Wild Shores

Chapter Eleven

The fog had lifted, leaving behind a cold, damp glaze on the railings, stair treads, and surfaces of parked cars. Scattered dryer-sheet wisps of clouds streaked the steel-gray sky. Gem turned up the collar of the denim jacket she’d pulled from her luggage, tossed her duffel into the backseat of her car, and headed down the nearly empty one-way main street. A few locals scurried along walking dogs, and others, bundled up in rain slickers and hunched against the wind, congregated in front of the coffee shop and diner, two of the only places with lights showing. Gem pulled over in front of the coffee shop and put on her emergency flashers. She hurried into the too-warm room, ordered a black eye from the harried teen behind the counter, and grabbed a muffin of nondescript ingredients to eat as she drove. All the things she would do on any ordinary morning, except this was no ordinary morning. She wasn’t fanciful enough to believe that a single night could change her life, but something had definitely changed inside her. Everything she valued was still the same—her job, her friends, her family, the satisfaction she found in small, day-to-day things like coffee and muffins—but those things no longer encapsulated her world. Something new had been added, and the solace she had once taken in the sameness of her life had vanished.

Gem sat in the car, sipping coffee and breaking pieces off her muffin, reluctant to drive away and leave the night behind.

Austin had somehow awakened her desire for the unknown. She hadn’t been eager to explore anything beyond the familiar since those last days with Paul and Christie. Those long-ago days had been different from the last twenty-four hours, so very different. She hadn’t sought or welcomed the experiences Paul insisted she’d enjoy, even though she’d vaguely acknowledged a desire for something she hadn’t been able to name then—a desire to save her marriage because she thought she should, the need to meet Paul’s needs, and beneath it all, the simmering unrest that only seemed to ease when she was with Christie. Easy to recognize in hindsight, nearly impossible to sort out from her fragmented emotions at the time. Now she knew that what had driven her to sleep with both of them had really been her desire for Christie, or at least, for a woman.

A tap on her window made her jump. A fresh-faced woman with short, wind-blown sandy hair in a navy flak jacket with an American flag emblem on one sleeve and a Rock Hill Police patch on the other smiled in at her. Gem rolled down the window.

“Morning, I—”

“You okay, ma’am?” The officer couldn’t be more than twenty or any cuter if she tried. She had dimples on her dimples. “You’ve been sitting here with the flashers on and the engine running for about ten minutes.”

“Sorry, I was lost in thought.”

“No problem. Not much traffic this morning.”

Gem finished her coffee and set the empty in the cup holder. “I have to go anyhow—is the causeway open?”

“Ought to be soon. They’ve been cleaning up out that way since dawn.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing. See you around.”

“Right.” Gem pulled slowly away, watching the cop saunter back to her patrol car in her rearview mirror. She had a swagger that looked good on her small, tight body. A faint zing of sexual interest shot along her nerve endings, and Gem caught herself up short. Really? Now she was cruising cute young strangers? What had Austin unleashed—or maybe more fairly, what had she been keeping caged? Not that it matters now. It’s over.

Gem turned off the main street onto the narrow spur leading to the causeway and, beyond that, the wildlife sanctuary. If the airport was functional and the causeway was passable, the other members of the research team ought to be arriving soon and she could get back into the swing of her life. She’d know about the road in a minute. Rock Hill Island was actually a peninsula connected to an island by a quarter-mile causeway with the marshlands on one side and the sound on the other. She rounded a bend and breathed a sigh of relief. The roadway was clear, although the effects of the storm were everywhere. The shoreline on the harbor side of the narrow concrete span was twenty feet narrower than she recalled, the erosion from the heavy surf and pounding rain having left deep trenches in the sand and layers of small rocks along the water’s edge. Tide pools collected in the marshes on the opposite side, but the waters had receded enough that the orange police barricades had been pulled aside to allow cars to pass.

She headed across, feeling as she always did that with every rotation of the wheels she was leaving the world behind. Usually that knowledge was accompanied by a feeling of freedom as she shed her daily responsibilities and looked forward to a few weeks of immersion in study and solitude. This morning she was anything but happy to be leaving the world behind. Austin was back in Rock Hill, and she wasn’t eager to forget her or what they’d shared.

The night with Austin had reminded her all too forcefully what passion felt like, and she’d rejoiced in it. She’d thought freedom was a quiet place of contemplation, but she’d relearned in the moments of abandoning herself to sensation that freedom was also the wild flight of birds on the wing, soaring above the clouds, diving into the currents, climbing into the heavens. Her skin tingled at the memory. No, she wasn’t eager to leave that behind at all.

With a sigh, she turned into the ten-car lot fronting the L-shaped, single-story stucco building housing the tiny visitors’ center and sanctuary offices. The long arm of the L extending toward the back had been allocated to the research team while on-site. A red pickup truck and a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with bright red turtle decals along one side were the only other vehicles. Her heart lifted. Emily and Joe had arrived.

Emily Costanzas was a turtle woman who traveled from Michigan every year to study the migratory and reproductive patterns of the freshwater and sea turtles that nested in the marshlands and beaches in late summer. The sea turtle hatchlings would be emerging at any time now, headed to the sea, where they would grow to maturity over the ensuing decades—if they survived. Joe Edelman was a grass man, an ecologist from Maine who studied the impact of migratory birds carrying seeds from distant places and how those transplants affected the biology of the sanctuary. Gem, Emily, and Joe were the three most senior researchers in their group, and they’d worked together for five years. More than colleagues, they were friends.

Gem hurried inside and down the corridor toward the conference room at the end of the building that served as a dining hall and meeting area for the team. Emily and Joe sat at a round Formica table in the center of the room with cups of coffee and a box of doughnuts.

“Hey,” Gem called.

Emily bounced to her feet. Small, red haired, and blue eyed, she exuded energy twenty-four hours a day, even when she was sleeping, as Gem had discovered when they’d shared quarters in the past. Emily tended to talk in her sleep.

“Gem.” Emily, dressed for fieldwork in tan cargo pants and a T-shirt proclaiming Love a Sea Turtle in pastel pink, opened her arms wide and hugged Gem for a long moment. “You made it. I didn’t expect to see you until later today, if then.”

Joe, a heavyset middle-aged guy with close-cut salt-and-pepper hair and a wide broad face with a slightly off-center nose and a C-shaped scar over his left cheek that betrayed his college boxing days, grinned and waved. “Great to see you.”

Gem kissed Emily’s cheek and waved back to Joe. “Believe it or not, I drove. Well, I didn’t, but I grabbed a ride with someone who did.”

“Wow,” Emily said, “that must’ve been one hell of a trip in that storm.”

Gem felt her face color and hoped they wouldn’t notice. Yes, it’d been one hell of a trip.

❖

Austin sat on the side of the bed with the echo of Gem’s fading steps resonating in her thoughts. She’d been there awhile, long after the sound of the car starting and Gem leaving had succumbed to the silence. Her mind was uncomfortably absent the usual whirlwind of ideas and schedules and seething have-tos, the myriad responsibilities that drove her days and kept her from examining the totality of her life. Now she was left with only the memories of the day before—snippets of conversation, the glimmer of amusement in Gem’s eyes when she teased, the lift of her breasts and curve of her mouth when she threw her head back in ecstasy. As Austin focused on the images, she realized Gem was all she could think of and all she wanted to think of.

Fingers itching, Austin rummaged through her leather satchel, pulled out her pad, and found a drawing pencil in the side pocket. Rapidly she sketched the picture emblazoned on her brain—Gem straddling her, hands gripping Austin’s thighs, her torso arched in an elegant C, her neck taut, head thrown back, and hair flying. Gem uncaged, powerful and free and heart-stopping. The lines and shadows came rapidly as her hand raced over the page, driven with the kind of urgency that usually drove her in other ways. What compelled her now was not the need for success, or proving herself, or winning anyone else’s approval. This passion was born of gratitude, wonder, and supreme pleasure. When her hand finally stilled, she looked at what she had done and her chest filled. Yes, that was Gem—stunning and surprising and like no other. Austin captioned the drawing Wonder, signed and dated it.

No one else would ever see it, the image was too personal, but she wanted her stamp on it in a way she’d wished she’d been able to leave her stamp on Gem. Even now, a flood of possessiveness and desire burned so hot inside her she didn’t even have to ask if she’d ever felt that way before. She knew she hadn’t. She wasn’t done wanting to touch her again, and feared she might never be. Gem set off a storm within her to seek and claim and possess. She never wanted anyone else to see the woman she had drawn. She had no right to feel that way, but there it was. The ache in her depths was as much pleasure as pain, discovery and loss all wrapped up in one.

Carefully, she closed the pad and stored it back in her case, stripped, showered, and dressed in khakis, clean socks, her boots that had finally dried, and a dark-blue cotton polo shirt. She pulled on her windbreaker and carried her duffel down to the car. Half an hour later she took a seat on a stool at the counter in the small diner in the center of town. A blowsy bottle-blonde with teased curls and a wide smile, tight T-shirt cut dangerously low, and tighter jeans sashayed over with the menu in one hand and a pot of coffee in the other.

“Good morning, stranger,” the blonde said, pouring coffee without being asked.

“It’s not raining, so it must be,” Austin said. “I don’t need a menu. I’ll take the special with bacon, eggs over easy, and wheat toast.”

“You got it.” The blonde leaned an elbow on the counter, giving Austin a panoramic view down her shirt. “Just get in this morning? Are the planes flying again?”

“I don’t know.” Austin focused on adding cream to the coffee and avoiding the show, which she wasn’t sure wasn’t deliberate. She sipped. Hot and strong, just the way she liked it. Which she pointedly did not say. “I got in last night. Drove.”

The blonde’s eyebrows rose. “You must have some cojones, then.”

Austin grinned. What the hell. “They’ll do.”

“I’ll just bet.” The blonde chuckled, shouted Austin’s order to the fry cook, and swiveled away to refill the cups of the other three people at the counter. The booths along the front windows were empty. Austin found a day-old newspaper in a rack by the door and read it while she ate her breakfast. She didn’t really absorb any of the news, but it kept her mind off Gem for a few minutes at a time. In between recaps of the coming storms, local crime stats, and high school sports scores, she’d picture Gem’s face when she was about to climax or hear her urgent cries or feel the press of her breasts, and a hard knot twisted in her stomach. Gem had held nothing back, at least in those moments, and neither had she. But she had at other times.

She hadn’t lied, but she hadn’t admitted the facts she knew would push Gem away. She had reasons for not revealing what had brought her to Rock Hill Island, good reasons for it, but after the night they’d spent together, those rationales echoed hollowly even to her. With a sigh, she left a twenty by her plate, finished the coffee, and headed for the door.

“Stay dry,” the blonde called after her.

Austin drove to the airport and arrived twenty minutes early. She made arrangements with the ticket agent—singular—for the airline, who doubled as a representative for the rental agency, to keep the car another week. At 9:55 she walked out behind the terminal to the far end of the runway and waited. At 9:59 the chop chop chop of an approaching helicopter signaled the end of her journey with Gem and the beginning of the job. The bird set down, the side door slid open, and a flight jockey she didn’t recognize signaled her to come aboard. Austin lowered her head and ran across the tarmac. As she climbed aboard, she carefully relegated the moments spent with Gem to the private vault of forsaken dreams that seemed to grow ever larger with each passing year.