Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara Read Free Book Online

strange to be around someone so free-speaking again.
    Abby’s eyes scraped Dez’s face. “No good.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “You didn’t have to.”
    “He’s a little too eager,” she confided. “I mean, clumsy. I feel like he goes at it with too much gusto.” She laughed a nervous, embarrassed laugh, but it also just felt so good to confide in someone.
    “Gusto,” Abby said flatly, then burst out laughing too, so hard Dez felt hot and ashamed.
    “I’m sorry, Dezzy. I just had this image—He wasn’t possibly your first, don’t tell me that! What about that fellow in Paris you told me about, what’s-his-name? Pierre?”
    Pierre Denis. She could barely recall him now, remembered only her own skin, mouth, hips, and what had been a heady, defiant testing and tasting of Paris. “No, Asa wasn’t, not really, no, but—” They didn’t hear the back door open, didn’t realize Asa was home until he called out hello.
    He filled the door frame, spectacles and gray pharmacist’s coat making him look older than his thirty-three years, despite his clear face and bright blond hair. He removed his hat and nodded to Abby. He was welcoming and friendly. He said, “You finally made it to Cascade” and “I hear you’re moving to New York.” And Dez remembered something she definitely never liked about Abby: her way of instantly judging people. Oh, she was pleasant enough but she was soon answering Asa’s questions with the kind of clipped courtesy she reserved for people who bored her, for men, in particular, who didn’t react to her.
    Suddenly Asa made a short, choking sound, noticing what they were doing, or rather, what Abby was doing. Dez looked across the table. Abby had drawn a violent, slashing-stroke sketch of a naked woman, legs open to reveal an obscenely abundant nest of hair.
    It was shocking and embarrassing. Yet—why was it shocking and embarrassing to look upon such a nude? Why did it feel so violent? It was honest, that was all. No gently rounded body, no play of golden light upon skin. Sly Abby.
Let’s see where our unconscious minds take us
, she had said, when each stroke, each line of her sketch had been deliberate and well-executed.
    “That looks like one of Egon Schiele’s,” Dez said, trying for unfazed sophistication.
    Abby smirked, taking pleasure in their discomfort. She coolly asked Asa what he thought of it.
    A blush mottled his throat, then spread up into both cheeks; he looked twelve years old. He wasn’t much of an art critic, he said, and pulled hisgaze away and coughed, looking over Abby’s head at Dez, eyebrows raised as high as they could go. Then he busied himself opening the icebox. “Anyone need anything? This tray’s overflowing, Dez.”
    He babbled about the ice, getting out the green delivery card for the iceman, setting it in the window sideways for a full block. “In case you forget. Jeez, it’s all water. Do you think this milk’s okay?”
    “The milk is fine, Asa.” She got up and put a hand on his arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll clean this up later.”
    Abby was speculative, watching them. “So, Asa, you have a drugstore,” she said. “Now, I’ve always wondered what you druggists are
really
doing in those back rooms.”
    He blinked, not quite sure what she was saying. “Nothing but our compounding.”
    “Maybe I’d better take a tour and see for myself.”
    He hesitated. “I’ll be pretty stacked up when I get back. Unless Dez wants to show you around?”
    “She doesn’t really want a tour, Asa.” Wishing he would just go, or that he would rise to Abby’s bait and give her a taste of her own sass. Something.
    When he finally did go, they listened to his footsteps on the back porch, to the Buick’s engine turning over. Abby cocked her head. “He does look like Lindbergh,” she said. “I’ll give you that, but is he always so serious?”
    “You weren’t very nice to him.”
    But Abby had lost the smug look. She leaned