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mingled with her taste, still sweet in his mouth.
“Or I was a teacher,” she said pensively. “I don’t know when I can go back there.” She shuddered.
Jefferson pulled the shared blanket more tightly over their shoulders, pulling her more tightly into him. “What happened?”
“First, I need you to understand why it happened.”
“Okay.”
“I met my fiancé in university.”
“Your fiancé?” Jefferson felt the shock of it. And the relief. All the electricity between them didn’t matter. She was taken! But his relief was short-lived.
“Not anymore,” she said sadly. “We broke off. That’s what made me so vulnerable when...well, I’ll get to that. Harry and I had been engaged since the second year of our studies. We graduated at the same time, and both got wonderful jobs. I secured my dream job teaching home economics in high school, he got on with one of the banks. I assumed it was time to take the next step, but every time I tried to set a date for the wedding, Harry would become evasive.”
He heard inside himself oh-oh but did not say it out loud.
“In fact,” she said, her lips pursed with remembered annoyance, “had I been paying more attention, I would have seen the whites of his eyes rolling in pure terror at the mere mention of spending a lifetime with me.”
“A lifetime with you doesn’t seem as if it should make eyes roll in terror.”
Her mouth popped open in surprise. She studied his face, as if she was looking for the lie. She smiled. He realized he was treading very dangerous ground, indeed.
“Finally, he worked up his nerve to tell me the truth. He had discovered his career in finance was a terrible mistake. He was bored.”
“God forbid we should ever be bored,” Jefferson said. He tried to keep his tone dry, but in fact, he felt angry.
“And unfulfilled. He had just discovered he didn’t want what other people wanted. He did not want a boring life in the suburbs with two-point-five children and a bus trip into work every day. And guess what? He’d already found someone who didn’t want the very same things he didn’t want and it wasn’t me.”
“Aw, Angie.”
She held up her palm. “Please don’t feel sorry for me. I should have picked up on the signs long before I did. And, besides, this is just the story before the story.”
“Go on.”
“So, in the space of a week, he quit his job and asked me for his ring back.”
“He asked for the ring back? That’s scummy.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Thank you. I thought so, too, especially after he told me he intended to sell it to finance his tickets. Make that two tickets.”
Jefferson was forming a very low opinion of a man who would not only ask for the ring back, but tell his ex-betrothed the reason he had to have it. “Loser,” he muttered.
“Thank you,” she said, as if she had desperately needed someone else to see it. Angie looked adorable all wrapped in the blanket, her hair curling wildly as it started to dry. But when she wrinkled her nose like that? How could anyone have ever pried themselves away from her?
“Thailand,” Angie went on, tilting her chin bravely. “That’s where he and Loxi—can that possibly be a real name?”
She glared at him as if she expected an answer.
“No, I don’t think it can be a real name.”
“Not that it stopped her from traveling! How can you even get a passport with a name like that?” Her question was full of indignation.
“I’d like to know,” he agreed.
She sighed at his agreement. “Anyway, that’s where he and Loxi had a plan to live on the beach and teach yoga or some such thing.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her eyes searched his, and her chin quivered. In denial of that emotion, she said quickly, “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m just setting up why I was vulnerable. I’m over it now.”
He doubted that. He could see she carried the pain of the betrayal as if it were somehow her fault, as if she had accepted her fiancé’s abandonment as a judgment of her. That she somehow was not worthy.
“But I wasn’t over it then. Right after it happened, I was in a shocked daze. Naturally, in the staff room, my missing engagement ring was noticed eventually. I had to tell people Harry and I were no longer an item. I didn’t tell anyone the Loxi or Thailand part. It was too humiliating.”
Jefferson thought of her carrying that on her own, trying to keep her head up high, and ached for her.
“Anyway, I went from discussing wedding plans and poring over bridal magazines with two other teachers who were engaged to being the subject of gossip and pity.”
She sat very still. She pulled the blanket a little tighter around her and gazed out at the dark waters of the pitching lake beyond the cove.
“There was another teacher there,” she said, her voice strained. “Winston.”
He saw a flinch crawl along her skin.
“I can’t say I’d ever paid the least attention to him besides a casual good-morning. He was quite an unassuming little fellow, given to wearing bow ties.”
“Never trust a man who wears a bow tie,” he told her.
“Now you tell me.”
She gave him a little smack on his chest and continued. “He confided in me that the very same thing had happened to him. I could actually see the tears in his eyes when he said it. He asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee with him.
“It seemed safe enough. My God, he was a fellow teacher. I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe he just needed to talk about it. I actually thought Oh, look, other people beyond you have problems. I thought it would be good for me to get out of myself for a bit. So, I agreed. One coffee.
“But I could tell, once we were out of the school environment, that there was something a touch off about him. I’m not sure I could put my finger on it, but it made me uncomfortable, and I gulped down my coffee and left with murmured sympathies about the pathetic state of his personal life.
“The next day in the coffee room, he was entirely inappropriate, sitting too close to me, putting his hand on my knee, touching my hair. It was creepy. I took to avoiding him, even taking breaks in my classroom. But he tracked me down, and I did not want to be in my classroom alone with him.”
She stopped, troubled. Her hands were wound together and she stared down at them.
Jefferson could see they were trembling. He covered her hands with his own and felt how shockingly cold they were.
“The more I rejected him,” Angie whispered, “the more strongly he pursued me. He bugged me at school. He called me at home. He gave me unwanted gifts. He sent flowers.
“I finally had to talk to my principal about it. Winston was warned to stay away from me. He didn’t. It actually got worse after the principal talked to him. Within a few weeks, he’d been fired.
“The phone calls really started to come in then. I changed my number three times. He always managed to get it. Sometimes he’d be raging that it was all my fault. Other times he’d tell me he had forgiven me for ruining his life. Other times he would be crying. Pleading with me to come back to him. Come back to him? We’d had a single cup of coffee.
“I had to involve the police. I had to get a restraining order. He started hanging out across the street from my place, just out of range of the order. I moved to a new apartment with what I thought was better security.