A Time for Us

by Amy Knupp

  She shook her head emphatically.

  “Shh. Let me finish. At the same time, you’ve got this soft spot that you only let certain people see, and it makes me want to hold on to you forever, so nothing ever hurts you again. You’ve hurt too much. I want to make a future of good stuff with you.”

  She wanted to die.

  She wanted so much to be able to throw her arms around him and say okay.

  “I thought when I didn’t look like her anymore, you would get it, Cale. That I’m not her and you don’t want me.”

  “I’ve never thought you were her. I take it back. The first moment I saw you in the E.R., I did a double take, but that’s because it was from a distance. There’s never been any confusion in my mind. When Noelle would have laughed and done something spontaneous, you bite your lip and think so hard I can practically see smoke coming out your ears. But I stopped comparing you two long ago.” He took a step back. “You’re beautiful with black hair. You’re beautiful with blond hair. I don’t care if you dye it bright purple. Shave it off. Try me.”

  He was saying everything right. If she’d been subconsciously testing him by changing her appearance, he’d passed with flying colors. Set the curve for every other man on the planet. Dammit, he was turning out to be the perfect man for her.

  When she studied that face she loved, though, she couldn’t get Noelle out of her mind. How could they build a future when she’d stolen it from her sister? How would she ever be able to live with herself?

  “I can’t,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry, Cale, but I can’t get over the guilt.”

  The pain in his eyes cut into her and she struggled to breathe.

  “I love you,” she said, her voice stronger. “You’re so easy to love. But I don’t feel right about it. I wish I did.”

  He stared at her with imploring, heartbreaking eyes for a long moment. “We could work through it. You can do whatever you put your mind to—”

  “Don’t you think if I could I would have already? You’re what I’ve wanted. But she got you first. And last.” She shut up before she lost it.

  Cale looked as though he was going to reach out for her and then ran his hands through his hair instead. He turned away, toward the water. The calm, beautiful bay water that didn’t make anything okay tonight.

  “This is stupid, Rachel!” He spun around, and the pain in his eyes was gone. Now they flared with anger. With his voice more in control, he said, “You’re telling me that we love each other and yet we can’t make this work?”

  “Yes. Why can’t you understand that there’s a loyalty to my twin sister? We shared a womb, Cale. I knew her before I knew how to breathe.”

  “You’ve worked through so much. But you’re just going to give up now? This isn’t worth fighting for?”

  “It’s not a fight I can win,” she said quietly. “I wish I could.”

  Cale swore crudely and squatted down as if the pain had knocked him over. He stayed that way, his head bowed, eyes closed, looking every bit as miserable as she felt.

  Rachel needed to get out of there before she broke in two inside. “I’m gonna go. There’s a bus due in...” She glanced at her watch, as if she had a clue what the bus schedule was. “Any minute,” she lied, fully intending to walk home but knowing he would insist on driving her if he knew. “Goodbye, Cale.”

  As her sadness threatened to swallow her up whole, she turned and walked away.

  * * *

  CALE KEPT HIS HEAD down, fighting the need to watch her walk away. He didn’t want that image burned in his mind.

  Shit-fire, he’d never felt so powerless in his life. So close and yet so completely denied what he wanted, what was right, dammit. The sense of loss, yeah, he knew that like an age-old enemy, but his helplessness to convince Rachel she had nothing to feel guilty about...that was going to eat him alive.

  The torment in her eyes would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  That was when it hit him—she would never get on a city bus or any other kind of public transportation looking and feeling like she did. She was intensely private and would avoid it at all costs. When he finally looked up and squinted into the darkness in the direction of the nearest bus stop, which was two blocks straight over, she was nowhere. He was sure she was walking home alone in the dark even though the Culver house was a good distance southeast of here, probably close to two miles.

  Leaving his truck, he jogged a block to the east. When he got to the corner, he looked to his right. Sure enough, a couple hundred yards away, Rachel headed along the sidewalk toward home and not the bus stop. He followed her, sticking to the opposite side of the street and keeping the same distance between them. There was nothing else he could say to her to change her mind, but he could at least ensure that she got home safely.

  Then, after that, he could fall apart.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  MAYBE RACHEL HAD finally done it.

  Sawyer, who’d been hanging around more than usual the past two weeks, ever since the concert and the last time she’d seen Cale, come to think of it, swore she was going to work herself to delirium. As she stirred from her postwork nap, she wondered if she’d succeeded at last—and if so, what was so bad about it.

  The dream about Noelle had been so realistic that if she believed in spirits and visits from the dead, she’d suspect her sister had been in the room with her. However, practical, levelheaded girl that she was, Rachel knew better.

  The fact that she’d moved back into her room was likely the cause, but not because Noelle’s spirit was visiting it, simply because she was surrounded by so many memories of her sister in spite of the changes she’d made to the room.

  After the concert, after walking away from Cale, Rachel had been determined to move forward with her life. It felt as if the months she’d been home had been spent either spinning her wheels and getting nowhere or churning over the past. Necessary steps, she realized, but she couldn’t stay there forever. So her first action had been to have a discussion with her supervisor, once again, to plead with him to let her work more shifts. During the weeks before the benefit concert, he’d gradually tapered her number of shifts down to what he considered “normal,” and she’d been so wrapped up in handling her grief she’d barely noticed. He’d agreed to give her the maximum amount of hours each week, but it had taken no small sales job on her part.

  The second step she’d taken was to change up the bedroom she and Noelle had shared enough to make it possible to walk in without being bombarded by the past. She and Sawyer had gotten rid of Noelle’s bed and her vanity, and then Rachel had rearranged the remaining furniture to make the room look like a new place entirely. The walls were now a dusky purple color, also thanks to her brother, who was proving to be a rock of support in so many ways. The only thing remaining of Noelle’s was the bookcase and a handful of her belongings that Rachel hadn’t yet decided what to do with.

  Still mired in the drowsiness of an uncharacteristically deep sleep, the sensations from her dream lingered. She kept her eyes closed and rolled to her side, curling into the feeling she’d had an actual conversation with Noelle. It had been on an inconsequential topic—she couldn’t even put her finger on what it’d been about—but Rachel longed to continue it.

  Her eyes popped open and she sat up on the edge of her bed, driven suddenly by that need to connect with her twin. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she went to the half bookshelf on the other side of the room and plucked out the item that drew her out of bed, that had been beckoning her for days. She hadn’t been ready to tackle it until now.

  Noelle’s diary.

  When she had the journal in her hands, there was a second’s twinge of guilt left over from when they were teenagers. Noelle would scream if she knew Rachel was reading her most private thoughts.

  Rachel shook it off. Noelle would never scream again. The woman who had had the thoughts contained in this thin, bright blue and green volume no longer had any though
ts at all. It was merely a link to the past. The connection to her sister she was yearning for.

  Skipping over the warning specifically to her on the inside cover, Rachel opened the book as she padded back to her bed and slipped under the covers.

  At first, she flipped open to a random page and practically inhaled the words in the familiar scrawl, her chest expanding with love and her heart breaking with loss at the same time. After a couple of entries, Rachel thumbed back to the beginning to read every single page, intent on spending the day with her beloved, beautiful sister.

  Noelle had kept a journal since they were in grade school. Rachel remembered the Christmas they’d both received coordinating, girlie diaries, hers pastel blue with dragonflies on it and Noelle’s apple-green with flowers. Rachel had used hers to play “school” with her plush animals, but Noelle had begun a lifelong semiregular habit. She’d not been the type to write every day; sometimes weeks passed between entries. She’d said she wrote when she had something to say, otherwise, what was the point? Rambling about nothing on paper was a waste of time to Noelle.

  One thing Noelle did faithfully was note the date every single time she wrote—month, day and year. This particular volume began several years ago when Rachel was starting med school. There was the Christmas that Rachel almost hadn’t made it home due to a snowstorm back in Iowa. She was touched by Noelle’s worry that Rachel would end up all alone for the holiday and Christmas wouldn’t be the same, and also her hope that she’d get to watch Rachel open the velvet-soft lavender-and-white-striped winter scarf Noelle had knitted for her. Rachel had ended up getting into the Brownsville airport after midnight on Christmas Eve, but she’d made it. And she adored the scarf to this day, having worn it every single winter-weather day when she’d lived in the north. The scarf had become like a toddler’s security blanket to her, keeping her close to her twin even when she was so far away physically.

  There was the long-distance argument they’d had over what to get their mom for Christmas four years ago, the time Noelle and Sawyer had visited Rachel at med school and the periodic mentions of some of Noelle’s men over the years, though only the few she’d dated for more than a couple of months made the journal. A fight with their mother over whether a twenty-six-year-old woman should have a curfew even if she was living at home. Her sister’s outrage made Rachel smile sadly because she remembered listening to Noelle rant about the same topic on the phone at the time.

  And then she got to Cale. The date of the first entry that mentioned him was two months after they’d met. Rachel froze, her pulse pounding in her throat.

  She couldn’t handle this. Not now.

  Sliding the book under her pillow, she threw the blankets back and rushed out of the room to take a shower, aching for distraction.

  As she let the hot water rain down on her, she hated herself for being jealous. Hated that she could be remotely upset by Noelle’s writings about the man she loved, when Noelle was gone now. Of course she’d written about the man who’d asked her to marry him. Why wouldn’t she? Rachel had known Cale would be in the pages, but she’d managed to put it out of her mind as she’d relived the years through Noelle’s eyes. By the time Rachel had reached the words Cale Jackson is the most amazing man ever, her guard had been down.

  It occurred to her, as the hot water ran out due to her cowardly record-long shower, that she needed to read to the end.

  Maybe experiencing Noelle’s love for Cale by reading her innermost thoughts and feelings about him would help Rachel to let go of him. It could serve to further cement it in her head that, no matter how much she loved Cale and missed him, he’d been her sister’s guy. She needed all the help she could get, because some nights, lying alone in her bed, the loneliness made it almost impossible not to call him or track him down just to say hi. Maybe reading Noelle’s entries about him would help Rachel make peace with her decision not to give in to the temptation to take what he’d offered her.

  It would hurt like hell, but then, so did her lingering thoughts of him, her periodic musings about what could have been.

  With renewed determination, she dried herself off, dressed and went back to the journal.

  Feeling less cozy and more guarded, she opted to sit on her desk chair to tackle the rest of the pages instead of lounging in bed.

  She found herself nodding in agreement, her heart in her throat, as she read the first four entries about Cale. About his patience, his gentlemanly ways, her awe at what he did for a living, his tenderness. How he went out of his way for others, how he supported her no matter what.

  And then she got to the fifth entry about Cale, which started with I called Rachel tonight to tell her Cale asked me to marry him.

  Rachel lifted her feet to the desk chair and wrapped one arm around her legs as she held the journal with the other. She closed her eyes for a moment, bracing herself to read all about the life-changing evening her sister had told her about back then. The entry, she gradually realized, though, was about Rachel, not Cale.

  I love that girl so much. I wish she was here in person. Of course, I always wish that. When I told her Cale proposed, she was so happy for me it just made the best moment in my life all the more special. Not that I expected anything different from Rach. She’s the most supportive sister a girl could ever ask for.

  She said something along the lines of “every girl should be lucky enough to find her own Cale” and those words have stuck with me. I told her at the time my greatest wish was exactly that: that she find and fall in love with a man as wonderful as Cale. She deserves it so much. Crap, I’m tearing up just writing this. My only sadness in life right now is that my sister hasn’t yet found her soul mate, the man who makes her get out of bed with a smile every morning in anticipation of seeing him. The man who gets her through the hard times and makes the good times ten times happier. The man who treats her like the amazing woman she is. And I hope she can set aside work and her ambitions and everything else she regularly lets get in the way of her most basic needs so that she can embrace love with the right man completely. That right there is my wish for my sis.

  Rachel read the page five times, then skimmed the rest of the book through tear-blurred eyes, finding only two more entries came after it, neither of which mentioned her or Cale. She shut the book hard and dried her eyes.

  She went back to the shelf and picked up the framed picture of her and Noelle—a photo they had taken of themselves on the beach the last time her sister had convinced her to make the trek with her so Noelle could do her night-swimming thing. It was one of four or five they’d taken and this one had always been Rachel’s favorite of the bunch. In the others, they’d both been looking at the camera, but in this one, Noelle had turned her head slightly toward Rachel. The look in Noelle’s eyes was so full of love it filled Rachel with warmth every time she saw it. Up until last week, when she’d finally “moved in” by unpacking the rest of her belongings and reclaiming this bedroom, she’d had it tucked away in a box because it had been too painful to handle. Now Rachel hugged it to her chest, the warmth flowing through her.

  Rachel had found the man who made her smile, who got her through the tough times and made the good times better. She’d found her soul mate.

  And her sister’s diary entry felt almost like a push from the other side. Like permission for Rachel to have a future with him. To let herself have a future with him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  SOMETHING CAUGHT CALE’S eye as he came out of Mariah’s second-story apartment in a rush to avoid being late. A woman paced the sidewalk next to the parking lot, her head down, arms crossed, fist pressed to her lips as if she were absorbed in deep thought.

  Was that...Rachel?

  He couldn’t help but think at first that he was hallucinating what he wanted to see, but he watched her as he descended the steps, and by the time he was on the ground level, he was certain it was her.

  “Rachel?” He jogged to her, concerned that something was terribly
wrong. Had something happened to her mother? Someone else?

  She spun to face him, and the next thing he knew, she was running at him and throwing her arms around his neck, clinging to him.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” he asked, feeling panicked as he hugged her to him, bowled over by the feeling of having her in his arms again, whatever the cause.

  Her shoulders began shaking and his concern grew. She buried her face in his shoulder, her sobs soundless, so he did the only thing he could do—held on for all he was worth and waited.

  The next ninety seconds were eternal, but finally, she loosened her hold on him enough to wipe her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said after gasping for air.

  “What is it? Tell me what’s wrong, Rachel.”

  Again, her shoulders shook, but now he could see her face and...she was laughing?

  “Are you crying or laughing?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, covering her mouth and nose with both hands and shaking her head. “Both. Oh, my God, I got ahead of myself. It feels so good to see you.” She took another deep breath and sobered. “Sorry. Nothing’s wrong. Yet. I need to talk to you.”

  Relief started to seep in at the announcement that nothing was wrong, but the way she was acting was truly bizarre. She was...giddy. He wondered if she was drunk, but he didn’t smell alcohol.

  “Okay. Where?” he asked. “Here?”

  She glanced around just as one of his neighbors got out of his car, slammed the door and strode past them, nodding at Cale.