Of Love & Regret (Madison & Logan 1)

And I was right.

Chapter Fifteen

I sighed in satisfaction as I pressed send on the email with my column attached to my boss. It had been a long week, and I was happy to have work out of the way. It was late Friday afternoon, and I was excited for the weekend to start. Emily and I were going to the Indiana Dunes, a stretch of beach on Lake Michigan’s shoreline, for some much deserved rest and relaxation. We were going to spend our days swimming, biking, and eating way too much food.

I was already packed, and I had about an hour to waste before Emily was supposed to pick me up in the rental car. I turned on the TV and flicked through the channels, trying to find something that would hold my attention. I paused at the classic movie channel that was showing Rear Window. There was a dull ache in my chest as I watched a scene between James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It was a reminder of who I had last watched the movie with, even if it had just been over the phone.

I quickly changed the channel, banishing the thought. I finally settled on the news since there was nothing else on. A few minutes later, my cell phone rang and I saw that it was Emily calling.

“Hey!” I said enthusiastically. “Are you almost done with work?”

“Even better. I got out earlier than I thought I would, so I’m on my way over now. I should be there in about five minutes. Are you ready?”

“Yup. I’ll be outside waiting for you. See you soon!”

I grabbed my suitcase and my sunglasses, and locked the apartment door behind me. I wrestled my suitcase down the long flights of stairs, and opened the door to the balmy summer heat. It was early June, and it was sticky hot and humid. I put my sunglasses on and sat down on the front steps to wait for Emily.

I didn’t have to wait long before she pulled up in front of my apartment building and double-parked. I waved as I grabbed my suitcase and quickly ran down the steps. After I had stowed my suitcase in the trunk, I opened the passenger side door and climbed in, grateful for the blast of air conditioning that hit me.

“This heat is killing me,” I complained as she pulled back out onto the road. “I’m sweating so much that I look like a drowned rat.”

“Pretty soon we’ll be lounging on the beach by the water,” Emily said. “Plus, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of eye candy in the form of hot guys wearing barely any clothes.”

I laughed at the eager look on her face. “I can get on board with that. I’m so glad you were able to get away this weekend.”

“You’re telling me! I’m getting pretty sick of my job. Sylvia doesn’t seem to realize that I have a life outside of work.”

Although I knew Emily appreciated that her boss trusted her enough to depend on her so heavily, it put a serious cramp in her personal life. It had gotten even worse recently, since Sylvia’s interior design business had expanded.

“That sucks,” I said in commiseration. “Would you ever think about leaving?”

Emily frowned as she thought it over. “No, I’m just hoping to stick it out until I get a promotion. I need her to stop thinking of me only as her assistant and give me the chance to do some designs on my own.” She sighed heavily. “Let’s forget about work for the weekend. For the next two days, work doesn’t exist!”

Emily and I spent the rest of the drive chatting about nothing important, from TV shows to Hollywood gossip. The further we got from Chicago, the more relaxed I felt and the tension in my body dissipated. The hour drive went by quickly, and soon we were pulling up to our hotel.

The hotel was small and quaint, and we were quickly checked in. Emily and I dropped off our suitcases in our room and decided to have dinner at an Italian restaurant that was within walking distance of our hotel.

We had a relaxing night filled with delicious food and multiple bottles of wine. Afterwards, we decided to continue our little party of two and bought a bottle of wine to drink by the pool back at the hotel.

We giggled like high-schoolers as we snuck past the gate and settled into a couple of lounge chairs. Despite being closed, the lights in the pool were still on, providing us with some illumination.

“I feel like we’re kids sneaking alcohol from our parents,” Emily said as she passed me a plastic cup filled with wine. I could tell she was as buzzed as I was and I lay back in my lounge chair with a satisfied sigh. Brilliant stars twinkled in the night sky, and even though we were only an hour away from Chicago, it felt like we were a world away.

“I remember one time when Cassie stole a bottle of rum from her parents,” I reminisced, staring up at the night sky. “We made rum and Cokes, although you could hardly call it that since we barely put any rum in them. Still, four drinks later, we were drunk off our asses. We ended up eating everything in her kitchen and then proceeded to puke it all out.”

Cassie’s mother had found us laid out on the living room couch moaning about how we were dying. She had been furious, but I had begged her not to tell my father. He was stressed enough about work, and the last thing I wanted was to give him something else to worry about. After swearing up and down that I would never do anything so stupid again, Mrs. Brooks had kept it from him, and had told me she trusted me to not make the same mistake again. I had taken my promise seriously and it wasn’t until college that I drank again.

“To this day, I still can’t drink rum and Cokes because they make me nauseous.”

“I’m glad you’re able to talk about Cassie,” Emily said gently. “You never used to bring her up but now I get to hear about the good memories with her.”

“I realized that by holding onto her death and how she died, I was blotting out all the good things I wanted to remember about her. It wasn’t fair to her. She deserves to be remembered as the person she was when she was alive, not for how she chose to end her life.”

Emily took a long sip of her drink before responding in a hesitant tone. “Do you ever think about Logan?”

The mention of his name made me slam a mental door on my emotions. The only way I knew how to cope with the loss of Logan was to try to forget about him, although I knew deep down it was impossible. It had been a little over a year since he disappeared from my life, and there had been no contact since then. I never mentioned him, and Emily followed suit because she knew how painful our breakup had been. I was surprised she was mentioning him now, and I attributed it to the copious amounts of alcohol we had imbibed. It’s also what made me answer honestly.

“I try not to, but so many things remind me of him,” I confessed quietly. “You’d think by now that I’d be over him, but I still avoid things that make me think of him. I can’t go to the aquarium anymore because I think about all the times I dragged him there. I can’t even go to the Half Pitcher anymore to get some damn nachos because it reminds me of Logan.” I gave Emily a rueful smile, trying not to dampen the mood. “Maybe I just miss the idea of Logan.” My smile faltered because I knew how false that was. I missed everything about him. I’d even just take friendship with him again because the lack of his presence in my life had left a gaping hole. It would be painful and hard not to have anything with him beyond a friendship, but nothing could be harder than having him completely absent from my life.