Chapter 7
“ C rap.”
Meredith’s eyes continued to flutter open as she took in the objects in the room. It wasn’t her bedroom. It was the hotel. It had the familiar bedspread that was supposed to be neutral and pleasing, but she’d always thought it was drab and ugly. She recognized the generic artwork that was meant to blend into the wall space without being interesting or notable enough to want to look at it. It wasn’t quite motel art, but it wasn’t Monet.
Griffin walked out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “ I left my shaving kit on the desk,” he said nonchalantly.
“Oh.”
“How do you feel?”
“Fine.”
“Really? I’m pretty sure someone cracked an axe over my head. It reminds me why I don’t drink wine anymore.”
She pulled the drab comforter up to her chin. “Well, now that you mention it, aside from the occasional glass of wine at dinner, neither do I.”
“I called down to the front desk and asked Darcy to send up something for headaches.”
“You called Darcy?”
He stopped at the bathroom door for a second. The towel lifted with his movement, and she was sure it would fall to the floor. “Yeah, bad idea?”
“No, Darcy is great. I need to hide, though. Better yet, I’ll get out of here while you shower. I don’t need my coworkers talking.”
“You don’t want her to know you’re here? ”
“Definitely not.”
“Too late. I think she likes me.”
She closed her eyes. “Oh, crap.”
He frowned. “You don’t want her to like me?
“No, she…never mind.”
“What are you afraid of? Nothing happened.”
“Why don’t I believe that when I’m in your bed with…” Meredith lifted the comforter to see what articles of clothing she had on. “A bra and panties on.”
“You didn’t want to wrinkle your dress if you had to walk through the hotel to change.”
“You mean I was thinking?”
He cocked his head to one side. “It may have been my idea. You look good.”
“Shut up.”
He chuckled. “Don’t leave while I’m showering. I sent for breakfast. The woman in the kitchen said you like strong coffee and an egg white omelet with spinach and tomato.”
“You talked to Angela about what I like for breakfast?” she protested. “I hate you.”
“You didn’t hate me last night when you were kissing me. By the way, I loved kissing the butterfly tattoo.”
He smiled wickedly and then walked into the bathroom, closing the door.
“Oh, crap,” she whispered, dropping her head back onto the pillow.
Within minutes, she found her dress hanging in the closet. She’d actually had the presence of mind to hang up her dress? Maybe Griffin did. She didn’t remember coming to the room, much less undressing and climbing into bed.
She walked away from the closet to the middle of the room. A quick glance in the mirror had her wincing at her reflection as she listened to the sound of the shower running. Someone had to be banging on her head above her eye with a hammer. She was sure of it. Every step she took made her sway. She didn’t drink like a young adult anymore. A glass of wine at dinner was usually her limit. Last night, they’d had a lot of wine, and her eyes showed it.
As the memory of walking back to the hotel became less fuzzy, she realized it also included a walk through the bar in her sandy bare feet to get another bottle. Glancing over at the desk where Griffin had just retrieved his shaving kit, she found two empty glasses with residual color on the bottom and an empty bottle of chardonnay.
The bottle was empty.
They weren’t drinking chardonnay on the beach.
That made two bottles of different wine they’d polished off last night if they hadn’t also raided the hotel room bar. No wonder her head pounded like a jackhammer.
She struggled with the zipper on her dress, pushing grains of sand out of the zipper to unstick it. She was just about to rip off the whole dress when Griffin walked out of the bathroom.
He winked at her when she saw her half in the dress. “Need help with that? ”
She turned her back to him and let him struggle with the zipper for a few seconds before it finally zipped it up to the middle of her back. “Room service hasn’t arrived yet?”
“Um, no. I can’t wait for breakfast. I have to go.”
“You need to get some food in you.”
“Eggs…I just can’t. I need to get out of these clothes. I can’t imagine what my staff will think when I walk back to my office in last night’s clothes.”
“You can put one of my shirts on.”
“Over my dress? Oh, right, like that isn’t a big neon sign for the ‘Walk of Shame.’”
“We didn’t do anything shameful. But we can.”
“You’re having too much fun with this.”
He chuckled. “I’m enjoying it. I’ll give you that. It’s been a long time since you woke up in bed beside me.”
“Um, about that.”
“I told you. Nothing happened. I’m serious. ”
He looked at her, and she swore he had released a soft sigh of disappointment.
“I was in my underwear.”
“I enjoyed that very much.”
She cocked her head to one side, and he shrugged.
“You know I liked watching you in your underwear.”
“You haven’t done that in a long time.”
“There is nothing for you to be embarrassed about. Although if we had made love, I’d be pretty devastated if you were embarrassed.”
His cell phone began to vibrate and bounce all over the nightstand. Griffin walked over to the nightstand and grabbed it before it fell onto the floor. After glancing at the caller ID, he shoved the phone in his pocket.
It may have been her throbbing head or the fact that the morning after never felt as magical as it did during the midnight hour, but Meredith glared at the phone. “That phone gets a lot of action.”
“It can wait.”
“Really? It keeps ringing, and I know someone on the other end of the line wants your attention. Maybe they don’t like that you’re giving that attention to me? Am I right?”
“Yes. But not the way you may be thinking.”
She blew out a quick breath, suddenly overwhelmed by the events of the last twenty-four hours.
“It’s none of my business. A few kisses and no sex doesn’t mean you owe me any explanations. Someone you want to tell me about? I mean, not that you’re obligated to tell me anything. That ship sailed a long time ago.”
“You’re right. I don’t owe you. But you owe me.”
“What? What do I owe you?”
“Forget it.”
“There’s no walking that back. Was that call the reason we didn’t make love last night, even though I was practically half-naked in your bed? And don’t say you didn’t want to make love because I won’t believe you.”
“Of course I did. But you were drunk. So was I.”
“That never stopped us before. In fact, I remember pretty great drunken hammock sex more than a few times.”
His smile was quick, and it was hard to ignore that Griffin’s mind raced to their shared memories.
“We were different then,” he said. I’d like to think I’ve changed—a little, anyway—for the better, I hope. Being with you makes me think the last thirty-plus years never happened.”
She smiled weakly. The phone rang again.
“Oh, come on. Answer the phone. I’ll leave you to it.”
“I don’t want you to leave. Breakfast will be here soon. I want to talk.”
“Yeah, sure. I owe you.”
“Yes.”
She stared at him for a moment.
“Answer your phone. Whoever is on the other end of that line clearly needs you.”
He pulled the phone out of his pocket and sighed. “He actually needs you. Well, maybe not need. He’s pretty independent now. He’s also very determined, as you can see.”
The words were out of Griffin’s mouth and caused the confusion he’d anticipated but suddenly wasn’t prepared for. He’d rehearsed this conversation with Meredith in his head many times in Hawaii in the months leading up to the class reunion, and he still didn’t know how to do it.
He was Colonel Griffin Cole, a United States Air Force commander. He had thousands of airmen who worked under him. He was responsible for them and their safety. And this phone call was more important than all that and the one he feared most.
“It’s Lucas,” he finally said.
She shook her head and frowned. “Lucas?”
“Our son, Meredith. Lucas is the son you gave up for adoption and never told me about.”
Her face drained of color and panic filled her expression. She took a wide step back, swayed, and leaned against the desk for support.
“No,” she whispered.
Oh, he wished that all the emotion and anger he’d felt when he initially found out about Lucas were gone, but her quick denial brought them back with a vengeance.
“Lucas. How do you…?”
“It doesn’t matter how.”
“The hell it doesn’t!”
“Wait. Are you angry? At me?”
“Shocked.”
“You can imagine my surprise when I learned I was a father, and you never told me.”
“You weren’t there.” She spun away and looked at a blank part of the wall.
“This isn’t buying a new car or getting takeout for dinner. This was…is a person that we created. You didn’t think I’d want to know? ”
“All this time…this is why you stayed at the hotel. This is the reason you came here.”
“Of course. Lucas wanted me to come. He’s been hounding me ever since his mother died.”
“His mo…oh, no.”
“He lost both his parents. I didn’t want to come. But Lucas wanted me to.”
“So, all this time you’ve spent with me was never about me or us. It was about you being upset that I never told you I gave a child up for adoption to a good home with two parents who were going to be there for him. Is that right?”
He frowned as his anger surged. “Don’t make this about me.”
His cell phone rang.
“Why not? You came here to what? Confront me?”
“If confronting you was all I wanted to do, I would have done it seven years ago.”
“Seven? You’ve known about Lucas for seven years? ”
“And what? I didn’t tell you? I guess now we’re even.”
The cell phone rang again.
She began to pace in a way that makes a person crazy as if they would spontaneously combust with every step. He knew the feeling well.
“We’ve just spent days together. We spent all of last night sleeping next to each other, not that I remember much of it, but I woke up here half-naked, and you said nothing.”
“Neither did you. Thirty years, and you said nothing to me. You broke things off and never said a word about being pregnant in your letter.”
“Don’t you dare judge me!”
“I think I have a right to.”
“You weren’t here. I was. My father had just died. My mother moved to Arizona, and my brother moved to New York. I was here alone waiting for you. I stayed here waiting for you. You were gone for years, and I trusted you’d return to me. I barely saw you. We rarely talked on the phone. I lived for the few days you had leave. And then you reenlisted for another four years without telling me until it was done. You didn’t discuss it with me or ask how I’d feel about it. You just made a decision about what you wanted without regard to me or us.”
“I would never have re-enlisted if you’d told me about him. I would have been there for you.”
“But you weren’t. Everyone was gone. Most of my friends went off to college. You have no idea the hell I went through alone here.”
“Meredith.”
“Don’t Meredith me. Leave me alone.” She began looking around the room for her shoes. She found one and considered just walking barefoot through the halls to her office. But that would attract more attention than her walking in the state she was in.
“You can’t leave now. We have to talk.”
“You lied to me. Again. Again, you lied to me. ”
“Don’t you dare put this on me,” he said, grabbing her by the arm to stop her. She pulled her arm away.
“Let me go. We have nothing to say.”
“You know that’s not true. There is so much we still haven’t said to each other.”
“Yeah? Do you know when a good time would have been to say something to me? How about thirty years ago before you re-enlisted just months before our wedding? How about the day you came back? That would have been a nice time. I have to go.”
“You owe me this!”
His words stopped her in her tracks. She slowly turned around and leveled him with a stare that matched all the pain and anger she’d felt thirty years ago when she walked out of that hospital without their baby in her arms.
“I what?”
“You heard me.”
“You must be remembering history wrong, Griffin. You disappeared on me. You left me and then kept choosing to leave me. I spent over thirty years agonizing over my decision to put our son up for adoption. I have one memory of holding him in my arms that had to last me a lifetime, and you come here now accusing me of owing you. Where were you?”
“You should have told me. I deserved to know and be there.”
“You signed up for another tour, another war. You left me and our son behind, expecting us to wait until you were ready to share our life, the life you promised to share with me and never did. You left me. And then you kept leaving me. I don’t owe you, Griffin. I…did what I had to do. You chose to leave us, and I had to make a very painful decision because I couldn’t give our child what he needed.”
“I would have been there.”
“But you weren’t. You were already talking about changing the wedding date. Again. I read the writing on the wall. The military won the coin toss. I don’t think I was ever a serious choice.”
“How can you say that?”
“How can I not say that given the fact I spent four years living for letters and phone calls that sporadically came? I planned things on my own. I spent all my time alone. And when you came home on leave, I lived for those moments. But those moments, the moment we conceived a child, were too few to drown out the loneliness of knowing I was being strung along and left behind. I wanted a life with you. I could have handled being your wife while you were in the military. I wanted to be part of our life together. But you never asked me about what I wanted. You made decisions and didn’t even talk to me about them. You just did it. You signed up for another four years of me waiting around for you. You didn’t give me a choice. So don’t you dare stand there and judge me. I made a choice without you, yes. But you’d been doing that all along. You never cared about what I wanted or needed.”
Not able to find her other shoe, she grabbed the one shoe she found and decided to leave his room barefoot. Talk be damned.
With her heart pounding and tears stinging her eyes, she walked as fast as she could through the hallway, dodging a cart where housekeeping was already busy cleaning rooms. As soon as she reached the stairway, she pushed through the door and ran down the stairs as fast as she could.
She couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t think.
He had known their son for seven years.
On the other end of that call was the son she’d given up for adoption.
How would he ever forgive her?