Wild Gold (Carolina Gold series, book 1 of 4)
an excerpt

WILD GOLD
by
David Zdras
(this is the end of chapter one, where they meet ... sort of ... )

Mitchy came in to say goodbye to Norma the realtor. When she had left, Mitchy announced "We need to unpack the box with the coffee pot in it first. I'm going to relax if this keeps up and then I’ll have to take a nap."
"Aye, aye, ma'am," Amy said. "I know you, so I packed it in the car trunk."
"You are the smartest sister I've got," Mitchy said and hugged her with an air kiss.
"I'm the only sister you have," Amy said.
"That, too," Mitchy said. "Hard to beat."
"Hard to beat."
They unpacked. They moved in box after box. Two teenage boys, friends of Norma, pulled up and helped them get the furniture in. The bed her dad had made for her went into the spare room. The queen size he had built for her mother and he to sleep in went in the other bedroom. The master bedroom, with it's own bath and private entrance was the owner's efficiency apartment. She had the two smaller bedrooms, but by herself, that was enough.
She put out water and food for the cat. Shaking the dry cat food in the plastic container with the lid on brought Halley inside rapidly. It would be the last time she would be left out for any purpose. Sometimes she brought fleas home; once had taught Amy to not let her cat outside. It had taken six treatments to cleanse the house of fleas. Once Halley had brought a gift home from a tom that had turned into five baby kittens born right on time sixty four days later. The vet had taken care of that; you didn't leave that to chance, although it had been fun to give away the one litter of kittens. That exhausted her set of friends, so there couldn't be any more. And she didn't have any friends here yet, not that even a good friend would take a kitten off of you. It had to be a friend with room. You had to have room in your life, in your house, in your heart, or you just shut down and kept every body out. Amy understood that; she had room for her cat in her life, but not much else. After about a week, she and Mitchy stopped joking and started fighting, so she didn't have much room for her sister. And who had room for a man when they took so much work? And offered so little in return?
After they had gotten the last box inside around midnight, Mitchy made a second pot of coffee and started unpacking the living room. Amy lay down, just for a minute to rest her eyes. She woke up hours later. The screen saver on Mitchy's laptop, set up on the kitchen counter, was the only light in the room; she must have been checking her email. It was about four a.m. and it was dark on the beach. She stretched in her bare feet and went out on the deck. Mitchy was making noise in the bedroom and Amy knew better than to interfere. Her sister was setting things in order; it's how her sister calmed herself. Rearrange everything, put everything in the right place, sometimes a new place, sometimes an old place. Dust it. Mitchy had been cleaning Amy's house in the night when she visited for years. It was an old pattern and Amy knew it comforted her sister.
The morning breeze was cool and ladened with the salt fragrance of the beach. She sat in a deck chair and squinted, trying to see. There was a little light, just a little, from the few lights on the street behind the house. It was too early for beachwalkers looking for shells, and half the houses were empty in early September. The hoards of vacationers were gone except for the few weekend people. Vaguely she could make out movement on the beach in the dark. She leaned over the railing of the deck and tried to discern the motions in the distance. Something, no, someone was on the beach, a faded glimmer of white, almost the same color but just a bit lighter than the sand. The image wavered, shimmered. No, it moved like it was dancing.
And then the image took form, as if understanding it allowed her brain to see it in the almost nonexistent light. It was a human form, dancing, moving back and forth in some decisive yet elegant choreography. She felt within herself a pull toward the distant figure on the beach. It called to her heart; it called to her body. She felt alive as if waking from a dream which still continued, a wonderful dream. There was a warmth in her body, in her belly, that spread through out her veins like a fine red wine. Perhaps her blood had turned to wine, for she was flushed, heated, with the flow of it. She was aware of her heart beating and the blood moving through her veins, down to her toes (which were curling on the deck as if looking for a toe hold), to the arteries climbing to her brain. Her mind filled with warmth, with a sort of calm excitement. She knew without needing to look that she was flushed, that the skin of her face was bright red and hot. A fine sweat broke out on her body that the wind immediately took away, but it did not cool her. In her imagination, she arched her back, entering more deeply into his embrace, striving to meld their bodies together into one. The night air was somehow perfectly right, and all was right as the figure below moved back and forth across the same patch of sand.
It could have been an angel or some alien dervish from a star ship, but somehow inside herself, she knew it was a man. And that man had captured her as easily as he had captured her attention, captured her heart and mind within the image of him dancing on the sand. She could almost imagine herself whirling about within the circle of his arms. She could not see the step he followed, but there was a definite rhythm to it, a rhythm she knew that she could match as his partner. She would move with him, paired, retreating as he advanced, advancing as he retreated.
And suddenly, without any noticeable sign, the lighter shadow that was a man was swiftly moving north and away from her. She could make out the form of him running now, along the beach, and the strength of his muscles flowing through each lunging step. She raised her arm, first to beckon to his retreating form, and then to wave farewell. As the distance grew, the connection she felt in her heart stretched as he ran away from her, as if she was trying to hold on. And then with a sense so genuine as to seem real, he was gone and she was alone again, breathing fast as if were she that had been running. “Men are always leaving,” she thought, blinking back the sudden wetness coming into her eyes. “Men are always leaving me, even men I’ve never met.” She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her T shirt.
Laying back down on the couch, she drifted off to sleep, trying to keep the dream, that perfect moment, that perfect man, in the center of her thoughts. And for a while, she was dancing on the solid sand of the beach at the water’s edge and the dream was real.

As she expected, Mitchy was gone when she woke up three hours later. The morning sun was shining into her windows - they were her windows now, she felt like she belonged here in this place. It’s funny, she thought, how quickly one adapts to a new place. It’s strange, it’s wrong, and then suddenly it is as if you have never lived anywhere else. Your entire life has been here, within these walls, and so a house becomes a home.
Mitchy, as always, had left a note. As a hospital nurse executive she lived and breathed the reality of documenting everything as second nature to her.

Amy - I did the best I could. Not much where you were sleeping as I didn’t want to wake you. I was able to get my flight switched so I could get out of Myrtle Beach at 9:30. I’ll drop off the rental truck for you. Don’t forget to look in my favorite place. Don’t mess with the way I’ve arranged the baskets; I’ll pick up the ones you don’t want at Christmas. Love, Michelle

Her eyes misted as she smiled. Her sister had not changed since thy had been children. Mitchy had to be in charge, in control all the time. Everything had to be set in order, and Mitchy had to control the order. It was the same anywhere she went, including the hospital that she now ran where she had started as a floor nurse right out of nursing school. She just went forward, ignoring any objections or resistance, until she was running everything. Amy knew that it pleased her sister to do the same in her house. This afternoon she would rearrange everything to suit herself, and she knew her sister knew that she would. But putting everything where she liked it gave Michelle a sense of order and rightness in her world, and she could fly home to Detroit and her husband with the belief that her little sister was safe because she, Michelle, had organized every detail of Amy’s life.
Amy was used to it, but it was really nice when Mitchy went away to college and she could live her own life.
She pressed the button on the coffee pot, which Mitchy had, of course, prepared the night before. She showered while the coffee made itself, ran a brush through her hair and donned clean shorts and a shirt. Everything in her drawers was folded precisely and her bed was made. Mitchy was predictable.
She took a cup of coffee out onto the deck and drank half of it with her eyes half closed, savoring the warmth of the wind that cooled her skin. Remembering her dream, she looked out at the section of the beach where she had watched last night. The tide was lower, so the sand was dry and undisturbed by the waves, but certainly something had happened down there.
She took her cup and walked across the board walk to the beach. The patch of sand she wanted was about a hundred yards from her deck, diagonally to the left. And there were footprints there, in the sand, round circles where feet had landed and turned in the next movement of the dance. She fit her own feet into the prints and turned, following them. They were of a distance that was comfortable to her, just a stretch wider perhaps than the foot prints she might have made in doing an active whirling dance like what she had seen. Or imagined that she had seen. She felt the same thrill she had felt in the night, perhaps a bit less intense, as she wrapped her arms around herself and moved along the sand, dancing in the footprints he had made hours before. It was not a dream. He was real. There was a real man this morning, dancing in the dark on her beach, scattering footprints all over the place.
And she wanted to dance with him in the dark more than anything she had wanted in her life. And she knew something else in her heart as she stretch her long legs and the full six feet tall length of her body to reach her toes into one footprint after another. The stride of this man, that fit with her stride, indicated that he was tall. He was tall, like her, a man that she could cling to and feel small and protected again, as she had once felt in the days when she was her father’s little girl. And so she whirled and danced among the foot prints in the sand until she could no longer tell which ones where hers and which ones were his.
Which is as it should be.