they hadn’t been able to say over e-mail or via phone. The morning felt good and the cool air was nice on her face. As she walked, her feet were silent with the spring growth padding her feet, letting the moist, morning air swirl around her, grateful for the lower number of bugs that were usually present in the evenings. That didn’t mean the absence of tiny critters she thought as she avoided putting her hand on a damp leaf, a small spider perched precariously on the tip as it prepared to move across to the next branch while weaving its web for the day. Moving around the web, she followed the stream, jumping over the rocks and eventually finding a large rock to perch upon.
The stone beneath her was cold but it felt good to have something solid beneath her. It helped her feel something. Helped her look around and notice things that she wouldn’t have seen two days ago.
Sidra thought back to the arguments she and Laura had laughed about over the past three months. Laura had been adamant that Sidra was going to visit and Sidra had been just as firm that she didn’t have time.
“You don’t have time for anything! You work twelve and fourteen hours a day and when you aren’t working, you just go out browsing the furniture and design stores so that you can do your work better! You need a break. You haven’t stopped since we graduated and you’re going to burn out if you don’t stop soon!”
Sidra had disagreed with Laura on all arguments. She worked hard, but she felt energized when she was on a project. “I’m not going to burn out, Laura. I love my job and I’ve just been promoted. There’s no way I can take the time to come visit now. Things are really picking up.”
“Sidra, there’s so much more to life that designing someone else’s rooms,” Laura argued. Sidra was an interior designer and had been hired right out of design school by one of the top designers in the industry for her area. She loved her job, was very good at it and was just starting to be asked for specifically within the firm. She’d designed so many bedrooms and living rooms and just recently, one had been featured in a magazine. It was a small magazine, but she’d been so proud of the end result. No matter how many times it happened, a designer always loved to have her work featured in any publication.
“Laura, I just can’t. Not right now.”
Laura had kept on nagging until Sidra had finally given in. She’d only taken a four day weekend, but sitting here in the middle of the woods, she realized that she really was missing a great deal of life. She smiled as she remembered the previous morning when she’d arrived on Laura’s doorstep, Rashid helping her off of his horse, his hands firm around her waist and looking so incredibly handsome in a dangerous, mean, yet oh-so-gentle kind of way. And those eyes! They were the kinds of eyes a woman could fall into and never want to come out of. They looked on her like she was some sort of delicious dessert and she wouldn’t mind, at least theoretically, if she were eaten up. That man had sex appeal coming out of his eye brows!
She leaned back and looked at the lightening sky through the trees. Her rental car had been delivered to Laura’s house about an hour after she’d been dropped off by Rashid. She had no idea if he’d fixed it or if one of his friends had done so, but the alternator belt had been replaced and the radiator repaired. She still hadn’t tried to drive it, but she felt a warm glow inside of her thinking that he’d taken so much time to help her out. And it couldn’t have been easy, she thought. Rashid’s horse was magnificent, but she didn’t think he had a lot of money. The riding pants he’d been wearing had been covered in mud and his boots, at one point had probably been owned by a great man, but they were now beaten up and well worn. The man was exceptionally built so she assumed he probably worked with horses a great deal.
Goodness, was she fantasizing about having an affair with a man who was poor? Laura would get a real laugh out of that!
Sidra wasn’t a snob, but Laura teased her about all the