Solomon's Sieve (22 page)

Lost in those thoughts he had to go back and piece together what she’d just said.

“What?”

“I said it’s time for me to sell the beach house. I don’t want to ever be there again. I guess I’ll go down this weekend, get the stuff out I want to keep, and talk to a realtor.”

“I want to go with you.”

After a long pause, she said, “Why?”

“It was a place you loved and it was a place where something life-changing happened to you. I’ll take Saturday off and go with you.”
After all,
he thought,
what’s the point of getting a second chance at life if not to do some things differently? Like take a day off to go on an important errand with your girl.

“You’ll take Saturday off?” She seemed to be considering. “I don’t know.”

“Why not? Is this a one night stand?”

She sighed and made a sound like a stifled laugh. “No. Nothing like that. It just… I don’t know. Seems like it would feel wrong to take somebody else there.”

“Tell you what. Let me go with you. If my being there makes you uncomfortable, I’ll take a hike. Okay?”

“I can’t imagine why you’d want to go. Really. But truthfully, I’d just as soon not face it alone.”

“You haven’t been back since?”

“No.”

“Then I absolutely insist on going.”

Things between Rev and Farnsworth were moving at dizzying speeds. She hadn’t had a lot of relationships with men, but she knew enough to know that her relationship with Rev was highly unusual.

On Saturday morning at dark early they left Jefferson Unit in her Land Rover. The vehicle was old, but it ran and she loved that it had so much glass. It was the next best thing to being in a convertible.

Rev noticed that she was becoming more and more apprehensive as they drew closer to Cape May.

“I’m with you, Susan. You’re not doing this alone.”

He saw her face soften as she glanced over at him. “I know. And I’m glad. It would have been harder to come all by myself.”

The house smelled a little musty when they opened the door and stepped in. As Farnsworth went through the rites of opening the house, Rev followed her around trying to keep her mind occupied with questions. Like, “How long have you had this place?” “Did you always want a beach house?” “What is it about the beach that you like so much?”

When she took her jewelry box out of the dresser drawer in her bedroom and dropped her pearl necklace inside, he saw the ring he’d given her sitting alone inside one of the pink velvet compartments. That ring wasn’t designed to sit inside a beach house jewelry box like a high school memento that had outlived its day and its usefulness. That ring was made for wearing on her finger. He’d known it the moment he first saw it.

Farnsworth glanced at her watch. They still had half an hour before the realtor was to meet them there so she made a pot of coffee and they sat down at the kitchen table to wait. Ten minutes after appointment time, the realtor called to say something urgent had come up and could they possibly reschedule for the next day?

“Just a minute.” She put the phone face against her chest to mute the sound and turned to Rev. “She can’t come today and wants to know if I can meet her tomorrow instead?”

“If you’re asking if I can stay with you until then, the answer is yes.”

She nodded, told the realtor they could meet Sunday afternoon instead, and ended the call. When she faced Rev, it was evident that she wasn’t sure what to do next.

“So! We’re spending the night?” he asked, trying to sound enthusiastic. She looked around nervously and bit her bottom lip. It was heartbreaking to see his supremely confident lady so devastatingly insecure. “Or we could go get a room at that bed and breakfast we passed. Come back tomorrow.” When she didn’t answer, he added another option. “Or I could go get a room at the B&B if you’d rather.”

He watched her chest heave as she took in a deep breath and steadied her resolve. It gave literal meaning to the term “suck it up”.

“No. We can stay here. It would be silly to go somewhere else.”

Rev wanted to do something to ease the pain he was reading on her face and body language, but didn’t know that anything but time, and maybe love, could fix that.

“Let’s go back up the highway to that grocery store and get some supplies. I’ll make dinner. What would you like?”

That seemed to distract her, at least temporarily. She smiled. “You know how to cook?”

“Not everything, but I have a couple of specialties. Bam!” He made a stage magic gesture with both hands.

She giggled. “Would never have taken you for an Emeril fan.”

“Well, while we’re driving to the store, I’ll tell you about the time I was stuck in a Nicaraguan dump waiting for a guy who was supposed to deliver a Chupacabra report. There was a TV, but the only channel that came in was the cooking channel. For days I had nothing to do but watch that guy and listen to it rain.”

“Okay. Going to grab a sweater and then we’ll go.”

When she came back down, she was wearing a brightly colored hand knit sweater that truly was wearable art and Rev would have thought it was gorgeous on her except for one thing.

“What’s that?” He pointed at her chest and looked unhappy.

She looked down. “It’s a sweater.”

“No. That!”

She looked closer, following the trajectory line to the exact place where he was pointing. The sweater was a highly prized designer item that had been an expensive gift. It was covered with rows of pretty white fleeced, white-faced sheep following each other in rows, except for a single black-faced sheep that was facing outward. “Are you talking about the little black-faced sheep? It’s the designer signature.”

His eyes rose to meet hers and he realized he probably looked and sounded a little crazy. He shoved a hand over his head. “I guess this sounds crazy and I apologize for that, but could you possibly wear another sweater?”

Farnsworth let her mouth fall open. “Are you afraid of the black-faced sheep on my sweater?”

He looked like he was trying to decide what to say, but never got a chance. She burst into laughter that racked her body. It was a feeling she’d grown unaccustomed to. She held her sides and laughed so hard she actually thought it might make her sore. The fact that Rev looked so humiliated only made it funnier.

Farnsworth wasn’t usually the sort of person to find humor in ridicule, but there was something so ludicrous about the battle-hardened vampire hunter being afraid of a little inanimate sheep, part of a woven pattern on a piece of cloth.

“I’m not afraid,” he said, failing to sound convincing. “I just don’t like it.”

She shook her head and started back upstairs to change, chuckling all the way.

She had given him the keys to drive, but said nothing else after coming back down wearing a sweater that was mono color. White. He thought she was making a statement with her choice of substitute.

En route to the store, he said, “I guess it was ridiculous.”

“What?” she asked innocently while batting her eyelashes and screwing up her mouth to stifle a giggle.

“Okay. Have it your way. Just keep it up, but you’re looking at karma’s errand boy.”

That phrase completely messed up her determination not to tease him anymore. The laughter started all over again.

“You want to tell me what it’s about?”

“What?”

“Being phobic of black-faced sheep?”

He looked away, out the driver’s side window, then back at the road, but did not look at her. “No,” was all he said, but it was obvious he was pouting. She’d hurt his ego.

Staring at his handsome profile for a few beats, she was thinking that everyone is entitled to a few quirks, a few eccentricities, and a few secrets. “Okay. I know it wasn’t that you were bitten by one because they’re herbivores. But that’s all I’m going to say. Subject closed.” True to her word she didn’t say anything else about it. Right after one last muffled chuckle.

They argued over whether to use red peppers or green peppers and finally compromised on both. Oddly, even the arguing felt like a glove worn into the exact shape of the hand.

It started to rain just as they made it back to the house, ran up the stairs, and closed the sliding glass door.

Rev grinned. “Good timing.”

The temperature dropped a little, but mostly it just felt colder because of the additional damp in the air. He built a fire using wood that Sol had brought in and, again for the thousandth time, wished that he could turn to Farnsworth and remark about the oddity and bitter sweetness of that.

They sat down on the couch in front of the fire together. With dinner a couple of hours away, there wasn’t really anything to do but be in the moment. Together.

She decided the best way to handle a silence before it became awkward was to fill it with sound. “So I guess Rev is short for Revenge?”

He angled his body toward her and reached over to finger a stray tendril of dark locks next to her face. “No,” he said with a light of amusement dancing in his eyes. “Short for Reverence.” And that’s what she would call the emotion being projected back at her, but she didn’t trust it. Couldn’t trust it. People just didn’t fall in love so fast.

He leaned over, lowered his voice, and said, “Let’s go upstairs.”

Her body betrayed her in a series of quivers. She asked herself if she wanted that and the surprising answer was yes. She thought making love to a man who wasn’t Sol, in that place of all places, should feel like a betrayal, but it didn’t.

Before they arrived she would have said the same thing about teasing and laughter, that it would feel horrible, that it would be an affront to her relationship with the man she loved – the man she would always love. But she didn’t feel guilty about laughing with Rev. It didn’t make her feel bad at all. It was more like the easing of a giant burden.

Without another word she rose and walked to the stairs.

They made sweet love that afternoon with rain falling on a roof that had been built before modern codes required sound-muting insulation. It was lovely.

It was also eerie that he seemed to know
exactly
what she liked in bed. All the little familiarities that lovers usually learn through time and experiment. Like the fact that she liked her nipples tweaked but not pinched, that she liked oral sex right after a recent shower, that she liked breath
on
her ear, but not tongue
in
her ear, that she liked nipping but not biting.

When they returned to the kitchen to make dinner, it felt as though an exorcism had been done on the house, clearing away ghostly vibrations of unhappy memories. Farnsworth insisted that they do the cooking together. They were making pasta primavera. He was responsible for the primavera and Alfredo sauce, which he finished before her part of the meal, the pasta, was ready.

She turned from the boiling pot on the stove, waving a long wooden spoon, and asked Rev to open a bottle of wine.

“Sure,” he smiled. He picked out a bottle of Red Guitar, then walked straight to the trick drawer, kicked the baseboard underneath the bottom cabinet and pulled at the same time.

Her mind raced through every conceivable explanation while her knees threatened to give out from under her. Somehow she managed to stay upright. It couldn’t be. But it
had
to be. She couldn’t dismiss the possibility out of hand. After all, she worked for an organization where impossible things were as routine as requisitioning printer paper.

While he was facing the counter opening the wine, she came up behind him.

“So,” she said in the lightest tone she could manage, “the realtor doesn’t come until tomorrow afternoon.” He glanced back over his shoulder, but didn’t turn around. “So I was thinking we might rent a dune buggy tomorrow morning.”

He wheeled on her with wild eyes, his face instantly drained of color and wearing panic like a mask. He grabbed her shoulders and tried to say the word “no” forcefully, but his throat had closed up and he could barely get out a sound that was somewhere between a whisper and a growl.

When he realized how much he’d appeared to overreact, he relaxed his grip on her shoulders. Seeing the expression on her face he knew instantly that it had been a trick. A good one. He released her, dropping his hands and stood up straight.

He clutched his arms around his body as if that would prevent the Powers That Be taking it from him. When a minute had gone by and he was still standing in the beach house kitchen, he started to breathe easier. He had promised that he wouldn’t tell anyone, but he hadn’t guaranteed that no one would guess.

Beginning to relax, he asked, “How?”

“How did I know?” He nodded slowly. “There’s a trick to opening the drawer with the bottle opener.” His eyes slid to that drawer and he glared at it like it was a traitor. “But if somebody in this room is going to ask a question that begins with ‘how’, by all rights it ought to be me.”