Here & There Bonus Scene

“What the hell!” Nate hollers as his pickup lurches. Only, because he’s stuttering on a gear and we’re doing a nice little headbanging routine, it comes out like ‘Wh-UT th-E h-Eh-LL!’

“Clutch!” I yell.

“In or out?” he cries, his voice cracking. It still does that when he’s stressed, even though he’s coming on seventeen.

Thankfully, the truck stalls before I can answer that.

“Okay, it’s okay,” I say, loosening my grip on the “Oh Shit” bar and mopping my perspiring brow with my shoulder. It’s not just nerves at nearly swinging out into the ditch, it’s also stinking hot today, and this thirty-year-old Chevy—a gift from my father to his grandson—has no air conditioning.

“I’m never going to figure this out!” Nate laments.

“It’s all right. You’re getting there.”

My son slaps his palms on the steering wheel. “Why’d you have to take me to a mountain to learn stick? The only good thing is no one’s here to witness my humiliation.”

I can feel myself losing just a shade of my cool. But I do the same thing I do when I get screamed at in the council chambers. I take a long breath, reminding myself it’s feelings, not facts.

“We’re not on a mountain, Nate,” I say calmly.

“Yeah. We are.”

I scrub my hand over my beard. We’re both getting frustrated—mostly at ourselves, I know. Nate for not figuring it out as fast as he’d like, me for not having figured out the best way to teach him.

We’re too damn alike.

I reach over and grip my son on the shoulder. “Let’s take a breather, yeah?”

He nods.

I step out of the truck and com around to his side, giving the hood a pat as I pass by. “You’re still a good girl,” I murmur.

Then I twist my mouth to avoid a grin. If Shelby were here, she’d give me a serious eyebrow waggle at my turn of phrase. Though I don’t call her that as much since we had Jessie. It’s too weird.

Nate’s back is propped up against the driver’s side of the old truck, his arms folded stiffly across his chest. He’s bigger than he was six months ago. So different from the boy who changed my life by coming into it three years ago. He looks nearly a man now, though his expression of frustration is still childlike. I hope he doesn’t take the next few years too quickly.

“Why are you smiling?” he asks as I settle against the truck next to him, my thumbs hooked in my belt loops.

“I’m just happy,” I say. It’s true, I really am.

“You didn’t look happy a minute ago,” Nate mumbles.

“I am. Even when I’m frustrated, I’m happy. You’re doing great. Learning to drive a stick is hard.”

“Why couldn’t Grandpa have driven an automatic like every other normal human?”

I slap a mosquito where it lands on my arm. There aren’t many on the coast, but here, where the woods are thick, we’re going to make a nice lunch. My shirt sticks to my chest. “Ever heard the saying ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?’”

Nate frowns. “No. But if it’s about the truck, it’s not a horse.”

I chuckle.  

The trees shimmy in the late afternoon summer breeze. A bird trills from somewhere up high, and I hear the whine of a float plane in the distance.

“I am happy,” Nate says after a while, like I knew he would. It usually takes him a few minutes to cool off. “It was really nice of him to give me the truck.” ‘

“I know, buddy. And you’ll pick it up as quick as you learned how to drive in the first place. Remember how hard that felt at first?”

Nate nods. “I’m sorry I got pissy.”

“I’ve heard much worse lately.”

“The deer?”

I sigh. “Yeah. The deer.”

Deer was the biggest hot-button issue in the town of Redbeard Cove. I’d been grappling with it ever since I was sworn in as Mayor last year. There was an overabundance of them all along this strip of coast this year, and it was all anyone wanted to talk about at council meetings. Forget the extension of the boardwalk along the beach, or the new tourist center downtown. Forget the car-free festival and community gardens.

Deer.

When I told Dad about it, he’d laughed until he cried, and when he was finally done, he clapped a hand on my back. “We all have one, son. Our own personal albatross that follows us through all your terms.”

At this point if I heard one more person come to council with another cockamamie scheme for how to reduce the deer population, I was pretty sure my first term would end with me walking out the door, onto the pier, and straight into the ocean.

Except I loved the job too much.

Dad said his albatross was a bridge replacement project downtown. “Boring as hell, and if I never hear about another damn bridge, it’ll be too soon.” he’d said.

I sigh now as my phone buzzes.

SHELBY: Jess is fighting her afternoon nap. Can we hang out with you guys?

I grin, happy to replace deer from my brain for my girls.

“Hey, you want to go for a swim?” I ask Nate, already typing in my reply. “The lake’s right over there and the girls are looking for something to do.”

Ten minutes later, Shelby pulls in behind Nate’s truck on the gravel logging road by Hidden Lake. It’s our favorite place to swim that’s not the ocean. It really is hidden, too—we’re often the only people here, even in the dog days of summer.

When she gets out of the car, I’m filled with the same expansion in my chest I always get seeing Shelby. When her eyes meet mine and she breaks out into a grin, that expansion damn near explodes. I’ll never get used to that sweet, sexy smile being mine, and I think that’s a good thing.

A moment later though, the cranky bawling of an underslept sixteen-month-old fills the soft silence of the woods. 

“That bad, huh?” I ask.

Shelby sighs, pulling out the beach bag. “That bad. I tried everything.”

After giving Shelby only half the kiss I want to, I open the rear door of Shelby’s car. Our daughter Jessica’s chubby hands are balled into fists, and she’s wailing with such determination at first she doesn’t see me.

When she does, on the next inhale, her sob falls away and she giggles with glee. “Da da!”

All right, my heart’s gone now. Flown right out of my chest like a helium balloon.

“Hey baby girl,” I murmur. 

Jess sighs contentedly, laying her downy head on my shoulder.

“You make it look so easy,” Shelby laughs as we cut through the trees toward the lake.

“What are you talking about? She’s easy as pie.”

That earns me a glower, which turns into a smirk when Jess’s mood shifts a moment later as we emerge onto the tiny beach, where Nate’s drying out on a rock. He jumped in the minute we pulled up.

At the sound of Jess’s renewed wailing, he gets up, striding over with his arms out. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll fix this.”

Jess giggles as I transfer her to her brother’s cool, damp shoulder. 

“Five bucks?” I ask.

Shelby rolls her eyes as she slips Jess’s diaper bag off her shoulder onto the ground. She’s wearing this sundress I fucking love; it’s blue with yellow sunflowers, snug around her chest and all flowing out at the bottom. When she adjusts one of the straps, making one of her breasts lift a little too enticingly, I have to look away.

“Ten bucks,” Nate says. “I’m saving up for a sub woofer.”

“Fine.”

Nate and I have an ongoing bet that started when Jess was a colicky newborn. He popped his head into the nursery one night while I was on baby duty, exhausted and at my wit’s end with how to help my poor baby girl feel better.

“Want me to try?” he’d asked.

“She’s been at it all night,” I’d said, touched he’d offered, but not hopeful.

“Bet you five bucks she passes out for me,” he said.

Desperate, I agreed, even though I knew he wasn’t serious about the money. But she did pass out, in five minutes. Now I lose about 80% of the time. Happily.

Nate walks down the forest path with Jess chirping happily in his arms. She looks at her big brother like he hung the moon.

I look at both of them with my chest nearly aching like it always does when I see my big kid hold my little kid. I may have missed my son at Jess’s age, but seeing the two of them together is the gift I never expected and never knew I needed. I swallow down an unexpected prickle in my throat.

Shelby and I have pretty much decided our family’s complete with our two kids. But right in this moment I want to make a dozen more with her. At least.

The moment they’re out of sight, I pull Shelby into my arms. “I’m going to win this one, I can feel it.”

“You always say that.”

“I’m going to take you in this dress later, too.”

“You always say that when I wear a sundress too. Actually, any dress.”

“Any clothes at all. Or no clothes.” I bunch her dress up on one side. “Actually, maybe now would be better.” I kiss her neck, inhaling her citrusy scent. “There’s a little grove back there behind the boulders.” I pull back only to indicate the far end of the beach, in the opposite direction our kids went. I’m only half kidding. Maybe less.

“Don’t tease me, Alasdair.”

I tip her face up with my other hand. “Is it teasing if I mean it?”

For a moment, Shelby looks like she might actually consider it. Then she rises up on her toes and kisses me. Her lips are so soft against mine, her hair so silky as I slip my fingers into it and cradle her scalp, her scent enveloping me so completely, that for a moment, I lose track of everything except the feeling of her.

Shelby breaks the kiss, and for a moment, we just stare at each other, falling into each other’s eyes the way we do when we lock eyes for too long.

Then she backs away and pulls the straps of her sundress over her shoulders one at a time.

I let out a pained groan.

“As much as every kiss from you makes me want to immediately jump your bones, I’d rather you take your time,” Shelby says, letting the sundress drop over her breasts.

It’s sexy as hell, but for a moment I can’t get over how fucking beautiful she is. I didn’t think it was possible, but Shelby’s gotten even more stunning since having Jess. And right now, she’s wearing my favorite bathing suit of hers, a red 1950s style one-piece halter that highlights every single delicious curve. 

She jiggles her but a little as she slides the top of the dress over her ass.

My crotch jumps. I have to look away since it’s neither the time nor the place for a hard-on. “You’re trying to torture me, aren’t you?”

“A little.” She laughs.

“But also, when do we get time?” My voice is a croak as she slips into the water like a goddamned siren.

“Tonight,” she calls. “When we check out the house.”

Shit. She’s right. Tonight a contractor is coming by to give us some estimates on Widow’s Walk, which now belongs to Shelby. Elizabeth signed the house over to her last year, after her mother insisted she didn’t want to claim it. Even though Elizabeth inherited the house when the Widow passed, she said she knew Abigail had always wanted to keep it in the family. She said it didn’t feel right keeping it in her name. So Shelby got it. She kept Elizabeth on as live-in manager of the B&B for a year, but Elizabeth retired last month, moving in with Bea up the coast. Shelby didn’t think she’d want to take on the business, but as it turned out, she’s full of ideas for making the place not just a B&B but an event center, perfect for her local clients’ events, especially now that the road up there had been paved.

And tonight, after the contractor leaves, we’ll have a precious hour or two to be by ourselves in an empty B&B while Nate watches his sister.

“Fine,” I say as Shelby pushes out into the lake, laughing as she stretches into a starfish.

“Mama!” The little titter of a voice has me turning around, a grin on my face.

“Guess I’m ten bucks richer,” I say as Nate strolls back onto the sand with my adorably unsleeping girl.

He scowls. “We’re just taking a break. I had her down. Then she saw a deer. Three of them, actually.”

I groan as I pick up my girl. “No deer, please.” I nuzzle my hair into her baby neck, making her giggle. “Anything but deer.”

“Cama!” Jess says.

I frown. “What’s that, baby girl?”

“Cama!”

“She thought they were camels,” Nate says. “I kept trying to tell them they were deer.”
“Cama!” Jess yells again.

At that, I laugh so hard Jess joins in with me, shrieking and flapping her arms. Even Nate grins.

Shelby swims up, reaching her hands out. “What’s so funny?”

When I tell her, her eyes go soft, tears brimming even as she laughs.
I know she’s thinking about her mom, the same way I think about mine every time I sing Jess the songs she used to sing to me.

I’ve been thinking about Mom a lot lately, particularly since Jess was born. Only now, it’s no longer like a punch to the gut to remember her. I guess there’s something about having kids that makes you look at your own parents as people too. People who love their children like nothing  could get in the way of that—not time or space or even death.

I smile at Shelby, my chest aching at how much I love our little family. At how much I love her.
“Guess it’s time for round two,” Nate grumbles as he watches us.

But he smiles as he takes his sister back, already humming one of his Grandmother’s songs he picked up from me. He’s expanded from gaming to music this year, and has an incredible ear.

On my own again, I walk toward the lake, to where my Shelby waits for me. The water feels deliciously cool on my calves as I enter it.

Shelby laughs as I keep coming. “I brought you a swimsuit, you know.”

“Don’t need it,” I say as my khaki shorts hit the water. My leather belt’s next, then my t-shirt, then I’m holding my woman in my arms, her laughter like trilling bells in my ears.

“You’re nuts,” she whispers once I’ve got her in my arms, her legs wrapped around my waist.

“Only about you,” I say as I spread my hands around her back, kissing the shell of her ear. “Always about you, Shelby.”