Chapter 36 #2
“You still wear it every day?” Nora already had to know the answer. “Did you forget the way I showed you how to take it off?”
It wasn’t fair for her to smile the way she was now. It wasn’t fair for her to be here at all. But she was, and—as much as he hated himself for it—he was glad she was. No—not glad . That was a horribly inadequate word. Overjoyed, maybe? Heart-burstingly happy?
“I never forgot anything you told me, Nora.” Now her hand was over his, and it felt good. Right. Like it should never have been anywhere but there.
And he knew then, with that one touch of her hand, why even after nine great months he hadn’t been able to tell Leanne he loved her. Why he’d never be able to tell her, and have it be true.
Nora , a few minutes later
Nora finished telling Daniel what had happened four years ago in Kansas City.
“That’s pretty much what I figured, once I saw your cover story,” he said.
“And the part you don’t know—there was no way you could—was that my phone got switched with somebody else’s on my team.
They were all loaners from work, same model, no way to tell them apart. So when you were leaving messages…”
She laughed; what else could she do? “Somebody else was getting them.”
Daniel shook his head. “That’s the other part you don’t know. He dropped the phone—my phone—in the bathroom sink in his room. Nobody was getting your messages, because the phone was fried.”
They were still sitting in the plush armchairs of the ship’s library, such as it was. His hand was on the arm of his chair, and her hand was on top of it. When had she done that? “Why did he have the phone in the bathroom?”
Now Daniel laughed, too. “I never asked. I didn’t really want to know.”
That was fair. There really wasn’t any good reason to have a cell phone with you in the bathroom. They’d been working a booth at a trade show; it wasn’t like Daniel’s coworker was a surgeon waiting to be called into the operating room or something.
“But you never called me once you saw the story in the magazine. If you knew why I left…”
He wasn’t laughing anymore. “I couldn’t. It would just have been another goodbye, and I—I couldn’t. Any more than you could. You knew where I worked, too.” He said it without any bitterness, which almost made it worse. Especially because he was right.
“I did. And—yeah. I could have called you, but I didn’t want to say goodbye again, either. I still love you, Daniel.”
He didn’t say anything for a while; he just held her eyes. Finally, he said, “Is that why you wore that dress?”
What did he mean by that? She didn’t know he’d be on the ship! What was he saying?
And then it hit her. She was making a statement to herself by bringing the dress from their Valentine’s Day dance dress on the cruise. She was telling herself she wouldn’t ever fully be with Greg, that she couldn’t ever commit to him because in her heart she was still back in college with Daniel.
“I didn’t think that’s what I was doing—but, yes, that’s exactly it.” She laughed gently. “The same reason I’m still using the pen you gave me. And I still sleep with Mr. Fuzzles.”
She hesitated for a moment. He didn’t say anything. She had to fill the silence. “And the same reason you still wear the necklace.”
“I still love you, too,” he said, reaching between the buttons of his shirt to pull it out. “So what do we do about it?”
Daniel , a few minutes later
She hadn’t answered his question.
He couldn’t blame her. He didn’t have an answer either. This wasn’t like Kansas City, where one of them could leave if they really had to. They were on this ship for ten days. There was no way to guarantee they wouldn’t run into each other. No way to make themselves believe they even wanted to.
He was pretty sure she didn’t want to anyway, any more than he did. So where did that leave them? She hadn’t said she was with someone, but she clearly was. Nobody went on cruises by themselves.
Which meant that, even though he hadn’t mentioned Leanne, she had to know he wasn’t alone either.
“Nora, we have to figure this out. I—I have a girlfriend. Leanne. She’s in our cabin. She’s probably asleep by now.”
She nodded. “So is Greg. I’m sure he fell asleep two minutes after I left.”
“They don’t deserve this.”
Nora looked down. “We haven’t really done anything. It was one kiss.” Nora had never lied to him, but he remembered the times when she’d lied to herself and tried to make herself believe it was true. She wasn’t any better at it now than she had been back in college.
“Yes, we have. It’s not about what we’re doing right now. It’s what I’ve been doing to Leanne from the day we met. I’ve been wearing your necklace, and carrying you around in my heart.”
Now she was looking at him again. “When I finally went to bed with Greg—and I made up so many ridiculous reasons not to before it happened—but after we did, I couldn’t talk to him for three days.
Because I felt like I’d cheated on you.” She smiled, but it was the saddest smile he’d ever seen. “How stupid is that?”
“It’s not stupid at all.” He’d felt the same after he’d been with Leanne for their first time, back in July.
“They’re never going to forgive us.”
No, they wouldn’t. “She’d forgive me for the kiss. If she ran into her first love, and she had a moment and she kissed him, I would forgive that. But if she said she’d never stopped loving him, and never told me—I couldn’t forgive that. And I could never ask her to.”
Daniel had been so caught up in the conversation that he hadn’t noticed the music had stopped—the band had probably packed up five or ten minutes ago.
But now he heard it again—different music, a slow, jazzy tune he didn’t recognize.
And Nora was standing up, and reaching down, grabbing his hands, pulling him up.
“Greg is the same. But I just figured it out, what we’re going to do.”
Her arms were around him, and he followed her lead into a slow dance.
“We’re going to have one dance. One last dance,” she continued.
“And then one last kiss. And then you’re going to go back to—Leanne, you said?
” He nodded. “And I’ll go back to Greg, and we’ll forget each other and spend the next ten days reminding ourselves about every great thing we ever saw in them.
And we’ll go overboard.” She chuckled. “Pardon the pun, and do everything we can think of to make them as happy as they deserve to be. And maybe, if we’re really lucky, that’ll be good enough. ”
Daniel couldn’t lie to her any more than she ever could to him. “And if it’s not enough, which we both know it won’t be, at least we can give them a good time before we break their hearts. Right?”
She didn’t answer for a while. Not until the song ended, and she kissed him, and he kissed her back. “Sometimes I really wish we were better at lying to each other, Daniel.”