Always Something There to Remind Me (34 page)

When I looked up I saw him.

Seriously. There he was. Right in front of me.

His face reflected the same surprise I felt.

“Nate.”

He shook his head and looked down for a minute before meeting my eye. “A little far from your neighborhood, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” I nodded, holding his gaze. “I was stalking you by driving past your house.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded again. “I’m about one tequila shot away from making you a mix tape.”

He laughed. “And what would be on it?”

I swallowed, then remembered my water and took a sip before saying, “A whole bunch of songs that say what I can’t.”

His gaze traveled from my eyes to my mouth and back again. “Like what?”

“Like nothing that would be appropriate for me to say now.”

Our eyes locked for what felt like a long time.

“Come here.” He came to me, took me by the arm, and led me to his car. “Get in.”

I did. Why? I don’t know. I should have argued, stood my ground, refused to be manhandled, pointed out that we had other people and other obligations; in short, I should have been some sort of grown-up, I don’t know.

But instead I willingly—eagerly—got in and sat in the passenger seat next to him.

Okay, actually I do know why. I wanted to know what he had to say. Standing my ground on some stupid principle would have deprived me of the one thing I wanted.

I wanted him to say something that would make me feel better.

He got in, closed the door, and turned to me. “I had
no idea
this would ever matter again.”

“You had no idea what would matter?”

He shrugged. “
Anything
I did. As far as you’re concerned, I mean. You were gone and I was the one who’d sent you away and by the time I got back it was too late. After that, I never even imagined our paths would cross again.”

“We live within twenty-five miles of each other
and
of where we grew up!”

“In the capital of the free world! A metro area in excess of six million people! Look how long we’ve gone without running into each other at all!”

I nodded slowly. And if I hadn’t actually walked past his mother’s house on a holiday weekend, we might not have seen each other at all, possibly even for the rest of our lives.

Yet here we were.

“It’s a big place,” I agreed. “And it’s been a long time.”

“And for things to go … the way they did when you came by the house…” He shook his head. “I don’t regret it.” He met my eyes defiantly. “I’d do it again. But I wouldn’t have anticipated it.”

“Me neither.” It was all I could say. Once upon a time I’d dreamed about it. A lot. Of course, Theresa knew that. Jordan knew that. Hell, even Nate probably knew that.

But I had long ago given up hope of ever having that particular brand of satisfaction.

“Erin.” His hand moved toward me, but he didn’t touch me. Still, the heat came at me as surely as if he had. “I made a huge mistake.”

“Me too.”

“Not as big as mine.” He closed his eyes for a second, then looked at me. “When we broke up it hurt. A lot. But I had no idea how minor the stuff with Todd was compared to what happens in the real world. At the time it felt like everything. Only later I realized it was nothing. And then”—he shrugged—“it was too late.”

“Why?” I had to ask. “Why was it too late?”

“Because you’d moved on.”

“There was a lot of time between us breaking up and me getting pregnant,” I pointed out. But how stupid, really. Quibbling about the years between major events, and who should have done what when.

This was an argument better suited to sixteen-year-olds than adults.

And that was exactly what I felt like: a sixteen-year-old, facing the boy who broke her heart and wanting to know
why
.

“I didn’t want
feelings
to get in the way of what we needed to do with our lives.”

“What the hell does
that
mean? What matters more than feelings?”

“That’s exactly what I didn’t want to think.”

“What, the truth? We
loved
each other. How lucky were we for that? How stupid to let that go!”

“It didn’t make sense to hold on to it just for its own sake,” he said. “There were so many other things to do before either of us could settle down.”

“Couldn’t
logistics
have been figured out later?”

He met my gaze. “I couldn’t go halfway with you.”

Maybe I couldn’t have either. Unless it was the only alternative to nothing. “It was better to be without me?”

He tightened his jaw. “I kept thinking it wouldn’t matter soon. I just kept thinking that.”

“How long did that take?”

A long tense moment passed between us.

“I’m still waiting.”

My heart throbbed. Might as well go all the way with this. “Tell me about Theresa.” I swallowed hard. “Tell me about you and Theresa.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You know what I want to know.”
Everything.

He braced his hands against the steering wheel. “It wasn’t…” He paused and tried again. “We were both living in Phoenix—”

“You
were
?
Both
of you? By coincidence?” Or was it fate?

He nodded. “Well, she was in Phoenix, and I was just outside, but we ended up having mutual friends and running into each other at a party. It was a lonely time in my life. I was working all the time, didn’t know anyone outside of work, felt like a stranger in a strange land.…” He shrugged. “When I saw her, there was something so … familiar about it that I couldn’t resist. We started seeing each other and even though it never reached that point of really being
in love
I just never got around to ending things.”

“Never
got around
to it?” It was unfair to be so angry now, to be mad at fate or whatever had brought them together in addition to holding it against him, but I couldn’t help it. “Wow, you wasted
no
time with me.”

He winced. “It’s not the same. This didn’t matter as much. In the same way. And pushing her away would have felt a little like pushing you away too. Again.”

“I don’t see how. She’s not me.”

“No. She’s not. I guess that was the problem.”

“Surely you realized that before you married her.” Despite myself, I was sad at the idea of him having what had to be a pretty difficult home life.

“Yes,” he said. And it was clear there was no questioning it now. It had been a mistake and it no longer mattered why he’d made it or what he’d been thinking when he did.

“Nate, why are you staying in a marriage you don’t want?”

“I thought it was because I’d made a promise I had to keep,” he said, then looked at me again. “Now I don’t know.”

I did. Because sometimes in life you do something that seems right even if it doesn’t
feel
right.

I cringed, picturing him planning it out, getting on one knee to propose, when, practically reading my mind, he said, “When Theresa suggested we get married, it seemed … reasonable.”

When Theresa suggested …
It didn’t erase the facts, but it certainly added to them. “Why?”

“Because there was nothing else.” He met my eyes. “There wasn’t going to be anything else. There was no chance, I knew there was no chance, of really falling in love again.”

Oh, God. I knew that feeling.

And sometimes grown people, who have actually
learned
something from their mistakes instead of just being doomed to repeat them until they die alone, needed to do the
right
thing, even if it wasn’t the most gratifying thing.

“What a mess,” I said to him. I wanted to reach for his hand, I wanted to touch him so badly, but it wasn’t my place anymore.

“Big mess,” he agreed.

He had no idea how big a mess this had become.

It had been almost two decades, yet part of me yearned for days that seemed like only moments ago, when Nate and I were free to do what we wanted, when we wanted, with each other, and no one would ever think twice about it.

Those days were long gone, tangled by the threads of more lives than I could even count at this point.

After a moment, I said, “I’d better go. I should have been home an hour ago.”

“Is Rick waiting for you?”

“No.” I swallowed. My lips ached to kiss him. My hands tingled, wanting to touch him. “I just shouldn’t be here.”

He nodded.

I got out of the car and went to mine, a few spaces over. He watched me go, I could feel it.

And it took all my willpower to keep moving and not turn back and run to him.

Chapter 23

Yes, I was nervous about Roxanne’s party the next day, but that wasn’t the reason I did what I did.

Well,
nervous
 … I’m not sure that’s the right word. I wasn’t afraid of things going wrong, I was just wondering how many things
would
go wrong and how many Blame Balls would be lobbed at me for them.

Pippa had ordered what felt like hours of taped interviews and establishing shots. She’d talked to me, Jeremy, the chef, the parents, the most attractive
and
the most unstable friends, and absolutely anyone else who might have slipped up and said something unflattering about Roxanne.

Helicopters were out at the last minute—it didn’t make for the most desirable sound—and somehow Pippa had talked Roxanne into a whole mermaid theme, which would begin with her being driven up in a giant fish tank. It looked something like a parade float, or something out of a Busby Berkeley film for synchronized swimmers.

It promised to be very embarrassing for anyone with the sense to feel humility.

So far that was only me. And that made me tense.

So when I got home that night and found Cam in my walk-in closet, surrounded by vestiges of Nate and me—in the form of letters, a prom garter, dead corsages, etc.—I nearly flipped out.

As in Nancy Grace could have talked about me for a week.

“What the hell are you
doing?
” I demanded, as soon as I saw her. Yes, she was my daughter, my flesh and blood, but this felt like a
huge
violation of my privacy.

“I’m doing what you
should
be doing, Mom,” she patronized, better than a fifteen-year-old should have been able to. “I’m trying to figure out where things went wrong and how to fix them.”

“Where
what
things went wrong?” I went over and started snatching things from the floor and putting them back into the box.

“Your relationship.” She began picking up letters and holding on to them. “You are in love with this guy.”

“
Was
.” I went to her, now competing to grab the letters off the floor around her ungracefully. “I
was
in love with him. I don’t even know him anymore!” That was the truth.

And that was the hell of it all.

“You had dinner with him the other night!”

“Yes.” I continued to pick up the envelopes, ticket stubs, and other memorabilia she’d strewn around. “And that was the first time I’d seen him in…”
Years
would have been perfect, but untrue. “
Ages
.”

“So all this”—she gestured now at my hands, because that’s where most of the letters were—“is all meaningless? All those feelings you had, all those feelings
he
had and said to you in such
huge
ways, were all just fake?” Her voice was sharp with emotion. She didn’t want it to be untrue.

“Give me the letters.” I held out my hand.

“But—”

“
Now
.”

She handed them over and I shoved them into the box. My emotion took over. I had no control. My eyes burned like I’d gotten acid in them, and I turned away from Cam and sat on the end of my bed, still holding the box like a six-year-old getting ready to bury a beloved hamster. “Just go to your room. We’ll talk about this later,” I said, hoping to sound normal. Angry. Maternal. But normal.

Not like a fifteen-year-old basket case.

Unfortunately, basket case won out.

And Cam wasn’t fooled. “Mom!” She rushed to me, kneeling before me with her hands in my lap. “Are you okay?”

Was
I okay? How could I answer the one fate I couldn’t live without—my daughter—that I
wasn’t
okay because of the other fate I could never forget?

It wasn’t even just Nate. It was the whole life we’d laid out, as two individuals together; a life that had been totally in line with who we essentially were because we’d planned it when we were too young to have piled on the baggage of realistic expectation.

Yet now, with the wisdom of more than twenty years past, I saw that the intentions of my younger self were more true to what I needed than anything I’d built on the details of my subsequent life. My ideals had disappeared somewhere along the way and I didn’t even know where or what they were anymore.

I just knew they once felt like “me” and now very little did.

And I had to wonder if that was what was the most painful part of this episode—though, if it was, I don’t know why Nate’s face always had to be painted across the emotions.

“I’m okay,” I said to Cam, in a fairly even voice considering, though we both knew it was untrue.

“Wasn’t it real?” she asked after a moment, with something that looked like desperation in her face. “Didn’t you
really
love each other?”

And that’s when I lost it.

It’s one thing to try and be a grown-up and hide your childish emotions to protect your child, but it’s quite another to be pushed to the limit where you can’t hold your emotions and, moreover, you can’t even be sure that keeping them secret is the best thing for that child.

In short, in that moment, I had to make a decision whether to perpetrate the endless lie of
You’ll meet The One when you’re older
and
You’ll know him when you see him
, or to just admit that, yes, sometimes maybe you meet someone perfect for you when you are a kid and you should try to scramble over all the childish impulses that come naturally to you in order to keep him.