His height and her blond hair were easy to single out. I looked around me, behind me, to make sure there still was no one in the pool area I recognized. Satisfied there wasn’t, I refocused my attention on them. They weren’t touching, which was a good sign. She kept looking up at him. He mostly looked straight ahead or to the side. He wasn’t smiling. Neither was she. I took another sip of soda, and a chill ran through me. Gooseflesh popped out on my bare legs and arms, and I rubbed them a little, continuing to watch. They were coming closer. Ryan looked around more now instead of directly at Christie. Suddenly her hand reached out and grabbed his shorts—the shorts I had sent him—as if to make him stop walking. He faced her now. She raised her hands up at him, and he grabbed both of her wrists as they landed around his neck. He held them for a few minutes before he released them and took a step back. Her face seemed to turn somehow. It was as if it grew dark, like thunderheads before a rainstorm. He was looking down at her, his emotions hooded. And then she slapped him and ran toward the hotel.
I scrambled off my seat. I didn’t want to see her here. I flipped open my wallet and took out some bills and sat them near my plate. I didn’t wait for the change. I headed toward the lobby elevators and pushed the button.
Hurry, hurry, hurry! I pushed again and caught sight of the lighted sign above the doors that said they were still on the ninth and fifteenth floors. Frantically I tried to calculate how much time was between us if she took the path through the pool area to the lobby. The sand and slight grade to the sidewalks would slow her down. Ryan could have even followed her; they could be talking again. But instinct told me they weren’t. Fourth floor. C’mon. I looked behind me again. Why was I so afraid? It wasn’t as if she was after me, that she even knew I was there watching them. I was being ridiculous, acting so guiltily. I had to calm down.
Ding! The elevator doors opened and I stepped inside, taking my first big breath in several minutes. I pushed the button for the eleventh floor. “Wait,” I heard a voice call, and held my breath again when the doors opened again and Christie entered. Her eyes were glassy and a little messy from mascara that had smudged from the moisture in the air, or something else. The bottom of her nose and the groove above her upper lip were pink. Her lips turned up in a snarl when she saw me. I hesitated for a second and considered stepping out of the elevator, before I pressed the button again and fixed my attention upon the navigation panel. Leaving would have let her know I felt intimidated.
Neither one of us said anything for the first couple of floors, but I could feel her stare and a thick animosity crawling up the walls around us. We stopped at the third floor, but no one was there. I wondered what Ryan might have told her before she left him like that. She was irritated now, but I wasn’t sure it was all directed at me. The doors closed. When we approached the fourth floor, she hit the tenth-floor button, the guys’ floor.
“I think I’ll go have sex with him, Kara. You never related to him like I do.” Her voice was deadly casual, except for the slight sneer when she said my name and her emphasis on the word “never.” I realized then he hadn’t told her anything about last night. At least not the part I remembered.
I kept silent but couldn’t resist a glance sideways.
“Yes, it’s true. I give him something you never did. We share a love together that you never had.” My skin prickled under the words, my peripheral vision catching her glance around at the corners of the elevator. I turned back to focusing straight ahead. I couldn’t help but wonder if she might attack me physically rather than with just words, and pushed my hand into the front pocket of my cutoffs, testing the teeth of the key inside it. I imagined she was considering her options, and their consequences. “I can see you’re jealous, but you missed your chance,” she said more softly. Even so, I could almost feel the heat in her breath. The air around us seemed to lose oxygen. “And there’s no going backward for him. He said so himself.”
I swallowed, trying to control my own anger that was building, inside. “Did he?” I shrugged, pushing down the urge to tell her I knew for a fact she was wrong. As much as I wanted to knock her to the floor with the news of last night, I held back. Soon she would wonder what happened, where it came from, how it took her unaware, and this was my consolation.
“Yeah.” She scoffed. “He did.” Floor nine. “So take that Miss Thinks-She’s-So-Classy.”
Plus, I didn’t really know what she might do, either. She sauntered out onto the tenth floor, stopping to check the numbers on the wall for direction.
“Maybe you don’t know as much as you think!” I called before the doors closed. She turned around toward me then, and the last thing I saw was the look of hatred in her mascara-smudged eyes.
Chapter 18
Unfair
Later Kelli and Nic told me that Nic heard from Lauren, who heard it from Deana, that Christie and Ryan had a big fight and broke up. I admitted that I might have witnessed part of it. There was another note waiting for me under the door when we came back from dinner, which asked me to meet him at the dunes again.
Nic was upset with the situation. “He’s not cool meeting you behind her back like this. And it would be so mean if he’s breaking up with her right before Spring Fling. Who’s going to be her date now?” She tidied up her space, setting things down hard and making discordant sounds.
“He needs someone to talk to.” I grabbed my toiletry bag to freshen up in front of the mirror. Kelli was in the bathroom. “I wanna talk to him.”
“You know it’s more than that, Kara.” Nic said, and the toilet flushed. They had asked me earlier if I kissed him last night and I told them yes. “If you dump Peter now it is going to be ugly too, you know.” I hadn’t told them any other important details.
I traced the end of my upper lids with some liner. The sun from this afternoon had washed me out a little. “Peter and I are just friends. I made that clear from the beginning. Dang it!” I wiped my finger over the spot I just swerved on, trying to correct the mistake. “Do you still have my lip gloss?”
“Seriously, what are you thinking? That you’re going to go with Ryan now?” Nic’s voice rang incredulously. “That everyone is going to be okay with this?” She foraged in her purse and found the gloss. Kelli came out of the bathroom. “He gave her a ring,” Nic said, pressing the gloss into my hand in an exaggerated movement. “It should mean something to him. And it should set off an alarm in your head.”
“Well, it did at the time. Thank God he’s come to his senses.” I tried to laugh, but neither one joined me. I told them about my exchange in the elevator with Christie this afternoon. Then I took a deep breath. “Maybe she pressured him to give her the ring. Ryan’s a good guy. He wanted to please her, but I think he’s realized he’s not in love with her.” I didn’t want to argue with Nic, but I could hear defensiveness creep into my voice.
Kelli kept silent. She went over and moved her own stuff around without saying anything to either of us.
“It’s sick, and you look really bad for this.” Nic’s voice was getting a little louder, a little more accusatory.
“What? Why me? What am I doing that’s so awful? It takes two people to be in a relationship. The connection has always been there for us. Why are you so upset with me?”
“What about Ben?”
I blinked back at her defiant eyes for an instant and then drew my own away, swallowing a lump. I hadn’t expected her to bring up Ben. I tried to laugh, but it came out as a gasp for air. “He’s a million miles away. I might never see Ben again.” I sat down on the bed. I wanted to cry. “I love Ryan, too.” My voice held a tremor.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this!” Nic threw her hands up and went into the bathroom, slamming the door.
I let out a big puff of air and looked at Kelli. “So, do you hate me too right now, or what? What’s with Nic?”
Kelli frowned and bit her
lip. The bathroom door flew open, and Nic stormed out.
“I’ll tell you what’s with Nic! Nic’s father cheated on Nic’s mother, and now they’re getting a divorce!” Her face reddened and contorted in front of us.
“What?” I jumped off the bed and went to her. “Nic, I’m sorry.” Kelli came forward, too.
“I don’t understand the world. The way people treat each other when they say they love each other. What happens to people’s loyalty? It’s not right. It makes no sense.” Nic let Kelli put her arm around her, but pushed away from me when I touched her shoulder. “You don’t care if he cheats on her.”
“Hey, I’m sorry! I didn’t know about your parents, and I understand how you must feel. I’m not her—that other woman. Ryan and Christie aren’t married. It’s different. And I don’t know why things happen. They just do.”
Her cheeks were wet when she faced me again, and I felt a stab of guilt for not being as good as the person she thought I was.
“Please…” I touched her shoulder again, and this time she let me. I gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry.”
She sniffed. “It sucks, Kara.” She sighed. “But I’m sorry, too. I know you’re not married or anything, but I just don’t like it. You better watch out for Ryan. He might do the same thing to you someday too, you know. He’s really messing up Christie.”
“He’s not doing anything to deliberately hurt her. It’s just a weird situation.” I looked down at the ground for a second, thinking about last year—about what people must have said about Ben, about me, then. “People get caught in them all the time. It’s just…we only have so much time together. And then there are no more chances.” Slowly I lifted my eyes up to theirs. I couldn’t stay down there in those flashbacks in present company. Nic needed me. Ryan needed me. I glanced at Kelli. She had tears streaming down her face too. “Kelli, what’s wrong?”
Nic looked up. Her alert face showed she was there for Kelli. My gut told me this was about something else entirely. I could tell from Kelli’s expression this was going to be bad.
Kelli took one of our hands in each of her own and backed us onto the bed. “I haven’t told you guys about this. Only my parents, and well, one other person, know.”
We sat on the bed and I felt her hand tighten around my own. I was scared of one more revelation today. I’d been watching Kelli suffering in her own quiet way since I’d been back, that part of her that shut down from us, and I’d tried not to think about it too much after a while. I’d told myself she’d get over whatever it was, even justified to myself it was probably because we grew apart somewhat when I was away, and what did I expect. I’d reasoned that she’d be all right, not knowing what it was, and pushed this feeling about her out of my mind most of the time.
“What is it?” I tried to ask in a calm voice.
“I…” She looked back and forth at Nic and me with misery in her eyes and swallowed. “I have MS.” Tears spilled out of her eyes in big crystal drops. They weren’t full of hurt or fear, just heavy and resigned. They were the saddest tears I’d ever seen. By comparison, my own, even in my deepest despair, seemed like nothing.
***
I thought about not meeting Ryan a few hours later, but Kelli insisted I go. It was my statement about having so little time left together that made her tell us tonight, she’d said. “And Ryan’s going through something big in his life now, too. With Christie. And you.” In her sweetness she had sympathy for everyone. I couldn’t believe she had this disease. Nic was so right: Life wasn’t fair.
***
“Hey,” I said when I saw him. “There you are.”
“Are you okay? You sound a little funny,” he asked as we immediately started walking.
“Yeah. My nose is a little stuffed up,” I said, trying for a big breath of the salt air. I heard before it was a good cure for congestion.
The moon was out again with stratus clouds crawling past and spotting it, but still weaving in and out of shadows from below. It would rain tomorrow.
“I broke up with Christie.” His arm swung more forcefully on the side away from me as he said it, as if he was volleying a ball into the air.
“I heard. Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Is she?”
Ryan glanced sideways at me. Maybe he didn’t expect me to ask about her. “She doesn’t want to accept it. I didn’t tell her about us. I just couldn’t. But I know she’ll find out soon anyway.”
“No one says you have to.”
“It’s just that it would hurt her so much to know that I cheated on her with you.”
“I’m not going to tell her myself, Ryan. Kelli and Nic know, but they won’t say anything, either.”
He took a big breath. “I wish I didn’t have to do this to her.”
“Do you?” I turned toward him and caught his eyes. I slowed down my gait to search them, but didn’t change my expression.
He stopped walking and grabbed my arm to pull me toward him. “Kara, I love you.”
“I know.” And it was then that I also realized Ryan actually did love her too in some way. He just loved me more.
We walked in silence for the rest of the way but had to wade through a foot of water to get around the cliff. The cove was as serene and beautiful as we left it.
Ryan set down towels, and we immediately started kissing and undressing each other. Something primal and intense, but as natural as the creatures I had thought of before, came alive within us. Everything else fell away.
It was only afterward when we were on our backs looking up at the night sky that I began to tell him about what happened with Nic and then Kelli.
“I’m afraid for them,” I said. “I’m afraid Kelli will die.” I began to cry.
“People with MS can live a long time, Kara.”
“It’s not curable. And what kind of life?”
“She’s strong. She’ll beat it. My father’s colleague’s wife has it. They have kids.”
“It’s what made her fall. She said she fell before when I was gone and they told her then, but she didn’t believe them until the last time. She says the doctors say it could get worse. She gets dizzy.”
He hugged me to him, and I rested my head on his shoulder. “She’ll be okay. She’s young, and doctors know about it. They can do something to help her,” he said.
“But what if she’s not okay?”
We lie together in silence.
“When I was away I never imagined these kinds of things would be happening to people I cared about. I just thought life would go on as usual for them.”
“You thought you were the only one dealing with stuff?”
It was like old times being able to talk to Ryan again like this. We used to be able to tell each other everything we thought or felt, and sometimes we didn’t even have to speak. We just knew. It felt like that now.
“Maybe big stuff.”
“You fell in love there, didn’t you?” I didn’t know why Ryan asked this now, how he could manage this conversation amid everything else that was going on. It was hard for me to comprehend.
“You fell in love here.” My reply was quick, too quick.
“You…you know who she is. You know now how I had to hurt her to be true to you, true to myself.” He wrapped his other hand around my body meeting his own, holding me even closer.
“I gave Ben up a long time ago, too,” I finally said. It was the first time I had said his name to Ryan. “In some ways it was because I needed to be true to myself, as well.” At some point in the last several months I’d decided that it was healthier for me to focus on circumstances that weren’t beyond my control. I relaxed into him. “I missed you so much, Ryan.” He kissed my forehead. I wanted to tell him everything. To be honest. I trusted him.
“I saw
your argument with Christie. I ran into her in the elevator.”
“What?” His body jerked in alarm, but I pressed him back down, tightening my arm across his chest.
“She didn’t know I saw what happened. She wanted to hurt me. She told me she could give you something I never did. That you said you would never go backward to me, and that she was going to go have sex with you. She got off on the tenth floor.”
“She was waiting for me when I got there. I swear nothing happened.”
“I believe you.” I did. His words tripped out of his mouth, but I was sure it was because my news surprised him. His focus was on that memory of her now, not on Ben, at least.
“It’s kinda ironic—what she said. Now. Us.”
“Yeah.” Ryan’s brow furrowed.
“Do you think you’d be with me now if we didn’t make love too?”
“No. No, don’t say that. Don’t think that. It’s not just the sex. Although, oh my God, Kara—I don’t know why we didn’t do this before.”
I laughed. “It is pretty amazing.” We both giggled, and I leaned over to kiss him. “Maybe it made things clearer for you?” I suggested before I rested my chin back on his chest.
“I’ve never felt the way I’ve felt with you with anyone,” he said. “I’ve always known that. Backward, forward, sideways—I’ve never quite been able to get you out of my head.”
The sound of his low, frank voice rumbling out of his heart and telling me he loved me like no other was the ultimate turn-on. We kissed again, and the sexual current charged between us. My brain went down a single track and there was this incredible hunger inside me to connect to him, to climb with him to our ecstatic place where the world around us shrank into insignificance. I knew I’d never felt quite this way with anybody else, either. The sex had taken our relationship to a new level, and maybe, whether Ryan admitted it or not, it did make a difference. For me at least, it made me feel more alive, and feel like Ryan, as in the past, was more myself than I had been.
Luz, Rebound Page 11
