Dirty Dancing at Devil's Leap

by Julie Anne Long

  “Well, hello, Humphrey!” She knelt to get closer to cat height. “Do you come with the house?”

  He wasn’t wearing a collar but he was plump and a quick peek told her he’d been divested of testicles, so maybe he was someone’s pet roaming far afield.

  “Prrrrrp!” He bumped her hand with his hard little noggin. His eyes were as yellow as doubloons, but little shavings of darker gold floated in there, lending him an air of mystery.

  She scratched him under his chin until he purred. She was vaguely aware of other ambient sounds. Squirrels making their scolding chuckling sounds from up in the trees. Was that bleating off in the distance? The creak and scrape of metal. She didn’t pay much attention to that last one.

  The cat was much smarter.

  Its eyes flared hugely and—VROOM! It was out of there.

  “What the—” Avalon gave a start and turned to look behind her.

  Just in time for that long metal gate to collide with her forehead and smack her flat.

  Chapter 5

  She opened her eyes a second later.

  She could feel gravel digging into her thighs through her yoga pants.

  “Mother fuck,” she half muttered, half moaned.

  “Oh, thank God you’re alive. I thought someone might have dumped a body.”

  She gave a start and turned her head. A pair of denim-clad knees filled her field of vision.

  The voice was male, lusciously deep, husked at the edges, familiar in a strange way. Maybe it was the voice of God.

  If it was, for just a millisecond there, she hadn’t minded being dead.

  “Does that happen a lot around here?” she said to the knees. A little woozily.

  “Not as often as you’d think, given the remote location.”

  She hoped he was kidding.

  She hoped he wasn’t a vagrant or the type that liked to hide from the law in the thick woods here.

  She touched her hand to her forehead to check for blood or dents.

  She held it in front of her eyes. It came away clean. It sure was stinging, however.

  “I saw that gate heading at you and I ran like hell but I couldn’t get here in time to stop it.”

  “There was a cat . . .” she began woozily. “I got distracted by a cat . . .”

  “Yeah, that’s The Cat.”

  That really didn’t clear things up at all.

  “So how are you feeling? How many fingers am I holding up?”

  She turned her head to look up.

  Just as the owner of the voice bent over her.

  Her heart jolted as if battery cables had been applied to it.

  Surely only one person in the world had eyes like those: like looking into the shallows of the Hellcat River, through to the fool’s gold and river rocks.

  She was certain she’d stopped breathing.

  “Wait . . . am I . . . am I dead?”

  She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. In a whisper, no less.

  Two straight dark eyebrows made a V when he frowned.

  “I have a hunch you got clobbered harder than we thought. Maybe I ought to call an ambu . . .”

  A series of subtle emotions whipped across his face like scenery outside a train window.

  He stood up abruptly.

  And then two swift steps back as if she were a ghost.

  Or maybe he was just getting old and needed a little distance to see clearly.

  She propped herself up on one elbow. The vertigo she felt when she did that wasn’t entirely because she’d been banged in the head. It was because she’d been dragged backward through decades.

  For an absurd moment, suspended in time, they stared at each other. The sensation was weightlessness, of all boundaries being kicked away. Like taking an underwire bra off after a long day, only infinitely better.

  “Avalon?” He sounded like a spy whispering a password to an enemy guard.

  She toyed for a mad millisecond with denying it.

  In the end, she said nothing. Mainly because she couldn’t speak. Her every cell was preoccupied with singing a sort of ill-advised “Hosannah.”

  It was resoundingly clear that the proverbial years hadn’t simply been kind to him. They had pretty much crowned him their king.

  Mac towered now, though. And while his shoulders were doing a pretty good job of blocking the sun, he was still lean as a runner. His dark hair was shorter but still waved a bit up off his forehead; she saw a couple of silver threads.

  Finally, his mouth quirked at the corner. “I always knew animals would be your downfall.”

  He instantly dropped back into a crouch and rummaged about in the little cooler he’d been carrying, then handed her a plastic bag knotted around ice.

  “Here. It’s been keeping a steelhead trout and a beer cold but I think you’re going to need it. Can you sit up all the way?”

  She demonstrated that she could sit up all the way by sitting up all the way. She remained on the ground, however.

  She wordlessly took the pack and held it to her head. Oh, the bliss.

  It did indeed smell like fish.

  They still didn’t speak. And then he cleared his throat. “It’s been a while, huh? I thought for a moment there I slipped through some sort of time portal, Harwood. It’s still . . . Harwood?”

  She nearly did herself another injury by keeping her neck motionless in an effort not to inspect his hand for a ring.

  “Yes.” She hated that she sounded subdued. That her voice still sounded dazed and wondering as he’d materialized just like the wizard she’d once thought he was. She didn’t trust it yet to tackle multisyllabic words without shaking.

  Not a single one of the fantasies she’d had about running into him again had featured her in rumpled yoga pants staring up at him from the ground.

  “You kind of disappeared a few years back, Harwood.” His tone was light. But there was something a little too careful about it. The way he was holding his body suggested that maybe his breath was held, too.

  So. He’d noticed she’d disappeared.

  There was no way in hell she was going to reveal to him why.

  She shrugged with one shoulder. “Huh. Did I? It was such a long time ago.” She gave him a remote little smile.

  Something jaded, guarded, and cool moved across his eyes then.

  And it was silent.

  She gave a start when two squirrels suddenly began chasing each other around and around a pine trunk. Either fighting, playing, or about to have noisy squirrel sex. One never knew with squirrels.

  “So how many pets do you have now?” His voice was wry. But a little uncertain.

  So he remembered that day, too.

  She was shocked by a sudden sense of violation that a person who’d caused her so much pain still walked around knowing the contents of her heart. Her precious memories. The vulnerable parts of her.

  “None,” she said shortly.

  He said nothing. He frowned faintly, as nonplussed and uncertain as if she’d just uttered a word in Turkish.

  She craved to know and yet feared to know. But she knew she would have to ask, because if she didn’t, it would seem as though it mattered.

  “So what have you been up to, Mac?”

  She kept the words as offhand and neutral as possible. She didn’t want him to think she cared in the least.

  “What have I been up to for the past decade and a half?” he said ironically. “Oh, nothing much.”

  The whole world pretty much knew what became of his dad, so he probably assumed he didn’t have to fill her in on that.

  His answer was limned in a faint bitterness.

  That was the moment she was certain Mac had no idea why she’d disappeared that day. She’d always wondered.

  If he’d suffered, that was as it should be.

  And she sure as hell wasn’t going to illuminate him now.

  So they’d established there wasn’t going to be any sharing.

  “So what brings you back he
re, Mac? Are you the Phantom of Devil’s Leap?”

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing. Kind of off the beaten path of any given nature walk. And it’s private property.”

  “Yes. My private property.”

  His whole body went rigid as a fence post. “Come again?”

  She rocked her hips a little and fished the keys out of her pocket and dangled them. “I bought the house this morning at auction.”

  He stared at those dangling keys, transfixed. “You bought the house?”

  “Yes.”

  Another wordless moment ticked by.

  “You bought it.”

  “Did you drink away the intervening years, Mac? Yes. I bought. The house.”

  His silence suggested he was struggling mightily to process this.

  “So you’re the . . .” He pressed his lips together over the colorfully profane word he genuinely wanted to use, though the emotion with which he would have delivered it rather throbbed in the air. “. . . who bought this house out from under me.”

  I’ll be damned, Avalon thought. Karma might be a bitch, but turns out she has a sense of irony, too. He must have sent that guy in the suit. Who looked like a very expensive lawyer.

  “You know . . . that guy in the suit went as white as his dress shirt when I outbid him. Or rather . . . I guess I mean when I outbid . . . you.”

  She locked eyes with him.

  She wanted to raise one eyebrow like a cartoon villain. She was pretty sure that would hurt, though, so she didn’t attempt it.

  Mac’s eyes narrowed.

  And then he shook his head to and fro, sorrowfully, almost paternally. “Avalon. You paid way too much.”

  “Or . . . maybe you just didn’t have enough money to outbid me?” She suggested this sweetly, oh so gently, with a sympathetic tilt of the head.

  He blinked. His eyes widened in surprise.

  Damned if that didn’t make him smile faintly, in what looked like genuine pleasure. “Maybe I have a particle of sense. I gave Graybill an explicit cap for a reason.”

  “Maybe I just know what the house could be worth. Some of us have vision.”

  “Vision, huh? I’m guessing yours is double right about now. You know, kind of like that time you tried to jump Whiskey Creek on your bike. Ava Knievel. Interesting, but I guess not surprising, to learn you’ve made overreach a life philosophy.”

  She was perilously close to scowling at him.

  She tried that brow arch instead. It worked, but it hurt, and it turned into a wince, which also hurt.

  He crouched down next to her instantly. “Look at me,” he demanded softly.

  The words somehow bypassed her reason. She obeyed him instantly, as if she’d simply been waiting for permission to do that and only that. She looked, and her heart hurt, as if it was unfurling after being curled in on itself, as she took in that familiar, once beloved terrain. The dimple she could nearly always see because he had a way of smiling crookedly, even in repose, as if everything was eligible to be amusing and he wanted to be ready to laugh. That little dent in his chin she could press her thumb into.

  A surge of something like wonder, maybe even joy, tensed his features, gone in a flash. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her.

  “Just wanted to see if your pupils are the same size and they are. You probably don’t have a concussion. You seeing spots, Harwood?” His voice was soft.

  “Nope.” One frayed, woefully delayed syllable. She wanted to trace those new lines raying from the corners of his eyes with a finger.

  As if they were the lines that connected the last moment she ever saw him to this one.

  “I am. Thirteen of them. Six on one cheek, seven on the other. I remember, because for some reason I counted them the last time I found you flat on your back after doing something reckless.”

  Her heart stopped.

  The words “flat on her back” instantly conjured that day in his parents’ bedroom, the two of them lying side by side, the sun glinting off the hair on his arms, her head against his shoulder. Drunk on a surfeit of slow, endless French kissing. Their hands never wandered much and buttons didn’t open but their legs twined and their groins sure did chafe. That was the day she’d made up her mind to let him touch her boob if he tried it.

  She scooted back from him now like a hermit crab. As anyone would reflexively retreat from a potential source of great pain. Or a cliff edge.

  “Well, this has been an interesting reunion, Mac, but I’m afraid you’ll need to excuse me. I have a lot of things to get done this afternoon.”

  She pretended not to see the gentlemanly hand he extended as she attempted to get to her feet. She managed it with a certain amount of grace. She only staggered a little. She swiped one hand all over her butt and little bits of gravel fell to the ground.

  He watched all of this in apparently rapt silence.

  She held on to his ersatz ice pack with the other hand, though.

  They stood together in silence. It felt reluctant, dense with unspoken things, with grief and joy that felt all of a piece.

  “When you open the gate and push it to the side, you need to lock it into place next to the drive. There’s a loop there for that purpose. Otherwise gravity will get you every time and it’ll swing shut.”

  “Okay,” she said. And then she added, “Thank you.”

  “Every couple of hours with the ice,” he said shortly. “Fifteen to twenty minutes at a time.”

  “I know,” she said, crossly.

  “I bet you do.”

  She did scowl, then.

  “You can keep the ice.”

  “Thanks. It’s mostly water now.”

  “You can keep that, too.”

  And then another silence ensued.

  It occurred to her that he didn’t want to move from her any more than she wanted to move away from him. Perhaps it was born of nostalgia for a time when they didn’t know all the things they knew now about men and women and hearts and truth.

  Though she couldn’t, of course, read his heart. After all, she’d been wrong before.

  A hick from the sticks, he’d said to whoever called him on the phone that day. Avalon? She’s just a hick from the sticks.

  She realized now, as he stood here, that a part of her had always refused to believe he’d actually meant those words. This part of her, she knew, was not to be trusted. She’d learned that the world was a safer place when you cleaved unto a “what you see is what you get” philosophy. It wouldn’t protect you from every shock, of course, like finding your boyfriend in bed with the intern. But it was a pretty good guiding manifesto and the only way she could explain the gulf between what she felt was true and what he’d actually said.

  “Mac,” she finally said quietly, evenly, “if you’ve finished with your . . . what is this? A farewell lap of the property? . . . I’m going to take a stroll over to Devil’s Leap and climb up there to take in the view.”

  He hesitated. “Um . . .”

  “What?” she said irritably.

  “There’s just one little issue.”

  “. . . What?” More tersely now.

  “Technically you’d be trespassing on private property if you do that.”

  Foreboding prickled at the back of her neck. Which was the only reason she didn’t shout, “YES MY PRIVATE PROPERTY.”

  “What are you talking about?” She took pains to sound bored.

  “Aw, don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

  She didn’t have a smart-ass answer prepared for this, so she opted to remain enigmatically silent. She had a sneaking suspicion she really wasn’t going to like the next thing he said, and that Mac, on the other hand, was really going to enjoy it.

  “The land here at Devil’s Leap is in two parcels, Avalon. It always was. The eight acres with Devil’s Leap and the swimming hole and the groundskeeper’s cottage is over there.” He gestured down the road to what looked like a sturdy, weathered box with a roof. She’d thought that w
as a shed. “The other parcel is the house and the two acres surrounding it. You bought the house and the two acres surrounding it.”

  He said this with the maddeningly patient cadence of a kiddie show host.

  “I knew that.” She’d tried for insouciance. Her voice emerged a little cracked, however, and a beat after she preferred.

  And it was a great big fat lie. In the thought balloon over her head, a cartoon Avalon was kicking another cartoon Avalon over and over.

  “Yeah?” he just said, with mild interest.

  “I just figured the swimming hole owner would cut his new and closest neighbor some slack and not object to a little nostalgic stroll. Especially since I’m a Hellcat Canyon native and my family has deep roots here.”

  “Well, I’m sure that all depends,” Mac said genially.

  “I’ll just make him or her an attractive offer for the property.” She shrugged as if this was no big deal at all. She wasn’t entirely certain how she’d go about doing it, unless she sold a big chunk of GradYouAte stock. She’d spent almost all of her savings.

  “Attractive, huh?” Mac mused. Unnervingly, he wasn’t blinking.

  She didn’t say a thing.

  “Why do you need a house this big, Avalon?” he asked suddenly. “Going to install a husband, kids, a Labrador, a few forest creatures?”

  He was fishing: an irrational, reflexive happy stab of gratification.

  “Why do you want it? Do you plan to install your third trophy wife and a legion of spoiled and ungrateful stepchildren who have run-ins with the law?”

  He was amused. “I’m going to fill it with hookers and blow. And rock stars and rappers. I’ll have nonstop parties. I’ll have limousines and ambulances and helicopters going in and out with equal frequency.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “Sounds like a good time,” she said evenly.

  He grinned at that, a slow-spreading, wholly delighted grin, and for a moment time slipped again. At one time her definition of happiness was simple: Mac Coltrane smiling at her.

  She’d managed to finally shoot a glance at his hand. No ring.

  But that didn’t mean there’d never been a wife. Somehow, given his previously outlined views on romance and kids, she didn’t think so.