Читать книгу Beyond Business - Elizabeth Harbison, Allison Leigh - Страница 9

Why had he picked the diner, of all places?

He probably just wasn’t thinking about it, Meredith decided. Perhaps it didn’t have the same ring of melancholy for him that it did for her. Not that it was a huge deal or anything. After all, it had been years since they were together, and the fact that he had been her first lover probably gave the relationship far more weight in her memory than in his. Twelve years had passed, yet some memories felt like yesterday.

* * *

“I love you, you know,” eighteen-year-old Evan had said to seventeen-year-old Meredith as they walked into the Silver Car Diner at 3:00 a.m. for a late-night snack.

“I thought you did.” She smiled, still languishing in the afterglow and warmth of his touch, despite the cold outside. “Otherwise I never would have … you know. Done what we just did.”

“Neither would I.”

“Liar.”

He smiled, that gorgeous devil smile that made her heart flip every time. “Maybe I would have,” he conceded.

“You would.” She smiled, privately secure in the wholehearted belief that he did love her, and nothing else mattered.

He echoed her thoughts. “Okay, but it doesn’t matter because I do love you.”

“I love you, too, and you know it,” she said, thrilling at the feel of the words tripping off her tongue. She’d been with Evan for over a year now, but she still felt the tickle of infatuation. That, she decided, was how she knew this was real love.

Evan squeezed her hand, and a tired-looking waitress led them to their favorite booth in the corner and took their orders for blueberry pancakes and colas.

When she had gone, Evan put money in the jukebox. Their eyes met and, as was their custom, he pushed a random letter and she pushed a random number and they listened to see what would play.

This time it was Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Breathless.”

Perfect.

“So you know what I’m thinking?” Evan asked.

“Probably the same thing you’re always thinking,” Meredith answered with a giggle. “But can we take a break to eat first? I’m starving. And it wasn’t a half hour ago that you told me you were going to die if you didn’t come here and eat some blueberry pancakes.” She gave a mock sigh of exasperation. “Even Don Juan took a break sometimes.”

He rolled his eyes. “That wasn’t what I was going to say. I mean, I’m all for that, but I was going to say I think maybe we should get married after we graduate.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Thrills filled her like bubbling champagne. “College, you mean.”

He shook his head. “High school. Why not? If we know that’s what we’re going to do anyway, why wait?”

A voice somewhere in her warned that this might not be a good idea, but at the moment she couldn’t think why not. “Graduation is in two months!”

“Great.” He reached across the formica tabletop and took her hands in his. “The sooner, the better. Let’s make your prom dress a wedding dress instead.”

“Come on.”

“Fine, we’ll go to the prom and you can wear something else for our wedding. What do you say?”

Meredith would have run off with him right this minute but someone had to be the voice of reason here, didn’t they? “What would we do about jobs? A home?”

He shrugged. “Whatever we’d do anyway. We could stay and work here, of course, but what about that trip to Greece? Why not just go and stay a year? We could work in a bar at night and just lie in the sun all day long, doing whatever we want. Whenever we want,” he added meaningfully.

She sighed. It sounded like heaven.

“Seriously, Mer, I would talk to your parents right now if they were in town.”

She gave a laugh. “If they were in town, we wouldn’t be here. And we wouldn’t have been able to—” she hesitated “—do what we did tonight.”

He twined his fingers in hers, and looked deep into her eyes. “And we wouldn’t be able to go back to your house and spend the whole night together.”

Spend the whole night together. She turned the idea over in her mind. She could sleep in Evan’s arms and wake up with him, seeing his eyes and his smile before anything else in the morning.

God, she loved him.

“I wish it could be like this every night.”

“It can,” he insisted. “It will. You’ll see.”

But Meredith was always skeptical of things that seemed too good to be true. There was always something deep inside her warning her that she might be disappointed. “I hope so,” she had said wistfully.

Instead of answering, Evan had kissed her.

At the time, she had taken that kiss as reassurance. A promise that would be kept.

Now she knew better.

As Evan and Meredith entered the restaurant together to discuss the mundane details of Hanson Media, the familiar smell of cheese burgers and waffles drifted into Meredith’s senses, and she had to remind herself to be as professional and as aloof as she could be.

It was hard to forget the past they shared here, but if Evan could be cavalier about it, she would, too. Since they had no choice but to work together, she needed to be very careful not to add undue discomfort to the situation.

“Man, this smell takes me back,” Evan said, inhaling deeply as they followed a pink-uniformed hostess to a booth along the back wall. “This is one thing I really missed when I was overseas.” He gave a laugh. “It’s hard to find blueberry pancakes and wet fries in Europe.”

Meredith thought he’d lost a lot more than diner food when he’d left, but she didn’t say so. “I’ll bet,” she said, sitting down opposite him on the cold vinyl seat. She felt like a poorly cast actress in a play about her own life. “But I’m sure Europe had its perks.”

“Yeah, chief among them being that it wasn’t here.” He looked at the small jukebox on the wall of the booth and shook his head. “Good Lord, they’ve still got Jerry Lee Lewis on here. You’d think they’d have updated that.”

“The jukebox only runs 45s,” Meredith pointed out, sounding didactic and snooty even to her own ears. “It’s not like you can just stick CDs in it.”

He looked at her with amusement in his eyes. “I left the country, Meredith, I didn’t leave the planet. I know how a jukebox works.” He smiled. “Though they do make CD ones now.” He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of change, which he dropped on the table with a clatter. “Still a quarter?”

She glanced at the box and felt for a minute as if she was watching a movie of her own life. How many times had they been here together? She’d probably studied the jukebox in this very booth before. Multiple times. It was a quarter. It was always a quarter here.

If only the rest of life were so consistent.

“You okay?”

His question startled her back into the moment.

“Yes, fine,” she said. “I was just thinking about work.”

“This ought to change that.” He put the quarter in and hesitated for just a fraction of a second before pressing C and 7 at the same time. “Get you thinking about math homework instead,” he added with a small laugh.

The sound of an old Platters song drifted out of the small, tinny speakers. Meredith knew it because it had been one of her grandfather’s favorites.

Evan had known that once. Was it too presumptuous to think that was why he’d chosen it this time?

“You’re not the only one with a memory,” he said, as if in answer to her unspoken question.

“What do you mean?” she asked. Where Evan was concerned, her rule was going to be Assume Nothing.

He gestured toward the jukebox. “You picked this song about a million times.”

She repositioned herself, hoping her straightened posture would pass for a lack of sentimentality. “That’s funny, I don’t really remember that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“What?”

He cocked his head and said, “We have a past, Meredith. There’s no getting around it, no matter how much you might want to. We can’t pretend we don’t know each other.”

“We don’t,” she said, too quickly. She sounded defensive. She was defensive.

She was going to have to get some perspective.

He shrugged and fiddled with a sugar pack from the little container on the table. “We did once.”

“What did we have, Evan?” She looked him squarely in the eye, even though it made her feel weak inside. “Obviously, it wasn’t that close, or that special, because you up and left it without so much as an adiós”

“That wasn’t because of you, Meredith.”

If she’d been successful at pretending nonchalance at all, she lost it then. “I didn’t know what it was about.”

“It was just … me. My own stuff. I’m sorry if it hurt you.”

That was it? After all these years, that was what she got in the way of retribution? I’m sorry if it hurt you.

Like there was some possibility that it hadn’t.

Like maybe she hadn’t even noticed, at seventeen, that the boy she adored more than anything on earth—the guy she was sure she was going to spend the rest of her life with—had just disappeared into the night. Lord, she’d been so sure—so wrong, but so darn sure—about his feelings for her that for the first six months she had continued to insist that something must have happened to Evan.

Imagined him wounded somewhere, needing help…. Thoughts had plagued her, night and day. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus.

And now he was sorry if he’d hurt her?

“It wasn’t just about you,” she said quietly, holding her outrage and disbelief deep inside.

“What do you mean?”

If he didn’t know, she didn’t want to have to explain it to him. It was all such old news now, anyway—how could she talk about it without sounding like a desperate loser who had been stuck in the past for all this time?

How could she explain what it was like for her—the girl who had trusted, and given of herself, and who thought if there was one thing in the world she could count on it was Evan Hanson—to find out that everything she’d thought was real for two and a half years was just an illusion? And even that revelation had come only after she’d gone through the undue stress of fearing the worst.

It sounded small to the disinterested audience, yet to Meredith it had been a life-shaping experience.

“What I mean is, we need to keep this about business,” she clarified. “Whatever we had was over a long time ago. And opening old wounds isn’t going to achieve anything positive or productive for either one of us.”

“Right.”

She went on, “Like I said, we don’t know each other anymore, and if we move forward acting like we do, based on ancient information, it’s just counterproductive.”

He hesitated, studying her, then said, “Okay, then. Business, not personal. Got it.” He pushed the menu aside. “I already know what I want, how about you?”

She knew she wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, so she pushed her menu to the end of the booth with his. “I’ll just get a cheeseburger.”

“Medium well, cheddar cheese, no raw onions, right?” Evan didn’t smile, but he may as well have. His eyes clearly showed that he had won a point.

And her heart conceded that point privately. Though she wouldn’t have wanted to admit it to Evan—or anyone else, for that matter—she hadn’t changed so much since she was a teenager. Basically Meredith Waters had always been the same person—she had simple tastes, a good work ethic and she could be counted upon to take the slow-but-steady route.

The only real difference, and it had come courtesy of Evan himself, was that now she had a very cautious heart.

Meredith Waters was determined to never fall in love again.