Wild Shores

Chapter Seven

“We might catch a break after all,” Austin said, looking out the window beside their table. Although the sky remained gray and heavily overcast, the rain had stopped while they’d looked at menus and ordered. Unlike the diner that morning, this restaurant was nearly empty at the height of the dinner hour. Although not large, the main dining room felt cavernous with only a few tables occupied, or perhaps it was the silence at their table creating the vast empty sensation in her chest. Austin resisted the urge to shake her shoulders to throw off the cloak of melancholy. The ominous weight wasn’t going to be dismissed with a casual gesture. The easy connection between her and Gem had disappeared, and the tension taking its place twisted in her middle like a giant claw.

So much for talking away the unease between them. She’d said everything was okay between them. So had Gem. But the awkwardness intensified with each passing minute. Gem toyed with the stem of her wineglass, her expression pensive. Austin wished again she could read her mind. She wished a lot of things, and wishing for what she couldn’t have was something she thought she’d given up a long time before. Apparently, she’d been wrong. She reached across the table and caught Gem’s free hand. “Hey.”

Gem looked up, her eyes widening. “Sorry? What?”

Just the sound of her voice eased the knot between Austin’s shoulder blades. “Are you really okay?”

“Yes and no. Mostly uncertain.” Gem smiled faintly. “Lousy company. I’m sorry.”

“No need to be. Anything I can do?” Austin grimaced. She might be a little too late for that. “Or am I the problem?”

“I hate to say it’s me and not you, but that’s the truth.” Running her thumb over the back of Austin’s hand, Gem shook her head. “I’m just trying to figure myself out, and believe me, that’s never been easy. When it really counts, I’m a mystery to myself. It’s hell when you keep secrets from yourself.”

Austin sat back, reluctantly releasing Gem’s hand. She wanted to keep holding it, but she couldn’t keep inviting that connection with all that went unsaid between them. All she hadn’t said. “I’m sure there’s a million things about you I don’t know, but you don’t seem secretive to me. In my experience, people with secrets to keep rarely talk about themselves—or when they do, they never say anything that matters.”

Gem’s brows rose. “What matters, do you think?”

“To you?” Austin smiled. “Your birds, your work, your love of solitude. You enjoy being alone, but you’re easy to talk to. You like people but you don’t need someone around twenty-four seven. You’re independent and comfortable with your own company.”

“Well, at least I’ve given a good first impression,” Gem said lightly, but her expression remained contemplative. Her gaze was reflective, as if she was looking inward or somewhere far off into the distance.

Austin waited, her heart thumping, feeling like a fraud. She was the one keeping secrets, even though she’d been more open with Gem than anyone she could ever recall—at least once she’d learned not to expose her innermost thoughts to her family. Could Gem tell the disclosures were a little one-sided? They never seemed to have casual conversations. Every moment seemed so important. Maybe that was why she couldn’t pull back, didn’t want to let the silence—the distance—grow. Gem brought every fiber of her being to life. Could anyone blame her for not wanting to let that exhilaration fade away?

“The last few years,” Gem said at last, “my main goal has been to keep my life on an even keel, to be happy with what I have—the friendships, personal and professional, and my work. I thought I’d achieved a pretty good balance, all things considered.”

“And today changed all that?” Austin didn’t want to hear Gem regretted the intimacies they’d shared, but she wanted to hear Gem’s truth, whatever that might be.

“Well, some of it.” Gem reached for her wineglass, took a long, slow swallow, and cradled the glass in both hands. “I would characterize myself as being slightly unbalanced today.” She looked up, gave a rueful smile. “The kiss might have been a bit of a tilt.”

Austin grinned, happy to see even a little of the worry ebb from Gem’s eyes. “I have to admit I like you unbalanced.”

“I’m glad to hear that, because I think it’s all your fault.”

“Mine?” Austin kept her tone light, but she watched Gem’s face and read the seriousness there. She prepared herself, pretty sure she was guilty of whatever Gem was about to accuse her of. “What have I done?”

“Somehow you made me stop thinking about balance and…and comfort.” Gem nodded as if in sudden understanding. “That’s it, I think. I don’t want to be comfortable around you.” Her eyes brightened. “I want to be a little crazy. Which I guess I was.”

Austin swallowed, urgency coiling in the pit of her stomach. “If it helps, you’re not alone. You make me pretty crazy too.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Gem asked, as much to herself as Austin.

“What do you think?” Austin sensed they were talking about the future as much as the past, and she had to let Gem decide if the kiss was something to risk repeating. She couldn’t voice her own desires, not this time. Not with this woman.

“I wish I knew.” Gem sighed. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Do you have to understand it?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I’m usually careful, cautious. I don’t leap before I look, hard and long. At least, that’s who I’ve been for the last eight or nine years at least.”

“And before that?”

A pained expression flickered across Gem’s face. Her eyes darkened again. “Before that I was young and naïve and impressionable. Some might say stupid.”

“All of those things go along with being young, don’t they?”

“Were you ever young and stupid?”

“Careless,” Austin said immediately. “Reckless. Risk-taking. So, yeah, stupid fits.”

“Have you ever done anything you knew in your heart wasn’t what you wanted, but you did it anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Austin blew out a breath, looked inward. “I’m not sure I know what’s in my heart.” She searched Gem’s face. “But I can’t imagine you’ve done anything you can’t forgive yourself for.”

“Forgiveness is a panacea for some ills that shouldn’t be masked.” Gem’s mouth set into a hard line. “I don’t believe that forgive and forget is always the best course. Sometimes we have to remember so we don’t repeat our mistakes.”

A chill doused the fire kindling in Austin’s belly. “What can’t you forgive?”

Gem was quiet for so long Austin knew she’d overstepped.

“I’m sorry.” Austin held up a hand. “That’s really personal, and being locked up in a car with me for a day doesn’t make us close enough for me to ask—”

“I kissed you, remember?”

“Oh yeah, I remember.” The heat surged back, a hunger in Austin’s depths that refused to be silenced. “I remember kissing you back too. And if it makes any difference, I’ve been thinking a lot about doing it again.”

“So have I. So I think that gives you the right to ask. I don’t have to answer, after all.”

“You’re right, you don’t. Your secrets are yours.”

“I was married,” Gem said abruptly.

“You must have been young.” Austin wasn’t as surprised to learn that Gem had been married as she was to learn she wasn’t any longer. She couldn’t imagine anyone letting Gem go.

“Nineteen. He was my high school boyfriend—more than that really. Our families were close. We’d known each other all our lives. He was my best friend growing up, and it just always seemed a given that’s what we would do.”

“Sometimes when we’re young we don’t question what we want or why we think we want things,” Austin said. “And it sounds like the two of you had something.”

“I loved him,” Gem said musingly. “A certain kind of love, at least, and I wanted that to be enough. Even when there were times I thought maybe it wasn’t.”

When Gem hesitated, Austin retrieved the wine bottle and poured another inch into Gem’s glass, giving her a chance to decide to keep talking or not.

“Thanks.” Gem picked up her glass. “We’d been married about three years, I guess, when I couldn’t keep pretending everything was all right. I was applying to graduate school and Paul to law school. Of course we were trying to find a way to stay in the same location if possible.”

“That’s a lot of pressure on any relationship.”

“That’s what I thought too, when things started feeling…off. We weren’t communicating, and the sex…well, the sex—” Gem shrugged. “Let’s say it went from not great to not much at all. At first I minded, because I missed the connection, but not enough to push the issue.”

“You didn’t have any experience with women?”

Gem sighed. “I didn’t have any experience with anyone except Paul. For a long time I thought it was me, not doing something right or not reading the signals correctly—but he kept saying everything was fine—and finally I stopped asking.”

“Until…” Austin said gently.

“Right. Until he suggested we needed to explore the boundaries of our relationship. That it would be good for us, individually and as a couple.”

Austin gritted her teeth. If she had Gem, she’d never want anyone else to touch her. She forcibly relaxed and kept her voice level. “He wanted to open up the relationship?”

“Yes. Or rather, sort of,” Gem said bitterly. “He had someone specific in mind. Someone we both knew. One of my best friends, as a matter of fact.”

“That couldn’t have been easy.”

“No, it was surprisingly easy. Christie, that was…is…her name, had always thought Paul was terrific. The perfect guy, she used to say. She was always looking for someone just like Paul.”

“Did you have feelings for her, besides friendship?”

Gem drained her wineglass and, when Austin reached for the bottle, covered the top with her hand. She couldn’t quite believe she was admitting all of this. She’d never even told Kim the whole story, and God, they were involved. But Kim had never asked, and she’d never been shaken out of her comfort zone enough to want to revisit any of it. Austin shook her up, all right. One simple kiss had her reeling, more than three years of dating Kim had ever done. “No, I’m good. Really. I can talk about this sober.”

“I don’t think one full glass is going to impair you.”

“I know.” Gem smiled. “I am kind of a lightweight, though. I’m good.”

“Okay.” Austin set the bottle aside.

“So, Christie.” Gem met Austin’s gaze, read acceptance there. Thankfully not pity or disappointment. “My feelings for Christie were pretty complicated. As I said, she was one of my friends, probably my best friend from freshman year on. She was beautiful, smart, funny, and loyal. I never admitted any kind of attraction to myself, but whenever I wanted to talk or needed to feel understood, she was the one I called. Not Paul.”

“Paul must have known she’d be a safe choice, especially if you had reservations.”

“Oh, I’m sure that was part of it.” Gem grimaced. Paul had been far more perceptive than she’d been when it came to her feelings for Christie. Just another one of her many blind spots. “Whatever else he thought, he was right about that.”

“So the three of you…”

“The three of us. Yes. After I told Christie what Paul had suggested, I thought we’d laugh it off. But she didn’t laugh. She said she liked the idea, that she’d always wanted to be closer to both of us.” Gem rubbed the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes for a second. Why could she still remember the glow in Christie’s eyes when she’d said that, long after the excitement she’d felt then had turned to acid? “I remember her saying she could get into the idea, and the strangest feeling came over me. Excitement, different than anything I’d ever known. She said she wanted to be closer to both of us, but what I heard was she wanted to be closer to me. And for the first time, I realized that I wanted to be closer to her too.”

“And you blame yourself for misreading things?”

“I blame myself for trusting Christie and for letting Paul’s needs dictate mine.” Gem swallowed the bitterness clawing at her throat. She would not let the past ambush her again. “I don’t think twenty-four hours passed before the three of us were…well, I don’t think I have to spell that out. I knew the second I kissed her why everything had always seemed just a little bit off with Paul. It wasn’t him, it was me after all.”

“Gem,” Austin said gently, “most of us are raised to think we’re heterosexual. Sometimes it takes a while to sort out expectation from desire.”

“I know. That’s not what bothered me. What bothered me was that I’d gotten myself into that situation because I’d been totally wrong about the man I married. He wanted Christie, not an open relationship with me. Oh, I should probably mention they’re married now.”

Austin winced. “Sorry.”

“I’m not.” Divorcing Paul was one of the only things about the whole mess she didn’t regret. “I certainly don’t want to be married to him and didn’t, from about the next morning on. I left him a few days later, after the second or third time we’d all been together. I might’ve been naïve and ignored all the signals up until that time, but I couldn’t ignore what was happening between them. And I couldn’t ignore the way I felt physically about being with Christie.”

Gem sat back while the waitress deposited their dinners. She drew a deep breath and discovered she felt amazingly good. Pissed-off still, but the anger only fueled her resolve to never take anything or anyone at face value again. She’d learned an important lesson that had kept her life uncomplicated and her heart securely locked away.

“And since then you’ve been on that even keel you mentioned?” Austin said.

“Let’s just say since then I’ve made it a point not to act on impetuous impulses. Until today.”

“That’s a pretty good record. What, six or seven years?”

“Seven years, ten months.” Gem smiled and broke off a piece of bread from the warm loaf in the breadbasket. “I like to know what I am doing and what I’m getting into before I commit to a course of action. I’ve been happy, comfortable, living that way. You derailed my train a little bit.”

“You’ve pretty much derailed mine too,” Austin admitted.

“Should I apologize?”

“No,” Austin said against all her better judgment. “I wouldn’t want to change a thing.”

Gem glanced out the window. “We’ll be there in a few hours, won’t we.”

“Looks like it.”

Gem smiled, weariness setting in. She had every reason to be tired, but she didn’t think that was it. The road trip was coming to an end, and she had a secret: she didn’t want it to be over.