by Lisa Hughey
They took the bags into the kitchen and he breathed a small sigh of relief. For right now anyway, they were safe. He thought she’d want to talk about Stanley but when she spoke it had nothing to do with her abusive stepfather.
“You want lunch?” she asked. “You can explain everything while I cook.”
“Wait.” He thought she’d want to hash out what had just happened on the beach but her expression was closed. She wasn’t ready.
Then her words registered. Zeke rubbed his hand down his chest. A strange pleasure rolled through him. “You’re going to cook for me?”
“Unless you want to make your own lunch.” She looked uncertain. She held still, her expression indecipherable.
“Ah, no. It would be great.”
“You want to fill me in on why you’re acting so weird?”
He felt stupid but answered anyway. “It’s just that…no one has ever cooked for me before.”
“Oh.” Her tone was skeptical.
But Zeke was precise with his speech. He knew what he meant to say and what he meant was no one.
As if she clued in to that fact, her eyes widened. The silvery gray reminded him of the moonlight on the ocean waves.
“No one?”
“No.” Zeke unloaded the groceries and put them in the refrigerator avoiding the question in her gaze. Thinking he should have just kept his mouth shut.
“But, what about your mom?”
“Left when I was a baby.”
She let out a soft, sympathetic sigh. “Dad?”
“Not much of a chef.” Zeke understated but figured he might as well go all the way so she’d know how much of a freak he really was. “We ate chili and soup out of cans and canned vegetables and fruits. Dad showed me how to use a can opener.”
“Um, you mentioned your grandfather.”
“Where do you think my dad learned how to open a can?”
“They didn’t cook, ever?”
Zeke thought back to his childhood. No. The men who raised him didn’t cook. Things changed after Grandpop died. He eventually learned how to cook, basic stuff, by surfing the net. Or what comprised surfing the net back then. Because he had been a scrawny kid, he’d wanted more bulk and to be healthier. Until the day his father died, Dad had lived out in the desert and ate out of cans.
“Uh, no.”
She dug through the bags. “We don’t have much to work with, but I’ll see what I can whip up.”
“You don’t need to go to any trouble.”
She shot him a steady look. “We need to eat. It’s no trouble.”
“All right then.” That’s when he figured out she needed something to do.
She began pulling items out of the plastic bags. Eggs, butter, bacon, peppers, onion, tomato, cheese. “You were hungry?” she teased.
“Omelets are easy if you’re camping, and yeah, I’m hungry,” he said sheepishly. “I’ve developed a real taste for fine dining but I work too much to spend a lot of time cooking.”
She pulled one more box out of the bag, a deep flush spread over her face and she jammed the box behind her back.
Zeke craned his neck to see what she was holding.
“What’s wrong?”
She giggled nervously. “Nothing’s wrong.”
And then he figured out what she had in her hands. The box of condoms he’d thrown in their supplies with a sense of hope, and a determination to be prepared if she were interested.
She whipped around, dragged open the drawer near the stovetop, and shoved the box inside.
Zeke dropped his head. He shouldn’t have assumed, but then he thought about her reaction. She hadn’t thrown the box at him in disgust. She’d tucked it behind her. And blushed.
A sign that perhaps she didn’t hate the idea.
For as good as he was at reading patterns and discerning connections that others missed, Zeke didn’t have much luck at reading women.
After she’d hidden the condoms, Sunshine removed an apron from the drawer. It had a pale aqua band at the top, with a square neckline, and the body of the apron was white fabric with little aqua, yellow, and pink flowers, another band of aqua at the waist extended to long ties. She tied the wide swath of cotton around her back in a bow. The hem hit at the top of her thighs. The cheerful fabric emphasized her tucked in waist and the flare of her hips. The design was straight out of a fifties sitcom.
For a moment he imagined what she would look like wearing only the apron, her breasts minimally covered by the square and that full bow perched above her bare rounded butt when she turned around.
Great, she was starring in his own little X-rated Leave It To Beaver fantasy. One he didn’t even know he had until she’d put that apron on.
“Well I’m no gourmet but I started out on a farm, and my mama is one hell of a cook. She taught me everything I know,” she chattered nervously as she lay the items out on the granite island.
The tension that gripped him since the phone call from Carson slowly ebbed from his body. “How can I help?”
“I think better, absorb better, when I’m moving. Kinesthetic learner. Drove my mother crazy. Teachers even crazier.” She efficiently cracked eggs into a plastic bowl. “Just talk to me.”
“You want to dive right in and figure this out?” He was still trying to gauge her mood.
“Could we…” Sunshine brushed a lock of her hair from her cheek with the back of her hand, the move innately elegant and so feminine it took his breath away. “…just talk while I make lunch. Like normal people?”
She glanced around the fancy kitchen, white cabinets, white granite with swirls of pale teal and gray, and stainless steel appliances. Sunlight from the transom above the kitchen doorway and the mostly closed blinds over the sink let in enough ambient light to allow them to see without turning on the kitchen lights, and created a surreal atmosphere, as if their surroundings were filtered by a diffusion lens, bathing everything in watery lines and intriguing shadows. “We’re safe here. Right?”
The breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding spewed from his lungs. “Yeah. I think we can spare an hour to reset.”
He wasn’t even aware he’d needed it either. But the more he thought about it, the more he thought it was a great idea.
He’d been turning over all the facts in his head until there was no recognizable pattern, it was one giant pile of mush, as if multiple cans of paint had spilled and mixed together, making each color indistinct and resulting in a giant puddle of pinkish brown so muddy nothing was clear.
“That’s actually a great idea.”
“You don’t think they can track us?”
Zeke shook his head. “Car model doesn’t have any kind of GPS locator in it. I disabled the GPS in the phone that I used to call Lucas. You threw your phone out the window. We should be safe. For now.”
They wouldn’t be able to hide forever. But he wouldn’t bring that up. “So what do you want to talk about?”
Sunshine pulled out a large chef’s knife and a cutting board. With efficiency, she chopped off the head of the onion, sliced it in half and then started a quick dice. The girl was good with a knife.
Her gaze shifted to the mostly closed blinds. The weak Fall sun shimmered on the waves and the light reflected into the kitchen. She was like a moth to a flame. He’d noticed her longing, that look of pure hunger as she stared at the waves rolling up the brown sand.
“Hit me.”
“Why do you like the ocean so much?” Sunshine asked.
He knew the question wasn’t casual. Her yearning was like a physical presence in the room and he wanted her to discover the same love of the ocean that he had.
“I grew up in the desert.” He shared. “I didn't see the ocean until I was about five.”
“Desert, like Las Vegas?” Sunshine dug around in the cabinets searching for something until she pulled out a sauté pan in triumph. She set the pan down carefully on the burner, turned the knob. The tick, tick, tick of the gas starter was
loud, like a time bomb, while he hesitated to reveal how crazy his family had been. As if eating out of cans wasn’t enough.
“Desert, like rural So Cal, between Barstow and New Jack City, lots of rock climbing and not much else.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. My Grandpop and father were survivalists.”
“So were you part of a commune or community?”
“Hell no.” Zeke played with the fringe on the sunny yellow placemats that decorated the round oak table. “They were paranoid bastards who trusted no one.”
Which was sort of ironic if he thought about it. Since he was in this predicament now. They were right to be paranoid. Tension stole over his shoulders again.
Sunshine dropped a bit of butter in the pan, waited for it to sizzle, then scraped the onions off the cutting board and into the pan. With quick efficient movements, she chopped off the head of the pepper and started eviscerating the veins and seeds inside.
She stayed silent as she absorbed his meaning. The onions simmered in the butter and the savory aroma filled the kitchen. “And then when I was about five, for some reason we relocated to a beach for a while.”
That was where he’d gotten his first taste of the ocean.
“It’s so fucking vast.” He touched each side of the rectangular placemat. The top, the left, the right, the bottom. “I remember standing in the surf and a giant wave sucked me in as if the ocean were calling me home.”
He ducked his head. It sounded stupid when he said it aloud but that memory was absolutely vivid. The sensation of being swept into a universe larger than himself.
“You could have died.” Sunshine shuddered. “Weren’t you afraid?”
“I was pissed when my Grandpop pulled me from the water.” Zeke closed his eyes and pictured that day. The sun had been shining in typical Southern California fashion. The sunlight on the waves had been glaring, nearly blinding. And he’d been hypnotized by the undulating ripples on the surface of the water.
She snorted. “I thought you were smart.”
“That moment wasn’t about intelligence. It was about emotion.” Zeke confided, “I felt connected to something so much larger than myself for the first time.”
Sunshine sliced the peppers into slivers with quick rocking motion of her arm. “You were only five,” she said, as if trying to discount his feelings, clearly uncomfortable with his admission.
“True.” Zeke thought back to that long ago experience. “But when I sink under the water, being surrounded, embraced in every pore, it still gives me comfort and...acceptance.”
Sunshine sighed as he ended his soft confession.
“You know what I think of when I think of bodies of water?” She dumped the peppers into the pan with a sharp swipe. “All that water, pulling me down, suffocating me.” Her voice tightened with the last few words.
“It will buoy you up, give you an indescribable high.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” she whispered.
He wanted to give that feeling to her. To give her a love of water. He wasn’t sure how he was going to do that but Zeke swore that if he could, he would make that happen. He realized that little bit of crush love he’d acknowledged earlier had changed. She was warm, compassionate, funny, beyond smart, and real. He was starting to like this girl, really like her.
Thirty
An aqua and white striped ceramic pitcher to the left of the cooktop held cooking utensils. I grabbed a wooden spoon so I could stir the vegetables while they sautéed, and gave Zeke a minute to compose himself.
I could tell he was a little bit embarrassed. But I wasn’t sure why. I loved that he’d shared something so intimate with me. Attraction simmered in the air between us. With the muted shadows and the rippling waves of sunlight coming through the partially closed blinds, the air was laden with intensity and anything we said would be cloaked in anonymity.
Even though he sat plain as day across the island from me, I felt like I could say anything, confess anything and he would accept me. Welcome me. Embrace me.
And phew, wasn’t that just a little fanciful?
I was becoming the hippy-dippy girl that everyone assumed me to be. Which wouldn’t do at all. That girl was naive, inexperienced, and vulnerable.
I had to shed that persona, stop hiding behind the illusion, and be the woman I was meant to be.
In that moment, I understood, even if he didn’t, the ocean was his hug from his mother.
“To feel connected, that must be….” I didn’t finish. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say. That I had felt disconnected my whole life. That without my mother this last day that disconnection had intensified, until I was adrift on a lonely sea.
Except I wasn’t completely alone. Zeke was here.
“That must be nice.” Such a tepid word for the sheer longing inside me. And maybe I knew what he was talking about because last night in the shadowed, darkened hotel room, as I’d learned his body and he’d explored mine, I’d felt those moments of connection as if we were tied together by some invisible string. Unbreakable string.
But then the morning had come and his first thought was to get rid of me. His instinctive reaction had hurt on a mammoth scale. I still wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because he had seemed so sincere when he’d been convincing me to lay low and keep out of John Stanley’s sight.
Zeke startled me out of my melancholy. “Best memory. Go.”
I grabbed the whisk from the ceramic pitcher and began beating the eggs with fervor, ignoring his challenge.
“C’mon. Play along.” Zeke touched the placemat again in that particular way of his.
Fine. I whipped the eggs even harder, my shoulder and arm beginning to ache. “I grew up without men around. Of course, there were men, in the store, at the mechanics, even at the business association meetings, there were men. But, after the age of seven, I had no constant father figure.”
The exact opposite of Zeke. He had father figures, no mother.
“I barely remember my Papa. He was a big robust man and he had a huge laugh. But I do have one memory of him holding me in his lap and laughing at something I said, or showed him, and his whole body shaking with it. That rumble would vibrate through him and into me. And I’d feel this, this well of happiness rise up in me.”
I beat at the eggs in the bowl, my arm moving faster and faster as I realized how much I’d lost when I’d lost my father. I hadn’t thought about his presence in my life for so long.
“Then he died. And after time, the well just dried up, disappeared. I haven’t felt it since.”
I wiped my hands down the purloined apron. And realized I should have stopped after telling him about Papa’s laugh and the well of happiness. I’d gotten too intimate. But that’s why I rarely laughed. And why it was such a surprise earlier when he’d made me burst into laughter.
I missed my father. Horribly.
I continued, as if by admitting my lack of joy, I’d opened some secret fountain inside me and everything came flowing out. “When we first went on the run, I remember thinking, if Papa would just come back…things would be okay. We could go back to normal.”
I couldn’t seem to stop. “What a laugh that was. We were never going back to normal. I’d already been accepted to Caltech because of my ridiculous IQ but I still foolishly wanted my Papa back.”
I threw the whisk into the bowl full of frothy eggs. “What the hell was I ever thinking?”
“Hey.” Zeke rose from the table and came around the island. I kept my back to him, not wanting him to see the tears shimmering in my eyes. Pretending nothing was wrong, I concentrated intently on dumping the onions and peppers onto a clean plate, then I poured the egg mixture into the sauté pan.
Zeke rested his chin on my shoulder and soothed his palms down my biceps and forearms, before he draped his arms around my waist and hugged me tight. He nuzzled his nose behind my ear. He was literally wrapped around me like a boa constrictor, but for some reason my internal personal space mete
r wasn’t going crazy, and the embrace was comforting rather than constraining.
His chest was pressed up against me, the bulk of his body a welcome presence behind me as if he’d have my back. As if he could absorb my pain into him and melt it away.
I grabbed a spatula and lifted the edges of the solidifying egg mixture to let the uncooked liquid seep underneath the already puffing eggs. “Sorry. Sorry.”
This certainly wasn’t what he’d signed up for. Hello, my name is Sunshine and I’m neurotic, emotional mess. My fingers were white from how tightly I clutched the spatula. Zeke peeled my fingers and gently took the utensil from my hand. Then he turned me until we were face to face.
“The eggs.”
“This is more important.” He speared his fingers through my hair and tilted my head back until I was looking into his ocean blue eyes, murky with some unnamed emotion. “We make our own normal. And screw everyone else.”
He stroked my tears away with his thumbs. The gesture was unbearably tender. We both suddenly realized we were standing very close. My breath caught. The inhale lifted my breasts and I brushed against his chest. His fingers tilted my head just so.
His heat pressed against me intimately. As if my body recognized his, the resultant chemical reaction was intense. My core softened, my nipples hardened, and my heart picked up its rhythm. The ba-boom, ba-boom echoed in my ears as he slowly bent his head toward me.
He was so close I could see his pale blond lashes and the variations of blue in his irises. The darker ocean color was really a tumbled mix of pale blue, darker blue, turquoise, and a hint of thundercloud gray. I could see the burgeoning blond stubble that dusted his strong jawline and upper lip. I remembered what that bit of coarse hair felt like against my softer skin.
The light in the room dimmed.
At first I thought it was just his head, blocking out the light, but then I realized that the sky outside had gone dark. Before I could register anything else, his lips brushed mine. The slight rasp of his stubble was a delicious abrasion, as he rubbed our mouths together in the gentlest of caresses. He captured my bottom lip between his and sucked erotically. Then in his customary pattern, he licked my top lip, his tongue touched mine lightly, before he licked at the left corner, right corner and then my bottom lip.
