Pamela Browning - Life Is A Beach - Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling

“Emote?” Slade said, wary about this new direction she was taking. All he wanted was a wife. He didn’t expect to have to change, and he wasn’t sure where movement fit into this whole thing, and he wanted to feel pleasure, but wouldn’t that come naturally when he found the right person?

“You want to run that by me again?” he said.

“Emotion is a building block,” Karma explained before she took the last bite of her sandwich.

“I see,” he said, turning this over in his mind.

“Are you sure you don’t want one of these tomatoes?” Karma said, shoving the dish across the table at him.

“No, thanks. And just between you and me, I think this whole chakra stuff is a bunch of nonsense.”

Karma stopped conveying a tomato from the dish to her plate and let it drop with a weary thump back into its dish. “Great,” she said. “Fine. See if I try to help you any more.”

“You’re supposed to find me a wife,” he said, losing patience.

Karma started to slide out of the booth. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you understand that this is what our conversation is all about? Don’t you think the fact that you haven’t managed to turn up a likely candidate so far might have something to do with some kind of—of mind block?”

“I don’t see the connection,” Slade said honestly and a little desperately as he slapped a large bill on the table and followed Karma as she charged out of the restaurant.

“You wouldn’t, since your chakra has for all intents and purposes shut down,” Karma said. Her long legs ate up the sidewalk as she barged her way through bunches of blondes and a gaggle of tourists all gawking and talking excitedly.

Slade caught up with her. “You told me that I’m supposed to express emotion. Wouldn’t you say I’m expressing emotion by telling you how I feel about all this chakra-babble?”

She slanted a look toward him. “What do you think emotion is?” she shot back.

He had to think about this for a moment, but the answer seemed clear enough. “Well, I’d say that emotions are instinctual reactions,” he said.

She seemed taken aback, surprised at his response. “Okay. At least you know one when you see one,” she conceded. “That’s a start. To take it a bit further, our feelings are our unconscious reaction to situations or events. We organize our feelings through emotion. We can choose the way we react to emotions, but the feelings themselves are quite separate.”

Karma had slowed her pace was now walking almost sedately at his side.

“My emotional response to all this is that you and me should go in one of these bars and discuss this over a drink or two.” Karma looked at him with rank skepticism. “So I can learn more about this,” he amended.

Ahead of them, a group of people spilled out onto the sidewalk from a neon-lit doorway. “How about here?” he said.

He thought he might be becoming more sensitive to others’ emotions when he recognized a whole raft of them flitting across Karma’s mobile features. Confusion, distrust, sheer terror—not to mention a brief blip of yearning over-laid with what he thought might be desire. But desire for what? For a beer? For his company? For more, even, than that?

“We can stop for a drink,” she said. “I don’t want to be out late, that’s all.”

He took her elbow, and she tensed as if she might shake his hand loose although she did not. They made their way into the club, where hot salsa music accompanied scantily clad bodies gyrating on a minuscule dance floor. Karma slid into a booth, and he slid in beside her.

“How do you know so much about all this chakra stuff, anyway?” he asked her after they’d ordered drinks.

She smiled at the waiter as he slid her glass of white wine toward her. “I guess you could say I was born into the territory. My parents met on a commune in the late sixties. My sisters and I were raised on soybeans, sprouts, tofu and a lot of other things that you’ve probably never heard of. Chakras, yoga, the freedom to be you and me, and so on. Commune life ended when we all had to go to school and they moved us to Connecticut where my father got a job in an aircraft factory.”

“That sounds normal enough,” he allowed.

“Oh, but there’s more. Life in suburbia was modified by my parents’ history. Jewish woman married to an Irish Catholic and spending their marriage’s first years grubbing around in an organic garden equals not just your ordinary family.”

“Are your sisters like you? Do they have unusual names like yours?”

“My oldest sister is named Azure, the youngest one is Isis, and the middle one is Mary Beth.”

“Karma, Azure, Isis, and Mary Beth?” he said, smothering a chuckle at the incongruity of it.

Karma picked up on his amusement. “Go ahead. Laugh if you want to. We’re used to it.”

“Where did the Mary Beth come from?”

“Mary Beth was named after the midwife who rode five miles on a snowmobile to deliver her. Consequently, Mary Beth has always considered herself lucky that she was born in the middle of the worst winter storm to hit upstate New York in twenty-three years.”

“Are their occupations as interesting as yours?”

“Isis is married to a dentist and they’re raising his three sons by his first wife, all model students and soccer enthusiasts. Azure is a management consultant based in Boston. Mary Beth is a rabbi. I love to ride by her synagogue and see ‘Mary Beth O’Connor, Assistant Rabbi’ on the sign outside. I imagine that the unexpected juxtaposition of our Irish surname to the title of assistant rabbi merits a few second glances from passersby.” Karma grinned.

Slade laughed. He couldn’t help but be charmed by this woman with her tumultuous hair, offbeat personality, and unusual background. It occurred to him that he hadn’t met an interesting woman in ages. Years. It was why he had come to Miami Beach. It was why he had signed up with a dating service.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I’d say we’ve pretty much covered that during the interview.”

“Not about your childhood. Or your family,” she pointed out.

Slade took a sip of his beer before answering. “Grew up in Okeechobee City, went to college, worked the rodeo circuit for a while and eventually came back to run the family ranch. My dad is ready to retire from ranching. He and Ma can’t wait until I come home with my fiancée so they can do some traveling.”

“This fiancée you hope to find,” Karma said carefully. “Do your parents have right of refusal? I mean, what if they don’t like her?”

“They’ll like anybody who decides to put up with me. They’re so eager for a daughter-in-law that they’d accept the bride of Frankenstein if she’d marry me.”

“I hope I can do better for you than that,” Karma said seriously.

He was about to say, I hope you can, too. However, he looked at Karma, really looked at her in that moment, and something in her expression made him bite back the words. He thought she looked regretful, even a trifle upset.

“Now about the way I move,” he said after they had watched the dancers for several minutes. “Why don’t you let me show you that I know how?”

She regarded him with a puzzled expression. “Excuse me?”

“Let’s dance. In the interest of freeing up my chakra, of course.”

“Don’t make fun of it,” Karma said sharply. “If you don’t believe in the theory, fine. Lots of people do, that’s all.”

“I guess I need to know more about it before I make up my mind. But for now, what about dancing?”

Karma bit her lip. “Well,” she said. “I was thinking it was time for me to go home.”

“You won’t turn into a pumpkin, Cinderella. Humor me.”