Dave's head still seemed to be spinning the next morning when he kissed Shae goodbye in the parking lot of her high-rise.

What a weekend!

They had eventually gotten up and taken a shower, together. It was good that the apartment building had a huge water heater, because they gave it quite a workout and were wrinkled like prunes when they got out.

The rest of the day went more or less the same. Neither of them managed to get fully dressed all day; mostly they wore robes if they were dressed at all. On two occasions Shae modeled a couple very, very daring swimsuits she'd never worn in public -- the only place it would be possible to wear them would be a nude beach, and why bother there? Predictably, she hadn't worn them long, which was the general idea -- they'd hit the floor on a direct path to the bedroom.

All in all the day was very sensual, filled with laughter and enjoyable touching. Dave was privately of the opinion he'd never had a day to match it before, not even when he and Julie had been on their honeymoon.

In spite of the intense and intensely enjoyable sex, both of them honored their promise to each other, to take the day just for the day, and not try to puzzle out the future -- there would be enough time later. Oh, Dave had his thoughts and concerns -- as he was sure Shae had -- but he was wise enough to keep them to himself, and figured she had made the same decision.

It had even carried on over to the morning. They still hadn't discussed much about what was going to happen in the future, but at least easily agreed they were going to have to keep things on the up and up when she was in Bradford. The fun and games like they'd had on Saturday would have to be kept in her apartment for the time being. Mostly, the decision was for the sake of the boys -- at a minimum, they could see some awkward times coming there, and they both agreed they wanted to put it off a little bit, for the sake of Julie's memory if nothing else.

Everything else -- and that meant everything -- was still up in the air as Dave started the Chevy, gave Shae a final wave goodbye, and headed out into the relatively light Staten Island Sunday morning traffic. They'd known from the beginning he wanted to leave early in hopes of getting home to Bradford before Tyler and Cameron had to go to bed. Still, it was awfully hard to leave and face the long drive with his back to Shae, even though he felt another day like it might have killed him.

Dave settled into the Chevy's seat as he turned into traffic and drove away. This would be a long trip, he was sure, and he was just as sure he was going to be considering things he and Shae hadn't talked about.

For instance, he could easily foresee marrying Shae at some point in the future, probably after next September. He had not mentioned it, and neither had she, but it seemed like a likely course of events. After all, the two of them really liked each other and shared a lot in common -- when you got right down to it, they shared more than he had with Julie. Shae adored the boys, treating them much like they were her own, and they liked her a lot, too. For himself, life with Shae promised to be more interesting than it had been with Julie, since Shae was a different person with a much more broad-based approach to life.

On the other hand, it wasn't a done deal. Dave knew the intimacy that follows a couple's first sex often opens a lot of doors between two people, and occasionally they're doors that really shouldn't be opened. He hadn't seen any sign of it so far -- outside of both of them having sex drives that could kill if they let them get out of hand, something he really hadn't detected in himself before -- but that's not to say something couldn't come up in the future. At least sex and the degree of intimacy weren't hurdles between them anymore.

But even now, there were questions in his own mind about where this would all lead, not the least of them about where they might live. On the surface, it seemed to open a door toward returning to New York, at least as long as Shae were involved in Avalon, which, while she reported it shaky at times, still existed and might for some time.

If it came down to a move back to New York, it would probably have to be in the summer, since he didn't want the boys to have to change schools in the middle of the school year again. Back in the fall, had he taken Shae up on her offer to stay with her, it would have meant her apartment. While it was a nice-sized apartment, bigger in fact than the one in Battery Park he and his family had lived in, after the house in Bradford with its yard and friends and neighbors, it seemed on the small side for the four of them. Oh, they could live in a place like it, people did all the time in New York, but now it seemed a little restrictive.

It didn't mean they had to stay there permanently. It would be very unfair to Shae to have to ask her to live in a place with low ceilings and low door frames after her apartment, though, and few houses had the kind of clearances she needed. If such a decision were made, though, it ought to be easy to solve the problem. There was nothing keeping them from building a new house from the ground up or nearly so, not even money. Even at New York prices, he ought to be able to manage it, if Aaron Tietelbaum were anywhere near close to correct in the estimates of his assets.

On the other hand, Dave was starting to have some doubts about how bad he wanted to return to New York. In fact, if it weren't for Shae, he might well be giving serious consideration to not returning at all. He was beginning to see Bradford had some huge advantages -- his mother being right across the street was one of them, but not the only one. He had more friends -- close social friends -- in Bradford than he'd ever had in New York, at least once he'd gotten out of college. Yes, life was slower there, and that was not all bad. The cost of living was considerably less, especially when you compared it to Manhattan. Yes, Bradford lacked much in the way of social and cultural activities in comparison to New York -- but how much had he and Julie made use of them? For that matter, how much had Shae? Maybe he was still a small-town boy at heart, and maybe she was still a small-town girl, too.

Over the past couple of months, it had become clear it was perfectly feasible for him to do his job from Bradford. Certainly, there were times a face-to-face in the office was useful, but living and working out of the office probably built a barrier to him rising any higher in the organization, say to a departmental chief like Michelle. But, it begged the question, too. Did he want to rise in the organization? If so, why? It wouldn't be for the money, since Michelle wasn't making much more than he was, and even the interest from the money Julie had left him more than offset any pay increase up to Rob's job and maybe even that.

In fact, the money made him wonder just how much he wanted to keep the job, anyway. In recent weeks it had become clear if he were willing to live quietly in Bradford, it would not be necessary for him to work again, ever, so working for the money really wasn't an excuse. He had toyed with the idea of approaching Rob or Dick or Michelle about the idea of continuing his job from Bradford, but on a part-time, contract basis so he'd have more time for the book he was working on. If he had that to supplement his income, the need to work in New York would be even less.

The book was several months away from being completed -- really, he'd only gotten started, the work he'd done on it in the last month had mostly been plotting, background research, thinking through a few problems. He'd written a few scenes, including the opener he'd dreamed up on his trip back the last time, with Andraen chained to the stake at the slave auction, trembling in fear that Garboncias might be the one to buy her, then the relief at being purchased by Mangoel.

While Dave had been thinking of his book as a possible test for a web-based way of evaluating books for print using a pen name, now he wasn't quite as sure he wanted to do it with his own creation. Keeping up his contacts at Dunlap and Fyre seemed like a much better way of getting the book into print and giving it a good start with a minimum of hassle. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to quit his job in the near future -- at least for the next few months, while the situation clarified with Shae, and while he still needed the grounding that the job offered him.

So much depended on Shae, and on Avalon. If the show was still going and she was still involved, getting together with her would obviously mean a return to New York for him. But, just for the sake of thinking it out, what if she'd been right, that some of the rumors about the show not being renewed were true? Would Shae be open to a return to Bradford, too?

It was hard to say. They hadn't talked about it, but it was clearly something that would have to be talked about. Dave could remember her in high school coming right out and saying she didn't want to be a Bradford mom with a house full of kids and a job running a fork truck out at General. But that was then . . . she clearly wanted the kids now, she seemed to enjoy it in Bradford the little she had been there the last few months, and realistically, she would not have to get a job at General unless she really wanted to. She seemed to have retained some of her small-town roots; she enjoyed the friends she still had in Bradford in comparison to the relatively lonely life he now understood she experienced living in New York. There was no way of telling without talking with her about it.

The chance to talk to her about it would be coming soon, he knew. They seemed to have evolved a rotation where he drove to New York one weekend, they took the next one off before she drove to Bradford, and they'd skip another weekend before starting over again. However, with the holidays coming the schedule had to change a little. She'd felt a little guilty about not seeing her folks in Denver in a while, and her family was going to be getting together there for Christmas -- it would be the first time in a couple years she would have seen her brother and her sister. But, she didn't want to miss Christmas with him and the boys, either.

Only in the past couple weeks had the details been worked out. Because of other family commitments, it had been decided the Kirkendahls would have their family reunion with all the details on Saturday and Sunday, the twenty-second and twenty-third. She'd fly out to Denver for it, then fly to Indianapolis on Christmas Eve, where he'd pick her up. She'd stay in Bradford with him for several days, and then they'd both drive back to New York, probably on the first. He'd do his monthly business in New York, then stay with her until Sunday, and drive back. It would mean almost two weeks together, and it would allow a lot of time for some of those issues to clarify -- and, he smiled to himself, some solid opportunities for some rewarding quality time in bed, too.

Traffic began to thin out a little as he got away from the city, although he was pretty sure it would stay fairly steady all the way to Bradford; this was the main route between the city and Chicago, after all. He crossed over into Pennsylvania, passed Stroudsburg and continued on. Though he hadn't driven the route lots and lots, he was familiar with it enough to just follow the highway and run with the traffic while his mind continued to examine some of the revelations of the weekend.

One of the things that bothered him the most when he stopped to think about it was his guilt over what he'd said and done over the course of the weekend. He ought to be feeling he'd been disloyal to Julie, when in fact it was only a distant discomfort. That surprised him -- were the prospects of the future overriding the pain of the past? Or had he just been blinded by the unexpected exciting weekend?

Certainly he had endured enough guilt in the recent past for even harboring thoughts of Shae. Julie was, after all, who he'd pledged his loyalty to, and now she was gone. Did it mean he was ready to pick up a new life or had just overlooked the truth of the past?

No matter what he felt for Shae, he still felt like it was too soon to be messing around with her -- well, at least in public, and they'd decided to minimize it. He remembered the custom of waiting for a year after a spouse's death before remarrying, and under the circumstances it seemed like a reasonable idea. For a few moments, he tried to remember where he'd heard about the custom, but the only thing he could come up with was the "Hornblower" novels of C. S. Forester. It had been a while since he'd read any of them, but he clearly remembered Hornblower had reached an understanding with Barbara only hours after returning to discover that Maria had died, but the two had waited the customary year before posting the banns. How much did a novel about a time nearly two centuries gone have to do with the present day customs? As far as it went, was it still a present day custom? Did it matter?

Yes, he decided after mulling it over in his mind for miles. It did matter. Whatever shape his life may take in the future, whatever may be going on in his private life, Julie deserved that much respect, and frankly a year seemed like about the right amount.

He missed Julie; there was no doubt about it. In fact, he missed her a lot -- it had been strange indeed to wake up next to a naked Shae rather than a night gowned Julie, although he recognized the difference instantly. But somehow this weekend he'd come to the conclusion that his denial that she couldn't really be gone had to be overcome by brutal reality. She was gone, there was no doubt about it, and he was beginning to realize there might not even be any remains to be buried in her home town of Hartford. He and the boys had their lives, and while they needed to remember her with love and respect, it was time to move on. But, there were doubts: was it his heart telling him that, or was it his penis? Whatever happened with Shae, with the boys around, escapades like this weekend could only be rare indeed.

All in all, it was a lot to think about, and he rolled the same issues over and over in his mind until he'd had lunch, gassed up, and was well into Ohio. Finally, he was tired of them to the point where he decided to force himself to think about the book, just for the sake of something different. Andraen was still deep in her training at Mangoel's hand, but it seemed a little static in a book that needed a lot of tension all the time. Could he mess with it a little, perhaps have Mangoel have her take a secret message somehow to someone, and use her nascent powers to escape a trap set by Garboncias?

Thoughts of the book kept Dave pretty well occupied for the rest of the way home. He came up with several plot twists he hadn't considered before, this for a book that was going to have pretty convoluted plot, anyway. For perhaps fifty miles, he gave quite a bit of consideration to going back and working on the description of Andraen, making her extremely tall, like Shae, but dark-haired for the sake of a little differentiation. He rejected the idea in the end, if only because Andraen was going to have to be very stealthy at times, and someone as tall as Shae really did stand out in a crowd. But the idea wouldn't go away . . . perhaps somewhere in the book he could write Shae's size into a character. It kept his mind active without having to listen to the mind-numbing babble on the radio. I'm getting some CDs before I head out the next time, he thought. Maybe some of Dayna and Sandy's . . .

It was well after dark when he pulled into the driveway but not after the boys' bedtime in these days, nearly the shortest of the year. He'd called his mother from near Toledo, to let her know he'd be there before bedtime, so the lights in the house were on. He shut off the car, grabbed his bag, and headed inside, to be met at the door by an excited Tyler and Cameron; JoAnne sat in the background, watching TV. "Daddy, did you see Aunt Shae?" Tyler asked.

"Of course I did," Dave replied. "That was part of why I went, after all."

"I wish we could have gone with you," Tyler said. "It would be so neat to see her again."

"You saw her just a couple weeks ago," Dave said, picking his oldest son up to hug him for a moment. "And you'll be seeing her again in a few days. Has she called yet for your story?"

"No, not yet," Cameron piped up. "I can't wait."

"It won't be long," Dave promised his other son. "So, did you have a good weekend?"

"Kayla came over and played with us this afternoon," Tyler reported as Dave sat him down and picked up Cameron for his hug.

"What did you play?"

"Oh, she taught us some games," Tyler replied. "I think I liked Chutes and Ladders the best."

"Have the two of you had your baths? Are you ready for bed?"

"We are, Daddy. Gramma wanted us to be ready before Aunt Shae calls."

JoAnne came over to them; she'd paused the videotape they'd been watching. "Did you have a good trip, Dave?" she asked.

"Oh, pretty good," he said. "Settled a few things, I think." He wasn't going to go into any more detail with her, not right now, anyway. She needed to know, and pretty soon, the gist of what was coming down between Shae and him, but now wasn't the time and maybe this evening wasn't either. He wondered how she would react. He didn't think she would be sorry to see him get into a relationship with the big girl -- she'd liked her clear back into high school, and had been especially taken with her when she'd stayed at the apartment last fall. If he had to bet, she'd even been doing what she could to grease things along, but still, the notion had to be approached carefully.

Shae called a little later and gave the boys their story. This time, for a change, JoAnne took the boys off to bed while Dave stayed on the phone with her for a few minutes. "I had a chance to think a few things over on the way," he told her. "But now is not the time to talk about it, what with Mom here and the boys still awake."

"Anything serious?" she asked.

"I don't think so," he replied. "Oh, some deep thoughts about things we need to talk about. But nothing that can't wait for a while."

It was good to get things back to normal for a bit, to get back into his routine. He got up in the morning, got the boys around, and took them to school before stopping off at the Spee-D-Mart for his morning cup of coffee and chat with Emily. "So how did the weekend in New York go?" she asked.

"Pretty decent," Dave admitted, of course not getting into the real details. "I wound up taking Shae to the office Christmas party. She got a lot of attention, of course."

"She has the way of doing that," Emily grinned. "Hey, I presume you're going to be around over the holidays, but how about Shae? Is she going to be coming to town again?"

"Yeah, she'll be here for a few days after Christmas. She and the boys have gotten pretty attached to each other, and they think she's a lot of fun. She's been a real big help with everything from the first, a real friend."

"You guys aren't getting serious, are you?" Emily the gossip pried.

"Not really," Dave fibbed. "Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to admit I've thought about it, and I think she has too, but we've both sort of agreed that we need to let it slide for a bit. It's still a little soon, if you know what I mean."

"I suppose you'd want to take your time," Emily smiled, recognizing the fib but not clear what it really meant. She knew she'd find out sooner or later. "Anyway," she continued, changing the subject, "If she's going to be around, how about a few of us getting together some night, maybe a day or two after Christmas?"

"It'd be fun," Dave agreed. After all, the friendships he'd renewed around town was one of the main reasons he'd been considering the idea of moving back permanently at all. "I'm sure she'd want to come. If you timed it right, we might even be able to get Eve and John to show up."

"That would be neat!" Emily exclaimed. "Are they going to be in the area?"

"They're planning on visiting some friends over in Chicago sometime over the holidays," Dave said. "At least that was the plan when I talked with her a month ago. I need to talk to her about a couple things, anyway. I'll ask if they can make it and when."

"Do that," she said, understanding Eve was still helping Dave over his rough spots. "Our time isn't set in stone; we can move it around a little if we need to."

Dave was glad to make it out of the Spee-D-Mart without spilling any of the beans about Shae, or at least not very many of them. He'd been a little surprised he hadn't felt the need to unburden himself to Eve after the events of the weekend, but it would be nice to give her a friendly update. He walked back to the house, booted up the computer, checked his e-mail, and pulled up Maiden of Hvalfjordjur, which was the primary thing on his agenda for the week. The book was all right, but needed a bit more work than his usual projects -- not that he was complaining, since he'd known that was going to be the case when it started.

He was a little startled when the phone went off. Probably Michelle, he thought as he reached for it. I wonder what bundle of snakes landed in her lap this morning. He was surprised to hear Eve's melodious voice on the phone. "So, I hear tell that you had quite a weekend."

"Shae told all, right?" he sighed.

"No, not all," she laughed. "She skipped over the X-rated stuff pretty quickly, but I could read between the lines. In fact, I could read quite a bit between the lines, and it was fairly inspirational. I think I'm going to have to have a little session with John to deal with it. How are you with it, Dave?"

"Actually, pretty decent," he replied. "To be honest, I thought I might feel bummed out about it when I'd had a chance to go over it a little, but really, I haven't been. I thought about it quite a bit on the way home, I mean the why-I'm-not-bummed-out part, and the only conclusion I can come up with is I'm getting my act back together."

"Do you think Shae is pushing too hard?"

"Not really," he replied. "Yes, she's pushing, but I was pushing a little bit, too. It really is still a little too soon, but I think we're coming to terms with it."

"I think you may be, too," she replied. "But I would love to sit down and talk with the both of you some time, just on general principles. I suspect you really haven't aired out all your issues."

"Oh, I'm sure we haven't," Dave told her. "But I don't think there's anything there we can't work out, given a little time. We pretty well agreed we don't want to do anything too major or too public until at least September."

"But things are moving a lot more quickly behind the scenes?" she laughed.

"Let's just say I didn't anticipate what happened this weekend," Dave grinned, leaning back in his chair and putting his feet on his desk. "Not that I'm complaining, mind you."

"I would say that, if you're able to look at yourself in the mirror the next morning, it's nothing to complain about," she laughed. "But I'd still like to sit down with the both of you so I can see the changes with my own eyes."

"Funny you should mention it," he replied. "Not half an hour ago Emily said she wanted to set up a get-together over the holidays. Maybe you two could make it down here around that time and kill several birds with one stone."

"It's not beyond possibility," Eve told him. "When is she talking about?"

"She's loose, sometime in the next few days after Christmas."

"Well, I probably should coordinate it with John. How about if I talk with him and call you tonight? Then you can get back with Emily tomorrow."

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