“ To a different time.”
She came over to him and started to unbutton his shirt. He was speechless. He felt so good and Christina looked so right, topless in the flickering candlelight. When she reached the final button, she crossed around behind him and pulled his shirt off.
Then she pressed her body into his, rubbing her breasts into his back as she lowered her hands to undo his button fly Levi’s. The sound of the buttons popping open echoed throughout the room.
“ Are you sure you want to do this?”
“ Hush.” She went down on her knees dragging her breasts down his back and buttocks as she pulled his Levi’s and boxer shorts down.
“ I’m hung up on the shoes.” She laughed as she untied them. “Raise your foot.”
He raised his right leg and she pulled off the shoe and the right pant’s leg.
“ Raise the other one.”
He complied and she repeated the procedure, leaving him standing naked with her behind him on her knees. She put a hand on each leg and spun him around. Then she surprised him by taking his stiff penis into her mouth and before he had time to think, he was spurting and she was swallowing.
“ I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t hold it.”
“ That’s okay.” She smiled. “We have all night.”
“ No one’s ever done that to me.”
“ Really? Ann never did that?” she asked, getting to her feet.
“ No, never.”
“ Why not?”
“ I don’t know. We never did that kind of stuff.”
“ How often did you guys have sex?”
“ Almost every night.”
“ Was it good sex?”
“ It was always great.” He felt a pain in his heart. He would never be over her death. She was the first thought in his mind when he woke and the last before he fell asleep. Their sex, by some people’s standards, may have been routine, but it was full of love, and love, he thought, was never routine. If more people enjoyed the kind of sex life he’d shared with Ann, then the world would be a better place.
She took his hand and gently led him to the bed. They cuddled in each other’s arms and kissed. She broke away and stripped off her skirt and panties, allowing Rick to revel in her body.
“ I haven’t been with anyone since Ann died and it’s been only Ann for the last twenty-five years.”
“ Then I’m going to do my very best to make this special,” she whispered, lowering her lips to his, while at the same time reaching between his legs, making sure he was hard again. She let go of him and rolled onto her back, guiding him into her and they began a long, slow, easy kind of love-making that continued for the better part of an hour, ending with them climaxing together. And at that final moment, for reasons he didn’t understand, a picture of Judy Donovan flashed through his mind.
Chapter Seven
The engine changed from a smooth rumble to the rough chugging of idle. They were there. It was still dark. On Fridays the Seawolf left the Palma Pier at midnight on its weekly overnighter for the serious anglers. Judy, like most of the fishermen, slept till they reached the fishing grounds.
Steeling herself, she rolled off her bunk onto the deck, put on her shoes and headed for the galley. Coming from the warmth of below to the cold of a morning at sea snapped her awake. Sometimes she asked herself if it was worth it, but J.P. loved to go out on the all day boat.
Drinking a cup of coffee, she picked up her rod with its five hooks and headed toward the bait tank, trying not to slip on the slimy deck. She set the coffee by the tank and, with a quick count to three, thrust her hand in, grabbing for an anchovy. The bait net was gone. She latched onto one of the fast moving little fish and jerked her hand out of the cold water, spilling her coffee.
She baited one of her hooks, repeated the process four more times, then sighed when a smiling man returned the net without a clue that he had committed a gross rudeness by taking it away from the tank. She felt like telling him, but instead took her rod over to her position.
Looking overboard, she saw a school of silvery mackerel swim by and uttered one word, “Shit,” under her breath. They’d try to steal her bait before it hit bottom, where the unsuspecting cod lay waiting to become dinner. She hoped she had enough weight on the line to get her hooks down before she lost her anchovies. Crossing her fingers, she dropped the line into the water and watched it sink.
She smiled when the bait slid by the mackerel without a strike and she spun out her line. Five hundred feet to the sea floor. Then she wound up five turns and waited. She thought about a cigarette as she watched the gulls soar overhead, backlit by the rising sun, but it had been almost a year and she didn’t want to start back up. Settling in to get comfortable, she felt the first quick tug, then another, then a third. She started winding.
“ Fish tonight!” she yelped.
Then she saw it, six feet of graceful glory, circling twenty feet away. Blue shark. Shifting her gaze skyward she saw three pregnant looking birds gliding into position. Pelicans. It wasn’t going to be easy. When she judged she had only about fifty feet of line left, she stopped winding and watched the shark. It seemed an eternity, the animal had done this thousands of times, she was an amateur compared to it. She watched as the shark turned and headed toward her line. There was nothing she could do if it decided to take it. Then without warning it turned and struck.
“ Damn!” an unlucky fisherman cursed as Judy wound with all the fury she could muster.
Forty feet, then thirty, then twenty, ten.
“ Oh boy!” she squealed.
Another shark, coming fast. Five feet, closing rapidly.
With a jerk she pulled the line, winding furiously and grinning as dinner, eyes bulging, burst from the ocean. But the grin was short lived, because a pelican, diving like a kamikaze, swooped out of the sky and grabbed her fish. It swallowed, fish, hook and all. Then it went limp and waited. Waited to be cut loose. Like the shark, it too had played this game before, it was like the birds knew they were protected. Gone was her dinner. There was nothing left to do, but cut the bird free, curse and try again.
Such are the perils of rock cod fishing, she thought as she heard J.P. shout out, “Mom, that was almost beautiful.” Hearing him say that made it all worthwhile.
“ Did you catch anything yet?” she asked her son.
“ Naw, I slept in.” It didn’t even occur to her to look for him when she got up. She thought he would be up front at his favorite spot fishing with the regulars. The fact that he wasn’t, meant that something was wrong.
“ I’m sorry, I didn’t notice. I just assumed you were up and at ’em. You always are.”
“ I was sleeping too good to get up early.”
She was worried about that. She wanted to know why and though she didn’t want to pry, she thought that maybe now was the time to bring it up.
“ You haven’t been sleeping well lately, have you?”
“ What?” J.P. snapped his eyes away from the blue Pacific and looked at his mother.
“ Come on J.P., I hear you get up during the night and go to the kitchen. And I see the way you drag your butt around the house. What’s wrong?”
“ Nothing.”
“ Come on, you can tell me.”
“ You’ll think I’m stupid.”
“ I would never think that.”
“ Dick Rainmaker told me that he saw the Ghost Dog.”
“ What?”
“ You know, the Ragged Man’s dog.”
