We knocked heads reaching down to pick them up.

Then burst out laughing.

If only making things up to Ice could be so simple.

After Kelly had left, thanking me profusely and apologizing yet again about the rapidly swelling knot on my head, I poked my head into the kitchen and smiled down at Ruby who was studiously working on a crossword puzzle and drinking coffee. "Thanks."

She looked up, her eyes magnified behind the reading glasses she wore for close work. "For letting you use the study? You're welcome, but you really didn't need to ask."

"Well, for that too. But really, thanks for spreading the word that I was a teacher. I was worried about not having a job, and you helped me get one."

"Wish I could take the credit for that one, Tyler, but I really haven't told anybody anything about you or Morgan. It's up to you to share whatever you want with them. It's none of their business, otherwise."

"But if you didn't ... ."

But even as I asked, I knew. Knew it with every fiber of my being. Knew there was only one person who would go to such lengths to assure my happiness.

Ice.

If my lover ever made it home that fateful evening, I don't know. We've never spoken of it, even to this day when so much water has gone over, under and around the bridge that spans our life together.

All I know for sure is that she hadn't returned when at last my eyes rebelled against my edict to stay open or else, leading me down into a fitful sleep filled with night terrors. If she came to my bed to soothe my dreams, I never woke to feel it, and when I awoke the next morning, she was gone from the house as if she'd never been. Even Ruby didn't know; or if she did, she wasn't talking.

The only thing that stilled my fears, if only by the tiniest of measures, was that her room was exactly as she'd left it, all her possessions stored away with the almost military precision so characteristic of her. How I resisted the almost overwhelming impulse to bury my face in the lone T-shirt that lay at the bottom of her hamper, I'll never know, but with a firm resolution I thought near lost, I turned from the room, determined to track her down and settle the lingering business between us.

I should have known that trying to hunt down a woman who was, in her former life, a Mafia assassin was a fruitless task at best, but with a stubbornness that would have done my father proud, I searched almost every square inch of the town in the hopes of finding my deliberately missing lover.

And came back empty-handed and heavy-hearted to the place where it all started; the half-built cabin by the lake.

She sat near the cornerstone, her back pressed flat against the foundation, one leg cocked, the other resting flat against the ground. A pine needle twirled and whirled between long fingers as she looked down over the path which led to a lake which was whipping up whitecaps in response to the wind's intermittent gusts.

Thunderheads stacked, a child's block castle, one atop the other far across the water, but I sensed that the tempest brewing beneath the gathering clouds could well give the encroaching storm quite a run for its money.

I stared at her for long moments, running opening gambits through my mind as I tried to ignore the fact that she was ignoring my presence. The coward in me wanted to run and hide, but the woman my lover had helped develop stood her ground, wanting nothing more than to breach the walls my own words had erected around her heart.

An apology, no matter how heartfelt and brimming with tearful promises, seemed much too shallow a thing to give.

Finally, the wind whipping the forest around us into a frenzy, I stepped forward, breaking the palpable distance between us. "Thanks," I said simply, too soft to be heard over the wind's howling cry, yet knowing she would hear it anyway.

She turned to me then, and the look in her eyes, one of absolute resignation, tore at my heart more than any angry recrimination ever could. "For what?"

Swallowing against the feelings her expression was engendering in me, I took a step closer, then stopped once again. "For sending Kelly my way. That was an incredibly wonderful thing to do, especially for someone who treated you the way I did."

Lifting her shoulder in a half-hearted shrug, she nimbly leapt to her feet and pushed off of the foundation. "Glad it helped."

She closed the distance between us and moved to brush by me. In a sudden fit of what I can only describe as insanity, I reached out and grabbed her forearm to keep her from passing. She stopped, then turned, then looked down at my hand on her arm. Then looked into my eyes, her own flashing a message that even the most slow-witted among us could easily divine.

Snatching my hand quickly away, I opened my mouth to say something, anything, when the strangest sensation came over me. The wind, which up until then had been changing directions as if trying to make up its mind which way it wanted to blow, stopped suddenly. Every hair on my body then lifted and a curious, and not very pleasant, tingle erupted along my nerve endings.

The next thing I knew, I was being borne to the ground, covered by a living blanket of protection as something fast and bright and loud and stinking of burned wiring exploded all around me, deafening me to anything else.

Then something, I didn't know what, collapsed down on top of us, driving the breath from my lungs, and when my head impacted with the cement foundation behind me, everything went black and silent once again.

When I awoke, it was to the sound of a heavy rain rattling off of the plastic tarp which covered the partially finished roof of the cabin.

At least, that's where I thought I was. With a head that felt like day six of a five day bender, and a chest that wondered if it had been used as a Chicago Bears tackling dummy some time in the recent past, I could have been trapped within a plastic bag and not known the difference. Or cared much, really.

After a moment, it occurred to me that opening my eyes might be a good idea, and so I did. Then closed them quickly when four of everything stared back at me through a blurry mist.

Something brushed against my head and I jumped, then immediately regretted it as the world around me spun threateningly out of control for a long moment. My stomach instantly rebelled, but thankfully, there wasn't anything in it, and so after a moment, it grudgingly settled back down.

When I was quite sure that everything that was in my body was going to stay there-and for a moment there, it looked like my brains were lobbying hard for an exit through my ears-I chanced opening my eyes again. When the blurriness cleared, I saw Ice looking down at me, concern etched clearly in every line of her face. I smiled weakly. "Hey."

"You alright?" she asked, the look in her eyes belying the gruffness of her voice.

"As soon as you give me the license plate number of the truck that hit me, yeah." When she didn't rise to the bait-- and poor as it was, I didn't blame her--I sighed, shifting a little. "I'm fine. Really."

The touch to my head came again, and this time I recognized it for what it was, Ice's hand stroking through my hair. I then realized that the hard surface my head was pillowed upon was, in fact, her thigh. I resisted the urge to snuggle, not knowing how things were between us, even given the relative intimacy of my current position. "What happened?"

"Lightning strike. It hit the big pine next to the house and one of the limbs came down on us." She shifted a little, and I caught a carefully controlled, and almost hidden, look of pain cross her face for the briefest of moments.

"You're hurt."

"I'm fine."

"But ... ." I struggled to sit up, a truly hopeless task as her free hand rested itself on my chest, anchoring my body to the floor.

"I'm. Fine."

If the tone of her voice hadn't gotten through, the look in her eyes certainly finished the job, and so I obediently settled back down on her thigh. After a moment, her hand began to stroke my hair again, softly, doing more for my pounding headache than an entire mountain of painkillers. Chancing things, I reached up and covered the large hand which rested on my chest, giving it the briefest of squeezes. "Thank you for saving my life. Again."

That got the reaction I was looking for, a small, wry smile that even reached the blue of her eyes. "Comes with the job."

I could feel my eyebrows raise behind the fringe of my hair. "Job?"

Her smile deepened minutely. "Someone's gotta look after you. Might as well be me."

I returned her smile with a rueful one of my own. "Hard job, sometimes. The working conditions aren't always the best. And the salary sucks." I swallowed hard against the tears closing my throat as the conversation suddenly took on a deeper meaning.

Her hand left my hair, and I felt her knuckles as they gently grazed against the skin of my cheek. "Maybe. But the experience it's given me is something I wouldn't trade for all the money in the world."

The tears came then, rolling hot and heavy down my cheeks and dampening the hand which continued to gently stroke my skin. "I'm so sorry, Morgan. I ...I don't know what came over me yesterday. I didn't mean those words I said. Not one of them. God ...I'm ...I'm sorry." When had words suddenly become so inadequate? How could they cut to the bone one minute, and become anemic the next?

Giving in to my misery, I shifted to my side, curling up in a fetal ball and pressing my heated face up against her lower abdomen, sobbing my heart out like a small child.

She said nothing, just continued to stroke my hair, letting me get out everything trapped inside, her very presence telling me more about her love for me than any words spoken ever could.

Finally emptied of the poison inside, I rolled back onto my back and looked up at her through tear-swollen eyes. "Can you ever forgive me?"

Reaching down, she brushed her finger tenderly against my lips. "Yes," she whispered.

The relief that ran through me was nothing short of dizzying. "Thank you."

She smiled at me, then gathered me close, and we waited out the storm in comfortable silence.

Summer was rapidly drawing to a close, and with it, our time under Ruby's generous, if sometimes intrusive, hospitality. The cabin was almost complete, needing only a few finishing touches to make it into the home I had dreamed of for so long.

On a certain summer's morning, I made my way into town on an errand for Ice, to retrieve a particular tool she had left back at Pop's garage. Walking down the main street, my curiosity was caught, as it often was, by the open door of The Silver Pine. Ruby had filled my head with stories of the new owner's many eccentricities, and so I decided that a quick detour to assuage my curiosity would be just the ticket for my somewhat mischievous mood.

Arriving at the front door, I was just about to poke my head in for a quick look around when a large chartreuse mountain collided with me, sending me back into the courtyard, my arms flailing to keep my balance.

"Are you alright, dear?" the mountain asked in a thick Bronx accent. "I wasn't expecting any visitors this time of the day. Do I know you from somewhere? You seem terribly familiar to me. The Hamptons, perhaps?"

Completely taken aback, I could only stare dumbly at the woman as she peppered me with her rapid-fire inquisition. Not even in prison had I ever seen a woman quite so large. She easily topped even Ice's six foot-plus frame and was perhaps three or four times as wide. All done up, from head to toe, in blinding pink made her a true sight to behold, and behold it I did, my jaw slack with amazement.

Her body was literally dripping with jewels-faux or real I couldn't tell-and gaudy ones at that. Rings adorned every finger and hideous broaches attached themselves, like leeches, to her massive chest. A heavy cloud of perfume wafted from her, trapping me in its none-too-fragrant net. I rubbed my nose against the urge to sneeze.

Underneath one massive arm peeped the head of a tiny dog of indeterminate ancestry, though I guessed, by its white fluffiness, that poodle was buried somewhere deep within the mix. Just how deep, I couldn't tell. Its brown beady eyes bulged at me and I was treated to the sight of needle-sharp teeth and a curled tongue, leading me to believe, in my fuzzy-headed way, that perhaps a rat was also among this creature's less-than-noble forbearers.

Returning my stare look for look, the woman tilted her head, her eyes wide with a compassion that is only seen in the truly snobbish. "Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. Are you deaf as well?" she asked at a decibel level which could have broken window glass several miles away. "Forgive me for my mistake. You just look so normal."

Resisting the urge to toss out a snappish retort, I instead gave her a gracious smile. "I can hear. I was just ...startled."

She brought her free hand up to her chest, her many bracelets tinkling discordantly with her exaggerated movements. "Oh, isn't that a relief! And here I thought we'd have absolutely no way of communicating."

I just smiled. And nodded. A lot.

"Where are my manners?" she asked after another uncomfortable pause. Sticking out a hand, she engulfed one of my own, pumping vigorously. It was like shaking hands with cold, wet bread dough. And that would be insulting to the dough. "My name is Millicent Harding Post. Hard on the 'T', dear, as in 'tittilating'." She chirped a bird-like laughter through ruby red lips.

Disengaging my hand, I resisted the urge to wipe it off on my shorts. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Post," I replied, making sure to stress the 'T'.

"Oh please, dearie. We're all friends here, aren't we? Millicent will do just fine. And you are?"

"Tyler Moore."

Her eyes, magnified behind half-glasses, widened comically. "Oh you poor, poor dear. What were your parents thinking?"

Probably the same thing your parents were when they decided to name you "Millicent" you pompous old windbag. Not that I said that aloud, of course. Though, to be perfectly honest, there was a moment there where I was sorely tempted. I smiled in wry acknowledgement of her false pity, and steered the conversation into another, and hopefully safer, direction. "Are you the new owner of The Silver Pine?"

Millicent turned to look over one meaty shoulder at the building in question, then turned back to me. "Unfortunately, yes. It's been my cross to bear since Mother Carmody passed on."

"I'm sorry for your loss."

She flapped a hand at me. "Don't be, dear. Why, I didn't even know I had an aunt until some lawyer in a monkey suit and California tan darkened my doorstep one morning and told me the old bat had kicked off, leaving me saddled with this useless pile of wood." She shook her head, a true martyr to the cause, then fondly patted her dog's head, engulfing the poor thing entirely with the size of her hand. I briefly wondered if she was giving it a concussion. "I was sorely tempted to just sell the thing and be done with it, but Puddles here told me that she'd like a chance to see how the other half lives, and so off we came. Isn't that right, Puddles? Of course it is. You're mama's little sweetums, aren't you."

Just when it appeared that "mama's little sweetums" was going to add some additional breathing holes to mama's little nose in retaliation for squeezing its innards out of its ears, Millicent pulled away and grinned at me, her capped white teeth bloody with smeared lipstick. "Isn't she just the sweetest little thing you've ever seen in your life?"

I took in the bulging eyes, the pointy teeth, the curled tongue, and the muzzle now smeared red by Millicent's kisses. "Oh yes. Very sweet." I surreptitiously checked my own nose just to see if it had grown.

She tilted her head once again. "Are you sure we haven't met before? I never forget a face, and yours is very familiar to me."

"Well, I come into town quite often ... ?"

Flapping her hand at me again, she shook her head. "No, not here, dearie. Unless they're paying customers, I never notice anyone here. You're one of us, yes?"

"Excuse me?"

"One of us, dear. An American. Not one of those ... Canadians. I thought I detected a bit of a Midwestern drawl to your speech."

The way she looked at me, I knew I'd just been called a hick, though in the most polite of ways. "I was born in the United States," I allowed.

She nodded triumphantly. "She was right then."

I looked hard at her, trying to process the non-sequitor. "Who was right?"

"Why, Puddles, of course. She told me I'd meet a charming young American today, and what do you know? I have!"

I spared a brief moment wondering if perhaps her perfume contained some mind-altering chemical, because the conversation was taking on a decidedly strange bent.