Moment in Time Read online

  As I make my way down the hallway to each room, I’m surprised by how therapeutic the work feels. It’s good to get my hands moving, working, doing something other than ringing them out of nerves as I wait for cancer marker results and white blood cell counts. I feel a small stab of guilt at giving my mother such a hard time at home when she asks me to do chores. She may not have had cancer, but she’d been struggling along with me just the same. Since listening to music on the iPod while working was prohibited, I hummed a little Alicia Keyes tune as I pushed the cart down to the next room on my list. I wrap my knuckles against the door, hoping it’s loud enough so I don’t walk in on someone in their underwear again like I did in room three-eighteen. By the sick smile on the middle-aged pervert’s face, I’m convinced he’d heard my knock and wanted to get caught in his whitey tighties. Instead of playing along, I simply shut the door and moved on to the next room, making a note about the incident in case Grace got a call.

  A few seconds after my knock, I hear nothing. So I knock again. This time, I knock a little louder. Still nothing. A lot of the guests have gone down to the restaurant for breakfast, making it a good time to blow through as many of the guest rooms as I can before they come back.

  When no one calls out, I use my housekeeping key to unlock the door and push it open. As is standard, I leave the cart out in the hallway and grab towels and bath supplies for this room, which is marked as having a long-term guest. I hum as I walk into the room and push through the closed bathroom door, deciding to tackle that first.

  But the bathroom isn’t empty. I gasp and drop the clean towels to the floor when I see a naked man stepping out of the shower. Firm, wet curves of the man’s ass are the first thing I notice before I lift my gaze to his strong shoulders. As he turns around quickly, my eyes fixate on his washboard stomach and—.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  I look at the man’s face and suck in a deep breath.

  “Bobby!” Opening my mouth, I can’t quite find my words. I step out of the bathroom and glance at the numbers on the door. Three-twenty-one. “I knocked. I did.”

  I take another step back, feeling heat singe my cheeks once again. Fuck it. I’m leaving the towels on the floor. I’ll finish the room when Bobby isn’t here.

  I turn to leave, but Bobby says, “Jenna, wait.”

  I don’t want to see him. Feeling humiliated and facing humiliation are two totally different things.

  “What for?”

  “You called me.”

  I turn around, remembering my stupid moment of weakness when I couldn’t find Bobby at the Inn last night.

  “It’s no big deal. Forget it.”

  He reaches around me and shuts the guest room door. When I turn around to protest, I see that Bobby has wrapped a towel around his waist.

  “I’m not supposed to be in a guest room with the door closed. I’ll get fired.”

  “I know the owner.”

  I reach for the door, but he holds it closed.

  “We have to talk.”

  I know he’s right. But here is not the right time.

  “I’ll get fired if I stay here, Bobby. It doesn’t matter that you’re Beverly’s nephew. Grace won’t tolerate us being in a room with the door closed. She told us as much this morning.”

  I pull the door open and take a quick glance down the hall. Sharon’s cart is down the far end of the hallway, but she’s not there. The hallway is empty.

  “I wanted to talk to you about the other night,” he says delicately.

  “Forget it. I need to go back to work.”

  I walk into the hallway and unlock the wheels on the linen cart. Before I can push it, Bobby says, “The offer is still good.”

  I turn to him. He’s standing in the doorway with the towel loosely wrapped around his waist and he’s gorgeous. Every inch of this man is perfection. My fingers are itching to run along the hard lines of his body, just as they’d been the other night. Oh, God, the other night!

  “Thank you,” I say. “But I have to work.”

  “You don’t work all day. I’ll be around. And now you know where my room is.” His lips lift into a tantalizing grin that makes my knees weak.

  “Okay, later,” I say just to get away from him. Would he be around? Maybe I’ll get lucky and he won’t find me and I won’t have to explain why I’d acted so crazy on the beach the other night.

  My heart pounds as I knock on the door to the next room on my list. Or maybe I’ll just get lucky.

  #

  Chapter Six

  Bobby

  Sigmund Freud said that there is no such thing as accidents. People do things deliberately, even if they don’t have the balls to admit it. Well, he might not have said it like that, but I can’t argue the truth in it. Going over to The Bluffs the other night may have been a mistake, but even though I didn’t know why, I’d wanted to see Jenna. Why else would I have gotten two dinners for us to eat?

  I hadn’t expected her to be so unraveled when I found her. The dinners had been long forgotten when I’d seen just how broken she was. When she’d walked into the bathroom this morning, I’d been so happy to see her that I’d forgotten I was naked. The look on her face was priceless and nearly made me laugh. But then her reaction was so different than what I’d expected after the other night. Perhaps she was embarrassed. But I’d love to know if it was from her behavior the other night or at not expecting to find me naked. This time of day I’d normally take a swim in the pool. By five o’clock, guests are usually headed back into the Inn from the beach or the pool to get cleaned up for dinner. That made it the perfect time to do laps in the pool without having too many people splashing around me.

  But not today. Today I am deliberately seeking out Jenna. It had taken some searching, but I finally find her as she’s walking back home after her shift at the Inn. Her face is turned down as she walks, as if she’s watching the white foam of the surf make lines on the wet sand as she walks barefoot along the water’s edge. She’s oblivious to the little boy running up the beach chasing a ball. The red ball hits her leg and bounces into the surf. Only then does she glance up and run after the ball, handing it to the little boy who clearly seems upset that his toy is now wet.

  A stab of pain slices through my heart. This little boy is about the same age Wyatt would be if he’d lived. With a heavy sigh, I sprint a few yards in the sand until I come close enough to call out to Jenna.

  “Hey, slow down,” I say.

  Jenna turns toward me and then quickly lowers her gaze. The sudden thrill I’d had at seeing her evaporates with her reaction.

  “I thought we were going to talk.”

  “I just said that,” she says, not looking up at me. She continues to walk, but now she’s walking in the cold surf getting her feet full of sand. She holds her white sneakers and her socks against her chest. “Why won’t you just let me slink away in private. I’m humiliated enough.”

  “About what?”

  She stops walking and glares at me. “Don’t pretend. I remember what happened the other night.”

  I sputter. “What happened? You got naked, ran in the water and I brought you back into the house.”

  Her cheeks turn red and sun-kissed. But I know it’s not from the sun.

  “I grabbed your crotch.”

  “Yes, you did that too.”

  “Ugh. Why are you making like this is totally normal? It isn’t for me.”

  I stop walking and hold her by the arm to keep her from fleeing down the beach. “I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I want to know what upset you so much that you reacted that way.”

  Tears filled her eyes and glistened. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “I can’t.”

  The little boy who’d been upset by his wet ball is now laughing and running around them.

  “Jacob!” his mother calls out. “If you bother those people with all that splashing, we’re going back to the room!�
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  Jacob runs back up the sand clutching the ball toward a group of older kids, stops and just looks at them while they play. I place my hand on Jenna’s back and start walking, hoping she’ll fall into step. She does.

  “You think I don’t understand heartache?”

  “You’ve never had cancer.”

  His stomach dropped. “No, I haven’t. You’ve got me beat there.”

  “I’d rather not have to beat anyone at this,” she says quietly.

  She gulps as she takes in a deep breath and then stops, looking up at me with eyes so sad it nearly brings me to my knees.

  “I have a friend. Had. She died the day I arrived here. My mother texted me about it after you and Beverly left the other day.”

  “I’m sorry.” The words are so lame. I know this because I’ve heard them often enough to make me want to slice my wrist. Sorry doesn’t even begin to touch that place that hurts so bad that you’re convinced you’ll never recover from it.

  “What happened?”

  “She had cancer. She died.” Tears trail down her cheek and she quickly swipes them away with her finger. “The thing is, Sissy wasn’t supposed to die. She was doing great. But she caught an infection and it was more than her body could handle.”

  Jenna put her hands over face as if she wanted to hide the tears from me. I pull her hands away so I can see her. To let her know she’s not alone. I’m here.

  But she’s not crying. She’s chuckling softly. “The irony is that she was the one who wanted to come here this summer. She showed me the ad in the newspaper. But she wasn’t going to be done with her treatment until July. So here I am, alone.”

  “You’re not alone.”

  “When you’re facing death, you’re alone.”

  I grab Jenna by the shoulders. “Here’s a news flash for you. We all face death. We all walk alone. The only difference is most of us don’t know how close we are to it until it’s too late.”

  She looks at me for a long moment and then nods. The wind blows her short hair around her face, but she does nothing to keep it back. It’s not long enough to obstruct her vision.

  “I know you’re right. But…”

  “What?”

  “I wish we didn’t have to know. I don’t want to know.”

  My mind wanders to Donna and Wyatt. “Maybe not. But sometimes… Never mind.”

  “What?”

  I start to walk again. “Nothing.”

  “You started this.”

  She’s right. I’m the one who opened up the wound Jenna was probably trying her hardest to close.

  “Tell me about Sissy,” I say.

  Jenna shrugs as she drops the arm that is holding her sneakers between her fingers. She swings her arm just enough for me to know that it’s okay to talk.

  “I only knew Sissy from the hospital. We seemed to always be scheduled for visits around the same time. We were even in the hospital once together. But we never saw each other outside of the cancer center.”

  Jenna turns and starts walking sideways so she can look at me.

  “She had the biggest crush on one of the male nurses on our floor. She had this whole scenario planned about how she was going to pounce on him as soon as her markers got high enough not to…worry about infection. He was married. It was just a silly fantasy we used to text each other about.”

  I pick up a piece of smooth glass from the sand and then throw it back into the ocean. “What about you? Were you crushing on any male nurses or doctors?”

  “No,” she says. The sound of her voice is sad again, as if this broken heart had many breaks before hearing about Sissy. “Sissy was very outspoken. Her laughter made her so alive. I can’t believe she’s really gone.”

  “Are you going home?”

  Jenna looks up at me and frowns. “Home? Why?”

  “For the funeral.”

  The way she shakes her head kind of makes me think the idea of her going to a funeral is crazy.

  “It’s funny how these things happen,” she says. “Who knew that when we both pledged to never go to the others funeral that one of us would actually die. We did, you know. Make that pledge. We wanted to focus on life, not losing life.”

  She sighs and then kicks the white foam of the surf that rushes in with the coming high tide.

  “That’s what this summer is all about for me. I spent two years scared to death about dying. I want to live. I want to feel. I don’t care how crazy it seems.”

  “Is that what the other night was about?” I ask.

  She cocks her head to one side and gives me an awkward grin. “Sorry about that.”

  “You grabbed my dick.”

  “Yeah, I did that, didn’t I? I guess I was trying to fit in all that living in one night.” She chuckles and hides her face with her hand for a second.

  I like her smile, I decide. I like her laughter even more. When Jenna Traynor laughs, I can feel it.

  “You’re making fun of me,” she says.

  I hadn’t realized I’d chuckled until Jenna looked at me curiously. But I guess I did.

  “Admiring you.”

  “The fact that I grabbed your dick?”

  “Nah, that was just a bonus.”

  She looks at me skeptically. “Oh, is that what they call it these days? You didn’t really seem interested.”

  “You didn’t really mean it.”

  “Are you sure about that?” She winks at me and then smiles as her cheeks turn pink.

  “I can’t believe you’re the same girl from the other night.”

  The salt air and walk with Jenna was more cathartic than I realized it would be. I’d gone looking for Jenna to get answers. I find myself more curious about her than I was before I left the Inn.

  “What are you doing for dinner?” I ask.

  “Ah, I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. Speaking of dinner, I’m sorry about your dinner the other night. And thank you. I didn’t realize you’d bought me dinner too until the next day when I found the containers on the porch.”

  I laugh. “It was just a hamburger.”

  “It was sweet regardless.” She stops and kicks at the sand, which flies with the wind and hits my feet. Making a sheepish face, and mouths, “Sorry. You said that invitation is still good?”

  “Tour of the island? Sure. We can grab a bite to eat at one of the restaurants in town.”

  “Okay,” she says shyly, pointing to The Bluffs which was just a few hundred yards away now. “I just need to change.”

  She runs up the dry sand toward the house and then turns back. “What are you waiting for?”

  I realize then that I have been waiting. For what, I don’t know. But as I follow Jenna to the house, I’m thinking a few hours with Jenna might give me a glimpse into exactly what that might be.

  #

  Chapter Seven

  Jenna

  It had taken me next to no time at all to change into a pair of cutoff shorts and a white eyelet top with cap sleeves. Lily was home from work at the restaurant and had zeroed in on Bobby as soon as we walked in the door. Penny wasn’t home yet from her landscaping job, and Heather had already left to see if she could get a job at the club on the beach. That left Lily downstairs alone with Bobby while I changed.

  When I came downstairs, Lily was leaning against the doorjamb to the living room, cocking her head to one side as she flirted with Bobby.

  She turns to me as I approach, and with wide eyes, she mouths, “O. M. G.” so Bobby can’t see.

  “So what are you two up to tonight?” she asks as she turns back to Bobby.

  “We were just going to take a drive,” Bobby says.

  Lily turns to me. “Oh, really?” She asks. l have no idea if she’s going to try to snatch an invite. But then she pouts and says, “Have a great time. Let me know where the fun is on the island.”

  “All over,” Bobby says. “There’s a club about a half mile down on the beach. In a few weeks they’ll be booking bands ther
e.”

  Lily pastes on a sickly sweet smile. “Great. I think that’s the place Heather just applied for a waitressing job.”

  “Cool. She’ll make a ton of money,” I say and then turn to Bobby. “Are you ready?”

  “Yeah, but I should have thought about it earlier. We need to walk back to the Inn to get my SUV.”

  “No problem.”

  I hook my arm around Bobby’s and pull him toward the door. I glance over my shoulder at Lily. “See you later.”

  We walk down the beach as the sun starts to dip into the horizon. The smell of salt air fills my head and mixes in with the scent of fried foods from the small restaurants along the beach.

  I glance over at Bobby. Being in the military, his hair is short, so the increase in breeze doesn’t give it movement at all. I wonder what he looks like with longer hair and what color it is because it’s so hard to tell when it’s this short.

  Good Lord, I knew the man was hot, but Bobby Callahan has a rockin’ body that is unlike anything I’d ever had my hands on. And two short nights ago I had had that pleasure. Only he’d wanted no part of it.

  We walk in silence the rest of the way, which gives me a chance to think. By the time we reach the parking lot, I have a fit of worry over the other night. Bobby pulls his keys out of his pocket, and presses the unlock button on his keychain. The lights flash on the SUV and the car beeps as the doors unlock. I make my way to the passenger side door and then pause with my hand on the handle.

  “Are you married?” I ask, glancing at him over the roof of the car.

  The startled expression he gives me makes me feel as uncomfortable as he probably does.

  “Where did that come from?”

  I shrug. “I gave you every opportunity to have sex with me the other night and you—”

  “I thought we went over that this afternoon?” he says, interrupting me.