My Everything - Seth & Amber (4 page)

Her eyes shot to him as her cheeks flushed.
She obviously remembered the question's significance. At least she
didn’t look like she was about to pass out anymore.

She looked down at the chair as if she was
battling with the decision to sit down and talk with him. Finally
she said, “This isn’t the time to do this. You have a house full of
people waiting to talk to you, Seth.”

“Say that again,” he commanded.

“I just don’t think…,” she began.

“My name. Say my name again.” He stared at
her intensely.

Her lips parted as her breathing quickened,
“Seth.”

He closed his eyes and exhaled. He didn’t
even try to disguise how the sound of his name on her lips affected
him. He had waited eight long years to hear it.

Voices in the kitchen caused him to open his
eyes again. He heard people talking and laughing behind him. He
knew it was a matter of seconds before someone would interrupt
them.

Amber looked panicked. He saw her eyes
darting around at all of the new arrivals. He needed to get her
alone. Talk to her. Isolation. That is what they needed.

If he ignored everyone and just got her out
of here then maybe she would relax, calm down. At least enough to
talk to him. He was forming a tactical plan when he felt a slap on
his shoulder.

“Can’t believe all my boys are under the same
roof,” his dad’s voice boomed from behind him.

Seth resigned himself to the fact that
ignoring his father was not an option. He turned around and his dad
pulled him into a hug. He saw Katie standing by the kitchen island,
she shrugged her shoulders, holding her hands up as she mouthed,
“Sorry.”

Before his dad had even released him from the
tight embrace there were several more people circled around, all
talking to him at once. He realized that the prospect of getting
Amber alone was looking as if it was not going to be an option.

He heard the back door shut behind him and
knew even before he turned that she had left. Still, he couldn’t
help it. He looked over his shoulder and saw the empty space where
she had stood.

She was gone. Again.

Sure, he knew her name this time. But did it
really matter?

Sunlight shone brightly through the bedroom window. Amber squinted
her eyes as she reached across her pillow and turned off her alarm
before it even had a chance to buzz. She had not overslept this
morning. Of course, that was mainly due to the fact that she would
have actually had to
sleep
for oversleeping to occur. Sadly,
she had just tossed and turned all night and hadn’t drifted off
once.

Amber had not been able to shut off her brain
since leaving Jason and Katie’s the previous night. Her head
was...spinning, turning, flipping...with so many conflicting
thoughts and feelings. The main two were disbelief and shock. There
were a few (hundred) others in there as well, but those would
definitely be the two emotions overriding all of the others.

Next was embarrassment. Normally, Amber faced
things head on. If something needed to be dealt with, she did just
that. She dealt with it. She didn’t run away. She didn’t hide. Last
night she had done both of those things. Why? Because her Mystery
Man was no longer a mystery at all...although he was certainly
still all man, Amber reflected ruefully. Still, he wasn't a
mystery. He had a name now: Seth Sloan.

She dropped her head into her hands. Of
course! Fricking
of course
he would end up being a Sloan.
Right?

Not only did she now know Mystery Man’s name,
she knew his whole family! And not just in passing, but
really
well. Her amazing, out-of-this-world, incredible,
anonymous
night was not so anonymous anymore. Not even
close.

She knew she was going to have to deal with
this. Deal with him. Harper’s Crossing was a fairly small town and
obviously they knew a lot of the same people. In fact, probably
more than half of her inner-circle were related to him. So yeah,
she was going to need to address the elephant in the room, and –
being Amber – she would be taking care of that sooner rather than
later.

First, before any addressing, facing, or
dealing with occurred, she needed a shower. She swung her legs over
the side of the bed, and reaching her arms up high over her head,
she stretched her back.

Yoga. That’s what she needed before her
shower. She needed to find her Zen place.

Amber didn’t believe she had ever actually
achieved finding said Zen place in the
two
yoga sessions
that she had attempted. But, what the hell? Today was a new day,
and if there ever was a time in her life that she needed to feel
centered and stress-free (which was what Zen was, right?) then
today was that day.

Just as she was pulling her barely-used yoga
pants from her drawer, her phone rang.

Seth! The thought popped unbidden and
instantly into her mind, but she realized almost immediately that
it was completely ridiculous. He didn’t have her phone number.
Duh
! Still, that realization did not stop her hands from
shaking as she picked up the phone.

She looked at the caller ID. Great.

Well, at least her hands were steady as a
surgeon's now.

“Hi, Mom,” she tried to cover the stress in
her voice.

“Hey pumpkindoodlebug,” her mother slurred
brightly.

Amber’s eyes slowly closed and her hands
began shaking for an entirely different reason than they had a
moment before.

Taking a deep breath, Amber could feel her
nostrils flaring as she asked, “Where are you Mom?”

“Well, that’s the thing, I don’t know. But if
you could just put some money in my account then I’m sure that I
could figure it out,” her mom reasoned.

“That’s not going to happen. I already told
you I am not giving you any more money, Mom. I will come pick you
up, wherever you are, and take you back to Horizons. But that’s it.
Nothing else,” Amber stated firmly as she tried not to let her
blood pressure spike.

“Please doodlebug, just this one last time,
pleeeaassee,” her mother begged. Amber felt her stomach clench as
she called upon her steel will to help her stay strong.

“No, Mom. No money. Where are you so I can
come and get you?”

“I’ll never ask you for anything ever again!”
her mother pleaded.

“Where are you?” Amber repeated the
question.

“It doesn’t matter!” Her mother began to sob.
“How can you treat me like this? You are my only daughter! I’m your
mother!”

Don’t remind me, Amber thought to herself as
she calmly explained, “I know that, Mom, and that’s why I will drop
everything to come pick you up.”

Her mother’s sobs instantly turned into
anger, “You really are a bitc..”

Amber disconnected the call. She had no
desire to listen to her mother’s drunken opinion of her. Her chest
felt tight and her limbs were heavy.

God, she missed her mom.

Not the person that her mother had become
since they lost Aaron. That was not who Amber missed. She missed
the mom that had been front row at all of her ballet and jazz
recitals, who never missed one of Aaron’s baseball games no matter
how far they had to travel to get there. The mom who made sure that
there was always food on the table and a roof over their heads even
if she had to work several jobs to make that happen.

She sniffed as she felt moisture welling in
her eyes.

No, she told herself firmly. She was not
going to waste one more moment of her life crying over things she
could not change. She had spent a good part of the last decade
doing just that and she was done.

She had good friends. An amazing business
that was thriving even in tough economic times. She had too much
good in her life to constantly live under a dark cloud of
sadness.

The past was behind her. This was a new day.
Out with the old, in with the new.

--- ~ ---

As Amber pulled into the back parking lot of
Bella, the boutique clothing store she owned on Harper's Crossing's
postcard-perfect downtown main street, she noticed both Haley and
Sophie’s cars parked in the back lot. Strange.

Haley was an employee at Bella but was not
scheduled to work today, and Sophie hadn’t worked there for a
couple of years. Of course, she stopped by a lot now. But, Amber
reflected with a small smile, even when she had been an employee,
she had never arrived this early. Sophie was a night owl, through
and through. So even if she had the opening shift she wouldn’t roll
in until five minutes before they unlocked the doors.

Amber looked at the digital clock in her
dashboard, it read 9:05. Hmmm. She figured they probably knew about
Seth and wanted the scoop. Well, it looked like her past was not as
firmly behind her as she had wanted, after all. She sighed,
thinking to herself that it was just better to get this over
with.

Stepping through the black beaded curtains
that separated the employee break room from the dressing rooms,
Amber saw that, not only were Sophie and Haley both in attendance,
it looked like Katie and Chelle were there as well.

They were all seated in the small lounge area
Amber had recently added to the boutique so that when customers
were shopping, those accompanying them would have a comfortable
place to wait. She might have thought twice about putting it in if
she had known that it would so quickly be used as a place where her
friends would comfortably wait for
her
, with an
interrogation in mind!

Oh, boy.

Amber stepped around the corner and was faced
with four very eager expressions. She sat down beside Katie on the
small red loveseat that faced the dressing rooms.

“Really?” Amber intoned dryly as she turned
to Katie, whom she assumed had been the one to tip everyone off
about the newest development in Amber’s wacky world of crazy
coincidences.

“Hey, they wanted to go to your house last
night but I convinced them to give you a little space,” Katie said,
sounding proud of herself. “You’re welcome.”

They all continued to stare at her. Amber had
the sudden urge to go back home, climb into bed, throw the covers
over her head, and stay there for the next….mmm, year or so.

“Alright, go ahead. What do you want to
know?” Amber resigned herself to the inevitable.

“So it’s really
him
?” Sophie
asked.

Amber nodded her head. “Yes.”

“Seth, my
cousin
, is Mystery Man,”
Haley clarified.

“That appears to be the case,” Amber
confirmed.

Everyone was staring at her with varying
degrees of disbelief on their faces.

“Yeah, I know,” Amber shook her head, “it’s
crazy.”

The room erupted as each girl spoke in a
rush, putting forth their own unique take on just how crazy it was
and what the odds were of this happening. Basically, voicing all of
the thoughts that had been crashing into each other like bumper
cars in her brain, for the last twelve hours.

Katie spoke over the loud chatter, asking,
“So what did he say to you when I left?”

The entire room fell silent.

“Not a lot,” Amber replied.

All of her friend’s facial expressions told
the same story. Namely, that there was no way Amber was going to
get away with an answer that vague.

“Fine.” Amber sighed in resignation. “He
asked why I left. Then asked me if I wanted to sit down.”

Which had immediately taken her right back to
the room in DC, but they didn’t need to know that. “Then he asked
me to say his name again.”

“What?” Katie asked, her head tilted to the
side.

Ooookaaay, it looked like Amber was going to
have to go the verbatim route for this crowd. Luckily, she had a
really good memory.

Amber’s hands flew up in exasperation as she
explained, “He wanted to talk. I said ‘This isn’t the time to do
this. You have a house full of people waiting to see you, Seth.’ He
said, ‘Say that again.’ I tried to explain again and he said,”
Amber lowered her voice an octave in a sad attempt to recreate
Seth’s deep timbre, “‘my name, say my name again.’”

Her friends remained sitting, all staring at
her, waiting.

“And then…” Katie prompted.

“Then I said his name again. Then the room
filled up with people. Then I left. Then...nothing. That’s the
whole sordid tale.”

There. Now that they knew that nothing
noteworthy had happened, maybe she could just go on with her
day.

“What did he
do
when you said his
name?” Katie continued the line of questioning as if she were
cross-examining Amber in court.

Amber hung her head slightly. Really,
Katie?

“He closed his eyes and just...” Amber didn’t
know how to explain what he had done, “He just…breathed.”

“Wow,” Katie and Haley said in unison.

“Okay, not to be the one that has to inject a
little reality into this romantic Ripley's Believe It Or Not
situation, but did anyone else notice that Bobby and Seth look
exactly alike?” Sophie asked, looking at Amber in disbelief, “You
never noticed the resemblance?”

“No,” Amber replied honestly. “Bobby was a
teenager when I met Myster…er, um…Seth. And remember, I only really
got to know Bobby when you two started dating. Which was
years
later. It never crossed my mind.”

“So what are you going to do?” Chelle asked,
and she seemed to be beyond being merely wrapped up in the
salacious drama of it all, but was rather genuinely concerned.

“Nothing,” Amber stated flatly.

“Nothing?” All four women repeated in
disbelief.

“What am I supposed to do?” Amber did not
know what these ladies wanted to hear but she had been running
possible scenarios of how this could all play out in her head and
she still had no idea how to handle the situation at hand.