Always You Page 3

  Not that Rick was rude. Never rude. He was polite, which was worse.

  With a deep breath into her belly, she rose from the sink and plastered on her best smile. She would see Rick. They would exchange pleasantries. She would ignore the stabbing disappointment. She would move on. Every day. Until there were no more days with Rick. It would come soon enough.

  With that encouraging thought—which left a dull ache in the pit of her stomach—she walked out the door.

  If Headmistress Berg was a bold, flashing neon sign in her tight fish-scale dress, then Sandra Wright was invisible. There was no comparison between them. Rick’s mother, despite being newly rich, wore the same khakis, white polo shirt, and practical white sneakers she’d worn when she drove the delivery van for the Academy’s daily produce run. They sat at the dining table next to each other, looking so incongruous that Anne had to blink to be sure she was seeing correctly.

  “Come in, Miss Escobar. Did you run all the way here?” Mrs. Wright sipped from the teacup in front of her. “There was no need. Rick is late, too.”

  “Oh?” A high-pitched squeak caught in her throat.

  “Have a seat. We’ve met before?” A smile softened her face. “Oh, yes, you’re one of Rick’s friends. You’ve stayed at our house. I hadn’t realized you were also an Escobar. Well, it’s a small town, isn’t it?”

  Miniscule, Anne thought. She took a seat, grateful to rest her wobbly legs. “My mom sends her regrets that she isn’t able to join us.”

  Headmistress Berg snorted and covered it with a cough.

  Anne resisted the urge to glare at her. “However, I’m more than familiar with the grounds, buildings, and historically significant points of the Academy. I’ll be happy to serve as your guide today as you evaluate what to include in your recommendations to the new developers.”

  “You and your friends submitted the request to declare the Academy a historical landmark, didn’t you?” Rick’s mother asked.

  “Yes, we did.” It was a desperate move, one of their many failed attempts to save the Academy.

  “Rick told me. I was so rooting for you.”

  Anne blinked. She rubbed her trembling hands together. She and Rick had kept their relationship a delicious secret as it moved from friends to confidants to soul mates. Confiding in her mother proved to be the worst decision she could have made. What had Rick told his mother, though? Did she know about the two of them?

  She wished she had a cup of tea of her own to clear her dry throat. “Thank you for that.”

  “He has such colorful stories about you.”

  “Me?”

  “All of you,” his mother amended.

  Anne needed a fire hose in her face, not a cup of tea. Desperate to change the subject, she asked Headmistress Berg, “Will you be joining us for the tour?”

  “I assure you I can prepare my report to the Board based on my knowledge of the Academy without any assistance from you,” she replied dryly.

  “But I would have so enjoyed your company,” Anne deadpanned, channeling Lizzie for a moment.

  Headmistress Berg raised a brow, perhaps in acknowledgement, but Anne left it at that. She was no Lizzie, and while she might have fantasized about bringing the headmistress down a peg or two, she didn’t have the cast-iron stomach for it.

  Rick’s mother glanced down at her phone when it made a single loud ping. She read a message and grimaced. “It looks like it will just be the two of us. Rick has other obligations.”

  Anne slumped back in the chair, her spine near boneless. She should have felt relief, but of course, she didn’t. It was moments like this that she experienced over and over. The certainty of her indifference proved once again to be nothing more than a mask, because every time she missed an opportunity to see him, she was lanced with a spear of disappointment. It was as if she preferred the agony of uncertain and unrequited heartache to the certainty of nothingness.

  * * *

  Anne studied Rick’s mother as the older woman tilted her head back to gasp in awe at the wooden balustrade that spiraled to the upper floors of the Academy’s main building, swirling beneath a transparent blue-and-amber Murano chandelier. It was no less gorgeous than the one Anne had seen in Rick’s newly inherited estate, but his mother still managed to look impressed. Her mouth fish-gaped as she blinked in disbelief and reached up to the sky as if she could touch it. “Is that—”

  “Yes,” Anne said. “An original from Italy.”

  “I wish Rick were here.” She fumbled with her phone in her back pocket and snapped a photo. She glanced down to look at her screen and scowled. “I can’t quite catch the way the light falls in prisms through the stairwell. He could.”

  Anne swallowed in silent agreement. She knew all too well.

  “Spin faster,” Rick said, holding up the single-lens camera to his eye.

  Anne held out her arms, tilted up her head to stare at the chandelier, and spun in a circle. She could hear the snap of the lens closing over and over.

  “Faster, faster!”

  She giggled and spun until the room continued to spin without her. As her stomach bowled, she came to a woozy stop. “Let me see.” She held out her hands for the camera. She saw double of him, and two of Rick was too much. It meant four sets of his green eyes. Two of his tilted lips. She had just finished studying the Italian Renaissance, including a sub-unit on Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa’s secretive smile. As far as Anne was concerned, the pale woman had nothing on Rick. His smile had a million mysterious ways to tantalize her.

  “Want to see the picture?” He held the camera a foot away, just over her head. “Get over here.”

  She took a step toward him but faltered as the room continued to spin.

  He closed the distance and caught her against his chest.

  It was so like Rick to catch her.

  It had been so like Rick to catch her.

  “Moving on,” Anne urged, taking Rick’s mother through the rest of the second floor. In each room there was something to draw his mother’s attention—and her own. Even in the suite of administrative offices, memory sparked to life. The guidance counselor’s office had a sandstone hearth.

  Rick knelt next to the fireplace, a gleam in his green eyes. “Do you want to learn how to start a fire?” he asked.

  She reached for the tinderbox, but he took it from her hands and tossed it aside.

  “That’s cheating.” Then he’d pulled out a flint, which he struck against the sandstone.

  After showing her the mechanics, she knelt next to him and lit a spark in only one try.

  He studied her, chagrined.

  “Better than you expected?”

  He smiled, a little shyly, and ducked his head so he was staring at the fire. “You couldn’t get any better.”

  She spent the next month wondering what he’d meant by the comment and hoping she already knew.

  The head of the English department had a corner office with a round picture window and matching window seat. The frames were hand-carved wood with a Renaissance design that was rumored—inaccurately—to be original.

  It was the coldest Merrywood winter in years. They kept warm in front of the fire until the sound of the guidance counselor’s footsteps sent them escaping into the hall.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Shhh,” Anne said as Rick laughed. She put her finger over his lips to quiet him.

  He pulled her into the closest office, where they waited for the footsteps to fade away. He walked over to the corner, sat on the window seat, and leaned back against the glass.

  As mysterious as his smile could be, his green eyes were always a clear reflection of his feelings. They lit up when he was happy and sparkled when he was amused. Now they were speculative and hooded.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “You wanna know? Get over here.”

  She crawled onto the seat, sitting back on her heels. Rick blew his breath across the window so it fogged e
ven more. With his finger, he drew a heart on the pane.

  The declaration she’d spent months hoping for.

  His eyes turned dark and intense. His gaze dropped to her lips. He leaned closer.

  The door blew open, and the guidance counselor yelled at them to get out of the office.

  Anne returned to the spot day after day to hiss her breath over the glass and see if the heart would return. It did, time and time again, for weeks.

  Mrs. Wright asked to have another look at the apple tree in the central courtyard. It seemed unnecessary, because the only success Anne and her friends had merited in their campaign to save the school was to save the historic tree. It was already drawn up in the new plans for the mall, as part of an outdoor food court. But she showed it nonetheless, painfully aware it was not only the place where Rick had first kissed her, but also where they’d first met.

  It was her first birthday without her mother—twelve. A cake had been delivered, but she hadn’t felt like eating it so she’d taken her slice to the tree and sat beneath it.

  She saw the dog first—a mutt with a white coat and black splotches like a cow—before the boy. But then she raised her gaze, up the jeans, the T-shirt, sharp cheekbones, to that wary green gaze. Anne inhaled so sharply it hurt her lungs. It hurt to look at him even, and she winced. Guys were only this hot on magazines after they’d been airbrushed, or in movies after hours in a makeup chair.

  The dog whined and limped toward her.

  “Is he all right?” Anne asked.

  “I don’t know.” His voice drizzled down her spine. “He’s never done that before.”

  “May I?” She stretched her hand toward the dog’s nose. The dog reared back a moment.

  “Don’t do that,” Rick chastised.

  She tried again, putting her hand out farther. “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Mooshu,” he said.

  “Moo like a cow?”

  Rick laid a hand on Mooshu’s neck. “It’s okay, boy.”

  The dog limped forward. Anne put her hand under the dog’s chin, and Mooshu’s wet nose dug into her palm. She grinned as she scratched him. She’d always wanted a dog, and in all her fantasies—some of which included knights in shining armor—her perfect knight had always had a dog instead of a steed.

  Anne stood in the exact same spot she had that night as Rick’s mother walked around the tree with a musing expression. “Have I seen everything?”

  “Except for the track. My friend Fanny may be there.” Anne led them toward the trail that would eventually wind back to the headmistress’s cottage. She fought a hopeful grin. “Fanny is going to be an Olympian someday, if you’re looking for a reason to keep the track.”

  “My list of recommended historical features is already pages long. I doubt they would consider the track. But… there is one place…”

  “Hmmm?”

  “I hesitate because I wouldn’t want Rick to get in trouble. I know it’s not on the brochures or on the Academy website, but I’ve been dying to see it.”

  “I know every inch of this place,” Anne reassured her. “I’ve shown you everything.”

  “Are you certain? Because before Rick even attended the Academy, he would only ever talk about this one special place.”

  Anne’s step faltered. She recovered, but not quickly enough, because his mother gave a quizzical look at her reaction.

  “Do you know where I mean?” she asked.

  “The meteor field.”

  “Yes! That’s the place.” Rick’s mother sighed in relief. “For a moment I wondered if he’d made it up or maybe gone somewhere forbidden off school property.” She lowered her head as if to peer more deeply into Anne’s eyes. “I used to deliver food to the Academy from town, and I would bring Rick with me. It was boring for him to stick around while I filled the orders. He’d disappear for hours. When I asked him where he’d gone, he always said the meteor field. But it’s not on any maps. I always wondered what he was doing. Who he was with.”

  Anne glanced away as her heart thudded painfully. “No… it’s not… on any maps. But I’ll show you.”

  The meteor field was part of the Academy but never advertised as part of its official grounds. Anne had loved it so much growing up that her mother had promised it would forever remain hers and hers alone. And she’d always felt that way—until the day Rick had walked into her life.

  She led Mrs. Wright past the headmistress’s cottage and turned into the woods on an unmarked path, barely visible beneath the brush. “Watch your step.” The forest grew darker, more condensed. Tree trunks knotted up from the ground, and branches reached across the space to ensnare their hair. Anne used to imagine she was a princess in distress, banished to the woods in a fairy tale. She’d run through this section of forest only to escape into an open field.

  The site of a long-ago meteor crash was roughly the size of a football field. The ground had burned into orange and bright-red sand, and the trees’ bark had whitened to ash.

  “Just a few more steps,” Anne promised Rick’s mother.

  Mrs. Wright didn’t respond but was breathing heavily from the exertion, and for a moment, Anne wondered if she was all right. She was supposedly fully recovered from the chemo that had brought Rick home, but what did it even mean to be fully recovered? Was it possible to recover from such a thing and be the person you’d been before? She hoped so.

  They stepped through the trees into the clearing, and Anne’s foot slipped against the familiar soft sand.

  His mother gasped, her fingertips to her lips. “It’s the dangedest thing. Imagine this one day being all forest and the next instant…” She knelt and picked up a handful of sand, the pulverized remains of heat and impact. “Do you think it will grow back? It has to, doesn’t it? One day?”

  “Someday.”

  Mrs. Wright turned her attention to the trees, and Anne felt a frog in her throat as Sandra Wright zeroed in on one in particular: the whitest tree in the field, almost bright with light. She rested her hands against the bark, and Anne knew from experience she would not find it rough and ragged, but smooth like ice, except for one spot.

  His mother dug her fingers into the grooves and slashes that marred the alabaster surface. “What do you think happened here?”

  Anne turned away quickly. Rick had shown his feelings by carving their initials into the white tree. Then, on the last day of summer before sophomore year, after a year of clandestine meetings, their relationship had ended.

  As if she were seeing him for the last time, her gaze sought to memorize every inch of him. In some ways, he looked just as he had the first time they’d met. The sharp cheekbones. The green eyes, hooded and wary. Now his T-shirt stretched across the breadth of his shoulders, his corded neck leading to a strong chin.

  “I spoke to my mother,” she said. Everything after that was a regurgitation of her mother’s words. He was moving across the country. She was staying in California. They were destined for other futures. There was no point in staying together, was there? Not with all the distance. It was best to end things as friends.

  He looked at her in disbelief, and his expression turned to horror.

  She turned and walked away so she wouldn’t have to watch it morph any further.

  When Anne had returned to the field the next day, regretful and heartbroken, she’d seen evidence of his reaction: their initials in the bark mangled with slashes and grooves.

  She’d thought she believed what her mother had told her, but maybe—she could admit this now—maybe she had just been terrified of hearing the same nonsense from him. She’d wanted to do it first. It would have devastated her otherwise. She had even imagined him breaking up with her at the time. He would have been polite about it, probably. Even kind. As if he thought he could make it better instead of worse. That cold indifference. She couldn’t have borne being on the receiving end, so she’d delivered the blow instead, not realizing that her blow against his heart would be like a boomerang tha
t came back to strike hers.

  “Maybe a lightning strike,” his mother suggested as she continued to study the tree. “Or a wild animal?”

  “It was probably just a person,” Anne said. “Someone who didn’t realize they were messing up a beautiful thing.”

  Chapter Three

  The Jane Austen Academy had never held a prom—it had been an all-girls institution until last year—so Anne had never given much thought to prom-dress shopping. Still, she was certain that it was nothing like the event that Emma had orchestrated.

  First, the girls had been ushered into town cars and driven into downtown Merrywood. The town cars veered past the main street filled with quaint little shops and into the warehouse district off the highway where most of the community’s wine bottling occurred.

  Anne and Josh had arrived first, and while Anne had been content to wait in the car, Josh immediately set about pulling open the industrial rollaway doors. Instead of the warehouse being empty or full of bulk grocery supplies or wine barrels as she’d always imagined, the cavernous space was flooded with lights that lit rows and rows and rows of steel wardrobe racks, each filled with dresses on hangers. Thousands of dresses filled the warehouse from one end to the other in an overwhelming display of silk, lace, bows, and metallic fabrics.

  “What am I supposed to wear?” Josh murmured to Anne’s right.

  She turned her attention to the morose movie star. “Josh Wickham can wear whatever he damn well pleases.”

  His eyes slid to her and then back to the dresses. “Damn right.”

  Several entertainment shows were calling him “the Comeback Prince” after the buzz around his latest movie and a slew of successful talk-show appearances. The once down-on-his-luck actor was now reveling in the success. Anne didn’t mind reveling with him.

  Anne and Josh waited for the other town cars to bring the rest of their friends. They sifted through the racks one by one. The hangers clicked against one another as they fingered the selections. “Were you really planning on finding something to wear today?” Anne asked. “Gowns could be the new tuxedos.”