Waking Up (5 page)

“I…always did like snakes,” she said then, irrelevantly. She stared down at her cup and abruptly raised it to drink from the warm, steaming liquid within. His hand fell away. “I mean, they’re such lovely, graceful creatures really, though certainly not cuddly like a pet. The way they can shed their old skin and emerge looking new and jewel-like is simply amazing…”

Jason moved convulsively and muttered something under his breath that sounded like, “Damn!” Then, louder, with audible restraint, he told her stiltedly, “Rob, I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

She turned her eyes to him “I’m not going to be hurt,” was her attempted reassurance, as she felt very touched by his concern.

But his response was explosive. “Not going to be hurt!” he snapped, looking suddenly angry, his eyes sparkling hard and bright. “What are you now, for God’s sake? Look at you, you’ve got shadows under your eyes, you’re pale, you’re exhausted! Why couldn’t you sleep last night? What was on your mind?”

“I…” Her eyes widened, stricken, for she couldn’t think of a single excuse to give him. Her mind was a blank, and she certainly couldn’t tell the truth.

He didn’t merely look angry. For some odd reason, he looked furious. “See?” he sneered. “Haven’t anything to say, have you? Admit the truth, Robbie! You’re in too deep!”

“You haven’t any idea what you’re talking about,” she told him, coldly, through a confusion of anger and bewilderment. How odd he was. How wrong.

“Elaborate.” The word was succinct. “Wasn’t that why you refused to come over to our table last night to say hello?”

“I was leaving you to some privacy!” she cried out impatiently, and pushed out of her chair to put her back to him in exasperation.

“I don’t believe you anymore, why can’t you tell me the truth?”

“I have no intention of telling you a damned thing!” Couldn’t, wouldn’t, God, what she couldn’t tell him.

Silence hit them like something crushing. She turned to face him and found his eyes peculiarly stark. “You used to tell me everything,” he whispered through thinned lips.

And suddenly she could sense and see the hurt she had unwittingly caused him, and it was throbbing through his entire, tense body. “God,” she choked and put her hand to her forehead in distress, in remorse. Then she hurt, too, and she said jerkily, “I didn’t mean it that way, Jason.”

“The hell you didn’t,” he said thinly.

“Things are different between us now!” she cried. And then the pain was unexpectedly, sharply raw and welling up in her, along with the loneliness she’d felt when he had left. “You went away! There are six years between what we were, and what we are! We’re not the same, and we can’t be good old pals anymore! It’s gone.”

Then suddenly he was standing, and she couldn’t remember seeing him move. He strode over to her with quick, violent movements. His hands snaked out and twined themselves into the hair at the back of her head. He jerked her close and stared down, eyes molten, into her face. She was in a state of shock. Never had he handled her this way. Never had he shown such emotion. “You’re going to break yourself over him,” he bit out between twisted lips. He gave her a little shake. “You’re being a fool over him. Can’t you see what he is? Damn you! You’re going to break your silly little heart.”

Then before she could move, or speak, or even breathe, he released her, spun on his heel, and was gone.

Chapter Three

Work that evening was as exhausting as she had known it would be. She dragged, her eyes heavy, her arms feeling leaden. Each laden tray was an effort to lift to her shoulder, and she nearly dropped several orders. When she finally slipped into the garage and turned off her car, she didn’t even move for long moments. Her neck hurt, her back ached, the muscles in her legs throbbed. She wasn’t good at functioning on little sleep. She was the kind of person who needed a set schedule, or she lost all her vitality.

No. Her head sagged, and then she forced her body to climb out of the car. The door slammed, loud in the confined darkness. It wasn’t lack of sleep that bothered her. She could do as well as the next person on an occasional short night’s rest. What lowered her spirits was the memory of that morning and her painful encounter with Jason. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed his companionship, hadn’t realized that she would reveal it so starkly and so completely in her tone and words, to either him or herself.

Somehow the hurt had only surfaced when she had well and truly acknowledged that their past relationship was gone. People grew up, moved away, pursued different lifestyles. But the tears pricked at her eyes as she moved clumsily through the darkened house. She didn’t want to let go of the past. The past was happiness to her. She wasn’t happy now, and it was a bitter admission to make. She was lonely. She existed well enough, as her father had existed for years now, but she wasn’t happy.

Sleep was a gradual darkening of her depression, a gentle easing away of thought and sight and sense until she awakened the next morning, rested but not refreshed. Robbie dawdled through her morning shower, dressed in her brief, black bikini with a white pair of shorts pulled over her hips, and after a ritual glass of orange juice and some light cleaning, she went outside to lie in the sun and read.

She had nothing to do for the next two days except to catch up on her housecleaning and amuse herself in any way she wished. The next evening she was scheduled to work was Thursday. Robbie situated the lounge chair so that she caught full advantage of the sun, and then after liberally coating her already dark body with lotion, which she now used to stop her skin drying out rather than for tanning purposes, she settled on her stomach and opened her book.

Soon she was quite engrossed in the story. The book was entitled
Burn Out
, written by a woman named Devan Forrester, and was supposed to be at least partially autobiographical. It had been on the bestseller list for ten months and was nominated for several literary awards. The story was tense, dark, filled with anguish and also filled with a powerful strength and hope. There were strong contrasts of light and dark in the plot, and a universal theme of revitalization that caught at Robbie’s flagging spirits and quickened her heart.

Revitalization, low ebb and high tide, great strengths and terrible frailty. This was the stuff of human life. Her book lowered slowly, until it rested on the chair and she was staring sightlessly at the sunny scene before her. The word kept echoing queerly in her mind, with a heavy emphasis. Revitalization. Odd, how depression could mar one’s outlook with tunnel vision, until all one could see and sense and taste was the darkness. Her optimism reasserted itself, and though she still mourned the scene with Jason yesterday, she now had hopes of patching the tattered, neglected fabric of their relationship together, perhaps continuing with something new.

Later that afternoon, her empty stomach finally made itself known in no uncertain terms, making her leave the lounge chair and head back inside for a quick, light snack. Since it was nearly time for her father to return home, she limited herself to an apple and a granola bar, while thinking ahead to what she should make for supper.

She and Herb fluctuated with the chores, though more often than not she was the one who cooked their evening meals. Herb did the grocery shopping and took the rubbish out, and as they owned a dishwasher, they both took responsibility for loading and unloading it.

She wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about working over a hot stove, and so she resolved to make a fancy salad, with delicately flavored chicken sandwiches, using the cold meat left over in the refrigerator. That decision made, she headed for the stairs, intending to shower and change out of her swimsuit.

As she reached the hallway, however, the doorbell rang, and so she changed course in midstride to answer the summons. When she pulled the door open, she found Jason leaning casually against the doorpost, his light brown hair ruffled. He was dressed in dark suit slacks, and had apparently stopped by after coming straight home from the office, though he had taken the time to rid himself of his tie and jacket. His white shirt was open halfway down his chest with the sleeves rolled up in the heat.

For just a split second, she had full view of his profile as he looked over the lawn, that young, lean face, the weariness in his eyes that was more an expression than physical manifestation, the firmness of his sensual mouth. Then he turned his head and smiled faintly into her closed, wary eyes.

“May I come in?”

She started and came to herself, and then backed away wordlessly so that he could enter the hall. He ran his vivid gaze down her body. The bikini was basically a series of small triangles in strategic places, leaving on open view her narrow rib cage, the graceful swelling of hipbones under an even narrower waist, and long, lean, lovely legs. She was in good physical condition from the demands of her job, her muscles tight, flowing, her skin very dark and shiny with lotion.

Under his gaze, she lifted one slim hand and pushed her smooth brown hair back. It fell straight to her shoulders from her strong yet refined features. Somewhere along the line, her face had sharpened from the round immaturity of a child. Her brown eyes searched his, questioningly. He seemed fascinated by something in her.

When he didn’t say anything straightaway, she asked, “Would you like something cold to drink?”

“Please,” he responded immediately. When she turned to go back to the kitchen, he followed close behind, and after she had poured two glasses of tea and handed one to him, he leaned against the counter. One hand was propped back on the counter’s edge, while with the other, he swirled his glass and stared down into the clear, brown depths. Light was reflected from the ice cubes and liquid in brilliant splashes of honey. Robbie kept her gaze on his glass while halfheartedly sipping from her own.

“Did you have a good day at work?” she ventured at last.

“Mmm, yes,” he replied, absently enough, and then frowned. “Rob, about yesterday morning…”

She moved involuntarily, jerkily, and put her back to him. She could feel his eyes on her, running down the sleek, slender lines of her silken brown back. She wondered where her usual grace had gone. “Please,” she interrupted quickly, at his slight pause. “Do we have to talk about it?”

“I was hurt, yesterday,” he said with difficulty. It brought her back to face him.

Her brown eyes glittered bright and wet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she told him, unsteadily. It seemed as if a gulf separated them, not just the tiled expanse of the kitchen floor. She couldn’t distinguish his features, his lean, long body a blur through her tears.

“It wasn’t necessarily that you hurt me, Rob,” he whispered. For a person whom she had always considered to be a strong individual, he was showing an astonishing vulnerability. “It was just that I hurt.”

“Me, too,” she muttered and hung her head dejectedly. To her intense chagrin, she felt her lips beginning to quiver, and quick, hot tears spilled down her cheeks, two streaking paths. Her hair swung forward, but not quickly enough. From where she was, she could hear his indrawn breath.

His mellow voice sounded strained then, as he told her, “What you said yesterday needn’t be true, Rob. I know we’ve changed. But I value what we had. You were my best friend.”

She put her hand to her forehead, blinking rapidly. Strange, how she never cried when she argued with anyone else. Not with her father, not with her girlfriends, nor with the restaurant manager. Only Jason brought that out. Her own voice a bare thread of sound, she whispered, “I missed you when you left. I didn’t have anyone to talk to.”

“I love you,” he said.

Her heart gave a great, half-frightened leap. Her head snapped up, and her brown eyes blazed.

He didn’t see. His own gaze was directed at the floor at his feet. “I can’t say that to many people, certainly not to any of my male friends. It’s just not something you communicate that often, know what I mean? But I do, Rob. I want us to continue being friends very much. Maybe we can’t have quite the openness we had before. Maybe we can, but we have to try.”

She was utterly stunned. He meant that he loved her as a friend. How else would he have meant it? Of course he had only meant friendship, but when he had said the words, everything inside her had gone crazy. Slowly sanity began to rein in her teeming thoughts; slowly she gained control over herself and realized the value of what he had just offered her.

This was a man in the first flush of his maturity. This was a man who refused to view an open declaration of feelings as being unmasculine. This was a man with integrity, constant values, high goals. This was a man with a golden future ahead of him, his personality more than fulfilling a potential that she had scarcely realized as a child. This was a rare, special individual, and she would be eager to accept any friendship at all with him.

His gray eyes lifted to her face. She smiled at him. “I love you too, Jason,” she said quietly, friend to friend, adult to adult. And somewhere in that smile, she let go of her yearnings for their childhood, accepting the changes in herself and in him.

His answering smile lit his entire, lean face with pleasure. He set his glass down. “Come here, you,” he said, and opened his arms to her.

She laughed and regardless of the slippery lotion all over her body or his business clothes, she walked over to him. His strong arms folded around her, his head bent over hers, and he held her tight against his chest. She could feel the warm skin of his forearms against her bare back, the slight rasp of his cheek against hers, his legs long, lean, harder than her own, and she sighed as her arms wrapped around his neck. “You’re going to have lotion all over your clothes,” she told him, to which he laughed also.