Glitter Baby

His feet shifted in the gravel. “I don’t want you to go, Flower. All that stuff last night…” His voice sounded hoarse, as if he were getting a cold. “I’m sorry.”

She wouldn’t cry, but the effort cost her, and her words sounded as broken as her heart. “I can’t-I can’t take any more. Let me go.”

He drew a ragged breath. “I did what you said. I read the book. You…You were right. I-I’ve been locked up inside myself too long. Afraid. But when I went to get you by the pool last night…All of a sudden I knew I was a hell of a lot more afraid of losing you than I was of anything that happened fifteen years ago.”

She finally turned to look at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She pulled off her sunglasses and heard him clear his throat again and suddenly realized he was crying.

“Jake?”

“Don’t look at me.”

She turned away, but then his hands were on her arms, and he was pulling her from the car. He squeezed her to his chest so tightly she could barely breathe. “Don’t leave me.” He choked out the words. “I’ve been alone for so long…all my life. Don’t leave me. Jesus, I love you so much. Please, Flower.”

She felt him crumbling. All the protective layers he’d built around himself were breaking away. She finally had what she wanted-Jake Koranda with his emotions stripped raw. Jake letting her see what he’d never shown to anyone else. And it broke her heart.

She covered his tears with her mouth, swallowed them, made them disappear. She tried to heal him with her touch. She wanted to make him whole again, as whole as she was. “It’s all right, cowboy,” she whispered. “It’s all right. I love you. Just don’t shut me out anymore. I can take anything but that.”

He gazed down at her, his eyes red-rimmed, all the cockiness stripped away. “What about you? How long are you going to keep shutting me out? When are you going to let me in?”

“I don’t know what you-” She stopped herself and rested her cheek against his jaw. His smokescreens were no different from her own. All her life, she’d tried to find her personal value in the opinions of others-the nuns at the couvent, Belinda, Alexi. And now it was her business. Yes, she wanted her agency to succeed, but if it failed, she wouldn’t be any less a person. There was nothing wrong with her. She’d been just as much a victim of her misconceptions as Jake.

Try to feel some compassion for the kid you were, she’d told him. Maybe it was time she took her own advice and felt a little compassion for the frightened child she’d been.

“Jake?”

He muttered something into her neck.

“You’ll have to help me,” she said.

He slipped his fingers in her hair, and they kissed long enough to lose track of time. When they finally moved apart, he said, “I love you, Flower. Let’s get this car out of here and drive down to the water. I want to look at the ocean and hold you close and tell you everything I’ve wanted to say for a long time. And I think you have some things to tell me, too.”

She thought of everything she needed to tell him. About the couvent and Alexi, about Belinda and Errol Flynn, about her lost years and her ambitions. She nodded.

They got the car back on the road. Jake drove, and as they began their slow crawl down the drive, he picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. She smiled, and then she gently pulled away. Her purse held a compact with a pocket mirror. She flipped it open and began to study her face.

What she saw was unsettling and disturbing, but she didn’t turn away as she’d been doing for so many years. Instead she stared at her reflection and tried to take in her features with her heart instead of her brain.

Her face was part of her. It might be too big to fit her personal definition of beauty, but she saw intelligence in her reflection, sensitivity in her eyes, humor in her wide mouth. It was a good face. Well-balanced. It belonged to her, and that made it good. “Jake?”

“Hmmm?”

“I really am pretty, aren’t I?”

He looked at her and grinned, a wisecrack ready to slip from his mouth. But then he saw her expression, and his grin disappeared. “I think you’re the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen,” he said simply.

She sighed and settled back into her seat, a satisfied smile on her face.

The motorcycle rider waited until the Jag disappeared around the bend before he came out from behind the scrub. He lifted his helmet, took in the road. Then he headed up the rutted drive to the cantilevered house.

Chapter 27

They returned an hour later, shivering with cold from their rambling, kiss-filled walk along the ocean. Jake lit a fire and laid a comforter in front of it. They undressed each other and made love-slow and tender. He mounted her. She, him. Her hair drifted around them both.

Afterward, they ceremoniously burned his manuscript, and as one page after another went up in flames, Jake seemed to grow younger. “I think I can forget it now.”

She rested her head against his bare shoulder. “Don’t forget. Your past will always be part of you, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

He picked up the poker and pushed a loose page back into the flames, but he didn’t say anything, and she didn’t push him. He needed time. It was enough for now that he could talk to her about what had happened.

She called the office and told David she needed a few days off. “It’s about time you took a vacation,” he said.

She and Jake shut out the world. Their happiness felt iridescent, and their tender, passionate lovemaking filled them both with a sense of wonder.

On their third morning, she was lying in bed wearing only a T-shirt when he came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel. She inched up against the suede headboard. “Let’s go horseback riding.”

“There’s no good place to ride around here.”

“What do you mean? There’s a stable not three miles away. We passed it yesterday when we out for a drive. I haven’t been on a horse in months.”

He picked up a pair of jeans and seemed to be inspecting it for wrinkles, something she’d never known him to care one thing about. “Why don’t you go by yourself? I need to catch up on some work. Besides, I have to ride all the time. It’d be a busman’s holiday.”

“It won’t be fun without you.”

“You’re the one who pointed out that we have to get used to separations.” He stumbled over her sneakers.

She looked at him more closely. He was fidgety, and an outrageous suspicion struck her. “How many Westerns have you made?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“Five…six. I don’t know.” He seemed to have developed a sudden reluctance to drop his towel in front of her. Snatching up his jeans, he carried them back into the bathroom.

“How about…seven?” she called out brightly.

“Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I guess that’s about right.” She heard him turn on the faucet and then the sounds of a noisy toothbrushing. He finally reappeared-bare chest, jeans still unzipped, a dab of toothpaste at the corner of his mouth.

She offered her most polite smile. “Seven Westerns, did you say?”

He fumbled with his zipper. “Uh-huh.”

“A lot of time in the saddle.”

“Damned zipper’s stuck.”

She nodded her head thoughtfully. “A lot of saddle time.”

“I think it’s broken.”

“So tell me? Have you always been afraid of horses, or is it something recent?”