CalaisForever - You're very kind! Thanks for reading!

This'll be the last update I post until the New Year rolls around, so I hope everybody has a great holiday season with lots of sparkle and cheer and everything that a holiday season is supposed to have.

Chapter 14 - November 1, 1979

Sandy woke up with a start as Dave Christian rolled over and dug his elbow into her back. It took her a moment to remember where she was and why she was sandwiched between Dave and Bah.

Dave had tossed and turned violently on the squeaky cot provided by the front desk for about a half an hour after they had all agreed to try and sleep. Eventually he had sat up in a huff and stared over at the bed where Sandy and Bah were also attempting to sleep.

"Would it be weird if I came over there with you guys?"

"It sure would, Koho," Bah had said, barely raising his head off the pillow.

It seemed like Dave had been hoping to get this answer, because he launched into a long speech that he had clearly been writing in his head while he thrashed around on the uncomfortable cot about he didn't see why he had to be the one who slept on the worst bed, he hadn't even wanted to be there, and he had an obligation to be in good condition for the game on the weekend, and if he messed up his back sleeping on a rotten cot, then it would be—

Eventually Sandy sat up. "Enough. Come over here, Dave. I'll sleep on the cot." She'd started to get to her feet, but Bah had grabbed her by the arm.

"No you won't. Nobody has to sleep on the cot. If you wanna come sleep with us on our big trip, Koho, go right ahead."

And so Sandy had stayed, and Dave, seemingly having no issues with sleeping with them on their big trip, flopped down on Sandy's other side and dropped off within a matter of minutes. Sandy had slept, too, until she was jolted awake by Dave's elbow.

She craned her neck to see over Bah's sleeping form, squinting at the clock on the nightstand. Seeing that it was almost three, Sandy flopped her head back down and groaned into the pillow.

After she had tossed around for a while, wondering how she had ever fallen asleep before in such tight quarters, Bah rolled over and threw his arm around her, pulling her close and whispering into her hair. "Hey. You're keeping everybody up," he said.

"Sorry." Sandy lay there for a moment and then wriggled her way out from under Bah's arm and slid down to the bottom of the bed. Then she grabbed her jacket, slipped her feet into Bah's shoes and quietly went out the door.

It was a clear, bright night, and the parking lot was lit by a combination of buzzing fluorescent lights and the moon. She settled down on a bench facing the highway and sighed, breathing a cloud into the air.

Several minutes passed while Sandy sat, hypnotised by the cars driving past on the highway and the quiet nighttime sounds of the small town. Then Bah came out in sock feet, running his hands through his hair. He stretched, yawned, and looked over at her. "Why'd you take my shoes?"

She smiled. "They're easy to put on. Sorry."

He reached back into the room and fished Dave's shoes out and then sank down next to her on the bench, forcing them onto his feet. "Couldn't sleep?" he asked. Sandy shook her head. "What's on your mind?"

"Nothing, really," Sandy said. She shrugged. "Dave woke me up."

"Mmm," Bah said, nodding. "I'm really going to have to have a talk with him when we get back about how much he forces himself into the time I spend with you."

Sandy laughed. "Would you? He's been just awful."

Bah reached for her hand and squeezed it, and they sat in comfortable silence for a while. Then Bah shifted a little on the bench and cleared his throat. "You didn't—uh—you didn't like it when I made that joke about bringing our kids here, did you?"

Thinking to herself that she needed to look into taking a course on how to avoid showing every emotion she felt on her face, Sandy sighed. "That obvious, huh?"

He shrugged one shoulder at her. "I appreciate how easy you are to read. It levels the playing field a little bit." He glanced down at her and smirked. "Can I ask why you had that reaction? You know I was just joking, right?"

"I know," Sandy said. "It was just—" She grimaced. "It obviously wasn't a big deal. I don't want you to think that I thought it was. Don't feel like you can't make jokes without me making a scene."

Bah snorted. "I won't. Consider it forgotten." He squeezed her hand again and fell silent.

After a few more minutes passed, Sandy said, "thank you for bringing me here, Bah. It's been a lot of fun."

"Yeah?" He grinned at her. "I was worried maybe you'd think it was dumb."

"No way," she said. "I think this is probably the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me." She leaned her head over onto his shoulder. "It was a weird week, so I definitely needed this."

Bah sighed. "The Big Visit," he said.

"Yeah."

"And so you—" he hesitated, apparently unsure how to ask his question. "So you weren't—you didn't want to—? Not at all?"

Sandy shook her head. "Nope."

"Hmm." Bah sighed again, this time more heavily, lifting Sandy's head up and dropping it a little with his shoulder. "Sorry. Do you think you'll ever talk with them again?"

She raised her head and frowned as she thought about it. "I'll have to someday," she said. "The rest of my life is a long time to not talk to my parents, you know? I don't know if could ever have the same relationship with them as I did before, but maybe it could be something close to civilized again. I wouldn't want to have to be talk to them right now, though, because I'm sure Will has told them that I'm happy here. They would probably be just awful."

"Why wouldn't you want them to know that you're happy?"

"What's your relationship like with your parents?"

Bah looked surprised by the question. "Well, pretty good, I think. Why?"

Sandy shrugged. "You probably wouldn't get it. I don't say that to be, you know, rude or anything," she added, seeing Bah's reaction, "I just don't see how you could understand feeling like I do if your parents have never disappointed you like mine did."

"Hmm," Bah said yet again.

Before they could lapse into another silence that would signal a change in subject, Sandy said, "can I tell you why I moved out here? I guess you should probably know."

The intensity of Bah's desire to know what he imagined to be a deep, dark secret was never more obvious than in that moment. He fidgeted with a hole in his pants with one hand and was suddenly squeezing Sandy's hand in his other one without realizing he was doing it. He cleared his throat once, twice. "Well—I mean—only if you want to tell me. It's up to you."

Sandy looked at him out of the corner of her eye and tried not to smile. "No, I think it's time I told you. It's just a long story, is all."

"Well, you know," Bah said, trying to regain his composure, "I think the best time to start a long story is at about four in the morning. You've got the whole day laid out in front of you. That's what I've always said."

She drew her legs up under herself on the bench and turned so she was facing him. Bah tried for a moment to do the same but, failing to find a comfortable position, settled for sitting turned awkwardly to the side with one leg crookedly balancing on the edge of the bench.

Sandy took a deep breath. "Okay. So, I guess the best place to start is the summer after I finished high school. I didn't want to go to college—at least not right away—so I convinced my dad to let me work for him to make a little money. He's a contractor—he has a little company that builds houses in Everett and in towns kind of in that area. And for basically my entire life, that was the most that I knew about what they did, because he made a big deal out of never talking about work or letting us meet any of the people that he works with."

Bah frowned. "How come?"

She shrugged. "I don't really know. His big excuse was that he didn't want me mixing with the kinds of people he worked with. But I always found that so stupid because, I mean, they were good enough to work with him, so why wouldn't they be good enough to meet his family? I met all of them that summer and for the most part, they were completely fine. But anyway, he had me doing little projects for him at job sites and driving around, picking things up, and I met this man who had been working with my dad since I was a little kid named Ray. You have heard of him." She paused, and Bah nodded again. "Ray and my dad have known each other since the summer that Ray finished high school. He's an engineer, but he'd come out and give recommendations on the structural details of the houses they were building. That's how I met him."

"So—" Immediately, Sandy knew the question that Bah was trying to ask, and she amused herself for a moment while he tried to find a delicate way of asking it. "So, this guy Ray… if he's been doing that for your dad since you were a kid… He was—? Well, I mean obviously he was quite a bit—"

"He's older than me by a fair bit, yeah."

"And so, this guy had known you since you were really young? Isn't that kind of—you know, kind of messed up?" Bah caught the look on Sandy's face a moment after he had spoken and started shaking his head. "I don't mean he's a creep or anything like that, I just wondered—you know, if he'd been around...?"

Sandy shook her head. "No, it wasn't like that. I mean, like I said, my dad kept that part of his life really separate from his home life, and so even though he was friends with Ray, I hadn't even heard of him before that summer. My mom kind of knew him, but that was the most anybody had ever seen him." She shrugged. "Anyway, that was kind of my job that summer; taking him to sites and unlocking doors for him when my dad was too busy. And he's this older, good-looking man who was polite and kind to me because he knew I had a crush on him, and that was basically the extent of it for a while." She shivered and zipped her jacket up. "Then around Christmas-time, one of the guys who worked with my dad had a bunch of people over and I went. And everything was going fine until this one guy started coming onto me, and I got flustered and uncomfortable and I left."

Bah snorted. "Hey, I think I know this story."

She grinned and elbowed him. "Anyway, it was the middle of winter, but I started walking home. I was starting to realize that it was a really bad idea, and just as I was thinking that I should turn around and go back to call my parents, Ray pulled up in his car. He had been at this party for some reason, and he saw me leave and came after me. So he drove me home, and the whole way I sat in his car and cried—well—about boys, basically. About how that guy at the party was an ass and about how I didn't think I'd ever meet anybody. I had been drinking," she added, somewhat unnecessarily.

"No kidding."

"Right. So, since I was clearly having a moment, Ray said he was going to take me to get something to eat so he wouldn't have to drop me off at home looking like a mess. He took me to this little all-night diner, and we just m—" She paused, glancing over at Bah, who had started fidgeting again. "On a scale of one to ten, how interested are you in hearing this part of the story?"

"What, the part where you get together with the guy who seems like he's probably the love of your life?" Bah made a wishy-washy motion with his hand. "Three."

"Okay, fair enough," Sandy said. "Anyway, it took a while for me to convince him to have anything to do with me because he hated that I was so young. I guess I sort of did too." She propped her elbow up on the top of the bench and frowned.

"That's hard," Bah said.

She shrugged and nodded. "I mean, obviously he got over it, but I think I changed a lot about myself to try and get him to see me as an adult. I thought about that when I first started seeing you, you know. It was so different to spend time with someone who I didn't have to work so hard to find common ground with." Sandy frowned and shook her head, clearing it of the thought. "So anyway, obviously we had to keep it a secret because we thought that my dad would lose his mind if he found out. And we were right, because when he did find out about around my birthday the year after, everybody went nuts and I was basically put on house arrest. I spent a few weeks cooped up at home and then on the night before Thanksgiving, Ray came to my window and told me that he didn't care what my dad said and that he wanted me to move in with him."

An eighteen-wheeler sped by on the highway, inexplicably honking its horn as it did, and Sandy fell silent. Once it had gone, Bah rubbed his face with his hands. "So, you were nineteen and moving in with your boyfriend who was, what, in his mid-fifties?"

She snorted. "I'm never going to tell you how old he actually is. But yeah. It just seemed like the right thing to do. We thought my parents were being unreasonable. And so my family woke up on Thanksgiving, and my mom went into my room to get me and found that I had packed a suitcase and took off in the middle of the night. Will and Jenny were there," she said, seeing Bah about to ask how she knew this. "They came and dropped off some things I forgot and told me after that my mom was pretty distraught over it. But anyway, I moved into Ray's house with basically just a suitcase full of clothes and I lived there with him for a year and a half."

Bah exhaled, puffing out his cheeks. "And so that's it? That's the whole story?"

She let out a short laugh. "You wish. No, things went really well for over a year. Ray wasn't working with my dad anymore, obviously, but he still had a lot to do and I probably would have gone to community college in the fall, but then everything kind of went to shit."

"How's that?" Bah looked somewhat terrified of the answer.

"Well, for starters, I found out I was pregnant."

"Oh God."

"Yeah. Right." She cleared her throat. "And so, I was worried about it, but I couldn't say anything to Ray, because he started acting all of the sudden like his one true goal in life was to become a dad and I didn't want to make him think—I don't know. I just felt like nobody cared what I wanted and I felt really alone. People I knew from high school were already having kids and were married and everything, but I didn't think I was ready and Ray was such an adult that I didn't think he'd get it." Sandy sighed. "So, I had a little lapse of judgement and called my mom."

Bah leaned forward and put his face in his hands. "Oh, my God."

"Yeah. I got her on the phone and she said all kinds of really terrible things that I guess she'd been wanting to say ever since I left, and then while we were talking my dad came home and said some of what was on his mind, too, about how I had made my bed and now I needed to lie in it and that I wouldn't get any help from them ever again." She cleared her throat again and rubbed her hands her legs. "So it was kind of hard to hear that."

Bah continued to sit with his face in his hands, shaking his head. "And you just wanted some support from your parents. I'm so sorry, Sandy."

"You know, Ray asked me later why I didn't just hang up on them, and I told him they were entitled to having a chance to say what they thought. I guess I felt like I took that away from them when I left."

"They did not." He opened his mouth to say more, but in the end he just shook his head at her.

Sandy smiled at him. "I don't know. I guess I felt bad about just deserting them the way I did, and maybe I wondered if them finding out about the baby would magically make everything better. But after that, I really started to stress and worry about how much a baby would change everything, and the whole thing just started to feel—it's hard to explain, but it didn't feel good. I wasn't excited. And I didn't talk to Ray about any of it, because I didn't want him to know that anything was wrong." She drew her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. "And, well, you can guess what happened. I'd still be pregnant."

Without speaking Bah reached out, grabbed Sandy's feet and pulled them until her legs were stretched out over his knees.

She was quiet for a moment, watching him as he stared down at the sidewalk and then cleared her throat again. "When I lost it, I thought it must have been my fault. Like, maybe the baby knew it wasn't wanted or something. I know that's not how it works. The doctor told me—well, I guess there was nothing we could have done differently, but I really wondered if it was me."

Bah shook his head and started to gently massage her calves, almost as if he wasn't aware he was doing it.

"But anyway, after that, Ray took a bunch of time off work and took me on a trip to Canada to cheer me up, and on the night that we got back, we went out for dinner. While we were eating, he said—" she paused, trying to remember the exact phrase, and finding that she couldn't recall it anymore, let out a sad little laugh. "You know, I saw it as such a significant thing at the time, but I don't even remember what it was that he said. Basically, he told me that maybe it would be better to wait to have kids when we were married. And, I mean, we had definitely talked about being married before, but on that particular night it was like someone hit a gong in my head when he said it."

"Why?" Bah raised his head to look over at her.

Sandy shrugged. "It was frustrating. After everything that happened, he felt like he could just decide that now wasn't the right time—but that wasn't something we discussed when it was actually happening, you know? I yelled at him in the car on the way home about how I thought he was trying to decide my future for me and how I was still young and had my whole life to decide to get married and have kids, and that he wasn't going to get to have the final say in it just because he was so much older." She leaned her head sideways slightly, against the siding of the motel. "He looked at me that night like he thought I lost my mind. When I woke up the next morning, I told him I was leaving."

Bah exhaled loudly again and leaned back, too. "Just like that, huh?"

She nodded. "Yep. And obviously he knew I didn't have anywhere to go, so he told me I was welcome to stay at the house until I found somewhere else, but only at first. Later on he told me that I had to be out before the end of that week."

"And so you called Will?"

"And so I called Will," Sandy agreed. "And of course Ray backtracked when he realized that I was going all the way to Minnesota, but it's hard to walk back that kind of threat. Even if he didn't mean it, he definitely said it knowing that my only other option was moving back into my parents' house." She shook her head. "So I drove out to Burnsville and then I met you." She raised her head off the side of the motel to look over at Bah, who looked deep in thought.

He rubbed his face with both hands. "I don't even know what to say."

She smiled grimly at him. "It's okay. You know, when I told Di all this I tried to tell her that it was in the past, but—" she shrugged. "It's not. Obviously it's not."

Bah rubbed his hands together to warm them up. "How do you feel about it now that it's been a few months?"

Sandy thought about it. "Well, it's hard, you know, because I had really wanted to make decisions for myself, but once I followed through with that I just felt so guilty. With my parents and with Ray. It makes me wonder what the point is. I can't enjoy the choices I make because I don't feel like I deserve to enjoy myself after doing the things I've done." She shrugged. "I feel better about it now than I did in August, that's for sure. You've helped. Di and Will and Jenny have, too. And I don't regret moving out here."

He squeezed her knee. "So," Bah said, glancing over at her. "Do you mean that you felt guilty about spending time with me?"

"Oh, definitely," she said, and they both laughed, although Bah did so a little nervously. "I'd feel guilty, and then I'd get mad that I felt guilty. It was really confusing."

They were quiet for a few moments, both shivering a little but not wanting to prematurely end the conversation. Eventually Sandy swung her legs back onto the ground and scooted closer to Bah. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. "Well, for what it's worth, I'm glad you moved here, too. I hope—" he paused, and Sandy craned her neck to look up at him. "I hope this is making you happy. Me, I mean."

Sandy rested her head back down on his chest and smiled. "You are. Thanks for letting me tell you everything and for not judging."

"I'm glad you trusted me enough to tell. Now I can finally tell all of my friends."

She snorted, and the two of them laughed together, the sound ringing out against the quiet night. When they fell silent again, Sandy sighed. "And really, thanks again for bringing me here. It's been great, even though we got chased by a ghost tonight."

Bah laughed. "I wouldn't speak too soon. We still have to kill a whole day here tomorrow."

"I'm sure it'll be even better than the real Paris."

"Well, let's not get carried away."