The One That Got Away (3 page)

“Thanks. My mom painted that.”

He shoots me a startled glance over his shoulder. “Seriously? She was really talented.” His informed use of the past-tense verb is the first acknowledgment, all evening, of the fact that he and I have ever had any interaction more personal than a passing conversation at one of Danny's get-togethers.

The ache blooms, right below my rib cage, as it always does when I think of her. “Yes, she was. Well, I'm at the end of the hall if you need anything,” I say, then feel heat creep up my throat as I realize that not only does he already know from personal experience exactly where my bedroom is, but it sounds as though I have just invited him there. All that was missing was a sexy lift of my eyebrows and a slow-motion lip-lick.

“But, um, you should be all set here,” I add, stumbling over my embarrassment. “The bathroom's right through that door.”

He smiles, politely ignoring my discomfort. “Thanks, Sarina. I'll see you in the morning.”

“Sleep tight,” I say, and pull his door shut behind me.

In my rush to enclose myself in the privacy of my bedroom, I trip over a pair of boots I'd left lying by the door.
“Chrrrrrist,”
I mutter, and belly flop onto my unmade bed. If Eamon really is moving back to town, he's good enough friends with Danny that I'm going to be seeing a fair amount of him, so I have got to quit with the staring and the blushing.
Especially
the blushing. Addressing it directly is out of the question—we have too little history together, and it's too long ago, for it to even merit a clearing-the-air conversation. Admitting that it's still on my mind would do more harm than simply continuing to stand on the carpet it's swept under. I'm over it—I just have to make sure from now on that I act like it.

Dread pulls me out of sleep the next morning like a kid tugging on my shirtsleeve. When my eyes snap open, I remember: I've got my one-night stand as a houseguest. And I am apparently supposed to spend the day Miss Daisying his ass all over Austin as a prelude to helping him renovate a house I have neither time nor inclination to work on.

I stack my hands under my head and trace my eyes along the wood beams traversing the ceiling of my bedroom. They were hidden under a grid of yellowed acoustical tile until Danny and I got our hands on the place. As I study them, I wonder how serious Eamon is about renovating. It's the kind of thing that sounds like fun to people unfamiliar with the process—you get to pick all kinds of cool stuff and totally customize your space to your own taste. But although he said he wants a fixer, the reality is that a young, single guy is much better suited to a place he can move right into.

It also occurs to me that, if he really does want an architect's help with the project, he could probably find a less awkward candidate than a woman he slept with once upon a time. Ancient history or not, there's no way around the fact that we've done
things to each other's bodies that have no place whatsoever in a business relationship. Unless, of course, I'm the only one who remembers the details.

I wholeheartedly wish I
didn't
remember them.

When we met, I was new to Austin, having only been living with Danny in his tumbledown Barton Hills split-level for a few months. He would
not
shut up about his old roommate Eamon, God's gift to backstroke and butterfly (“Nobody can compete in both of those strokes, Sarina! Nobody!”), who was so cool, so funny, so talented, oh, and had he mentioned he was also hot like sun flare? This being before my forced indoctrination into the cult of swimming, I'd warned Danny that if I heard the name Eamon Roy one more time I would Sharpie it across his forehead while he slept.

Eamon was, I had been told no fewer than five times, coming to the demolition party we were throwing to celebrate the start of our renovation work on Danny's house (guests were welcome to bring hammers and chisels to join in the festivities). I was aware that I was supposed to be awaiting the event with the breathless anticipation befitting the arrival of a rock star, but I had already decided I couldn't stand him. Sight unseen. Rocketing down a snowy mountain at eighty miles an hour is cool. Lunging horizontally to dig a tennis ball out from six inches off the court is cool. Churning through chlorine at four miles an hour for a minute or two at a time is just not that cool. And besides, he was still in college, finishing up his senior year at UT; I was three years older and
way
too sophisticated to be impressed by college boys. I was into musicians.

When he arrived at the party, I was grudgingly forced to admit
that he actually was as good-looking as he had been billed, but the gaggle of girls that immediately formed around him and his friends made me all the more determined to ignore him. I was in the kitchen, craning to reach a bottle of Cuervo from the top shelf of a cabinet, when he appeared next to me and grabbed it without lifting his heels off the ground.

“Here you go,” he said, offering it to me along with a friendly smile. His voice matched the rich fudgy tone of his eyes.

“Thanks,” I said, and started to move past him, but he stepped into my path.

“I'm Eamon, by the way.”

“I've heard,” I remember saying, which made him laugh. I liked the fact that his response to Danny's bragging was not false modesty, or entitlement, but amusement. In spite of myself, I was intrigued, and we started talking there in the kitchen. I'd always been a little baffled by the seeming closeness of Danny's friendship with Eamon, assuming the latter to be a chest-bumping meathead like most of the other athletes I'd met, but his intelligence and impish irreverence made it clear why Danny was so fond of him. After a long time, I set the tequila bottle down on the counter, having completely forgotten why I wanted it in the first place.

He cocked his head and studied it, frowning. “You know, that tequila's not looking so great.”

“What do you mean?” Tequila is inherently toxic.

He lifted the bottle toward the bug-littered light fixture on the ceiling. “Just looks skunky. Cloudy, almost. I think you need a new bottle.”

“But we just bought it. It's fine. Here, I'll pour you a shot to prove it.” I took it from him and started unscrewing the cap, but he waved me off.

“Nah, I can't drink much when I'm training,” he said, so
young but so serious about his swimming. “But I
can
drive you to the liquor store to get a new bottle of tequila.” He cracked open the fridge door and peered inside. “You're low on beer, too. Wanna make a run?”

I couldn't understand how we could be low on beer when we'd been well stocked the last time I checked, but with the way he was smiling at me, I wasn't about to protest.

“Sure.” I was still trying to play it cool, though I had stopped thinking he was nothing special about thirty-five minutes ago.

Of course, because it was 12:30 on a Saturday night, the liquor store nearest me was closed, as was the shady one a few streets over with the proprietor that Danny and I referred to as Cyclops. Eamon, who turned out to have surprisingly deep knowledge of liquor store locations for someone who wasn't allowed to drink for most of the year, chauffeured me around to three more possible locations near the UT campus while I car-danced to his
Rumours
CD. (College boy he might have been, but his possession of Fleetwood Mac's masterpiece attested to his credibility on the music front.) I was having so much fun with him that I didn't want to go back to the party, but after an hour of fruitless searching, we gave up on the tequila and decided just to head to a 7-Eleven for beer.

I was stacking six-packs of Lone Star into Eamon's arms when Danny called me to find out where the hell we were. He erupted with indignation when I explained about the beer.

“He's full of shit,” he yelled over the noise of the party. “Why the hell did he say we were running low on beer? We have plenty. Get your asses back here, you're missing the party.”

I hung up the phone and turned to Eamon in confusion. “Danny says we have plenty of beer. Tell me again what we're doing here?”

“Ahhh, I'm busted,” he said. “I never thought you were low
on beer. I just wanted to hang out with you.” And as I stood there, blinking in breathless surprise, he dipped his head and kissed me, right in the middle of the drink aisle with his arms full of the national beer of Texas.

It is still the best first kiss I've ever had. Better even, it pains me to admit, than Noah's, which transpired enthusiastically but somewhat drunkenly against the side of the pool table where he'd just spanked me three games in a row. And everything that came after it was just as good.

Grinning like fools, Eamon and I paid for our Lone Star and climbed back into his dirty old Jeep, where we kissed some more. He kissed me at every stoplight on the way back to the house. Including one time when we got too absorbed to notice the light had turned and broke apart, laughing, when the driver behind us leaned on his horn. “Worth it,” Eamon muttered. He carried the misbegotten beer inside and kissed me again, in the kitchen. We kissed for a long time, and then, reluctantly, he pulled away.

“So, I gotta go home and sleep,” he said, the wry tone of his voice indicating exactly how unsexy he thought that to be. When, actually, I loved that he took his training seriously, treating his body like the precision machine that it was. “But do you want to hang out next weekend?”

I didn't pretend to have other plans, the way my girlfriends would have advised me. The way I might have if it were anybody else. Instead I simply said yes, my heart banging inside me like the clapper of a bell.

I have over forty emails saved from the seven days between when we met and when we went on our first (and only) actual date. Playful, teasing, flirtatious emails. Emails that said, “I can't wait to see you” and “The only thing stopping me from driving over there right now is six
A.M
. practice” and “I spent my entire psychology lecture this morning thinking about you, instead of psychology.” In the three or four months that it took me to process him out of my system, I must have reread the messages fifty times. Attempting to convince myself that I hadn't been a fool for believing our connection was something special, while trying to understand how someone who seemed to be so into me could have just evaporated into thin air. But there was no explanation.

For our date, he took me to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema down on Sixth Street. He refused to tell me what movie we were seeing, or why we had to arrive at the theater half an hour early, but by the time we got there, there was already a crowd of people out front, chattering excitedly. The theater was located in an old brick building with a huge Art Deco sign out front announcing its name and a vintage neon marquee blaring light down on the sidewalk. The movie turned out to be
The Princess Bride
, a selection which delighted me, but the crowd seemed to view the familiarity of the movie as license to recite the lines along with the actors. After a few minutes I turned to him in frustration, expecting him to commiserate with me, but instead his eyes were creased with humor.

“It's a quote-along,” he explained. “The louder the better.” Then, to demonstrate, he cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed, along with the entire theater, “Do you know what that sound is, Highness? Those are the
shrieking eels
!”

This crazy little jet of pure happiness bubbled up inside me at the perfection of it, the perfection of
him
, and I leaned over in my
seat, so quickly I nearly upended my bottle of Dos Equis, and laid one on him. I didn't care that I tasted like fried pickles and beer, and neither, apparently, did he. The people behind us kicked our seats, yelling at us to get a room. But he was cute when, standing under the glare of the theater marquee an hour and a half later, he asked—pretending I hadn't just practically jumped him—whether I wanted to go track down an ice cream truck.

“Not really,” I said, winding my fingers into his. Already wanting him so badly.

His smile promised me everything. “Well, come on, then.”

The sex was unbelievable. More than in just the physical sense, although it was certainly that. There was just this sense of sweetness, almost innocence, to it that I hadn't experienced with anyone before, and haven't since. We stayed up until seven o'clock in the morning, talking when we weren't making love; I remember feeling a bizarre sense of pride that I was compelling enough to make him forgo his self-imposed Saturday night bedtime. I was positive that such lapses in discipline were extremely rare for him.

After discovering we were both originally from Virginia—he from the northern suburbs outside D.C., I from the far southwestern corner, pinched between North Carolina and West Virginia (“That accent is so cute I could listen to you read the federal tax code,” he said)—we shared everything about our childhoods and our families, even the stuff you normally wait for a while before unloading. I told him that my mother had died of breast cancer two years before, and waited for him to either smother me in a big, sorrowful hug, eager to show me how sensitive he was, or stiffen with anxiety that I was about to start spewing forth a geyser of Feelings. Those were the two reactions that my personal tragedy had always elicited from guys in the past.

But he just rubbed my knuckles gently with his thumb, and asked me questions. How long had she been sick (ten years, going into remission twice). Had anyone else in my family had the disease
(my grandmother, who died of it before I was born). Did I do the self-exams like I was supposed to (yes, with the unfailing consistency that other people reserve for prayer). They were the kinds of questions you would only ask if you actually cared about the answers.

The only sign, the entire time, that anything might possibly be less than perfect came at the very end, when I woke to the soft clink of his belt buckle as he quietly dressed.

“Why are you going?” I mumbled, reaching for him. “It's still early.”

“It's almost ten,” he said, pulling on his T-shirt. “I have a paper to finish up for tomorrow.”

“Oh yeah…schoolwork,” I teased. I had quickly come to enjoy ribbing him about the fact that I was older than he was. His smile was a little remote, but when he leaned over my bed to kiss me goodbye, his lips lingered on mine for so long that I slid my hands down to his hips, trying to pull him back into bed with me.

He gently dislodged them, whispering, “I really have to go. I'll talk to you later.” I noticed that he was frowning slightly as he kissed me one last time—with irritation, guilt, or whatever else I'll never know—but at the time I just assumed he was thinking about the paper he still had to write. Either way, I wasn't concerned. I've never been the sort of person who can fall in love quickly, or easily, but as I sunk happily back into sleep that morning, I was most of the way there.

And he was…nowhere. I never heard from him again, not even a drunken late-night booty text. After a long, silent week had gone by, I cornered Danny and asked him—my pride around my ankles—if he knew anything. He shook his head, looking so sorry for me that I immediately regretted having asked.

“Is this the kind of thing he usually does?” I asked, trying to sound sardonically amused.

“No,” said Danny. “Not at all.”

He plainly didn't know whether the fact that his friend didn't
typically
treat women like disposable toys made his having done it to me better or worse, and neither did I. If it was such an aberration in character, what had I done to deserve the distinction? Danny offered to talk to him, but I refused to hear of it. It was bad enough that Eamon had blown me off; he didn't need to know that I'd actually been hurt by it. And he never said anything about the encounter to Danny, either, which I always thought was even stranger than his going AWOL on me. He'd slept with one of his best friend's roommates and never came up with so much as a “Hey, man, she's really cool and all, but it wasn't going to work out.” It literally seemed to be as if the whole thing had never happened.