Authors: Gina Hummer
Charlotte nodded, her heart racing with dread. “Sure. I understand. Things to take care of. I get it.”
“I’ve just got to deal with something. Won’t take more than a day or two at the most.”
Charlotte felt tears spring to her eyes. Not wanting him to see her cry, she jumped off the couch in search of a donut. “David, its fine.” She found the donut box and ripped into it. “Besides, I need a few days to myself anyway. You know, get home, water the plants, check my mail----- that sort of thing. You go and do whatever it is you need to do.”
David sighed and stood up. “Charlotte, it’s not what you’re thinking----”
“What am I thinking?” she cut him off, as she tore off a chunk of donut.
David’s shoulders slumped. “Listen, it’s just something I need to tend to. I’ll meet up with you back in L.A. and we’ll finish planning our trip.”
“Oh, yeah right; our trip,” Charlotte said.
David sighed. “Come on, Charlotte. Stop acting like this. You’re scaring me.”
“I just don’t understand what the big secret is and why you can’t tell me. God knows we’ve told each other just about everything since we’ve been here.” She paused. “Haven’t we?”
“Yes, yes of course, but this is…it’s just something I need to do, okay? Please, I’m asking you to just give me a few days.”
Charlotte took a deep breath and put the donut on the counter. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s just with the phone calls and something you obviously don’t want to talk about, and now this…” her voice trailed off. “It’s just all very mysterious and weird, and I’m just not sure what to make of it.”
David drew her into his arms. “Sweetheart, I swear---- just a few days.” He kissed the top
of her head before he looked deep into her eyes. “You trust me?”
Charlotte stared at him a moment before pressing her lips against his. Finally she pulled back and nodded. “Yes. I do.”
#
That night David and Charlotte made love with zealous intensity. No words were spoken. No double entendres. No jokes. Just mad, passionate love. The next morning; they woke early, as Charlotte had agreed to take David into town to rent a car to drive back to L.A. for his mysterious mission. They kept conversation to light topics before they set off. Charlotte turned the oldies station on, and they both listened to the radio, not saying much. Charlotte pulled up to the rental agency and turned off the car. They sat in silence.
“So I’ll call you in a few days, and I’ll meet you at your place.”
Charlotte nodded, afraid to speak for fear of her voice squeaking.
David turned to Charlotte and traced the outline of her jaw with the tip of his index finger. He smiled. “The next few days will be torture, being away from you.”
Charlotte managed a feeble smile. “Right.”
David leaned over and gave Charlotte a kiss, and she swore she felt her heart fracture into a million pieces right in her chest. They broke away from each other, and Charlotte looked down.
“Guess it’s time to pick up the car,” David said.
Charlotte touched his hand. “David, please drive carefully,” she whispered.
David grabbed the back of Charlotte’s neck and looked into her eyes. “I will. I promise.
Charlotte clamped her hand around David’s wrist and nodded, not sure how much longer she’d be able to keep her steely resolve.
David opened the door of the Jeep and looked down at her. “I love you,” he said.
She nodded.
With one last look, David gave her a small wave before he headed inside. Charlotte sat there for a moment, stunned. A single tear slid down her cheek, and she started the car.
She cried all the way back to the cabin.
CHAPTER 7
Charlotte put on a brave face for the ladies over the next two days. She told them that David had some business to tend to but was vague about the details. They seemed to sense she didn’t want to talk about it, so they let her be.
Memories of him ---- his scent, his taste, the way he would double over whenever he found something particularly funny, the way he moved inside her when they made love ---- were all stuck on repeat inside her head. He’d pleaded with her to trust him that everything would be okay and Charlotte was holding on to that slim hope, slippery though it was between her fingers. If only he’d told her what was going on…
On the last day Charlotte half-heartedly packed in preparation for the trip back to L.A. There was a knock on the door. Charlotte’s heart leaped.
“David,” she whispered as she ran to the door, all sins, real or imagined, forgiven.
She threw the door open and tried to hide her disappointment when she saw Karen and Hendra standing there.
“Oh, hey guys,” she said with forced enthusiasm.
“Jeez, you’d think we showed up with a batch of cholera to pass on to her,” Karen snorted her hand on her hip.
“Karen and I were wondering if you’d take a walk with us before you got on the road,” Hendra said.
Charlotte twirled a strand of hair around her finger. “Well, I’ve got a lot of packing to ----”
Karen rolled her eyes and yanked Charlotte outside. She yelped and was barely able to close the door behind her before the forced stroll.
“What’s this all about?” Charlotte asked, annoyed.
“What’s going on with you and Mr. Wonderful? Where did he run off to?” Karen demanded.
“I already told you. He had to head back to L.A. for some business.”
Hendra shook her head. “Seems a little abrupt. I mean, you two seemed to be getting on quite well, like you’d known each other for years. In fact he seems pretty crazy about you.”
The trio came upon some benches near the boathouse. Charlotte winced and tried not to let memories of that rainy night flood her brain. They sat down.
“So are you meeting up in L.A. or what?” Karen demanded.
Charlotte swallowed and nodded. “Yeah, in a few days, once he’s done with his business. And he wants me to go to Canada with him for a movie shoot and then to New York for a premiere.”
Did he still?
Hendra let out a low sigh, and Karen clucked her tongue. Charlotte crossed her arms in a defensive gesture. She wouldn’t have been in the mood for this, no matter what the circumstances.
“Alright, Karen, whatever it is you have to say, spill it.”
“Listen. You know I was all for you gettin’ your groove on, though it seems it’s gone a little past that,” Karen stole a quick glance at Hendra. “And like she said, it seems like the guy is pretty crazy about you. But now you’re headed out into the real world.”
“And?”
Karen shifted in her seat. “And so now it’s a whole different ballgame. When this man gets a haircut, it’s in the paper. Every time he does a film, the tabloids wag that he’s screwing everyone on the set. Are you ready to be a part of that? People being in your business all the time?”
Charlotte was silent, deciding to let Karen continue with her rant.
“Do you know how you’re going to react when someone says you’re old enough to be his mother? Or call you a cradle robber, or a leopard?”
“Cougar,” Charlotte and Hendra corrected her in unison.
“Fine, cougar, whatever…You’ve never had to deal with this before. People are going to crawl up your ass with a flashlight. You got a mild taste of it in town, and it bothered you so much you brought him here to hide out.”
Silence fell over the group. Tears began to roll down Charlotte’s face.
“What is it?” Hendra asked.
“Do I look like a fool?”
Hendra took Charlotte’s hand. “No, dear. The heart wants what it wants. You shouldn’t have to defend it. Unfortunately, you both will have to.”
Charlotte sniffed. She was afraid to tell them she was already questioning her involvement with David. She decided it would keep. She wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve and stood.
“Well, I appreciate you ladies showing so much concern, but I’ll fine.”
One way or another.
Hendra stood and gave Charlotte a fierce hug. “You know how much we love you, right?”
“Even Karen?” Charlotte joked.
Karen joined the hug. “Only on my good days.”
#
Charlotte let out a groan as she got out of the Jeep and stretched her cramped limbs. It had been a difficult drive between an unexpected patch of traffic on the 10 and memories of David brought on by the oldies station; Charlotte was ready to stick a fork in the day. She frowned as she looked at the droopy multi-colored flowers that filled the small, fenced-in front yard. She unlocked the black door to her white, one-story bungalow with blue shutters and sighed. She knew that she should do some gardening to keep her mind off David, but the truth was that all she wanted to do was fall into bed with a pint of Rocky Road.
Charlotte spent the next hour going through mail, unpacking, and changing the sheets on her bed before submerging herself in a bath filled with jasmine-scented bubbles. She kept her cell phone perched on the bathroom counter, her ear trained for a ring. It had already been nearly three days since she’d dropped David off at the rental place, and he’d promised it wouldn’t be more than a day before he called. She sighed as she examined her breasts beneath the soapy cobwebs. He’d thought them flawless. Charlotte closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the slippery tile, trying not to succumb to the tears shimmering just below the surface of her eyelids.
Suddenly, the shrill pierce of her cell phone punched the air. She jerked up and scurried out of the tub, bubbles floating through the air, water sloshing over the sides and onto the rug. She grabbed it, hoping it hadn’t gone to voicemail. She didn’t even bother to look at the caller ID.
“Hello?” she shouted.
“Charlotte? It’s Karen. Just wanted to make sure you got back to L.A. okay.”
Her bottom lip began to quiver, but Charlotte composed herself. “Oh, yeah, about an hour or so ago. Did you make it back to San Francisco yet?”
“Got a few more hours ahead of me. Listen, you seemed a little out of it before you left. I just wanted to check on you, see how you were.”
Charlotte leaned against the counter, soap bubbles dripping down her body to the floor, goose bumps beginning to sprout all over her legs and arms. “Oh, I’m fine. You know, I think just the emotion of everything got to me a little bit. But I’m okay. Really.”
“You heard from David?”
“Um, no, not yet, but I will,” Charlotte said more for herself than Karen.
Karen didn’t say anything, and Charlotte knew she was holding her tongue. “Okay. Well, have a good night, and talk to you soon.”
“Thanks, Karen.”
Charlotte hung up and drained the bathtub. She hadn’t gotten much relaxation out of it anyway.
#
Nighttime droned on in a long, gaping maw. Charlotte found an old Lean Cuisine pasta dinner hiding in the back of her freezer, and pain stabbed at her heart at the flash of remembrance over the dinner David had prepared for her birthday. She wasn’t normally a TV person, but she comforted herself with reruns of the “Friends,” unable to cope with the eerie quiet of her house. She downed a few glasses of wine and obsessively checked her cell phone every few minutes, willing it to ring.
At midnight, an exhausted Charlotte trudged off to bed. She brought her phone with her, something she had never done and set it on the nightstand, careful to position it as close to her ear as possible. She flopped down on her stomach, afraid of the tears she knew were coming.
There was no stopping the deluge.
#
The first thing Charlotte did the next morning was check her phone. No missed calls---- no voicemails. She let out a heavy sigh and wearily got out of bed. She would lick this. She’d licked worse. Charlotte would outsmart this pit of despair gnawing at her insides. It had been a delicious fantasy. Maybe she’d turn it into a book one day. That thought cheered Charlotte up slightly as she set about getting her house back in order after having been gone for a month. Fortified by two cups of coffee, she paid bills, scrubbed her house from top to bottom, and made out her grocery list. She’d even decided to spend some time gardening that afternoon.
By the time Charlotte left for the store, she was humming. The sun was out, the sky was blue and brilliant, and the birds were chirping. It would be a glorious day. She’d make sure of it.
Because it was the middle of the day, the grocery store was practically empty except for a few elderly women doing their daily shopping and some moms with kids going cuckoo for Coco Puffs. Ignoring them all, Charlotte set out to fill her cart with all sorts of goodies that she never used to buy: exotic cheeses, fresh pasta, hunks of salmon, bulbs of garlic, and stalks of firm green asparagus. After an hour when she was ready to check out, she pulled up behind a frazzled mom who kept finding items in her cart that her two kids had dumped in when she hadn’t been looking. Charlotte didn’t even let it bother her as she casually scanned the items in her own cart, pleased with her purchases.
While she was humming to herself, her eye fell upon the magazines in the rack next to her, the usual trash. And then her eyes got wide as she saw David with a tall, skinny blonde on the cover of one. She felt the color drain from her face as she read the headline, which screamed out at her in bold, yellow block letters:
REUNITED! DAVID KING AND OLIVIA HUDSON REKINDLE ROMANCE!
Charlotte snatched the paper and stared at the photo. There was David with one arm around the waist of starlet Olivia Hudson, the other raised to shield his eyes from the paparazzi’s flashes. Olivia wore a broad smile and faced the cameras directly, her porcelain white teeth gleaming beneath her pale pink lipstick. Trembling, Charlotte tossed the rag on top of her groceries and gripped the edge of the shopping cart in order to keep herself upright. She licked her lips and felt the salt of her tears begin to sting her eyes.
“Ma’am? Are you ready?”
Charlotte blinked at the checker, who stood there staring at her, waiting for Charlotte to unload her cart.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” Charlotte said as she started to dump her food, unseeing, onto the conveyer belt. Charlotte mechanically wrote a check and refused assistance out to her car. Once locked inside her Jeep, Charlotte struggled to keep it together until she got back to her house, that’s when she would read the article. She arrived home by rote and quickly grabbed her bags and dropped them on the counter before she started digging through them in search of the tabloid. She yanked it out and flipped to the page with the story about David and Olivia. Plump tears poured from her eyes, blurring the newsprint. She forced herself to read the article: