Tattered Innocence (14 page)

“Come to my cabin later.”

She gave a slight negative shake of her
head, the most she could muster.

“The invitation stands.” He climbed up the
companionway, his jaw set.

A thousand invisible rubber bands anchored
her to him.

When she relieved Jake at the wheel, he
nudged her. “Sing much?”

“Not really.”

“
That’s
going to change.”

Late Wednesday night Rachel tossed on her
bunk. A drive-in movie of Bret memories played on the back of her
eyelids.

On a January afternoon, before guilt crawled
into her skin, she’d sat on a starting block at Aqua Park Aquatic
Center. She pushed her assistant swim team coach jacket sleeves up
to her elbows and tilted her face to catch the warmth of the sun.
Water splashed her leg, and she sluiced droplets off with her
hand.

Bret crouched in the corner of the pool over
Sassy McQuen. Her round face angled up, drinking in his gentle
words of encouragement. The girl weighed a hundred and ninety-five
pounds and floated like a buoy. Bret and swimming were changing her
life. She’d lost ten pounds the first week of training.

Bret stood and paced the pool. “Pick it up,
pick it up, pick it up!” he yelled across six lanes. He leaned on
the block beside Rachel, arms crossed over his chest. “You going
for your bachelor’s?”

Rachel lifted one shoulder as if she could
care less. “Why?”

“Why not?”

Because I’m too stupid, maybe?
She
raked a loose curl away with her sarcasm. “Bored—with school, life.
They don’t give degrees for what I want.”

Bret quirked one brow at her.

“Babies.”

“There’s a bucket of ice water on some guy’s
libido.”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Right.”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me. You’re
beautiful. I’ve thought so since the day you held Colton in my
classroom three years ago.”

His steady look made her turn to jelly
inside.

In the pool, Alex Tremain backstroked into a
turn.

“Alex!” Bret yelled and followed him up the
pool. “My Grandmamma swims faster than you!” He circled his arm
around his head signaling for Alex to speed up. Bret jumped away
from a splash and circled toward her.

“You’ve got kids,” she said.

Bret’s gaze focused on her. “Make your
choices now. You have to live with them.”

“You regret your kids?”

“I adore my kids. I wish….” He stared hard
at the opposite end of the pool. “Never mind.”

Rachel shaded her eyes with her hand and
peered at him. “You wish what?” The rhythmic splashing faded from
her consciousness.

“I wish I hadn’t picked the first career
that came along, the first girl.”

“Things can change.”

“Yes, they can.” He stood between the blocks
piercing Rachel with his eyes till her breath stuck in her
throat.

She’d meant he could go back to college,
change his career.

She sat up, tossing the memory off with her
sheet. Bret was right. They needed to have a private
conversation.

Rachel eased out of the cabin, careful not
to disturb Jake’s regular breathing. Connie and Clive Sevick
chatted quietly on the foredeck, Clive’s ever-present skipper’s cap
bent toward his wife. When Rachel had gray hair, she wanted a man
like Clive listening to her in the moonlight.

Rachel tapped on Bret’s stateroom door.

He opened the door shirtless in a pair of
New Smyrna Beach High athletic shorts. His face lit up.

The memories she most regretted cascaded
toward her. She felt dirty like when she’d spied the condom in the
trashcan. He probably packed a whole box this week. “This was a bad
idea.”

He motioned with his head. “Come on, we’ll
have that conversation you didn’t think we could have.” He flashed
a white grin.

She stepped into the cabin and clicked the
door shut behind her.

Bret slid onto the bunk.

Rachel remained standing, pressed against
the bulkhead, as far away from him in the small space as possible.
Her eyes darted from the pale hair curling on his pecs and his
pool-water-blue eyes, to the hull beyond his shoulder.

“You’re as skittish as a chameleon,” Bret
said.

“Part of me has always known this is
wrong.”

“But part of you—”

“You make me feel things.”

He leaned over and ran a finger along the
tender skin of her forearm. “What kind of things?”

“Things I have no right to feel with
you.”

He stared at her in silence, then emptied
his lungs. “You’re right. But we didn’t choose this.” Bret pinched
the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, it’s wrong to love you. But I can’t
help myself. It’s like a Lolita fascination.”

“In plain English, please.”

“An old man fascinated with a
schoolgirl.”

“I’m twenty-three. You’re twenty-five.”

“Okay, so that allusion was a stretch.”

So, he’d been fascinated with her. She
remembered Bret’s glances that lasted a moment too long around
school. She’d thought they were her imagination, a product of her
crush.

“With Sheri, I know everything there is to
know, like
The Great Gatsby
I’ve taught every year, studied
ad nauseum
in high school and college.”

He ran a knuckle under her chin and her skin
tingled.

“But you’re… adventure.”

Rachel crossed her arms. “I’ve lived in the
same town all my life—bored out of my mind—and
I’m
adventure?”

He cupped her cheek with his hand, and
Rachel steeled herself against the sensation.

“The unknown has intrigued man from the
beginning of time.” His fingers slid to the nape of her neck,
tugging her closer. “Every male wants to taste beauty.”

Desire and revulsion caterwauled inside
her.

God, help!

She broke away from him. Her breath jabbed
into the silent room. “I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice sounded
firm, masking the quiver inside.

His mouth dropped open. Disbelief washed
across his face. Lines spidered out from the corners of his eyes as
he stared at her. Understanding dawned and his eyes narrowed. “It’s
Jake.”

He moved his head back and forth, the sway
of defeat. He slumped back against the bulkhead. “Would you kiss me
good-bye?” He didn’t move, just stared at her with sad eyes.

The creases in his forehead softened him. He
had come on this cruise willing to leave his wife for her. What
could one more kiss hurt?

He held a hand out to her, palm up.

She placed her hand in his and let him pull
her toward him. Bret’s eyes deepened to ocean blue as he sandwiched
her hand against the skin of his chest. The scent of Obsession
floated around them.

In the breath before their lips met, Rachel
envisioned a poignant, greeting-card touch she could airbrush and
file in her memory. But she had forgotten the fire that came with
Bret’s kisses.

Liquid heat flowed through her veins at the
touch of his lips, and she let it carry her to a place she wanted
to go.

His mustache tickled her face, just enough
to bring her to her senses.

She shoved him away with the flat of her
hand, a move aimed more at protecting her from herself than from
Bret. “Goodbye.”

She opened the cabin door and slipped out
before the surprise melted from his face. Before she changed her
mind. She didn’t slow down until she’d shut the aft cabin hatch,
clattered down the steps and curled into her bunk. She remembered
too late that Jake slept in the next bunk.

At eleven p.m., it must have been
eighty-five degrees, way too warm to close the hatch. She’d only
been thinking of escape. She’d open the hatch when Jake’s breathing
settled back into the rhythm of sleep.

She stilled her body, willing Jake to return
to deep sleep. Her heart raced. Her breaths came in short bursts.
Thank God she’d gotten out of Bret’s cabin in time. The guilt she’d
already borne had almost flattened her. How could she have carried
more?

“Rae?” Jake’s voice sounded rough from
sleep.

“Sorry I woke you.”

“Everything okay?”

Seconds ticked by. She looked over at Jake,
his bare chest washed white with moonlight pouring through the
porthole. His eyes were open, and he looked at her, brow wrinkled,
waiting.

She stared at the cabin sole between their
bunks. “I went to Bret’s cabin tonight to end things.” She pulled
her knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “It
seemed like a good idea. But it wasn’t. He wanted a goodbye
kiss—but it felt like hello—and Bret knew it.”

Jake’s eyes widened and he sat up, dropping
his feet to the sole.

“I need some
help.”

“What kind of
help?”

She waved her
arms around. “I don’t know, run interference for me.
Something.”

Jake rubbed the stubble on his chin. “I’d
hate to get in a fist fight with a paying guest.”

She tossed her pillow at him. “Be
serious.”

“I
am
serious.”

“Maybe you could pray for me.”

His eyes rounded under sun-bleached brows.
“Not really my forte.”

“You have another idea?”

“Not at the moment.”

She sat up. It was a dumb idea, asking Jake
to do something she should be doing.

He cleared his throat and dropped his head.
Curls bounced onto his forehead.

Ocean swished against the outside of the
hull.

“God, keep this jerk away from Rae. Get him
out of her system. Show me something more constructive to do than
punching the guy.”

She peered at him. “Thanks.” Her eyes misted
and she blinked. “You pray fine, really fine.”

“High praise from a church girl.” Jake
grinned and lobbed her pillow back. “Now, can we get some
shut-eye?”

A cold clump of scrambled egg plopped onto
the top of Rachel’s tennis shoe from the serving dish she held. The
emotion from last night’s confrontation with Bret had subsided, but
the slimy sensation remained. She didn’t blame Hall for his disgust
with her.

She glanced at Bret’s closed door. He hadn’t
appeared for breakfast, and she dreaded facing him. She wiped the
scrambled egg off her shoe with a paper towel.

Morning sun glinted in her eyes as she
peered at Jake through the companionway. He wiped sweat from his
forehead with the neck of his T-shirt, then popped a whole
mini-doughnut into his mouth.

When he glanced through the hatch at her, he
winked as if to say
I’ve got your back
.

She smiled and dusted her fingers across her
face till he brushed the powdered sugar off his chin.

She submerged the orange juice pitcher into
the hot, soapy dishwater. With an elbow, she held the refrigerator
open and put away plastic-wrapped melon and bacon. She’d made
dozens of bad decisions like agreeing to last night’s kiss. Mama
was to blame for her weakness.

A fragment of a memory flared in her mind.
She must have been about ten when she stood outside the back screen
door about to come inside. Mama reached for something in the
refrigerator, the door cutting her off from the view of the adults
in the kitchen.

A man stood with his back to the screen. His
neck thickened at the base like a banyan tree, unlike Daddy’s
slender neck that topped his lanky body. Past the man’s elbow,
Rachel saw her father sitting at the kitchen table behind the chip
bowl, his head thrown back, laughing.

The man’s beefy arm snaked toward the
garbage can, but he had nothing to throw away. Instead his hand
closed around Mama’s.

Mama’s fingers curled around his just for a
moment, so quickly Rachel thought she must have imagined it. But
Mama’s eyes shouted warning at the man, and something hot that
wasn’t warning at all.

Rachel ran around to the front of the house
where the rest of the children played dodge ball. She threw up in
the croton hedge.

Hall’s birth had cemented her and Mama
together. But this man, Mama’s secret, chiseled between them.

Mama had “gone on vacation,” Daddy said to
explain her absence. But Rachel knew better. Undercurrents of fear
and anger had swirled through the rooms of their house with Daddy
closed off and Rachel working too hard to be a mother to
four-year-old Hall.

Mama had come back eleven days later and
went to work at Winn Dixie on Monday morning like she always did.
The man with the thick neck never appeared again. Her mother didn’t
divorce her father and disappear. But the residue of the episode
stuck to them all.

Rachel’s nightmares changed after that.
Instead of dying in a puddle of blood and placenta on the kitchen
floor, Mama slid into a black Corvette beside the man with the
thick neck, and never returned.

Rachel reached for the three-day-old
doughnut bag to throw it away, but put it in the wire basket over
the potatoes instead. Jake would eat them till they turned to
rocks.

Even if she
had
inherited Mama’s
weakness, she could have fought it and made good choices. Well,
she’d make good decisions from here on out. Nothing in her wanted
to dive back into the sludge of guilt.

Please, please take away my feelings for
Bret.

How many times did she have to pray that
prayer before God answered? Maybe still caring was her
punishment.

Rachel settled on the main cabin, elbows on
her knees, listening to Ginger recount her wedding. The woman’s
multiple piercings glittered in the Coleman lantern light.

The anchor chain grated in the chock.

Jake handed Rachel the cheese and cracker
tray up through the hatch and she sent it around the cockpit, the
evening gathering spot.

An arm settled across her shoulders. She
swiveled her head. Her gaze smacked into Jake’s.