The Seattle Boy Ch. 03

The morning's light was slow and creaky, touching first the floor and then the foot of the bed, reaching first Charlie's feet, all the way up their entwined legs, until it touched Clare's face and she woke.

Charlie's arm was wrapped around her waist, his face pressed into the nape of her neck, one leg pushed between hers. Trapped as she was, Clare had few options but to lay there and feel his breath tickle the back of her neck. Lying in bed with him (again) was such a lie that it made her throat close and her eyes well up with tears. 'This could have been every day, waking up with the man I love,' she thought. 'And I really thought it would be. How old were we when we met? Twelve?'

Her thoughts were interrupted by a grunt from behind, a snuffle in her hair as he huffed out a breath as he woke up. Feigning sleep, she lay still and quiet as he leaned against one of his elbows and she could feel him examining her. When he finally slipped quietly out of the bed and shuffled off to the shower in the next room, she breathed a silent breath of relief. Now she could dress and make her escape.

Charlie sat in a new bar that night, desperately needing a change of scenery, and moping over his glass with the other patrons buzzing around him. It was just like her, he thought, to be there one day and then gone the next. Except.. It wasn't, not really. Only their last interaction supported that observation, and then last night again. All through their time together in high school, and certainly through college, she had never been fly-by-night, nor was she one to fuck and run. Then again, it had only been him, and perhaps the six years apart had changed that about her. I wonder what other kinds of things are different about her, he wondered. She was so sharp and bright, and like what you see after a firework has gone off when you close your eyes, she remained imprinted on the backs of your eyelids what felt like forever. Clare was the only woman he had ever loved, and still was. However, it seemed to him that she was not still that same woman.

Sighing in defeat, Charlie stood up from the bar, paid for his drinks and shuffled to the doors. The air was cold, so cold in fact that the snow from the previous nights had frozen into an icy shell that crackled and snapped beneath his feet. Luckily he hadn't been in the bar long enough for his truck door to freeze shut, so he got in and drove slowly home on empty back streets, the people content to stay home in their warm houses together. As he pulled into the driveway, he found small tracks leading up from the sidewalk to the front door, but not coming back. Suspicious, he turned the truck off and entered the house quietly, leaving the lights off. He followed damp tracks through the house, up the stairs, and down the hall to his room where the only light in the house was on and he could hear little noises coming from inside.

Charlie edged closer to the door, peering through the crack of light to see Clare bent over the end of his bed, the bedskirt tossed up on the mattress as she searched beneath. She was cursing quietly, and to his observations her vocabulary had grown vastly in the last years.

"Where the hell could it have gone? I swear to god I had it here, and if he's stolen it, he's a mother-"

Charlie stepped in silently and grabbed her hips, pulling them back against him. "Hello lover," he said to her after her scream quieted as he caught her punch.

Clare, after getting over her initial terror and paralysis, felt it slowly melt into anger.

"What the hell were you thinking?! Sneaking up on me like that? What the fuck are you playing at?"

He felt his amusement melt into his own anger. "What the fuck am I playing at? I should be asking you the same damn thing! What are you doing here? Back in my city at the least, and in my house and damn room!"

She pulled away angrily, throwing his arms off of her and putting the span of the bed between them.

"I came back for something I must have left here. Nothing more."

He snorted. "Your sense of pride maybe? Or a sense of dignity perhaps? What happened last night?"

She shook her head and turned away, studying the wall in front of her. Glancing down on his dresser, she spotted the envelope on the top, tucked under a candle. She snatched it up and spun around again.

"I'm sorry about what happened yesterday. And I won't let it happen again, I swear."

He didn't say anything to her for several long moments. He looked down and the bed and then turned away from her to look out the window. As he stared through the frosty glass, he felt his anger melt away as quickly as it had accumulated, and he was left feeling tired to the soul.

"Would you like to have coffee with me," he asked.

Clare blinked for a moment.

"I don't know," she answered. "Are we friends? Can we have coffee?"

Charlie leaned his face against the cool glass and closed his eyes. "It's really up to you. I want to talk. But if we can't, then that's okay too."

She turned the card between her fingers nervously. "When were you thinking of going? I'm kind of trapped here for a while, so anytime works for me."

"Tomorrow is Saturday, and I don't have work."

"Tomorrow it is then."

The next morning dawned bright and cold. Clare woke earlier than she had yet on vacation, and lay in bed for a long while. What had she gotten herself into? Was she really going to go meet Charlie in a few hours to "talk"? Why would she do that? Ditching town completely would irresponsible and unduly cruel, but her natural instinct was to run, and run fast. She sighed and turned over. Of course that was her reaction, it always had been, ever since she was about fourteen. The instinct to flee from a situation that had the potential to turn hard or unpleasant was inborn, but it got more prominent the older she got until it had culminated when she was almost twenty two and had disappeared for good.

Scolding herself, reminding herself that she owed him at least this much, she rolled out of bed and shuffled to the shower where the floor's tiles froze the bottoms of her feet and made her bones ache. "Now I remember why I moved so far south," she grumbled. "Any much longer in this damn city and my joints would freeze in place before shattering into pieces." The genetic condition that had given her perpetually painful joints her entire life worsened and was even more of a problem in damper and colder climates, so after graduating high school she and Charlie moved south as quickly as they could.

As she walked into the coffeehouse, she was struck by a sense of deja vu- somewhere, lost long ago in time, she was walking into another coffeehouse like this just off campus in northwestern California to meet Charlie for breakfast. On mornings when he didn't have class and hers finished or if he had been out in a boat all morning and her class had let out, they'd have breakfast and go back to class together.

Settling herself at one of the tables, she nervously rearranged her scarf and took off her heavy black peacoat, anxious now to the point of almost a panic attack, but she calmed herself and inhaled the warm coffee smell wafting to her over the counter.

Her breath caught in her chest when he walked through the door, looking for all the world like he had just stepped off the research boat after a long morning of gathering samples and running tests on a boat in the middle of the ocean off the coast of California. The pain in her throat matched the feeling she carried with her last night as she was leaving; like two giant hands squeezing her lungs and her heart while they both pumped furiously to stay alive. She was tempted to close her eyes against the pain, but didn't want to stop looking at his beautiful face. He didn't see her at first, and scanned the room swiftly before his eyes finally landed on her.

"Good morning Clare," he said politely as he sat down across from her. "Have you ordered yet?"

She was struck dumb by the sense of deja vu again, and was silent for a moment.

"No, of course not. I wouldn't order without you here, that's impolite."

He smiled at her. "Of course." They stood in unison and walked in silence to the counter to begin ordering, just like the hundreds of times before.

"So. How have you been?" The question hung over the tiny table like a giant ominous thundercloud, threatening at any moment to split open and strike them both down where they sat.

"I've been... You know. Fine. Work is challenging, but I love it. I was on my way through to Bellingham for Christmas, but the snow stalled my car and I missed the bus home." She stirred the plastic spoon in her coffee, watching the swirls of milk chase themselves and avoiding his eyes. "What about you? What's been going on in your life?"

"I'm good. I've been working on a project with the Pacific University, so that's nice. It's nice to be out on the water with students again, I've missed that."

"Whatever happened with the TA position you were offered at HSU? Did you take it or were you accepted for the internship?" Forgetting her nerves a little, she let the coffee alone and glanced up into his face to guess the answer.

"I ended up getting to TA for a full eight quarters at Humblot before I got the internship. I didn't get the internship the first time, but I applied again during the final quarter I was teaching, and they accepted me. I went out in the fall, and didn't come back home until the beginning of the summer."

"Wow." she remarked. "That's a long time to be on a boat." Clare, who had always loved to be on the ocean, couldn't imagine being away from her beloved forests for that long. "What was it like?"

"Crowded," he said a bit dryly. "There were something like eleven grad students and four scientists on this smallish research boat. I bunked with two other guys, and we got to know each other real well during that time. In fact, that whole group of students got to be really close. We're still sending pictures and Christmas cards these days."

"That's great," she said with little enthusiasm. She had never been one to keep friends for longer than a few years. Wanderlust had gripped her at a young age, making it hard to keep close friends, and never released its hold. "How are you liking being back in Seattle?"

"It's... Nice. Nice to be back in a familiar place, you know? And it's kind of interesting to be back in the place I grew up and look at all those places that I thought were so important as a kid, through adult eyes."

Clare laughed. "Places like what?"

"Oh you know. Like the old Woods, and the abandoned shed out on 99. Oh, and especially Golden Gardens." He flashed a grin. "Remember all those... Movies we went to?"

She laughed again, and closed her eyes in shame. "Oh yes. I remember. My parents still don't know about those. And with any luck, they never will. Those were some pretty wild... Movies."

The table went quiet again as the awkward settled, taking the place of the thundercloud. They could both feel the other flashing unwittingly through their memories of better days. The coffee was observed studiously, and neither of them moved.

"Clare-"

"Charlie-"

They stopped and awkward, stilted laughter followed.

"You go first."

"No, that's okay. Whatever it is that you have to say, say it."

He was still for a moment. "Clare... Where did you go? And what have you been doing ever since?" He could feel the terror clutch his stomach as he asked the questions that had been haunting him for years.

The noise of the coffee shop filled Clare's ears as the silence inside of her rang in the blunt shock of the questions. Not that she hadn't been expecting these questions for a long time, because she knew that someone would ask her eventually and it would be painful enough, but the shock hit her anyway. "It's a long story," she said slowly. "But I'd like to start off by saying first and foremost, I'm sorry. I am so, so sorry.

"I left that spring while you were up north, here. I had signed up for the e-letter months before, and had been thinking about joining for ages. I wasn't shipped out until October, but I stayed in L.A. until I was. It was lovely there, for those months. So hot, and so full of people. I had a tiny apartment for the duration of my stay. It wasn't much, it was a studio apartment above a yoga studio. I was there, and then when I left, I sold a bunch of my stuff and sent the rest of it home to my folks. I worked at an at-risk youth center for eight months.

"I was in Benin for two and a quarter years, and I led after-school groups that talked about you know, sex, and STD's, especially HIV, and growing up, things like that. It ranged from general mental health to sometimes more like counceling sessions. They were usually ages twelve to seventeen- anyone older than that was usually given to the other group leader who was older and had more experience than me. Those kids usually had more precise questions that I wasn't comfortable advising until late in my first year. I got home in December of 2008, just in time to go home for Christmas." At this point, she paused and sipped her coffee. "I contacted the center I had worked for before leaving and they set me up with a center in Eastern Washington. I've been there ever since. I have a cat and a dog, and we live in a tiny house in Spokane."

Charlie leaned back in his seat, eyebrows raised so far they threatened to come off his face and he was silent for a long time. He leaned so far back that he tipped his seat backwards until it balanced steadily on the back two legs. He was quiet for a very long time, before: "were you happy there?"

She was equally quiet. "Yes, I believe I was, eventually. It was stuff I truly believed in, and it was good work. I think I made a difference in at least someone's life, and that was my only goal, really."

"Oh come on Clare. Don't give me that. You know what I meant." He pushed his chair back onto its four feet angrily.

"Well what did you mean then?" In contrast, she was strangely calm.

He shook his head in frustration and stared at her intensely. "I mean, were you happy while you were there? In the moment."

"It's hard to pin down a moment and have it analyzed," she said, dodging the question solidly. "For the most part, yes I was happy. But it was scary too, being in a country that only spoke a language I was barely fluent in, and having it be a different dialect was a challenge at first. It wasn't really lonely, I had my host family to help me out, and then I held an apartment near by when I got the chance. I had a couple really good friends too, but we weren't assigned to the same city, when it came down to it. Mostly I made friends with the locals, who made sure I wasn't able to settle into my hobbit-ish lifestyle as I did once I moved back here."

He sighed in exasperation. "Well. Alright. You know that's all I ever wanted, right?" Leaning forward he looked at her more intently than he had all day. "I only ever wanted you to be happy."

She looked down, aversed to looking him in the eyes as intently as he was looking into hers. "I know," she said. "I just didn't know what I wanted. And I figured you'd be better off without me in case I never figured it out."