Page 498 of Summer Heat
Chapter Three
An hour into her studies, Tamara rested her head on her arm. Just for a minute. Just to clear her eyes. Maybe ease the headache pounding through her temples.
She fell asleep. And dreamed she was at college again. She and Eric walked one of the avenues on campus, beneath trees shedding leaves in red and brown and yellow, their varied shapes dotting the withering lawn and floating atop the green water of the pond. The air was crisp and full of excitement. She and Eric debated the place of poets in the scope of history, swinging their hands between them.
Tamara jolted awake suddenly, yanked into her tiny kitchen in Red Creek by the sound of a tomcat in the garbage cans outside. She blinked slowly, an ache in her chest.
Four years, and she still dreamed about it all the time. Four years, and she had not come to terms with the fact that she would never be that free, excited girl again, with a future filled with intellectual pursuits, in the company of people who didn’t think she was odd for enjoying French films or preferring to read rather than go to the rodeo.
At the university, for the first time in her life she’d found people to talk with about the things she loved. Music and books and history, a world of ideas and dreams and visions that most people around Red Creek found impractical at the very least.
She missed it desperately.
Wearily she closed the book and turned off the overhead light, making her way to the bathroom. She was almost too tired to shower, but if she left it till morning, she would be more rushed than she could stand. She stripped off her clothes and turned on the shower to let steam heat the small room.
In the mirror, she caught sight of her face. She leaned forward, gingerly touching the black eye. Her entire lid was purple, a garish contrast to her green iris. It added an impression of too many years on her youngish face, like the tightness around her mouth, the circles ringing her eyes. With a frown, she tugged out the braid and worked her fingers through the dark mass of her hair. Better. She didn’t look so old and worn with it down.
She rubbed a circle in the misting mirror, looking for the girl she’d been only a few short years ago
. Was her life over at twenty-five? Sometimes it felt like it.
The mirror swallowed her image once more. Tamara fixed the temperature of the water and stepped into the shower. The heated spray felt glorious on her tired neck and she sighed aloud, ducking her head to let the water pound down on the tight muscles. What a day.
A wavery picture of Lance Forrest floated before her closed eyes, then solidified. That bright hair. The twinkle in his eyes. The aura of zesty good humor that surrounded him. He made her think of Loki, the Norse god of mischief.
He wasn’t at all what she had expected all these years.
* * *
Tamara’s cousin Valerie had generally liked dark men—brooding, ruthless types who took what they wanted and strode through life without giving a second thought to the people around them. Bad boys. Jocks. Businessmen. Never the kind of man Tamara found attractive.
She should have realized, looking at Lance’s brother Tyler, that Lance would not be the dark brooding man in her imagination, that vague image toward whom she had directed all her frustration and hatred all these years. If not for Lance Forrest, she had told herself over and over, she would be happily teaching in a university somewhere, working on her doctorate.
Instead, she was stuck in Red Creek, eating macaroni and cheese, studying accounting so she could eventually pay doctor bills, taking care of a child she adored and wanted, but wasn’t even her own.
It was Valerie who had given birth to Cody.
Tamara and Valerie’s mothers had come to Red Creek together, to make a new life for themselves far from their poverty-stricken Arkansas roots. To some degree, they had succeeded, but the sisters had very different ideas of what marked success and when Tamara was eight, they had a fight. They never spoke again.
But Valerie and Tamara managed to sneak around to see each other, anyway. Six years younger than her dazzling cousin, Tamara had worshiped the ground Valerie walked upon, and lived for the stories of romance and love Valerie spun.
When Valerie was in high school, she fell in love with Lance Forrest, and the pair were an item for their last two years there. Valerie had even shown Tamara the ring Lance had given her as a promise ring. It was a striking tiger-eye—he’d said diamonds were too common for a girl like Valerie.
But at the end of senior year, Lance had left Valerie and gone off to college. He never came back; instead he went to work for a Houston construction firm. Occasionally Valerie caught word here and there of what he was doing, but she never saw him when he came to town.
Finally, she gave up and married another man, and just as quickly divorced him. Tamara knew it was because Valerie had never quite gotten over her first love. It struck her young heart as deeply romantic—and tragic.
After her own high school graduation Tamara went to college at the University of Colorado at Denver. There she met Eric Marks, a philosophy major. By her junior year, they shared a small apartment and had planned a future in which they both taught at the same university. When Tamara’s mother died at the start of her junior year, Tamara suffered a setback, but with Eric’s support, managed to stay in school.
That Christmas, the first Christmas without her mother, Tamara received a letter from Valerie, telling her Lance Forrest had come home, and their love affair had been rekindled. Tamara worried, but Valerie sounded so happy, she tried to put aside her reservations.
But she’d been right to worry. After a brief—and by Valerie’s accounts—torrid affair, Lance blew out of town just as quickly as he’d come in.
Leaving Valerie pregnant.
It had been the beginning of the end. By the time Spring Break rolled around, Tamara was worried enough about the wild ravings of Valerie’s letters to go home and check on her. Valerie had always been a little unstable, prone to wild swings of emotion, but it had increased tenfold with pregnancy. Valerie had no one else—her own mother had gone back to Arkansas, washing her hands of her daughter.
Spring Break stretched to two weeks, then three. Eric made frantic, and increasingly irritated phone calls to Red Creek, urging Tamara to get back to school, but Tamara knew she couldn’t live with herself if anything happened to her cousin.
