Back in the Bachelor's Arms

Chapter Four

“Don’t get scared—I’m coming up.”

Chloe heard Reid’s warning from the bottom of the stairs to the attic. The sound of his deep voice and the thought that he was on his way to see her were enough to make her pulse race.

There was nothing she could do to slow her heartbeat; she just tried not to pay attention to it. Or to the fact that it meant she was glad he was coming to see her.

It was after seven o’clock Tuesday evening and although they’d both been in the house all day, they hadn’t actually connected. Chloe had been awake, lying in bed when she’d heard the front door open at 8:00 a.m. Moments later she’d also heard Reid climb the steps to the second floor, stop just outside of her bedroom door and then go back downstairs, leaving the scent of fresh coffee to drift in to her.

Curiosity had prompted her to get up and peek out the bedroom door where she’d found a foam cup full of wake-up-call waiting just outside.

She’d called a “Thank you!” in Reid’s wake, he’d hollered back, “You’re welcome,” and that was that. They hadn’t set eyes on each other.

Since coffee was frequently all she had for breakfast, she’d decided to skip the cold pizza and merely make the hot beverage her meal. Sipping it after she’d showered and dressed for the day, she’d gone directly to the attic.

When she’d stopped for lunch and finally trespassed into Reid’s territory downstairs, he’d been on his cell phone, apparently discussing a medical case. So Chloe had merely waved to him, snatched a slice of the cold pizza and a soda from the fridge and returned to the attic to eat while she attempted to put some sort of order to what she needed to do there.

Which was where she was and what she was doing still when he appeared in the doorway at that moment.

“Hi,” she greeted, slipping her hair behind her ears as she glanced up from the small stool where she was sitting in the middle of the attic floor.

“Hi to you, too,” he responded. “You’ve been up here so long without even poking your nose out that I was beginning to wonder if I should check and see if a giant attic rat had taken you prisoner.”

Chloe laughed and wrinkled her nose at the same time. “A giant attic rat? There better not be any rats up here, giant or otherwise.”

Reid came all the way into the attic, stopping not far from where she was and surveying the room.

As he did, she surveyed him. He was dressed almost exactly as he had been the day before—jeans and a white crewneck T-shirt, both of them similarly paint-stained. But unlike the previous evening, tonight his face was cleanly shaven, as if he’d left when the five o’clock shadow had appeared to remove it before coming back. Before climbing the steps to her.

Chloe liked the look of him both ways—scruffy and clean-shaven—but it gave her a bit of satisfaction to think that tonight he’d cared enough to do the second shave.

After a moment of studying the attic he said, “I was kind of surprised when we toured the house and saw how much stuff was up here.”

“Me, too. Apparently moving in a hurry leaves a lot behind.”

“It’s cleaner than it was when I initially saw it, but after all the hours you’ve put in, I thought you might have made a dent.”

“Yesterday was cleaning day—dust and cobweb duty. Today I’ve just been trying to get some idea of what I’m dealing with and how to organize it. Once I’d cleared some spaces for what will need to be thrown out, what can go to charity and what I’ll take with me piles, I barely got started actually going through anything. Hopefully I’ll make more headway tomorrow.”

“Big job.”

“Bigger than I’d anticipated,” Chloe said.

She debated about whether to say what was next on her mind, wondering if it would be a sore subject for Reid. But then she decided that she’d merely been enjoying what she’d been doing for the last half hour and if it didn’t bother her, maybe it wouldn’t bother him either.

So she said, “I started with some of my own stuff—” She pointed at two boxes set to one side. “Those are just old clothes and things I’ll donate to the church. But this box might interest you.” She nodded at the cardboard storage box at her feet, decorated with heart and flower stickers, and with Private! written in several places in bright pink marker.

“I don’t know,” he said, playing along. “It says it’s private.”

“To keep my parents out of it if they came across it hidden under my bed. But there are some things in it that you might even want back.”

“You found things of mine?”

“Mementos and keepsakes of dates,” she confided. Then she altered her tone and said, “Unless you’d rather not…”

Reid glanced into the box as cautiously as if something might jump out at him, and Chloe had the impression he was using that brief time to consider whether or not he did want to take that stroll down memory lane.

Then, as if his curiosity had gotten the best of him, much as it had her over coffee that morning, he said, “A hamburger wrapper?”

Chloe took it out of the box and handed it to him. “From Tastee Dog. It was where you took me to dinner before the Homecoming dance my freshman year. Is it still open?”

“Tastee Dog? Thriving. Being across from the school keeps it going.”

He studied what he was holding in hands that seemed bigger to Chloe than they had been fourteen years ago and she wondered if that was possible.

Then he said, “You honestly kept an old hamburger wrapper?”

“I not only kept it, I washed it, ironed it and had it taped to my wall for a while. That was not only my first date with you, it was my first date ever and I had to beg and bargain to get my parents to let me go. After all, you know how my parents were and I was only fourteen and you were the big man on campus at fifteen.”

Reid gave the hamburger wrapper back to her, rolled his eyes and, as if he were a pre-adolescent boy, said, “Girls are so sappy.”

“Be careful, there are a couple of things in here that were pretty sentimental and sappy of you.”

“Nah, never happened,” he joked. “I’m a tough guy.”

“Oh, Tough Guy, you’re just asking for it,” Chloe countered, searching through the box until she found what she was looking for.

“An old milk bottle and a broken arrow—were you going through my trash or what?” he said as if he’d never seen them before.

Chloe playfully swatted his shin with the back of her hand. “You gave them to me and I know you remember.”

He must have been drawn in in spite of himself because he sat down then, with the side of one thigh pressed to the floor and his other leg bent at the knee to brace his arm. He was also smiling a Cheshire cat smile that told her he did remember whether he wanted to admit it or not.

But just to bring home her point, she said, “It was from our song, the one that was playing on the radio when you said we were together—the Rod Stewart love song. This is a bottle of rain—evaporated now, but it was a bottle of rain—and this is a broken arrow.”

“It’s a good thing that was a wet spring or I still might not have that bottle filled,” he said by way of admission. “I’d leave it out every time it was supposed to rain and one of my brothers would get to it before me and dump it just to be ornery. I finally had to put it on the roof after they were all asleep one night and get up before any of them did the next morning.”

“So it would really be a bottle of rain and not just a bottle of water—I thought it was the most romantic thing anyone would ever do for me,” Chloe confessed.

“And was it?”

“Pretty much,” she said with a laugh.

Then, to avoid dwelling on that, she took out a shoe box and lifted the lid to show him what appeared to be a collection of scraps.

“Stubs,” she dubbed it all. “Well, stubs and receipts and matchbooks and napkins and any little thing I could put in my purse as a souvenir of almost every place we ever went.”

“Kleptomania?”

“A teenage girl’s need to immortalize everything that goes on with her boyfriend.”

When Chloe closed the lid on the shoe box Reid peered into the larger storage box again. “I see a whole bunch of dead flowers in there. What did they immortalize?”

“Some are flowers you gave me on birthdays or special occasions or just to be sweet, and the rest are corsages from every dance we went to—ten all together.”

“Did we go to ten dances?”

“That Homecoming dance my freshman year was our first date—you were a sophomore. We went to that, the Christmas dance and the Pre-Spring Fling that year—we couldn’t go to the prom because we were too young. That’s three dances. My sophomore year—your junior—we went to all four dances. That makes seven. And the year you were a senior we missed only the Pre-Spring Fling. A total of ten.”

“You had the flu the night of the Pre-Spring Fling,” Reid contributed.

Chloe scrounged in the box again and as she did she said, “And you came over and sat with me the whole night anyway and brought me Spiderman comic books.” When she found the old issues she took them out to show him she’d kept them, too.

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