I shouldn’t have been listening anyway.
Back to the bed, I shrugged on my boxers and pants and the far wall casted light when the bathroom door open. The light flickering off, I proceeded to look down and find the rest of my clothes. Ann had made her way back out by then and I felt her before I saw her.
Her scent squeezed me tight, her floral aroma chasing its way into my chest and messing up my insides like it had that first hour, the first moment of her known existence to me.
I saw her bare feet when she stood in front of me. I’d been putting on my socks and shoes.
She said nothing as I got them on, her smooth legs leading up to panties covered by nothing but the top she’d worn today. I only knew because her legs and waist were in my direct line of sight. I didn’t look up at her. No phone cord was by her legs and I assumed she’d returned the phone to the end table.
“Blake?”
My fingers went to my shirt, buttoning it up. I would have managed just fine.
But then she had to go and intercede.
Taking over the buttoning for me, she sat to my side on the bed.
She kept her head down, her head a wash of those spiral curls. I could taste their smell again, Ann too close.
I got to study every line of her face from the harsh dip of her cheekbones to the smooth curves of her lips. Her framed eyelashes in the direction of my buttons kept her attention away from me, my greedy observations of her.
And they had been greedy. She truly wasn’t mine.
Upon finishing, her fingers stopped at the button pressed warmly to my chest, her hand flattening the hem out before falling away.
We sat there, beside each other. Many questions but also undeserved answers between us. Eventually, I had to ask her. I couldn’t assume.
“Who is he?” I asked eventually, not looking at her.
The words came out harsher than I wanted them to and with more disdain and emotion than I had the right to. I had no right to her. Like I said…
She wasn’t mine.
Ann’s legs crossed in my direction, her smoky brown legs brushing my jeans.
“Someone from home,” she settled on. “A guy from home.”
This could mean anything and I was sure that’s why she said it that way.
I breathed. “Are you with him then or…” I pushed my hands down my face, again not looking at her. “Are you with somebody, Anita?”
I wasn’t the type of person to be with someone if they were already involved. I wouldn’t take a woman from another man out of respect and dignity. That was just the type of person I was and how I’d been taught.
But Ann wasn’t from here, was she?
My head talked to me again, saying things of foolishness and kicking me hard, my brain saying it didn’t rightly give a damn about me or my heart.
Ann’s hand came down on my arm and as much as I hated it, I let it stay.
Because I knew I’d hate it falling away even more.
“We’re not together, Blake,” she said, relieving the pace of my heart only a little. She had something in her voice that told me she wasn’t finished, a breath there like there were more words.
Her hand squeezed on me before it pushed and when she touched her forehead down on my shoulder I closed my eyes.
“But we’re expected to be… in the end,” she continued, cutting away, and that dagger deepened. I truly couldn’t breathe.
And I hated my lungs for it.
Ann went on to tell me things I didn’t want to hear, speaking about tradition and all the things that meant something where she came from versus where I came up. She wasn’t with this guy now but she had been in the past, something they cut off right before college. They wanted to live, be with others and experience life. The intention was to come back to each other, a pairing that wasn’t an official betrothal but basically put together by her parents. They both came from affluent families. They knew in the end that’s what this would be, but what I didn’t know, what she hadn’t told me was one more thing that involved her and us, a nothing that hadn’t even existed forty-eight hours ago. It hadn’t been two full days since we met, merely a few hours more than twenty-four. We really meant nothing.
Especially when you compared it to a lifetime of something and someone.
Her arms had pushed around mine at this point, her cheek on my shoulder so warm it could burn me through my shirt. It was burning me, a brand I didn’t want or desire. I didn’t wake up that morning for work the day I met her expecting anything like this. I didn’t ask for it.
My lids fell hard on my eyes, behind them burning like inside my chest. Eventually, I couldn’t deal with them anymore. It was just too much.
I touched her hand on my arm, but that’s all I could do.
“We should get you to the train station,” I said, knowing it was time for that. “I can drive you. I can take you there.”
Ann
I thought about all the things I should have said, all the things that should have been said.
My vision panned to the side mirror, Blake’s large and encompassing frame outside of his old Ford pickup. He pumped gas, his vision away from me as it’d been since we left the motel. He offered to drive me though I could have walked.
I should have walked.
My arms moved around me, my head down. There were so many things I should have said. I should have told him I was standing up for myself. I should have told him I was going to change things. I wouldn’t do the things expected of me.
I’d choose a different path.
I looked toward him again but he ventured from the truck at this point. I watched as his large back moved in the direction of the gas station, his intent I assumed to pay for the gas he’d just pumped. He’d come out and that would be it.
We’d be strangers again.
The wait forced a hurt inside me that wasn’t justified. In a way, at least how we were leaving things, had been my fault. I would have liked to say we never should have slept together, that I never should have met him the day after we met for coffee, or that I should have sat with him for lunch in the first place. I’d like to say all those things, but they’d be lies. I’d been lying to myself. Meeting him had actually allowed me to have more beyond the best day, making me feel like I had when I treated patients. I felt the same purpose of when I did the job I never got to have.
How fitting as I never got to have him either.
His silhouette could be seen through the gas station window, Blake in line as he waited to pay. In that moment, watching him must have been too much for me because I panned away, trying to look at anything and feel nothing. In that fruitless journey, I studied his seat, the moleskin notebook sliding into my hand when I reached for it. He always had it on him, but apparently not this moment.
My hand smoothed over the nearly flawless yet worn cover, feeling even more of those feelings I didn’t want to feel. They hurt so much.
I opened my eyes, not knowing they were closed and I panned to the right again, studying Blake’s large frame. He’d gotten up to the attendant and I used that time to reach into my purse. Finding a pen, I opened his notebook. If I couldn’t say the things that needed to be said…
I could at least write them down.
Blake
We sat in the cab of my truck, even breaths too loud in there. Neither one of us moved. Though, I think we both knew she should have left a while ago. Her train was here, loading.
I could hear it.
We sat in the parking lot, waiting while time passed us by, waiting for what I didn’t know but Ann must have figured it out.
I felt her before she actually touched me again. Her smell so soft in the wind. She got so close but I didn’t turn. If I had our lips would have met.
I just couldn’t… do that. It’d be too much and sending me down a rabbit hole I didn’t know if I could work my way out of again. I knew she wasn’t meant for me now.
No sense in giving false hope.
I waited for what she’d do, what she’d say but I ended up being wrong in the second account. She chose to do something and that was put her hand on my bicep.
As well as kiss my cheek.
Inside me and everywhere, I felt this city girl’s lips. She could get that deep with me and, perhaps, for the rest of my life if I ever saw her again. I had not much hope of that. She lived too far away.
She lingered after her lips left mine, her forehead touching my temple once before her hand slid away from my arm, the absence of which I felt immediately. She was falling away from me, disappearing with every moment and every ounce of breath that passed.
Say something to her…
My lips couldn’t say the words, my damn brain, my damn bastard brain. He wouldn’t say anything, putting a vise on my heart. Stuck in the vault of silence, I watched someone I had a connection with grab her purse from the floor of my truck and push it over her shoulder. The crack of the door came next, her duffle she had with her up front hitting the ground. I assumed I’d hear her footfalls in the wind but from her side came something I thought I had on me.
The moleskin notebook slid into the dip of her seat it was so smooth, and for the first time, I chose to directly look into Ann’s line of sight.
I captured her fully with my gaze, drank her in from the curls whipping around her in the wind to her large dark eyes that thirsted themselves on me as well. We feasted, both selfish and without hope. Because there wasn’t any.
This was our reality.
Ann’s lips moved and I hoped she’d be the one to say something. She could get my brain’s rear in gear, make him get out of my way to be the man I knew I was and do something. I could tell a girl I had a good time with her. I could tell her I liked her…
So many damn things.
But neither of us said anything. I guess both of us were weak in the end. Smiling at me, Ann at least let me have that, her fingers lifting before closing the door. Her head dipping, she severed her gaze and I couldn’t even watch as she lifted the handle of her bag and dragged it away. I couldn’t watch her walk away. Instead, I chose to grab the notebook, something falling out of it.
A slip of paper slid across the same seat my notebook had been on, the paper the same as in the notebook itself. It’d been ripped out and when I turned it, it had writing on the page.
A list was there, a short list but a list. It had things like “eat an entire bowl of ice cream with many different flavors,” and “shout from the highest point in town.” Both things had been checked off and at the bottom the final thing with yet a similar check beside it.
Have the best day(s).
She’d put the “s” like that, the word “days” underlined. She checked it like she accomplished it, like she accomplished everything on her list.
Bones crushed inside my chest as if in a collision, my insides hollow and the fervent emptiness making it hard to breathe. I couldn’t even hold the paper she’d written, the scrap falling from my fingers. I ended up opening the notebook for some reason, the spine broken to the page she ripped out and there I saw more writing.
There I saw all I needed to see.
My boots moved in the wind and I didn’t even go inside the train station, knowing she’d already be inside. Her train was already loading. She would have rushed to be let on.
I went to the track, looking through the windows with my notebook and I passed the window she sat in front of at first. I had to go back, but I knew it was her.
Her curls were in the wind, her head against the window frame.
“Anita!”
Half the people on the platform looked at me, Ann amongst them.
She turned as if startled, rising up and immediately.
I held up the notebook, her words in the air between us.
They said, “Never forget your dreams,” and “Always remember them, Blake.”
“If you will,” I started, moving forward. I shook the notebook at her. “I will.”
She knew what I meant. She had to. She may have been going home and into some universe to be with this guy.
But she could still live her dream.
Her mouth opening, I watched her eyes. All that empty space lifted the moment her eyes did that thing I loved, that soft and hard crinkle thing.
They lit her large eyes up, a sheen in them I could see from the platform.
She put her hand to her chest, nodding.
“I promise, Blake,” she said, her voice thick and cast with emotion. She nodded again, a tear falling into her lap. “I promise.”
I nodded too and so tall, I knew I could get to her from where I stood.
I reached up, right into the train for her hand.
“Be safe,” I told her wishing I’d said something else. I wanted to tell her to be happy and that I’d always remember her.
Gripping my hand, she held it as if a lifeline. I did too. It was a lifeline.
She nodded again, pushing her hand over her eyes.
We stood that way for a while, for as long as the train conductor would let us. Eventually, I had to let go and even after I did, I watched. I watched until the train moved out of my sight.
I made the short-term moment, the longest of memories.
St. Albert’s Hospital
El Paso, Texas
Four years ago… continued.
Blake
It’d been like waking up, like being inside heaven with just as much light around me. It shined through my hospital room—on her and being unable to see her was impossible. I refused to lose her.
A ghost of a dream.
Her response to her name had been little more than a head raise in the sunshine, her hair up big and busy, but even with those curls fastened up real tight I still remembered how they played in the light. How each and every ray reflected off the pretty brown tone and made the strands of her hair more hazel than dark brown, the same with her eyes…
Her eyes that held age lines now, more than thirty years into the future but that the only sign of time passed, the curve of her full pink lips plush and her cheekbones as high. Her features were just as soft as the last hours I’d seen them.
Soft…
My fingers bunched at my side over my hospital sheet, still… feeling her in those last moments, her deep brown skin flushed everywhere, her body heated.
I’d been heated too, impulsive and I wondered if that had to do with why some of it had played out the way it had. I wondered for a long time if I’d scared her off. If I had been the reason she left in the end and not fate and life in general. The thoughts had been anything I could do to rationalize the situation, that it had to have been me.
That I just hadn’t held on tight enough.
Her movement toward me in her hospital scrubs came as something of an aberration. She couldn’t be here. Not after all this time and so close. I lived not far from this hospital. She couldn’t be here.
Ann…
But she responded to me when I said her name. She came to me and this time she stayed, her hand bunching just as much at her side like she didn’t know what to do. I’d had a heart attack, been in and out for days and was just as unclear about this situation as my time under. I was out of it. She wasn’t here.
But then…
Pink flowers, peonies in the wind when the gorgeous and fluid woman lifted her hand to her head, catching one of those curls I knew was still just as big and vibrant as the last time I’d seen them out. I only wished I could see her dance, wish I could see those curls flowing big and wide.
The actual thought of all that time missed, passed emotion in me, all those dances I was sure she had in her life I hadn’t gotten to see. Because I hadn’t been strong enough to keep her, hold on and tell her what I should have those last moments, how things could have been all right with us and despite us being strangers she didn’t have to go. She could have stayed with me, but as I watched her watching me I decided to let it all go. I had to. Because she had left she’d been able to live
her own life and I mine, my boys, the families and lives they were starting to build the greatest product. I wouldn’t give any of that up for nothing.
But I wouldn’t give up the chance to see her again either.
Ann’s hand fell from her face. “Blake, I…”
Her fingers found their way in mine when I grabbed her hand. She’d probably been about to say something significant but I couldn’t help stopping her. I saw her hand start to retreat, go away, so I grabbed it.
I had to have her hand in mine.
I didn’t think about her life, who she was now and where she was going. I honestly didn’t even really put together her purpose in this hospital besides being a nurse and put no ties really to what I was doing. I just wanted to hold her, whatever that meant, feel her if not one more time.
And she let me.
Her lips parting, she let me, so much emotion playing on her face. It placed shine in her brown eyes and made them just as big, as wide as they’d been that day, those hours that placed a lifetime in both my heart and mind.
“Where have you been?” I asked her, not why was she here or even who she was now. I just wanted this question answered.
I didn’t think I could have chosen it if I wanted to.
Ann
We talked for hours. We could have talked for days if his family would have allowed him to. They checked on him often, his beautiful family of strong men who looked just like him. They passed me little more than a glance, but with the flashes of the light blue eyes of their father more respect and upbringing in their acknowledgement than most men twice their age. Blake had instilled so much good in them, their hearts I knew had to be just as big. I gave them their time with him, their families and girlfriends, as well as the rest of Blake’s kin, but with each interruption, I knew in my heart I couldn’t leave the room. Blake would always see me, never letting go despite his family’s attention. He’d keep his gaze on me, leaving from them just long enough to let me know he was still here, that he wanted me there.
Blake (Found by You Book 6) Page 5