by Lisa Jackson
He turned and headed in to buy a ticket for the ride to Tipón.
Of course she doesn’t see me as a threat. I’m not one.
So why, moments later, did Meredith feel so odd climbing into the van behind Sam? As if she were heading off on an illicit, clandestine adventure? Why did she feel so guilty?
The van was smaller than he’d expected. Smaller and older. The first ones on, he and Meredith gravitated toward the back bench seat, and then found themselves squished together when a group of late arrivals showed up. It was a beautiful day outside, but the sun beat in through the windows of the van—windows that didn’t all open, he discovered—which caused a trickle of sweat to run down his temple. Also, Meredith’s left thigh was pressed against his. He practically hugged the inside wall of the vehicle, but that didn’t relieve the space problem.
She smiled. “Tight squeeze.”
It was impossible not to smile back and not to feel a surge of affection for someone who could make him feel so at ease and uncomfortable all at once. For a moment back in town, he’d feared she wasn’t going to come . . . although maybe that would have been better after all. He’d intended to make this a solitary day journey, but once he’d seen her waiting at the little pick-up spot, his heart had lifted at the idea of spending time with her. When he’d feared she was going to back out, a kind of panic had overtaken him.
She jumbled up his emotions without even seeming to try. Under the circumstances, he shouldn’t be so glad to be with her. But he was.
“Is this how you expected it to be?” she asked now.
I never expected we’d be together again, he almost said. I never expected to see you again at all.
She pointed out the window and elaborated. “The countryside. Peru.”
“Oh!” Thank God his tongue had remained tied. “I’m not sure.” He hadn’t really anticipated what the scenery would look like, apart from eyeing the spectacular pictures of Machu Picchu and trying to judge whether it would be worth the time, money, and inconvenience to get there, and if it would be a suitably dramatic backdrop for his big romantic moment with Gina. “How about you?”
The van trundled past a field where some kind of reddish-topped grain was being cultivated. “I suppose I hadn’t expected it to be so agricultural,” she said. “When you’re looking in a guidebook and online, you forget that the whole country doesn’t exist just for tourists. Sort of like when you go to England—that millions of people live there, but a part of your brain expects the place to be one giant history pageant. You know what I mean?”
His heart juddered like an engine stalling out. England. An entire country with millions of people and thousands of years of history, but all it brought to his mind was coming home to an empty apartment. “I’ve never been to England.”
He didn’t mean the words to sound so resentful, but Meredith winced a little and looked away. The minute she did, he felt foolish for his reaction. He wanted to reassure her that he wasn’t bitter. Of course, he would prefer not to have that conversation when they were stuffed like sardines in a tourist bus.
Meredith turned to the middle-aged couple next to her—British, wouldn’t you know—and struck up a conversation. But her chirpy tone belied her real mood, if the tension in her thigh was any barometer.
The couple mentioned a place called Hay, where they were from, and Meredith seemed to know something about the town, or at least about some kind of festival they held there.
Sam tried hard not to eavesdrop, but when the man asked, “Are you two married or just on a romantic adventure?” he couldn’t help pivoting.
Meredith hesitated. He could practically hear the hitch in her throat.
To help her out and fill the awkward silence, he blurted, “Neither.”
In tandem, the man and the woman turned their gazes to him. A red stain rose in Meredith’s cheeks before she laughed and explained, “Sam and I used to live together, actually, but he’s here with his fiancée.”
Too much information. The expressions on the couple’s faces morphed from curiosity to confusion to speculation. Meredith didn’t see it, of course. She went on, “But she’s sick, and so Sam thought he’d seize the opportunity to get out and about.”
Two pairs of eyes zeroed in on him, and he read the couple’s thoughts at once. Left his sick fiancée to sow wild oats with the ex.
He wanted to refute the misperception, but for the life of him, all he could come up with was, “She’s not my fiancée.”
Meredith turned to him sharply. “How can you say that?”
Yes, how could he? He’d been thinking of himself and Gina as almost engaged for a while now. But nobody else knew that. Nobody. “Why did you think we were?”
“Because of the—” Her words stopped abruptly, and she reversed course. “Well, aren’t you?”
“ No.”
She folded her arms. “Interesting.”
The couple had been following the conversation like spectators at a tennis match. Now their gazes turned back to Sam. Before he could explain the technicalities of the situation—or even decide if he wanted to explain them—Meredith stole his turn.
“Sorry, I must have misunderstood,” she explained to them. “Or maybe it’s just beginning to dawn on Sam that things are serious, and he’s decided to cut himself off emotionally from his partner. He has a history of that.”
He sputtered at the unfairness of that. “I have a history of cutting myself off? Who was the one who bought an airline ticket and flew off without a word of warning?” He appealed to their audience. “Getting on a plane bound for another continent. Isn’t that an example of shutting someone out?”
Their eyes widened. The man shook his head in confusion, while his wife nodded.
“And what made you think Gina and I were engaged?” he asked Meredith.
She lifted her shoulders. “I just assumed.”
“You sounded pretty sure.”
“Well, Janie told me some things.”
Janie. He faced forward and was dismayed to discover the people sitting in front of them were now angling back to listen to their argument. “And of course you believed her. Janie’s word is gold. She’s your touchstone.”
“No, not anymore,” Meredith said with a sharpness that surprised him. “But when I was younger? Yes, I valued her opinion. She raised me, Sam.”
He looked at her. “That didn’t mean that she was right.”
“No, it didn’t.” One of her brows arched. “But is she right about the ring?”
“Yes,” he bit out, unaccountably irritated. That was supposed to be his secret. The idea that everyone knew about it—that even Gina knew about it, and had told people—seemed to take something away from him. Even if it was just the element of surprise.
“So you’re engaged.”
“Practically,” he said.
The van braked, and the driver called out, “Tipón.”
Thank heavens. He didn’t want to continue this conversation.
He’d expected to lose himself in a tour of the place, but the busload of people found themselves dumped on a path at the bottom of a hillside with nothing but a stone marker letting them know they’d reached their destination. The driver—evidently not a tour guide—stayed in the van with a newspaper. The others started up the hill in their own little groupings, leaving only Sam and Meredith.
Awkward. He considered turning and walking away, alone, but that would seem rude. But he was still chaffing from the things she’d said in the van, and from the way she’d characterized him. As if he was emotionally distant—as if he’d been to blame for the breakup.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“What’s the matter with what?”
“You’ve stopped talking.”
“So have you.”
“And you were doing that thing where you focus straight-ahead and clench your jaw so that I can see your mandible hop under your cheek. You used to do that in the old days.”
Men
tioning the old days didn’t help, and in fact sent a surge of irritation through him. “That’s because I’m the same person as in the old days, which only are the old days because you left, which you seem to have forgotten. And now you show up on my vacation—”
A strangled cry interrupted him. “Excuse me. I thought I was on my vacation.”
“—and then get in a snit every time I mention Gina.”
She bristled. “I wasn’t in a snit; I just ran out of things to say. You of all people should know about conversation-killing silences. You were always sinking into uncommunicative funks. It drove me insane. Whenever I had something I really wanted to talk about, you clammed up.”
“I’m not a chatterer.”
She tossed her head back in a challenge. “I didn’t want you to chatter. I wanted you to listen.”
“I always listened.”
“But it didn’t feel like you did.”
“What could I have done about that?” He sighed. “For Pete’s sake, Meredith. You’re accusing me of being uncommunicative, when you were the one who ran out without a word. What was I supposed to do? You always just expected me to read your mind. That’s what drove me insane.”
She took in a breath, puffing up as if she might escalate the argument, but just as quickly, she deflated with a laughing sigh. “It’s a good thing I left when I did, apparently, or we both might have ended up in padded rooms.”
He nodded, although he could have mentioned that her leaving had done nothing for his peace of mind. In fact, he’d been depressed for months afterward. Only when he’d gone back to school for his graduate degree had he begun to slough off the malaise he’d felt since she left.
She hitched her backpack over one shoulder. “Anyway . . . I read in the guidebook that there’s an interesting village nearby, with a zoo. I think I’ll check it out.”
He shook his head. “Liar. You hate zoos.”
She laughed. “I didn’t count on your memory being so good.”
“I remember more than you think I do,” he said. “Look, it would be silly for us to try to avoid each other while we’re here.” When she didn’t argue, he tilted his head toward the sign. “The whole day would be ruined.”
She groaned. “The zoo’s sounding better and better.”
They headed toward the rough paved walkway, climbing the hill together.
He’d felt a pang of guilt after he’d denied being engaged to Gina, as if he’d betrayed her. Now he was wondering if it wasn’t Gina who was betraying him. Could telling about a ring be categorized as betraying a confidence? He wasn’t sure. Hard even to call it a confidence when he hadn’t told her about it. Yet it should have been private, and she should have known that.
He tried to sort out his feelings. It was just a ring, but it seemed much more than that. And yet it would be crazy to make too big a deal of it. Especially now that nothing in life seemed as certain as it had forty-eight hours ago. Before he’d seen Meredith at the airport, he’d been sure of what he wanted.
A strange thing happened to his muddled thoughts as he huffed up the incline. They didn’t resolve—they simply dissipated. He concentrated on breathing. The air was thinner, forcing him to breathe in wheezy gulps of it. Still, once he’d acclimated, there was something calming about this spot.
He stopped and looked around, impressed. The hillside in front of them was terraced gracefully, the levels divided by stone walls that had stood for centuries. All through the area, clear water flowed in narrow stone channels, its rushing providing a soothing sound track.
“What is this place?” he asked, awed.
Lacking a guide or even a tourist information booth, Meredith told him what she remembered from her book, giving the essentials of the five hundred-acre, self-contained ruins. “They aren’t sure if this was meant to be a sort of resort for the Incan nobility or an agricultural center.”
Or maybe, Sam thought, the place had been an ancient mental-health center. Instead of handing their stressed-out citizens a Xanax, the Incas just sent them up the hill to listen to the trickling of calming, life-giving water.
They continued to climb. Occasionally, precarious-looking steps would jut out of a wall to lead them to the next level, and he would take those, giving Meredith a hand up once he reached the top. The gesture was reflexive, but touching hands felt strangely intimate. He remembered the looks the people in the van had given him—as if he were some kind of tour lothario. And the feeling in his gut made him wonder if maybe they were right. Looking into Meredith’s bright eyes, it was easy to forget the last seven years. He was twenty-three again, living through his first hot summer in New York, but humming Black Eyed Peas songs while he worked his boring bank job, just happy to come home every night to the apartment. To Meredith.
Was Meredith as blissed out by their surroundings as he was? He couldn’t tell. He was afraid to ask, to break this moment of peace.
After a few moments, she cleared her throat and turned to him. “I’m sorry about how I spoke earlier—saying that you were emotionally cut off.”
He shifted uncomfortably. “Please, it’s—”
“No, what you said was true. I was wrong to run away like I did, without explaining myself. I’ve felt bad about that for years.”
“Well . . .” There it was. The apology his bruised ego had been craving for the better part of a decade. And now he felt no better for it. “Water under the bridge.”
“I know, but I wanted to say it. I’m sorry. If I had it to do over again—” Abruptly, her words stopped, and her eyes widened in mortification.
His mind filled with what she might have said. I wouldn’t have gone.
But for all he knew, she might have just meant to say that she would have written a note, or returned her overdue library books. Why did his brain jump to the idea that she wouldn’t have gone at all?
Because that’s what he’d wished for . . . still wished for?
He reached out to her, just meaning to brush her arm. Instead, he took her hand and pulled her to him. The tug wasn’t even conscious on his part. He angled her body against his and lowered his mouth to her lips, brushing them lightly. The moment his lips touched hers, he felt like a lost man—lost in the vanilla scent of soap or shampoo, in the taste of her, in memories.
How many kisses had he taken for granted when they were young? Had he appreciated the feeling of her pressed against him, his hand on the curve of her waist, and the gentle warmth of her breath? Now he wanted to stop time, savor every moment....
She groaned and with a thump against his chest pulled away.
“Meredith . . .”
She shook her head. “Okay—that was wrong. Very wrong.”
But it felt so right. It had to happen.... Nothing came to mind that didn’t sound like bad Top 40. “I couldn’t help it. I’ve tried to forget about us forever. I wanted to move on—”
“You did,” she pointed out. She added quickly, “We both did.”
“Then why am I still so drawn to you?” He reached out for her hand again, and she sidestepped a safe distance away.
“Everybody has feelings of nostalgia for old girlfriends and boyfriends,” she said. “Occasionally they act on them, like we just did. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It could.”
“No, it can’t. There’s Gina, remember?” She crossed her arms and almost glared at him. “If you’ve become the kind of man who would cheat on a girlfriend during his vacation—when you’re practically engaged—then you’re not the Sam I knew.”
Just the mention of Gina’s name was like a douse of cold water. He took a deep breath. Meredith was right. What had he been thinking?
He hadn’t been thinking at all. That was the problem.
“We just got carried away,” she said. “It’s my fault too. I’ve been moping about old times since we met up at JFK.” She shrugged. “We’re on vacation. Out of our element. It’s easy to forget there were reasons things didn’t work out between us. And in a
ny case, we can’t change history and start over as if none of it happened.”
Did she want to? He didn’t have the nerve to ask. She was right. It was insane even to be having this conversation. When he’d seen her at the bus stop, he should have turned and headed to the hotel, or at least to another tour.
She glanced at her watch. “Maybe we can catch an early bus back.”
He nodded. That knife-edge of tension was back between them. He wanted to kick himself.
“Meredith, I—”
“Please don’t apologize again,” she said. “I’ll forget about it if you will.”
“All right.” He meant the words, but as he said them they felt like wishful thinking. Forgetting evidently wasn’t his strong suit. “But just let me say that I wish I’d done things differently too. I know there were moments when I didn’t step up to the plate. Like with the pregnancy thing. Maybe you thought I was being callous—”
She looked him straight in the eye. “You said ‘thank God.’ Like you were so relieved you wouldn’t be saddled with me.”
“Because I wasn’t ready. If you had been pregnant, I would have reacted differently. But I don’t think either of us were ready for parenthood at that point.”
She let out a knowing laugh. “Obviously. We weren’t even ready to deal with the hiccup of worrying about being pregnant.”
“But after that, I didn’t have any idea that you were unhappy.”
“I wasn’t unhappy. I was just worried that you didn’t actually want a long-term relationship, and that the false alarm was really my wakeup call that you weren’t serious about me, that our relationship was just something you’d fallen into out of convenience and didn’t take all that seriously.”
“How could you think that?”
“You sat around talking about grad schools all that fall. Some in California. You weren’t asking if I’d want to live in California. I figured you’d get in somewhere, and then that would be the end of us.”
“So you dumped me preemptively?”