Dear Readers: Back at Cloe and Tom's favorite cafe on campus - the last scene on Commencement Day at Veriton! And second-to-last scene of Episode 2!!
So last time, Cloe was about to ask a question...
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Scene 11: Ishy
A.D. 2015
After the longest sigh, she finally asked.
“Tom…” Cloe whispered, clasping his hand even more closely, “…how are you?”
He blinked, not bothering to act as if he didn’t know exactly what she meant. He had tried, the first few times she’d asked about it with those three short words, in far too many previous conversations—but it would be no use pretending now.
He swallowed hard. “I’m all right,” he responded, his lower lip quivering into an attempted smile. “No bad news or anything.”
She bit down on her own lower lip, as if to keep it from mirroring that tragic tremor. She nodded slowly, somberly. “Okay.”
And those were all the words between them, on that note.
Tom did not like to talk about the details of his illness. He was dying; that was all. And so was everybody else. Maybe he was dying earlier and faster than most others, but whatever.
Sometimes, he tried to see it as a good thing. Like his life came with a clock. It could be kind of convenient, being able to tell time. Everyone was on death’s schedule, but most were not provided with a stopwatch counting down until their turn.
But then he would remember that the countdown didn’t work. For it was always changing, always playing tricks on him. And every doctor read the clock a little differently, so that Tom never knew what time it really was. How much more time he had until his turn.
Tears welled in Cloe’s eyes. This wasn’t right. When death wrote up its schedule, Ishmael Thomas Colbeck should have been the last name on the list. The whole earth would be darker, for the loss of such a life, of such a light.
Well—at least no bad news, right? So that was good news. He was all right. Today, for now, whatever happened next, he was all right.
She tried to make herself believe that that was enough, as they wrapped up their chat, made promises to keep in touch more often, pushed in their chairs with screechy scrapes against the pavement, hugged goodbye, left Pampelune behind, and went on with their lives.
Cloe climbed the Acorn House stairs to her dorm room and found her mother lounging on the bare twin mattress with a magazine.
“Ugh, look at this bitch,” Silvia griped, pointing at the glossy cover of the issue, on which one of her least favorite actresses was striking an audacious pose involving puckered lips. “She thinks she’s so cute.”
Cloe smiled in amused assent, then looked around and noticed that her moving bins had been left mostly untouched. “So did I do a fine job packing on my own, or were you just too tired today to bother rearranging things?”
Silvia tossed the magazine into a trash bag. “Little bit of both.”
They spent the next several minutes waiting for Cloe’s father to arrive for the move-out. Silvia asked how Tom was doing. Cloe summarized their catch-up, highlighting the fact that he had made no moves to sleep with her, despite the fact that he was single now. Insisting that the teddy bear gesture was not part of a hookup ploy, as her mother had surmised.
“Well, he’s not going to be in-your-face about it,” Silvia rejoined. “Especially if you give him the ice queen treatment.”
“I’m really sweet around him…!”
“But not that kind of sweet. I’m sure he can tell you’re not into him; guys pick up on those things. I mean, hell—even when you really are gushing over someone on the inside, you put up an ice-cold front. Like with that hunky Mr. Campion today.”
And there it went—every cell in Cloe’s body instantly combusted. Fucking fuck. She had been doing so well today, keeping that man from her mind, or at least from the forefront. It had been helpful that Tom hadn’t brought him up during their chat. Cloe had even devised a strategy to subdue her subconscious: every time her mind began to stray toward someone from a bygone world, she just forced it to think about Charliese instead. That had been working pretty well, till now.
She averted this conversation from the Mr. Campion tangent. Kept the topic squarely on her friend. “But I just know, with Tom. And he knows, too. We’re so perfect as friends; we’d never change that.”
“But have you at least considered it? Love can grow out of close friendship—the slow-burning flame and all that good stuff, right?”
Cloe laughed, silently through her smile. She always found it funny when her mom gave the obligatory ‘good’ advice; it was a lot more natural when Silvia drew on her own unconventional wisdom.
“I mean, you know. Think about it,” Silvia casually counseled. “He’s a really good guy who really cares about you, and you get along so well. You really couldn’t ask for more.”
“I’m not asking for anything…”
“Hoping, wishing—whatever. Just don’t let the good guys slip out of your fingers, while you wait around for something even better.”
It was true that Cloe had spent much of her life waiting. For her knight in shining armor, Prince Charming, Mr. Right, the Romeo to her Juliet, all that lovey-dovey whatnot. Ever since she’d seen the Disney movies, read the fairytales, an epic love was all she’d ever wanted. Waited for forever. And it was something she had always been denied.
Somehow, though, she felt that today the wait came to an end…
Shut the fuck up, she ordered the starry-eyed toddler in her head. From her toddler days onward, she’d had crushes on movie stars, on the equally elusive popular boys in middle school, on all sorts of guys to whom she'd never talked. But she was twenty-one. This wouldn’t do. She couldn’t let herself feel such intense things for the marble statue.
Sure, they’d spoken, and he’d given her a flower. But that’d been what, two minutes? By this time today, he’d certainly forgotten ever meeting her. And there was no chance that their paths would cross again. No way that their two lives could be entwined.
She had to put him from her mind. He was already in her blood, more so than she could understand or overcome. She could not let him overtake the rest of her.
“No guy is going to be Eldor—tall, dark, handsome, heroic, saving the world with each blink of his beautiful eyes…” Silvia continued, referring to the princely protagonist of Cloe’s trilogy. “Just because you can write the perfect man, doesn’t mean that you could ever meet him in real life.”
Cloe had indeed developed her main character as the ideal male: a valiant warrior with a deep, brooding soul and heart of solid gold. And easy on the eyes, of course. The paragon of human perfection.
And yet she couldn’t help but feel that her concept of perfection had changed. Just this morning. Or perhaps not changed—rather, that someone had shown up and completely transcended it. With a pair of bay-blues that pierced straight to the core of her heart. As if they’d seen her heart before, a thousand times, and knew it outside in…
Bells were ringing—from inside her bag this time, breaking her momentary trance. She pulled out her chiming phone to see a text from Erin Bellamy, her best friend from childhood, congratulating her and wishing her a happy move-out day. Cloe smiled at all the capital letters, exclamation points, and overused emoticons; Erin’s exuberance never got old.
Erin was in a very merry fairytale relationship that also never seemed to get old. Blossomed from a long-time crush on a shy athletic nerd that’d conveniently turned out to be mutual. And now, she and Josh Walden were going strong and very steady, engaged to be engaged.
Cloe was happy for her dear best friend. But she was also human, so this happiness was… bittersweet, to say the least.
Before she had even put away her phone, it buzzed with an incoming call from her father. She went downstairs to greet him.
John Turner was waiting in front of Acorn House, his midnight blue minivan parked at the curb. He’d lost a lot of weight, Cloe noticed immediately—he looked more like the dad who used to take her on morning hikes followed by donut runs, in the pre-divorce days.
He’d been pretty thin back then, despite all the donuts. Probably because she must’ve been a constant source of exercise and stress as a small child, Cloe mused; maybe his new kids were less demanding.
She hugged him hello, his grey whiskers grazing her cheek. Asked how the drive had been, thanked him for coming, complimented his impressive weight loss. They couldn’t take too much time catching up, as they had a long haul ahead, to Cloe and Silvia’s home in New Jersey.
After hundreds of treks up and down the stairs, from the car to the dorm room and back again, all of Cloe’s college stuff was crammed into the trunk. Some spilled into the backseat, piled so high as to block the rearview mirror—which happened every time, when Cloe's dad came up to help with her move-out. She heaved a wistful sigh, realizing now that this would be the final trip. It'd been a nice tradition for the past four years: one of the rare occasions that she ever spent in the company of both parents at once.
John set the final crate in place, blocking the last possible glimpse of the rear window from the front seat, and reassured his passengers that he could still drive safely.
Silvia felt safe as well. “Your dad is the best driver I know,” she told their daughter. John brushed it off. He always looked constipated when Silvia said anything positive about him, as if she’d never sat him down that day, to tell him something that would capsize his entire life. He had spent all the years since then nursing a heartbreak that would probably never mend. Cloe could tell, though each of her parents would staunchly deny it. So she brushed it off as well. Some truths were better buried than believed.
Cloe closed the trunk, then took her seat, white teddy on her lap. John asked its name, because he’d always asked his little girl about the names of her stuffed animals. She replied that its name was Ishy, having decided that that sounded cuter and fluffier than Ishmael.
They had only just driven off when her phone rang again. It was the hiring manager for the travel guide. Tom and Prof had been right, of course—the summer job was hers. She beamed, grateful and glad.
All set to live the dream in Greece.
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Any feels for Tom? :'(
Or other thoughts? As always, I would love to hear!
Next scene, we'll end Episode 2 back in Egypt with Atria... and if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :)