Love in Maine (25 page)

“Hi,” Maddie said. “I’m Madison Post. We’re in Latin class together. I think I threw
myself at you last night.”

He had light reddish hair and it was all flattened out on one side. He looked like
a stray.

“Hi. I’m Samuel Pruitt. Nice to meet you, Madison.”

She reached her hand out from under the too-thin blanket in order to shake his hand.
“Nice to meet you, Samuel.”

They talked a little bit more, and Maddie felt like the least she could do was offer
the guy some breakfast in thanks for not sleeping with her despite her—
ahem
—gracious offer to do whatever he wanted to his body or hers. He was just reminding
her of all of her generous propositions.

“How charming.” Maddie cringed, but they both laughed and through the odd set of circumstances,
Maddie had made a new friend.

After she’d made him an omelet, there was a quick double-tap at Maddie’s front door.
It was only about nine thirty on Saturday morning and all of her roommates would be
asleep for hours. The only reason she was awake was that she was used to getting up
in the dark every morning for crew . . . and there had been a guy snoring on the carpet
next to her bed. She rubbed her achy forehead and pulled the front door open. Sam
was coming up behind her, his sneakers in one hand, his winter coat in the other.

“I should probably go. It was great to meet you—” He leaned in to kiss her cheek as
Maddie pulled the door open, figuring she could show Sam out and sign for the UPS
package or whatever else it would be at that unusual hour.

Sam froze.

Maddie froze.

Hank was, as always, frozen in place. Unmoving.

“Hank?”

“Wow,” he said with a slow glance at Sam and then back into Maddie’s eyes. “You remember
my name.”

Sam looked from Hank to Maddie, then slipped past Hank. Sam’s floppy red hair bounced
around as the poor guy hopped onto the cold front porch and pulled on one sneaker
and then the other to get out of that loony bin as quickly as his legs could carry
him.

“Do you want to come inside?”

Hank stared at Maddie and wanted to rip his own heart out. She looked ragged. Her
hair was lank, she was too thin. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and her lips
looked chapped and drawn. “I don’t know . . . maybe this isn’t a good time . . .”
He stood where he was and let her take the responsibility of telling him what the
hell had just happened.

“Up to you,” Maddie said with a dismissive wave of her hand. She left the front door
open and started to walk back toward the kitchen. “Either come in or don’t, but shut
the door to keep out the draft, please.”

What had happened to her? He walked in slowly, pulling the front door quietly behind
him. He knew she had three roommates who were probably asleep behind the closed doors
that led off the living room. He followed Maddie back toward what must be the kitchen.
She was pouring a cup of coffee, and he could see her hand was shaking as she tried
to hold the carafe steady over her mug.

“Here, let me do that,” Hank offered.

Maddie slammed the carafe back into place on the heating unit of the coffeemaker and
swung around to face him. “I can make my own cup of coffee, Hank.”

“Maddie. It’s me. What the hell is going on?”

“What’s going on?” Her voice was shrill. Deeanna had woken up and wandered into the
kitchen in a too-short nightie and nothing else. She walked over to the coffeepot,
reached up for a mug, started to pour, then turned to Hank and said, “You the one
she picked up last night?”

Maddie growled. “Deeanna. Shut. Up. Get out of the kitchen and leave us alone.”

“Touchy. Touchy. I need milk in my coffee.” She shuffled over to the refrigerator
and topped off her coffee with a splash of milk, then shuffled back toward her bedroom.

“And put on a bathrobe!” Maddie cried after her.

“Whatever, Maddie.”

Hank stared at her.

Maddie stared at him. “What? I’m a college senior. You send me one stupid letter and
I’m supposed to wait around like an idiot? Haven’t you ever heard of the Internet?
Or the telephone? Or the US Mail?!”

At least she was getting worked up, he thought. When Hank set aside the boiling rage
that accompanied the thought of her picking someone up at a bar the night before,
he was relieved to see her get that fire back in her cheeks.

“I couldn’t. I was on totally high security—” he said in a defensive tone.

Maddie slammed the flat of her hand on the cheap kitchen counter with a loud
thwack
! “That is such a lie!” Her voice was rippling with anger. “You are such a screwed-up
liar! You just say shit, and I am such an idiot that I actually believe you—”

He reached out to touch her, anything, her hand, her cheek, to hold on to her upper
arm.

“Don’t! Don’t touch me!” She pulled away from him. “I talked to your mother yesterday.”

He let his hand drop away from trying to touch her.

“Yeah. Remember her? Your mother?”

Hank’s face fell. He felt so guilty that he had taken the few precious days he had
to come to Providence instead of going to see his mother who had dedicated her entire
life to repairing the damage she thought she had done.

“I thought—” He was going to say he had thought Madison was more important, but he
stumbled when he saw the rage in her eyes. It was so unfamiliar. Especially directed
at him.

“You thought what? You thought it wouldn’t strike me as odd that you send me one letter,”
she held her index finger up and put it close to her face, “
one
stinking letter, and then your mother just blithely tells me that of-course-she-hears-from-you-all-the-time-and-didn’t-I-hear-from-you-all-the-time-too?!”

Hank stared at Maddie, his face impassive. “Is that what this is about? You’re jealous
of my mother?”

Maddie stomped her right foot on the ground. “How
dare
you try to twist this around?!” Another roommate could be heard plodding down the
hallway to the kitchen. “Ugh! Just come into my room so we can talk without half the
neighborhood coming and interrupting us.” Maddie sort of shoved Hank into her bedroom
and pulled the door shut just as Emily was turning into the kitchen.

Hank saw the pillow and the pallet of blankets that was on the floor next to the bed
and he reminded himself that Ms. I-have-condoms-falling-out-of-my-bag had also happened
to be a virgin. “You have a dog?”

Maddie looked where Hank was looking, then rolled her eyes in disgust. “No! I don’t
have a dog! Well, not counting you, I don’t. That’s where Sam the Latin nerd slept
last night.”

Hank took off his black windbreaker and set it on the back of her desk chair.

“Why are you taking your jacket off and making yourself comfortable? You are not staying
here.”

“Because I only have forty-eight hours, and I don’t want to waste it bickering.” He
stood with his hands on his waist. He was wearing a black woolen sweater with canvas
patches at the shoulder. He supposed he looked military and foreign all at the same
time. “Come here, Maddie.”

He saw the flash of longing in her eyes, then her immediate attempt to squash it.
“No.” She folded her arms to cover her breasts. He could tell her body was already
betraying her. He pulled her desk chair around so he could sit in it, then bent over
to untie his laced-up combat boots. They were polished and immaculate. He had wanted
to look sharp for the NATO officials on the flight they’d been kind enough to offer
him a seat on. But mostly he wanted to look good for Madison when he imagined her
opening her front door.

Part one of that vision had turned out great: the NATO officials had congratulated
him on a job well done. Part two of that scenario hadn’t turned out at all the way
he’d planned. But if anyone knew how to move forward after unexpected circumstances,
it was Hank.

“Why are you taking off your shoes?! Seriously, Hank, you can’t just walk in here
after—what, six months—”

He stood up, and Maddie gasped. He pulled the dark sweater over his head and began
unbuttoning the cuffs of the gray button-down shirt. He towered over her. “Seven months.”
Maddie looked down at the floor. He touched her cheek. “Three days.” She whimpered
a lame protest. “Twenty-two hours.” He traced the contours of her lips with his finger.
“Seventeen minutes,” he whispered finally.

Maddie looked up at him, still clinging to her defiance. “But why not a single call?
Why did you have time for other people and not for me?”

He wanted to kiss her so desperately. He leaned in—

“Hank! Tell me!” Her voice was cracking.

He kept his fingers at the back of her neck, in that warm place beneath the fall of
her beautiful hair. “I wrote to my mother in advance . . .”

“You what?” She wasn’t able to follow his words when he touched her like that. Her
eyes were already beginning to cloud with lust.

“I wrote fifty-two letters in advance,” he repeated.

“So . . . why didn’t you . . .” She moaned when he reached his hand under her long-sleeved
T-shirt.

“I couldn’t write to you in advance . . . it felt like a fraud. My mother just wants
to know I’m alive. You? I couldn’t . . . I just wasn’t able to bring myself to do
that.”

He leaned in and kissed her neck, and someplace in the back of her mind she thought
she should be fighting harder to tell him something or demand something. Her head
was still fogged from drinking too much the night before, after being so torn up about
him just the day before. Wrecked. It was too much.

“Hank. Please stop.” She said it so softly, but he felt it more powerfully than if
she’d clocked him.

“What is it?”

“I just need to look at you and touch you and know you’re real. It’s been so long,
Hank. Really, really long.”

His brow pulled tight. “I’ve thought of you every minute, Maddie. I’ve been working
on a project, so completely immersed, and you are always with me. I think of things
that I’m going to tell you, and stories about the stuff I’m doing, and what I’m going
to do to your body . . .”

She swayed into him, her lips barely an inch from his. “I don’t trust you, Hank.”

Maybe it
would
have been better if she had clocked him. He felt the wind get knocked out of him
after he heard those words. He set her a little bit farther away from him. “
You
don’t trust
me
?! I just knocked on your front door and some good-time-Charlie kisses you good-bye,
and
you
don’t trust
me
? This is unbelievable!”

Maddie moved away from him and sat at the foot of her bed. She looked around her bedroom
and tried to see it through Hank’s eyes. There was evidence of her infatuation with
him everywhere. The jewelry box with the coin in it was sitting on her bedside table.
A picture of the two of them that Janet had taken over the summer was framed and sitting
atop her dresser. A movie stub. A fortune from one of the Chinese fortune cookies
from Ming’s. Small scraps were tucked into the edge of the frame of her mirror. The
brown wrapping paper with the Greek stamps and her address in Hank’s handwriting was
in a shadow-box frame over her bed.

He looked at all the evidence and then smiled down at her. “Really? I think you’ve
missed me as much as I’ve missed you. And you’re too stubborn to admit it.”

He kneeled at the end of the bed, pushing her legs apart so he could see her eye-to-eye
and lean into her. Whatever had happened on the phone with his mother, Maddie had
been devastated. Hank took a deep breath.

“I’m so sorry, Maddie. I . . . I don’t have any idea how to do this right. I took
the assignment because the pay is amazing and it ends in August and I thought, maybe,
if you still cared about me, we could be together then. I’ll have enough saved to
go . . . wherever you’re going. To Cyprus for the fellowship, or to California to
train for the Olympics. Because you’re going places and you’re not going to be easy
to keep up with, you know?”

Her eyes were still closed, and the tears were beginning to seep out. “You kept everything
from me, Hank. Not just where you were these past few months, but all your feelings.
Everything. The whole time.”

He leaned in and kissed her neck and reached under her shirt again, lightly touching
her stomach. “I might have been quiet, but you always knew how I felt. You’ve always
known that I loved you, since the minute you walked into my mother’s living room and
you were supposed to be some little old lady. But you were you.” Hank took a quick
breath. “And I was a mess. I just . . . I’m better now, I swear. I’m talking to the
right people—”

Maddie opened her moist eyes and stared into his. “You are?”

He laughed. “Yeah. I am. Big man meets shrink. You good with that?”

Maddie nodded and smiled, but she was still sad. “I’m glad someone is there for you.”

“It’s all because of you, Maddie. You were there for me.”

She looked like that wasn’t correct either.

He shook his head. “No, that’s not right. It’s not because of you in that way that
leaves you with the burden. It’s thanks to you . . . for making me see it was possible
. . . that everything was possible. I had no incentive to really connect with other
people after I left the Army. You were amazingly incentivizing . . .” Hank kept one
hand under her shirt and one hand at the back of her neck. And waited.

Reaching up to touch his cheek, Maddie finally released her arms from the defensive
posture across her chest. “I missed you so much . . .” She touched his cheek, and
his eyes softened. The relief of her touch. The relief of being there with her.

Hank had been worried that he might have concocted the power of their connection.
Now he knew for sure it was entirely real. She took his hand from her neck and put
it to her chest. “I can feel my heart starting to beat again,” she said softly. “I
felt sort of dead when you were gone. It’s not healthy. It’s wrong. I feel like I’m
disappearing when we’re not together.”