Shooting Starr

Chapter 13

Caitlyn moved toward the table on feet she couldn’t feel. Her groping hands found the back of a chair, but she didn’t sit down. Magically, her butterflies were gone. She felt instead a strange icy calm. “How much did you hear?”

“Enough to know your eyesight’s come back,” Jess said quietly. “That’s great. I’m as happy as I can be for you.”

“Thanks-”

“And that you’re about to do something that’d be dangerous for a professional law enforcement person with perfect vision.”

“It’s…something I have to do,” Caitlyn muttered, staring fixedly at the pale-gray shapes that were her hands.

“Yeah,” Jess said in a voice that cracked, “that’s what my husband said when he went off to Iraq. Tell me something-were you going to tell any of us? Momma and me? Or were you just going to sneak off with Eve tomorrow and leave us sitting here in the dark? So to speak.”

Caitlyn gripped the back of the chair and leaned her weight on her hands. Her face felt hot…swollen, and she had to swallow twice before she could answer. “I don’t know. Please don’t think- It’s not because of you. I just…I can’t let C.J. find out. He’d have a fit. He hovers over me like a…like a mother hen with one chick, as my Aunt Lucy would say. He acts as if I’m completely helpless…as if he’s afraid I’ll break. He’s never-”

“Well, of course he does,” Jess interrupted in exasperation. “He’s in love with you!”

“-going to let me… What?” The last word came out in a wheeze, much as if someone had punched her in the stomach.

Slowly, patiently, Jess repeated it. “C.J.’s in love with you. Don’t tell me you didn’t know!”

Caitlyn gave her head one quick, dazed shake. She was feeling earthquakes again. As the ground shifted beneath her feet, she pulled the chair out and lowered herself into it.

“You have been blind, haven’t you?” Jess said in a kindly way. “The rest of us knew from day one.” Her tone betrayed a smile. “Right from when he insisted on carryin’ you up those stairs in true Rhett Butler style.”

“Rhett…Butler?” Caitlyn whispered, still disbelieving. “I thought he just felt guilty. Like…I’m this huge responsibility, because he blames himself for what happened.”

“He may very well,” Jess said, nodding, “but believe me, I know my baby brother, and if he feels he’s responsible for you, it’s not because of guilt. It’s because as far as he’s concerned, you are his, honey chil’, and he is not about to let any harm come to you, not if he can help it.”

Caitlyn put both hands over her eyes, but it couldn’t stop what was happening. To her dismay, she had begun to cry. She wept in total silence while images played across the blank screen of her mind: Ari Vasily’s cold black eyes watching her from his seat in the courtroom the way a snake watches a mouse, sensuous lips curved in a cruel smile; Mary Kelly’s sweet face and sad, gentle look; the scars and bruises on her body; Emma’s frightened eyes; the blue September sky over the courthouse steps; dreams of people she loved lying dead in pools of blood.

Other things, too…not images, but sensory impressions even more profound: C.J.’s warmth and arms closing around her; his smell, that unique amalgam of soap and clean clothes, diesel fuel and a familiar aftershave she didn’t know the name of; his deep-throated voice, growly in her ear; I’ve got you…

She drew a quivering sniff and wiped her cheeks with her hands. “Oh, dear,” she said, and this time her voice was soft and purposeful. She cleared her throat and pushed back from the table. “Jess-what time is it?” Wired with a terrible sense of urgency, she didn’t wait for a reply. “Would he be home…do you think? Right now?”

“He was when I drove by. His pickup was in the driveway and the lights were on.” Jess had risen as well. “Why? You want me to call him for you?”

“No-” vaguely Caitlyn shook her head “-not on the phone. I…I have to tell him something. Have to see him. Before-” Before I go. If something goes wrong, if Vasily kills me, I’ll never get to tell him. He’ll never know. I’ll never know…

She didn’t say any of that, but strangely, Jess seemed to understand. She touched Caitlyn’s arm and said gently, “You want me to take you over there?”

“Oh-” relief trembled through her, almost like a sob “-would you? Please.”

“Sure. Just let me get my keys.” Counting heartbeats, Caitlyn listened to the scuffling, jingling noises Jess made, rummaging through her purse. “Okay. You ready?” she asked, and Caitlyn nodded, too choked with fear to speak.

“Are you sure you don’t need a jacket?” Jess asked her as they were going down the steps. Caitlyn shook her head; it wasn’t cold that made her shiver.

The one-mile trip to C.J.’s house seemed to take forever-and was much too short. Bewildered, Caitlyn huddled like a sick sparrow on the front seat with her hands tucked between her knees to stop the shaking and thought about all the reasons she shouldn’t be doing what she was doing. What if he’s not there? What if I’m too late? What if Jess is wrong? What if I’m making a terrible, colossal fool of myself?

She didn’t understand it. She’d never felt so uncertain in all her life, or so scared. She, who’d faced wife beaters and child abusers twice her size, violent men, often armed, with everything from guns to broken beer bottles and most of the time drunk besides. How was it that she should be more afraid of a man with only goodness in his soul, kindness in his heart and gentleness in his hands?

Could be, a voice inside her replied, there’s never been so much at stake before. Could be that you’re afraid to hope…

“Look’s like he’s home,” Jess said. “His pickup’s here.” Tires crunched as she turned onto a graveled driveway. “Want me to come in with you? Need any help finding the door?”

Caitlyn shook her head; she could make out the light-colored door and the steps against the darker building. “As long as the lights don’t go out before I get there, I should be okay,” she said with a wan attempt at humor, taking determined hold of the door handle. “Any obstacles on that grass I’m not seeing?”

“Not a thing. You’re clear all the way. I’ll wait till you’re inside, though, just to be sure.”

Caitlyn nodded and slipped out of the car. Her heart knocked against her rib cage as she started across the gentle grass-covered slope, Jess’s car engine idling softly behind her. And maybe it was the crisp autumn feel of the air, or something about the way it smelled-of hay and drying cornstalks, of burning leaves and pumpkins ripening on the vine-that took her suddenly back to another time…another place…another Caitlyn. A Caitlyn just as apprehensive and uncertain as this one. A very small Caitlyn, picking her way across a leaf-strewn lawn while her daddy’s car idled at the curb, holding the flapping pieces of her Halloween costume together and gathering up the courage to knock on an unfamiliar neighbor’s door.

The memory and the cool October breeze lifted her spirits. Dizzy with nervous excitement, she mounted concrete steps and felt her way across a small front porch. Unable to find a doorbell, she raised her hand and knocked. The sound seemed frail and timid against the heavy wooden door. Would he even hear it? She waited, rocking gently with her own heartbeat, like a boat tied up at a quay.

Her throat closed when she heard the doorknob rattle. A rectangle of light appeared, and in it a shape that seemed already familiar to her-though how could that be? She heard a shocked, “Caitlyn. Oh, my God…”

“I’ve lost track of what week it is,” she said in a droll but unsteady voice as somewhere behind her Jess’s car whined in reverse down the driveway and purred away into the night. “Am I too early for ‘trick-or-treat’?”

He was losing his mind. It couldn’t be Caitlyn standing in his doorway, like the answer to some adolescent dream.

At first he could only stare at her, tongue-tied as an adolescent would have been, beholding the object of his fevered imaginings. Then he saw her eyes, misty and lost above the stretched mask of her smile, and he forgot everything in the fervency of his desire to fold her into his arms. Not knowing what it was that had brought her to his doorstep, he restrained the impulse and, heart flapping furiously against his rib cage, waved his pancake turner at her instead.

“I was just- Here…come in, for Pete’s sake. How’d you get here? Was that Jess? Why didn’t she…” He took her arm and cast a quick look over her shoulder at his empty front yard as he drew her into the entryway.

He didn’t know what to do with her. What to say to her. He’d never, except perhaps in his dreams, imagined her here. “Uh, look, I was just…I’m making myself grilled cheese. You want one?” Her eyes had been aimed past him toward the living room, separated from the entryway by a half wall partition. “I make a pretty fair grilled cheese,” he added, attempting a smile as her gaze, vague and bewildered, swiveled slowly toward him.

“Thank you. That would be nice.” She sounded like a well-brought-up child.

C.J.’s heart was about to choke him. Juggling the pancake turner, he did an awkward little do-si-do to switch sides with her so he could usher her down the hallway to the kitchen, and everywhere her body brushed his felt like he’d been lit on fire.

“You have a nice house,” Caitlyn said, tilting her head as though she was listening to voices.

He glanced down at her, curious. “How can you tell?”

She lifted the hand she’d been trailing along the wall. “You have wallpaper,” she explained, smiling crookedly. “And hardwood floors.” There was a patch of color in each cheek.

“Huh,” said C.J. “I guess it is…nice, I mean. Not mine, though. I’m just renting the place-people that own it are getting up there, so they bought a place in town. He used to be a friend of my daddy’s, actually, and his wife’s Momma’s cousin, second or third once removed-something like that-so I get a pretty good deal. No sense in buying a house, not until I pass my bar exams and figure out where I want to hang out my shingle, right?” He realized he was babbling and made an effort to stop.

“Where do you want to hang out your shingle?” she asked in a breathless voice, half polite and half distracted. “Atlanta?”

He gave a dry huff of laughter. “Not if I can help it.” He guided her to the small maple table shoved under the window that overlooked the backyard and pulled out a chair. She lowered herself into it and he turned back to the stove. “No,” he said, squinting as he relit the burner he’d shut off to go and answer the knock on the door, “the way I see it, people who live in small towns need lawyers, too.”

“So, that’s what you want? To live in a small town?”

“Live, practice law, raise a family…I don’t expect I’ll get rich, that’s for sure,” he said, aiming an ironic smile at the slice of butter he’d just dropped, sizzling, into the frying pan. “I guess,” he said after a moment, “what I’m lookin’ to be is the lawyer equivalent of a small-town family doctor. Know what I mean?” He said it casually, but having laid out his future as a kind of offering to her, the way he felt was exposed. As if he was standing on the edge of a cliff with a cold wind blowing against his back.

He waited an interminable time for her to answer, and when she didn’t, briskly clapped his hands, rubbed them together and announced, with thumping heart, “There…that’s comin’ along good. Now, how ’bout some soup with that? What kind of soup goes good with grilled cheese?” He opened a cupboard door. “Let’s see…we got-”

“Tomato,” Caitlyn said. “Tomato soup goes with grilled cheese.”

“Tomato it is.” He plucked a can from the shelf, closed the door, opened a drawer and took out a can opener. Closed the drawer. Opened the can. Opened another cupboard and took out a pot. Closed the cupboard door.

And on and on, doing the normally routine things required to heat up a can of soup, something he’d done a few thousand times, probably, in his lifetime. Only, tonight he had to think about each step, recite them to himself as he checked them off, one by one. Why? Because it was impossible to concentrate, hard to even hear himself think above the voice inside his head screaming, For God’s sake, Caitlyn, why are you here?

More than once it was on the tip of his tongue to ask her. Each time, he bit the words back, thinking they’d sound too blunt…even rude. Or maybe he didn’t want to ask because he wasn’t in any hurry to hear the answer to that question. Because he was so certain it wouldn’t be the one he wanted.

What did he want? Not so very much, really, no more than any man wants. To have the woman he’s chanced to fall in love with by some miracle love him back. To lay out his dream for the future in front of her and find that by some miracle it’s her dream, too. Nothing special. Nothing out of the ordinary.

So why did it feel like he was hoping for the moon? His whole body prickled when he thought of the implications of her coming to his house, alone, in the evening like this. Prickled…why? With fear? Excitement? Uncertainty? Being a man, he feared feeling uncertain more than anything.

“My mother used to fix me this when I was a little girl,” Caitlyn said. She was hunched over her bowl, spooning soup, and her voice sounded husky. “When I’d walk home from school on cold winter days…and my nose would be so cold I couldn’t feel it…and she’d make grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup. I had this special plate with a big matching cup, with the Campbell’s Kids on them. I remember that little burn you get in the back of your throat. Tomato soup. It always does this-makes my eyes water and my nose drip.”

She touched the back of her hand to her nose, then abruptly remembered the napkin she’d spread across her lap and snatched that up instead. She wiped her nose, then her eyes, then laid the napkin on the table and gazed at it helplessly. Her eyes were still streaming.

“Caitlyn?” C.J. said in a wondering tone.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, gulping softly. “I’m so sorry. I know you have to be wondering why I’ve barged in on you like this. You’re just…too darn well brought up to ask-” A hiccup interrupted her, and she put her fingertips to her lips and muttered, “Damn.”

“Caitlyn-” He scraped back his chair and reached for her, but she had risen to her feet at the first sound and eluded him, pushing at him with a groping hand.

“No-don’t. I wanted to tell you…something. You asked me a question and I…didn’t answer. I don’t know why I didn’t-I wanted to tell you. I want you to know…I think you should know-”

“For God’s sake, Cait…” Quaking inside, he interrupted her hurried and gulping babble. “Tell me what? Whatever it is-”

“You asked me why I can’t stand needing help, and I…I think I said it was because I’m afraid of being weak…something like that? The truth is-” she took a breath and let it out, while her cheeks turned rosy pink “-I probably have some control issues.”

Control issues. He was thinking the phrase, like so many others commonly referred to as psychobabble, had become nothing but a clichéd excuse…meaningless crap. And then she went on.

“Because of something that happened to me…a long time ago. I’ve never told anybody. I was raped by my prom date the night of my senior prom. I felt so helpless. He was much bigger than I was…so much stronger. He wouldn’t listen. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. But I made up my mind I wasn’t ever going to be that weak and powerless again. And I haven’t been. Until now. And that’s why…it’s hard.”

C.J. stood absolutely still while the last of her words went rumbling and echoing off into the distant reaches of his mind, like rocks falling into a canyon. He couldn’t seem to feel anything, not even his own body. And he didn’t notice the lengthening silence until he heard a tight and airless whisper.

“Say something, damn you.”

He couldn’t, not yet, but the thought of what the silence must feel like to her after such revelations tore at his heart. He took a step and folded her into his arms. The air and the tension seemed to flow out of her as she melted against him, and he cradled the back of her head in his hand and tucked it tenderly under his chin. Eyes closing, throat aching, he nestled his face in the sweet-smelling softness of her hair and held her like that, rocking slightly. After a while, when he felt her arms come around him, it seemed to him the most incredible miracle.

“You’re gonna have to forgive me,” he said in a voice like sandpaper, muffled in her hair. “Apparently you don’t know what it does to a man to hear something like that about the woman he-” He coughed and couldn’t finish it.

“I didn’t mean to shock you.” She stirred a little, restive against him.

He drew her back in and enfolded her more completely. “It was a bit of a shock,” he said, but didn’t tell her the worst shock, for him, had been discovering in himself the powerful desire to kill someone. He hadn’t known he was capable of such a thing. With the worrisome residuals of those primitive urges still percolating through him, he tilted Caitlyn’s head back and stared down into her face. For a long moment her silver-glazed eyes seemed to gaze back at him, in a way that made his heart leap. And then her eyelids slowly closed.

“You do know,” he said, husky and overfilled with emotions, “that I would never…that you don’t ever have to worry… I mean, I would never, ever force you or even ask you-” He stumbled to a halt. Her lips had curved unexpectedly into a smile.

“I do know that,” she said gently, and, standing on tiptoes, brushed his lips with hers. “C.J., you are the most honorable man I’ve ever met, besides my dad. You are, in fact, the very essence of Southern gentleman…hood. It’s just that-” He would have been happy to contribute his part to that enticing mouth play, but she paused, rocked back on her heels and let out an exasperated breath. “Dammit, C.J., sometimes a woman would like a little less Ashley Wilkes and a little more Rhett Butler.”

He frowned, his brain fuzzy with her nearness. “Rhett Butler? Oh, yeah-that’s Gone with the Wind, right?” Dizzy from the scent of her, he mumbled, “Sorry, never read the book, or saw the movie, either.”

Her hands lay on his chest, high up near the base of his throat, and her fingers were lightly stroking the place where his skin met the neck of his shirt. Her smile was slow, her voice a murmur. “There’s a scene-very famous-where Rhett scoops Scarlett-you do know who Scarlett O’Hara is?-anyway, he scoops her up in his arms and carries her up this great sweep of stairs to the bedroom. And…well…” She paused, and he could feel his heartbeat tapping against her fingertips. His body-all of it-felt stretched and tight. His insides boiled sluggishly, like molten lava. “The way I figure, you’ve had plenty of practice.”

“One problem-” his lips were barely capable of movement “-no stairs here.”

“Then that should make it easier, shouldn’t it?”

Courage flooded through her. She felt lightened by it, buoyed up like a leaf in the wind. Catching her lower lip between her teeth to hold back laughter and excited breath, she stared intently at the indistinct blur where his smile would be, and then, impatient with her stubborn blindness, put her fingertips there and felt a shiver of happiness as it blossomed and grew beneath them. His lips were silky smooth, mobile and firm; her fingers tingled in the warm flow of his breath. And then, tilting his head slightly, he took them into his mouth, one by one. Desire fluttered in her belly. Her legs grew weak.

“I think,” she whispered brokenly, “you could do that Rhett Butler thing any time, now.”

His chuckle butted gently against her fingertips, and the burgeoning confidence in it bolstered her own. When, with a sudden, fierce movement, he turned his head and pressed his mouth into her palm, she gasped aloud, then slowly drew her hand and his mouth down to hers. When his lips slid from her palm to her mouth, her awakening vision failed her. She saw golden showers and rainbows, and then her eyelids came down and there was only lavender darkness filled with sweet sensation…his silky-firm lips gently massaging the inside of hers…tingling darts of cold fire shooting from there straight into distant throbbing places.

His hand kneaded her back between her shoulder blades, gathering the fabric of her shirt so that the other, sweeping down her spine, met only naked skin where it dipped beneath the waistband of her jeans. His tongue, impatient with teasing, drove deep; her hand skidded along his jaw and her fingers pushed into his hair, wildly clutching. His hand, pressing hard on the lower part of her spine, brought her hips against his, and she remembered his lean, wiry strength and the taut and quivering muscles of his belly.

His hand slipped farther down, under her bottom, and with that same sudden, savage motion, like a movement in a passionate dance, a tango, perhaps, lifted her up and drew her legs around his hips, locking her to him. And through the supple fabric of his jeans and hers, she felt him, the very essence of him, and the essential feminine part of her body seemed to remember that, too, and giddily throbbed a welcome.

She felt a swaying, like the rocking of a boat, and knew that she was being carried. But there was something she wanted to say… Dizzy, she separated herself from the kiss, but before her swollen lips and passion-fogged mind could form words, C.J.’s voice came, raspy in her ear.

“Guess this probably isn’t the way Rhett Butler did it…”

Drunkenly she mumbled, “This is way better than Rhett,” but when she found his mouth again, for some reason she had begun to laugh.

And for some reason, so had he. Remembering how much she had wanted to laugh with him just this way, she clung to his shaking shoulders while he carried her to his bedroom, quivering and snickering and hiding spurting tears and breathless gusts in the warm hollow of his neck.

It’s too much, she thought. Too much stimulation, too much emotion. She wondered if the laughter was a kind of safety valve, like the steam shooting out of a pressure cooker or the teakettle’s whistle. Without it, maybe she would simply have to explode…fly apart in so many pieces, she would never find her way back together again.

“I’ve never been this way before,” she told him, the words sticking to her swollen tongue. Her feet felt pins and needles where they touched the floor. Under her sweatshirt, where C.J.’s hands were stroking the sides of her waist, her skin was afire with goose bumps.

“This way…how?”

Excited…silly…scared…happy. She shrugged. Her hand lay under his shirt, fingers splayed across one hard, flat pectoral, gently kneading, greedily exploring. She felt his heart thumping against her palm, and deep in her belly, desire thumped a response. “I don’t know-just…like this.” Wanting you…so much.

He didn’t say anything, not at first. Lowering his head until his forehead touched hers, he brought his hands from under her shirt and, warm and moist from her body, placed them on the sides of her neck. He moved them upward until they formed a basket for her head, and gently tipped it back, a little at a time, so that his lips touched her eyelids first…then her nose…and finally her mouth.

They barely touched her at first-lightly, delicately, like the brush of flower petals-caressing with feather strokes while she held herself in a rapt and breathless stillness. Then, as he had in the woods, increasing the pressure so slowly he seemed to become a part of her…come inside her and fill her so completely she couldn’t imagine how it could ever end. And when it did end, she whimpered, as if a part of her had been wrested away.

“Neither have I…like this…” She felt his body tremble.

She understood, then, why he hadn’t spoken after her declaration. Emotion filled her, a pool so vast it awed and overwhelmed her and left no room for words.

Her hands shook as she placed them on his sides and slowly, slowly lifted his shirt. Dazed, she thought how silky and fine his skin felt. She wanted it touching hers. Desire made her ache. Sick with it, she swayed forward and buried her face against his chest…her nose, first, then her mouth…her tongue. His skin smelled good, tasted good, felt good. It was smooth there, too; her exploring fingers found only a few hairs in the center of his chest and around his flat, hard nipples.

“You didn’t turn the light on?” She wanted to, oh, how she wished she could see him.

“No.” His hands were sliding upward along her back, raising her shirt with their slow, massaging progress. She lifted her arms and let him pull it over her head. Her chest rose and her breasts hardened as cool air sifted over her fevered skin.

“You can,” she whispered. “I don’t mind if you do.”

“No,” he said as he nested her breasts in his palms and gently kissed her, “it’s not fair.”

“Not…fair?”

“For me to see you when you can’t see me.”

Her breath caught; her heart stumbled. Mind and emotions reeled in hopeless disarray, caught up in the whirlwind created by the collision of those two opposing forces, joy and despair.

Because…in that moment she knew that she loved him, with all her heart and soul and mind and strength. And in that same moment knew that what she was about to do might cause her to lose him forever.