Chapter 5 – Retrograde
For at least the fifth time since leaving his apartment, Bobby worried that maybe he should have opted for something other than black jeans and a white button-down Oxford shirt. He hadn't told Alex what his plans were for this afternoon, mainly because he was still undecided. There was a time when he knew her almost as well as he knew himself. But now, all these years later, he wasn't sure what she might want to do…or what she might wear.
Bobby stood on the front porch and nervously rubbed his palms together as he waited for someone to answer the door. In the days leading up to this Saturday, his mind had barely stopped thinking about Alex long enough for him to get anything done. Several times that morning, he'd caught himself staring blankly at a wall as memories and fantasies conspired to take his mind off the task at hand. During the drive out here, he'd almost rear-ended someone and had managed to run right through a four-way stop intersection. Yeah…'nervous' didn't even begin to cover it.
He still couldn't believe she was back in New York. After five years of separation – five years of wondering how she was and thinking that he might never see her again – she was here. Even more unbelievable was that they were going to spend the afternoon getting reacquainted.
They had traded phone calls for the first month or so after she moved to Chicago. Painful as it was, he'd needed to know that she was safe and, if not happy, at least settled. She was concerned about how he was coping with his mother's death, and seemed relieved to learn that he was spending a lot of time with a friend of his who worked as a grief counselor for the Department.
Although their phone calls eased his worry about her, they left him miserable for days. Giving in to pain and pride, the calls quickly diminished, and irregularly timed e-mails took their place. The e-mails gave way to cards exchanged at Christmas and on birthdays, augmented by an occasional postcard from some vacation or other. Last year's Christmas card was the last time he'd heard anything from Eames.
And now, the whole concept that he would have to 're-learn' her was both exciting and depressing. Maybe if he'd bothered to stay acquainted with her five years ago, maybe if he hadn't been such a self-centered coward who let her slip away emotionally before she ever even considered leaving physically…well, maybe things would be very different today. He was confident he would have gone through with what he'd been planning before the Wisnesky case. They might now be looking forward to their fifth wedding anniversary instead of this awkward uncertainty.
The unrelenting question that had haunted him all these years skated through his mind in the second before John Eames opened the door. How did I let it come to this?
TBC…