“Right.”
“And how long do you plan to keep running?”
She shrugged.
“Mia,” he said. “This is not a good reason to run away, and certainly not to some little hamlet like Valle Rosa. You need to live somewhere where you can meet other people, people who’ll let you know you’re a worthwhile person who didn’t deserve to be treated like shit.”
“Look, Jeff.” She wanted him to stop talking about this. “I’m not badgering you about running away, so please don’t badger me, okay? And I’m hungry.”
Jeff smiled and swerved the car into the right lane to exit the freeway. “The lady’s hungry,” he said, pulling onto the off-ramp, “and suddenly feisty. Unpredictable. Timid one minute, brassy the next. She allows men to sculpt her in the nude, but turns to ice when you touch her. She—”
“Please don’t,” she said. If he uttered one more word, she thought she might explode.
He had pulled up at a stop sign, and he didn’t cross the intersection until she looked at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when she met his eyes.
“It’s okay.” She regretted her sudden bitchiness, but at least it had put an end to his teasing.
They stopped at a delicatessen and picked up subs—vegetarian for Mia, turkey for Jeff. When Jeff took a bottle of wine from the shelf, Mia grabbed another. She wanted to get drunk tonight.
They picked up the cat at Jeff’s cottage, then walked over to hers. She rolled up the sheet of plastic from the carpet, and they sat on the floor, their backs against the sofa, while they ate. And drank. Mia was on her second glass of wine when Jeff dared speak to her of anything substantive again.
“So,” he said, “did Glen make that sculpture from pictures of you or did you pose? Or would you rather not talk about it?”
“I posed.” She rewrapped the remaining half of her sandwich and set it on the coffee table.
“Was it awkward?”
She shook her head and took a long drink of wine. “It seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do at the time. But I was a lot younger then.”
He laughed. “You’re only twenty-eight now.” He poured more wine into his own glass. “Though I have to admit it surprises me that you would do that.”
“Why?”
He swallowed a bite of his sandwich before speaking again. “Because you’re a very closed person, physically,” he said. “You keep this enormous personal space between you and other people. I don’t think it’s just me, is it?”
She shook her head and stared at her bare feet. They looked pale against the nut-brown carpet. How long since she’d been out in the sun? “I didn’t use to be that way,” she said. “At the time I posed for Glen, I wasn’t that way at all.”
“Did losing him to Laura do that to you?”
She shrugged, non-committal.
Jeff finished his sandwich and rested his head against the cushions on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t think you’re plain,” he said.
Mia leaned her head back, too. The room had a little spin to it. “Well,” she said, “it’s just that Laura is extremely beautiful.”
“You said she got all the boys and that you took care of your mother.” Jeff tipped his head forward again to take a sip of wine. “Does that mean Glen was your first?”
She turned her head on the cushion, looking at him from under a lock of blond hair. “Are we talking first boyfriend or first lover?”
He shrugged. “Your choice.”
“He was both, actually.” She nearly giggled, and she took another swallow of wine before resting her head on the cushion again. “I was a late bloomer.”
“So he was very significant. Very important in your life.”
“Mmm.” There was a brown water stain on the ceiling from some long-ago rain. “How about you?” she asked. “Who was your first?”
“I was very young.”
“How young?”
“Thirteen.”
“Thirteen!” Her head shot up, and she winced at the sudden vertigo. “How old was the girl?”
“Seventeen. It was a dare. She was very sexy and very… carefree, shall we say. It sounds better than ‘loose.’ Some of my friends bet me ten bucks to do it with her.”
“That’s disgusting.” Mia poured more wine into her glass.
“Do you think you need that?” Jeff pointed toward the glass, and she nodded.
“Yup,” she said stubbornly. “I certainly do.”
“Well, you’re right.” Jeff returned to the conversation. “I guess it was disgusting, in retrospect. It backfired on me anyway. They demanded a report from her before they’d pay up, and she told them I was the lousiest lay she’d ever had. She said, and this is one quote I’ll never forget, ‘He doesn’t know his dick from a doorknob.’”
Jeff shuddered, and Mia laughed. The wine was definitely taking hold of her, the giddiness warm and inviting.
“So, that was ego-deflating enough to make me wait a few long years before I tried again.” He smiled at her as he wadded up the wrapper from his sandwich. Then he reached behind him to take her sketch pad from the sofa. Resting it on his knees, he began drawing a crude-looking version of the two-tiered fountain. “I was wondering if you could make this part wider.” He pointed to the upper tier. “What do you think?”
He held the sketch toward her, and she laughed again.
“Finally, something you’re no good at,” she said. “You can’t draw at all.”
He pulled the drawing away from her, an insulted look on his face, and tossed the balled wrapper at her cheek. Then he propped the sketch pad against the coffee table and leaned his arms on his knees. “Well, Mia,” he said, “do you think I’m going to make it rain?”
She giggled. “No.”
“How come you bought all that stuff for the fountain then?”
“I thought I should humor you.”
“Carmen probably had her spies following us all over San Diego. You’ll be on the news tonight.” He began speaking with a Spanish accent, far stronger than Carmen’s. “Valle Rosa’s mystery man, the elusive Jeff Cabrio, was spotted today in San Diego with Mayor Chris Garrett’s winsome secretary, Mia Tanner. The alleged rainmaker, Mr. Cabrio, seems to have engaged Ms. Tanner in his delusion that he can make it rain.”
“Oh, God, I don’t want to be on the news,” Mia said. There was real alarm in the thought, but she couldn’t quite grasp the source of it.
“Mr. Cabrio was seen contemplating a nude sculpture of Ms. Tanner,” Jeff continued. Then he laughed. “I can see the headlines in tomorrow’s paper: Secretary Poses in Nothing but Scarf and Fedora while Rainmaker Looks On.”
“Oh, no,” she groaned.
“Carmen’s spies are probably right outside your window as we speak.” Jeff gestured toward the evening sky, a splash of orange at the living room window. “And I think we should give them something to take back to the dragon lady.”
He leaned over to pull her to him, softly, by her shoulders. Mia felt herself stiffen, felt the urge to slip her arms protectively between their bodies. But he was already too close to her for that, and his mouth was on hers, pressing and eager. When she felt his tongue slip between her lips, the battle inside her began in earnest, the hunger in her own body fighting the impossibility of letting this go any further.
She pulled away from him, pressing her hands lightly but firmly against his chest. A wave of nausea washed over her, and she tasted the wine in the back of her throat. “Please don’t,” she said. “Please go.”
After a moment, he stood up, but only to move to the sofa. He reached for her hand. “Come here, friend,” he said, pulling her up from the floor and gently onto his lap.
She felt too weak and sick to fight him and she let herself lean against him, her arms held close to her body, wrists crossed above her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut as he rubbed her back.
“Holding you is like holding a giant prickly pear,” he said, softly. “Was he
abusive to you? Glen?”
She shook her head. His hand was warm on her back.
“Do you really want me to go?” he asked.
She bit her lip. “Could we just sit like this for another few minutes?”
“No,” he said, “not like this, we can’t. Loosen up a little, Mia. I won’t kiss you. That’s better.”
She felt her body begin to relax, and with the thawing of her muscles came her tears. He held her, rubbing her arms, smoothing his fingers over the skin of her hands, while she cried quietly against his chest.
“Oh, Mia,” he whispered. “There’s a pain in you as big as the world, isn’t there?” He pressed his lips against her shoulder, and she felt their warmth through her shirt. “There’s a pain in you as big as my own.”
She lifted her head to look at him. “I want you to kiss me,” she said. “But that’s all. I need to know that’s all you’ll do.”
“All right,” he said, and with that promise in her ears, Mia opened herself to him. Jeff kissed her slowly, deeply, with a tenderness that gave her courage. She rose to her knees and straddled him, and at his look of surprise, said, “I want to touch your face.”
Shutting her eyes, she rested her palms against his cheeks, then slowly glided her fingers over the warm angles of jaw, his nose, his temples. The skin was satin-smooth on his forehead, rough with a day’s growth of beard on his chin.
“Feels good,” he said.
She moved her hands to his shoulders and shifted her weight until she could feel the heat of his erection through the denim of his jeans and the thin fabric of her shorts. She kissed him, pressing her hips against him, and was jolted by the beginning electric promise of an orgasm—an orgasm that would be unexpected and very welcome, but impossible to accept in this miserable, dishonest, hazardous fashion.
Jeff groaned, and kissed her harder, pulling her shirt from her shorts with one quick tug. She panicked as he slipped his hands beneath the shirt, as she felt them glide over the bare skin on her back.
Quickly, she sat up and grabbed his wrists, pressing them down hard on her thighs. “Now,” she said. “You really have to go now.”
He watched her through the narrowed eyes of a skeptic as she stood to tuck in her shirt. The room swirled slightly, but for the most part, she felt clear-headed and sober.
Jeff rose from the couch, placed his hands on his hips and stared at her until she had no choice but to raise her eyes to his.
“I’d be wrong to assume you’re merely a tease, wouldn’t I?” he asked.
She winced at the sound of the word. “Yes,” she said, surprised by the huskiness of her voice. “You’d be wrong.”
He leaned over to kiss her lightly on the cheek.
“What you are, Mia, is a liar,” he said. “A kiss is definitely not all you want.”
He lifted his glass and drained the last of the wine before giving her his half-smile and heading for the door.
From the window in her darkened bedroom, she watched him walk back to his cottage, the cat scampering after him in the moonlight, and the memory she’d been fighting much of the day flooded over her.
She’d had a difficult time finding a job after recovering from the mastectomy. Her depression over her loss, and over what she knew to be Glen’s true feelings about her body, must have come through during her interviews. Or maybe the interviewers could see that her enthusiasm would always lay at home with her clay and not at some tiresome desk job. The temporary agency was her last hope. When she showed up for work that first day and was told she wasn’t needed, she wasn’t disappointed. She would go home and go back to bed. Glen would be at his studio, Laura at work. There would be no one to chastise her or try to cheer her up.
She’d been surprised to see their cars in the driveway, but not nearly as surprised as when she walked in the front door. It was like stepping inside a dream. A nightmare. Her sister and Glen were in front of the fireplace, naked, Laura’s legs wrapped high around Glen’s waist as he thrust into her. Mia stood frozen, her hand on the doorknob.
Laura was first to see her.
“Mia!” She pushed Glen away from her and sat up, her perfect breasts glistening in the sunlight. Glen turned to face the door, his erection full and painfully familiar.
Mia spun around and ran out to her car. She drove blindly, with no sense of destination. Glen was behind her, though, in his old Rover. He caught up to her at the first corner and jumped out of his car wearing only his jeans. He was still zipping them up as he climbed into the passenger seat beside her.
“Bastard,” she said. “Get out!”
“No, Sunny. Pull over.”
She drove across the intersection and pulled up to the curb but didn’t turn off the ignition. Staring straight ahead of her, she spoke quietly. “Get out of my car, Glen. Leave me alone.”
He leaned over to turn the key in the ignition, and silence filled the car.
“Sunny.” He tried to pull her toward him, to hold her, but she flailed at him with her arms.
“Go to hell!” She pressed herself against the car door, as far from him as she could get. She was surprised she felt no urge to cry. There was far more rage inside her than sorrow. She longed for the satisfaction of hitting him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Laura and I were sort of thrown together, taking care of you.”
She scowled at him. “Please come up with something better than that. That’s so simplistic, it’s insulting.”
“We didn’t intend to fall in love. It simply happened. Sometimes these things are unpredic—”
“Shut up!”
“We wanted to wait until you were strong and well again before we told you.”
“How very considerate of you both.”
Glen was quiet a moment. “I still love you, Sunny,” he said, his voice thick. “But it’s simply not the same as it used to be.”
She swallowed a sarcastic reply. Right now, she needed to deal in the truth. “I repulse you,” she said quietly.
“No.”
“You can’t make love to me, but apparently you have no problem at all making love to my sister.”
She pulled the diamond engagement ring from her finger. He tried to grab it from her, but she opened the car window and threw the ring as far as she could into the road.
“Sunny! You’re bloody crazy!” Glen opened the door and ran into the street to hunt for his precious diamond, and Mia took that opportunity to drive off, knowing that, except to get her clothes and some sculpting supplies, she wouldn’t return to her house again.
She stopped looking at herself in the mirror after that day. This wasn’t her real body, she told herself. It was a shell. A temporary shell.
After the lights flicked off in Jeff’s cottage, she lifted the mirror from the wall above the dresser and rested it against the headboard of her bed, so that as she sat in front of it, she was reflected from waist to chin in the pale moonlight coming through the window. She began unbuttoning her shirt, slowly, the way she thought a man might, the way Jeff might.
Could she tell Jeff? He wasn’t at all like Glen. Maybe he would respond warmly. Not with pity, but compassion. Maybe he could see past the damage in a way that Glen could not.
She slipped the shirt from her shoulders, but found it difficult to look at her image. Even in the hazy moonlight, even wearing a bra, it was obvious that she wasn’t normal. Her right breast was full where it met the bra. The left side of her chest gave her the look of a child dressed in her mother’s underwear. She forced herself to unhook the bra, let it fall.
She pressed the tips of her fingers hard against her lips. It was worse than in her memory. The skin was a smooth, white plane, unbroken by a nipple, but crossed with the pink line of the scar.
Mia lowered the mirror face down on the bed and closed her eyes.
She would take his friendship. Settle for that. She wouldn’t kiss him again or let him hold her or touch her. She wouldn’t take the chance of fright
ening him away. She couldn’t expect anyone else to love her when she couldn’t even love herself.
28
THE AVOCADO GROVE COVERED a little more than two acres on the sloping rim of Cinnamon Canyon. Carmen parked her car on the crest of a hill and got out, shading her eyes to survey the land below her. In the distance, smoke rose above the horizon, the latest in a string of fires burning their way toward Valle Rosa. Last night, the blaze had destroyed six homes and killed a teenaged girl who had apparently slept through the warnings to evacuate. In the middle of the night, Carmen visited the neighborhood with a camera crew. The people looked exhausted. “Don’t know how much more of this we can take,” one woman said into Carmen’s microphone.
Carmen had slept poorly after that midnight outing, haunted by the vision of the fire fighters dragging the charred body of the girl from the ruins of one of the houses, so she had been awake when Jeff started his car in the driveway of the adobe. It wasn’t quite five o’clock. She put on her robe and looked out the bedroom window to see his tail lights disappear around the first curve in the road. Her curiosity wouldn’t allow her to go back to sleep. She got dressed and drove to the warehouse, stopping the car a block away to watch as Jeff and Rick pulled the two flatbed trucks out into the street. She followed them at a distance as they drove to the grove, then used her car phone to call the station, requesting they send a camera crew to this little corner of Cinnamon Canyon as quickly as possible.
Rick had parked his truck at the south end of the grove, closest to where Carmen stood, while Jeff had parked his to the north, a good distance away. The arrangement of the trucks seemed important, and the men had shifted them back and forth on their respective roads in a peculiar pas de deuxbefore being satisfied with their resting spots. It wasn’t until Rick got out of the truck that Carmen realized they were communicating with one another by two-way radios. Rick spoke into the little box in his hand, and Jeff waved to him from the other side of the grove.
She wished she had binoculars. From this distance, each truck looked identical. Each carried what appeared to be something like a satellite dish, surrounded by three tall, broad white cylinders. There were several black boxes on the floor of the trucks, boxes which must have had buttons or knobs on them, because Rick and Jeff knelt next to them, pressing or pulling or turning things, talking all the while into the radios in their hands.