Holding Hands by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online

ahead,
shining the flashlight’s beam down and slightly to his left to help
guide her to their door. She supposed he deserved a point for that,
but...
    She understood her mother’s yearning to hold
a man’s hand.
    She wondered if Emily was holding her really
hot guy’s hand. Or doing much more than holding his hand. Who knew?
As of yesterday, the last time Meredith had spoken to Emily, she
was still gushing over the guy, but by today she might have found
someone new. She was eighteen, awash in hormones and romantic
notions.
    Meredith and Scott stumbled into the cabin,
peeled off their jeans and collapsed onto the bed. Meredith assumed
a clock existed somewhere in the room, but it was probably electric
and therefore not working. She could have used the flashlight to
read her watch, but she didn’t want to waste the battery. Her phone
was buried inside her purse, and she didn’t want to waste its
battery, either.
    Not surprisingly, Scott fell asleep almost
instantly. Meredith lay beside him, her body absorbing the warmth
of his, her mind churning far too rapidly for sleep to take hold.
She thought about the dog, about how tenderly Scott had carried it,
how coldly he’d announced that she shouldn’t consider adopting it.
She thought about how attractive she found him even when he was
being a bastard, and how infuriating that was.
    When she finally did drift off to sleep, she
dreamed about taking long evening walks with him back home. In her
dream she held Skippy’s leash in her left hand, and in his right
hand Scott held a leash at the end of which was the dog they’d
found on their cabin’s threshold, his leg fully healed and his eyes
as bright as Skippy’s, knowing he was wanted and loved. In the
dream, she and Scott held hands—her right, his left, their fingers
intertwined, their palms pressed together, warm and comforting.
    She woke to a cabin filled with sunlight. A
surprisingly charming cabin, now that she could see it. Its rustic
paneled walls held framed watercolors of seascapes and beach
scenes. The dresser was sturdy oak; it looked like an antique. The
bed on which she lay featured an elaborately wrought brass
headboard, and the cover spread over her was a delicately stitched
quilt. Tulle curtains fluttered at the windows, and the braided rug
she’d felt beneath her feet last night was in fact an intricately
woven floor covering. The chairs where she and Scott had eaten
their too-late supper last night were as drab as she remembered,
but everything else in the room was much prettier than she’d
imagined.
    Scott was seated in one of the chairs,
sunlight pouring over his shoulder as his fingers danced across the
keyboard of his laptop. His hair was as damp as it had been last
night, but the faint, spicy scent of his shampoo hung in the room.
He had on faded jeans and a navy blue T-shirt that showed off his
lean torso. His feet were bare.
    She tried to remember what she’d been so
angry about last night. The dog. The fact that she’d swept Scott
away for this intimate escape and he was using it to catch up on
his work. The fact that they’d driven through wretched traffic and
flooded roads and wound up taking up residence in what had seemed,
in last night’s stormy gloom, to be a dreary little hovel. The fact
that she felt as if her husband and her marriage were slipping away
like the tide, tugging her down in a deadly undertow.
    The fact that her mother and her daughter had
better love lives than she did.
    “ Good morning,” she
said.
    Scott peered up. A tentative smile flickered
across his face. “We’ve got power.”
    She pushed herself to sit and saw the alarm
clock on the nightstand on his side of the bed. The digits glowed
red: 7:50. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d slept that late.
“You showered?”
    “ We’ve got hot water, too,”
he reported. “Lights. And a hair drier, if you want
one.”
    She wanted one. She also wanted to see that
sweet, hesitant smile brighten his face