Chapter Four
Tammy
I trailed my hand delicately through a vase full of tiny white flowers, watching their spry green stems spring back as quickly as I displaced them. Beside those I just touched, vases of lovely purple asters reached their petals toward me like a child holding out her arms, asking to be picked up.
Sorry, not today.I did love asters, but they wouldn’t fit the theme and colors of the wedding I was currently planning. Purple was a very cool, calm color, and the bride and groom for whom I had made this trip to the local flower shop wanted to be surrounded by bright, warm colors on their special day.
I leaned toward another bunch of flowers. “Whoops!” I caught my hair just in time to keep it from getting tangled in the petals. For the past few months, every time I visited the hair salon, I had my hairdresser cut my hair just above my collarbone. Having it hang to the middle of my back again was taking some getting used to.
I shouldn’t try to get used to it,I reminded myself. Extensions weren’t permanent by any means, and I didn’t intend to get them redone every six weeks or so. Really, I hadn’t intended to get extensions at all. It had been a completely spur-of-the-moment decision, based on memories of all the times Nate told me how much he loved my long blonde hair.
I paused in front of the roses. Maybe, I had been afraid that Nate wouldn’t recognize me. Maybe, I wanted to impress him. Either way, Nate complimented me on my hair at dinner, so I guessed the extensions had done their job.
I let out a breathy chuckle, stirring the leaves of the roses. It was kind of ironic that I was worried about whether or not Nate was impressed with me.
In high school, I didn’t like Nate at first. He was hot, popular and athletic, and he always had at least two guys from the football team around him at all times. The first time I ever saw him alone was the first time he asked me out. Since I had looked at Nate and seen a typical football jock, I turned him down.
Nate had been a non-violent high school bully who never gave up until he got what he wanted. He made it a point to flirt with me in the hallways, invited me to dances, showered me with compliments and continuously refused to take no for an answer. For some reason, I found his incessant behavior irresistible, and before I knew it, I was his girlfriend, and he was bragging to everyone that he knew I would change my mind all along.
My thoughtful expression melted into a fond smile. It comforted me to know that some things never changed. Nate was still that same cocky guy. My nerves nearly had gotten the better of me more than once before the dinner party at the Hamptons Peak, and I got so close to calling Claudia to cancel. Thank goodness I hadn’t done that. My reunion with Nate, albeit a bit awkward, had confirmed my hopes and expectations - we were both adults now, and we could talk and interact as such.
I turned away from the roses and searched the shop for other options that fit with the bride and groom’s criteria, still mulling over that evening in my mind. In the end, the evening with our mutual friends was nice - it had been really nice. Over dinner, I managed to get the short version of Nate’s accomplishments since college, and I had the chance to share mine.
Despite that, regret and dissatisfaction had followed me ever since we all said our goodbyes after dinner and left for our respective homes. The Wisteria Room hadn’t allowed us much privacy. So, neither of us discussed our past, putting off that conversation for another time.
Oh well.I shrugged, turning my focus to the flowers. I knew Claudia, Claudia was married to Zeke and Zeke and Nate were best friends. Nate and I wouldn’t lose touch again.
Ooh, these are nice!I stopped to examine a particularly lovely bunch of deep pink chrysanthemums.
“Um… excuse me?”
I snatched my hand back, my face tomato red as the woman holding that bunch of flowers eyed me like I might snatch them from her and take off running. “Oh, sorry! I was just browsing and didn’t realize you were holding those.”
“It’s fine,” the woman assured me, but I saw her shoot a little suspicious glance at me as she sidled away.
Now that the embarrassing moment was over, I managed a laugh. Thoughts of Nate distracted me just as much now as they did when we were in high school.
Finally, deciding on the yellow and peach roses, I was still slightly pink from my encounter with the woman as I made my way to the register. Everyone who worked here knew my name, so I was out of the door and tucking the receipt into my purse in no time. Before I started my SUV to head home, I sent a quick progress update to my clients. We had already reviewed several reference pictures online, so I was confident they would agree with my selection.
I loved picking out flowers for weddings, but when I finally parked in front of the guest house and let myself inside, I flopped onto the couch and breathed a sigh of relief. Here and there, back and forth, driving across the Hamptons and back again… my job usually kept me busy, and I didn’t mind that, but this morning and afternoon had been go-go-go, and it was time for a bit of TV before I had to worry about what to fix for dinner.
I tapped the power button and flipped through the channels, stopping on a baking show I had never heard of. As long as I could lean back and relax, I didn’t care what happened on the screen. Languidly, I watched as the bakers ran back and forth, mixing, folding, shaping, frosting, and arranging in their efforts to finish their pastries before the buzzer sounded. Just as things started to get interesting and the piles of dough began to take shape, boom - commercial. Slightly annoyed, I leaned back and closed my eyes.
They shot open again at the sound of Nate’s voice. My first instinct was to look at my phone or the door, but why would his voice come from either of those places if I hadn’t answered them? Then, my brain caught up with the circumstances and snapped my eyes back to the television.
Sure enough, there was Nate, standing in front of a camera, doing an advertisement for a brand of sports deodorant. His black Under Armour shirt hugged his rock hard ads and shifted slightly as he talked about the product. What were the producers thinking? This ad would be more of a turn on to potential customers if they had Nate take his shirt off entirely.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the logical part of my brain rolled its eyes at my daydreams, but I didn’t care. Since Nate’s mother had worked all the time, he and I had plenty opportunities alone in his room to be typical teenagers. We had gotten to know each other so well, emotionally and physically and we just clicked in a way that had my mom commenting over mother-daughter dinners, “You two are lucky. You make the perfect match.”
I had never found that connection again, but I knew I never really tried. When Nate left without saying goodbye, it had broken my heart. School and work kept me so busy that I never found the time to put into mending it again. A couple of times, I let Claudia convince me to try dating or said yes to a date request from a guy I thought particularly attractive, but none of those relationships had gone anywhere. They became intimate in the physical sense, but not the emotional. A bond never developed, and the feelings always dissipated like thin mist.
I drew my knees up to my chest. Was I really still blaming Nate for this? That seemed childish and out of character for me, and I quickly realized the answer. No, I didn’tblameNate any longer. I just had a lot of regrets. We were so happy together, and we planned to give a long-distance relationship a try.
But then, one summer afternoon toward the beginning of August after we had graduated from high school, I went to Nate’s house. I pulled into the driveway, parked in the space in the side yard like I had done a thousand times, and bounded up the front steps to the porch. When I knocked, Nate’s mom answered, and I asked joking if Nate was in the bathroom messing with his hair again or something. She just gazed at me, concerned, and spoke the words that changed my life. “No, honey, Nate left for college yesterday afternoon. Didn’t he tell you?”
“Men,” I muttered under my breath. They couldn’t say their feelings aloud and talk things out. Instead, they had to do things that hurt people who loved them. If Nate couldn’t handle a long-distance relationship, he should have just told me. I still would have been hurt, but not betrayed. Not devastated. Not haunted by broken trust.
That’s it.I reached for my phone. Years ago, I could have taken the initiative. I could have called Nate or even driven to the University of Kentucky. Instead, I listened to my broken heart when it told me to give up because Nate was a lost cause.
