Page 116 of Ten Years and Then…
She hesitated for a moment. He didn’t say anything. She had to fill the silence. “And the same reason you still wear the necklace.”
“I still love you, too,” he said, reaching between the buttons of his shirt to pull it out. “So what do we do about it?”
Daniel, a few minutes later
She hadn’t answered his question.
He couldn’t blame her. He didn’t have an answer either. This wasn’t like Kansas City, where one of them could leave if they really had to. They were on this ship for ten days. There was no way to guarantee they wouldn’t run into each other. No way to make themselves believe they even wanted to.
He was pretty sure she didn’t want to anyway, any more than he did. So where did that leave them? She hadn’t said she was with someone, but she clearly was. Nobody went on cruises by themselves.
Which meant that, even though he hadn’t mentioned Leanne, she had to know he wasn’t alone either.
“Nora, we have to figure this out. I—I have a girlfriend. Leanne. She’s in our cabin. She’s probably asleep by now.”
She nodded. “So is Greg. I’m sure he fell asleep two minutes after I left.”
“They don’t deserve this.”
Nora looked down. “We haven’t really done anything. It was one kiss.” Nora had never lied to him, but he remembered the times when she’d lied to herself and tried to make herself believe it was true. She wasn’t any better at it now than she had been back in college.
“Yes, we have. It’s not about what we’re doing right now. It’s what I’ve been doing to Leanne from the day we met. I’ve been wearing your necklace, and carrying you around in my heart.”
Now she was looking at him again. “When I finally went to bed with Greg—and I made up so many ridiculous reasons not to before it happened—but after we did, I couldn’t talk to him for three days. Because I felt like I’d cheated on you.” She smiled, but it was the saddest smile he’d ever seen. “How stupid is that?”
“It’s not stupid at all.” He’d felt the same after he’d been with Leanne for their first time, back in July.
“They’re never going to forgive us.”
No, they wouldn’t. “She’d forgive me for the kiss. If she ran into her first love, and she had a moment and she kissed him, I would forgive that. But if she said she’d never stopped loving him, and never told me—I couldn’t forgive that. And I could never ask her to.”
Daniel had been so caught up in the conversation that he hadn’t noticed the music had stopped—the band had probably packed up five or ten minutes ago. But now he heard it again—different music, a slow, jazzy tune he didn’t recognize. And Nora was standing up, and reaching down, grabbing his hands, pulling him up.
“Greg is the same. But I just figured it out, what we’re going to do.”
Her arms were around him, and he followed her lead into a slow dance.
“We’re going to have one dance. One last dance,” she continued. “And then one last kiss. And then you’re going to go back to—Leanne, you said?” He nodded. “And I’ll go back to Greg, and we’ll forget each other and spend the next ten days reminding ourselves about every great thing we ever saw in them. And we’ll go overboard.” She chuckled. “Pardon the pun, and do everything we can think of to make them as happy as they deserve to be. And maybe, if we’re really lucky, that’ll be good enough.”
Daniel couldn’t lie to her any more than she ever could to him. “And if it’s not enough, which we both know it won’t be, at least we can give them a good time before we break their hearts. Right?”
She didn’t answer for a while. Not until the song ended, and she kissed him, and he kissed her back. “Sometimes I really wish we were better at lying to each other, Daniel.”
Chapter 37
Day 2 and 3 of the cruise—Empress of the Seas/Charleston, SC
Nora, November 7
She and Daniel managed to keep their mutual promise to avoid each other for twelve whole hours.
When Nora got back to her room last night, Greg was asleep, just as she’d assumed. He was snoring gently, and he didn’t even stir while she washed her face, brushed her teeth, undressed and got into bed next to him.
He’d awoken refreshed, and it took all her self-control not to burst into tears and confess everything to him. “I know I was kind of a wet blanket last night, Nora. But I’m ready to go now. Let’s go and see everything on the ship today.”
So they went to breakfast in the Main Dining Room, with no sign of Daniel. She looked up every time anyone walked by their table, and passed it off as idle curiosity. “I always wondered what kind of people come on these cruises,” she’d said, and he accepted that.
After breakfast, he suggested going up to the spa. “Maybe they’ve got couples massages,” he said. She could hardly say she wasn’t interested, when she’d been the one to mention the spa yesterday.
