Kicking Eternity (5 page)

Jesse’s expression brightened. “I’ll ask Kallie to pray for a wife for you. It’s one of her favorite subjects.”

Great. He wasn’t desperate.
Single women from church already plied him with too many chicken surprise casseroles and chocolate chip cookies.
Triple S was a welcome relief from the attention.

Jesse smacked him in the chest as he stood. “Maawidge.” Jesse mimicked the priest’s voice in
Princess Bride.
He hummed the wedding march as he headed for the pass-through with his family’s dishes.

Drew couldn’t stay mad at Jesse. But he hadn’t considered marriage in seven years, and he wasn’t considering it now. Other questions had to be settled before he would even know if marriage was an option. Questions that had no answers.

#

Raine perched on the bow of
t
he
Smyrna
Queen
, feet dangling over her faded aqua hull. She smiled. Tough luck drawing sailing duty. Too bad it was only once a month. Sixty-eight feet of yawl stretched out behind her. Her gaze skimm
ed the massive, aluminum mast,
the shorter, wooden mast and the sweeping triangles of dirty white sail.

She splayed her hands behind her on the scarred teak deck and breathed in the sun, wind, and ocean that separated her from Eddie. The
Queen
was a wizened woman with a two-pack-a-day habit for thirty years. And Raine loved her.

She gazed at the soft chop of the waves, the water catching and releasing the sun’s brilliance.
Lord—
All around her God’s artistry and vastness drew her to Him.
I’m going to Africa. Alone. But I wish—
She couldn’t even ask God. Going to Africa was enough.

The
Smyrna
Queen
bounc
ed, lulling her
. A sharp dip jerked her to alertness. Cal dropped onto the bowsprit, his leg brushing hers on the way down. “Hey, sleepy head.”

He sat at a right angle from her, their knees kissing with the bounce of the boat. The sun had toasted his skin a deep caramel. She leaned forward wanting to catch his citrus scent, but the wind cut between them.

“Hey, Mr. Proficient-at-all-things-sailing.”

“You watched me haul up the sails this morning, huh?”

“I helped Missy keep her girls out of your way.”

“Give it up, Raine. I saw you watching.”

Raine’s fingers tightened on the gunwale. “Look, Cal, you’re just amusing yourself with me. You already told me I’m not your type. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Cal’s eyes widened in surprise, then, he laughed. “It’s called flirting. Most girls think it’s an Olympic sport.”

“I’m not most girls.”

“No kidding.”

Raine squinted at Cal. “Why
are you talking
to me?”

“You mean with a boatload of junior high girls, my sister, and Captain Jake—who didn’t want to hire me in the first place—I had a choice?”

“Thanks so much.”

“Besides, you’re—interesting.”

“Like a Sponge Bob lunch box buried in a time capsule.”

“Come on, you have to admit you’re the Christian bubble girl—über protected.”

“I am not.” She pinched her lips together. She refused to bleed all over Cal.

“Why are you so weird with me?”

Her head jerked up.

“For every word you say, there are five hundred you don’t say.”

I’m so into
you.
There were
four
more words she wasn’t saying.

“Sometime, will you say the five hundred words?”

Would she?

“Cal! Take down the spinnaker,” Jake yelled.

Cal jumped up and grabbed a nearby line and loosened it from its cleat.

Her gaze slid to his solid pecs and biceps, then to the ballo
on-like sail as it deflated and
flew toward them. Raine helped Cal gather the neon green canvas and stuff it into the sail bag.

Cal looked over at her from where he was winding a line around a cleat. “We’ll finish this conversation later.”

Raine watched his sculpted back move along the
Queen’s
deck. She shook her head to clear her vision. But she had more to deal with than Cal’s looks.

Cal was a nucleus of safe neutrons—a preacher’s kid who knew the Bible, intelligent—and dangerous protons, like his interest in Eastern religions and alcohol. Electrons of all the things she didn’t know about him zinged around him, tantalizing her.

Enough. She tortured herself crushing on a guy who saw her as hopelessly white bread. Cal had an agenda—something to do with educating her about the world. Once he proved his point, he’d lose interest. This crush would bury her if she didn’t do something. Fast.

#

Drew leaned against a
sand pine
that skirted the inlet. The coarse bark dug into his back through his T-shirt like Jesse’s marriage jabs at lunch. White sun pierced through the pine needles, blinding him. Did marriage belong in his future?

Once upon a time he thought God told him to marry Samantha. But she hadn’t gotten the memo. He probably heard wrong. But what if he hadn’t? He’d blocked marriage out of his mind—until Jesse poked him about it.

Kurt went all the way to Japan to force him into dealing with Samantha. He and Jesse sang the same song. And Drew had the sinking feeling God made it a three-part harmony. He had to face Sam—probably not literally, but he had to face the questions she raised.

The first question: Was Sam married?

The person Raine most wanted to avoid this morning stood in the hall waiting outside her classroom. “Cal.” She kept her voice cool.  Their conversation from yesterday on the boat flew through her mind.

He nudged the classroom door open for her.

Her gaze skittered away from his. She looked down at the muscle flexing in his arm as he sandwiched a stack of cardboard squares against his chest, and back at the intensity in the blue depths of his eyes. She brushed past him putting space between them and slipped into the chair behind her desk.

He followed her. “We have unfinished business from yesterday.”

She looked up, feigned ignorance.
“Oh?”

“I asked you if you were ever going to say those five hundred words.” He stood beside her desk looking down at her. “Are you?”

Raine dropped her gaze to his hand wrapped around a Folgers can of brushes. It wasn’t an artist’s hand, but thicker, like a wrestler’s. The memory of Cal’s taking her by the shoulders with those hands flitted through her mind. She met his eyes. “Maybe.”
Not in this millennium.
I am so sunk.

“Now?” His eyes burned through her.

“I have to teach now.”

“Ouch. Cold.”

She tensed. Nobody ever called her cold. Cal stood too close. She could smell the clean shampoo scent from his damp hair. She inched her chair away from him. “I’m sorry, Cal, I’m just distracted. Thanks for opening the door for me. Gentlemen are hard to find, even at Bible college.” She smiled at him, a small smile meant to be kind, but not encouraging.

“Whatever, Raine.” Cal walked out of the classroom and toward the front door of the lodge. She felt the slap of his disgust as the screen door smacked behind him.

She shut the classroom door and locked it. She didn’t have time for this drama. Her first class of elementary students would show up
in less than ten minutes
for the story of Jesus walking on the water. She sunk to her knees on the carpet square next to the window. Her chin dropped to her chest.

Focus me on the lesson I have to teach.
She was quiet—waiting for Jesus to walk across the wild ocean of her emotions.
Please.

Peace flowed in, a sense of Jesus, like so many times before. She sighed, soaking in the quiet.
Give me the ability and the power to teach Your Word to the children.
She
reached for the class list and prayed for each child. Her eyes slid shut.
Use me right now. I love You. And, thanks.
A fresh breeze blew in through the screen-less window cleansing the air of the musty scent of old Bibles and hymnals.

“Rainey, Rainey, where has your sunshine gone?” a familiar, deep voice sang.

Her eyes popped open.

Drew grinned and tipped his baseball cap at her as he stopped on the dirt road outside her window. A bat strung with mitts angled over his shoulder.

Was Drew’s mission in life to tease her?
‘
Hypersensitive
’
, Mom called her. How many
times had Mom said her brothers
didn’t know how to express affection toward her? They could hardly wrestle their baby sister to the floor like they did each other. Teasing was how they said they cared about her. Yeah, right.

“I was praying.” She wished back the petulant note in her voice.

Drew grabbed hold of the window sill knocking a few paint chips to the ground. “Hey, then, I must be the answer to your prayers.” She smelled the mint on his breath, and a speck of dried toothpaste clung to the corner of his mouth.

“More like the interruption.” She arched a brow at him. “Unless you want to play a part in our Bible drama. You can be the Sea of Galilee and let Jesus and Peter walk on you.”

“Hey,
that was funny, Rainey
! Why don’t just you bring the kids down to the beach for the story? I’ve got some old tires in the storage shed the kids could walk
on
instead of me.”

“That’s brilliant!” Why didn’t she think of that? “Maybe you
are
an answer to prayer.”

“Like I said.” Drew shot her an I-told-you-so smile and slapped the sill, dislodging another spate of paint chips. “I’ll see you in ten at the beach.”

“Wait.” One good turn deserved another. She licked her thumb and reached through the window to rub the dot of toothpaste from his cheek.

Drew’s eyes widened and something like panic flashed through them before a huge smile spread across his face. “You can do that anytime. I don’t remember it being remotely as enjoyable when my mother used to do it—when I was six.” He turned and headed down the road toward the beach.

She smiled watching his long strides, the mitts swaying on the bat behind him. For once she’d knocked
him
off balance, if only for a millisecond.

#

Drew leaned his chair back on two legs. He sat on the front porch of
the
cabin balancing his laptop on his knees. Night watch had been over for thirty minutes. While the camp slept, longing for companionship crawled into his gut.

Rainey’s touch, two fingers under his chin and a thumb on his cheek, was the closest thing to a caress he’d had since Sam. It woke up a sleeping giant of loneliness—not for Kurt, though he was certainly part of the equation—but for love. He almost couldn’t remember what it felt like to be in love with Sam. The ache to remember, to experience love again, washed over him in a suffocating wave.

His fingers flew across the keys almost without conscious decision. But he stopped before loading the site. He hadn’t looked at porn since right after Samantha broke up with him. Even now, the guilt that racked him for months waited behind a dam to flood over him again.

“Ever feel so guilty you can’t look in the mirror?” he’d asked Kurt near the end of his freshman year in college.

“Yeah. Sure.” They were coming home in Kurt’s car from a pick-up football game on the
Daytona
State College
campus.

The words stuck in Drew’s throat. He pushed them out. “It’s porn.” He looked down at the football on the floorboard at his feet. “I feel like a total perv.”

“How many times?” Kurt’s voice was even, not giving anything away.

“
I don’t know. Some. A
fter Sam broke up with me.” He ground his teeth back and forth in his mouth. “God’s gotta be disgusted with me.”

Kurt rubbed the dark stubble on his chin. He sucked in a breath and let it out. “Well, little brother, been there. Done that. Regretted it. Not a pervert.”

Ever since that day, he and Kurt had checked up on each other. How many times had knowing that he’d have to tell Kurt kept him from going there?

Drew swatted at the insects orbiting overhead in the yellow cabin light. What triggered the temptation? Maybe if he could put his finger on the cause…
.

The desire hit him most often when he was
utterly alone. When he hurt. When he felt weak.
Lord, be strong when I am weak.

He clicked on his
MSN
account to write Kurt. Who knew?
Maybe Kurt was struggling too.
He stared at the darkened athletic field for a long time after he sent Kurt’s email. Drawing in a deep breath to fortify himself, he opened Samantha’s Facebook page.