The First Time at Firelight Falls

by Julie Anne Long

  Although, who knew. Men often just liked to hack things.

  Someone really ought to bear a burden or two for him.

  How she longed to carve a place for them outside of time, just a small space. Maybe about the size of a phone booth, or a closet.

  She indulged in a little fantasy now. Her and Gabe, alone, together, in this little space she’d just carved.

  Wait. Something was wrong with this picture.

  She mentally removed all of his clothes.

  That was better.

  And then hers.

  Even better.

  Just for fun she vajazzled herself.

  No, no, that was alarming.

  She restored her standard fluffy wedge.

  Then she mentally pushed those two people up against each other’s bodies.

  Wrapped them together.

  Whoa.

  Lust skewered her, and the breath-stealing spiky rush of heat skittering over her skin was delicious, but she didn’t have the luxury of standing there in front of the whiteboard, frivolously savoring it. She banished it. She ought not to have even summoned it.

  It was right about then that Annelise had gotten awfully quiet behind her. No spoon clinking against the soup bowl.

  “Are you ever going to eat that lion, Leesy?” she said absently.

  “Mama?”

  “Yeah, sweet thing?”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  Eden whirled, the marker held aloft like a saber, ready to rush into mom battle. “In what way?”

  “My throat hurts.”

  Annelise put the grilled cheese lion down and propped her cheek on her hand.

  Eden all but lunged for her and lay the back of her hand against Annelise’s forehead. Her heart gave a little lurch.

  “Oh, honey. You’re warm. Who in your class is sick?”

  “Emily, Tobin, and Braden.”

  “All of them? Cheezus!”

  “It’s hard to tell. Tobin kind of always has some snot on him, but he stayed home yesterday.”

  “How’s your tummy?”

  “Kinda weird.”

  Eden closed her eyes. She might as well take a rifle, throw the whiteboard up like skeet, and shoot it into smithereens.

  And after she took Annelise’s temperature, she picked up the eraser and with one mighty swipe, the drawing of the tooth, the cat, the flowers became a big gray smudge.

  None of that mattered when her baby was sick.

  Two weeks later . . .

  The Wasteland.

  That’s what Gabe mordantly christened the period between the last time he talked to Eden to the next. Oh, sure, his schedule was full that entire time. Even lively. Meetings with the vets, softball games, various board meetings. Hearty laughter. Beer.

  His big empty house.

  His vast white ceiling.

  It was like functioning in a world suddenly stripped of birdsong or music. As if the colors had desaturated. Or if all the windows were sealed shut and no fresh air could get in.

  And no one looking at him would have noticed a damn thing. Gabe had learned long ago how not to visibly wear suffering.

  He knew all about Annelise being out of school, because that cold cut a swath through the fifth grade, and all those parents called the office. Annelise also missed soccer practice, and Eden missed a decorating committee meeting, and Jan roped him into helping, which was how he wound up painting the words Dunking Booth.

  He considered texting her. To commiserate. To check in. To see if she needed anything. But would that be an intrusion? Did he have the right? She hadn’t given him her phone number; it was part of the school records.

  No, he decided, this was a long game. It hadn’t played itself out yet.

  And boy was this ever a test.

  She might not even be thinking about him at all. She might have decided that in light of the chaos life could dish up without warning, a courtship conducted in the chinks of their schedules was pointless. Even foolish.

  He would just have to wait.

  The Tornado.

  That’s how Eden thought of those two weeks. Because tornadoes were seasonal (though of course not really in California), and this one wasn’t unprecedented. They came along now and again and sent her best-laid plans twirling into the next county. Like that scene in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy had looked out of the window of her flying house and saw her wicked neighbor peddling on by through the sky—that’s how she imagined all those little drawings on her whiteboard.

  Mostly because, boy, the store-brand cold medicine was potent stuff.

  Annelise got better pretty fast.

  But Eden caught Annelise’s cold. And it went nice and bronchial on her.

  And then Danny caught her cold.

  And he was out for a couple of days.

  And then her mom and dad spent some time with the cold.

  And then Avalon somehow got it.

  And it was a mad scramble to keep her life running for those two weeks—to make sure orders at the store were fulfilled and food entered the house and the bills were paid and Annelise got to where she needed to go. Eden was on the phone constantly, sniffling and croaking, planning, rearranging, negotiating favor trades like that crazy agent Ari Gold on Entourage.

  And yet through it all some vein of grace ran. Something that during previous tornadoes hadn’t been there at all. Something that felt like hope or peace, maybe? The cold medicine was awfully good; it blurred access to sophisticated thinking, and she could probably lay a lot of the inner calm at its door. But she was pretty sure she could also call that inner calm “Gabe.”

  The epiphany was that she’d all along thought she hadn’t room in her life for him. But you didn’t make room in your life for a beautiful song or the weather. It just was there, making things better.

  “The last time your heart was bro—” She knew, too, by the end of those two weeks, how she was going to answer his question.

  Gabe went still when he saw Eden in the hall, zipping out of Annelise’s classroom into a crowd of kids moving toward their next class.

  He had a hunch someone had forgotten her lunch again.

  He half smiled. Wow, she looked like hell.

  And like an oasis in the desert.

  Also: like the very essence of beauty, as far as he was concerned.

  A bulky blue sweater worn over a blue-collared shirt that was slipping out of the back of her jeans, like she’d thrown all of it on in a second to get here. She saw him. Froze. Then drifted toward him. There were mauve shadows under her eyes. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail and she’d missed a few strands and they were fluttering alongside her chin. The mauve shadows made her eyes look even bluer.

  And for a moment they said nothing at all. Just gazed.

  He wondered if he looked the same as he had two weeks ago, or if he looked haunted from missing her.

  “Give me back my fidget spinner, you big turd, Todd!” some kid hollered behind them.

  Gabe whirled around and barked, “HEY.”

  The kids yelped and gave a start, and Todd immediately thrust the purloined fidget spinner at the other kid.

  Gabe adroitly intercepted it and shoved it in his pocket. “You can pick it up in the office after school,” he said sternly. “Now get to class.”

  The kids glumly shuffled off to class.

  He turned back to Eden.

  Who was biting her lip to keep from laughing.

  “. . . ken?” he said tenderly. Tentatively. Like a tourist in a foreign land revisiting a language he’d learned in high school.

  She drew in a long breath. Exhaled. “When this great guy I know told me how he lost his fiancée. That’s the last time my heart felt broken.”

  He gave a soft, stunned laugh.

  Together they stood absolutely wordlessly in the hall as kids swirled around them.

  Two minutes until the bell.

  He struggled to recover his aplomb, then gave up. What use was it to him?
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br />   “Truthfully,” she said, a little more conversationally, “you really made me think hard about it. Because I don’t think a man has broken my heart before. But I’ve realized it breaks a little all the time. In a sweet way. You know how sometimes there are swarms of little quakes along the minor faults in California? When Annelise says something amazing . . . a little while ago, and this is going to sound dumb, but I caught her talking to a caterpillar outside near our roses, explaining that it was about to become a butterfly, which might feel funny, but she was reassuring it, telling it not to be afraid. It’s something I told her about. My heart is broken and rearranged all the time, feels like, but it’s stronger along the broken parts. The whole landscape of my life changes all the time.”

  That funny pain in his chest was like that jerk after you yanked your parachute rip cord, and it unfurled to catch the wind.

  “Not dumb at all,” he said, when he could finally speak.

  He didn’t really want to speak, actually. He just wanted to stand there and look at her and listen to her, as if she was music. And touch her poor beautiful tired face, which, if he was not mistaken, was sporting a teeny booger in the left nostril. It was pretty clear she’d had Annelise’s cold, too.

  He really just wanted to make her life easier and better. To buy them name-brand Barbies if that’s what they wanted. To take care of them when they were sick.

  Their bodies were suspended in that push-pull tension, leaning ever so slightly toward each other while being tugged at by their days and their duties.

  Mrs. Pfingsten called to him from the hall, “Oh, Mr. Caldera, I wanted to talk to you about the sixth-grade field trip. Got a minute?”

  “Sure, Peggy, why don’t you meet me in my office.”

  He smiled at Eden. “All those earthquakes sound kinda like the making of an ecosystem, in fact,” he said over his shoulder, as he headed back to his office.

  There was some consolation in walking away to the sound of her great laugh.Rightness was restored to his world once more.

  And with the sound of the class bell ringing came the conviction they were headed toward that moment where a rogue breeze either knocked him and his parachute off course face-first into a cliff . . . or whether he would waft gently down into a smooth green meadow toward her smiling face and open arms.

  And . . . maybe she would be naked, too, in the meadow.

  Because what the hell. Even lyrical fantasies could be improved with a little nudity.

  Four days later . . .

  Eden’s dad usually did soccer game duty for Annelise because Eden needed to mind the store, but Eden didn’t even have to have an angsty heart-to-heart with herself before she sent Glenn the text that morning.

  Hey pop—it’s a beautiful day and Danny’s minding the store. I thought I’d take Annelise to her soccer game. You could probably use the break!

  Her dad texted back:

  I do have to go to Home Depot. Water heater at Misty Cat is acting up. Thanks pumpkin. Tell Leesy knock ’em dead. xoxox

  She’d brought a folding chair and sunglasses. Puffy white clouds scudded across a sky so blue it dizzied. The pesky cough that had hung on for weeks was just about gone. She no longer felt like a convalescent. Especially when Gabe was standing next to her in jeans and a polo shirt, hands on his hips, squinting out at the field, silver whistle glistening from the chain around his neck.

  Sex on two legs with a whistle, she thought.

  There truly could not be two more different men than Gabe and Annelise’s father. Who, ironically, was also considered an actual sex bomb by a large portion of the population.

  “Why flowers?” Gabe said. Still watching the field.

  She knew what he meant. “Mmm . . . because when I found out I was pregnant, suddenly I was fitted with these like—don’t laugh—new goggles. The metaphorical kind. I’d been gung ho on this . . . GO LEESY GO! GO GO GO GO!” She leaped to her feet.

  Annelise was a pink and blond and peachy blur driving the ball toward the net.

  “KICK IT!” Gabe bellowed. “NOW! NAIL THAT BABY! YOU CAN DO IT!”

  BAM!

  The Acorn goalie leaped heroically, pigtails flopping, but came down hard with an armful of air and THWACK! The ball slammed into the net.

  Much enthusiastic shrieking and pogoing ensued among the Hellcat Canyon Wildcats.

  “Atta girl, Annelise!” Eden hollered. “Beautiful goal!”

  Annelise raced and bounced a horizontal path along the sidelines to high-five Gabe, Eden, and anyone else who had their hand stuck out, just like a pro boxer before a big match.

  “Her first goal this season,” Gabe said proudly.

  “And about her seventy-second try.”

  They both smiled. Annelise always went for the goal, whether it made sense to do it or not. She was crushed every time she missed one. Once she’d slipped and accidentally kicked her own butt, landing hard in the mud. Eden wouldn’t admit it out loud, but sometimes watching fifth grade soccer was as much fun as watching a Warner Bros. cartoon.

  Gabe was working hard on helping Annelise to choose her moments.

  “And that was a bull’s-eye, too,” he said with relish. “A real beaut of a goal. GIRLS, GATHER ROUND.”

  He trotted off to talk to his team full of colty-legged little girls possessed of endless supplies of energy, not all of it juice box–fueled.

  And while he was gone Eden contented herself with watching him: the way he moved, his confidence, his easiness with who he was, his good-humored authority with the team. All of it was downright erotic, as far as she was concerned.

  He strolled back up the line, shared a few words with some other parents swigging from thermoses, then returned to his spot next to her.

  Hand shading his eyes, looking toward the field, he said, “. . . you were gung ho on this . . .”

  “. . . this really proscribed career path—I was going to be an attorney and live in a big city. I decided—and suddenly all I wanted was a . . . nest. Near my family. And near all the familiar things I’d always loved so I could share them with my baby while at the same time being completely independent.”

  He turned toward her. “Complete—”

  “Mr. Caldera! Mr. Caldera!” Their goalie, Michelle, clearly had some urgent business, which may be a bathroom break. He trotted off to have a word with her.

  Then trotted back.

  “. . . completely independent . . .” he prompted when he returned.

  “Yep. And as for flowers . . . when I was pregnant I was just so much more emotional, and when I saw the shop for sale . . . Well, flowers require tender care and creativity and they make people happy and everything else just a little more beautiful, and suddenly the idea of being a purveyor of beauty and happiness, of being a little part of other people’s life events around here made me feel part of something bigger, and I wanted that. Like I was creating this lovely net below a high wire or something like . . . What?”

  He’d turned to stare at her. Taking his eyes from the field. Entirely. His expression was almost . . . awestruck.

  “Nothing,” he said lightly. After a delay.

  His voice was a little gravelly.

  Suddenly she felt a little shy. “Anyway, so the shop was for sale, and it just seemed like serendipity. I decided to spend the money I’d saved for tuition and buy it. It’s cozy and it sustains us. You?”

  “SEAL or principal?”

  “Start with SEAL.”

  “Because I wanted to join the military like my dad and always like to be the best at whatever I do. Back then, I was happiest when I was striving, or so I thought. Challenging myself all the time. And when I want something, I set out to get it. And I always did.”

  Her eyebrows shot up.

  “What?” He was amused. “Was that too alpha?”

  “I don’t know if it was too alpha, but it certainly was very alpha.”

  “It’s true, though,” he said, a faint smile still playing around his lips. “A
nd I was like that until—” He raced up the sidelines. “C’mon MARTINEZ, SNAG THAT BALL FROM HER! YOU CAN DO IT! YES! GO GO GO! YOU CAN—”

  He sighed. The Acorn defender nutmegged the ball right through Chrissy Martinez’s legs.

  She bent over in surprise to watch it roll away from her, only to be briskly captured by another Black Oak Acorns defender, who scurried off dribbling it.

  “THAT’S OKAY, CHRISSY, GOOD HUSTLE. JUST REMEMBER THE DRILLS WE prac . . . oh for the love of . . . DON’T CRY. I KNOW YOU’LL GET THIS.”

  Gabe exhaled in a great, long-suffering gust and propped his hands on top of his head.

  “Sorry, Caldera,” Chrissy’s beleaguered dad, standing next to him who also loved to win, said. “We’ve been working on it at home, but she chokes with an audience.”

  “Ah, no worries, she’s doing a lot better this year than last, Doug. We’ll keep working on it.”

  Doug Martinez took a swig out of his thermos and winced with great satisfaction. Eden was pretty sure he’d spiked his coffee with whiskey, which was a perfectly reasonable way to get through a soccer game.

  Gabe paced back to Eden.

  “Boy, coaching fifth grade soccer must be killing you if you like to win,” she said.

  “By a thousand cuts,” he confirmed with cheerful resignation.

  “. . . until?” she prompted.

  “Ah, yes. Until . . . I figured out winning was about proving something to myself. Still like to win. I just know the difference now between fighting to win just to win, because my ego craves it, and doing my best to win something because I know it’s . . . absolutely right.”

  The collision of their gazes just then by rights ought to have struck sparks like an axle hitting a roadway. The kind of sparks that lit countrysides on fire.

  And that telltale tingle along her spine, her nape, her arms.

  She dropped her eyes and surreptitiously inspected her arm: Goose bumps.

  She slowly lifted her eyes again.

  His smile, tilted, almost rueful; his eyes, unreadable. He gave a one-shouldered shrug.