Always Something There to Remind Me

by Beth Harbison

  In other words, it felt like her home, but it didn’t feel like his.

  But what did I know?

  He smiled, that wonderful crooked smile that made his dark eyes lighten to amber. “It feels like a grandparents’ house, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, my gosh, you’re right—it feels like your grandparents’ house!”

  “You’re sitting on their sofa.”

  “That’s right! I thought this felt familiar!”

  “A couple of pieces here are.” He shrugged. “Most of them are Theresa’s, though.”

  I nodded. A few moments passed in awkward silence. Finally, I said, “This is weird.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you remember that time I went out with Pete Hagar for a few weeks in high school?”

  “Yes,” he said immediately.

  I met his eyes. “This is way worse.”

  He nodded and looked away. “I’m sure.”

  “I mean really,” I went on, unable to keep from harping at least a little bit. “This was a shock in so many ways.”

  “I’m sorry. I handled it … badly. All of it. But not because I wanted to score something from you.” He looked at me intently. “You know that, right?”

  “I do.” And I did. There were a lot of easy ways to hurl blame at him, but one thing I knew absolutely was that he hadn’t had sex with me this time just to get some.

  “If I could do things differently…” He didn’t finish.

  I didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t right. None of this was right. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  He cocked his head. “Doing…?”

  “Why are you married to a gorgeous perfect woman and … doing what we did the other day?”

  “I’m not in love,” he said quietly. “With her. No matter how perfect she is.”

  “Then why did you marry her?”

  He tightened his jaw. “Life throws curves.”

  “I’ll say.” I looked at him. God, he was cute. He still looked like My Nate. Those eyes, those teeth, those hands, that body … it was impossible to be so close to him and not want him. It felt right. Things trembled deep within me, and while I knew I should wish I wasn’t there, what I really wished was that we were alone.

  It was a good thing we weren’t.

  Instead I just sat there quietly, simultaneously wishing Rick and Theresa would hurry up and that they’d never come back, and feeling my heart break. If things had gone just a little differently—maybe even just that one night—Nate and I might have been in our house, not their house. It all felt alien, like something had gone terribly wrong and we’d screwed up our fate.

  Then again, anyone who believes in fate has to be prepared to believe that whatever happens is fate, whether they like it or not.

  “What about you?” he challenged. “Are you in love with Rick? Because I’m not seeing that.”

  “I’m not married to Rick.”

  “No, but you’re thinking about it.”

  Before I could respond, Theresa and Rick came up the basement stairs, shrieking with laughter over some joke Theresa had told about the Gettysburg Address.

  I’m not kidding.

  “That’s a good one,” Rick said, apparently never having heard it before.

  “Shall we move into the dining room?” Theresa suggested. “Dinner is ready whenever everyone else is.”

  Anything that took us one step closer to being finished and out of there worked for me. We moved into the dining room and sat at a perfectly set table with a centerpiece of fresh freesias.

  And, really, it was a mistake. The whole thing, coming here, it was one big debacle and I should have known better than to try. In fact, I think I did know better, I just didn’t know how to get out of it gracefully.

  And there was some part of me that didn’t want to lose contact with Nate, even if contact did come under these circumstances.

  Theresa served a fantastic Chardonnay, which the guy at Pearson’s Liquor Store had taken out of the back vault for her when she told him she was having her best friend from twenty years ago over for dinner.

  “So, Nate,” Rick said, leaning toward him. “I understand from your wife that you work as an aeronautical engineer at Quince.”

  It was the tone Nate’s grandparents had used to ask me where I wanted to go to college.

  I’m thinking about Southern Methodist University, I’d told them. Lucy Ewing had gone there on Dallas.

  The grandparents had been thrilled. It was the family alma mater. From that moment on, they had just grown to love me more and more.

  But now here I was, grown-up Erin, sitting at a dinner table with grown-up Nate, but with our significant others … not each other.

  Which would have been fine; I’d interacted with adults many, many times in my adult life, of course. But never with Nate. This scene was just too uncomfortable.

  Theresa said to me, “Isn’t that funny, Erin?”

  I dragged my attention back to the moment, blinking against the discrepancy of the then versus the now. “I’m sorry?”

  “Didn’t you always think Nate would be, like, an investment banker?” Theresa asked. “He’s so good with numbers!”

  She was his wife! How could she be so completely off base about him? “No. I thought”—I looked at him uncertainly and just went ahead and said it—“this is exactly what he wanted to do. Since he was really young.” Suddenly I was uncertain. “At least I thought so. Right, Nate?”

  For a moment, it felt just like it always had talking with him over dinner. But it wasn’t. We both knew it wasn’t.

  He suppressed a smile but just met my eyes and gave a small nod. “It’s a good fit for me.”

  A good fit.

  My hands, holding knife and fork, started to tremble slightly. I tightened my grip on the utensils and tried to still the earthquake that was erupting inside of me.

  Oblivious to my meltdown, Theresa said, “Of course, Nate could probably do just about anything he put his mind to. You know that almost as well as I do, don’t you, Erin?”

  Now, I know what she was trying to do. She was trying to validate my history with Nate in some way. To acknowledge it without handing it too much importance. And definitely without trumping her importance in the matter.

  There was no way she realized what a terrible position she was placing me in by putting me on that spot, though. Now was not the time for me to reminisce aloud about the old days of Nate and me. In fact, probably no time would be the right time for that again.

  “I’m sure,” I said, not looking at him. “He can be very focused.” God knows that was true. He’d set his mind on dumping me and keeping away and he’d succeeded.

  I straightened in my chair, remembering. That was ancient history. It shouldn’t be acting on me now. The problem was, recent history had made it difficult for me to see any of this clearly.

  “That kind of focus is important,” Nate pointed out. “It’s an asset in my work.”

  “Sure, in work,” I said, looking at him. “But maybe less so in personal relationships.” I held his gaze for just a moment before realizing how inappropriate I was being. I cleared my throat. “For instance, in my work, I have to deal with difficult people all the time and, while I’d love to tune them out, what I actually have to do is tune in to them, determine the root of the problem, and solve it.”

  “Not all interpersonal problems can be solved, though, can they?” Nate said. “Sometimes, if you don’t focus on the big picture instead of the details, you end up going under.”

  “That’s for sure,” I said, a little sharply. “If you don’t have the cooperation of other people involved.” This was really making me mad, but I tried to keep my cool. “Teamwork. That’s key.”

  Nate shrugged. “That’s the difference between you and me, I guess. Our work, I mean. I deal with facts, you deal with emotions.”

  “The problem with that is that everyone has emotions,” I said. “Even if they don’t want t
o acknowledge them.”

  “And there are always facts,” he countered. “Even if people don’t want to acknowledge them.”

  “I’m with Erin,” Theresa said, and I couldn’t tell if she’d picked up on what was going on or not. I mean, really, how could she not? But she didn’t seem to think anything of it if she did. “I wrestle with emotions all the time, but I have to maintain my left-brain impartiality for work.”

  “Well, I’m not wrestling with emotions—”

  “No, no, that’s a good thing,” Theresa said. But I didn’t believe her.

  And one quick look from those brilliant blue eyes told me, yup, she’d picked up on something. She knew Nate and I weren’t talking about work.

  Rick, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue. “The world wouldn’t run very smoothly without our left-brained engineers,” he said, and gave a laugh. “We’d still be driving around the Chesapeake Bay to get to the beach.”

  Nate just ate, looking amused by the conversation. It might as well have been about someone else.

  Rick asked Theresa a question about her work, and they got going in an animated conversation about a company they’d both done work with.

  I turned to Nate and said privately, “Congratulations. I know you always wanted that. Quince, I mean.”

  “Thanks.” He gave that smile that had always made me melt. “I know you’re good at yours too. You were always good at making people feel … emotions.”

  I swallowed. “Not good enough,” I said lightly.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  My heart stopped. Meanwhile, Theresa chatted away with Rick, while so much heat buzzed between us that I was amazed neither of the other two looked over and asked what was going on.

  “Nothing surprises me anymore,” I said with a small smile. “How could it?”

  “Life is full of surprises.”

  “These days, I prefer the predictable,” I said. “Surprises aren’t always pleasant, are they?”

  He shifted in his seat, and the heat from his body whooshed closer to me for a moment. “No,” he agreed. “They aren’t.”

  “Erin!” It was Theresa again. This time there was a tiny impatient tinge to her voice.

  “What?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You and my husband are so deep in conversation that you missed the big news.”

  My husband.

  I guess I deserved that, but wow, it stung.

  “What news is that?” I asked with dread. Had she had wine with dinner? Yes, she had. So it wasn’t that she was pregnant. Thank God.

  “Your fiancé”—did she draw the word out or was I imagining that?—“got a promotion today but hasn’t had the chance to tell you!”

  I looked at Rick, shocked that he would announce that to Theresa so she could make a production of it. “Is that right?”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” he said, but he looked like the proverbial cat to my canary.

  “If you call being made partner not a big deal,” Theresa said, and waved a manicured hand. “We should get out some champagne!”

  “Wow, Rick, that’s really great,” I said, unable to bring the enthusiasm the news needed, thanks to the awkward presentation.

  “Yeah, congratulations, man,” Nate agreed, and suddenly it felt like the two of us were the couple congratulating the two of them on their news.

  I saw that register with Theresa, saw it flicker across her expression immediately before she stood up and said, “Does anyone want champagne?”

  Everyone demurred.

  Instead we moved back to the living room, which she had somehow reset for coffee between serving wine and dinner, and had, unsurprisingly, a delicious brew.

  Finally, with cups drained perhaps a little hastily, I seized a moment of silence to suggest that Rick and I should be going since we had to work in the morning and he had still to tell me the details of his big promotion.

  Theresa hooked her arm through Rick’s and led the way to the door. Nate hung back with me.

  “Sorry you had to do this,” he said to me quietly.

  “You too.”

  A moment passed, then he said, “I’ve thought about you a lot.”

  I wanted to know, but I didn’t want to ask. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

  “It’s all…” He stopped and blew air into his cheeks before expelling a heavy breath. “It’s a mess.”

  He just seemed so sad. I mean, I was too, but the ache of regrets I felt was nothing compared to the ache I felt when I looked at his drawn face. And yet, part of me wondered if he regretted what he’d done to us. He’d cut us off like it was nothing, like that kind of connection was expendable or easily replaced.

  But now did he, who clearly still had feelings for me after all these years and who obviously knew I did too, ever regret detonating the single most loving and cohesive relationship either one of us would ever have?

  “Well,” I said stupidly, “we survived it anyway.”

  He flattened his mouth into a grim line.

  “Good night!” Theresa flung herself toward me. “It’s been so great to see you! We have to get together soon.” She drew back and eyed me with surprising kindness, maybe even pity, saying deliberately, “Just us girls. There’s a lot to catch up on.”

  More than she knew.

  “We’ll do it,” I lied. “I’ll call you.”

  “Thank you for inviting us,” Rick said, shaking Nate’s hand. He nodded toward Theresa. “You’re a lucky man.”

  Nate’s gaze moved to me. “You’re not doing so badly yourself.”

  “I know it.” Rick put his arm around me and it felt inappropriately intimate. But it wasn’t, of course.

  “Good to see you, Nate.”

  “You too, Erin.”

  The understanding between us was clear: there would never be understanding. The whole thing sucked.

  And we both knew it.

  Chapter 20

  As soon as I got home, I called Jordan.

  “How was it?” she asked immediately.

  “It sucked. Of course. Theresa was completely enchanting; of course, Rick thought she was great. She looked great. Nate looked great too.” Sudden, unexpected tears threatened. “It was pretty painful.”

  “God, I’m so sorry,” Jordan said, her voice warm with compassion. “That must have been torture for you.”

  “You just have no idea.…” I recalled the feel of Nate’s gaze on me, the way his heat found me when he got anywhere near me. “And, of course, Rick thought it was great.”

  “Sounds like a nightmare,” she said. “I mean, literally, it sounds like a nightmare.”

  “Okay, so what does it mean, that Nate kept looking at me all night long?”

  “It means you’ve been magically transported back to high school and you’re asking your best friend to read a guy’s mind for you.”

  “You’re supposed to be an expert! Is this what your patients pay you two hundred and fifty bucks an hour for?”

  “My patients pay me to be objective, which I cannot do with you. I didn’t see how he was looking at you. But if he’s the guy he used to be, or the guy I think he used to be, then whatever he’s thinking is probably exactly what you think he’s thinking, because you two were always sharing one mind.”

  Something in me deflated. That was true. But I would have preferred to discover, or finally feel, that ours had been the kind of teenage relationship that didn’t have any real significance. Plenty of people could chuckle at themselves now and say that they hadn’t known what love was back then and that they hadn’t even known themselves, but, damn it, I knew exactly what love was—then and now—and I’d known myself as well then as I did now.

  Maybe I was wrong about both, but if I was, at least I was as wrong as ever.

  “Plus,” Jordan went on, “he could always read you really well. If you were angsting tonight, he probably picked up on it and was concerned about you.”

  “I
t didn’t take Carnac to figure that out.”

  “And maybe he picked up on the fact that you dream of having wild animal sex with him.”

  “What?”

  “I’m kidding.” She laughed, but then I could imagine her arching her brow. “Aren’t I?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to blot out the torrid images that suddenly came to mind. They’d be back. They’d been dancing around there ever since we’d enacted them. “So, what, you’re going to help me or just make fun of me and make me cry?”

  That made her laugh even more, and I smiled at the sound. Maybe this, right here, was a good example of why you shouldn’t marry your high school boyfriend or girlfriend—because you are never completely grown-up around someone you’ve known since you were thirteen.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sobering slowly.

  “Honestly, Jordan, do you think our relationship was unusual? Was it more than just the usual puppy love? Or am I making way too much of this?”

  “No, no,” she said. “It was unusual. For one thing, you were way too young to handle that kind of emotion, and for another, it went on way too long. How long were you guys together?”

  “Two years.” It was a long time. Eight long seasons. Two long D.C. winters, which in themselves seem to last years. Two Christmases. Four birthdays.

  Two anniversaries.

  “Then on and off and back and forth for another couple,” I added.

  She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I wish your parents hadn’t allowed you to do that.”

  “If they hadn’t you wouldn’t have had nearly so much fun,” I said, though privately I’d had the thought myself that I wished my parents hadn’t allowed me to spend all my time wrapped up in a relationship.

  I would have hated them for it at the time, probably, but they would have been right.

  “True,” she agreed with a small laugh. “But I was probably a bad influence too.”

  “Probably.” I loved her. I was incredibly lucky to have a friend like her.

  “But that isn’t the point now. It was what it was.”