It was very quiet, only the wind’s howling and the rattle of the shutters coming through over the ceaseless pounding of the surf outside.
“I guess it was a lot worse during Andrew, huh?” Kerry asked quietly, tucking her legs up under her and leaning on the arm of the couch.
Dar nodded. “Oh yeah. They evacuated the island, but a few of us stayed, along with a few security people. They’d always told us how sturdy these places were, so we stupidly believed them. Surprisingly, it was true. We had very little damage—mostly surf damage to the seawalls, and some boats that got slammed up against the dock because their owners were either too stupid or too lazy to secure them.”
“Mmm.” Kerry put her chin down on her arm. “Do you have a boat here?”
“Yeah. It was my aunt’s; it kind of came with this place.” Dar leaned back in her chair and put her bare feet up on the desk. “Every once in a long while I take it out, just cruise around the artificial reefs a little, do some shallow diving, that kind of thing.”
Kerry nodded slowly. “I like boating. We used to take sailboats, the really big ones, out on Lake Michigan in the summer. I learned to run one of the racing kind. That was a lot of fun.” She considered. “You don’t do much swimming, though, it’s kinda cold up there.” She looked up. “Do you enjoy the diving and stuff?”
“I do. Very much so, in fact.” Dar fiddled with a pencil that had been on the desktop. “It’s not smart to go out by yourself, though, and I…” She hesitated. “I don’t have much time nowadays.”
Kerry soaked it all in, the spoken words and the unspoken ones. “I’ve always wanted to see what that was like. I used to watch the Jacques Cousteau specials all the time and wonder.”
A quick smile chased itself on and off Dar’s face. “We can probably
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arrange that,” she commented offhandedly. “It’s beautiful out there, on a nice, sunny day. When it’s calm, the sun filters down through the water, and you can see all kinds of fish, in every color.” She leaned down and pulled open a desk drawer, tugging out a folder and leafing through its contents, then handing it over to Kerry. “Here, see for yourself.”
Kerry got up and perched on the desk, tilting the folder towards the candle to get the light. She poured slowly through the pictures, examining them in fascination. Most were of fantastically shaped coral formations, with clouds of fish over them. Kerry wished it was daylight, so she could see the colors better, but one picture was a huge, flat, striped fish that seemed to be staring right into the camera lens. “Oh, wow!” She looked up at the quietly watching Dar. “Did you take these?”
“Mmm-hmm. Most of them at John Pennekamp Park down in the Keys, but this one…and these two were off Bermuda.” Dar put a fingertip on the striped fish. “He didn’t like me taking his picture. Right after I snapped this, he got right in my face and whacked me with his tail.”
Leaning closer to the light, Kerry peered at the fish. “Mmm. I bet that hurt.”
A hand lifted and gently pushed the blonde hair back. “Careful, don’t want you catching on fire. You can’t imagine the paperwork I’d have to fill out.” “Yikes, you’re right.” Kerry put the endangered locks back behind her ear and smiled. She turned to the next picture, this one of Dar, in a sleek black one-piece swimsuit, a scuba tank propping up one elbow and a huge lobster in her other hand. “Good grief, how much did that thing weigh?”
Dar peered over her arm. “Me or the lobster?” She chuckled. “Ten pounds. It was huge. The damn thing dragged me half across the reef before he tired out and I could bag him.”
“Mmm.” Kerry studied the picture, a faint, curious smile twitching her lips. “Did you have him for dinner?”
“Nah,” Dar cheerfully told her. “That big…well, after four pounds or so, the taste starts to go down. No, I took the picture, then let him go.”
“Oh, I did that too when we went fishing,” Kerry admitted. “It got everyone so mad at me. I’d catch these nice big fish, and the guys would fight them for an hour, finally drag them onboard, and I’d let them go.” She lingered over the photo for a moment more, then went on to the next.
“You have a big family?” Dar asked gently.
Kerry kept her focus on the pictures. “Oh well, not really. My mother and father, of course, and I have a younger brother, Michael, he’s in law school, and a younger sister Angela, who’s married and has one child and another on the way.”
“What’s it like having siblings?”
Kerry felt her chest tighten. “It’s…all right, I guess. There’s always some competition.” She glanced aside. “You don’t have any?”
“No, I always wondered what it would be like. Thought it would be nice to have a sister, or something.” She paused. “Is it?”
Kerry pondered the question. “I can’t really remember not having any,”
she confessed, “so it’s hard to say. We fought like kids do, but I love my 130
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brother and sister.” She frowned. “I miss seeing them.”
Dar studied her profile. “Your father’s a senator, huh?”
The blonde head inclined once. “Yes.” Kerry’s jaw almost clicked shut audibly.
Hmm.
Dar’s curiosity was sparked. “That must be a little strange.
Everything’s kind of public record, huh?”
Kerry’s eyes fastened on her hands, clenched lightly around the folder.
“More or less, yeah.”
A silence fell, lasting until Dar cleared her throat. “You…want to talk about it?”
Green eyes jerked up and met hers, startled, and a little afraid. The flickering candlelight threw her shadow against the far wall with menacing size, and she studied Dar’s face for an endless moment, before letting her gaze drop to the desk. “Not really, no.”
A little stung, Dar shrugged quietly. “All right.”
Kerry dragged her eyes back up at the words, her jaw working a little. “I, um, I guess that sounds harsh, coming from someone who was asking you to do the same thing just a little while ago, huh?”
“It’s your life,” Dar replied evenly. “You have the right to keep it to yourself.”
The silence settled again, and went on longer. Kerry closed her eyes, and listened to the wind whipping the surf outside, and the trees which slapped against the outer wall. “My parents are very…they have very high expectations of us.” She slipped off the desk and went back to the couch, curling up into a ball against one end of it “They want a certain life for me.”
Dar remained silent, keeping her opinion of both the policy and Kerry’s father to herself. ILS had run headlong into the senator more than once, and he was currently trying to oust them from several government contracts in favor of his own choice, a competitor who was, in all likelihood, paying him off. “That’s a tough thing to deal with,” she said very quietly. “But surely he shouldn’t have any complaint about you.”
A short, bitter laugh. “I’m not married and barefoot in the kitchen with two kids.” Kerry stared at the wall. “I had to pretend to be majoring in something…‘fit for me’ in college. They didn’t want to hear the word ‘career’
at all.”
A realization clicked. “So that explains the English double major,” Dar commented softly.
Kerry glanced at her, surprised, then she rubbed her temples. “I forgot you had my résumé.” She managed a thin smile. “Yes, by the time I graduated, it was too late for them to protest, and I had my degree.” She took a breath. “I took an entry level job with Sperry. God, how they hated that. It was a fight just about every day. The only thing that saved me was that Brian was still going to school.”
Knowing that Kerry had spent some years in the IS field, Dar was puzzled. “What happened?”
A wry, cynical smile crossed the younger woman’s face. “Bill Clinton happened. Or, more specifically, Al Gore happened.” She lifted her chin. “All of a sudden, it was a ‘prudent precaution’ to have someone in the family who
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‘knew how those people thought’ and was into the technology end.”
“Ah.” Dar digested that. “But they still give you a hard time,” she hazarded.
“Yeah.” Kerry sighed, resting her chin on her arm.
“Who’s Brian?”
Green eyes lifted to hers. “My theoretical fiancé.”
Both of Dar’s dark brows shot up to her hairline, giving the taller woman almost a comical air of astonishment. After a moment, she schooled her face into a more casual expression. “I…um…huh?”
Kerry sighed. “We grew up together. We’ve been friends forever, since we were in strollers, practically. He’s a really sweet guy, nice looking, just graduating from law school. He likes me…”
“But?”
“But when I look at him, he’s just a friend,” Kerry replied ruefully.
“Ah, no skipping of the heart?” Dar joked gently. “No getting swallowed up in his eyes. That kind of thing?”
Kerry stared at her in silence for a few heartbeats. “N-no,” she finally stammered. “Not… It’s not like that with him…at…at all.” She paused. “What do you mean, skipping of the heart?”
Dar examined her interlaced fingers. “I wouldn’t know personally,” she glanced up with a wry grin, “but I’m told that when you meet your true love, something like that happens.” She chuckled. “You know, um, all that romantic stuff.”
“Mmm. Oh, yeah, right. I’ve heard of that.” Kerry pushed her hair back behind an ear. “God, you were right. It is getting pretty warm in here, isn’t it?” She glanced up to find hooded blue eyes watching her and a slight, almost puzzled little smile on Dar’s face. “So, that’s my story I guess. My folks give me a hard time over living down here. They think it’s decadent and licentious.” She sighed. “When I go home for Christmas, all I hear is plans for the wedding, and where I’ll live, and…”
Dar got up and circled the desk, then crouched down next to her, her features almost wholly in shadow as she blocked the light from the candle.
“You don’t have to do what they want, you know that, right?”
Kerry’s eyes held a quiet, shuttered sorrow. “It’s easy for you to say that.”
She laid her cheek against her forearm. “It’s a lot harder for me to live it.” She blinked a few times. “I feel like I have a responsibility to them.”
Dar sat down and leaned back against the couch, facing away from her younger companion. “I used to believe that, too,” she murmured. “After my father died, I thought my responsibility was taking care of my mother. I was going to give up this job, move to Richmond…”
Kerry gazed at the dark, sleek head inches from her face. Almost hypnotized, she watched her fingers reach out and tangle themselves in an errant lock. “Why didn’t you?” she asked softly.
“She told me she didn’t want anything to do with me.” Dar’s voice was quiet but matter-of-fact. “I reminded her too much of what she’d lost.” Feeling a slight tug on her hair, she turned her head and glanced at Kerry. “That’s when I figured out the only person I was ever going to be responsible for was myself.” She held the younger woman’s eyes. “Follow your heart, Kerry, don’t 132
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live for someone else’s dreams.”
It was the closest they’d ever been to each other, mere inches separating them, so close they were breathing the same air. So close Kerry could see the faint, almost invisible scar just above Dar’s right eye, and the crystal clarity—
even in the low light—of her pale blue irises. She became aware of a sound that she only later realized was her own heartbeat, hammering in her ears in irregular rhythm. “I-I’ll try to…to keep that in mind,” she stuttered.
Dar turned her eyes towards the door and broke the tension. “Can I interest you in more of that peanut stuff?”
Kerry swallowed a few times. “Um, sure. They were small plates.”
They exchanged wry glances then laughed in thinly veiled relief.
DAR LEANED HER head out of the window, studying the worsening weather. The trees outside were almost obscured by rain, and the wind was pulling branches from them, slapping the leaves against the building and leaving dark green streaks against the wall’s surface.
A wet, cool breeze blew her hair back, and she turned her face into it for some relief. She’d opened a window on the opposite side of the apartment to get a cross-breeze, but it was still very stuffy inside, and scarfing down the spicy stir fry hadn’t helped matters. Dar glanced behind her to where Kerry was lying on the floor, her hands folded over her slim waist and her eyes closed. Even from where she was, in the flickering light Dar could see the sheen of sweat on the younger woman’s face, and she felt a twinge of sympathy as a droplet trickled down from her own temple.
It was well past midnight, but sleeping was almost impossible, at least for Dar, who was used to the air-conditioned peace of her water bed-equipped room. She enjoyed her comforts and didn’t mind admitting that—roughing it in the outdoors with bugs and snakes was not her idea of a good time. With a sigh, she rested her chin on the windowsill, and put up with the soft mist of water which drenched her skin.
Still, she was glad Kerry was there. She was getting to feel comfortable with her, too—a slow, insidious relaxation of her usually very stiff and very prickly outer shell, that she was only half-heartedly trying to stop.
“Anything interesting out there?” Kerry’s voice floated up softly.
“Rain and wind,” Dar replied in a mumble. “It’s just a little cooler, though.” She felt a warmth at her back, and instinctively moved over to make room as Kerry sidled up next to her, poking her nose out into the darkness.
“See?”
Kerry hitched herself up and leaned out, shaking her blonde head as rain dripped on it. “God, you can’t see a thing…not even lights from the city.” She tipped further forward and felt a sudden, warm pressure against her back as Dar stuck a hand out to make sure she didn’t fall over. Despite her overheated state, it felt good, a comfortingly safe sensation that made her bold enough to lean out a little further, to see what she could see.
“Hey, careful,” Dar warned, moving a little closer just in case she was needed. Kerry now had her entire head out in the rain, and she was peering around with interest. The wind was blowing her dampened hair back and she
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looked, for a moment, very much like a cocker spaniel enjoying a drive.