Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows) (23 page)

"But they aren't Ted. They aren't the guy I fell in love with. The
guy I learned all about love with. Ted was my soul mate."

"And you think he still is?"

"It doesn't matter what I think. He's with another woman.
And..." She drifted off, remembering.

"And?"

The words echoed in her skull, harsh and bruising. "He said, `I
will never be with you again."'

"When did he say that? Tonight?"

"When I broke up with him in college."

"That was a long time ago."

"He said I hurt him too badly. He couldn't bear ever to be hurt
that badly again, so he would never love me again."

"Maybe he's changed his mind."

Erika laughed through her tears. "That's not the kind of thing
you change your mind about. Like he'd say, `Oh, I thought about
it recently, and I decided you didn't hurt me that badly after all.'
I stabbed him in the heart, Allyson. He'll never forgive me for
what I did." And I'll never forgive myself, she added silently.

"But he had a drink with you. Who initiated that?"

"He did," Erika conceded.

"So? Why would he have asked you to meet him for a drink if
he didn't want at least something to do with you?"

"A drink with an old friend is meaningless."

"Not to you, it isn't. And maybe not to him, either. Like you
said, he's your soul mate."

"Was," Erika corrected her.

Allyson fell silent for a moment. "Remember the old days
when you used to ride?"

"Yeah, I think I have a few memories of that." It was Erika's
turn to be snarky.

"So, a horse threw you. What did you do?"

"Don't give me platitudes, Allyson. I know how to ride. I know
how to pick myself up and dust myself off. But if a horse said to
me, `You will never ride me again, because you hurt me too
much,' I wouldn't get back on that horse again."

"I'm not talking about Mr. Ed," Allyson retorted. "I'm talking
about you. Figure out what you want, Erika. Set a goal and go
after it. You know how to do that. If he's really tight with his current girlfriend, you'll wish him well and move on. But don't be so
defeatist. You never know about these things."

With a few final sniffles and a brief enough-about-me change
of topic so Allyson could whine about all the petty annoyances of
her life, Erika ended the call. After tossing her cell phone onto her
night table, she sank back onto the bed, stared at the high ceiling
above her, and took a few deep breaths. Then she sat up again and
leveled her gaze on the wall beside her closet. A framed picture
hung there, of two lovers in bed, with donkeys watching them.

Why had he drawn donkeys on that picture? He'd always liked
donkeys, and she'd loved horses, and ... who knew? The drawing
had worked. It had moved her enough to frame it. She'd stashed
it in her parents' house while she'd been sailing across the ocean,
and while she'd been sharing a flat with two other girls during
her year of menial labor and theater auditions, and when she'd
headed out west to attend business school. Once she'd moved
into her quaint little apartment in a grand pre-war building in
Gramercy Park, however, she'd retrieved the drawing from the
depths of the closet in the guest room of her parents' home. She'd
brought the drawing back to New York and hung it on the wall.

Not because she loved Ted or missed him, she'd told herself at
the time, but because it was a work of art. A work of genius.
Intriguing and odd and beautiful.

She stared at it now, stared at the intertwined lovers at its center, and tried to figure out what she wanted. To get back together
with Ted?

Getting back together with him was impossible.

If she couldn't have him, if she couldn't go back and reclaim
what she'd tossed away all those years ago ... what else did she
want?

To find another man who could make her feel the way Ted had.
A man she could trust as much as she'd trusted Ted. A man who
could make her laugh the way he did, and who could see through her shit and call her on it and keep her honest. A man with bedroom eyes and strong arms and big, sturdy shoulders, the kind of
shoulders a woman knew she could lean on. A man with an artistic streak, an abundance of energy, and the intelligence and wit to
conquer worlds.

Another Ted. That was what she wanted. Either another Ted or
no one at all, which had suited her fine until that evening.

She shouldn't have agreed to meet him for that drink. She'd
been perfectly content until he'd reentered her life and reminded
her of what it was like to be in love.

Being on the receiving end of a breakup can be agony. But being
on the giving end wasn't exactly a walk in the park, either. When
you use a knife to whittle away a space between yourself and someone else, you are as likely to nick yourself as to cut the other person.
You both wind up bleeding.

Ted had never thought of that when Erika had broken up with
him all those years ago. He'd been so deeply wounded, so angry,
so utterly certain that she was wrong and he was right. He'd never
wasted an instant imagining what she might be experiencing,
whether hurting him had hurt her as well.

Breaking up with Marissa hurt. The waves of her pain washed
over him and dragged him under. "What do you mean, it's over?"
she wailed. "How can you just end things like this?"

He gazed around the living room of their Brooklyn apartment.
It was nicely decorated, mostly reflecting Marissa's taste-which
she had in abundance. No complaint about the choices she'd
made, the shades on the windows, the area rugs, the old sofas
jazzed up with colorful accent pillows. Ted was artistic; he knew
how to make a room look good, but he'd left her to her own
devices, figuring she'd turn the apartment into a warm, welcom ing residence.

Or maybe he'd allowed her to decorate the place because he
hadn't been fully invested in it. Maybe he'd been thinking,
Marissa can't fix up my heart, but she can fix up the apartment.

"I'm sorry," he said, realizing at once how feeble that sounded.
"I never wanted to hurt you, but-"

She froze him with a lethal look, then took a sharp, quick
gulp from the glass of Stoli she'd poured herself. "If you didn't
want to hurt me," she snapped, "we wouldn't be having this
conversation."

"I'm not doing this because I want to." He sighed, accepting
that he was hurting her, despite his protestations. "I really hoped
this would work out, babe, but-"

"Don't call me babe."

He sighed again. At that moment, he would have liked nothing
more than to be at that neighborhood bar in SoHo with Erika.
After so many years, after the pain and the resentment and the
silence, he'd still felt more comfortable with her than he'd ever
felt with Marissa. "If we were meant to be, we would have been
there by now. I wasn't sure. You kept asking me when I would
take the next step, and I kept telling you I didn't know. That was
the truth. I didn't know."

"And now you know? Now you know you'll never take that
step?"

"I'm sorry, but ... yes."

"Stop saying `I'm sorry."'

Okay. No babe, no I'm sorry. Maybe he should ask her for a list
of prohibited words and phrases.

He tried again, selecting his words carefully. "There's always
been ... something ... holding me back." The truth was, there had
always been someone, not something. Until he'd seen Erika, though, he'd thought it was something. What, he hadn't been sure of. A
block, a wall he couldn't get around, a gate he couldn't unlatch.
Something holding him back, preventing him from opening his
heart again.

The fear of getting hurt the way he'd been hurt by Erika. The
fear of allowing himself to be that vulnerable ever again. The
knowledge that a person who'd survived one heart attack was less
likely to survive another.

If he broke up with Marissa-no if about that; it wouldn't be
fair to continue with her, feeling the way he did-when he broke
up with Marissa, he would want to see Erika again. Yet he would
never allow himself to be vulnerable to her the way he'd been vulnerable years ago. He didn't want the second heart attack. If she
broke up with him again, it would kill him.

But he wanted her. There was no question in his mind about
that. Ever since he'd seen her sweep into Fanelli's, her face glittering with raindrops, her eyes so wide and warm and her body.
.. Christ, her body.

He wanted her. He wanted to make love to her properly, not like
a breathless kid but like a man. Slowly. Gently. Wildly. He wanted
to make her melt and moan his name. He wanted to do it right.

For all he knew, she had no interest in him other than as an old
high school classmate, someone to have a beer with while reminiscing about the good old days. He might break up with Marissa
and wind up with nothing, no one. Erika might say, "Ted, you
asshole. I broke up with you. Remember?"

But he couldn't stay with Marissa, not feeling the way he did.
Love wasn't like buying a car; you didn't accept the red sedan
because the silver sedan wasn't in stock.

"It's for your own sake," he told Marissa, knowing she'd want
to add that to her list of things he mustn't say, but saying it any way. "It's for your own good. You deserve a guy who can give you
one hundred percent. I can't. I've tried, but I can't."

"I hate you," she said.

He didn't blame her.

And he knew there was nothing he could do to make things
better for her. Leaving her was for the best. She might not realize
that now, but maybe-hopefully-she would someday.

And maybe someday, he'd realize that Erika's having broken
up with him sixteen years ago had been for the best, too.

A few weeks later, she heard from Ted again.

She'd needed those few weeks to screw her head on right. To
remember that she and Ted were just friends, that he was in a
relationship, that if he wanted to see her again, it was probably
because their last meeting had been kind of short and they hadn't
really finished catching up.

And that was fine, she assured herself. Her bout of tears after
she'd seen him at Fanelli's had been one of those weird hormonal
things, nothing more. A reaction to the comprehension that she
was no longer the naive young girl she'd been so many years ago.
A pang of nostalgia, nothing more.

That was what she'd told her mother during their most recent
phone call. Her parents had moved to Florida. They'd reached the
stage in their life where the occasional hurricane seemed less of a
hassle than the frequent snowstorm, and Erika was happy to have
a warm place to visit when the New York winters dug their icy
claws into her.

After her mother caught her up on what was going on in her
parents' life, Erika filled her mother in on developments at work,
what she liked and didn't like about her new job. "We're so proud
of you," her mother said repeatedly.

Erika smiled. Her parents were always proud of her. They'd
been proud of her equestrian achievements, proud of her good
grades, proud of her for graduating from a top-notch college and
business school. Even proud of her for sailing across the Atlantic,
although they'd also panicked and tried to talk her out of that
escapade. Once she'd flown home and they'd seen for themselves
how much the experience had changed her, how it had made her
even more independent, more confident of her abilities, more
joyfully fearless, they'd allowed that perhaps it hadn't been the
stupidest thing she'd ever done. "We can say that now that you're
home, safe and sound," her father had conceded.

"So," she told her mother, "Guess who I had a drink with not
long ago? Ted Skala."

"Ted?" Although her mother was down in Florida, Erika could
picture her mother's startled expression as if she were sitting just
a few feet away in Erika's apartment. She could picture the arcs of
her mother's eyebrows, the circle of her lips shaping an 0 of surprise. "He's in New York?"

"Working in Manhattan, living in Brooklyn. It was great seeing
him, Mom. He grew up."

"We're all getting older," her mother said with a melodramatic
sigh. "So. Ted Skala. What's he been up to?"

Erika told her mother about his job.

Her mother sounded duly impressed. "He always had a lot on
the ball," she said. "Not taking the route everyone else took, but he
was a smart boy and a hard worker. That summer, he was working
two jobs, wasn't he? Caddying at Somerset and working at the gas
station. Definitely a hard worker." Her parents had always
honored hard work. Her father, after all, had started his life in the
humble environment of the working-class Bronx, earned scholarships and wound up a stockbroker on Wall Street. Her mother had been an immigrant who hadn't even understood English when
she'd arrived in New York, but she'd found work teaching Wall
Street executives how to speak Spanish so they could communicate more effectively with their business associates south of the
border. Neither of her parents had started out with much, but
thanks to hard work they'd wound up affluent. "He has a work
ethic, that boy," she said of Ted.

"He's not a boy anymore," Erika pointed out.

"And? Are you going to see him again?"

"He's in a relationship, Mom," Erika said. The night she'd met
him at Fanelli's, and burst into tears, and raced home and wept
on the phone to Allyson, she wouldn't have been able to say that
so calmly. But time had passed, and the inexplicable, turbulent
emotions of that night had vanished like a storm blown out to
sea. Ted was an old friend. A mature friend. Period.

"So he's in a relationship. Are you going to see him again?"

"Mom," she said firmly. "It's a relationship of long standing.
They've been together for years. They're living together."

"He isn't married to her, is he?" her mother asked.

Erika didn't want to venture too far in the direction her
mother was heading.

Her mother apparently did. "If she was the woman for him,
they'd be married by now. They're not married."