“Yes, before that, I was horrified by my curves,” she said. She could feel herself blush even after so many years.
“Believe me, I was enjoying the more confident you,” he told her. “You and Sage, always inseparable, came walking up to us with a couple other girls—I can’t remember their names—and you were carrying a bottle of Sage’s grandma’s lemonade. That stuff was to die for. I think you were practicing a new way of sashaying, ’cause your hips were swiveling and shaking the entire time, and I could barely tear my eyes away.”
“I was not doing that!” she said with another laugh.
“Anyway,” he went on, “you said you wanted to talk to me about something, and I was more than willing to break away from the group. We walked to the other side of the barn, and you asked me if I was going to the barn dance that Friday.”
“Oh, my gosh, I forgot about that part,” Grace said. How much more forward could a young girl get?
“I said that I was going if I could take you as my date,” he said. “And then you handed me the bottle of lemonade and told me I looked hot. I was burning up at that point. You looked up at me, licked your lips, and I was your slave from that moment on. I leaned down and stole the kiss I’d been dreaming about for the past month straight.”
His fingers continued caressing her neck the entire time he told the story, and the way he said the words made her stomach quiver and her heart race. He hadn’t forgotten a single detail of a moment that had meant so much to her.
“I can’t believe you remember all that,” she sighed, leaning into him without even realizing it.
“That was the day you became my girl. I asked you out again that night at the dance, and then we had many more barn kisses . . . not to mention other things later on.”
“I must say, you were quite patient, Cam. I moved pretty slowly.”
“It was enough to just hold you in my arms and taste your sweet lips,” he whispered, leaning down and kissing her cheek, causing another shudder to pass through her.
“Some days I wish we could turn back time and live in those moments forever, the moments when young love was so powerful, and summer nights were something to treasure.”
“You don’t have to let go of those moments,” he told her. “You can hold on to them forever.”
“But you have to grow up, Cam. You have to become an adult. The real world demands that we don’t live on love and dreams alone,” she said with a sad shake of her head. “We have wins and losses, and sometimes the losses are too much to bear . . .”
“Who says that?”
“Everyone. I can’t name a specific person.”
“Well, they’re all stupid. Because I think you can live on love and dreams alone. Sure, you have to work, and you have to be responsible, but then you get these moments, these perfect moments in the day, when the rest of the world falls away, and you close your eyes, and you remember the past, and look ahead to the future. To lose your dreams is to lose a piece of your soul, and no one should give that up.”
Grace was quiet for several moments as she tried to process his words. How she wanted to believe what he said. But hadn’t her life shown her that dreams had never been enough? Once she’d wanted nothing more than to be Cam’s wife and to live the fairy tale forever. But her dreams had been shattered, forever changing her.
“If we all lived in a dream world, then nothing would ever get done,” she said sadly.
“I came to see you once when you were in New York.”
His words stopped her from what she’d been about to say. She repeated them back to be sure he’d said what she thought.
“When?” she finally asked.
“You’d been there for about a year. You were going to school, and I stopped by your campus. I was going to surprise you. I’d just finished my law degree and it had been years since we’d spoken, and I was in New York for a conference. I was too close not to see you.” His voice faded away.
“Why didn’t you follow through? Sometimes New York was pretty rough. I think I would have really loved seeing anyone from back home.” She didn’t want to give too much of herself away—didn’t want to tell him that he was the person from home she would have most liked to see.
“I found you on the campus, but you were with a group of people and you were laughing. I thought you looked really happy. I didn’t want to risk interrupting that. I’d heard you’d had a rough go of things for a while.”
“Yes. Even without me saying a word, I’m sure the gossip stretched all the way back to Sterling,” she said with bitterness.
“It’s not that people like to gossip. It’s that they care about their own when you’re from a small town, Grace.”
“I didn’t need them to worry about me, Cam. I was doing just fine.”
“In two seconds flat, you go from open and trusting to instantly closed off again. I was once your friend and your lover. You don’t need to shut me out,” he told her, turning her head and forcing her to look at him.
Grace had to fight the sudden urge not to cry.
“Well, Cam, I think our ‘stroll down memory lane’ is over,” she said, untangling herself from him and standing.
“Why do you always run the second you start feeling something?” he asked, not chasing her but sitting there and holding her gaze.
“Because I learned a long time ago that to open myself up only hurts me. I learned that dreams are for fools, and the past is best left where it belongs.”