Almost Remembered

by Marilyn Tracy

  God, she had loved him so. With every fiber of her being. Looking at him now, she didn’t know what she felt. Different. Apart.

  Was this part of that odd dissociation she’d experienced all too frequently in recent months, or was this merely the hard reality of a true time warp?

  She hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. And yet, seeing him again, she found that the same part of her that had ached for him all these years wanted him still. She felt tears burning her eyes at the strength of that want. And she wanted to curse him for making her experience that helpless longing.

  She waited for him to speak, to tell her he’d seen her on television, to comment on the weather, to explain why he’d married someone else when he had claimed her body all those years ago. And rejected her for someone else when she had loved him so very desperately. So innocently.

  Allison cursed herself for being such a fool. The past was long, long buried. She was only reacting this way because she’d been through so much confusion lately. Nothing more.

  She held her face impassive as he frowned slightly, his eyes narrowing to study her. He’d always been able to read her, back when she was a kid and he little more than that—though the ten-year difference in their ages had mattered a great deal to him then.

  But he shouldn’t be able to read her now. Not anymore. He’d thrown away that right in their youth. When he’d told her he was marrying Thelma, when he’d rejected everything they’d shared to spend his life with another woman.

  “You know, it’s funny,” he said, looking as though it were anything but. He fell silent.

  “What is?” she asked, or tried to.

  He hesitated, seeming to argue with himself, then shrugged slightly, as if having lost the war. “I’ve thought about seeing you here in Almost again. Too many times, I guess. But I always thought I’d know just what to say.”

  She tried taking in the full meaning behind his words. Too many times... She shook her head as if shaking off the past. And what meaning would he take from that gesture?

  “Did you find what you were looking for, Allison? I know you’re famous, but was it everything you wanted it to be? Glitz and glamour...bright lights and sparkle?”

  She felt her breath hitch in her lungs. Having him refer to her own anguished words—disjointed phrases spoken out of desperation the afternoon he’d dropped his decision for their future together—thoroughly disconcerted her. And that he would ask her that now, when everything she’d strived for lay in chaos.

  But most troublesome was the element of bitterness in his tone. As though it had been her decision all those years ago, as if what had happened afterward had been her fault. It had been his casual attitude, then his announcement he was marrying Thelma, that destroyed their love.

  “No,” she said, then amended her answer, “Yes.”

  He gave her a lopsided, seemingly rueful grin. “No ambivalence there.”

  “Ambivalence is all I feel,” Allison said softly, and while it sounded like a quip or a lie, it was the raw, honest truth.

  Chas didn’t flinch or look embarrassed. He merely stilled, looking for all the world like a man who has heard the report of a gun and waits for the impact. After a few seconds, he sighed and withdrew his hands from his pockets.

  “I think I’ll get some lemonade. Can I get you anything?”

  My heart, she thought. My memory. My naïveté...or maybe my suitcase so I can go back home to New York. Or run away somewhere far from anything I know, because I won’t be knowing anything much longer.

  “Nothing, thanks,” she said, and this time she heard the tinge of sorrow in her own voice.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said. It wasn’t until he’d opened the back door that she realized he’d misunderstood her.

  “Chas?” she called softly, not turning around, but aware with every perception in her body that he’d frozen in place. That she wanted—perhaps needed—to extend their moment of reunion, to put the past into place once and for all. Forever.

  “Yes?”

  “I...I take it back. I could use some lemonade.”

  Seconds later she felt his warm hands settle onto her shoulders.

  She couldn’t withhold the sudden tension that sprang up to meet his fingers. But she could fight the urge to relax into his grip, to let those broad, caring hands smooth away her anxiety.

  “What’s wrong, Allison?”

  Dear God, she thought, too aware of him and much too aware of a desire to unburden herself, what wasn’t wrong?

  She shook her head and wished he’d lift his hands from her shoulders and, at the same time, wished he’d never stop caressing her stiff muscles and would draw her into his arms. Into an embrace that would be anything but safe, but would feel so heavenly, so perfect.

  He leaned down and slowly, deliberately pressed a kiss to her temple. His warm breath played against her cheek, against her hair. His fingers tightened on her shoulders. His lips lingered. The moment seemed to stretch into infinity.

  If she turned her head, their lips would meet. Such a small thing, she thought, just a simple movement, but it was far too difficult to accomplish. Far more dangerous than any strange memory lapses or panic attacks.

  He stood erect and gave her shoulders a seemingly final squeeze but didn’t remove his hands. She could hear him draw a ragged breath that matched her own. She felt tears gather in her eyes, ached for his touch, wished she had turned her head, wished she had met that kiss.

  “Ah, Allison. After all this time...why did you come back?”

  Chapter 3

  Chas felt Allison’s reaction to his question in her stiffening, already too tight shoulders. He wished he could take the words back while at the same time he stood, fighting an urge to shake an answer out of her.

  She murmured something that sounded like I had to, but he couldn’t be sure. He waited, half angry with her for being there at all, and at the same time, half crazed with a desire to hold her in his arms forever.

  He thought that some things never changed. Years ago that young Allison he’d known so well, so intimately, had fallen silent then, too, shutting him out of her mind, her heart. Shutting him out of her life. Because she wanted more than a “one-horse anachronism of a town.” Her very words in the face of his starry-eyed plans for the two of them.

  “Have you been happy?” he asked finally, abandoning his earlier question.

  “Have you?” she countered.

  He thought of the past fifteen years with an odd dispassion, shrinking them to a mere few important moments. Moments without Allison.

  And then he thought of the fourteen years spent with his son. Billy as an infant, his big blue eyes blinking with wonder. Billy as a toddler, racing into the clinic, a toilet-paper-wrapped cat draped across his baby arms. “Billy fixed the cat, Daddy!” Billy as a young boy, confidently lifting a horse’s foot to treat a split pad. “Like this, right, Daddy?”

  Had he been happy?

  “Yes,” he said simply, unconsciously tightening his fingers on her too thin shoulders.

  He heard her sigh a little. From his angle behind her, he couldn’t see her face, could only read the tension in her fragile frame, could only feel the anxiety pulsing up through his fingertips.

  “And you, Allison?”

  “Yes, of course I have,” she said, and he knew with every fiber in his being that she lied.

  She hadn’t been happy. At times, maybe, but not all the time, and certainly not at this moment. He knew it with as much conviction as he knew that something was deeply troubling her now, saw it and felt it manifested in her tousled hair, her brittle hold on calm.

  Once he might have asked what the problem was and received a prompt reply. Once he might have been able to figure out a way to solve whatever it was that was troubling her. But that time was long past, and Chas didn’t have the tools to build the bridge she’d burned all those years ago and he’d razed soon after when he announced he was going to marry Thelma.

  She
tossed her head as she used to do, only now her hair was short and merely brushed his wrists instead of draping them with silk. As if she’d been reading a dim portion of his mind, she asked, “And...Thelma?”

  His hands jerked convulsively on her shoulders, undoubtedly nearly crushing her. For a moment, he didn’t know what to say. He fell back on the hard truth. “Thelma’s dead, Allison.”

  He saw her hands grip and regrip the arms of the old oak rocker as if she were trying to mold it to a completely different shape. “I didn’t know,” she said. “How long...?”

  “Nearly five years ago now,” he said.

  “I didn’t know,” she repeated.

  Chas didn’t know how he felt at that moment. Allison should have known. Someone should have told her. She should have come back to Almost then. She should have run back to him. A part of him had been hurt when she hadn’t, though he’d never really expected it. Hadn’t dared even dream she’d come back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding as if she were choking on the words.

  He nodded his acknowledgment. It was so long ago now that he scarcely could conjure up the small details that comprised Thelma’s personality. Not like he still could about Allison. Not in the way he’d always been able to remember Allison’s every gesture, her every look. And, of course, he’d been able to watch her at least twice a month on Timeline, seeing her lovely face mature and gain character.

  He opened his mouth to tell her any or all of his thoughts and was saved from such a damning disclosure by the back door bursting open when Taylor’s triplets came spilling outside, trailed by their calmer cousins and his own son, Billy.

  “Aunt Allison! Lookit over here!”

  “How come you’re crying, Aunt Allison?”

  “She’s not crying, doofus, she’s only got the sun in her eyes!”

  “She is too crying! Besides, the sun’s already going down. You are crying, aren’t you, Aunt Allison?”

  Chas stepped away from behind her chair, amazed at how difficult it was to release his hold on her, but needing to shield her from the boys’ curiosity more. She was crying? Why?

  “Hey, kids, Aunt Allison’s had a long afternoon. And she’s on camera all the time. Let’s give her a day off. Whaddya say?”

  Billy, true to his thoughtful nature, suggested the boys film their dogs. “They’re on the front porch,” he added, brushing past them and leading the way to the other side of the house.

  “Billy...” Chas called, and his son abruptly halted and turned back to face them, a half smile on his thin lips. His braces caught a late sunbeam and flashed for a moment.

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure, Dad,” he said, then he grinned, the crooked, slightly gamin smile that seemed to have such an effect on the girls. His mother’s smile. “No problem.”

  Chas would have introduced them then and there, his son and the only woman he’d ever loved, but the moment slipped away as swiftly as the years had passed, and Billy rounded the corner of the house trailed by five Leary cousins.

  “Your son,” Allison said softly.

  For some odd reason, he couldn’t look at her, didn’t really want to see the expression on her face. “Billy.”

  “I guess when I pictured you with your son, I had an image of a baby in my mind.”

  “He was that once,” he said, forcing a smile to his lips, thinking about her in faraway New York, picturing him back home in Almost, holding Billy. A baby who completely captured his heart the moment he wrapped tiny, delicate fingers around one of his own.

  She gave a ghost of a chuckle, and he couldn’t resist looking at her. Then she finally, finally turned her head to meet his eyes. He could see the traces of tears and of some unexpressed, still deep sorrow gnawing at her, but her lips curved into a smile. “No wonder you’ve been happy, Chas. He’s a fine young man.”

  Chas smiled, too, something shifting deep inside him. Dear God, help me, he thought. He’d known he’d loved Allison Leary all those years ago, had thought of her a million times since. But he’d never have guessed it could still hurt so very much.

  “You must be proud of him,” she murmured.

  “I am,” he said simply. “He’s a good kid.”

  She nodded, as if agreeing with him. And perhaps she was. Her smile broadened, and he found himself returning it, a little sadly perhaps, but a smile nonetheless. The first shared smile they’d had in fifteen years. Maybe that bridge wasn’t totally burned after all.

  “And you, Allison...did you ever have any children?”

  The smile slipped from her face, and her features seemed to draw in, as if she were consciously realigning her expression from guardedly open to profoundly neutral. But just before she looked away, he caught a glimpse of raw hurt and anger in her eyes.

  “No. I never did,” she said.

  Allison could feel his assessment of her and kept her face as cool and impassive as was humanly possible. The flicker of surprise on his features before she’d turned her gaze away told her she’d imperfectly hidden her bitterness from him when he’d asked her about children. That was one subject she wouldn’t discuss with him. Ever.

  Luckily, perhaps sensing the extremely thin ice he was treading upon, he didn’t pursue it. Instead, he fell back on a reliable reunion cliché. “It’s hard to believe you’ve been gone so long.”

  “Fifteen years,” she said softly.

  “A long time, Allison.”

  “A long time,” she agreed.

  “Too long?” he asked, reaching a hand out to hang in the air between them.

  Allison felt a surge of resentment toward him. “What are you asking me, Chas? Whatever was between us is in the past. And that past is fifteen years cold.”

  She leveled a look at him that would have reduced a lesser man to pure jelly. She’d had heads of state cower beneath such a hard look.

  Not Chas. He didn’t pull his hand back, and she realized with a faint flush that he wasn’t ignoring her words; he was simply waiting to assist her up from the chair.

  Somehow, in some indefinable way, he’d turned the tables on. her and it was he who had control of this very strained situation. She didn’t want to touch him again, yet wanted nothing more than to place her seemingly small hand in that broad, callused palm, to feel his fingers wrap around hers once again.

  As if of its own volition, her hand rose and hovered above his. He reached up, as if in slow motion, and slid that tantalizing hand beneath her own, capturing it, holding her captive. As in her imagination, his fingers enfolded her to him, pressing her palm against his own.

  “Allison?”

  She couldn’t seem to drag her gaze from the point where their hands met, skin to skin, cold to warm touch. His warmth seemed to flow through her, igniting something she’d prayed was long, long buried, had tried believing for years.

  “It’s never too late,” he said, mocking her futile prayers.

  She wasn’t sure what she read in those deep brown eyes, but knew he was wrong. Some things were late the very instant harsh words were spoken. And some things were better left permanently late, forever unvoiced.

  “It can be,” she said honestly.

  He pulled her up from the chair, not allowing her to hesitate any longer. He held her firmly, not letting her rock on her unsteady leg. And when she gained her balance, he didn’t release her hand but instead folded it to his chest so that she could feel the strong, hard beating of his heart.

  Her own pulse felt thready and unsure.

  They stood so close together she could smell the clean, fresh scent of his newly washed hair, the faint whiff of whatever soap he’d used, something that reminded her of open fields and golden grain. And she could smell that familiar, oh-so-familiar odor particularly his, a rich, slightly tangy scent that reached straight to her taste buds and made her eyes feel heavy with want.

  He raised his free hand, gliding it across her face, cupping her cheek in his palm in a gesture both tender and possessive.
r />   “That’s up to you, Allison. I’m just glad to see you again.”

  Mesmerized by the feel of his warmth against her face, ensnared by his gaze that held too many desires, too many demands he had no right to expect of her, Allison told herself to step back, to pull away from him.

  Where was that panic and fear now, when she could have used a measure of it? Why, standing so close to Chas Jamison, the man who had irrevocably changed the entire course of her life, wasn’t she running away?

  “This is crazy,” she murmured.

  “Not seeing you in fifteen years is crazy,” Chas said, and drew her closer, tilting his head slightly before lowering his full, warm lips to hers. “This,” he murmured, “this is the first sane thing I’ve done in years.”

  Somewhere in the distance, she heard children giggling, heard the soft voices of an impromptu welcome-home party in Taylor’s loving home. She wanted to pull away from Chas, to run back to New York and whatever fragments of a well-ordered life she might have left behind.

  But instead, she leaned into this country vet with lips like velvet, hands as strong as steel and as gentle and knowing as an artist’s, forgetting the past, forgetting the past fifteen years of solitary dinners and midnight heartache. And blessedly, miraculously, forgetting the past two months of torment.

  With his scent filling her nostrils and his touch holding her to the present, she could forget all but the feel of his hands and lips, his hard, lean body pressing against hers, the taste of his mouth, the insistent pressure of his arms.

  “Ah, Allison,” he murmured, folding her against his chest, pressing his face into her hair, his lips against her temple.

  She gave in to the sheer pleasure of being nestled against his broad chest, letting her face absorb the deep, now slightly faster pace of his heartbeat. She reached around him and held on to his back, feeling the warmth of his body emanating out from beneath the thick cotton sweater he wore and molding her palms to the contours of his shifting muscles. She ached to lift it and slip her hands underneath to meet his skin directly. He would never know how she struggled not to give in to that desire.