The car pulled up outside of a beautiful, low-slung house, perched on bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
"Are you sure this is the place, Kurt?" Finn couldn't believe Rachel was staying here during the filming. The house was on one cusp of a perfectly half-moon-shaped bay; even though it was late December, surfers bobbed in the water, amidst dark-brown beds of kelp, under a flawless azure sky. Santa Catalina Island's blue bulk rose from the horizon.
"14211 Rocky Point Road, Rancho Palos Verdes," his brother read off the email. "This is it."
"Well, are we going in or not?" Sarah demanded. The four of them piled out of the car.
Finn, Kurt, Nell and Sarah walked up the flagstone path through a beautifully-manicured and landscaped front yard. Kurt didn't want to even know how much this home must have cost. It was owned by two highly successful novelists, Geoff Fielding and Elena Bosaic, who Rachel met when she was a student at NYADA. The film was based on Geoff's insanely popular best seller.
Elena met them at the door. She was tall, tanned and blonde, athletically built for a woman of Rachel's age. She and her husband were avid surfers, who met on the beach when they just thirteen. Elena was dressed in gray yoga pants and a dark blue t-shirt with "Cal" written in gold script.
"Come on in," she beamed, adding, "Don't worry. Rachel's down on the beach, reading a script revision, while Geoff and our son Phil are surfing."
Kurt gave the introductions,. Elena was particularly interested in meeting Finn. She looked him up and down, approvingly, then said, "Geoff and I have spent almost twenty-three years listening to Rachel talk about you. I'm glad you finally made it back together." Then she looked at Nell and Sarah, adding. "I hope you two brought bathing suits—Phil's surfing buddies that he grew up with are all down there now, and there's a big beach party planned., so you won't have to spend all your time with us old fogies." She explained Phil was down on Christmas break from her alma mater, U.C. Berkeley. "And don't worry—there are girls down there as well, so you won't feel too weird." Nell asked how she and Geoff knew Rachel, and she explained that Geoff was a student at NYU, and met Rachel at an all-night diner when they were both suffering from insomnia. "Geoff and I were doing the long-distance thing, and it sucked mightily, but we made it."
She threw Finn a meaningful glance.
Kurt, knowing that was a sore spot with Elena, said, "Okay! Are we ready to go surprise her?" He had brought Finn and the girls out West when they had Christmas break, even though Rachel was supposed to fly to Ohio the next day for a few days over Christmas. Geoff and Elena had been thrilled to hear of his plan, and invited all of them to spend a day or two at their house before heading back. They told him that Rachel was missing all of them badly.
Elena led them to the bluff face itself, and Kurt could see a tiny, lone figure, sitting in a chair on the rocky beach. A wooden staircase led all of them down the face of the cliff, , but Elena and Kurt remained on the last step, letting Finn and his daughters sneak up on Rachel.
"How is she doing?" Kurt asked.
"She's happier than she has been," Elena said, "So you did good acting on your hunch, but she's also wary of getting too excited. I think it's too soon to know how she really is about all of this. I mean, think about it: they were barely together two days before she had to traipse out here."
They watched as Finn approached first, Rachel hearing him, turning around, and leaping to her tiptoes, arms around his neck, kissing him with abandon, then seeing the girls and gathering them all in, joyfully.
"She seems pretty happy," Kurt remarked.
Elena snorted. "The prospect of getting laid in the immediate future makes most people look happy, Kurt."
True.
"Finn has seemed happier in some respects as well, but he's been very introspective the two weeks she's been out here."
Elena thought a moment, then said, "Let's give them some mutual introspective time. The girls can hang out with Phil and the surfer kids. I'll go wave Geoff in and we'll take you out shopping after lunch, leaving the two of them alone. They can meet us at a restaurant later."
Kurt was dubious.
"Knowing them, I don't expect much talking to occur."
"Maybe they'll surprise us," Elena winked.
XXXxxx
They sat on a blanket in the backyard after lunch, almost on the edge of the bluff, with a sweeping view of the entire bay as well as the island channel. He was dressed in a blue t-shirt and khaki cargo shorts; she in a white tank top and denim cutoffs. They wiggled their toes in the grass and inhaled the pungent sea air. Rachel marveled at how something so briny could still smell so fresh. She noticed him staring intently at the water beyond the bay, wind-whipped into whitecaps atop impossible blue.
"I'm glad you came out here," she started. It was true. Despite everything that had happened, Rachel still missed his physicality, his presence. She relished waking up in his arms. Elena had roared with laughter when she said it would have all been easier if Finn was just her boy-toy.
"Me too, because it was hard to stay away, after all the thinking I've been doing."
"What kind of thinking?" She watched a large, almost perfect wave form at the mouth of the bay, carrying several surfers towards the rocky beach, leaving the rest bobbing gently behind it.
"I wanted to know what I could do to make you happy."
Part of her wanted to say just loving her was enough, but that just wasn't true. The fact was, she still hurt. The bitterness may have faded, now that she understood why he had done what he did, but the pain and sense of loss certainly had not.
She tried explaining how she felt to Elena and Geoff at dinner the week before, and Geoff brought up the possibility of having a child. Of all the things contributing to her sense of loss over Finn, being childless certainly was high on the list, but, curiously, it wasn't high on her list of current priorities.
"To me," she explained, "A child is an incarnation of love. There's no doubt we love each other, and if we stay together, there's always a possibility of having a baby together. I mean, I'm still young enough. But what I'm talking about is what I need from him in order to be willing to stay in for the long haul." Geoff and Elena looked at her expectantly, but she just shrugged. "I'm not sure I can articulate what that is yet." She paused, and actually smiled. "But I think I'll know it when I see it, because I'll feel it—" she tapped her heart—"at the same time."
A sailboat appeared, scudding before the wind, rounding the other cusp of the bay.
"Did you come to any conclusions?" Rachel asked.
"No conclusions, but I did think about who I am, and what I might mean to you." He turned to look at her. His sunglasses couldn't hide the tenderness in his face. "And what I want to mean to you."
"What do you think you mean to me?" She propped herself on one elbow, intrigued.
He lay on his back, hands clasped behind his head.
"When I first met you, your voice went straight to my heart. I didn't realize what had happened, then, but soon after I noticed the most significant communication between us was always through song. It never ceased to amaze me how the two of us could screw up communication every other way, always having to backtrack and apologize, yet when we sang to one another, there was never any misunderstanding. And worse, when we didn't listen, or refused to listen, the results were disastrous."
The two of them were startled at that moment by five Brown Pelicans, who popped up from below the lip of the bluff, right in front of them, riding the air currents climbing the face of the cliff. The birds eyed them disinterestedly before wheeling away, soaring out across the bay.
"Geoff's favorite bird," Rachel remarked. Finn smiled briefly, but grew serious again."
"I still kick myself for not listening to you sing that Christmas present you gave me in the auditorium," he said sadly, "And I wonder what our lives would have been like if I had."
Rachel said nothing. She wondered what would have happened as well. And she realized that, for Finn it could well have meant he would never have met Alice, and never had the children that were enjoying themselves on the beach below, and was it being selfish now to wish for something that would have prevented them from ever existing?
"The thing is, Rach," she smiled, it being the first time he had called her that since meeting up again, "I think I am the only person with that kind of connection to you, and you are the only one with the same connection to me. And I spent the last two weeks arranging a song for piano that I'd like you to hear."
He rose, and grasped her hand, pulling her up. They walked, hand-in-hand, across the lawn to the house, into the living room, where he sat at a baby grand piano. Instead of sitting, Rachel stood where she could see his hands.
"Phil's the only musician in the house," Rachel remarked. "In fact, I gave him his very first lesson." Finn smiled.
"I changed one line to better express what I want to say," he said.
He played a soft introduction, with a gentle, rocking beat, and she enjoyed watching his fingers moving surely over the keys, his head slightly bent forward, eyes closed, nodding slightly to that beat. The song was familiar to her, the beautiful "Fields of Gold", by Sting, and it fit his warm voice perfectly:
So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold
His eyes opened, and he smiled at her for the next verse:
Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in fields of gold
See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold
Then his countenance changed, into sincere regret, tears behind his eyes:
I never made promises lightly
Yet there've been many I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in fields of gold
We'll walk in fields of gold
A catch came to her throat, and she closed her eyes, his regret and commitment travelling straight to her heart, lodging there in a way not even Tom could match, because they never had this kind of pure, undistorted channel.
She let him finish:
Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
He ended beautifully, the piano embracing that gentle beat, coming finally to rest, on velvet.
She couldn't move; his love, transmitted so purely, so undistorted, was still reverberating within her.
"I was never able to do this with Alice," he said, softly. "She would ask me to sing to her all of the time, but she never reacted the way you are now."
Her eyes finally came back into focus. He was looking at her kindly.
"You said you weren't going to try and compete with Alice. But the fact is, you have to feel like you are, just by being with me."
She nodded, silently.
Finn got up and gathered her in his arms. "You aren't competing with her. Our connection is completely different; you just witnessed an example of what we have that Alice and I never shared."
They moved to the couch, and he held her close again.
"Was she like me?" Rachel asked.
"In some ways, yes. She was kind and compassionate, like you. But she didn't have the drive and the artistic talent. She was taller." She giggled and punched his arm, then relaxed in his embrace.
"Will you sing to me all of the time, like you just did" she asked. He nodded.
"Will you write songs with me?" She looked up at him, as she felt his surprise.
"Write songs with you?"
"Yeah. You've done it before. We both have. And you're the only person with whom I could feel comfortable writing."
"What about Tom?" She loved how there wasn't a trace of jealousy in his voice. She shook her head.
"My musical relationship with him is as a performer, an interpreter of his music. I hope to have the same relationship with Nell."
"And with me?" His eyebrows arched, and she could see he was intrigued by the idea.
Rachel felt the stirrings of old, latent feelings. She saw the beginning now of something special, free of the lopsidedness of their past, and with it some of the insecurities, too.
"With you and the connection we have, however," she said, with a dreamy expression, "the possibilities are… endless."
A/N: many thanks to fellow writer henriettaline for her suggestions and encouragement, and to my readers for their patience.
Lyrics are from "Fields of Gold", by Gordon Sumner, AKA Sting
Finn changed the lyric "And there have been some that I've broken" to "Yet there've been many I've broken"