The Notebook - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,22

up the table, and he poured two more cups of hot water, adding teabags to both.

“How about the porch again?” he asked, handing her the cup, and she agreed, leading the way. He grabbed a quilt for her in case she got cold, and soon they had taken their places again, the quilt over her legs, rockers moving. Noah watched her from the corner of his eye. God, she’s beautiful, he thought. And inside, he ached.

For something had happened during dinner. Quite simply, he had fallen in love again. He knew that now as they sat next to one another. Fallen in love with a new Allie, not just her memory.

But then, he had never really stopped, and this, he realized, was his destiny.

“It’s been quite a night,” he said, his voice softer now.

“Yes, it has,” she said, “a wonderful night.” Noah turned to the stars, their twinkling lights reminding him that she would be leaving soon, and he felt almost empty inside. This was a night he wanted never to end. How should he tell her? What could he say that would make her stay?

He didn’t know. And thus the decision was made to say nothing. And he realized then that he had failed.

The rockers moved in quiet rhythm. Bats again, over the river. Moths kissing the porch light. Somewhere, he knew, there were people making love.

“Talk to me,” she finally said, her voice sensual. Or was his mind playing tricks?

“What should I say?”

“Talk like you did to me under the oak tree.” And he did, reciting distant passages, toasting the night. Whitman and Thomas, because he loved the images. Tennyson and Browning, because their themes felt so familiar.

She rested her head against the back of the rocker, closing her eyes, growing just a bit warmer by the time he’d finished. It wasn’t just the poems or his voice that did it. It was all of it, the whole greater than the sum of the parts. She didn’t try to break it down, didn’t want to, because it wasn’t meant to be listened to that way. Poetry, she thought, wasn’t written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

Because of him, she’d gone to a few poetry readings offered by the English department while in college. She’d sat and listened to different people, different poems, but had stopped soon after, discouraged that no one inspired her or seemed as inspired as true lovers of poetry should be.

They rocked for a while, drinking tea, sitting quietly, drifting in their thoughts. The compulsion that had driven her here was gone now—she was glad for this—but she worried about the feelings that had taken its place, the stirrings that had begun to sift and swirl in her pores like gold dust in river pans. She’d tried to deny them, hide from them, but now she realized that she didn’t want them to stop. It had been years since she’d felt this way.

Lon could not evoke these feelings in her. He never had and probably never would. Maybe that was why she had never been to bed with him. He had tried before, many times, using everything from flowers to guilt, and she had always used the excuse that she wanted to wait until marriage. He took it well, usually, and she sometimes wondered how hurt he would be if he ever found out about Noah.

But there was something else that made her want to wait, and it had to do with Lon himself. He was driven in his work, and it always commanded most of his attention. Work came first, and for him there was no time for poems and wasted evenings and rocking on porches. She knew this was why he was successful, and part of her respected him for that. But she also sensed it wasn’t enough. She wanted something else, something different, something more. Passion and romance, perhaps, or maybe quiet conversations in candlelit rooms, or perhaps something as simple as not being second.

Noah, too, was sifting through his thoughts. To him, the evening would be remembered as one of the most special times he had ever had. As he rocked, he remembered it all in detail, then remembered it again. Everything she had done seemed somehow electric to him, charged.

Now, sitting beside her, he wondered if she’d ever dreamed the same things he had in the years they’d been apart. Had she ever dreamed of them holding each other again and kissing