Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) - By Elizabeth Ruston Page 0,73
beers and handed her one. Then he motioned her toward the living room.
She chose the dark gray couch and let him have the dark leather chair. She kicked off her shoes and pulled her feet up under her.
“Comfortable?” Joe asked.
“Not particularly.”
He left the room for a moment and returned with a folded blanket. Sarah took off her suit jacket and wrapped the blanket over her. Then she took a sip of beer.
“Well, I think we know why we’re all here,” Joe began, and even though he tried to make a joke of it, Sarah could hear the tension in his voice. Was he afraid, despite what he’d said? “Do you want to ask the questions, or do you just want me to tell you?”
“Tell me,” she said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be too involved in the conversation. It might be easier just to listen.
“How much do you know?” Joe asked.
“Not much,” she said. “Thanksgiving, finals, then that was it.” She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but she could hear it just the same.
“First your birthday,” Joe said. “You remember that.”
Sarah nodded. She looked away and took another drink.
“I meant all of it,” Joe said.
She shrugged.
“Sarah . . . ”
“Doesn’t matter now,” she told him. “Keep going.”
He hesitated, but obviously decided not to press it.
But of course she remembered. Everything. She had replayed that night a million times.
Thanksgiving fell during the last week of November that year. Sarah’s birthday was the day before. They celebrated before they both went home for the holiday.
That was the night Joe gathered her into his arms after they’d made love, and told her he loved her like crazy. That he could barely stand to be away from her for the four-day weekend. That he loved her so much he wished he hadn’t waited so long to come after her. That she was everything he’d ever wanted.
It was how Sarah felt, too. It was how she felt from the very beginning. She had fallen for him so hard, it sometimes hurt just to look at him. She loved him like she never thought possible. He felt like an extension of her mind, her body, her soul.
“I want to marry you,” Joe had told her then. “Not now, but after we graduate. I can’t imagine spending my life with anyone but you.”
She kissed him so hard she was surprised his teeth didn’t fall out. She told him yes, and then laughed at the tears spilling down her face. He smudged them away and kissed her, and they went right back to making love as if they had never stopped.
Sarah drank another sip of beer and could feel how much tighter her throat had become. This was why she had never wanted to ask, she thought. Because asking meant remembering, and she had been fighting against that for years.
“So you went home for Thanksgiving,” she prompted. “And you found out your mom was sick.”
Joe nodded. “She’d been cancer-free for ten years. Maybe I told you that. We thought it was over. But when I went home, nobody even needed to tell me—I could see it. She’d lost so much weight, she looked like a teenager. And she just looked . . . bad. My brother walked in about an hour later, and the first thing out of his mouth was, Shit, not again. That was when they decided they’d better tell us.”
He hadn’t given her as many details back then, but she remembered the look of shock and grief on his face when she saw him again that Sunday night after Thanksgiving. He wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face against her neck. Then he sobbed—so hard, Sarah sobbed right along with him before he could even tell her what was wrong.
Even now, she could see the remnants of grief on his face. She understood that he didn’t like reliving this story any more than she did.
“Then we had finals,” Joe said.
Sarah remembered vividly the two of them trying to study in between phone conferences with his father and brother. Joe’s mother was fading quickly, and every phone call marked the further decline. It finally got to the point where Joe couldn’t bear to answer the phone. He let it go to voicemail so he could just listen, and process the information on his own without having to say anything to his dad.
“Advanced Federal Tax Law,” Joe said. My last final. December twentieth.”