Brother Willy's Traveling Salvation Show (6 page)

She responded before
he could continue. “So much for your powers of observation, Sherlock. In case you haven’t noticed, I am a girl, which means I am not Watson.”

Scott
started smiling as he heard her speak. “I don’t have to be Sherlock to know you are a girl. There is no real mystery there and the evidence speaks for itself.”

Her answer was as serious as
he thought he had ever heard from her before, catching him by surprise and leaving Scott confused. “You may know I’m a girl, but you have never treated me like one.”

Scott
turned and looked at her without speaking as he tried to understand what she meant. Michelle then turned to face him as she repeated herself. “Well, you haven’t, and you sure don’t treat me like the other girls you have gone out with.”

Scott
’s response was made as an effort to demonstrate his lack of understanding her point. “Surely you don’t think I treat you like one of the boys.”

Michelle
was unyielding in her response. “That’s just the point, Scott. You don’t treat me like one of the boys or one of the girls. It’s as if I am a family member or something.”

In many respects, what
Michelle had managed to say in a few sentences was very much the truth and Scott had to stop and think about what he might say to her. She felt uncomfortable and said more than he thought she intended. Still, this was one of their truth sessions and this was a conversation they should have had years earlier. Before Scott knew what he wanted to say to her, she stood and walked closer to the water with her back turned to him.

After only a few moments,
he got up and stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. “You haven’t exactly given me the opportunity to treat you like one of the girls. For the first few years I knew you, I thought you were happy being on the baseball team and doing things together. Then one day, you left the team and started going out with other guys. I took that to mean you were happy with us being just friends and that you were not looking for anything more from me.”

She continued to stare out at the ocean
, but her answer told him she had given her ideas more than just a casual thought. “Teenage girls go through some very awkward times. We don’t always know what we want and sometimes what we want changes from hour to hour. We don’t always know where we fit in with the world. When you never asked me out, I took it as rejection but you were always there for me, which I took as your interest in me. I didn’t know then and even now I don’t know for sure where you and I are supposed to be.”

Scott
realized very quickly they could spend the entire night reliving their past or they could take the opportunity to move forward. “When it comes to you, I was doing nothing more than playing the odds. I assumed that if I came on to you and you said no, then our relationship would be over. On the other hand, if I was your friend, we could go on forever.”

He
then pulled her left shoulder while pushing her right shoulder hoping she would turn to face him, which she did. “I can’t change the past so let me spell it out for you right here and now. I love you.”

They
stood with their arms around each other for several minutes before she spoke the words he was waiting to hear. “I love you so much, Scott.”

After holding on to each other for quite some time,
they returned to their beach towel. Once they sat down, Michelle stretched out letting her head lay in his lap. Scott could not have planned a more perfect night with the full moon, the sound of the ocean, and the warm summer breeze. After a prolonged period of both silence and contentment, he made a confession, “I lied to you when I told you I was sorry about things not working out for you and Tom. I’m not really sorry.”

After a thoughtful pause, she looked up and smiled at
him. “You know something? You should have been careful what you wished for. I am not going to be easy for you to get rid of like the other girls you have dated.”

Scott
was thinking about Michelle’s encounter with Tom’s mother as he replied, “I’ll just let my mom deal with you if things get to be a problem.”

“That won’t work because your mom likes me and she’ll be on my side. You are stuck with me
now.” She replied, as she reached up and touched the side of his face.

Scott
took her hand and kissed the palm before letting their hands rest on her stomach. “If I am stuck with you, does that mean I can’t go out with other girls?”

Her reply was made with casual indifference. “It’s entirely up to you if you
want to live long enough to see your next birthday.”

Scott
leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I’ll take that as a definite no. It does seem somewhat strange that you and I are giving up our independence on the 4
th
of July. I think we should celebrate the occasion. We could call it lack of Independence Day.”

She smiled as she thought about
his idea. “It’s too bad we don’t have any fireworks.”

Scott
knew she would understand the intent of his suggestion. “Maybe we should make our own fireworks.”

Her smile grew more noticeable. “Maybe we can make this a 4
th
of July that neither one of us ever forgets.”

She
then sat up before she turned around to face him. “So what should we do to celebrate our new commitment to each other?”

Scott
leaned forward and kissed her. “I think we should go back to the house, pop the cork on a bottle of champagne, and then go sit in the Jacuzzi. What do you think of that plan?”

They
watched each other for several minutes before they shared another longer and more fervent embrace that lasted for several minutes. In a soft voice she whispered in his ear, “I think we should make wearing clothing in the Jacuzzi optional. What do you think?”

He
replied after a brief kiss, “I think that’s a great idea. I think that when we get finished with the champagne and the hot tub, I should carry you to the bedroom where you and I can finish our celebration. What do you think?”

After another long passionate kiss she replied, “I think we should celebrate all night long. What do you think?”

Scott kissed her forehead again and replied, “I think we have a plan.”

As
he began to stand up, she reached out her hand to stop him. Scott sat back down as she put her arms around his neck. Her expression suggested she had some reservations and she was about to express them. “Scott, I am not like this with other guys. I don’t make myself this available to other people like I have with you.”

He
knew from his personal experience and from the comments other people had made to him that Michelle was a reserved person who did not open her life to many people. In some ways, she was very guarded, but for some reason trusted him from the beginning. Scott could easily sense the discomfort she was experiencing in feeling she needed to explain herself.

He
sat back down and took both of her hands. “I know who you are and I know you about as well as you know yourself. I know you trust me and I know trust doesn’t come easy for you. I know you were not like this with other guys because you and I have talked about this before.”

She had a look of determination as she looked directly at
him. “I don’t want you to misunderstand anything I’m about to say. I want the physical part of our relationship. I want you to kiss me, hold me, touch me, and make love to me, but I think it is going to be awkward for me for a little while. This is new for us.”

Scott
watched her face while making a suggestion he thought would put her more at ease. “We have been dating each other for ten years only we didn’t have the physical part of that type relationship. We don’t have to celebrate tonight. We can celebrate on July 5th, August 3rd or November 28
th
. We move at our own speed and only when we’re both ready. It’s that simple.”

She started shaking her head back and forth slowly. “Wait a
second, Scott. You and I just made a plan and we are going through with it tonight. I just don’t want you to be disappointed with me if I am not what you expect.”

He
started smiling. “No, you wait a minute. First, it is entirely possible that I will not live up to your expectations. Beyond that, we were just at the beach a few days ago and you were wearing your rather small two-piece suit. I may not have seen you completely unwrapped, but I have a pretty good idea about what’s in the package.”

Michelle
’s response was both assertive and playful as she started grinning. “I sure hope you have some idea about the contents of my package because I made it about as obvious as I could without doing a strip show for you.”

Scott
thought about her comment for a moment. “At the time, I thought you were still getting married to Tom so I didn’t know it was your intent to be so obvious. But I can assure you, I didn’t miss anything.”

Her expression became more serious. “Tonight just before we went into the barn, you said you wanted to talk to me. What did you want to talk about?”

“When you and I were at the beach on Monday, you kept making comments expressing your doubts about you and Tom. You made a few less than respectful comments about him and I realized that something was wrong and that you weren’t just nervous about getting married. You seemed almost angry with him. I was going to suggest you postpone your plans and I was also going to tell you how I felt about you.”

She began to share her thoughts about him in a way
Scott had not expected. “I was then, and I still am angry with him. But, I am just as angry with myself. When I first came home from college in May, the more time you and I spent together, the more I realized he was not the right person for me.”

Michelle
could tell from his expression that he wanted to hear more. She chose to change her explanation. “I can show you my heart and soul and tell you my deepest secret. He wasn’t interested in my heart or my soul. He has some corporate concept of what a wife should be and his mother seems to fit that role.”

Scott
could not resist the temptation to ask what he thought was an important question. “When you came home from school, we went to Cape Lookout. I asked you what was bothering you. You said I would not understand because I was not a female. Now, here is my dumb male question. What attracted you to him in the first place? Why would you agree to marry him if he was not close to what you were looking for?”

Michelle
took a few minutes to think about her answer. “We were both business majors in school and had that in common. His dad was entrenched in the corporate world and I guess I was impressed by that because he had passed along that corporate worldview to Tom. Somehow, I became impressed with his world and forgot the value of my world. We went to dinner at nice restaurants, got dressed up to go to nice parties, and sort of lived that fantasy life for a while.”

He
asked the logical follow up question. “So what happened to bring you back to earth?”

Michelle
looked at the ocean for a moment and then back at him. “William and Betsy were taking a road trip and stopped in to see me at school one day in late April. You have to know that William and Betsy are very wealthy people, yet we went out to dinner at a typical local restaurant instead of one of the nicest restaurants in town. I realized he had been very successful in the business world, but chose to live his life with a degree of elegant simplicity. That was when I realized Tom and I came from different worlds.”

She paused for a moment before she continued. “One night after
William took me to dinner, Tom took me to a very nice expensive restaurant to eat. While we were there, he made some smart-ass comment about the dress I was wearing not being appropriate if I were planning to move up in the business community. At first, I was embarrassed and then I got as mad as hell. I came home from college the next day, you and I went to Cape Lookout, and you know the rest of the story.”

Scott
steered the conversation in a different direction trying to understand her motives. “Why haven’t you told anyone that your engagement was off? I would have thought you would have told your mom before now.”

“I wanted you to be the first person to know because I knew you would be there for me in a way that mom can’t be. She will support my decision and me, but you and I hold each other up in the bad times in a way parents can’t. I can tell you things I wouldn’t want to tell her.” She replied.

He was silent long enough to cause Michelle to question his thoughts. “You have something you want to say, but you aren’t saying it.”

Scott
hesitated to tell her the truth, but at the same time, he had to get the answer to his question. “Are you coming to me on the rebound from a failed relationship?”

Her voice was emphatic. “No. Not at all. I left him. He did not leave me. I realized he was a stuffed suit and that was not what I wanted. I didn’t leave him with my heart being broken. I left with a sense of relief. I came to you because I realized this is where we belong and that is the only reason.
Tom is history and you and I are the future. I think it’s time to close the door on Tom and talk about us now.”