Chapter 37 #2
He leaned over and kissed her. “I think it’s perfect.”
They toasted each other with their first round of drinks, and swapped embarrassing high school stories for the next three rounds.
And an hour later, as they didn’t quite stagger their way back to the cabin to rest up before dinner, Daniel wondered if, just maybe, he might be able to keep the promise he’d made last night after all.
Nora , nine o’clock in the evening
It had been a good day, and so far a good night.
They’d had a surprisingly good lunch in the buffet up on deck nine, then Greg spent an hour swimming laps in the solarium pool while she watched.
He’d invited her in, but the waves in the pool from the motion of the ship were a little too big for Nora’s comfort.
Later, they’d sat in the back of the big South Seas Lounge on deck six and enjoyed cocktails and watched a spirited session of bingo.
Then, before they knew it, it was time for dinner in the Main Dining Room.
And this time, when Nora wanted to order three different appetizers, Greg didn’t say a thing.
No, that wasn’t true. He’d suggested a fourth one.
“Let’s try the shrimp cocktail, too.” he’d said.
So they stuffed themselves, waddled back to their cabin, and now she was sitting on the little sofa, her arm around Greg and leaning into him while she idly flipped through channels on the remote control.
“I don’t care what’s on TV,” he said. “I’m just glad to be here with you.”
She was glad, too. She hadn’t thought of Daniel once today, after the near-miss this morning.
Maybe that was the key—take it a day at a time.
There was no need to make promises for the future, or even for the rest of the cruise.
She just needed to focus on Greg and how she felt about him right now .
And then in the morning, do it again, and tomorrow afternoon, and so on.
Step by step. That’s how everything else in life worked, right?
She could manage that.
Hopefully.
Daniel , November 8, ten o’clock in the morning
The bad weather from yesterday afternoon was gone, a couple of hundred miles to the north. It was a bright, clear morning in Charleston when Daniel stepped off the ramp and onto the pier, hand in hand with Leanne.
It was chilly, though; he was glad he’d brought a jacket on the cruise. Leanne had given it to him for his birthday, the first gift she’d bought him. He wore it whenever the opportunity presented itself, even though he didn’t actually like it that much. It looked good; that wasn’t the problem.
What he didn’t like was that it was too heavy for a day like today, but not heavy enough for anything colder than today.
He hadn’t said anything about that to Leanne—you didn’t criticize gifts.
No matter what you really thought, you acted like they were great, because someone cared enough to buy them for you.
Just like the Members Only jacket he’d desperately wanted back in tenth grade, and Mom finally bought it for him and then it turned out to not fit quite right, and he didn’t look nearly as cool wearing it as he’d imagined he would. But he wore it anyway, so she knew how much he appreciated it.
“You want to go to the market first?” Leanne was looking back and forth between the map in her free hand, and the street up ahead.
“Sure,” he said. Honestly, he didn’t care that much what they did. He was, first of all, glad to be on solid ground, and second, happy to enjoy Leanne’s company wherever she wanted to go. “Look, there’s a sign, we’re headed the right way.”
It was only two blocks until they got to the open-air portion of the Charleston City Market. There were tents on either side of the street for two more blocks, leading up to the main building.
“Let’s get something for Bianca,” Leanne said. “A thank-you gift for getting us together.”
Daniel nodded. That was a great idea, but he had no idea what to buy his cousin. He knew her better than anyone, but she could be very finicky and her hobbies changed with the season. Just this year, she’d taken up and quit pottery, quilting, and stained-glass painting.
“Maybe clothes. Those sweaters look nice.” There was a table on their right with what he assumed were hand-knitted sweaters, in a variety of bright colors. “She might like one of them.”
He and Leanne were going through the stack of sweaters looking for something in Bianca’s size, when he heard her voice, bright and clear. There was no mistaking it.
“Rachel would love one of these!”
And then Leanne was pulling him aside, politely making room for Nora. “Daniel, let them look too.” He had no choice; he had to scoot over, and look up to see Nora’s face, maybe six inches from his.
Nora gasped, but caught herself before she could do or say anything more. At least he’d had a moment’s warning, but the way he was bent over looking at the sweaters, she’d had no idea it was him until he stood up straight.
She jumped away from him, and the man with her was looking at her curiously. So Daniel did the only thing he could think of to protect her. “It’s okay,” he said. “You didn’t quite step on my foot.”
Nora patted his arm, touching him for just a split second.
“No, I did, but thanks for trying to make me feel better. We can come back here later, I think I need a snack now anyway. Have a nice day.” She said it all without taking a breath, the way she always talked too fast when she was nervous or excited.
And then Nora and Greg were gone. “That was really sweet, Daniel,” Leanne said. “You always look out for everybody, don’t you?”
He wanted to believe her words. But he didn’t feel like he was doing a very good job of looking out for the person right next to him.
Nora , an hour later
Nora was still rattled, an hour after blundering into Daniel. Thank God he’d been alert enough to come up with something on the fly that let her escape the situation without unraveling her relationship—and his—as though it was one of the handmade sweaters he’d been looking at.
“Nora, what’s going on with you?” Even the glass of wine she’d ordered at the little café across the street from the market wasn’t helping, and Greg was growing more concerned as the morning went on.
“Did that guy you bumped into—did he do something to you?” Anger was just creeping into his voice.
She had to calm down, and calm her boyfriend down, and she had to do it now.
“No, Greg. I stepped on his foot, and—this is stupid, but it brought back a bad memory. I did that in high school, to one of the other girls on the volleyball team, and she tripped over me and sprained her ankle, and everybody blamed me.”
It hadn’t happened like that at all; she’d injured herself because she hadn’t stretched properly, and it had been her calf rather than her ankle, but the anger and shame from her disastrous week on the high school volleyball team was still there thirteen years later, and she used it now.
He pulled his chair closer to hers, put an arm around her. “I guess it’s true what they say—high school never really ends. It must have been really bad, if you still get upset about it all these years later.”
Nora wasn’t sure which was worse: that it was so easy for her to lie to Greg, or that one crummy week in 1984 still hurt as though it had just happened.
What stung even more was another realization: the only time she’d been able to put the volleyball incident in its proper place, was when she’d told Daniel about it back when they were dating.
It was a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, 1988.
They’d been sitting in his dorm room, and they’d somehow gotten onto the topic of the horrors of high school gym class.
She’d started telling the story, and she got panicky and then the tears had started, and Daniel took her hands in his, and said, “You’re not her anymore.
You never were. It‘s not worth crying over a bunch of jerks who couldn’t see how great you were, and besides, you’re probably never going to see any of them again anyway. ”
And that’s all it had taken. His hands and his pretty eyes staring at her with love—and so much more than love.
Daniel had been able to talk her down when she was so much closer to that episode, and to the girl she’d been; why did the hurt and shame burn so strongly now, so much farther away? Why couldn’t Greg’s touch, and his words, do what Daniel’s had back then?
She knew. Of course she knew. But she couldn’t accept the answer.
Daniel , around six o’clock
By the time they’d finished lunch, at a great little seafood restaurant tucked into a side street near the City Hall, Daniel had—mostly—managed to put the meeting with Nora out of his mind.
He and Leanne spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the streets and admiring the gorgeous old houses.
Leanne surprised him with her knowledge of architecture and building techniques.
“My uncle restores old houses,” she’d explained.
“My first high school job was helping him out. I guess I picked up more than I thought.”
When they got back to the ship, she insisted on a soak in the solarium hot tub, to ease her—and his—sore legs. And now they were in the Main Dining Room for a relatively early dinner.
While they waited for their appetizers, he asked her, “So what do you want to do tomorrow?” They’d be at Port Canaveral—close to both Orlando and the Kennedy Space Center, and the ship offered a dozen different excursions.
She had an immediate answer. “I figure you want to see the space center.”
He absolutely did, but he didn’t think it would be her top choice. “I mean, that would be cool, but there’s also Disney World. I know we’d probably only get four or five hours in the park, but that’s enough time for a few rides, and maybe we can get a picture with Cinderella. Or the mermaid…?”