Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows)

by Judith Arnold

  "They moved the cemetery," he reminded her. "They reburied all the bodies up the road at Pleasant Hill Cemetery."

  "Well, it makes more sense to me that the ghosts would have moved when the bodies moved. I mean, wouldn't the ghosts want to stay with their bodies?"

  He loved when she got all logical. How could you be logical about something as ridiculous as ghosts? "I'm telling you, Erika, I know this stuff. I was born on Halloween."

  "And that makes you an expert on ghosts?"

  "It makes me an expert on getting Fun Size candy for my birthday," he said with a laugh, then feigned seriousness. "I've heard ghosts thump around the house all my life. I'll be lying in bed and I'll hear them moving around in the attic." Her skeptical frown only inspired him to greater heights of imagination. "I hear them whispering."

  "That's the wind blowing through the cracks around your windows. I bet an old house like that must be pretty drafty."

  "It's not drafty. What some people think is a draft is actually the hands of a ghost brushing against you. Ghosts' hands are very cold." He gave his voice a little shiver as he said this. "Very, very cold." He reached across the console and ran his hand lightly over her bare leg.

  His hand wasn't cold. Her leg wasn't cold.

  She didn't pull away. "So what do these ghosts say when they're whispering?" she asked, her voice sounding a little huskier than usual.

  "They say, `Make Erika believe."' He whispered, too, because the air inside the Wagoneer was getting warmer and closer and he was getting warmer and closer to her.

  She leaned toward him as he leaned toward her. He hooked his free hand around the back of her neck, drew her to him and kissed her.

  They'd done a lot of kissing in the past few weeks. Light, easy kissing. Deep, hard kissing. Yet every kiss seemed like something new to him, some amazing discovery of just how good he could feel. Every time Erika's lips touched his, his entire body experienced a jolt of sensation. Not horniness, not lust but something more, something that felt like life itself.

  If pressed, he wouldn't have been able to describe it. Words weren't his thing. Pictures were, and each time he kissed her it was like discovering a new color, one he'd never known the existence of before. Some of her kisses were a cool, fresh green, not quite mint and not quite emerald but a shade in between. Some of her kisses were a variation on hot pink, some a metallic bronze.

  Tonight her kiss was dark blue, midnight blue, a blue that bled into black. Her kiss was shadow, smooth and round and dark. His fingers clenched reflexively against her thigh as her tongue met his and lured it into her mouth.

  Oh, God. This was love. It had to be love. He'd kissed other girls. He'd had sex before. But nothing, nothing had ever felt as good as this.

  Erika didn't remember moving from the front seat to the back, but somehow, there they were, stretched out along the leather upholstery, Ted on top of her, considerately distributing his weight so he wouldn't crush her.

  She didn't care. If he wanted to crush her, she would die smiling.

  She was a good girl. She'd never gone much beyond kissing with a boy before, but with Ted she wanted everything, welcomed everything. When he kissed her throat she wanted to purr like a cat. When he stroked her breast through her shirt, she wanted to arch into his hand. When he pressed his groin to hers, and she felt him through the layers of clothing separating their bodies, she wanted to strip naked, to see his body, to touch it.

  She didn't dare.

  Maybe, someday. Eventually. After she'd thought about it, analyzed it, made sure that this was the right thing to do, the right time. The right boy. Actually, she was already pretty sure about that.

  She was by nature a cautious person. She made plans. She thought about the future. She wore a helmet when she rode, and she wanted the same protection for her heart. Ted had been right to worry about what might happen if she fell; a rider could get seriously injured, permanently damaged, even killed. A cracked heart could be as painful as a cracked skull.

  And she didn't love Ted. She couldn't. Not when she knew she would be leaving him soon.

  Still, when he kissed her like this, when he blanketed her body with his warmth, and she inhaled his clean sunshine scent, and the world beyond the fogged windows of her car fell away, she trusted him. She might not trust herself, but she trusted Ted to her very soul.

  "I still don't think your house is haunted," she murmured when he lifted his head after a very long, probing kiss.

  "There's this one ghost," he said, then dropped a light kiss on the bridge of her nose. "The ghost of a young guy who died when he was maybe twenty." He touched his mouth to her forehead. "He died a virgin. He sneaks into my room and whispers, `Don't do what I did."'

  She laughed. "I'm glad to hear you're not going to die when you're twenty."

  "He whispers, `Have sex every chance you get. You never know what tomorrow may bring."

  "That is the dumbest line I've ever heard," she said, even as her hips gave an involuntary wiggle against him.

  He groaned softly. "I think he's making a lot of sense."

  "I think he's about as real as all the other ghosts. It's your head that's haunted."

  "You haunt me," he murmured, then dove in for another long, deep kiss.

  "I can't," she moaned when he finally broke the kiss. "I want to, Ted, but ... I'm not ready."

  He was breathing hard, pressing himself into the valley between her legs. He moaned, too. "Okay," he said, closing his eyes, although she could tell pulling back was a struggle for him.

  She was struggling, too. Struggling because she wanted him. Struggling because the minute she said no, he said okay. Ghosts or no ghosts, he would never force her, never pressure her.

  Which made her want him more. Which made her wonder if she did love him.

  Which scared the hell out of her.

  WORKING AT A GAS STATION IS SERIOUSLY BORING. You sit behind the counter in the store, which thank God is air-conditioned, and wait for people to drive up to the pump. Then you go outside into the steamy summer heat and fill their tanks. Sometimes they'll pay you outside, and sometimes they'll follow you inside because, along with their gas, they want to buy a candy bar or a bag of pork rinds. Maybe something for their car-a bottle of motor oil or an air freshener shaped like a pine tree that they can hook over the rearview mirror. Occasionally someone will ask you for directions, and you have to be friendly and helpful. If the customer is an old lady, you might exert yourself a bit and wash the dead bugs from her windshield-especially if the boss is around. And if the gas station is really dead, you might help out in the garage bay, patching punctured tires or carrying the sludge from oil changes to the drum in the back.

  Oh, and sometimes you get to refill the toilet paper dispensers in the rest room.

  There are promises about giving you some training and letting you tackle greater challenges-having proven your skill at changing wiper blades and fuses, the mechanics have hinted that you might want to learn how to do state inspections. But this isn't what you want out of life. This isn't what you were born for. It isn't your calling.

  Sometimes, however, if you're lucky, a beautiful girl drives up to the pump. Before she can get out of her vehicle, you're out the door, racing across the hot asphalt to the driver's side as she rolls down the window. "Can I fill you up?" you ask, and she gives you a sly, sexy smile and says something about how she'd really like it if you did just that. And you pump her Jeep Wagoneer with the Trinity College sticker and the horse decals all over it full ofgas, and when the pump clicks off you return to her window, and she's smiling even more, and looking sexier than before, and you want to jump into the car with her and drive away. You don't care where. You don't care about paying for the gas, or keeping your spirit-killing job, or saying goodbye to your parents or even your dog. You just want to go. With her. Wherever she'll take you, that's where you want to be.

  It was too soon to start packing for college, but Erika liked to be organized and on to
p of things. She didn't want to wait until the end of August, frantic and frenzied as she tried to figure out what to ship, what to bring with her, what to leave behind. Some things-her computer, her CDs-couldn't be packed yet. But her winter clothes could. She wouldn't need sweaters in New Jersey in July, but she sure as hell would need them in Colorado in December.

  So she'd methodically packed most of her sweaters into a carton for shipping. They were too bulky to make the trip in a suitcase. She'd also packed the books she would need at college: dictionary, thesaurus, a few classic novels, her calculus textbook, although God knew she wasn't planning to take a lot of math courses.

  Even though most of her bedroom remained untouched, it felt different to her. She knew that several inches of the hanger rod in her closet were now exposed because she'd packed the flannel shirts and cardigans that used to hang there. She knew the desk drawer where she used to store printer paper and ink cartridges was empty.

  She knew that in the not too distant future, she would be leaving. And her bedroom seemed to know it, too. Her bedspread, the matching curtains framing the window, the cordless phone on her night table, the alarm clock that used to rouse her for school and riding lessons and trips to horse shows, the shelves of trophies and ribbons-all these familiar things seemed to radiate a chill, as if they resented her decision to abandon them.

  "I'll be back," she whispered, feeling like an idiot for talking to inanimate objects. "There'll be trips home for school breaks. It's not like I'm leaving forever."

  Yet a part of her knew she was leaving forever. She was leaving not just the phone and the curtains but her childhood. The girl she once was.

  For months, she'd dreamed of leaving this room, moving on, setting off on her great Colorado adventure. Nothing was going to stand in the way of those dreams. She couldn't wait to begin the next stage of her life. That was what she wanted. Even if it meant saying good-bye to riding, saying good-bye to Five Star.

  Saying good-bye to Ted.

  A soft moan escaped her. This-the unable-to-say-goodbye part-wasn't supposed to happen. Ted was her summer boyfriend and, yes, she was crazy about him. Mad about him. Wild about him. But Erika wasn't a crazy-mad-wild kind of girl. She would leave, she would miss him-and as she had just told her bedroom, she'd be back.

  By the time she returned to Mendham, he would probably be gone himself. Just as she was growing and changing and moving on, he would be, too. How much longer would he be pumping gas? Surely he'd grow sick of it and find something else to do, someplace else to be.

  Her phone rang, and she sprang across the room to answer it. She hoped it was Laura, someone she could whine to, even though she wasn't sure what she had to whine about. "Hello?"

  "Hi," Ted said.

  Instead of being disappointed that the caller wasn't Laura, she felt her mouth spread in a giddy smile and her breath catch in her throat. After all these weeks, after so much time spent with him, after spending the past few minutes persuading herself that she wasn't really in love with him, she still responded to the sound of his voice like someone intoxicated by love. "Hi," she said.

  "I'm just about finished at work."

  "Do you want me to pick you up?" she offered.

  "Nah. I smell like axle grease. I've got to shower before I'll let you near me.

  "I'm sure you smell fine."

  "I'll smell fine after I shower. Wanna come by later?"

  "Sure."

  "I was thinking maybe we could take in a movie."

  "Is anything good playing?"

  He didn't immediately answer. They'd already seen every halfway decent movie that had come out that summer. "Encino Man?" he suggested.

  "Yuck."

  He laughed. "So, what do you want to do?"

  "We could just hang out," she said. "Go driving or something."

  "Okay. Why don't you come by my house in about an hour? I should be smelling less greasy by then."

  "Sure."

  "I wish ..." he hesitated.

  "What?"

  "I wish you didn't have to do all the driving."

  "That's okay," she said. "I don't mind." She honestly didn't. At some point in the future, she might get tired of driving, but the novelty hadn't worn off yet.

  She knew what Ted was really saying, though: he wished he had a car. She wanted to reassure him, to tell him it didn't matter to her that she had a car and he didn't. But he probably didn't want to hear that. Guys wanted cars. They wanted jobs that didn't leave them smelling like axle grease. They liked to impress girls.

  She was already so impressed by Ted-by his artistic talent, his devotion to the animals his family raised, his devotion to his family. He didn't need a car to make her heart swoon over him.

  "Go shower," she said. "I'll pick you up in an hour."

  "My parents are thinking of moving to Maine," he told her.

  Their big drive had so far taken them only as far as the Country Coffee House, where they'd ordered sandwiches and sodas. Under the table, Erika had slipped off her flip-flops and perched her feet on Ted's lap. Every now and then, he'd let one hand drop beneath the table and give her toes a squeeze.

  "Maine? Why?"

  "Money?" he half said, half asked. "New Jersey is so freaking expensive. You know they love going up there. My dad's thinking of making it permanent."

  "Wow." She nibbled the corner of her chicken sandwich, thoughtful. "What will you do if they move there?"

  "I don't want to live in Maine," he said. "Too cold. I'll find someplace else to live." He grinned. "I hear Colorado is nice."

  He seemed to be joking, and she dutifully responded with a laugh. But what if he was serious? What if he moved to Colorado Springs with her?

  On the one hand, this was not part of her plan. She wanted to concentrate on college, not on Ted. She wanted to try new things, not continue with the old. She wanted to be open, unencumbered, moving on.

  On the other hand ... This was Ted. Sweet, funny, intense, smart, sexy Ted. Who she was not in love with, she reminded herself firmly. Mad-crazy-wild about, perhaps, but not in love with.

  She didn't want to think about it. Didn't want to think about his following her to Colorado, didn't want to think about saying good-bye to him. Her sweaters might be packed, but she wasn't ready to leave town yet. That major step was weeks away. She spent too much time thinking about the future; at that moment, she only wanted to think about the present.

  Once they'd finished their sandwiches, she slid her feet back into her sandals and they drove off. She cruised past the high school, past India Brook Park, past Village Pizza. They didn't see any of their friends' cars at any of those places, so they just kept driving, hot wind blasting them through the Wagoneer's open windows.

  Erika's reflexes must have kicked in, because without consciously thinking about it she wound up driving to the stable where Five Star boarded. "Let's go say hi to my baby," she said.

  Ted seemed satisfied with that choice. Once she'd pulled into the lot near the barn, he got out and joined her at the front bumper. The sky still held the last traces of daylight, but spotlights had been turned on near the barn entrance and out in the corral, where a few young riding students were trotting in a circle, practicing their posting.

  Erika strode directly to the barn, Ted falling into step beside her. Inside, the ceiling lights spilled a yellow light over the stalls, some empty, some occupied by snorting, munching horses. Erika knew a few of the other horses and liked them fine. But Five Star was her one and only. She headed straight for his stall.

  As soon as he saw her approach, he thrust his head out and gave a happy whinny. "Hey, baby," she cooed, rubbing his nose. He exhaled, warm and moist, onto her hand. "You remember Ted, don't you, honey?"

  Ted gave the horse a perfunctory nod. Erika knew he was humoring her, and she appreciated his effort.

  "Have you been a good boy today?" she asked Five Star, still rubbing his nose and then resting her head against his cheek. "You're my sweetheart, aren'
t you."

  Five Star bobbed his head, his mane flopping along his neck.

  "I'm going to miss you when I leave for college," she confided to the horse. "I'm going to cry when I have to say good-bye."

  "Are you going to cry when you have to say good-bye to me?" Ted asked. His tone was light, but she heard a solemnity underlining the words. He meant the question seriously. He wanted to know if she would miss him as much as she missed Five Star.

  "I will be a wreck," she promised. That wasn't a lie. She would miss Ted-assuming he didn't do something totally nuts like follow her out to Colorado. She knew Five Star wouldn't follow her out to Colorado. And it wasn't just Five Star she would miss. It was riding. It was the entire life she'd been living since she first climbed onto the back of a pony at the age of six.

  But she'd decided to stay focused on the present. And the present meant Ted and her and a tranquil summer evening, with crickets singing and a light breeze stirring the air and stars just beginning to poke through the darkening sky.

  She gave Five Star a final pat, and she and Ted left the barn and climbed back into the Jeep. Live in the now, she told herself, then smiled at him. His face was so beautiful to her, his eyes so seductive, his sweet smile a thin veil barely concealing determination and desire-and he smelled so good, nothing at all like axle grease.

  Tomorrow didn't exist yet. Colorado was far away in time as well as miles. Now was Ted and her and a night full of possibilities.

  You have dreamed of this moment for weeks. For years. Probably for your entire life. You have visualized it in lines, in angles and loops, in vivid color. In blind shadows and blinding light. You have imagined it. You have lived it in your mind, in your soul.

  Erika Fredell is the girl of your heart, and you want her so much.

  She is the perfect girl for you, and you want this to be as perfect as she is.

  You're scared that it won't be. You're scared shitless.

  They wound up back at his house on Pleasant Hill Road, in the backseat of the Wagoneer, where so many of their nights ended. This time he was under her. She straddled him, her knees digging gently into his sides. He had his hands molded to the sweet, tight curves of her butt, massaging her through the thin fabric of her shorts.