Picture Perfect Read online

  "What are you thinking?" Dorothea whispered, careful to keep her voice down so as not to disturb Cassie and Connor and Will, who slept in the living room. She ran her hand up Cyrus's forearm, feeling not the wrinkled skin and sinews of an old man but the thick muscle she remembered from her youth.

  "I'm thinking of the first time I touched you," Cyrus said.

  Dorothea flushed and swatted blindly at him, but she was smiling. "You crazy old fool," she said.

  "I used to stay up at night thinking of ways to get rid of your grandmother," Cyrus said. "She went everywhere you went."

  "Well," Dorothea mused, "thatdid keep you away."

  Suddenly Cyrus laughed. Dorothea rolled toward him, her hair spreading across his chest, and clapped her hand over his mouth. "You want to wake them?" she hissed, but Cyrus was still laughing.

  "It's just that I remember what the old woman said when I asked her advice on how to get you to pay attention to me." He propped himself up on one elbow. "She told me thather husband had killed a buffalo in her honor."

  "There weren't any more buffalo in the thirties," Dorothea whispered, grinning.

  Cyrus smiled. "Your grandmother told me that was my problem, nothers ." They both laughed. "At least she had the good sense to fall asleep long enough for me to kiss you," Cyrus said. He leaned over Dorothea, smoothing her long white hair back from her forehead, much as he had done the very first time. He leaned forward and touched his lips to hers.

  "She wasn't asleep," Dorothea murmured against his mouth. "She told me so the next day. She said she was getting tired of you hanging around all the time, so she figured she'd better hurry things along."

  Cyrus's eyes widened. "I thought she hated me," he said.

  Dorothea laughed. "That too."

  They both settled down on their backs again, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the symphony of the owls outside. Dorothea's hand crept between them blindly to find Cyrus's, and she threaded her fingers through his. She thought of Cassie lying in the fold-out bed, time ticking before her like a life sentence as she awaited the arrival of her husband. She considered how different the white girl's life might have been if she'd been born a hundred years earlier, like Dorothea's grandmother; if this Alex had courted her under the cover of a buffalo hide blanket; if abuse had been something never even considered, because it went against the grain of the tribe.

  Cyrus squeezed her hand just as surely as he'd been reading Dorothea's mind. "It was easier back then," he said flatly.

  Dorothea rolled toward her husband, burying her face against the hard bones of his shoulder so that he wouldn't know how close she'd come to crying. "It was," she whispered.

  DOROTHEA DID NOT SAY WHY SHE STAYED HOME FROM THE CAFE teria the next day, but Cassie knew, simply by the way she sat in the rocking chair beside hers on the porch and waited, unmoving, in a silent show of support.

  She also knew that the time had come, when just after noon, Dorothea softly whispered, "Kokepe sni yo"--Don't be afraid--and stood up. The wind whipped her skirt around her ankles as she came to stand beside Cassie's chair, but by the time the unfamiliar black Bronco pulled to a stop in the Flying Horses' front yard, she had gone inside.

  Cassie knew no one would come out and bother her while she was speaking to Alex. Not Cyrus and Dorothea, who believed this was her business alone, and not Will, who was sitting with Connor. And for right now, anyway, that was the way Cassie wanted it. Her palms were damp and she wiped them on the front of her shift as she stood up and stepped toward the porch railing, trying to hold fast to her fury.

  Alex shut off the motor of the Bronco and tugged off his sunglasses. It was Cassie. It was really Cassie. After months of agony, he was ten feet away from his wife.

  He stepped out of the car and stared up at her. She seemed to be smaller than he'd remembered. The imagination that had served him so well as a director began to function double-time: he pictured the wind blowing her hair around her face, her lips breaking into a delighted smile, her feet flying over the rough boards of the steps. He envisioned her soft skin pressed against the lines of his body; he saw himself carrying her into whoever's hut this was and stretching her out on the whitest of sheets and burying himself inside her.

  "Alex," Cassie said. Having been warned by Joseph Stands in Sun of Alex's preemptive arrival, she'd planned all night to take him to task.You lied , she would accuse.You gave me your word . But it had been so long that she found her anger fading and she stared at him the way she used to when she first saw the dailies of his films--awestruck and overwhelmed by his beauty, his very size.

  He stopped in front of the porch, underneath the railing where she stood, like he was playing Romeo to her Juliet. Then he reached up, gazing at her hand as if he'd never seen anything like it, and touched his fingertips to hers.

  It was the physical contact, the stepping of the movie idol off the screen, that jolted Cassie. She jumped back as if she'd received a shock, and let the tears run down her cheeks. She thought of Alex wearing his dinner jacket and serving her wine on a Tanzanian set. She imagined him draping a pillowcase on his head and doing Lady Macbeth while standing on a coffee table. She considered Connor, living proof that the sweet ache of coming together could create something perfect. And she did not remember why she was supposed to be angry; or why, exactly, she'd left.

  Then Alex was standing beside her, wrapping her in his embrace. "Don't cry," he begged. "Please, Cassie, don't cry."

  "I can't help it," Cassie said, but she was already wiping at the tears, ready to do anything she had to to keep that raw, bleak note out of his voice.

  He was running his fingers over her face, remembering the features. Then he smiled and sat down on the top step of the porch, pulling her to sit beside him. He wrapped his hand around the nape of her neck and kissed her so gently she felt her resistance shatter like glass. His hands came to rest at familiar spots on the sides of her breasts; the pattern of his breath was an old, slow song. Cassie rested her forehead against his, tamping down the stirring fear which she had begun to associate even with Alex's softest touch, assuring herself that things would be different now.

  "I had two more weeks," she murmured.

  Alex squeezed her waist. "It was harder knowing where you were and not being able to go than not knowing at all." He kissed her again. "I thought if I came in person I might be able to argue my case."

  "What if I still decide to stay?" Cassie said.

  Alex glanced out at the plain. "Then I'll develop a taste for South Dakota."

  Cassie shook her head. There was no point arguing over something that had already been done; something she knew, deep down, she had wanted. Besides, she was hardly the person to complain about a breach of trust, when Connor was just on the other side of the door.

  "So," Alex said, smiling. "What do we do now?"

  Cassie smiled back, relieved, more than willing to put off the time for explanations. "I don't know. You're the one who reads all the good scripts. What happens in the movies?"

  Alex scuffed his boot against the step and looked down, but he didn't stop rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand, as if to remind himself that Cassie was indeed flesh and blood. "Usually the hero and the heroine ride off into the sunset."

  Cassie bit her lower lip, as if she were considering this. "Then we still have a good seven hours to sit here on the porch," she said.

  Alex's eyes grew dark, lazy. "We could goinside ," he suggested.

  Cassie knew exactly what he was thinking, and laughed out loud at the thought of Alex walking into the living room, expecting to make love, only to find Cyrus, Dorothea, Will, and Connor staring him down. "I don't think you want to do that," she said. "It's a little crowded."

  Alex frowned, thinking of the goddamn tabloids that had ripped Cassie apart after she left, linking her with every man from the Shah of Iran to JFK Jr. He told himself she was not living with another guy. She wouldn't have been so relaxed. She wouldn't have kissed him like t