by Coralie Moss
Wait, when did that idea insinuate itself into her head?
She thought her plans were made, the road ahead plotted, ready for the area to be cleared of cloying underbrush and readied for grading.
“You WHAT? Do you have any idea what Ontario’s like in the winter?” Elaine’s voice went up half an octave. She underlined her point by dropping two heavy reference books into a box.
“I’d come here in the winter.”
“How could you do that, if this house is rented out?”
Elaine made a good point. “I’d only rent it out in the summer? Live with you?”
Clearly, the endless list of logistics needed consideration, and Anna’s arguments for the move were growing weaker. Must be a sign. She refilled their wine glasses, rinsed the bottle, and put it into the recycling bin.
“Think this decision through carefully, Anna. It’s not like when the kids were little and wanted us around twenty-four-seven. I know you and Suki get along, but Gary belongs to her now.”
“You think I should drop this idea of moving,” Anna said, affecting a pout. She plunked her butt onto the couch and crossed her legs. Her attempt to convince herself and Elaine she was seriously contemplating a cross-country move was halfhearted at best.
“Yes, I do. I think it’s a reaction to being dumped by two men, neither of whom deserves you.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence, but I wasn’t dumped. And I’m trying to not make this about a man.”
“But it is, in a way,” Elaine chided. “Your feelings are hurt, and your instinct is to run away and lick your wounds. But this island is your home. You have friends here, and clients. You love the ocean, and there was no ocean in Toronto last time I looked. And besides, we have the floating bordello project. Which I am completely serious about.”
“Then tell me, how do I stay here and not go right back to all my old habits?” Anna stood, fists on hips, surveying the kitchen like it was a castle in need of storming. The clutter in her cupboards clamored for liberation, and Elaine seemed to have a handle on the books.
“You finish this project you started. You buy yourself a new bed. You get rid of those godawful curtains. And you open yourself to the possibility that there might be another wonderful man out there for you. And there might not. But you’re not allowed to go all weepy wallflower on me because I don’t do pity very well. And my wine glass is empty.”
Anna laughed and went to the floor to hug her friend, knocking over a pile of books as she bent over.
“Watch it, girlie, I charge extra for restacking. And while you’re refilling my glass, how about another slice of that pizza?”
One of the projects Anna started—technically, Daniel started—nagged for resolution. The day after Elaine gave her the pep talk and the help with the boxes, Anna called Daniel at his home.
“Annalissa.” He picked up on the first ring. “It’s you. I was hoping we could talk.”
She nodded, knowing he couldn’t see the relief flooding her body, blasting away the knot that had reformed in her chest as she’d prepared what she wanted to say, once she’d decided she should call him. She wrapped a crocheted afghan around her legs for comfort, took a big breath in, and let it out.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she offered. “We owe it to each to mend whatever we broke in Mexico.”
“And in New York,” he added, his voice simultaneously soft and hopeful. “But I’m choosing to view it as something we broke open, Annalissa, not something we can’t repair.”
Lowering her chin, she pinched the bridge of her nose. Her nose was starting to run. Tears would be next. She was genuinely ready to stop being so close to crying so much of the time. She threaded her fingers through the holes in the coverlet and pulled it up to her thighs.
“Where do we start?” she asked.
“I’ve wanted to tell you what happened, why my reaction to seeing you in New York was so…intense. May I begin?”
Anna curled deeper into the corner of her couch, her nod unseen, and choked out a scratchy, “Yes.”
“That weekend, I was so looking forward to seeing Liam and hearing about his time away from work. I knew Cassidy. I knew they were talking about living together, possibly getting married. When they broke up, I could tell it was difficult for him, although he didn’t go into much detail about it at the time.” He paused. An audible sigh came from his side of the call. “Which gave me even more reason to look forward to meeting the woman responsible for putting a smile on his face.”
“He talked about me?”
“He did.”
“But he never said my name?”
“If he did, it never registered that his Anna could be my Annalissa.” Random city noises rose in the silence between Daniel’s words. “Last summer, Liam and I met up in Italy. I told him about finding you. When I researched where you live, saw how beautiful it was, I suggested the Gulf Islands as a possible destination for his sabbatical. Then we both got busy, and even though he told me his plans, I didn’t give him any more information about you.” Daniel sighed again before continuing. “I had to resist the urge to ask him to spy for me. I should have been upfront. With both of you.”
Anna worried at what was left of the fringe on the old afghan, grateful for the distance offered by talking on the phone. “Yes, you should have, Daniel, but there’s no do-over on that decision.”
“I agree,” he said, “and I know I shouldn’t have looked through his sketchbook. The first pages were all furniture ideas. Nothing unusual, but then I got to the more intriguing ones, of chairs and tables and his notes about incorporating driftwood into the construction. And then came the nudes. The subject—in all of them—was a very sensuous woman and the expression on her face was…” He paused. “Well, it was obvious she’d just had sex, was about to have sex, or was thinking about sex. And I knew that woman. I spent three days in Mexico with that woman. And never once did I see you look at me the way you were looking at Liam in those pages.”
A shuddering breath echoed in Anna’s ear. Daniel was all but officially confirming she’d made an impression on Liam. He was also confirming he still felt a connection to her.
“I was so upset,” he continued. “I wasn’t thinking or reacting clearly. And when I saw you at Liam’s, I was at a total loss for words. Or at least, kind words. And when you turned around and headed for his bedroom, not the guestroom, it punched me in the gut to know—to imagine—the two of you were intimately involved. I wanted to talk to Liam. I told him I was confused about my actions, about everything, but it wasn’t possible—or advisable—for us to talk right then.”
The afghan fell to the floor when Anna had to stand and stumble to the bathroom for a fresh box of tissues. The best she could do was pull squares of toilet paper off the roll while Daniel kept apologizing.
“I should have been upfront from the very beginning, with you and with Liam. I was afraid you’d changed too much. That what I remembered of you and our time together when we were younger was a series of memories I’d kept in that damn box for far too long.”
Silent tears streamed down Anna’s face. She was done holding back. At some point, her endless supply of waterworks would abate. “I’m so glad you told me all of that, Danny. And I want us to be in each other’s lives. I really do.”
“Me too, Annalissa. Me too.”
There was no getting any work done after their phone call. Anna poured cereal into a bowl, sliced a banana on top, and ate breakfast for dinner in bed.
Liam didn’t call or come by her house in the days following her excursion to Tofino and the conversation with Daniel. She had made the subtext under her texts clear. She would contact him when she was ready, and by Saturday, one week before his sabbatical ended and he was due to leave, she wanted the two of them back on good footing.
She messaged him. “Beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. Join me for dinner?”
“Ask me in a few days.”
Anna s
wallowed equal parts pride, humiliation, and irritation, put down her phone, shot her arms into the sleeves of her rain slicker, and stomped along the path to the beach and up across Liam’s lawn.
He opened the door to her frustration-fueled knock wearing a paint-splattered flannel shirt over a white, V-neck tee. She stifled a sudden intake of breath. He was a beautiful man, grown even more so by his time on the island, and the way his arms and legs moved under his clothes was heart-stoppingly, slam-your-drink-on-the-table, sexy.
“I want to talk now,” she said, boosting her bravado by straightening her spine. Raindrops pooled together on their way down her sleeves and dripped onto the tops of her hands. She rubbed the water into her skin with her thumbs.
“Then come in. I was availing myself of the quiet to finish some of my sketches.” He had positioned the table he used for drawing in front of large pieces of driftwood hauled off the beach. The sea- and sun-worn wood glowed in the light emanating from a single desk lamp.
“I won’t stay long, but I didn’t want you to leave before I explained myself.”
“I appreciate that because it made me sad and mad that you cut me off, just like that, and I’m not sure I understand why.” He gazed at Anna. The same low light traipsing over his body did nothing to hide the confusion playing across his shadowed face. Even the addition of generic reading glasses couldn’t detract from the moment.
“I needed to give myself space because I don’t understand what’s happened since New York.”
“Are you really ready to talk?” An unfamiliar edge sharpened his voice. He pulled off the glasses and tossed them on the table.
“Yes, I am.”
Liam pulled a chair next to the bed and offered her first choice of where to sit. She chose to remain standing. “When I first learned your mystery man in Mexico was Daniel,” he began, “I kind of shut down about the reality of the situation. I was happy to have you come to New York, and then I was confused about why you were there.”
“I was there because you invited me, Liam,” she said, trying to keep her voice from disappearing into a sudden whirl of confusion. “Because you had ideas about...about us. About working together.”
He looked at her blankly then shook his head. “I know I asked you. But in that moment, when everything was caving in, I wasn’t sure why I asked you.”
Anna restrained the wings of fear moving up the front of her chest, caught like little birds in the netting of her ribs. “Wasn’t the why because we were enjoying being together?”
“Yes.”
“Then what was the problem?”
“The problem was, and perhaps still is, I got territorial. It makes sense that you and Daniel would have picked up your relationship in Mexico, and when I was confronted with that reality, I felt jealous and angry.”
She let his words hang in the air and waited for their charge to dissipate before adding her own confession.
“Daniel and I did get sexual, to a degree, but we didn’t… There was no…” She released her hands and let them flutter in her search for a word that wouldn’t cause her to die from blushing. She pushed on. “We never consummated, not fully. He did some things that upset me,” she admitted, “like check out other women and take way too long to kiss me the first time, and his indecision, his doubt, just cut me to the bone.”
Liam stared, his face blank.
Anna pushed ahead, wanting to share her biggest revelation. “Daniel and I had a connection in college, and in the decades since we last saw each other, we assigned that connection greater meaning than it warranted. And that’s one thing we failed to recognize until it was too late.”
“Thank you for clearing that up for me.” Liam sounded almost…sarcastic, although the tension in his hands belied the odd emotion in his voice.
“Did you reconnect with Cassidy because you’re attracted to her again or because you wanted to get back at me for being with Daniel?”
“I’ve been asking myself that question. The answer is, a little of both,” he answered, looking to the window and back to her. “When you and I went to bed that night, when we were supposed to be getting ready to go out to dinner, I felt…whole. That feeling of wholeness got me hard.” His voice lowered, deepened, and the pacing of his words slowed for emphasis. “Seeing you naked, in my bed, got me hard. Entering you was so easy. You were so ripe and wet, and there was no pressure, only the possibility of pleasure.
“When Cassidy invited me to dinner the next night I had this…flash…of being angry with you and wanting to prove something to her. I wanted to show her what she chose to walk away from. We ate, she came back to my house, and we started to fool around in my bed.”
“Where we’d made love?” Anna clutched at the fabric lining the pockets of her jacket. How could he bring another woman into the bed he’d made for her?
“Yes, where we made love. And all I could smell was you, Anna, and that’s what got me hard. A little bit of anger and a lot of residual scent from us having sex.”
Liam leaned forward, elbows on his knees, twirling a pencil around and around as he described the scene. Anna’s reaction confused her. She was angry and upset with Liam. And she was sexually aroused, the animal part of her wanting to mark him as her territory and claim him with more of her scent. She was going to have to look through her books on women’s health again to see if these feelings were normal or more like a random hormonal surge that would leave as quickly as it had arisen.
“But I couldn’t do it,” he whispered, snapping her attention back to the moment.
“Couldn’t do what?”
“Couldn’t have intercourse with Cass. Could not and have not.”
The last of the fight drained right out of Anna. She plunked herself into one of the rickety wood kitchen chairs. “What do we do now? What do you want?”
Liam looked over at her from under a sweep of hair. “I want everything having to do with Daniel and Cassidy out of my head. And I want to fuck you, in my bed, now.”
Anna appreciated a man who could speak his mind. If they were lucky, neither of them would have much of a mind left by morning.
They left their clothes on the floor and tossed their inhibitions on top. Liam replenished the stack of wood by the stove twice, keeping the room hot enough to slick their skin and make staying naked the only reasonable option. For Anna, there was no saying no to the man who kissed, stroked, licked, bit, murmured, and groaned his way into her body. The lovemaking opened the front door to her heart and ripped it off its hinges, and she reveled in the feel of the moon and the stars and the morning sun entering her hidden places.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Before she could find any kind of handhold on the days flying by, Liam was gone. The darkened windows of the house next door confirmed the loss coursing along the surface of Anna’s bones, pooling in her joints, creating an unfamiliar ache. The ache of missing a lover. Her lover.
She rubbed her upper arms and lowered her forehead to the cold glass of the window.
They had that one night together after the disastrous weekend in New York, a night that would live on in her body as a fiery, no-holds-barred night of sexual intimacies with a man willing to bare it all for her.
Liam had departed without fanfare. His lease was up, the sabbatical was over, and an ill-timed text from Cassidy reminded Anna another woman had dibs on his attention once his plane landed on the opposite coast.
She channeled her loss and longing into the house project. Boxed-up kitchen supplies waited by the side door for the short trip to the storage pod. The second bedroom, once the kids’ domain and scheduled to become her art studio, was lined up in her crosshairs. She managed to sort the accumulated toys and gear in one four-hour stint. Another set of strong arms was needed to take apart the bunk beds and move the mattresses to the storage pod. Late in the afternoon, while walking the ambit of her property, she found it impossible to avoid looking in the direction of the MacMasters’ empty cottage.
When
she forced herself to stay on task and look elsewhere, trees with branches in need of trimming before winter came into focus, and when the lens widened, it appeared her entire yard was begging for an overdue seasonal clean up. She could hire high schoolers for the yardwork, but she would have to schedule a professional for the trees.
Anna called Elaine’s lover, Richie. He was finishing with his morning client and bumped her to the top of his list. It helped she was best friends with the woman he was happy to have in his bed and in his life.
“You’ve got a lot of branches needing a good trim,” he said after quickly assessing her property.
“Do you need to call anyone to assist you?” Anna asked. She couldn’t picture how he was going to manage the higher branches on his own.
“I would if we were topping any of the big firs or taking them down, but I don’t see anything in risk of falling over.” He walked to the back of his truck and assembled his gear. “You want me to split anything usable to fit your woodstove?”
“That would be great, Richie. I could use some kindling too.”
“Sure. Easy enough to take care of that while I’m here.” He finished strapping a heavy-looking apparatus around his hips and shouldered the smaller of two chainsaws.
The large windows in her living room gave Anna a one-hundred-eighty-degree view of Richie’s handiwork. He took to the first tree with ease. There was something decidedly erotic about watching a well-muscled man straddle a tree.
“Richie’s here, up a tree,” she texted Elaine, “I see why you like his a**.”
“HANDS OFF!”
“But I’m paying for this…”
“And I get it for free.”
Elaine could coax a smile out of Anna even in the challenging times. With Richie outside sawing and chopping, her day had a soothing, almost musical accompaniment. She inserted a new roll of packing tape in the handheld dispenser and folded and taped enough boxes to hold the contents of the guest room closet.
