Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows) (18 page)

"It's not exactly the same thing," Becky pointed out.

"This hill is hardly even sloping!"

"That's the point. The first thing you need to learn is how
to fall."

"I don't want to fall."

"Doesn't matter. You will fall, and you need to learn how to fall
without hurting yourself."

Two minutes later, Erika fell. The hill might have been about as
steep as a typical highway ramp, but the snow was awfully slippery and the skis were unwieldy. At least her skis were. Becky's
skis were obviously vastly superior. They never seemed to slide
out from under her, even when she was zigzagging and making
sharp turns and hunching into a tuck position.

She ordered Erika to angle her skis so they were nearly touching in front of her. Becky called this "snow-plowing." Erika called
it "skiing cross-eyed."

"It will slow you down," Becky explained, and Erika wanted to
argue that she didn't want to go slow. She was used to cantering
on horses, galloping on them, flying over fences on them.

But she was the novice here, the East Coast chick in Rocky
Mountain country, and she obeyed Becky and Adrienne and the
other kids from her dorm who had dragged her off to this mountain for her first attempt at skiing.

Her years of riding had taught her a thing or two about balance, at least. And she was blessed with fearlessness. If she fell, she
fell. Sooner or later, she'd make it down the hill without falling.
And without angling her skis to slow her down.

She and her friends spent all of Saturday at the slope, which
made sense since their lift tickets were good for the entire day. By
early afternoon, Erika was actually using the ski lift rather than
gliding up to the top of the bunny hill on a tow line. She was a
long way from qualified for the double black diamond trails, but
she made it down the green trail, escorted by two of her friends,
and she fell only twice. At the bottom, she immediately slid over
to the lift line to ride up again. She would master skiing the way
she'd mastered riding.

She didn't fall at all during her last run of the day. She began
to feel comfortable enough to straighten her skis out and add a
little speed to her descent. The dry mountain wind stung her
cheeks and fanned through her newly cropped hair-she'd
decided to try a new style, and she loved the freedom of not having those long, heavy tresses hanging down her back.

New hairstyle. New sport. New life.

Just what she'd wanted when she'd left Mendham.

And yet.

Like an ember that refused to die but continued to glow and
send a thread of smoke into the air when the rest of the fire had
been reduced to cold, gray ash, there was a part of her that refused
to let go of the old life. It had nothing to do with horses, nothing
to do with her parents and their comfortable house and the bathroom she'd had all to herself once her sister had left for college.
Nothing to do with Allyson and Laura and all her other friends,
who'd scattered to other colleges but who managed to stay in
touch with phone calls and email.

It was Ted. She couldn't seem to let go of Ted. He was that
ember, that spark, still glowing, still hot. Still capable of warming
her, or burning her.

Like the long, thick hair she'd once had, he was a weight on
her, holding her back. She wanted to move on. She wanted to be
Erika, the Colorado ski queen instead of Erika, the New Jersey
horse show queen.

She wanted not to be always thinking of him, wondering what
he was doing, how he was feeling, whether he still believed they
ought to be married. He wanted to marry the old Erika, and she
wasn't that person anymore.

Her friends insisted on toasting her success on skis that night
when they ended up at a frat house party, drinking cheap beer
from plastic cups. "Look at you," one of the guys said as he
hoisted his cup in her direction. "A whole day on skis, and you're
not in a full-body cast. I'd call that a success."

"Not even a broken leg," one of the girls pointed out.

"Or a totaled knee. I totaled my knee the third time I skied."

"There's a real confidence booster," Erika joked. "Now I can't
wait to get back on skis again."

The truth was, she couldn't. The more beer she drank, the
more eager she was to return to the slopes. Before the end of the
school year, she was determined to qualify for black diamond.

Ted would never understand this, she thought. He'd mastered
wrestling, but that was completely different. Wrestling was combat, but it wasn't death-defying, or life-affirming. It was about
winning, not about soaring.

He wouldn't understand anything about her anymore. Not her
excitement about her studies-intro psychology utterly captivated her, and the level of analysis in her literature class was so
much more advanced than those superficial high school discussions about Julius Caesar and Silas Marner.

He wouldn't understand. He wouldn't know her anymore.

Thinking about that stubborn, glowing ember made her want
to cry. She had to extinguish it.

"Hi," she said the next morning. Her head was aching, maybe
from the beer she'd drunk last night but more likely from tension. This was not going to be an easy conversation.

"Hey, Fred," Ted greeted her. "How's it going?"

Just do it. Put out that ember before it ignites and burns down
your world. "Ted, we've got to stop calling each other."

He said nothing.

"Are you there?"

"I'm here." His voice was low, hard.

"I'm sorry, Ted. Really. But I just can't make this work longdistance. It's crazy." I'm skiing now, she wanted to say, as if that
explained everything. My hair is short. I'm someone new. "You're
a great guy, and I don't want to hurt you. But I just can't do this
any longer."

Another long silence stretched between them. Closing her eyes,
she could visualize the cables stretching across the continent,
across the Great Plains, over the Appalachians, north along the
coastline to Maine, where he'd moved with his parents. Brilliant
inventors had created telephones, engineers had designed grids,
laborers had sweated and toiled to string the wires and lay the
cables that connected her to Ted right now. And all that effort, all
that labor, led to this: silence.

Finally he spoke. "Wow, Fred. That is a really ballsy move."

Not what she'd expected. She'd thought he would plead with
her, argue with her, insist that she was wrong, remind her of how
much he loved her. Not call her "ballsy."

"Why?" she asked.

"`Because I'm a sure thing. And you're letting me go. I will never be with you again, I could never be this hurt again."

Then silence once more, and she realized the line was dead. She
stopped visualizing the cables and instead focused her gaze to the
pile of drawings on her desk, the drawings Ted had sent her since
she'd left for college. Beautiful drawings, hilarious drawings,
somber drawings, and each of them a piece of his soul, captured
on paper and presented to her. Gifts, all of them, from the boy
who'd been a sure thing. The sure thing she'd just cut out of her
life. The ember she'd doused.

She lowered the phone, wiped her eyes before her tears could
fall, and slid the drawings into a folder, which she placed carefully
into a drawer of her desk for safekeeping.

She might have broken up with Ted, the first boy she'd ever
really cared about, the boy with the sexy green eyes and the sweet,
hot kisses, the boy who had taught her about wrestling and sex
and love. She might have broken up with him-but she wasn't
ready to let go of his drawings.

"Yo, Skala," his friend Dave said. "What do you think of
Tempe?"

Ted didn't think much of anything these days. He couldn't let
himself think of Erika; it hurt too much. And what else was there
to think of? His future? Yeah, right. Life in Jonesboro, Maine,
population fifty, a few miles down Route One from his parents'
home in East Machias? Oh, there was a lot to think about there.
Love, sex, work, the meaning of life? Thinking about those things
hurt too much.

Right now, all he could really wrap his mind around was the
six-pack of Budweiser he and Dave were working their way
through. Dave was a few years older than Ted. Now that Ted had
quit college and was no longer a student, he and Dave were practically equals-other than the fact that Dave could walk into
a store and buy a six-pack of Bud and Ted couldn't.

"What's Tempe?" he asked. "Some kind of sushi?"

"It's a city in Arizona. I'm heading out there. Time for a change
of scenery. What do you think?"

"Arizona? That's like the other end of the world."

"It's sunny there, all the time. And there's work there. Why
don't you join me?"

Ted tipped the can of beer against his lips and let the sour fizz
wash over his tongue. What the hell would he do in Tempe,
Arizona? Besides enjoy the sunshine?

Work sounded good.

And what was keeping him back east? His parents were okay,
happily settled in Maine, and if they needed anything, his brothers and sister were around. There was nothing to hold him here,
nothing that called to him. Nothing that meant anything to him.

"They got beer in this town called Tempe?" he asked Dave with
a grin.

"They got everything."

"How long a drive is it?"

"Drive, nothing. I can score us some airplane tickets. We can
fly out there, have a look around, try our luck with employment.
There's a university there, too-Arizona State."

"I'm done with college," Ted protested.

"Yeah, but there are many thousands of undergraduate girls
who aren't done with college there."

Girls. Like he wanted to hook up with anyone.

He did want to hook up with someone. Anyone. Anyone who
wasn't Erika Fredell, anyone who could make him forget her, anyone who could heal the festering wound she'd left in his heart.

"Airplane tickets, huh."

"Gratis," Dave promised him.

"So how long a flight is it?"

"I don't know. You can't fly there direct. These tickets I can
score for us, we'd have to change planes in Denver."

Ted might not have known where Tempe was, but he sure as
hell knew where Denver was. In Colorado. In the state where
Colorado Springs was located, and Colorado College, and Erika.

Don't be an ass, he scolded himself. That's over. She's over.
You're over her.

Even if he was over her, though, they could still see each other.
As former classmates, right? For old time's sake.

And maybe she'd see him and realize she'd been wrong. Maybe
she'd see him and think, What an idiot I've been. Ted is the only
man I've ever loved, or ever will love.

Stranger things had been known to happen.

"Really?" he said to Dave. "You can score free tickets?"

"Why did you agree to do this?" Becky asked as they merged
onto 1-85 north, heading toward the Denver Airport.

Seated next to her in the passenger seat, Erika sighed. Good
question, she thought. Becky and the girls in the backseat
deserved a good answer.

That it was a sunny winter day and they didn't have anything
better to do than spend more than an hour cruising tip to the
Denver Airport was not a good answer. That after spending so
many months in Colorado, Erika was hungry to hear a New
Jersey accent was not a good answer.

That she'd spent hours last night thumbing through the folder
of Ted's drawings, trying to convince herself that she was truly
over him, and that she thought seeing him would nail that conviction down was not a good answer.

But she was over him. And he was over her. He'd said he would
never be with her again. When he'd phoned a couple of nights
ago and informed her that he had a two-hour layover at the airport in Denver, she remembered his telling her he would never be
with her again. She figured he wanted to see her, just to be sure.

She wanted to be sure, too.

"We're friends," she said.

"I'm your friend," Adrienne commented from the backseat.
"Would you drive an hour to see me?"

"In a heartbeat," Erika said, meaning it.

"Okay, so you want to see this friend," Anna said placidly.
"Sounds good to me."

"Oh, come on. He was more than a friend, wasn't he?" Becky
asked. "You showed us that picture he sent you, with the couple
going at it."

Erika wanted to scold Becky for her mocking tone. That picture was awesome; all the girls who'd seen it had agreed that it
was. She and Ted had never been "a couple going at it." They'd
been in love. That love was over, but out of respect for what had
once been, she had to travel up to Denver to see Ted.

So it was an outing with her friends. They'd go to the airport,
and then, once Ted was on his plane and flying off to wherevershe recalled him mentioning somewhere in Arizona-she and the
girls would cruise into Denver and check out a club or two. Or
they'd drive back to campus and stop in at one of the frat houses.
Or whatever.

It was important for her to see Ted. Important for her to assure
herself that he was all right after she'd broken up with him.
Important for her to assure herself that she was all right, even if
the breakup had been at her instigation.

Denver International Airport was a maze of roads, connectors, and parking lots all weaving around a building that looked like a
circus tent designed by Dr. Seuss. "Those points are supposed to
represent the mountains," Anna explained, pointing to the
swoops and peaks of the main building. It didn't remind Erika of
mountains, but she was in no state of mind to assess the architectural daring of the building.

In a matter of minutes, she would be seeing Ted. For the first
time since she'd broken up with him-for the first time since
she'd said good-bye to him before heading off to Colorado-she
would be seeing the boy who'd been her first love. Her palms felt
clammy and her heart pounded more fiercely than it ever had
when she'd been about to ride in a horse show, ski down a slope,
or take an exam.