A/N: Thanks, you guys, for all of your reviews, and I'm so sorry that I made you wait this long. I've been pretty busy. My excuse for everything. *sigh* I just had major writer's block on this chapter.
Oh, and just to be lame and advertise my own stories, if you guys want to read more of my work but another chapter isn't up yet, you're very welcome to check out any of my other stories. Thanks!
What happened last?
"Uh … am I in the guest room… again?" I asked, walking over to the stairs and picking up my bags.
Tina frowned. "Yeah… it's kind of your room now …"
"Okay," I said, hopping up the steps. "I'll be down in a while."
"Dinner's at six!" she called after me.
The hall was long and the walls were filled with pictures of little Jennifer. The guest room was the third door on the right. It was a pretty big room decorated nicely, but not too much. But it was definitely a guest room.
Without unpacking, I flopped onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Six long years and all I could think about was her…
Chapter Three ~ Baby Steps
Kelsey Martin looked just like a model. Her dark red hair was close to auburn and her eyes were a bright color of green. Her form was thin and she didn't look as though she was forty-two years old. You could certainly see where Lane had gotten her looks, but not her height. That she had gotten from her dad. Kevin was six feet two inches tall, and when Kelsey stood at four feet eleven inches tall, it had put Lane right in the middle.
Kelsey was happy to see me and gave me a huge hug when I walked in the door. Tina had come along, of course. I wouldn't let her get out of it. I made sure that when we took a tour of their house (though I had been in it several times before) that I turned my eyes away from any sort of picture frame. I didn't want to look at any pictures of Her, especially the ones with the two of us together. Those were all too common, though I had been forced to pose in many of them.
"Iced tea, Eric? Tina?" Kelsey asked as we walked into the kitchen.
"Sure," we said at the same time. Mrs. Martin smiled at us and went to the refrigerator.
I looked around the familiar room. I had sat in front of the television so many times, playing video games while Lane sat on the couch looking at magazines or talking to her friends on the phone. I had never really liked being there during middle school and ninth grade. But after that one summer I spent on Isla Sorna… many things had changed. In a sense they were for the better, but the loss of a friend was truly regrettable.
But I wasn't going to think about that.
"Take a seat, won't you?" Mrs. Martin offered as she pulled a couple glasses out of the cupboard.
Tina and I sat down on the stools behind the bar and watched as Kelsey poured iced tea and set them in front of us. "So how have you kids been?" she asked as she poured a glass for herself.
"Good," Tina answered for the both of us. "Eric's come up here to look for a job."
I sighed and ran my index finger along the rim of the glass.
"Oh?" Kelsey said.
"Yeah," I said simply.
Tina looked at me queerly, then gave a complete answer in the place of my own. "He was having trouble finding one up where he was, so he moved down here and until he finds one, he's going to watch Jessie for me."
"Oh," Kelsey said again. But this time it was the kind of 'oh' you said when you liked something you heard. "And how is little Jessica?"
Tina launched into a story about her most recent 'cute' stories of Jessie, telling them with an acute sense of detail. It was obvious that she wasn't about to leave a thing out. My attention immediately began to wander. I was back to sitting on the green futon, playing video games and trying to ignore Lane's constant voice as she talked on the phone to her friends and complained about me and how she had to hang out with me. I was back to standing on a stool to reach the sink so that we could fill water balloons together. I was back to sitting on the tree swing out back with her and proposing, saying that we could get married when I turned six next month.
Before I knew it, an hour had passed and Tina was poking me in the arm, telling me we had to leave. I stood up and gave Kelsey a hug and followed Tina out of the house down to her car parked on the street. "There," she said, "that wasn't too bad. Was it?"
I just shook my head and sat in the passenger seat. "Where are we going now?" I asked.
"We have to pick Jessica up from Greta's, then I'm going to drop you two off at home so that I can go run some errands," she said as she turned on her blinker and waited for a car to pass so that she could pull out onto the street. Warm air blasted in through the partially open windows of the forest green mini-van and filtered around the small space. I lay my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes, letting the hot sun seep through my skin.
***********
"What color do you want?" I asked Jessica. I was holding two candies her mom had said she could have. "But she can only have one!" She had said over and over.
"Pink and owange," Jessica said, looking up at me with her big brown eyes.
"No, Jessie, you can only have one. Now pick one," I said.
"Uh-huh," she said, "pink and owange."
"No," I said. I was getting a headache. "Pick one, Jessie. One."
"Yeah, pink and owange."
"Do you want the pink one?"
"Uh-huh, pink and owange."
"Jessie, no. Only one. How about the orange?"
"Yeah, pink and owange."
"How about I give you the pink one?" I tried to hand her the pink candy.
"Uh-huh," Jessica said, ignoring what I was trying to hand her. "Pink and owange."
"I'M HOME!" Tina's call rang through the house. Thank heavens, I thought.
I dropped the candies on the counter as Jessica ran out to greet her mother. Ugh, I needed to get out of the house.
"I'm going to take a drive," I said, brushing past Tina as she walked into the kitchen.
"Oh… okay," she said.
I grabbed the keys of her Volvo off of the dining room table and went outside. The large, blue sky stretched out over a small Arizona town. Everything looked so peaceful, but I did almost anything I could to get away from this place. There were too many memories of Lane wrapped up in its folds.
I drove through the streets, looking around at all the familiar things. I would look at the gas station (it was now a Shell station but it used to be an old Texaco) and see Lane leaning against the old coke machine, talking with Hannah and Tina. I would look over at the Blockbuster and see Lane coming out with a video tucked under her arm, sipping on a slurpie. Anywhere I looked, there she was, like a phantom, following me around the town.
"This is getting pathetic," I said to myself, making sure to only look at the road and ignore the little shops (especially the ice cream parlor). Not only was it getting pathetic, it was also getting a little freaky. I needed to stop the car so that I could think.
The first parking space I saw, I flipped on my blinker and quickly pulled in. I didn't even look at where I was parking.
I rested my head against the steering wheel. "Dang, man, pull yourself out of this," I told myself in a fierce whisper. Tomorrow, I thought, you are going to continue your life as though Lane is a thing of the past and… well she is a thing of the past… "DARN IT ALL!" I yelled at myself. This wasn't going to work. Just take it one step at a time, Eric. One baby step at a time.
A/N: I'm sure you're all thinking exactly what I am. Get over Lane and get to the island! Anyways, I am SO incredibly sorry that I made you wait this long for this chapter. I will try REALLY, REALLY hard to get the next chapter out as soon as I can. So in the meantime, PLEASE REVIEW!!!