Always Something There to Remind Me

by Beth Harbison

  He moved onto her again and started to press into her. She widened her legs and bit her lower lip, willing this to be over so she could find out about all the good stuff people talked about.

  “Ow ow ow, wait a minute,” she said, when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Just let me breathe for a sec.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “Yes. It’s just … is it always this difficult?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never … done this with a … you know…”

  “What a what?”

  “Virgin.”

  “Who said I’m a virgin?” she asked, and they both laughed.

  “Okay,” she said, bracing herself like a boxer in the corner going in for another round. Hopefully the last round. “Let’s go.”

  “I don’t know, Erin, maybe we should wait.”

  “For what? For this to stop aching so we can start all over? No way. We’re going to do this.” Things had become decidedly unromantic. Now she was determined to lose her virginity.

  So he tried again, distracting her moderately with his kisses, then, with a searing, earth-shattering pain that made her cry out, he was finally in.

  They stayed still for a minute, half afraid to move and half afraid they’d hear Aunt Cheryl upstairs.

  When a few minutes had passed with no sign of rousing, Erin whispered, “Now what?”

  “We move,” he explained. “You move your hips when I do.”

  He pulled out and she moved her hips up.

  “You go the opposite way,” he said, without a trace of the laughter she later learned would have been completely appropriate.

  “Ooooh!” She wondered, privately, how that could work because wouldn’t he just slip out if she moved down when he moved up? But she tried it anyway.

  And it worked.

  It didn’t feel good that night. This was no romance novel where the heroine was taken by a handsome monster of a man and spent the evening moaning with pleasure at this newfound thrill.

  But it did begin to hurt less. Or she got numb. Or something.

  Before long, he pulled out and came onto her stomach.

  It was one of the more triumphant feelings she’d ever experienced.

  “Are you okay?” he whispered again in her ear after a moment.

  “Yes. Just sore. And relieved.” She touched his cheek. “I love you so much.”

  He kissed her, then said, “I love you,” his lips next to hers. He kissed her again, longer, until they drifted off together.

  They lay there for a long time, dozing in and out, but still locked together. Eventually, Erin noticed a faint light showing outside the high well window.

  “It’s morning!” She tapped Nate’s shoulder.

  “Hm?”

  “It’s morning. Aunt Cheryl will be down any second!”

  He sat up and squinted at his watch. “It’s five thirty.”

  “I have no idea when she gets up. She’s been gone every day when I wake up.” She giggled. One of the best things about summer was the complete freedom. Nate had a job, which was both good and bad, but Erin didn’t have anything she had to do. “Of course, it’s not like I’m waking up at six thirty or anything.”

  They collected their clothes and put them on in the semidarkness. Then Erin went and flipped the switch to turn on the light. The bolt of fabric they’d been lying on was marred with blood.

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed.

  Even Nate’s eyes widened when he looked at the amount.

  She looked at him. “I told you it hurt!”

  He nodded. “I’m sore too.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah, I was bent, like, in half!”

  She winced. “Sorry. Well, it’s done now. You can’t undo it.”

  He looked concerned. “Do you wish you could?”

  “Nope.” She went to the sewing table and found the only scissors she could, pinking shears. Then she cut the fabric off of the bolt. They’d ruined about two feet of it because of where they’d been.

  “I kind of feel like I should save this as a souvenir,” she said.

  “Gruesome.” He held out his hand. “Give it to me. I’ll throw it out at my house.”

  She handed it over. “You just want to keep it as a trophy.”

  “Yup, you got me.” He guided her to the stairs and they went up very quietly.

  Erin heard a movement overhead and pointed.

  He nodded and somehow managed to open the front door without a sound.

  ’Bye, she mouthed.

  He kissed her silently, then laid his hand to her cheek for a moment before drawing back and closing the door as noiselessly as he’d opened it.

  She stood there a moment, hand against the wooden door, heart still pounding with the memory of their time together.

  Then she whispered, “I love you.”

  And she’d never meant what she said more than she did in that moment.

  Chapter 6

  Present

  “How long did he give you to think about it?” Jordan asked.

  I continued my run down Wisconsin Avenue, answering her through my Bluetooth earpiece. I hated exercise, hated running, but it was better than sitting around on my sofa, spending the whole Saturday trapped in my condo and my head. Camilla was out with a bunch of friends at the zoo and the moment she’d left, I’d felt a strange, restless lack of purpose.

  It was either stay in and let my brain melt or go out and run until my legs melted.

  I opted for legs.

  “It’s not a contract negotiation. I can think about it until I have an answer.”

  “All right, so how long do you give you?”

  “I don’t know. Should I be timing it? I honestly thought the answer would come to me with some sort of magical certainty, but every time I try to meditate on it, I get distracted and start to think about other things.” It was true, I had the attention span of a two-year-old child. If I was reading or working or trying to coordinate schedules on the phone, all I could think about was Rick’s proposal. If I put the book down, hung up the phone, and decided to devote my attention entirely to the situation, my mind wandered. Too often it wandered to Nate, which freaked me out and made me search desperately for something else to concentrate on.

  Suddenly I was the poster child for ADD.

  “No, no, no,” Jordan insisted. “You can’t expect to have some psychic knowledge of what to do. This is a practical decision you have to make. Can you spend the rest of your life with this man? Do you want to have a family with him? Do you want to grow old with him?”

  “Well, think about it, it makes so much sense! Cam would have a family! She loves Rick, she loves Amy, this completely makes sense!” I stopped at the light at Battery Lane and jogged in place, wishing with every step for clarity.

  “You can’t do this for Cam,” Jordan warned.

  But I disagreed. I completely disagreed. With her father dying when she was so young, she’d never had a chance. She’d been completely ripped off in the family department.

  But Jordan wouldn’t understand that because her whole life was about healing the individual, empowering the individual. Sacrifice, of any sort, didn’t belong in there for Jordan.

  “It’s good for me too,” I said. “Rick is good for me.” If I were on Survivor and had to form an alliance with one person I knew and trusted the most, it would absolutely be Rick.

  Most people probably didn’t decide their futures by pretending they were on Survivor, I suspected.

  “Okay, then pretend you have made the decision to marry him and really sit with it for a while, see how you feel.”

  The light turned and I continued forward, down the hill toward the Navy Medical Center and NIH. Every step was torture, but I had so much adrenaline coursing through my veins that stopping would have been even worse. “Perfect.” I imagined I’d said yes.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “Tell me something,” Jordan said suddenly. “What was you
r very first thought when he said it? Maybe your answer is that simple.”

  My breath caught as I remembered my first thought. Nate’s image came to mind, a little faded like an old photograph. “I don’t think so. It was … weird. My first thought was weird.” I tried to shake it off mentally. “It’s not relevant.”

  Jordan hesitated, then asked, “So are you going to tell me what it was or just be cryptic about it?”

  So here’s the thing. I would have told her the truth right up front if I hadn’t found the thought so deeply resonant. Honestly, there were other guys I had dated—guys I’d dated longer than Nate—who could have come to mind and it would have made more sense and mattered less.

  The fact that a guy who had dumped me heartlessly two and a half decades ago came to mind when a certifiably great man proposed embarrassed me to death.

  “I don’t mean to be cryptic,” I said, hoping to sound airy. But I couldn’t pull it off. “It’s just … Nate. My first thought was of Nate.”

  This was not a proud moment for me. After the huge ass I’d made of myself mourning the end of that relationship, I wasn’t eager to tell anyone who’d been there that the thought of him might be standing between me and my verdict on marriage to a great guy.

  It was classic Stupid Girl Syndrome to prefer the asshole who wasn’t interested. And while I wasn’t preferring Nate, obviously, that I was even thinking of him was humiliating, even though it was Jordan I was talking to.

  “What?” Jordan asked.

  I stopped in the shade of a big oak and shook out my wobbly legs and finished, “The first word that came to mind was Nate.”

  “Oh!”

  “Yeah.”

  She let out a long breath. “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  There was a long pause while Jordan processed it. Finally, she said, “We never talk about him.”

  “Why would we?” I walked around in little circles on the sidewalk. My entire body felt agitated, from the inside out.

  “Because he was a really important person in your development.”

  Let me pause here to say Jordan is a psychologist. Usually she didn’t pull out the psycho-speak with me because she’s been talking to me without filters since we were both idiot thirteen-year-olds and it’s hard to take someone’s professional opinion of your mental health seriously when you’ve personally witnessed her clinging to the back bumper of an ex-boyfriend’s car while he drove away.

  In this case, she was right, though. She was probably usually right, but the fact that Nate had been there for some major developmental stages was undeniable. Not all of them were pretty, but he should have expected that when he started dating a fifteen-year-old. I don’t care how slowly boys mature, he was three years older than I was.

  It didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out why that had been traumatic for me.

  “Well,” I said, impatient with the truth. “I’m pretty much developed now, so I don’t see why he’d come to mind at all.”

  “You don’t?” I could picture her leaning back on her office chair, thoughtfully removing her glasses. “Seriously?”

  “Not really. I mean…” I tried to think what deep, dark thing she might be getting at. That was then, this was now, the ’tween didn’t meet. “He was important to me once. Not anymore.”

  Her voice was measured. “Honey, you kind of had a nervous breakdown when you guys broke up.”

  I grimaced. “I wouldn’t call running around the neighborhood in my underwear at midnight singing Bon Jovi songs exactly a nervous breakdown,” I said.

  I started running again.

  There was an audible silence, before she asked, “You’re kidding, right?”

  I rolled my eyes to myself. “Yes, Jordan, I’m kidding.” Like she wouldn’t have known if I’d run around the neighborhood in my skivvies singing hard rock ballads. But the fact that she remembered me as so bad off that, even now as a professional, she found that conceivable was disturbing. “I got depressed. Had some panic attacks. It was a bad time, but not a serious psychological trauma.”

  “You dropped out of school.”

  “For one semester.” Yeah, that was bad.

  “Your parents took you to Chestnut Lodge!”

  “They didn’t leave me there!” It was an outpatient thing. A psychologist who was supposedly good at helping teenagers with anxiety problems. It wasn’t like I’d really gone crazy.

  “Mm-hm.” Her chair squeaked and I knew now she was leaning over her desk, toward an imaginary me across from her. She was in full therapist mode. “It was bad. I don’t think you ever got over that experience.”

  “Yes, I did!”

  “You want my professional opinion?”

  “That wasn’t it?”

  She laughed softly. “There’s more. I think you need to find Nate and meet him face-to-face, to exorcise this demon once and for all. It will help you make your decision about Rick.”

  I laughed out loud. In fact, I had to stop running for a moment, the idea was so preposterous. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I’m serious,” Jordan said.

  “That is the worst idea you’ve ever had,” I said shortly. “And you’re the one who thought we could turn a Ping-Pong table into a raft and sunbathe on it in the middle of Conroy’s Pond.”

  She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “First off, that wasn’t my idea, that was our idea, and second, I didn’t spend six years at Vanderbilt so some punk I’ve known since before we got our periods can tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. I knew you and Nate together. You were unusually close. You were way too young to be so close. My studied opinion is that it’s still working on you on some really base level.” She sighed, and I recognized it as a sound of sympathy. “I’m serious about this, Erin. It’s not the first time I’ve thought this.”

  “What are you talking about? Nate has nothing to do with my daily life!”

  “Really? It’s not like you dated for just a few months, it was years. During crucial developmental years.”

  I didn’t want to think about this.

  “And you never really let another guy in,” she went on. “Which, I think, is the root of your dilemma now.”

  “All right, so what if there is some kind of unresolved thing there? What good will it do to talk to a guy who might barely remember me? A guy who, in fact, might think I’m crazy to be holding on to any lingering thoughts. You know, if someone like Stuart Heeley called me and said he had unresolved issues with me, I’d seriously think about calling the police and getting a restraining order just because it would be so wildly out of proportion to the way I remembered him.” Which was barely at all—we dated long enough for me to remember his name, but not long enough for me to feel confident I’d recognize him in a lineup.

  “This isn’t the same,” Jordan said, sounding a little impatient. “Don’t play a playah, honey, you and I both know how he felt about you. Nate remembers you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said flatly. I didn’t. I had no idea anymore. In fact, I had serious doubts that I’d ever really known him.

  “Then that’s another thing you need to find out,” Jordan said, with the finality of a death sentence. “Find him and put this whole thing to rest.”

  I shook my head again even though she couldn’t see me, and my audience in a Honda at an intersection had moved on when the light changed. “I can’t do it.” There had to be another solution. “Don’t you have some sort of puppet I could talk to instead? Have a mock conversation to work this out?”

  “I seriously doubt Mr. Snoodles would fool your subconscious.”

  “Look, I’d be willing to wrap Mr. Snoodles around a vibrator and pretend I love him if there was any chance.”

  “Find Nate. Talk to him.”

  My call waiting beeped. My first thought, as always, was Camilla. Child emergency. I was always braced for the worst. “Hold on a sec,” I told Jordan, and switched over. “Erin Edwards.”

&nb
sp; “Erin, it’s Jeremy.” As if I’d mistake that voice for anyone else’s. My relief that it wasn’t a child emergency was short-lived as he continued, “Can you come to your office right away? We have a catastrophe on our hands.”

  A catastrophe. Good. That sounded like just what I needed to get my mind off of things. I switched back. “Jordan, I’ve got to run. But thank you, truly. I really appreciate your help.”

  “No problem. Think about what I said, okay?”

  “I will.” I wouldn’t. No way. I’d tried hard to bury my feelings for Nate so deep, no one would see them again until my autopsy. I couldn’t possibly open that wound again. “Call you later.”

  * * *

  Forty minutes later I was on TV.

  Had Jeremy mentioned the words “camera crew,” I might have showered before hightailing it over to work. Possibly done something with my hair. Maybe put on some makeup so I didn’t look like I was actually haunting the hotel instead of working in it.

  As it was, I found him hiding in his office. “I can’t be on camera!” he shrieked like a little girl. “I have a zit!”

  Oh, for God’s sake. I looked at his face and saw nothing. “Where?”

  “Right here.” He pointed at the nothing on his chin.

  “I don’t see anything, Jeremy.” Why did he always have to get so hysterical over everything? And how was it he was still the boss, given that I had to take care of him all the time?

  “You have to handle this.”

  Every muscle in my body seized. “Oh, no. No, no, no. The deal was that I have nothing to do with the on-camera stuff. You had me cancel my vacation to stick around and help with the specific codicil that I would not be on the show, even in a background shot. Remember?”

  “They just need to do some establishing shots.” As soon as he’d found out VTV was coming, he’d learned everything he could about television production and liked to toss the terms around like an expert. “And they also want to start getting some background information on the planning. They probably won’t use it.”

  Right. Just like my mother wouldn’t keep the unflattering blowfish pictures she got of us every year extinguishing birthday candles. “Jeremy, I am telling you right now, there is no way I’m going on camera. You agreed to that, rather enthusiastically, when I told you that six months ago.”