Patterson, James - Sundays at Tiffany's by Patterson James

Author:Patterson, James [Patterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

Forty-six

MICHAEL WAS THERE the next morning.

Patiently waiting outside my building, just as he used to, so many years ago. In the flesh, so to speak. Not a hallucination. At least I didn’t think so.

He had another beautiful white gardenia in his hand.

“Hello, Jane,” he said, looking slightly rumpled and adorable. “Sleep well?”

“Oh yeah, out like a light,” I lied. “You?”

We began walking side by side, in perfect rhythm, just as we used to walk to school each day. So was he watching over me again? Protecting me? Why? Did he even know why himself? Why didn’t he have all the answers? He’d always known everything when I was little. He was never unsure, never hesitant. The fact that he seemed as confused about this as I was made him infinitely more human, somehow.

The weather was chilly for spring, and the sky threatened rain, but nothing could get me down today. I was hopeful, wasn’t I? For the first time in a long, long while.

While we walked, we talked nonstop about everything and nothing, the past and the present—but not the future. Maybe talking with Michael was the best part of this, or of any, friendship or love affair. Although, God knows, I wanted to grab him and kiss him, and, honestly, do a lot more than that. He was a hunk in a way that an eight-year-old just couldn’t appreciate.

“Jane! Want to go in there? For old time’s sake?”

Michael was pointing across Madison Avenue to a familiar little shop of horrors called the Muffin Man. We had gone there on many a guilty morning twenty-some years ago and, to be perfectly honest, I had kept up the tradition.

“Once a sucker for muffins, always a sucker for muffins,” I said. “Lead on.”

As we waited on line in the shop, Michael said, “As I remember, the Apple-Cinnamon-Walnut was your muffin of choice.”

“Still is.” Among others. I’m not that picky, muffin-wise.

We each had a muffin, though I found that I wasn’t really that hungry, which was odd but fine with me. Michael had a coffee frappe, I had a decaf. What struck me most about me and Michael together was how little Hugh and I had ever talked about, or even had in common, really.

Once we were back on the street, and about a block from the office, the skies opened and it poured, coming down in buckets of icy rain.

“We can wait it out under that canopy, or we can make a run for it,” Michael said.

“Run, obviously.” Which was what I felt like doing, running and yelling out loud.

So we raced through the rain, through puddles up to our ankles, around people who were smart enough to have brought umbrellas. I wisely decided to keep the shouts of abandon to myself.

We practically fell through the doors of my building, drenched to the skin but laughing like a couple of kids, or at least challenged adults. Smiling goofily at each other, we naturally leaned closer, closer… Oh God, I wanted this… to happen… so much.

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