Safe Harbor (20 page)

Her laughter cut through his insecurity, and he
relaxed and eased out of her arms, settling next to her on his side
so he could continue to gaze at her. “All right,” he said
patiently. “What did I lose two points for?”

She grinned at him. “You lost two points for
deducting two points from my kiss that time in the
cupola.”

“Ah. A lady with a long memory.”

“A long memory and a big grudge.”

“What can I do to earn back those
points?”

“Hmmm.” She pretended to give the question a
great deal of thought. As she contemplated various possibilities
she draped her hand over his side, running it down toward his waist
and then forward to weave through the sweat-damp curls of hair
matting his chest.

His body reacted all over, in a deliciously
uncomfortable way. He cupped his hand over hers and held it.
Together they felt his heartbeat, slower than it had been a minute
ago but still fierce and strong. “Keep touching me like that,” he
whispered, “and you’re going to have another opportunity to grade
me real soon.”

“Is that a warning?”

“A statement of fact.” He leaned forward to
kiss her. “You’re dangerously sexy.”

“Oh, right,” she scoffed.

“You are.”

“How much wine was in that scallop dish you
made?”

He frowned. “Don’t you know how attractive you
are?”

Her smile lost its sardonic edge. “What I know
is, the last time you were on Block Island you didn’t notice
anything the least bit sexy about me.”

“You mean—when we were kids?”

“When we were fifteen.”

He let out a laugh. “When we were fifteen...”
He stroked his thumb over her hand, exploring the slender ridge of
her knuckles, the smoothness of her skin. “I thought you were the
sexiest girl I’d ever laid eyes on.”

“Like hell. You thought I was just a guy,
someone to pal around with.”

“If I thought you were just a guy, do you think
I would have made out with you in the cupola?”

“That wasn’t making out,” she argued. “That was
just practice.”

“Sure,” he humored her. “That was the most
exciting practice I ever had. Didn’t you have any idea what you
were doing to me that summer?”

She appeared genuinely perplexed. “No. What was
I doing to you?”

“Making me crazy.”

“Really?”

“Constantly. I was in a continuous state of
insanity from you, Shelley. I remember one day...” He reminisced, a
nostalgic warmth wrapping around him. “We biked down to our special
beach near Dorie’s Cove, and you had on this bathing suit—if you
could call it that. It was really just three microscopic triangles
held together by a thread. One triangle was here—” he bowed and
kissed one of her breasts “—one here—” he kissed her other breast
“—and one fractionally larger triangle down here.” He stroked his
hand through the thatch of blond hair curling between her legs. “It
was blue, I think—”

Her hips moved reflexively against his hand,
and when she spoke her voice sounded unusually husky. “It was
turquoise. And you didn’t even notice it.”

“Didn’t notice it? Are you kidding?”

She pouted slightly. “Well, you didn’t say
anything when I wore it.”

He laughed again. “Christ, Shelley—I was
speechless. As I recall, I had to flee into the water so you
wouldn’t see what that bathing suit was doing to me.”

Her eyes grew round. “Really?”

“For months afterward, whenever I saw a
triangle I got a hard-on.”

She gave him a shove. “I’ll bet.”

He stroked his fingers down between her legs
again, a teasingly light brush against her. It was an unfair
tactic, but it kept her from trying to shove him away again. “I was
a kid,” he reminded her. “Embarrassingly inexperienced. Heavy on
the fantasies, but lean when it came to action.” He deepened his
caress, savoring the restless motions of her body, the uneven rasp
of her breath as she responded to his touch. “You were my friend,
Shelley. It scared me to think of you in sexual terms.”

She forced her eyes open. “I’m still your
friend,” she whispered.

“Maybe it still scares me,” he confessed before
sliding his free hand around her waist and drawing her to himself.
Their mouths met, and the fear he’d just confessed to burned away
in the heat of her kiss.

Rolling onto his back, he pulled her on top of
him, down around him, sliding his hands forward from the pliant
curves of her bottom to her thighs, to the place where their bodies
met most intimately. He touched her as she rocked against him, and
kissed her, and arched deep into her, filling her, binding himself
to her in flesh and sensation, in friendship and love.

If he’d stopped to think, he might have been
scared again. But he wasn’t thinking right now. He was only
feeling, glorying in the splendor of being alive, a man making love
to a woman.

For this one magnificent night he didn’t need
to think, and he had nothing to fear.

***

WHEN HE WOKE UP, he was alone.

The room was awash in the pearlescent light of
early morning. The bed was warm, the sheets tangled around his
naked body. Through an open window he heard the distant honks of a
gaggle of geese migrating south. Everything appeared in a myopic
blur to him, except for one thing, one thing he saw with
excruciating clarity: Shelley was gone.

Panic slammed into his chest, knocking the wind
out of his lungs. Where was she? How could she have left? Had he
lost her again? Forever this time?

Frantic, he vaulted out of bed and grabbed his
slacks from the floor, where they’d spent the night crumbled in a
heap. He yanked them on, lifted his equally wrinkled shirt from the
rug and punched his arms through the sleeves. He shuffled his bare
feet into his loafers, figuring he’d need to be wearing shoes if he
had to chase her down in his car. Not bothering to button his
shirt, he lunged for his eyeglasses, shoved them up his nose, and
surveyed the room.

With his vision restored to twenty-twenty, he
spotted her purse on the dresser. He let out a long breath as
relief flowed through him. She wouldn’t have left without taking
her purse. She had to be here—somewhere.

Abandoning his bedroom, he glanced down the
hall to the small bedroom containing the stairs up to the cupola.
She might have gone up there if she’d needed time to reflect on the
night they’d spent together. He supposed he needed time to reflect,
as well, but first he had to find her.

He started toward the small bedroom, then
inhaled the aroma of brewing coffee and halted. She must be in the
kitchen.

Reversing direction, he headed downstairs. His
pulse gradually slowed to normal, and his eyes adjusted to the
delicate shafts of dawn light streaming through the windows. At the
bottom of the stairs he strode down the hall to the
kitchen.

The room was empty. He saw the coffee maker on
the counter, its decanter full of coffee. A clean mug stood on the
counter beside it, waiting for him.

Where the hell was she?

He filled the mug and carried it into the
dining room. Through the window he spotted her outside on the front
veranda. Fully dressed, she leaned against the railing and gazed
out at the mist rising off the dew-drenched grass. A mug was
balanced on the railing beside her elbow.

She had her back to him, and he took a minute
to study her. Her hair glinted with streaks of blond, her shoulders
were gracefully broad, her spine straight, her waist narrow, her
hips lean and her legs, her long legs...

His groin tensed, a detached appreciation of
her figure combining with his still-fresh memories of what her body
had felt like, what it had done to him, what miraculous things it
had made him feel. Last night had been incredible.

But it wasn’t last night anymore.

He hesitated. Now that he’d found Shelley, he
had no idea what to do or say.

At fifteen, he’d had pathetically little sexual
experience with girls. At twenty-seven, he had little experience in
how to survive the awkwardness of a morning-after. He’d done his
share of screwing around in college—but only until his junior year,
when he’d met Amanda and fallen madly, monogamously in love. She
was the last woman with whom he’d ever awakened after a night of
sex.

Until now.

This wasn’t a
typical situation. Shelley wasn’t some woman he’d met and become
infatuated with. Nor was she someone he’d picked up for a carefree
night of fun. She was his friend, for Christ’s sake. His
friend
.

He adored her;
he thought she was the greatest. He wanted to be able to come to
Block Island and visit her, to talk with her as they’d always
talked, to feel comfortable with her. But he didn’t
love
her.

Had last night changed everything they were to
each other? Was he going to have to regard her not as a friend but
as a lover now? Would she demand that they renegotiate their
relationship?

Shit.

He didn’t want anything to change. He wanted
Shelley to be the woman he trusted, the woman who had helped him to
recover, who had given him the support and compassion he’d needed
to become human and whole.

He didn’t
love
her, though—not in
the way last night might have implied. Not even after a moonlit
interlude of glorious sex, of passion and humor and astonishing
intimacy.

Not the way he’d loved Amanda.

As understanding as Shelley was, he doubted she
would be able to understand that. She was a woman, and when a man
slept with a woman...it changed things.

Their relationship had always been grounded in
honesty, and if Kip had anything to say about it, that would never
change. He would simply have to be honest with her, reassure her
that she was special but explain, if there was any question, any
confusion—if, after all these years, Shelley had somehow failed
understand what was going on between them...

He would just have to be honest, that was
all.

He took a quick sip of coffee for fortitude,
then left the dining room. He pushed the front door open and
stepped out onto the porch. “Good morning,” he said.

She turned from the railing and saw him. The
smile she gave him was one of pure, distilled pleasure. Her eyes
were gentle, her posture relaxed, her expression profoundly
tranquil. “I made some coffee—” she began, then noticed the mug in
his hand and grinned. “Oh. I see you’ve found it.”

He glanced down into his mug. Steam rose from
it in translucent wisps. He searched for inspiration in the vapor
as it curled into the air and evaporated. His thoughts were just as
ephemeral. They drifted up, seeming almost tangible, and then
evanesced into the cool morning air.

He had to say something. He had to meet
Shelley’s courageous, open gaze and say something.
“Shelley—”

“No, Kip,” she said, her voice low and certain.
She crossed the veranda to him, her nearness forcing him to lift
his eyes to her. She brushed her fingertips lightly over his lips
and smiled. “No explanations. No regrets. It happened, that’s all.
It happened.”

His heart seemed
to swell inside him, growing heavy, aching beneath the overwhelming
burden of his emotions. She
did
understand, everything,
completely.

He stared into her silver-gray eyes, absorbing
their depth and beauty, the boundless faith illuminating them. “I
have no explanations,” he murmured, curving his hand over her
cheek, using his thumb to tuck an errant strand of golden hair
behind her ear, as he’d done innumerable times before. “I also have
no regrets.”

“We’re still friends?” she
half-asked.

“Always, Shelley.” He set his mug on the
railing and gathered her into his arms. “Always,” he whispered, and
prayed for it to be the truth.

He had lost Amanda, and the pain of losing her
had been almost beyond bearing. Losing Shelley would hurt just as
much.

She was not his lover, but she was his friend,
and she understood the difference. She understood.

***

SIX WEEKS LATER, he moved into his new
apartment in Back Bay. It was a charming one-bedroom place with a
terrific view of the Charles River, and while the rent was
outrageously high. he could afford it.

His parents had donated a few essential pieces
of furniture, but most of his belongings were still inside moving
cartons. He had no shelves for his books, and only one three-drawer
chest for his clothes. He had left all his furniture out in San
Francisco, but now that he was finally of reasonably sound mind, he
could begin to cope with the idea of selling the co-op and
transporting the rest of his belongings east.

The day he’d signed the lease he joined a
health club in the neighborhood; one of his old high-school
buddies, now an attorney on Beacon Hill, was also a member. An art
dealer who lived in his building had sold him a couple of framed
Georgia O’Keefe prints at discount for his barren walls. Another
neighbor, noticing the fresh-paint smell of his apartment, had
given him several spice balls to counteract the oppressive scent.
Harrison Shaw and his wife had presented him with a set of towels
as a house-warming gift.