“Say you’ll spend the afternoon with me,” he interrupted.
I turned toward the water again. As the wave receded it seemed as if the ocean were pulling away from me. Why on earth would I say no? “All right,” I said. “Of course.”
“Can we walk?” he asked.
He was gazing at my bare feet; he seemed to have a hard time meeting my eyes. Yesterday he’d been so cool and charming, but today he seemed skittish. Nervous.
We walked along the beach in silence for a little while. Then, because someone had to say something, I asked, “How was your meeting yesterday?”
Julian sighed. “Well, that particular client wants to leave his body to science and his money to his pet llama, if you can believe it,” he said. “When I suggested that there were more deserving beneficiaries—for the money, anyway; science can have the old codger if it wants him—he smirked at me. I loathe smirking and anyone who does it. I can’t even stand the word itself.” He shook his head. “Wait, why am I going on like this?
“I asked,” I said, following him as he veered off the beach and onto a narrow path that wound between high, grassy dunes.
“I think he’s just pulling my leg, honestly, and he’s got so much money that it doesn’t matter if he’s paying me three hundred an hour to do it.”
“Maybe he’s lonely,” I suggested.
“Then he could play golf, or join the Elks. I have better ways to spend my time.” Julian swiped at a clump of beach grass, and then he smiled to himself. “Like taking a walk with Anne McWilliams, formerly of Andover, Massachusetts.”
“Thank you, I’m flattered,” I said, laughing. “Even if a grouchy old weirdo doesn’t offer much in the way of competition.”
We turned a corner, and the path narrowed even more before stopping at the far end of the dunes. But we weren’t at the parking lot now, which I’d expected. Instead, we were standing at the edge of a manicured green lawn, dotted with clusters of Adirondack chairs. A hundred yards away stood a small, quaint seaside inn.
Our conversation, which had barely begun, stopped immediately. I suddenly understood why Julian had come to find me.
He finally looked me in the eyes, and I looked back at him. I knew what he’d hoped would happen next.
And almost imperceptibly, I nodded.
Chapter 28
WE WALKED into the lobby, where Julian paid for a room. We didn’t say anything until we were standing in the middle of a suite with yellow wallpaper and French doors that opened onto a tiny patio. My cheeks felt hot—whether from sun or self-consciousness, I wasn’t sure.
“The obligatory bottle of Napa Chardonnay,” Julian said, lifting a bottle from its bucket of ice. “A glass?”
I took it with slightly trembling hands and set it down without taking a sip. I noticed he did the same.
Then we smiled at each other, not quite certain how to begin.
“May I kiss you?” Julian asked softly.
It was so romantic—so silly—that he asked. That was why we were here. But he’d always been a gentleman, even at seventeen.
I nodded and moved toward him. Taking a deep breath, I slid my hands around his waist and tilted my face up toward his. He hesitated for a single instant, and then he leaned down. His kiss was so tender that I thought I might cry again.
It had been such a long time.
Our mouths quickly grew hungry. I took his bottom lip between my teeth because he used to like it when I did that. He slipped off my shirt and then my bra. His hands, his devouring kisses, were everywhere. I felt like every nerve was singing.
“Let me look at you,” he whispered.
I lay down on the bed and let him take me in. I knew that I’d changed, that I wasn’t the radiant, blossoming thing I’d been the last time we saw each other, but I didn’t care; right here, right now, I loved my body more than I ever did when I was young. Julian wasn’t the skinny poet boy he’d been, either; his chest was broad and tanned and no longer hairless. I reached out and pulled him to me, skin to skin.
“This is a little crazy,” he whispered into my neck. “I don’t know what this means.”
“I don’t know either,” I said. “But that doesn’t matter.”
Then I kissed him again, harder, more insistent. We didn’t have to know what we wanted from each other, because our bodies knew. They remembered everything.
Afterward, lying next to me, Julian said, “I think you should stick around for a while.”
“Like until your wife gets back to town?” I asked. I was trying to be lighthearted, but it came out wrong.
He sucked in his breath.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
He ran his hands through his tousled hair. “It’s not unfair, Anne. I’m not divorced; I haven’t filed any papers. I’ve just been waiting. But not for Sarah to come back to me. It’s more like I’ve been waiting for some kind of sign, some reason to act. And maybe that’s you.”
I pulled the sheet up to my chin. “I don’t want to be the reason for anyone’s divorce.”
“Not the reason,” Julian said. “The… encouragement.”
I took a deep breath. “You know, there’s something I never told you,” I said. “After my mom died, I went to Cambridge. With Karen. We skipped school one day and drove there.”
“To see me?” Julian asked.
I nodded. I hadn’t thought of this trip in years, but now the memory had come rushing back. “I couldn’t call you back then. I couldn’t write you. But I wanted to see you. So the two of us wandered around Harvard Yard for hours. It was spring, and the lilacs were blooming, and everything was lush and beautiful. We were so excited at first! Then we got bored because you didn’t appear, and then, another hour or two later, we decided that we were completely crazy. Harvard has thousands of students—why in the world did we ever think we’d see you?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were coming,” Julian said.
“But the crazy thing was, we did see you. We were getting ready to leave and suddenly there you were, in front of the library, with your backpack over your arm and your ratty Bob Dylan T-shirt under your Ralph Lauren button-down. You looked so at home, and so happy, in a place I could never get into—or pay for if I did. I think that’s when I realized that you and I weren’t meant to be. That we didn’t belong together.”
Julian frowned ever so slightly. “I don’t understand,” he said.
I tried to explain. “Take me and Karen,” I said. “We were so unlike each other that I used to think we were basically two different species,” I said. “But animals of two different species can be friends. Like a gazelle and a tortoise, for example—no problem. There are entire books about cross-species buddies. But animals of two different species can’t mate.”
Julian reached for my hand. “Anne, I hate to say it, but you’re still not making sense.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s confusing to me, too, and probably the animal metaphors aren’t helping. But I think the point is that for a little while, our two different worlds overlapped. And when they did, we had something wonderful. And this, right now, is wonderful. But it isn’t real, Julian. This is memory. This is us paying a visit to our old selves before we figure out who our new ones are.”
“I don’t know that I agree with you,” he said quietly.
I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s okay. You don’t have to,” I said.
He took a long, slow breath. “So what are we going to do now?” he asked.
“Let’s take that nap we didn’t take yesterday,” I said. I turned toward him and put my arm across his warm stomach. “I could use the sleep. I have a really long drive ahead of me.”
Chapter 29
FUELED BY coffee, doughnuts, and a giant bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans, I made the twenty-six-hour drive to Bonner Springs in two days. It had been hard to say good-bye to Julian, but I knew it was the right thing to do. He belonged to my past, and my future—whatever it was—lay somewhere else.