'Tis The Season: Under the Christmas TreeMidnight ConfessionsBackward Glance

by Robyn Carr

  “Very young, but she’s been taking great pictures since she was in high school. Maybe earlier.”

  “Where?”

  “She lives in L.A. Long Beach, actually.”

  Long Beach, Drew thought. Like next door! Of course, that didn’t matter if she wouldn’t even talk to him. But he wasn’t giving anything away. “Is she a little artsy-fartsy?” Drew asked.

  Nate laughed. “Not at all—she’s very practical. But lately she’s been trying some new stuff, shooting the horses, mountains, valleys, roads and buildings. Sunrises, sunsets, clouds, et cetera.” Nate looked over at Sunny as she busily snapped pictures of a happy couple. “It’s kind of nice to see her taking pictures of people again.”

  Drew watched Sunny focus, direct the pair with one hand while holding her camera with the other. Her face seriously lit up; her smile was alive and whatever it was she was saying caused her subjects to laugh, which was followed by several flashes. She was so animated as she took five or six more shots, then pulled a business card out of the pocket of her jeans and handed it to the couple. She was positively gorgeous when she wasn’t giving him the brush. Then she retreated to her spot by the hearth and put her camera down. He noticed that the second she gave up the camera, her face returned to its seriousness. The sight of her was immediately obscured by partiers.

  He wanted one of those business cards.

  “Hey, buddy, you didn’t make out your resolution,” Jack said, passing him a slip of paper and pen. “That’s the price of admission.”

  “I don’t usually do resolutions,” Drew said. “Well, except every morning when I resolve to fly under the radar of the senior residents.”

  “Because?” Jack asked.

  Sometimes Drew forgot that few people knew what the life of a junior resident was like. “Because they’re sociopaths with a mean streak.”

  “Ah,” Jack said as if he bought that. “Maybe that’s your resolution—to avoid sociopaths? When you’ve written one, it goes in the pot here.”

  “And then?” Drew asked.

  “When you’re getting ready to leave, you can draw one—maybe you’ll get a better one than you wrote. Give you something new to strive for.”

  Drew laughed. “I dunno. This is such a crazy idea,” he said. “What if the one I draw is to bike across the U.S.?”

  Jack looked around. “Nah,” he said. “No danger of that around here. You could draw one that says to remember your annual mammogram, however. Now get on it,” he said, tapping the paper on the bar.

  Chuckling, Drew wrote. Then he scratched it out. Thinking about the grumpy but beautiful woman in the corner he wrote “Start the new year by giving a new guy a chance.” Then he folded it in half and shoved it in his pocket; he asked for a new piece of paper. On his second try he wrote “Don’t let past hurts ruin future possibilities.”

  Then he took a bolstering swallow of his beer and said, “Excuse me a second.” And off he went to the other side of the room.

  He stood in front of Sunny, smiled his handsomest smile and said, “So. You’re a photographer.”

  She looked up at him, her expression deadpan. “Yes,” she said.

  “You like being a photographer?” he asked.

  Again there was that pregnant pause before she said, “Yes.”

  “What do you like best about it?”

  She thought for a moment. Then she said, “The quiet.”

  He had to ask himself why in the world he was interested. She was beautiful, but Drew had never been drawn by beauty alone. He’d known lots of gorgeous women who fell short in other areas, thus killing his interest instantly. For a woman to really intrigue him she had to be fun, smart, good-natured, energetic, driven by something besides her looks and above all, positive. So far this one, this Sunny, had only looks going for her and it was not enough. Still, for unknown reasons, he lingered. “The quiet,” he repeated. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. It doesn’t require any other people. I can do it alone.”

  “Just out of curiosity, are you always this unapproachable, or is it just at New Year’s Eve parties?”

  She shrugged. “Pretty much always.”

  “Gotcha. One last question. Will you take my picture?”

  “For what occasion?” she asked.

  Nothing came to mind. “Passport photo?” he attempted.

  “Sorry. I don’t do passport photos.”

  He smiled at her. “Well, Sunny—you’re in luck. Because that’s all I got. You are, as you obviously wish to be, on your own.”

  * * *

  Oh, I’m such a bitch, she thought as she watched Drew’s back weave through the people to return to the bar. When he sat up on the stool beside her uncle, she cringed in embarrassment. She adored her uncle Nate and knew how much he cared about her, how it had hurt him to see her in pain on what was supposed to have been her wedding day, how it killed him to see her struggle with it for so long afterward. But while she knew Nate had nothing but sympathy for her, she realized he was running short on patience with her bitterness and what could only be described as attitude a full year later.

  He wasn’t the only one. Friends had tried to encourage her to let go of the heartache and move on. If she didn’t want to date again, fine, but being pissed off all the time was not only wearing on friendships, it was hurting business. And she was hearing a lot about the fact that she was only twenty-five! She wasn’t sure if twenty-five was so young it excused her for making such a mistake on Glen or if that meant she had decades left to find the right guy!

  Then, right after she arrived in Virgin River, Annie had taken her aside, sat her down and said, “This rage isn’t going to help you get on with your life in a positive way, Sunny. You’re not the only one who’s been dumped. I found out the man I was supposed to marry had three full-time girlfriends he lived with—each of us part-time, of course.”

  “How’d he manage that?” Sunny had asked, intrigued and astonished.

  “He obviously kept a very careful calendar. He was in sales and traveled. When I thought he was selling farm equipment, he was actually with one of the other girlfriends.”

  “Oh, my God! You must have wanted to kill him!”

  “Sure. I was kind of hoping my dad or one of my brothers would do it for me, but when they didn’t I got past it. I realize I wasn’t left at the altar with a very expensive, nonrefundable wedding to pay for, like you were. I can’t imagine the pain and humiliation of that, but even so, I was very angry. And now I’m so grateful that I found a way to get beyond that because if I hadn’t, I would never have given Nate a chance. And your uncle Nate is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  What Sunny wanted to tell Annie was that the pain and humiliation wasn’t the worst part—it was that her friends and family pitied her for being left. What was wrong with her, that he would do that?

  She knew what was wrong, when she thought about it. Her nose was too long, her forehead too high, her chest small and feet big, her hips too wide, she hadn’t finished college and she took pictures for a living. That they were good pictures didn’t seem to matter—it wasn’t all that impressive. She sometimes veered into that territory of “if I had been a supermodel with a great body, he’d never have left me.” Intellectually she knew that was nonsense, but emotionally she felt lacking in too many ways.

  Instead she said to Annie, “Did you know? Did you ever have a hint that something was wrong?”

  She shook her head. “Only when it was over, when I looked back and realized he never spent a weekend with me, and I was too trusting to wonder why he hadn’t ever asked me to join him on a business trip to one of the other towns where he stayed overnight on business. Oh, after it was all over, I had lots of questions. But at the time?” She shook her head. “I didn’t know anything was wrong.”

 
“Me either,” Sunny said.

  “I probably didn’t want to know anything was wrong,” Annie added. “I don’t like conflict.”

  Sunny didn’t say anything. She was pretty well acquainted with her own denial and that hurt just about as much as the hard truth.

  “Well, there was one thing,” Annie corrected. “After it was all over I wondered if I shouldn’t have been more desperate to spend every moment with him, if I loved him so much. You know—Nate gets called out in the middle of the night pretty often, and I never make a fuss about it. But we both complain if we haven’t had enough time together. We need each other a lot. That never happened with Ed. I was perfectly fine when he wasn’t around. Should have tipped me off, I guess.”

  No help there, Sunny thought. Glen had complained constantly of her Fridays through Sundays always being booked with shoots. There were times she worked a sixteen-hour day on the weekends, covering three weddings and receptions and a baptism. Slip in some engagement slide shows, photos of babies, whatever had to be done for people who worked Monday through Friday and who only had weekends available. Then from Monday through Thursday she’d work like a dog editing and setting up proofs.

  Glen was a California Highway Patrolman who worked swing shifts to have weekends off and she was always unavailable then.

  She revisited that old argument—wait a minute! Here was a clue she hadn’t figured out at the time. Glen had a few years seniority with CHP, so why would he work swings just to have those weekends off when he knew she would be tied up with her clients the entire time? She’d been rather proud of the fact that it hadn’t taken her long to develop a strong clientele, to make incredibly good money for a woman her age—weddings were especially profitable. But she’d had to sacrifice her weekends to get and keep that success.

  So why? It would have been easy for him to get a schedule with a Tuesday through Thursday, her lightest days, off. In fact, if he had been willing to take those days off, and work the day shift regularly, they could have gone to bed together every night. He said at the time that it suited his body clock, that he wasn’t a morning person. And he liked to go out on the weekends. He went out with “the boys.” The boys? Not bloody likely....

  After being left at the church a couple of his groomsmen had admitted he’d been having his doubts about the big, legal, forever commitment. Apparently he’d worried aloud to them, but all he ever did was argue with her about it. We don’t need all that! We could fly to Aruba, get married there, take a week of sailing, scuba diving... He hadn’t said the commitment was an issue, just the wedding—something Sunny and her mom were having a real party putting together. So she had said, “Try not to worry so much, Glen—you’ll get your week in Aruba on the honeymoon. Just be at the church on time, say your lines and we’ll be diving and sunning and sailing before you know it.”

  Sunny shook her head in frustration. What was the point in figuring it out now? She grabbed her coat, her camera and headed out the door. The snow was still gently falling and she backed away from the town Christmas tree, snapping photos as she went. She zoomed in on some of the military unit patches used as decorations, caught snowflakes glistening against gold balls and white lights, captured angles of the tree until, finally, far enough away, she got the whole tree. If these came out the way she hoped, she might use them for something next Christmas—ads or cards or something.

  Then she turned and caught a couple of good shots of the bar porch, the snow drifting on the rails and steps and roof. Then of the street with all the houses lit for holiday cheer. Then the bar porch with a man leaning against the rail, arms crossed over his chest—a very handsome man.

  She lowered the camera and walked toward Drew. There was no getting around the fact that he was handsome—tall and built, light brown hair, twinkling brown eyes, and if she remembered right, a very sexy smile. He stood on the porch and she looked up at him.

  “Okay, look, I apologize,” she said. “It’s not like me to be so rude, so ‘unapproachable’ as you call it. I got dumped, okay? I’m still licking my wounds, as my uncle Nathaniel puts it. Not a good time for me to respond to a come-on from a guy. I’m scared to death to meet a guy and end up actually liking him, so I avoid all males. That’s it in a nutshell,” she added with a shrug. “I used to be very friendly and outgoing—now I’m on guard a lot.”

  “Apology accepted. And I had a bad breakup, too, but it was a while ago. Water under the bridge, as they say.”

  “You got dumped?”

  He gave a nod. “And I understand how you feel. So let’s start over. What do you say? I’m Drew Foley,” he said.

  She took another step toward the porch, looking up at him. “Sunny Archer. But when? I mean, how long ago did you get dumped?”

  “About nine months, I guess.”

  “About?” she asked. It must not have impacted him in quite the same way if he couldn’t remember the date. “I mean—was it traumatic?”

  “Sort of,” he said. “We were engaged, lived together, but we were arguing all the time. She finally told me she wasn’t willing to have a life like that and we had to go our separate ways. It wasn’t my idea to break up.” He shrugged. “I thought we could fix it and wanted to try, but she didn’t.”

  “Did you know?” she asked. “Were you expecting it?”

  He shook his head. “I should have expected it, but it broadsided me.”

  “How can that be? If you should have expected it, how could it possibly have taken you by surprise?”

  He took a deep breath, looked skyward into the softly falling flakes, then back at her. “We were pretty miserable, but before we lived together we did great. I’m a medical resident and my hours were...still are hideous. Sometimes I’m on for thirty-six hours and just get enough time off to sleep. She needed more from me than that. She...” He looked down. “I don’t like calling her she or her. Penny had a hard time changing her life in order to move in with me. She had to get a new job, make new friends, and I was never there for her. I should have seen it coming but I didn’t. It was all my fault but I couldn’t have done anything to change it.”

  “Where are you from?” she asked him.

  “Chico. About four hours south of here.”

  “Wow,” she said. “We actually do have some things in common.”

  “Do we?” he asked.

  “But you’re over it. How’d you get over it?”

  He put his hands in his front pants pockets. “She invited me to her engagement party three months ago. To another surgical resident. Last time I looked, he was on the same treadmill I was on. Guess he manages better with no sleep.”

  “No way,” she said, backing away from the bar’s porch a little bit.

  “Way.”

  “You don’t suppose...?”

  “That she was doing him when she was supposed to be doing me?” he asked for her. “It crossed my mind. But I’m not going there. I don’t even want to know. All that aside, she obviously wasn’t the one. I know that now. Which means it really was my fault. I was hooking up with someone out of inertia, not because I was insanely in love with her. Bottom line, Sunny, me and Penny? We both dodged a bullet. We were not meant to be.”

  She was speechless. Her mouth formed a perfect O. Her eyes were round. She wished she’d been able to take her own situation in such stride. “Holy crap,” she finally said. Then she shook her head. “I guess you have to be confident to be in medicine and all.”

  “Aw, come on, don’t give the study all the credit. I might actually have some common sense.” He took a step down from the bar porch to approach her, his heel slid on the step and he went airborne. While he was in the air, there were rapid flashes from her camera. Then he landed, flat on his back, and there were more flashes.

  Sunny stood over him, camera in hand. She looked down at him. “Are you all right?”

/>   He narrowed his eyes at her. It took him a moment to catch his breath. “I could be paralyzed, you know. I hope I was hallucinating, but were you actually taking my picture as I fell?”

  “Well, I couldn’t catch you,” she said. Then she smiled.

  “You are sick and twisted.”

  “Maybe you should lie still. I could go in the bar and get the pediatrician and the midwife to have a look at you. I met them earlier, before you got here.”

  He looked up at her; she was still smiling. Apparently it didn’t take much to cheer her up—the near death of a man seemed to put her in a better mood. “Maybe you could just show them the pictures....”

  She fell onto her knees beside him and laughed, her camera still in hand. It was a bright and happy sound and those beautiful blue eyes glittered. “Seriously, you’re the doctor—do you think you’re all right?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t moved yet. One wrong move and I could be paralyzed from the neck down.”

  “Are you playing me?”

  “Might be,” he admitted with a shrug of his shoulders.

  “Hah! You moved! You’re fine. Get up.”

  “Are you going to have a drink with me?” he asked.

  “Why should I? Seriously, we’re a couple of wounded birds—we probably shouldn’t drink, and we certainly shouldn’t drink together!”

  “Get over it,” he said, rising a bit, holding himself up on his elbows. “We have nothing to lose. It’s a New Year’s Eve party. We’ll have a couple of drinks, toast the New Year, move on. But give it a try not so pissed off. See if you can have some fun.” He smiled. “Just for the heck of it?”

  She sat back on her heels and eyed him warily. “Is this just more inertia?”

  His grin widened. “No, Sunny. This is part chivalry and part animal attraction.”

  “Oh, God.... I just got dumped by an animal. So not looking for another one.”

  He gave her a gentle punch in the arm. “Buck up. Be a big girl. I bet you haven’t let an interested guy buy you a drink in a long time. Take a chance. Practice on me. I’m harmless.”