[ - ]
Table of Contents [Report This]
Printer Chapter or Story Microsoft Word Chapter or Story
- Text Size +
Chapter 133

When Claire went back to work a few days after returning from her honeymoon, she was immediately accosted by her coworkers.

“Mrs. Turner!” cried Carey, one of their receptionists, jumping up from her desk to hug Claire. “How was the trip?”

“Amazing,” Claire sighed, smiling. “Greece is gorgeous; I’d love to go back sometime, maybe in spring or fall.”

“Ahh, glad to hear it! We got your postcard here; it looks absolutely beautiful,” said Carey.

“Oh, good, I’m glad the postcards made it here before we got back. We weren’t sure,” Claire laughed, remembering her scramble to mail out postcards to those she had promised – the office staff, Dianna, her parents, and her grandparents. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal, but with only two weeks and so much to see, she’d gotten the cards out with little time to spare.

She found her postcard of the Acropolis thumb-tacked to the bulletin board in the break room, along with a couple of pictures someone had taken at the wedding reception – one of Jamie and her cutting the cake, and one of Laureen and her together, their arms slung around each other. The day had been such a whirlwind that Claire barely remembered posing for that picture, but she thought Tim might have taken it.

“Claire!” a familiar voice squealed, and Claire turned away from the pictures to see none other than Laureen herself bounding into the room. She grabbed Claire up in a hug, asked how the honeymoon had been, and then burst, “I have something huge to tell you! I’ve been waiting, like, two weeks!” She danced from foot to foot, her eyes large and animated.

More than curious, Claire asked, “What??” but Laureen shook her head, casting a mysterious look.

“Not here. Can we do lunch?”

“Yeah, definitely! I can’t wait to hear it!”

Normally, the curiosity would have killed her, but thankfully, her first day back was going to be a busy one. Her schedule was practically booked solid with patients, and the first one was due to arrive in just ten minutes. Hoping to escape to her exam station before she ran into anyone else, she hastily reached for a fresh timecard for the month and started to scrawl her name across the top. Claire R- she wrote out of habit, but stopped herself before she could add the “-y-a-n” of her maiden name. In bold lines, she scratched a letter “T” over the “R,” turning its tail into an awkward “U,” and finished writing her new last name. Claire Turner, the card read, when she jammed it into the clock to punch in and then dropped it into its slot on the wall.

She smiled to herself as she walked across the hall to her cubicle, wondering how long it would take her to adjust to using Jamie’s last name.

***

It took Claire all morning to get back into the swing of things, for, between the last days of harried preparation before the wedding and the long honeymoon, she hadn’t worked in several weeks. By noon, she felt less rusty, but was already tired. She liked her job, but she couldn’t wait to get off.

It was Jamie’s first day back at the office as well, and since he didn’t get off until five, she planned to go right home to the apartment that afternoon and attempt to make a nice dinner for the two of them. It seemed the wifely thing to do, and for now, she sort of liked the quaint idea of having a hot meal on the table, á la June Cleaver, when her husband came home from work. That would get old fast, she was sure; she wasn’t a very good cook and certainly didn’t uphold the view that a working woman should also be expected to do everything around the house while her husband just sat around… but tonight, at least, she would humor Jamie and play the part.

She was already thinking about what she might cook for dinner when she walked into the break room to punch out for lunch, making a mental list of things to get at the grocery store on her way home from work. Then she saw Laureen and instantly remembered their brief conversation that morning. “Hey, are we still on for lunch?” she asked her friend, raising her eyebrows inquisitively. She couldn’t wait to hear this “huge” thing Laureen had to tell her.

“Yeah, of course! Just lemme punch out!” Laureen quickly slid her timecard in and out of the clock, jammed it back into its slot, and grinned at Claire. “Let’s go!”

It was a beautiful day outside, so they walked down the street to a small, shabby café that didn’t get a lot of business, except for a few loyal regulars. Choosing a booth away from the few others who were there eating lunch, Claire and Laureen studied the menus that were already on the table and waited for a waitress to come. Claire’s eyes scanned over the menu, but she realized she was not really reading it and wouldn’t be able to until she knew what was up with Laureen.

“So what’s your big news??” she asked finally, looking across the table in anticipation.

Laureen glanced up from her menu and beamed, her cheeks blushing pink, but instead of spilling, she said, “Can we wait until after someone takes our orders? I just… I don’t want it overheard,” she added, lowering her voice.

“Oh… okay, that’s fine.” Claire was thoroughly mystified now, and it was hard to concentrate on the menu long enough to figure out what she wanted. She was pretty sure that whatever Laureen wanted to tell her was good news, from the way she kept smiling about it, but it had to be news of a certain kind for Laureen to want to keep it so private. What exactly that kind was, Claire didn’t know. She was dying to find out.

Then the waitress came, Claire ordered the first thing she saw on the menu, the cheeseburger basket. As the waitress scribbled down their orders on a pad of paper and took the laminated menus, she had the fleeting thought that it would be nice to have a big, greasy American burger, after being out in another country for two weeks, but then her thoughts returned to Laureen and her “huge” news, and she rounded on her friend.

“Okay, we’re in the clear – now tell me!!” she begged.

“Okay…” Laureen said, leaning across the table, her eyes shining with the look of a teenage girl who was about to divulge a big secret, “… so. You’ll never guess what happened after I left your reception.”

Wow, she really has been waiting to tell me this a long time, thought Claire, flashing back to her wedding night. “What happened??”

“Well…” Laureen grinned. “I guess I should say, you’ll never guess who I left with.”

“Who??” Claire asked with interest, trying to remember what guys had been there, since she knew it had to be a guy. “Please don’t tell me it was Tim.”

“NO!” Laureen gasped, exploding with giggles. “No way. Tim and I danced one dance, and that’s it.”

Claire remembered seeing the two of them dance, sometime after Laureen had gotten away from her groomsmen, Greg. She’d apologized profusely for pairing Laureen with him, since he was the friend of Jamie’s she despised the most, ever since the incident in the bar a few years before, when she’d socked him in the face. But she hadn’t really heard what Laureen actually thought of him. “It wasn’t Greg, was it?” she asked cautiously, hoping for another emphatic “no.” Maybe she just didn’t know the guy well enough, but every time she was in the same room with him, she just wanted to hit him again; he always seemed like such an arrogant asshole.

“Oh, God, no!” Laureen exclaimed, wrinkling her nose. “I think you were right about him being a jerk; I would never go anywhere with a guy like that.”

“Okay, so…?” There was really only one more guy Claire could think of that would excite Laureen so… and he happened to be the one who would probably excite her the most. “Nick??”

Laureen’s face broke into a huge grin, and Claire felt her eyes widen. “You left with Nick? What happened??” she wanted to know.

“Well, he was pretty wasted by the time you and Jamie left, so I drove him home. I walked him inside, cause he was almost falling over, and I got him to the downstairs bedroom, and we were just talking, and then… he kissed me!”

Claire’s heart performed a strange flip-flop, but she was too surprised to think much of it. “He did??”

Laureen grinned, blushing. “Uh-huh,” she said with a little giggle. She reminded Claire of Dianna, gushing about her first kiss the day after it had happened back in eighth grade. She knew Laureen had been kissed before, probably many times, but still, she could understand why this time would be particularly exciting – he was Nick Carter, and Laureen had adored him long before she’d actually known him. It had to have been almost magical for her, no matter how wasted Nick had been when he did it.

“So what happened??” she probed, curious to hear more. In a way, it was easy to imagine it happening – Nick drunk, Laureen trying to take care of him, and whoops, somehow their lips had ended up together. And yet, it also surprised her. Despite knowing about Laureen’s fan crush on Nick, she’d never really considered the idea of the two of them being together. To her, it had always seemed like the classic “freshman nobody crushing on the star senior quarterback” scenario. It wasn’t that Nick was “out of Laureen’s league,” exactly, because he wasn’t – he’d proven that he could date regular girls. But he’d never shown any romantic interest in Laureen, at least not to her, and so she’d never really given that hook-up much thought.

“Well, I kissed back… obviously,” she giggled again, “and… well, we sorta ended up making out… on the bed.” Claire’s eyes widened further, until Laureen added quickly, “But he kinda passed out before we could get any farther than that. I mean, not that we would have… well, I don’t know… I have no idea what he was thinking, but I’m kinda glad we didn’t get any farther – I would have felt really weird, you know?”

Claire nodded, not knowing quite what to say. “So… have you talked to him since all this?” she wondered.

“Well, I did the morning after… I didn’t really want to leave him alone, cause he’d had a lot to drink, so I ended up just staying, and so we talked a little the next morning. He felt really bad, like he’d taken advantage of me or something, but really, it wasn’t like that at all! I wanted it as much as he did! I mean, I wasn’t expecting him to kiss me, but when he did… wow. Even drunk, he’s incredible,” she gushed, her expression radiant.

Claire couldn’t help but smile, though there was a sense of wistfulness tugging at her heart. “He is a very good kisser,” she agreed, remembering the sparks that had flown the first time he’d kissed her, in the movie theater after King Kong. The memory was bittersweet now.

“Yeah, so… I haven’t really talked to him since,” said Laureen, and her smile faded. “It was sort of awkward in the morning; I was kind of self-conscious around him when he was sober, like I usually am, so I left in a hurry, and that was it. I guess part of me was hoping he would call or something, but he hasn’t. Probably stupid of me, right? I mean, he’s Nick Carter… he’s got better things to do and prettier girls than me to see.”

Claire’s heart squeezed with empathy. “Aww, Laureen, no, don’t say that. Nick’s really not as shallow as he might seem. He’s a guy, so he can be shallow, but he’s really not. Hell, he saw something in me, and I’m certainly no supermodel,” she said with a dry laugh. “And for the record, I know he’s in LA right now, and I think he spent his birthday in the Keys, so maybe that’s why he hasn’t called – he just hasn’t been around.”

“Ohh, really? I didn’t know he was leaving.”

“Yeah… he mentioned it to me sometime before the wedding, and I just got an email from him last night. Kristin had her baby!” She’d just remembered the email, a short blurb saying he was glad she’d enjoyed Greece and giving the basic details of Kevin and Kristin’s new baby, Brayden.

Laureen’s eyes lit up. “Really??” she squealed. “Didn’t know that either! Boy or girl??”

“I don’t think it’s out in the media yet, but – boy,” she said, and told Laureen the specifics she could remember from Nick’s message.

“Aww, that’s so exciting!”

Claire smiled. “I’ll forward you pictures, if he sends some; I don’t think he’d mind. And if you want me to put in a good word for you, maybe suggest that he call you, I can,” she offered. Surprised though she was about the news that Laureen and Nick had spent a night together, she thought they might make a cute couple. Laureen certainly cared about Nick, and now that she’d gotten to know him more, Claire knew it was more than just a “fan” kind of adoration. And if Nick took the time to really get to know her, she could see him liking Laureen too. She would be good for him. And now that Claire was married, she wanted to see Nick find happiness with someone else, a woman who would love him and treat him right, not hurt him… the way she had.

Her heart turned over again at the thought.

Laureen smiled nervously. “Thanks… I’ll let you know,” she said, after some hesitation. “I don’t want to come on too strong and assume things… I mean, I know he was drunk, so maybe it meant nothing to him, and I’d just look silly if he knew how much it meant to me.”

Classic fear of rejection, thought Claire; who couldn’t relate to that? She understood how Laureen felt and nodded. “Okay. Well, I won’t say anything for now then, but if you ever do want a little help, just say the word. He’s a guy; sometimes they just need a little bit of pushing from us chicks,” she said with a wink.

Laureen laughed and nodded in agreement. “Thanks, Claire. I’m glad you understand. I wanted to tell you so bad, but I was wondering how you would take it… I mean, even though you’re married, he’s still your ex, you know? I don’t want to go breaking one of those classic rules of friendship – don’t go after your friend’s exes…”

Claire chuckled. “Nah, that’s okay. Nick’s still a great friend of mine, and of course I’ll always have a special place in my heart for him, but you’re right – I just got married, and it’s over between us. If there’s chance for you and Nick, go for it – I’d be all for it. I just want him to be happy.”

She could say the words, even believe they were true, but when she thought back to this lunch in the distant future, she would remember the way her heart had flip-flopped when Laureen revealed that Nick had kissed her.

***