Amanda wondered if her heart would burst out of her chest.
Ten years might’ve passed, but she still remembered everything about their conversation. Josh had been smiling, teasing her. Neither of them dreamed for a minute that it would be their last time together. They were in love, after all, with everything in common. Of course they’d see each other again.
She arrived two hours early. Her hair was long and loose over her shoulders, and she wore a pair of dark Capri pants and a white short-sleeved pullover. The sky was brilliant and sunny, and despite the ocean breeze, temperatures stayed in the high seventies. Even still Amanda had goose bumps. She parked in the camp lot, walked down the wooded path and climbed the stairs to the covered bridge. It was empty.
She crossed to the middle and leaned against one of the wooden windowsills. For a moment she looked up, beyond the blue to the place where God must’ve been watching her. Am I crazy, Lord? Should I have stayed home? She waited, but no dramatic answer came. After a few minutes she turned away from the window and looked at the bridge, the six feet between the two wooden walls.
The place where she and Josh danced that night, the place where they promised to come back again. Amanda continued to the other side of the bridge and then down the steps to the beach. She crossed the sand and found a piece of driftwood where she sat until it was just five minutes before noon.
Only then did she make her way back up the stairs to the bridge. She was two stairs from the landing when she heard the sound of footsteps. Her heart responded with a triple beat. It couldn’t be him, could it? He was a busy movie star, someone the whole country recognized. His life would’ve been too busy to remember a girl from his seventeenth summer, right.
She took one more step and then another. The moment she stepped into view of the bridge, she saw him. She blinked, as if maybe his image would disappear and it would all be a dream. Certainly Josh Nelson wasn’t really standing there, fifteen feet away, wearing the same grin he’d worn a decade earlier.
But before she could think about whether it was a dream, he closed the distance between them. With slow steps, his eyes locked on hers, he came to her and when he was a few feet from her he stopped and held out his hands. “Amanda . . . you came.” He swallowed. “You’re so . . . beautiful. Even more than before.”
“And . . . you.” Tears filled her eyes but she blinked them away. Her throat was thick and she had to work to find the words. “I thought you forgot about me.”
“Never.” He came to her and took her hands. His voice was low and kind, the voice she remembered from all those years ago. “No matter what you’ve read about me, I never forgot.” He shrugged. “I just didn’t know how to reach you or . . . whether you’d want me to find you if I could.”
A sound that was mostly laugh came from her throat. “Can you believe it’s been ten years?”
“I think we have some catchin’ up to do.” As easily as he’d done a decade earlier, Josh took her hand and motioned toward the beach. “Let’s walk.”
They shared the next four hours together, walking the shoreline and finding their way back to all the places they’d missed. When the afternoon was over, Josh took her hands and kissed her on the lips, a kiss of nostalgia and regret and a depth that even time couldn’t erase. “I have to go.” He searched her eyes. “My car’s a rental and my flight leaves in three hours out of Portland.”
Disappointment cut her sharp, but she nodded, her smile in place. “Thanks for coming. It . . .” she forced herself to keep her emotions in check. “It was great seeing you.”
“My life’s crazy, you know that.” He’d talked about acting, but not his fame. Not until then. “But can I ask you something?”
“Anything.” She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything to interrupt the moment. It was just as well that he was leaving. His lifestyle was nothing like hers. The two of them were too different now, worlds apart. There would be nothing for them after this moment, an afternoon stolen from yesterday.
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, his eyes shyer than before. “Amanda . . . would you mind giving me your number?”
Only then did Amanda exhale.
