Free Kathleen Valentine by My Last Romance, other passions

close her eyes but let the starlight dance off of them. The spring peepers were singing as they climbed the stone steps to the wooden platform at the lighthouse’s locked door. He sat down on the wooden floor washed smooth and silver by decades of salt spray. She leaned over, the veil of her moonlit hair settling around him. Neither of them pretended that they were there for any other reason. He unbuttoned her blouse flicking fireflies aside and rubbed his face in the deep, lush hollow between her heavy breasts and when she slid down onto him, head thrown back, eyes filled with stars, she groaned as deep and long as the in-rushing tide.

Most men could live for years off the memory of that night—rolling together like savages in the dunes and then again back in her hotel room Most men wouldn’t even expect such a night in an ordinary lifetime. If he’d never seen her again he would have lived happily with those memories. It would have pleased him to think of her back in the city having lunch with her girlfriends and telling them about her night in the dunes with a horny old fisherman.

He hadn’t expected her call. She asked for his number—offered hers. He’d tucked it in the corner of the mirror in his bachelor’s bedroom, his only souvenir other than the embarrassing ache in his scrotum that haunted the next few days. When the phone rang two weeks later and she said, "Hi there, handsome, got any more dune stories?" he was darn near speechless.

That’s how it worked now—the phone rings and she says, "What are you doing this weekend?"

"Spending it with you, if I’m lucky," he says.

She purrs in that throaty way of hers and says, "You’re in luck then."

And that’s that. She drives in Friday night with her backpack and assorted city treats—expensive coffee and bread—sometimes a homemade fruit pie. He tends the shop during the day while she toasts herself golden on the beach. At night they eat fresh scallops and bluefish in the local bars and play pool before meandering off into the dunes again. He has nothing to complain about—only the uncertainty of it. But he’s given up worrying about that.

People notice. You can’t live in a Cape fishing town all your life without knowing that privacy is non-existent. But he keeps his own thoughts and when someone asks what’s going on he says, "I’ll let you know as soon as I find out."

He hasn’t mentioned her to his kids. With the older ones it doesn’t matter. Sylvie has inherited his talent for worry and he is afraid to believe the affair will last long enough to concern her with. But Hugh lives two towns away—not out of gossip range by a long shot. True he is off fishing for days at a time and off wenching in Falmouth or Hyannis between trips. Guy has decided to worry about it when the time comes.

Jingle.

The door opens and a young couple come in wearing matching nylon bar jackets. Holding hands. They browse aimlessly, being silly—being in love. Then with a slight nod they exit into the fog. Guy looks at the gray wall where the harbor is supposed to be. Where the hell is Hugh?

Maybe he should call Lindy and tell her not to drive down in this weather but she always leaves straight from work and he has never called her there. He sighs. He’ll wait another half hour and then call around to a few of Hugh’s buddies. It is getting colder—too cold for romance in the dunes tonight.

He wonders what Bonnie would think about sex in the dunes. She wouldn’t have done it. She could never even relax and enjoy it in the morning light. He wonders, not for the first time, if Bonnie liked having sex with him. He knows she never did it with anyone else. She was agreeable and usually accommodating but when he thinks of Lindy’s abandoned moans and writhings he can’t imagine Bonnie getting that excited. She’d been his first, too. And—except for one brief transgression—his only, until long after her death.

After he opened the shop and started