Tattered Innocence

by Ann Lee Miller

Desire and revulsion caterwauled inside her.

  God, help!

  She broke away from him. Her breath jabbed into the silent room. “I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice sounded firm, masking the quiver inside.

  His mouth dropped open. Disbelief washed across his face. Lines spidered out from the corners of his eyes as he stared at her. Understanding dawned and his eyes narrowed. “It’s Jake.”

  He moved his head back and forth, the sway of defeat. He slumped back against the bulkhead. “Would you kiss me good-bye?” He didn’t move, just stared at her with sad eyes.

  The creases in his forehead softened him. He had come on this cruise willing to leave his wife for her. What could one more kiss hurt?

  He held a hand out to her, palm up.

  She placed her hand in his and let him pull her toward him. Bret’s eyes deepened to ocean blue as he sandwiched her hand against the skin of his chest. The scent of Obsession floated around them.

  In the breath before their lips met, Rachel envisioned a poignant, greeting-card touch she could airbrush and file in her memory. But she had forgotten the fire that came with Bret’s kisses.

  Liquid heat flowed through her veins at the touch of his lips, and she let it carry her to a place she wanted to go.

  His mustache tickled her face, just enough to bring her to her senses.

  She shoved him away with the flat of her hand, a move aimed more at protecting her from herself than from Bret. “Goodbye.”

  She opened the cabin door and slipped out before the surprise melted from his face. Before she changed her mind. She didn’t slow down until she’d shut the aft cabin hatch, clattered down the steps and curled into her bunk. She remembered too late that Jake slept in the next bunk.

  At eleven p.m., it must have been eighty-five degrees, way too warm to close the hatch. She’d only been thinking of escape. She’d open the hatch when Jake’s breathing settled back into the rhythm of sleep.

  She stilled her body, willing Jake to return to deep sleep. Her heart raced. Her breaths came in short bursts. Thank God she’d gotten out of Bret’s cabin in time. The guilt she’d already borne had almost flattened her. How could she have carried more?

  “Rae?” Jake’s voice sounded rough from sleep.

  “Sorry I woke you.”

  “Everything okay?”

  Seconds ticked by. She looked over at Jake, his bare chest washed white with moonlight pouring through the porthole. His eyes were open, and he looked at her, brow wrinkled, waiting.

  She stared at the cabin sole between their bunks. “I went to Bret’s cabin tonight to end things.” She pulled her knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “It seemed like a good idea. But it wasn’t. He wanted a goodbye kiss—but it felt like hello—and Bret knew it.”

  Jake’s eyes widened and he sat up, dropping his feet to the sole.

  “I need some help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  She waved her arms around. “I don’t know, run interference for me. Something.”

  Jake rubbed the stubble on his chin. “I’d hate to get in a fist fight with a paying guest.”

  She tossed her pillow at him. “Be serious.”

  “I am serious.”

  “Maybe you could pray for me.”

  His eyes rounded under sun-bleached brows. “Not really my forte.”

  “You have another idea?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  She sat up. It was a dumb idea, asking Jake to do something she should be doing.

  He cleared his throat and dropped his head. Curls bounced onto his forehead.

  Ocean swished against the outside of the hull.

  “God, keep this jerk away from Rae. Get him out of her system. Show me something more constructive to do than punching the guy.”

  She peered at him. “Thanks.” Her eyes misted and she blinked. “You pray fine, really fine.”

  “High praise from a church girl.” Jake grinned and lobbed her pillow back. “Now, can we get some shut-eye?”

  A cold clump of scrambled egg plopped onto the top of Rachel’s tennis shoe from the serving dish she held. The emotion from last night’s confrontation with Bret had subsided, but the slimy sensation remained. She didn’t blame Hall for his disgust with her.

  She glanced at Bret’s closed door. He hadn’t appeared for breakfast, and she dreaded facing him. She wiped the scrambled egg off her shoe with a paper towel.

  Morning sun glinted in her eyes as she peered at Jake through the companionway. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the neck of his T-shirt, then popped a whole mini-doughnut into his mouth.

  When he glanced through the hatch at her, he winked as if to say I’ve got your back.

  She smiled and dusted her fingers across her face till he brushed the powdered sugar off his chin.

  She submerged the orange juice pitcher into the hot, soapy dishwater. With an elbow, she held the refrigerator open and put away plastic-wrapped melon and bacon. She’d made dozens of bad decisions like agreeing to last night’s kiss. Mama was to blame for her weakness.

  A fragment of a memory flared in her mind. She must have been about ten when she stood outside the back screen door about to come inside. Mama reached for something in the refrigerator, the door cutting her off from the view of the adults in the kitchen.

  A man stood with his back to the screen. His neck thickened at the base like a banyan tree, unlike Daddy’s slender neck that topped his lanky body. Past the man’s elbow, Rachel saw her father sitting at the kitchen table behind the chip bowl, his head thrown back, laughing.

  The man’s beefy arm snaked toward the garbage can, but he had nothing to throw away. Instead his hand closed around Mama’s.

  Mama’s fingers curled around his just for a moment, so quickly Rachel thought she must have imagined it. But Mama’s eyes shouted warning at the man, and something hot that wasn’t warning at all.

  Rachel ran around to the front of the house where the rest of the children played dodge ball. She threw up in the croton hedge.

  Hall’s birth had cemented her and Mama together. But this man, Mama’s secret, chiseled between them.

  Mama had “gone on vacation,” Daddy said to explain her absence. But Rachel knew better. Undercurrents of fear and anger had swirled through the rooms of their house with Daddy closed off and Rachel working too hard to be a mother to four-year-old Hall.

  Mama had come back eleven days later and went to work at Winn Dixie on Monday morning like she always did. The man with the thick neck never appeared again. Her mother didn’t divorce her father and disappear. But the residue of the episode stuck to them all.

  Rachel’s nightmares changed after that. Instead of dying in a puddle of blood and placenta on the kitchen floor, Mama slid into a black Corvette beside the man with the thick neck, and never returned.

  Rachel reached for the three-day-old doughnut bag to throw it away, but put it in the wire basket over the potatoes instead. Jake would eat them till they turned to rocks.

  Even if she had inherited Mama’s weakness, she could have fought it and made good choices. Well, she’d make good decisions from here on out. Nothing in her wanted to dive back into the sludge of guilt.

  Please, please take away my feelings for Bret.

  How many times did she have to pray that prayer before God answered? Maybe still caring was her punishment.

  Rachel settled on the main cabin, elbows on her knees, listening to Ginger recount her wedding. The woman’s multiple piercings glittered in the Coleman lantern light.

  The anchor chain grated in the chock.

  Jake handed Rachel the cheese and cracker tray up through the hatch and she sent it around the cockpit, the evening gathering spot.

  An arm settled across her shoulders. She swiveled her head. Her gaze smacked into Jake’s.

  Jake dipped his mouth close to her ear. “Doing my part for the cause.”

  Chapter 13

  The warmth f
rom Jake’s breath in her ear crept through Rachel. He was playing a cameo to help her out of a tough spot. She willed this fact to talk sense to her emotions.

  She took a deep breath and looked at Jake’s hand, dangling casually over her shoulder. A pink scar laced across his thumb. No telltale tan line showed on his ring finger.

  Her gaze swept across the cockpit and landed on Bret. He held a cracker and talked to Ginger. She let out her breath.

  They docked tomorrow, so Jake’s “help” would be short-lived.

  The body heat of his arm branded her back. She didn’t want to move. Dropping the thread of the story, she concentrated on laughing when the others did.

  Jake shifted and broke the spell woven around her.

  Her eyes followed him as he went below and restocked the soda chest.

  He glanced up and tossed a box of crackers through the hatch into her hands.

  She shook the crackers onto the cheese tray and took the empty spot between Ginger and the Queen’s wheel. No need for Jake to think she was eager for Act Two. She launched into her woman overboard tale.

  Bret sat across from her, eyes glued to her face, his mouth turning up at the corners.

  But his attention failed to touch her. Jake’s “help” had flipped off the switch of attraction. She glanced at Bret, testing herself. No response in any part of her mind or body. Thank You, God.

  Rachel glanced at Jake as he stepped through the companionway. An obnoxious morning person, he would probably turn in for the night.

  Instead, Jake scooted against the coaming behind Rachel, one leg on either side of her. She darted a glance at Jake’s bare feet and avoided Bret’s eyes. Maybe Bret wouldn’t notice her blush in the lantern light.

  “…so, Jake hauled me into the dinghy like a hundred and twenty-five pound sea cow.”

  Jake laughed behind her. She twisted to look over her shoulder. Did he really find it funny the fifth time he’d heard it—and after having been there in the first place? But the lantern light picked up the sparkle of merriment in his eyes.

  Somewhere in the middle of Bret’s recap of their swim season, Jake’s hands settled on her shoulders. She tensed. He kneaded her back through Sassy McQuen’s completing the twenty laps of the Five Hundred Free and Alex Tremain earning the Most Valuable Swimmer trophy.

  In spite of the weirdness of the charade, she began to relax. Bret’s smooth voice droned on. But she could only think of Jake’s thumbs pressing the tension out of the muscles between her shoulder blades.

  Bret stared at her as he recounted the State meet, as though willing her to remember their first kiss in front of her apartment.

  Jake’s hand slipped under her hair and rubbed her neck until it turned to Silly Putty. Blessedly, she forgot about State, about the shame. Her muscles went limp, and she felt like she might slide into a puddle in the cockpit foot well. Jake tugged her boneless shoulders against his chest.

  Bret must have finished the season because Clive’s raspy voice launched into a joke about three guys playing golf in Heaven. Rachel turned her head toward Clive.

  Jake’s heart beat in her ear. Her eyes drifted shut as she listened to the sound. Every once in a while, words rumbled in his chest.

  Voices pirouetted and dipped around her.

  The next thing she knew, Jake said her name. “Rae….”

  Even half awake, Rachel heard the shortening of her name. No one called her Rae but Jake. She smiled sleepily. A couple drops of rain splatted against her arm and she snuggled into the warmth of his body and sleep.

  “Rae… Wake up.”

  Rain sheeted against her skin, rousting the last of sleep’s Novocain from her body, and she scrambled for the aft cabin.

  Jake propped his feet on his desk in the darkened engine room and listened to rain patter on the deck above his head. Rachel had fallen asleep in his arms, and she still filled his senses. He wouldn’t be catching Z’s anytime soon.

  Posing as her boyfriend seemed like a no-brainer to help her out, but it got complicated about point five seconds after he hooked a wrist over her bare shoulder. The skin-on-skin felt nothing like pretending, nothing like the handful of times they’d touched this summer.

  He’d felt Rachel’s discomfort in the way she held herself so still, the muffled sigh of relief when he went below for soda. He would have left her alone, but Bret’s Matthew McConaughey-gazing-at-his-lover act changed his mind.

  Bret would never have bought them as a couple if Rachel sat there all evening like the Queen’s third mast. He’d rubbed her neck and shoulders till she finally gave up and relaxed against him. He’d held her for an hour, breathing in her trust with the pine scent of her shampoo. He shouldn’t have been surprised since she’d already trusted him with her secrets.

  He hated to admit it, but he and Gabrielle had never been this close. Gabs held him off physically because she wanted to wait for marriage. But she’d locked him out emotionally, too. He only realized it now because of Rachel’s openness.

  He smiled, picturing Bret’s exit from the cockpit. Bret had stretched and raked his gaze over a sleeping Rachel. His jaw clenched, eyes narrowed to slits, hands dropping into fists at his sides. He didn’t so much as look at Jake before he stormed down the companionway, leaving a huff of disgust in his wake.

  Rachel’s splash of freckles across her cheeks had seared into Jake in the lantern light and robbed his sleep. But those thirty seconds of Bret’s reaction were more than payback.

  The steady rain blowing in gentle sheets across the deck lulled him. He stood, felt for the bungee cord, and anchored the chair into his desk. He wasn’t going to figure out what he felt for Rachel—or Gabs, for that matter—tonight.

  He eased open the door to the aft cabin and shut it after he passed through.

  “I’m in love with someone else… with Jake.” Rachel’s words swam in his head.

  He slid under his sheet and lay back on the cool pillow. The sway of the Queen and the drone of the rain weighted his eyelids.

  He’d never known Rachel to tell a lie.

  Rachel watched Jake load Clive and Connie’s luggage into a waiting cab at the end of the pier.

  “Alone for once.”

  Rachel turned at the sound of Bret’s taut voice.

  He stood in the cockpit, shoulders rigid, sunglasses hiding his eyes.

  The deck swayed.

  Rachel dropped her gaze to the murky green water between the boat and the pier where a redfish carcass floated.

  “It’s over.” She lifted her eyes to the mirrored lenses.

  “You made your point last night.” Disgust thickened his voice. He heaved his duffle over his shoulder and cleared the coaming inches from her. “This—” he waved his hand between them, “—dance with desire would have been more satisfying for both of us if you—”

  “Did you ever really love me?”

  “I wish I could forget you.”

  “So, that would be a no.” Seconds ticked by while she stared at double images of her face in his glasses.

  “I was ready to choose you over my kids.” He stalked across the gangplank to the finger pier.

  “Get over it, Bret. I will.” She shot ice into the words, the performance of her life.

  His step hitched, then he kept walking.

  Inside, she blubbered.

  Rachel touched a match to the page she’d ripped from the New Smyrna Beach High Yearbook. A corner turned black. The flame ate the words lettered in Bret’s neat script. Thanks, Rachel, for being my assistant coach and friend. I’ll never forget State. She dropped it into the empty hibachi she’d lugged onto the afterdeck. The page burned to ash.

  She struck another match and cupped her hands around the flame until it lit the card he’d laid on her desk one day in May. The watercolor greens and blues dissolved into black and gray. But the words were carved in her memory.

  You hear my heart when no one’s listening. I tried to forget you. But you’re so beautiful. Tell me I’ll
hold you again.

  Rachel yanked the delicate chain from her neck. She sifted the heart and chain back and forth in her palms, balled her fist around them, and heaved. The necklace sailed a few yards and slipped under the green water.

  Color caught the corner of her eye, and she saw Jake sitting on the main cabin, elbows draped over his knees.

  “You watched?” Her voice weighed sixty pounds.

  Jake squinted against the sunlight. “I wasn’t going to let you burn the Queen down to her waterline.” He stood and walked over to her, offering a hand. He tugged her to her feet and wrapped his arms around her. “I’m proud of you.”

  She slumped against the sun-warmed cotton of his T-shirt. “I only wish I could get rid of my regrets as easily.”

  Leaf chuckled, and Jake pulled his eyes from Rachel’s form as she walked down the dock toward the street, the long, leather fringe of her purse swaying beside her.

  “Caught you wrapped in a clinch earlier. A mighty good cruise, I’ll wager.”

  “Come on, Leaf, she was having a moment.”

  “Looked like you got your moment, too.”

  Jake grinned. “Yeah, I guess I did.” More than one.

  “Beat out the competition, eh?”

  “I’ve got more important things to worry about—like how I’m going to keep the Queen out of dry dock.” Jake squatted on the finger pier and squinted at the waterline where the fiberglass had begun to buckle.

  “That guy had a tongue smoother than a lizard’s. Should have heard him when he came aboard.”

  Jake looked over his shoulder at Leaf perched against the Escape’s cabin and shook his head. “You need to get a life.”

  “I got a life. You’re the one who got tossed on your head. You need a girl who won’t jerk you around. Rachel’s sweet on you.”

  Jake laughed. “Yeah, she loves me, you old busybody.”

  Leaf shot him a thumbs-up. “Try Down the Hatch in Ponce Inlet if you need hull work. Tell Barry I sent you, and he’ll knock off some of the price.”