Always Something There to Remind Me (6 page)

He took a long sip of his champagne, then let out a long breath and set the glass down. “I didn’t plan to do this here, like this.”

“Do what?” Okay, if I hadn’t been so tired, I might have thought for a minute before asking that.

He dug his hand into his pocket.

Then—and only then—did I
finally
get an inkling where this was going.

And I panicked.

No, no, no, please not this, not now. Please please please don’t go there. Things are so nice. Please don’t do this! I don’t want to think about this.

My thoughts roared in my head like an old engine turning over and choking out blue smoke. I had to stop him but I’d worked so damn hard to start him that it was clearly going to be impossible.

This was definitely the wrong timing for this. I had so many other things on my plate, the new job, a wedding over the weekend, the stupid sixteenth birthday party and TV show. This was a moment that should have been wonderful; I should be anticipating it, hoping for it,
praying
for it, glorying in all the ways it made perfect sense for us and for the girls, but instead it felt like my head was going to explode with the will to
stop him
at all costs.

But it was too late, he’d already gotten on his knee in front of me, jostling awkwardly as the limo bounced across K Street.

“Oh, Rick.” My laugh sounded tinny and hollow, but everything in me wanted to stop this moment. “Come on, now, you don’t have to tell me, let’s just go have a nice dinner. I hear the desserts are pretty amazing too. Maybe not coffee, though, because it’s a work night and if I have coffee, I will just never sleep. Did you know it takes coffee five hours to leave your system?”

I do this. I chatter when I’m nervous. I hear it and it annoys me as much as it annoys anyone else, maybe more, but I’m powerless to stop it.

“Frankly,” I blathered on, “I think it takes longer than that. I’d probably be up until it was time to go to work…”

“Erin.”

“… and then I’d be dead tired. Which”—I yawned and gave an exaggerated stretch—“actually, I already am. Not that I’m not appreciating this elaborate evening, because I absolutely am, but it’s just—”

“
Erin
.”

Damn it. It was going to happen. “Yes?”

“I’m on my knee in front of you.”

“I see that.”
Get up get up get up, don’t do this.
“You’re going to ruin your pants. Here, let me help you back to the seat.” I reached for his arm and tried pulling. Actually, I sort of
tugged
, which sent him off balance and his hand shot sideways, knocking his champagne glass over.

“Oh! I’m so sorry.” I grimaced and reached for some of the napkins next to the ice bucket. “Wow, I am so clumsy. Rick, please forgive me.” I dabbed at the seat until he gently grasped my wrist and took the damp napkins out of my hand.

“It’s okay.” He put the napkins aside. “Are you really not seeing what I’m doing here?”

I hoped my look was blank. It should have been. That many emotions conflicting at once
had
to erase each other out. “Seeing what?” I asked in a small voice.

“Okay, here goes.” He took a deep breath. “Erin, I love you—”

“I love you too,” I said automatically. It was coming. I couldn’t stop it. It was exactly like watching a fuzzy gray security-camera view of a car crash or Princess Diana heading for the Mercedes at the Paris Ritz.

“You have brought more light and fun into my life than I ever thought possible.”

It was then that I realized he was holding a small black box in his hand. Not that it was a surprise at this point. I just hadn’t noticed it up to then. Somehow I hadn’t even wondered.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. And I would be honored”—he opened the box, revealing a perfect two-carat emerald-cut diamond, flanked by slender sapphire baguettes—“if you would become my wife.”

And that’s when I had the weirdest thought possible.

Nate
.

Holy cow, where did
that
come from? I hadn’t thought about him in
ages
.

I mean, he was there in my subconscious, obviously. Part of my experience in life. Periodically I had dreams about him—sometimes hot, sexual dreams and sometimes typical disjointed dreams where I’d pass him in the hall where he was watering the trash cans—and they’d always disconcert me a little but … that was normal, right? He’d been a big part of my life once, of course he’d be floating around in my subconscious.

That was different from really
thinking about him
.

This was terrible timing.

I was being proposed to by a great-looking, successful, young, vibrant,
available
(not a given anymore) man—he was telling me he wanted to commit his life to being with me and only me!

This
was not the time to be thinking of a guy who’d left so long ago.

A new dialogue started in my head, one shooing Nate away in order to give me the brainpower to think of an answer, or a way to stall, for Rick. Instead, it all came out as one big, jumbled mess. “I—I—I have to use the ladies’ room. Oh, look, we’re here.” The car drew to a halt outside Naveen’s, just in the nick of time. “Boy, that was a quick drive.”

Rick was looking flummoxed. And who could blame him? “Erin, I just
proposed
to you.”

I grimaced, probably only adding insult to injury. “I know.”

The driver opened the door next to me.

“Not yet,” Rick said sharply, and the driver, seeing what was going on—anyone seeing the scene could have known exactly what was going on—slammed the door shut.

I focused on Rick. “Look, I’m shocked. I mean, maybe I should have seen this coming, but I didn’t, and it’s not like in movies and books where you just have the perfect response at the ready, because I just
wasn’t
ready. You had time to prepare.” I gestured at the ring box. “You really prepared. It’s beautiful. You must have known what you were going to say for days now.”

“Weeks.”

“
Weeks!
There you go.” How had I missed it? I hadn’t detected even a tiny sign of this. Was he that good at being covert or was I that blind to things that were going on right under my nose? “But I’m on the spot. Not in a bad way,” I hastened to add. “Oh, Rick.” I sighed. “I’m so sorry. I’ve made a mess of this.”

He chuckled uneasily. “I understand. But my knee is starting to hurt sitting here like this, so do you
have
an answer?”

I swallowed hard. It would have been wise to say yes right away, to yank this fantastic man off the market before he realized what he was doing and rescinded the proposal. But I couldn’t. I let out an unsteady breath. “No,” I began.

He groaned irritably and snapped the box shut, moving over onto the seat next to me. “I knew I should have talked to you about this first. It’s too soon. Something in me told me that.”

“Wait,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean no I won’t marry you, I meant no I don’t have an answer yet.”

He brightened fractionally. “So it’s not a no?”

I shook my head and smiled. “No, it’s not a no.”

“Which means it could be a yes.”

My stomach tightened. I swallowed again. “It could. I just … need to think. To process. There are so many considerations.” I was in danger of expounding upon that ridiculously, so I pressed my lips together for a moment, then simply said, “I hope that’s okay.”

“Beats the hell out of a no.”

I gave the brightest smile I could muster, as if I were a normal woman who was thrilled to receive a proposal from a wonderful man. Not a woman who had just received a proposal from a wonderful man and thought immediately of a guy who’d dumped her
twenty-three years earlier
.

“So what do you say we get fortified?” Rick asked. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a drink. A few drinks.”

The relief I felt at his practical tone was enormous. “Sounds like a great plan.”

Rick opened the door, ignoring the driver, who was standing by outside waiting to do that for him. He got out of the car, then turned and took my hand, helping me out only a little more gracefully than I’d tumbled in.

Rick gave instructions to the driver about our return, and we went into Naveen’s ornate interior.

It was the most expensive meal I’ve ever not tasted.

Chapter 5

July 1986

Another clear summer night.

Erin was newly sixteen and had all the freedom in the world, because her parents were gone for the weekend.

Of course, there was the problem of Aunt Cheryl, her father’s sister, who was staying with her because they thought she was too young to stay alone. But Aunt Cheryl had actually turned out to be kind of cool. Where Erin had always thought Aunt Cheryl hadn’t married because she’d missed her chance and life had passed her by, she was, in fact, a lot younger and more vibrant than Erin had realized. Although, to be fair, Erin hadn’t really seen her since she was about seven, and at seven every adult seems ancient.

Turned out Aunt Cheryl was forty-five and had a boyfriend who, even to Erin’s discriminating eye, was pretty hot. For a forty-five-year-old. He looked like Magnum P.I. but without the big mustache.

So the good thing about Aunt Cheryl was that she was so youthful. That turned out to be the bad thing too, since Erin wanted Nate to come over once Cheryl was asleep, and at 10:07
P.M.
—and counting—that didn’t seem to be anywhere close to happening.

“So you have a boyfriend?” Cheryl asked, coming into Erin’s room. She was wearing a nightshirt and had her hair pulled back, so she was obviously close to either turning in for the night or mud wrestling.

Erin nodded, tucking her still-clothed body closer under the covers so, if all else failed, she could claim she was going to sleep, lock the door, and climb out through the balcony and trellis. “Nate.”

“What’s he like?”

Erin drew in a breath. She wanted Cheryl to sleep so she could see him, but, on the other hand, she loved to talk about Nate. “He’s wonderful,” she said, so ridiculously dreamy that she added, “really nice. Really.”

“Really.” Cheryl smiled. “Is he cute?”

“I think so. He’s perfect.” She thought of him, the mix of perfections and imperfections that he was, and how it made her feel when she looked at him. She gave an involuntary shudder. “He’s perfect,” she repeated wistfully, reflexively touching her chest where a locket with his picture in it hung beneath her shirt.

Cheryl chuckled. “Enjoy this while you can. You only have one first love.”

“I didn’t say I love him,” Erin objected, but it was the diminishing term “first love” that bothered her. Because she
did
love Nate. But not in a “first love” sort of way—that implied puppy dogs and shared milkshakes and a small smile with the shake of a head later, musing over this tender, innocent time.

That wasn’t how it was at all. She wanted to be with him forever. She wanted to see him get older, hear his opinion on changing world events forever; she wanted him to meet her at the altar, hold her hand through childbirth, and sit in a rocking chair next to her in old age. Somehow the assumption that that was where they were going had lodged in her mind, and Aunt Cheryl’s implication that it might be a passing thing made her hackles rise.

“But I do,” she heard herself say. “I do love him.”

“Of course you do!”

Ugh. There it was again. That I-know-more-than-you, someday-you’ll-understand smugness. Made worse by the fact that she obviously didn’t mean it as smugness. She just thought she was stating a fact that they’d both agree on later.

Erin would never agree that this was just “first love.”

Aunt Cheryl must have picked up on her discontent, because she lowered her brow and asked, “Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing.” She didn’t mean for it to sound like a pointed
nothingggg
but it did, even to her ear. She tried to soften it with, “I’m just tired.”

That seemed to satisfy Cheryl. “Me too.” She yawned, as if on cue. “Good night, sweetie.” She came forward in a cloud of Shalimar perfume and bent down to kiss Erin’s cheek. “Sleep tight.”

“You too.” Erin slunk deeper under the covers and tried to make her eyelids look heavy. “Could you hit the light on your way out?”

“Sure thing.” Cheryl hit the switch and the room was cloaked in darkness. “See you in the morning.”

Erin remained silent, hoping to perhaps give the impression that she’d already knocked off.

Then she waited in bed, fingering the locket on her necklace and listening to the cicadas outside her open window, until Cheryl had stopped moving around in her parents’ room.

She reached for the phone and dialed his number, as she’d done a million times in the dark.

He answered after the slightest chirp of a ring. “Hey.”

“Oh, my God, my aunt would not go to bed.”

He laughed. “She’s keeping an eye on you.”

“Not a very good one, I hope. Come in half an hour?”

“I don’t know.” He gave an exaggerated yawn. “I’m getting kind of tired.”

“Yeah? Maybe I should call someone else.”

He never thought that joke was funny. “I’ll be there.”

“Okay, but wait in the car for a sec when you get here. If I don’t come out it’s because she’s still up.”

They hung up and Erin kept the light out, looking through the window at the nothing that was happening outside. Any car arriving at this hour was sure to call attention for anyone who happened to be up and looking. But when she opened her door and looked down the hall at her parents’ door, she could see the light was out in there. She couldn’t hear a sound from within.

Cheryl was asleep. Or almost. Why would she stay up? She’d mentioned at least five times tonight how she had to get up at six thirty
A.M.
and go to work and how she envied Erin the freedom of high school summers with no responsibility greater than reading good books and watching soap operas.

For all she knew, Erin was getting rest for another busy day of leisure.