Northern Moonlight (25 page)

When the shower was over,
Sabrina
felt like a kitten who desired nothing more than to curl up into a ball and sleep on a crocheted bl
anket by the consoling warmth of the fireplace.
 
Her juxtaposed feelings of vulnerability and satiation were
new to her.
Gio
wrapp
ed her in a plush cotton towel and
led her to the bedroom, looking at her intently and with
undisguised
appreciation.

Mischievously, he left her in the bedroom and ran down the stairs.  Before she had a chance to ask what he was doing, Gio was back in her bedroom with the picnic
basket in hand.  He unlatched the beige wicker basket and pulled out a bag of long stem strawberries, followed by a bunch of plump grapes. 

“Did you pack these aphrodisiacs hoping that you’d get your way with me?” Gio winked as Sabrina feigned a look of innocence.

“Of course not!  I don’t need to do anything at all to get my way with you.” She replied flirtatiously as he grinned back at her, removing a strawberry from the bag. 

Gripping the stem, he offered her the succulent fruit, as she parted her lips and accepted it.  She took the stem from him and swirled the strawberry around in her mouth, as Gio watched appreciatively.  Then he dangled the grapevine over her mouth, as Sabrina bit into one of the grapes and captured it between her teeth.  “You like juicy things too, don’t you?” She asked, reaching for a strawberry and feeding it to him.  Together, they made a meal of the fruit, followed by the bread and cheese. 

When they were sated, Sabrina
was about to part her smiling lips to hav
e an intimate talk with Gio
when a piercing, obnoxious sound
sliced through
the air and shattered her dream-state.
 
She scowled as she realized it was his beeper, urging him to call the firehouse.
 
In a matter of moments he could be gone, again risking his life, and leaving her feeling utterly exposed and alone.
 

“
Sabrina
, you know what that sound means.”
 
He frowned, looking at her apologetically.
 

She swallowed and nodded, as he hesitantly walked over to her rotary phone on the nightstand.
 
She turned away and enveloped herself more snugly in the towel as he dialed the num
ber and spoke a few terse words.

“It’s Gio Salvatore.
 
I just got paged…I’m off-duty right now…Oh, man.
 
Right off of…Yes, I’ll be right there.”
 
He hung up the phone and bolted up, throwing on his
clothes in a fluster as Sabrin
a waited for an explanation.

“There’s a forest fire that they can’t control.
 
It’s in another township, but they’re calling
for back-up.
 
I have to go.”

“
Are you going to be back later?”
 
She asked in a
hopeful voice.

“I don’t know.
 
It depends on how much progress we make with the fire.”
 
He shrugged, and in this subtle gesture she perceived indifference, infuriating her.
 

Logic told her that this was his job, and an admirable one at that, but the woman in her screamed abandonment and was sorely tempted to run and cling to him like a vine so he couldn’t leave her
again
.
 
But she had her dignity and fought the tears that she could
feel liquefying behind her eyes.

She walked
over to him,
gave him a hug and watched
with a sinking heart as he raced out the front door, jumping into his truck, turbo charging the engine into motion, and disappearing around the bend with a screeching of tires.
  Sabrina
let the towel drop to the floor, standing naked in front of an open window and not even caring.
 
She rubbed her eyes and wondered how one moment they could be so unbelievably close to one another, probing each other’s physical and emotional depths, and then, with the shrill sound of an electronic beeper, he could be vanished.
 

Barely aware of her own nudity, she walked over to her
credenza,
where a small AM/FM radio cassette player perched
.  She
turned it on to her favorite easy listening station, trying to drown herself in the glum sounds of
a lonely heart song. She flung
herself with considerable force onto the
bed
and lay
directly on the downy
decorative
pillows, not bothering to move them aside.
 
That was a strange trademark of
Sabrina
: whenever she felt sad, she listened to dark, melancholy music to match her mood.
 
Although the sad songs did little to lift her spirits,
they were still oddly soothing and somehow validated her sadness. 

With her hair a sopping mess, her stomach twisting into knots, and her eyes growing redder by the
millisecond
,
Sabrina
tried not to picture Gio
’s thick, capable fingers wor
king their way over her skin.
 
But a
s she drifted off to sleep, her remembrance of his hands was the last conscious thought she had.

Hours later, she
awoke with a shiver and instantly stiff neck, shocked to look down at her body and find herself nude with goose bumps covering the length of her flesh.
 
The room was pitch black
,
and she felt a cold d
raft fanning through the window
.
 
It must be the middle of the night, she surmised, taking note of the pervasive darkness as well as the crackling of static coming from dead air on
the
radio.
 

She slipped
under the sheets,
realizing
with a l
ump in her throat that Gio had
not return
ed
.
 
If he were still fighting the fire, she would have no way to reach him.
 
She would simply have to wait, painfully wait until he came back to her
.
She glanced
at
the wall clock and blinked
as she
registered the time, 2:28 AM.
 

*****

             
At that late hour, Gio
was indeed still fighting the fire, and battling with his own exhaustion as
much as with the flames
.
 
Natural surges of testosterone and adrenaline always provided him with a substantial amount of energy initially, but as the hours waned into dawn, so did his vigor fade.
 
Sweating copiously beneath his heavy armor, he felt like a zombie and secretly longed to be in the soothing arms of
Sabrina.
 
He
thought of her petite, curvaceous body thinly veiled by the towel, her luxurious hair dripping water onto
the
hardwood floors,
and
fe
lt a pang of longing.
 

As the aurora sunl
ight swam into the sky, Gio
was
finally
parking his truck on the side of the road, wearily making his way inside the barren loft.
 
With a hint of nausea, he recalled the destruction that the forest fire inflicted after it had
at last
been conquered.
 
Rows of pine
and oak trees
lay in ashes, creating a hot, murky graveyard in the middle of
a
once magnificent forest.
 
If only they could have contained the fire, they could have saved all that gorgeous foliage from withering into nothingness.
 
Even a dedicated team of fire squadrons from
several
nearby townships could not prevent
the calamity, caused by teenagers having a bonfire
.
 

New trees would be planted
eventually
but
,
for now,
acres of the forest were
desolate.
 
It could have been worse, though, he admitted to himself, thinking how some forest fi
res burn for days or even weeks
before finally being defeated
.
 
Then, with a sensation of
déjà vu
, Gio remembered the fire of 1966. 
Every time he was faced with a monstrous fire like the one he confronted tonight, it wer
e as though he were once again an eighteen year old orphan
.
 

When Gio finally sa
nk into sleep, his dreams were both vivid and troubling.
 
In the only one he would recall upon awaking at noon, a
vicious
green dragon was breathing fire directly into his chest, singing him at his heart center.
 
In a fit of agony, he felt the fire penetrate his shirt, aiming directly for his racing heart.
 
Behind the dragon, he glimpsed a beautiful
angelic
woman in a white gauze gown, looking at him with compassionate eyes.
 
In the dim light of his bedroom, she seemed almost to be an apparition.
 
It’s Sabrina
, he marveled
in his dream
. 
Gracefully, she glided forward, and with each light step she ventured, the dragon became smaller and less imposing.