Later, when we are back at our tent, I tell him that I need to call my boss.
“I need to tell her that I won’t be able to work for a few days,” I explain.
“Sure. Take your time. I’ll...uh….” He points a finger down the hill.
“Wander around?” I laugh.
He pulls a face and heads off.
I wait until he is a safe distance away and I head toward the lake. My sneakers suck at the mud and make revolting noises.
My message to Bernie takes only a minute. I briefly explain about the break in and promise to call back in a few days. I hit the end button and glance over my shoulder. Caleb is nowhere in sight. I pull his cell phone from my pocket and power it on. Two messages. I jab at the voicemail key and hold the phone to my ear. A voice asks for the password. Shit. I type in his birth date and the voice tells me that the password is incorrect. I try his birth year and bingo!
First message.
“Caleb, it’s Leah. Look…we really need to talk. I have some very interesting news for you. It’s about your new little friend Olivia. She’s not who you think. Give me a call back as soon as you can,” a pause, then, “I love you.”
The second message was left thirty minutes after the first.
“It’s Leah again. I’m really starting to get worried. I’m at your place and it looks like you left in a hurry. I just really need to talk to you babe. Call me.” I make a face and snap the phone closed. She has a key to his condo. Why didn’t I suspect she’d have a key? She was probably snooping around in his apartment while he was in the hospital after the accident. The little tramp has probably already seen her ring!
I glare at the phone, weighing my options. It has to go. It was the phone or it was me.
I walk down the little dirt incline that leads to the water’s slimy edge and watch the mosquitoes dance drunkenly along its surface.
“Leah,” I say looking down at Caleb’s phone. “Not yet.” And then I throw it into the water.
“Olivia, Have you seen my phone?”
I am crouched over a can of beans trying to manipulate the cheap can opener we’d bought. I drop both of them.
“Shit,” I say sidestepping the brown mess that is creeping across the ground towards my toes.
Caleb grabs another can from our stash and opens it for me.
He dumps it into our hot pot.
“You can use my phone. It’s over there on my sleeping bag.”
Caleb takes two strides to where I point and lowers himself to his haunches.
“I could have sworn my phone was in the car….”
“Maybe you dropped it at Wal-Mart,” I suggest over my shoulder.
“Yeah…”
I hold my breath while he dials and pray that he isn’t calling Leah.
“Mum,” I hear him say and I slump against Pickles in relief.
“No, no, I’m fine. I just decided to take a little trip…she did? What did she want?”
I didn’t think about Leah calling his parent’s house.
“…Oh, but she didn’t tell you why?…well, I’ll be back in a couple of days, I’ll talk to her then…Yes I’m sure mum. Love you too.” I watch his face carefully. He looks worried.
“Hey,” I say taking my telephone from his hand and stuffing it in my purse.
“Come flirt with me while I heat these beans up.”
I grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the plug outlet.
For the next four days, we stay cozened in our tent as the temperature drops to forty. We eat cup o’ noodles and fight over who got to sleep next to the portable heater. When it grows dark outside we pull our beach chairs together and wrap ourselves in blankets to watch the fire. Caleb keeps bringing up my failure to fill out my law school applications and I respond with a jab about his failure to propose to Leah. By the time we crawl into our separate sleeping bags at night, we have stupid smiles plastered on our faces. Every night Caleb engages me in an exchange that makes my toes tingle underneath all four pairs of my socks.
“Olivia?”
“Yes, Caleb?”
“Are you going to dream about me tonight?”
“Shut up.”
And then he laughs that beautiful, sexy laugh.
Chapter Eleven
The Past
“Do you love me?”
“I’m sorry—what?!”
“Do you love me? That’s a simple enough question. Would you prefer if I asked you in another language?” He rolled from his back onto his belly, rearing up above me. “M'aimez-vous? Você ama-me tanto como o amo?” Caleb, who was fluent in French and Italian, was showing off. The grass beneath my back began to itch like his question.
We had been dating for exactly one year and I had successfully skirted, ignored, and deferred my way through not answering it. It was hard work putting any of those techniques into use when Caleb Drake was inches away from your face, staring at you with his intense eyes. I took a deep breath to level myself and thought about the millions of starving children in Africa. We were in Georgia, camping much to my chagrin. I was tired and sweaty and wearing the same pair of pants that I wore the day before. We had been here for twenty-four hours and all I had received other than this rather obtuse question, was a bazillion bug bites and sore muscles.
“When I get home, I’m going to sponsor one of those kids from Kenya,” I said scratching my knee. “You know—from those Children’s Fund commercials?”