“Are you packed yet? We need to leave here in the next thirty minutes!” she gave me a warning look then went back to her room.
With our suitcases stuffed into the trunk of the taxi, Chrissy and I drove away from the beach house. I stared out the window as the beach sped past us. I searched the waves for Nick’s figure, but we were moving too fast for me to see anything. I’d tried to find him before we got in the car, but he was gone. I thought about leaving him a note, but couldn’t think of what the right thing to say would be. Sitting in the backseat of the taxi, I rested my head against the window and closed my eyes.
“Are you feeling okay?” Chrissy asked.
“I’m just tired.” I lied to her. I didn’t want to spend the next few hours rehashing all the details of my week with Nick, so I gave in and gave Chrissy what I knew she wanted. “So, where do you think Clark will get a place?”
Chrissy talked excitedly the entire trip home. She talked about Clark in the taxi. She talked about Clark as we waited for our flight. She talked about Clark as we flew from North Carolina back to New York. When we landed in New York, Clark was there to meet her at the airport. He was kind enough to give me a ride home in his car, but spent the ride making out with Chrissy in the seat across next to me.
I would have preferred Chrissy’s commentary.
The driver dropped my bags at the door to the townhouse and I gave him a small tip as a thank you for the ride. As the car drove out of sight, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Ready to be alone in my room, I opened my eyes and opened the door. I dragged my bags upstairs to my bedroom, shut and locked the door, and collapsed onto my bed. All the feelings I’d been suppressing since I woke up that morning welled up inside me and I screamed into the comforter.
I stayed locked in my room for a few hours, trying to work it all out of my system. When I finally emerged from my bedroom, I slipped into the bathroom for a much-needed shower. I washed the last remnants of my vacation, and my encounter with Nick, off me and tried to convince myself that I was done. I’d cried it all out, washed it off me, and was ready to move on.
The next few days were miserable, but I got through them. I still thought of Nick all the time, but I’d finally stopped tearing up every time I did. To try to keep my mind off him, I’d spent a few hours every day working in my classroom. Chrissy had been virtually nonexistent since we’d returned. She sent me a message about how great the place Clark had gotten for her was, but other than that, I hadn’t heard anything from her. To be fair, I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to hear from her. Listening to her talk giddily about how happy she was with Clark seemed like exactly the opposite of what I wanted to hear.
Midway through the week, the sisters decided that the house needed to have one of its famous family dinners. We all gathered in the dining room, at their old family table, and filled each other in on what was happening in our lives. I kept to myself, not feeling in the mood to share my misery with the rest of the house.
“What’s up with you, Miss Cami? You’ve been awfully quiet since returning from the beach this last time.” Henrietta, the oldest sister said teasingly to me from the other end of the table.
I smiled politely, “Nothing new with me, Hen. I’m just trying to get back into the mood for the school year.”
Everyone at the table smiled and nodded at me, but Henrietta raised an eyebrow. The conversation continued to flow around me and I let out a sigh of relief. I’d been a ghost around the house since my return. It’s not as if I was normally a social butterfly, but I did like to spend time in the shared living space. Lately, however, I stayed in my room and stayed by myself.
Later, when we were clearing the plates from dinner, Henrietta cornered me as I filled the dishwasher.
“So, you met a guy, huh?” she said confidently.
A blush immediately burned my cheeks, “No. What makes you say that?”
“You’re not the same girl who left here, so that makes me think that either you met someone or you did something you shouldn’t have.” Hen winked at me. “Of course, you could have done both, but that doesn’t seem like the Cami we’ve come to know.”
When I didn’t deny it, or even look up at her, she must have figured she was right. Before I could stop it, she’d grabbed my arm and dragged me into the library. Renters weren’t allowed in the library, it was one of the few rooms that were off limits.
“Spill it!” she ordered me when the door was shut behind us.
“It’s not that big of a deal, Hen. I just made a mistake, that’s all.” I shrugged casually.
“Cami,” she shifted her weight to one side and looked sternly at me.
I sighed, “Fine! Sit down. It’s going to be a long story.”
I told her almost everything. I didn’t give her any details about our last night together, even though she asked for them repeatedly. I also left out the part about not using protection. She didn’t need to know how much of a mistake I’d made.
“He sounds great. Why didn’t you stay?” she asked when I’d finished my story.
“He lives in LA. What would be the point of staying for one more day?”
She said quietly, “He did offer to get a place here. That means something doesn’t it?”
I sighed and rolled my eyes, “Hen, he wanted me to be his weekend girl. Who knows what he’d be up to in LA during the week? That lifestyle is just not for me!”
She shook her head at me, “Still, you didn’t have to be so cold. You wanted him as much as he wanted you that night.”
I grimaced at her. “You’re really not making me feel any better, Hen.”
She smiled, “Did I ever tell you that I was engaged?”
“No,” I said in surprise.
“Yep,” she smiled sadly. “For two whole days, I was engaged to the most amazing man.”
“What happened?” I asked incredulously. I’d always assumed that Henrietta and her sister Georgia were lifelong spinsters, women who’d never shown any interest in living a different life. Finding out that Hen was engaged was like finding out that your parents used to date other people. It seemed weird and completely out of character.
“He really was an amazing man.” She looked dreamily out the window then turned back with a smile. “He was gorgeous, too.”
I smiled at her as she continued in a dreamy voice.
“We met on the subway one rainy afternoon. He told me he liked my umbrella then chatted me up the whole ride. When we got to my stop, he got off too. I asked him if he lived nearby and he said no, that he actually lived three stops back but didn’t want to end our conversation so he stayed and rode with me. That was it for me! From that moment on, I was hooked on him. We went to fancy dinners. We went dancing. We went for long walks in the park. It was all very romantic. When he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him I didn’t even hesitate before I said yes.” Hen smiled sadly at her own story.
“So what happened?” I asked, entranced by her story.
She sighed, “He wasn’t perfect, but I knew that. He’d told me about his less than virtuous past. He said one look at me had changed him forever.” She rolled her eyes. “Being the innocent girl that I was, I believed him when he said he was changed. Georgie on the other hand, she didn’t believe a word he said. I thought she was just jealous because someone wanted me and not her, but it got me thinking. I started to wonder if a man really could change that easily. I wondered if he was playing me for a fool. I must have stayed up for two days straight, just thinking about all the what ifs. So, when he came looking for me two days later, I wouldn’t come to the door. I sent Georgie out with the ring in a box.”
“You talked yourself out of it? Why?”
She shook her head, “Being as headstrong as I was, I just couldn’t fathom the idea of someone being able to change. A leopard can’t change its spots, my dad used to say that to me all the time, and that’s all I could think about when I looked down at that ring. I didn’t want to end up like some of the ladies in my mother’s tea group, married to a man who couldn’t be faithful and was barely around.”
“Whatever happened to him? Do you even know?” I was still processing everything, but had to know the outcome.
“He eventually got married to a lovely girl from Jersey. They lived a few blocks from here for many years.”
“So he did change after all?”
She shook her head vigorously, “Oh, goodness, no! He turned into a big drunk and notorious skirt chaser! I really dodged a bullet with that one!”
Feeling gypped with the ending, I said, “Thanks for the story, Hen, but I’m not sure it really relates to my situation.” I stood up and took a step towards the door, but stopped when she started talking again.
“The point was, dear, that those two months I spent with him were the best two months of my life and I don’t regret them for a second.” She stood up and walked over to me. She placed a hand on my shoulder and smiled. “If you’re going to be a fool for anything, let it be for love, Cami.”
I shook my head at her, “I’m not in love, Hen. I only knew him for a week.”
“It only takes one spark to start a fire big enough to burn a whole house down to the ground.” She patted my shoulder and left me standing alone in the library.
I’d never allowed myself to say the L word, even in my head. I’d been in love before. I thought. I thought I’d been in love with Jack, but that was different from what I felt with Nick. I had chalked it all up to the excitement of meeting a handsome stranger, but at the mention of the word love my heart beat faster and I felt the room start to spin. Needing support, I plopped down on the nearest chair and closed my eyes.
“It figures,” I said quietly and threw my head back against the back of the chair. “The one time you foolishly hook up with a guy and you fall completely in love with him.”
A miserable week after that, I came home to find Henrietta waiting for me on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms.
“You got a package today!” she said with a big grin.
I reached for it and she pretended to snatch it back from me. Not at all in the mood to play, I gave her my teacher look and she relinquished the package.
“It’s from a ceramics place in North Carolina,” she smiled as she handed the package to me.
My heart raced at the memory of the day we’d painted the ceramic sculptures. All the tiny details of that day flooded my mind. The way it felt when he’d touched my face that morning, the way his scent drifted over to me with the beach breeze, the feeling it gave me when he smiled at me, all the details of that day replayed in my head.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Hen asked excitedly.
I stared at the box in my hands. I knew what would be in it, I’d snuck a peek at it as he handed it to the girl behind the counter, but I just couldn’t bring myself to open it.
“Come on! Open it. I want to see what’s in there!” Hen pushed me to confront what was in the box.
I shook my head, “I’ll open it later. I have some stuff to do.” I carried the box up to my room, set it on the dresser, and sat down on my bed. After a few deep breaths, I stood up and headed for the dresser. My cell phone rang before I could get to it, though. The screen said it was Chrissy calling, and since I hadn’t heard from her in a while, I figured I needed to take it.