“Particularly right now, when you’re still so close to it,” he murmured.
“And I get that too,” she said, “so I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. But, at the same time, it’s hard not to at least constantly be aware of it.”
Outside on the front steps, she took several long slow deep breaths of the sultry air. “So different than being on the water,” she said.
“Even though we’re close, and can smell the saltiness,” he said, “there’s a freshness coming down from the valley.”
She nodded, and together the two of them walked around the small town. Everything was closed; everything was silent, but there was still a uniqueness. Most of the town consisted of stone or some mud-brick buildings, but there was a classiness, just a historic agelessness to the whole town. By the time they walked around the entire settlement, she smiled and said, “Thank you.”
“Are you ready to go back now?”
“I think so,” she said. “Thankfully a boogeyman didn’t appear around every corner.”
“No, and that should help you sleep.”
“Maybe. I’ve learned everybody could be the predator that’s after me next, even if I don’t want it to be.”
At the front door of the hotel, she sighed. “I know I need to go to bed,” she confessed, “but I don’t really want to.”
“No pubs are open, and there’s no common area to just sit and enjoy,” he said, “unless you want to go back outside again.”
She shrugged. “No, it’s fine.”
He walked her to her room, and then she unlocked the door and stepped in. She turned, smiled up at him, and said, “I did want to say that it’s really nice to see you again.”
“It’s really nice to see you too,” he said in surprise. “Obviously it is a surprise.”
“I know, right?” she said, laughing. “At the same time, it’s nice because I feel like I’m a very different person than I was.”
“You are,” he said, “and I really appreciate that.”
“Thank you,” she said, with a smile, and turned to go inside.
“I’m really proud of you,” he said quietly. “You’ve come a long way.”
“I know it feels like I should have come a lot further, faster, but, hey, it is what it is.”
“Don’t do that,” he said, grabbing her by both shoulders and giving her a gentle shake. “You shouldn’t knock yourself down. You’ve done a lot of work, and you’ve become somebody who you could be proud of. That’s more than most people can say they’ve done.”
She smiled. “Thank you, that means a lot. You’re one of those checkboxes that I needed to deal with, before I could move on.”
He tilted his head and looked at her sideways. “Move on, in what way?”
“I don’t know,” she said, aiming for that honesty again. “Just feels like I did you wrong.”
“You didn’t do me wrong,” he said stepping back to lean against the doorjamb, his arms crossed over his chest. “You did what you needed to do for yourself back then. I’m okay with that.”
“I was a bitch.”
“You were,” he said cheerfully. “And I recognized it, and I left.”
She burst out laughing. “Okay, for that,” she said, “I appreciate it.”
“I’m not unfinished business,” he said. “If we move forward as friends, don’t drag that behind us.”
“Oh,” she said, “that’s a good way to look at it too.”
“We have known each other for a long time,” he said. “We’ll just leave it at that.” Her smile fell away. He looked at her and asked, “What’s the matter?”
“It just was so nice to see you,” she said, “I guess I overstepped the balance.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked in exasperation.
She looked at him, frowned, and said, “You said, just leave it at that.”
He looked at her, blinked several times, and then started to chuckle. “I meant, we don’t need to discuss you having a checkbox to clear with me,” he said. “We’re both fine as we are right now. Obviously I want to stay in touch, and it’s nice to see you. We used to have quite the thing together.”
“We did,” she said, “but, outside of it being dynamite in bed, I’m not sure there was a whole lot else to it.”
“Back then, being dynamite in bed was really, really good,” he said, with a cheeky grin.
At that, she burst out laughing again. “You always used to make me laugh,” she said, shaking her head.
“You know what? You’re right. I’m not quite ready to go to sleep either. It’s nice to just talk.”
“Yes,” she said, “but it’s not as if there’s any place to go here. You’ve got Killian in your room, and I’ve got Jessie in mine.”
“A couple chairs are down at the end of the hallway there. If you want,” he said, “we could watch a sunset or maybe see if the stars are out.”
She looked at him eagerly. “Are you okay to spend some time together?”
“We’ll be spending a lot of time together over the next few days,” he said. “I’m not deserting you.”
She looked up at him, and he realized just how worried she was, and that’s really what would happen. He reached out, gave her a quick squeeze, and said, “I promise.”
She smiled with relief. “I know you say that,” she said, “but it does seem that circumstances have been conspiring against me and that you’re likely to disappear.”
“Not going to happen,” he said. “I promise.”
She nodded, slipped her hand in his, and together they walked down the hallway.
“We were good in a lot of other ways too,” he said, thinking about it. “We could always laugh together.”
“Yes, we could always talk too,” she said. “I was just really demanding back then.”
“And I wanted different things,” he said.
She smiled, and so did he. “I wanted that big fancy house and the three-car garage with spare cars spilling out on the other side. I was all about stuff.”
“What you were,” he said, “was all about growing up. And your growing-up version was a whole lot wealthier and more full of stuff than mine. But, as you have dumped off a lot of that stuff, you’ve become a very different person.”
“I’ve become me, I think,” she said, “at least that’s the way I look at it. An awful lot of everybody else was stuck to me. Like I had to go take a very long shower and just scrub myself clean,” she murmured.
“It’s not a bad analogy,” he said. “When you think about it, when you grow up, you are bits and pieces of everybody around you. You take on bits and pieces of who they are and what it is that they think that you need to learn and to know and their own code of morals and ethics to live by,” he said. “It’s almost never your own at that stage. Yours becomes more evident as you grow up and become older.” He led her to a small sitting area, where they could sit and stare out the window.