5. Richard #2
The lot’s half full when I get there. I find a spot near the bus, lean against a pillar where I can watch people come in without looking like I’m watching.
They trickle past, faces I half recognize, names I lost years ago.
A couple of them clock me, lean into each other, whisper. Let them. I’m not here for them.
I’m looking for her.
A dark sedan pulls in. Guy driving, brown hair, handsome in a way you forget the second he turns away. The passenger door opens.
Emily.
Christ.
She was always pretty, back then. Most people never bothered to notice, too busy looking at the loud girls, but I noticed. God, I noticed.
She’s not just pretty now. She’s gorgeous, and it knocks the air clean out of me.
Same curls, longer. Same blue eyes that used to trip up my tongue across that council table.
But there’s a hardness in her face that wasn’t there before, and she holds herself stiff now, spine straight, shoulders squared, like she’s waiting on a hit and has been for a while.
I want to cross the lot and ask who put it there. I stay where I am.
She hauls her own suitcase out of the back. Gives the guy in the driver’s seat a little wave, the husband, has to be, and he pulls off without getting out, without a kiss, without so much as waiting to see she makes it to the bus. Just gone.
Something ugly twists in my chest. That man gets to wake up next to her every morning, and he can’t be bothered to lift her bag.
I don’t even know the guy and I already want to put my fist through something.
Eight years I spent picturing whatever man she’d end up with, somebody who’d see what I saw, who’d treat her like the rarest thing in the room.
Not somebody who drops her at a curb and drives off before she’s halfway to the door.
Her eyes catch on somebody in the crowd, a woman with a pixie cut who shrieks and comes barreling at her. Tara, I’m pretty sure. They hug like it’s been years, which it has.
Then Emily’s eyes keep going. Searching. And they land on me.
For a long second neither of us moves. The whole lot just drops away, the noise, the people, the eight years, until it’s only her looking at me and me looking right back.
Same current as high school, except it’s got teeth now.
Back then it was a kid’s crush, all nerves and hope.
This is something lower and hotter, a pull that kicks my pulse up just from her holding my eyes across a parking lot, and Christ, I feel it everywhere.
She’s not a memory anymore. She’s right there, close enough that I could cross the asphalt in ten strides and find out if her mouth is as soft as it looked the day she fell asleep in my car.
Then I see it. The ring.
A band on her left hand, catching the light when she shifts her grip on the suitcase, and there it is, the answer I came out here to get.
So it was true. She’s married. Some part of me had been holding out, the same stupid part that took the long way home in the rain, betting the rumor was wrong, betting I’d get here and find her finger bare and her heart free.
The ring kills that clean. It lands in my gut like a dropped weight, this dull sick drop I’ve got no right to feel about a woman who was never mine to begin with.
She doesn’t look away from me, though, ring or no ring. And neither do I.
Then the friend grabs her arm and says something, and the spell snaps. Emily turns and heads for the bus, suitcase rolling behind her, and I stand there watching her go like I’ve been doing it for years.
She’s here. She’s real. And she’s somebody’s wife.
Probably she’s perfectly, sickeningly happy and I’m about to spend three days proving it to myself. But I keep seeing that car pull off without her, no kiss, no wave back, and I can’t make the happy part fit. I know better than to do this to myself. I do it anyway.
I should look away. Let her go, save us both the trouble. I watch her until she disappears up the steps instead, and then I keep watching, hoping she’ll glance back. She doesn’t. But she didn’t look away first, either. Not until she had to.
I push off the pillar and grab my bag. People are filing on, calling out to old friends, finding seats.
I could sit by somebody I half remember and make the easy small talk.
Instead I drop into the seat across the aisle from Emily and her friend like it’s nothing, like I didn’t decide on it the second she stepped out of that car.
This close I can smell her, something warm and clean cutting through the diesel and the old vinyl.
It does absolutely nothing to help the situation.
She glances over and clocks me, and there’s a flash of surprise she scrambles to cover. “Oh,” she says, quick. “Hi, Richard.”
I just smile at her, because for one selfish second I want to see what she does with the quiet, whether she thinks I’ve forgotten her. Her face does exactly what I’m hoping it won’t, that old flinch, like she’s already bracing to be a stranger to me.
“It’s Emily,” she adds, smaller now. “In case you don’t...”
Like I could forget. Like I haven’t spent the better part of a decade not forgetting. “I know who you are.” I let one corner of my mouth go up. “I remember you, sunshine.”
Her breath catches. I watch it happen, watch the word land somewhere under her ribs, watch a little color climb up her throat, and damn if that isn’t the best thing I’ve seen in eight years.
The friend beside her, Tara, I’m almost sure it’s Tara, jabs her with an elbow and grins like she’s just won money.
“Long time, Reed.” Emily gathers herself fast, even and controlled, but I can hear what it costs her. “You been well?”
“I have.” My eyes drop to her hand before I can stop them, to the ring sitting there on her finger. “You too, I take it?”
She glances down at the ring like she forgot she had it on, and her thumb goes to turn it around her finger out of plain habit. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “All rainbows and unicorns over here.”
There’s a whole story buried under that little phrase, and I can hear every bit of it, the flatness, the dare in it not to ask. So I don’t. I tilt my head a fraction, let her see I caught it, and let it go. She doesn’t owe me a thing. Not yet.
Beside her, Tara leans in. “Hey. Everything okay?”
Emily nods, eyes front, jaw tight, and I face forward too as the bus shudders into gear.
Three feet of aisle between us. A ring on her finger that should settle the whole question and doesn’t, not with that flat little “rainbows and unicorns” still hanging in the air.
A look in that parking lot she didn’t break until somebody made her.
The color that climbed her throat when I said one stupid word.
I shouldn’t want her this bad. She’s married, and wanting a married woman is a fast way to wreck us both. But I’ve spent eight years telling my body to forget her, and one look across a parking lot just told me exactly how that went.
Four hours to the resort. Three days after that.
I settle back and let myself do the stupidest thing I know how to do. After all these years of telling myself she was a closed door, I let myself hope she might not be.