Page 46 of My Favorite Lost Cause
I head to the primary suite. I love this room too, but in a different way. I love Margaret’s room the way you might love your childhood home. I love the primary suite simply because it’s glorious, with two full sets of French doors and a wide balcony overlooking the backyard and the cove.
I picture this room with its carpet pulled up, the gleaming hardwood beneath it refinished. I picture it with a canopy bed piled high with blankets and a dog bed at its foot for the puppies.Not that the puppies will sleep here. Obviously, it will be Charlie’s room one day.
It’s strange that I keep forgetting it won’t be mine too.
That night,I dream about a desk I had as a kid, one that belonged to my mother as a girl. I pull out the chair and feel beneath the desk’s top drawer for my journal, hidden in the open space between the drawer’s frame and the cross post.
I am bursting with news that I can share with no one but this book in front of me. It feels as if my life is changing by theminute, growing more exciting and more troubling all at the same time.
What’s strange is that when I look at the hands holding the pen, they are mine and yet they are not mine. I try to focus on the words spilling onto the page, but I can’t quite make them out. I only know that I can barely contain my excitement and that they are absolutely one hundred percent abouthim.
My eyes fly open. It’s barely dawn, and the puppies are sound asleep at the foot of the bed. The desk in that dream…did I see it in the attic last week? I’m positive it’s just my imagination running away from me again, but…the hands. I noticed my hands, and even at the time, I thought that they looked different.
And the handwriting, too. I tend to print more than anything else, but those words in the dream were in perfect, rounded cursive…almost like calligraphy.
It’s definitely my imagination, the whole thing.
But what if it isn’t? I saw Elijah’s guys carrying the furniture out of the house yesterday…Did they take it to the dump already? And if the furniture is gone will I actually drive to the dump like a lunatic, crying that I dreamed about a journal?
I climb from the bed, waking the dogs as I slip on shorts and flip-flops. I exit the studio with them at my heels, and I’ve just passed Charlie’s door when he emerges in nothing but boxers, running a hand over his face—a motion that sends a dozen muscles rippling across his stomach. “Maren, why the fuck are you up and making a racket at five-thirty in the morning?”
“Sorry,” I whisper, wincing.
“You know, you whisperingnowdoesn’t help me much. Why are you up and…inappropriately dressed?”
I frown at him. “Inappropriately dressed?” I demand, looking at my outfit. “Sorry, Winston Churchill. I didn’t know we had a dress code.”
“I’m pretty sure you know you ought to be wearing a bra when we’ve got thirty strangers working on the property.”
I glance down again, and like clockwork, my nipples decide to stand at attention. “Oh. Well, no one’s here right now. I just wanted to see if the furniture from the attic was still in front.”
He scrubs his hand over his face again. “It is. Mystery solved. And we’re not keeping it, so go back to fucking bed.”
Thank God I don’t have to drive out to the dump, because I absolutely would have. “The dogs are up, so I’m just going to check on some stuff. Go back to sleep. Sorry I woke you.”
“Put on some clothes first,” he barks as he returns inside, letting the door slam shut behind him.
I ignore him—the crew won’t be here for hours—and continue on to the front of the house, where the oaks block the early morning sun and the furniture remains stacked in a big pile—tables atop shelves, bed frames disassembled and leaning haphazardly against the surrounding trees. Fortunately the little desk is only on top of a credenza. I’m in the process of dragging a bookcase over so I can climb up when Charlie walks around the house, now in a T-shirt and shorts.
I flush. I’d rather he not be out here to witness my insanity. “I thought you were going back to bed.”
“Yeah, that was the plan, but I had a sudden image of you climbing on sixteen poorly balanced pieces of furniture to get something and here you are.Why?”
My exhale is half embarrassed and half exasperated. I wish he’d stayed in bed—then I wouldn’t have had to explain this thing that might sound a little quirky. Possibly worse than quirky. “You’ve got to promise you won’t make fun of me.”
“That’s…a really tall order.”
“Fine,” I reply, beginning to scale the bookcase, which sways slightly beneath my weight. “Then you don’t need to know.”
He was ten feet away, but I’ve barely climbed up one shelfbefore his hands are around my waist and he’s setting me back on the ground. For a single moment, I’m wildly conscious of those hands of his, in a way I shouldn’t be. “I won’t make fun of you,” he says, letting me go. “Tell me.”
I don’t actually believe him, but it’ll all come out eventually. “You remember our first night here?”
“Of course. It’s the closest we’ve ever come to having sex. I’m not about to forget that anytime soon.”
I roll my eyes. “We werenotabout to have sex. But anyway, it wasn’t the mouse that woke me up. I was tapped.”
“Tapped.”
