

  Juliana rested her hand on the back of his neck. “Both of them must’ve aged a lot by then. I wonder if they ever wondered what it might’ve been like to grow old together.”

  “Terrence did. But most importantly, he’d forgiven her for taking the painting by that time. His sourness about Dream Rising had turned to longing
, and he thought she felt the same way when their gazes caught as they passed each other.”

  “They didn’t even stop.” Not a question.

  “No, they didn’t.” He took Juliana’s hand and held it. “She didn’t reveal anything about still loving him—even if she did until the day she died. So he didn’t say a word as they walked off in opposite directions. The painting was lost, and so was any chance that either of them might have had with each other.”

  Silence arched between them, but Juliana wrestled it back down. “Isn’t it a good thing then,” she asked, her voice quivering slightly, “that we didn’t pass each other by like they did?”

  “Yeah,” he said, enveloping her in his arms, breathing her in and knowing he’d never let her go. “It’s a good thing.”

  While they held each other, he closed the worn book, letting go of the past.

  Claiming the future.

  “I love you, Thomsen,” he said.

  “And I love you, Cole,” she answered, taking the journal from him and putting it aside.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-3419-6

  WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN…

  Copyright © 2009 by Chris Marie Green.

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