When they were young, he would’ve turned her around, lifted her face with his fingers, wiped her tears, but this time, he didn’t do anything. She didn’t expect him to. It was just one more reminder of what he must think of her now. She blinked in the sunlight, trying to keep the tears from spilling over her lashes.
“I’ve never seen you cry so much,” he said from behind her.
“I’m not happy,” she said with a sniffle.
“I know.” His voice was quiet and thoughtful.
Once she had swallowed the lump in her throat and pushed the tears back from where they’d come, she turned around to face him. “I’ve hurt you by the things I’ve said and you have every right to hate me, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It makes me sad, that’s all.”
He took in a deep, steady breath and let it out, his eyes on the sand. “It’s hard for me too, Libby. You turned out to be someone totally different from the person I knew. A person who left without a care in the world about your family. It’s all about you, all the time.” He looked out over the water. “It’s hard to see you again… You blindsided me when you left. It was as if I hadn’t known you at all. I lost the one person I thought I knew best. It knocked the life right out of me for a while. When I look at you, I see everything that made me angry that day. Can you blame me for not wanting to see you?”
Libby shook her head. She didn’t blame him. She knew what she’d done. She had to feel that guilt over and over. “I thought you weren’t coming back here, anyway,” she said.
“What?”
“To my cottage. You said you weren’t coming back.”
“I never said that.”
“But you said ‘maybe.’”
He took his sunglasses off and looked down at Libby for an oddly long time as if searching her face for something, a little smirk twitching at the edges of his lips. Was he having the same memory of ‘maybe’ that she’d had? “You do remember that?”
“Oh. Did you really mean maybe and not ‘maybe?’”
His face was too close, his eyes not leaving hers. A strand of hair relentlessly blew across her cheek as she tried unsuccessfully to hold it back with her hand. Pete reached out and tucked it behind her ear. It was almost too much, and she felt her limbs start to tremble. He was making her nervous. She worried by his change in expression that he could sense it. He took a step away from her. “I’d better go hang that swing,” he said.
Libby nodded.
After he disappeared around the corner of the beach, Libby sat in the sand, hugging her knees, the wind blowing her designer linen trousers around her ankles. What am I doing getting nervous around him? she thought. He wasn’t right for her, and she wasn’t right for him, no matter what their past had been. They’d moved on. The situation was maddening.
The more she thought about it all, the more frustrated she became. She didn’t want him showing up anymore, running into her in town. She had to refocus, work on getting out of there. She needed to set things straight with him and make him understand that she wasn’t a different person; she was the same driven person she’d always been, she just hadn’t made any moves until the one that had taken her to New York. And she needed him to stop… whatever that was he was doing.
With resolve, she got up, brushed the sand off her bottom, and made her way through the woods and down the beach toward Pete. He was at the top of the ladder knotting the rope when she reached him.
“I’d like to make this better, but I can’t. Nothing can make it better,” she called up to him, her hands balled into fists by her sides from the aggravation she felt with the situation. She felt a catch in her chest as a sob rose from within. “I’ve always been this person you see before you. Always. I just hadn’t grown up yet, that’s all. I can’t change who I am,” she said as the tears returned.
Pete climbed down the ladder two rungs at a time until he was standing in front of her. He looked exasperated, the skin between his eyes puckered, his lips in a tight line. He was quiet for a long while, staring above her head as she tried unsuccessfully to stop crying. When he finally looked at her, he said, “I don’t like it when you cry. It makes me crazy, to be honest. But you’ve done this to yourself. Life doesn’t have to be as hard as you’re making it. You’ve made your choices, and now you have to live with them.”
“I didn’t choose this! I didn’t choose to come back here! None of this was by choice!” She was shouting at him, but she didn’t care at that moment because she had to get it all off her chest. After her outburst, Libby stood, silent, her hands now on her hips to hide the trembling in her fingers. She had nothing to show for her choices, and the reality of it stung her to the point of speechlessness.