Love Untold

Love Untold: Chapter 28

Love Untold: Chapter 28

Race smoothed out the piece of notepad paper on Chrissie’s desk.  He found it earlier this week while looking for a pen to jot down a reminder to call his racing sponsor and reschedule a meeting with the athletic clothing company.  When he saw the words that his wife wrote in an attempt to apologize to him, he couldn’t believe his eyes.  The notepad had fallen out of her work bag that he knocked to the floor, and his heart almost stopped.

“...It’s sad, so sad...sorry seems to be the hardest word...”

The lyrics to the song had clearly been written in the last two weeks because underneath that page had been a note about a doctor’s appointment.

Slowly, he dug out Chrissie’s box from the desk drawer, almost afraid that his memory was as bad as hers.  But no...as soon as he held the letter written years ago, right after they first met, he trembled because similarities were just too astonishing.

Race,  I’m sorry for...well, you know why.  This past week has been wonderful, and you are a great guy, but there’s just too much to overcome.  We live in different states, for one thing.  And after my last relationship, I’m not ready for anything more.  I just started a new business, and I’m on my own, and I’m happy the way things are.

Do you remember that song we heard the other night in the bar?  Sorry seems to be the hardest word.  Then there was that line about what do I have to do to make you love me...well, right now, good-bye is the hardest word, and you don’t have to do anything.  Chrissie.

With only the desk lamp illuminating the dark room, he sat there, fingering both letters and thinking about that last day he shared with Chrissie at her mother’s resort.

*****

The fist-sized snowball whizzed past his head, and he ducked behind a ponderosa pine, just in case Chrissie launched another chunk of snow at him.  The woman had terrifying aim!  

He couldn’t believe he just asked her to marry him.  They’d been in the middle of the biggest snowball fight he’d ever seen, and she was pitching large pellets of snow at him, and he was dodging, and then he just blurted it out, “Marry me, Chris.”

A wayward ball smashed him in the ear, but he didn’t notice.  She stopped, stared, grinned, said, “No!” and scooped up more snow.

Somehow since then, he and Chrissie managed to get away from the other participants of Hilltop Resort’s Annual Snowball Fight, and now they waged a private war on the edge of a stand of trees that lined the back end of the resort’s property.   He heard laughter to his right and whirled around just in time to get plugged with a ball to his chest.  

Chrissie flashed a grin at him and darted into the trees.  He took off after her.  Back at the resort and the Fight proper, large stadium lights lit up the area, but here, with only the moon glowing down on the bright snow that covered the ground, he could barely make out her black parka as it flitted through the pines and firs.  “If you get me lost, you’ll feel really guilty about it!” he yelled as he followed her tracks deeper into the mountainside forest.

Her voice called out in the night, “Turn around and go back if you’re scared!”

“I’m not scared,” he muttered, keeping a gloved hand around a ready snowball and his eyes on the trees.  After a minute, he came to a stop and frowned.  Dang it!  She circled back and now his tracks mixed with hers.

Icy cold and hard slammed into his back.  “Gotcha!”

He turned and let his own snowball fly.  It splattered against a cropping of boulders where her head disappeared behind.  “Okay, I give up.  You win.”

“Aw, you’re no fun!” she laughed, not showing herself.  Race silently crouched down and crept through the snow and around the rocks.  She was peeking out the other side.  He rushed up and caught her in his arms before she could do more than squeak.

“Now, I’ve got you.”

She twisted in his arms and shoved a handful of snow in his mouth, giggling as he spit and sputtered, but he did not let her loose.  “You think that’s funny?”

“I think it’s hilarious,” she replied, wrapping her wet, cold hands around his neck.  He stared at her, loving how the moonlight mirrored in her eyes.  “Well?  I win.  Don’t I get a trophy or a prize or something?”

“Oh, yeah...I’ve got a great prize,” he said as he lowered his mouth to hers.  She responded eagerly, and he hastily stripped off his gloves, wanting to touch her.

“Oh!  Your hands are cold,” she gasped as he cradled her face.

“I was wearing gloves,” he said, running a fingertip along her lips.  And his hands weren’t nearly as freezing as hers were, but he wasn’t going to mention that.  She played with the hair on the back of his head, smiling beautifully at him, making him drown in those blue pools, and he couldn’t fight the growing emotion in his chest any longer.

“Marry me, Chris,” he heard himself say again.

The hair teasing stopped as she lost her smile.  A twig snapped nearby, and they both glanced in that direction.  Chrissie groaned as she saw her sister disappearing into the woods with that blond ski instructor.  “My sister,” she sighed and wriggled out of his grasp.  “Always got a point to prove.”

“What do you mean?”

She chewed on her lip for a moment, and then shook her head and smiled at him.  “Nothing.  Maybe we should get back.”

He wasn’t ready to go back yet, but he didn’t say that either.  Race allowed her to lead him out of the trees, because frankly, he didn’t know where they were, and he couldn’t see the lights from the resort from here.  They joined some people at the bonfire and sipped on hot chocolate while many of the other guests still battled on.  The night was getting late, and he wanted to spend some more alone time with Chrissie before she eventually shut herself up in her room for the night.

After the time she spent the night with him in his room, she hadn’t been back.  Oh, he tried to coax her into his suite a few times, but she’d only smile and demur.  And he overheard Dena giving her a hard time about it once.  Since this was his last night here, he wanted to try one more time.

He walked with her to the back door of the suite she shared with her sister and gave her a long, heated kiss, hot enough to melt the icicles that hung from the roof.  “Spend the night with me,” he murmured as he trailed more kisses down her throat, unzipping her coat to access more skin.  She arched against him, combing her fingers through his hair and moaning.

“I...I can’t...”

“Yes, you can,” he tried again.  “It’s my last night here.  I want to be with you.”

“Race...”

He stopped his recreations with her neck and gazed seriously at her.  “Is it because I asked you to marry me?”

She laughed, but it sounded hollow.  “No.  I know you were just kidding around, but...”

“But what?”

“But...I can’t stay with you...I’m not like that...like Dena...”

He stepped back a little to really, truly see her face.  “Like Dena?  Of course, you’re not like your sister.  I never thought you were.”  Her sister was a nosey, bed-hopping tease.  In the three days he’d been here, he saw Dena Hill with no less than five different guys...six if he counted the ski instructor tonight.  But he didn’t say any of that.  In those three days, he also noticed how close the sisters were, and he didn’t want Chrissie upset with him because of his low opinion of her best friend.

She nibbled on her bottom lip again, a sign she was nervous about something.  “Then why do you want me to spend the night with you?”

Okay...tell her he was in love with her?  Or just mention the fact that he suffered a continuous hard-on since the first time she kissed him?  Which reason would make her flee not as fast as the other?

He spent too much time deliberating, and she pushed him away.  “You do think I’m like that, don’t you?  I knew I shouldn’t have spent that one night with you.  Now, you think I’m easy and just playing hard to get!”

Ah, hell...her eyes were darkening.  That was never a good sign.  He’d seen glimpses of her tantrums this week, but so far, none of them had been pointed at him.  “Chrissie, I don’t think that about you at all,” he said, hoping to appease her before she started hurling more than snowballs at him.  “I think you’re beautiful and wonderful and almost perfect in every way--”

“Almost perfect?”

He grinned sheepishly.  “Well, you do have this issue with your temper...”

“You haven’t seen anything yet, Race,” she threatened and stomped away.  He couldn’t let her go, not like this.  

“Chrissie, wait,” he groaned, rushing after her.  “Please, let me explain...”

“There’s nothing you can say that I want to listen to,” she grumped, shrugging off the hand he put on her shoulder.  “We’ve known each other for only three days--”

“And yet in those three days, I met a beautiful, energetic, fascinating woman who has stolen my heart.  I’m not about to let that go,” he told the back of her head since she wouldn’t look at him.

“But I’m not going to sleep with someone I met less than a week ago!”

He walked around to stand in front of her.  She stared at the ground, kicking at a clump of snow that’d been shoveled off the path.  “Time has no meaning for something like this.  I know you feel it, too.  I saw it in your eyes while the moon highlighted them tonight.”

“But...three days, Race!  I don’t know anything about you.  I’m just not made that way.  Please...”  She brought her gaze up to him.  “Please, make this easy on me and let me go.”

Such fear...so much confusion and torment in those lovely eyes of her...  Race stepped aside.  But as she warily scraped past him, he said, “You can’t run from me forever, Chris.  I meant what I asked you earlier, and I’ll ask it again and again until you finally agree to marry me.”

She blinked at him for a second, but she still vanished around a corner and was gone.

*****

Race sighed as the memory took hold of him.  When he woke that next morning all those years ago, he found the note under his door and discovered that Chrissie had hopped an early flight back to her home.  It took him exactly four hours to find out where she lived.  All he had to do was approach her mother, say he was in love with her daughter and he planned to marry her.  Dolly Hill gave him Chrissie’s address, her phone number, her business number, her birthday, a detailed list of her favorite color, favorite food and favorite flower, and the name, number and address of a very good wedding coordinator.

The Dolly proceeded to take him on a tour of the resort, pointing out that the large dining room would be perfect for a wedding reception and that the mountain was absolutely breathtaking during the early parts of the summer when the indigo and yellow columbines were in full bloom.
Race made no comment about marrying that next summer, seeing as how that was only three months away, but he fell in love with Chrissie at first kiss, so it wasn’t impossible, just improbable.  First, he’d have to get her to see him again, maybe date a little, take some trips together...convince her that his intention was not to sleep with her, but to love her.

That had been his challenge then.  

And it seemed that challenge was repeating.

Dr. Malik’s words from the emergency room came back to him.  “She married you, didn’t she?  So, you must have done something right...”  He got Chrissie to fall in love with him once before.  He could do it again, especially since there didn’t seem to be a cure or treatment for her odd memory loss, and his day trip to the Ozarks that morning helped to clear his head.

He folded both letters and stored them in the desk, just as the music began, Aerosmith’s “Lay It Down.”  Race glanced at his watch.  1 A.M.  She was early tonight.

Dena stumbled, bleary-eyed and disheveled, from the spare bedroom as he walked out of the office.  “I’ve got her,” he said.  “Go back to bed.”

“Well, at least now we know it’s not the sleeping pills doing this,” Dena said with a giant yawn.

“What did you replace them with anyway?”

She shrugged.  “Generic Tylenol...looked exactly like the other pills.”  She yawned again and said, “Have fun...wake me if you need anything, or if she starts stripping again.”

Race smiled and shook his head.  Chrissie’s sleepwalking had been a source of concern for both him and Dena.  Neither knew what to make of it, and since they could not schedule an appointment to the sleeping clinic until next week, they had blamed the sleeping pills.  Dena suggested switching the prescription with something else to see what happens.  Dolly told him about how Chrissie did this when she was a child, a stress-related disorder triggered by the death of her father, but he had never seen her do it until Sunday night, two weeks ago.

Had it really been two weeks?  After surviving the doctor appointments, they settled into a comfortable routine.  Chrissie went back to work and buried herself in her job to hide from everything -- him, her memory loss, her family.  Her two sessions with Dr. Gray had been the only breaks from the monotony of going to work and coming home.  And other than training with his bike club today, Race did the same.  Dolly went back to her mountain and called everyday, but Dena still resided in the spare bedroom, and Chrissie felt content to keep her there.  

Race, on the other hand, wanted his sister-in-law gone.  He liked Dena most of the time, and he appreciated all the help she gave him to cope with the status of his marriage, but he hadn’t been alone -- during the daytime -- with Chrissie in a week.  They lived in the same house, but they were almost like strangers.  Friendly strangers, but strangers all the same.  They ate together, talked to one another, but any time he got within a few feet of her, she scurried away, making excuses about having something important to take care of.  And they hadn’t fought once since he accused her of being in love with another man.  Whenever Chrissie got a spark of anger in her eyes, she’d look away as though feeling guilty about it, and Race wanted to see her angry, if only because she seemed dead inside without her temper.  It was a part of her, and he loved every part of her.  

The only real time they spent together was at night, when he got to hold her in his arms and breathe in her scent, and only then because she wasn’t awake to know what was happening.  It broke Race’s heart to watch his wife every night, wandering through the house unaware.  But he found that he learned a lot about her during those short minutes -- once, she was up for almost two hours, trying on shoes and the selection of evening gowns in their closet  -- and he saw...not the Chrissie he’d been married to, or the Chrissie she woke up as that dreaded Sunday morning after her birthday, but a woman in between.  She talked to him, she looked at him without that fear and wary she’d shown this last week, but she didn’t demonstrate any evidence that she knew him.

First things first...get her out of the basement.  He was going to have to put a lock on the basement door now that he knew it wasn’t the pills causing this.  To know that she walked down those stairs in her sleep...he got sick, just thinking about.