Another Summer Read Online Free Page B

wanting something I can’t have. Just what is it you’re sorry for, Andrew.”
    “That I was such a coward.”
    At last she looked at him. “Oh, is that what happened?”
    “I’m not the man I was then.”
    “Too bad, I really liked that man. Actually, I loved him. With one small exception, of course.”
    The anger didn’t bother him. The pain did. How easily he’d convinced himself the wounds he’d inflicted would heal and that she would be whole again and happy without him. “Do you ever wonder–”
    She turned on him. “Don’t you dare ask me that. What I wonder, what I think about, what I feel are none of your business anymore.”
    “Then I’ll tell you how it is with me.” He ached to touch her. Just holding her hand would be enough. It seemed impossible that he had once taken the hundreds of small, day-to-day moments they’d shared for granted.
    “There isn’t a day I don’t think about you. There are times I’ll see a woman walking alone on the beach and let myself believe it’s you. Some days someone will knock on the door, and for the seconds it takes to answer I tell myself you’re the one waiting for me.”
    “How long has this been going on?”
    “I can’t say. I’m not sure when it started.”
    “I know exactly how long it’s been with me.” She stared at the liquid in her glass, brought it to her lips, and finished the wine in two long swallows. “What happened that finally made you realize you’d made a mistake?”
    “One day I took a hard look at myself and all the other men I knew chasing the endless summer and realized we’d bought into something that doesn’t exist.”
    Her eyes flashed an antagonistic challenge. “I was hoping for something better.”
    “I had to grow up to understand what I had lost. By then it was too late.”
    “Lost? You didn’t lose me, Andrew, you discarded me.”
    He flinched. None of the arguments he’d used to justify abandoning her made sense anymore. In hindsight he understood the fear that had consumed him the day he was told he had cancer. He remembered the growing, desperate need to grab hold of whatever time was left to him. Most of all he remembered the shame that came with the prospect of losing his manhood. Facing testicular cancer hit him harder than anything else ever had, stealing his youth and with it the belief that he was invincible.
    He’d reacted the way he had reacted to every crisis he’d faced before he met Cheryl, pulling into himself and closing out those who would have helped him. He battled the cancer and chemotherapy and radiation alone, dropping out of college, coming up with excuses at the last minute not to meet Cheryl for holidays and birthdays, lying toher about difficult classes and intractable professors. He came through the experience so completely focused on himself all he could think about was his determination to savor every moment left to him, to experience everything life had to offer, to refuse ever again to settle, or compromise, or bargain.
    Cheryl turned back to the man and boy and watched them until they went inside a house at the end of the block. “If you realized you’d made a mistake all those years ago, why did you wait until now to look for me?”
    “You were married. Happily, I thought.”
    She nodded. “For a while we actually managed to convince ourselves that we were the perfect couple portrayed by the media.” She paused as if struggling with what she would say next. “But a marriage gets a little crowded when another person becomes involved,” she said finally.
    “Jerry was unfaithful?”
    She held up her empty glass as if to ward off the question. Andrew reached behind him for the bottle of wine. As he poured, he said, “I know you. There’s no way you would ever–”
    “You
knew
me, Andrew,” she reminded him. “The breakup was my fault.”
    The revelation stunned him. “There was another man? What happened? Why aren’t you with him now?”
    She stood motionless, her