Cherry Girl (Blackstone Affair) Read Free

never far from my thoughts, Cherry.  Don’t ever forget it.
    Yours always,
    Neil
     
    His lett er was written hastily on military-issue stationary, which spoke to the hectic pace the army was keeping right after the attacks.  Neil was busy fighting a war against terrorism and I was busy trying to grow up, and accept the fact that I had only one parent left in my life.  Ian was busy at university and his career in law.  Our mum was busy drowning her grief in glasses of gin.
    We were all very, very busy getting on with our lives and doing our jobs.  Isolated.  Alone.
    My dad had done well by us though, and there were settlements from his life insurance, the airlines , and the US government, so money was not the issue.  No, it was more so the void and abruptness that we were forced to accept that he was never coming back to us.
    Never.
    I understood the finality of death then and took my newfound knowledge to heart, closing off a little of myself, in an effort to prevent such terrible hurt from ever happening to me again.
    Foolish , foolish girl.
     
    ****
     
    My mum has always loved to cook.  She still does, and just like that very first night when Neil joined our family for dinner, she embraced him as a son whenever he was on leave from the army, with huge home-cooked dinners.  It was a given that he would come to see us, but now when Mum cooked in her kitchen, a hi-ball glass of gin and tonic stood at the ready to see her through.  I cannot fault my mother.  She was still a good mum and devoted to my brother and me with all her heart, she just wasn’t as “present” or aware of my activities following the tragedy, as she normally would have been.
    I had the open road of freedom dumped in my lap at a time when I needed censure.
    As a confused and grieving teenager , I embraced the opportunity.  Hell, I grabbed onto it with everything I had and then some.
    By the summer I was seventeen , I had experienced just about everything you wouldn’t want your teenage daughter doing.  Yes, that was me.  Parties, alcohol, smoking…boys.  I sampled just about everything, and came out of my experience a little older, somewhat wiser, and a lot insecure about myself, and with no idea about what I wanted for my life.  Well, I knew one thing I wanted.
    Neil.
    I still wanted him.
    And Neil had been right about one thing.
    The boys were all over me as I matured.  I think he would have wished I was more selective in who I allowed to be “all over” me.  Actually, I knew he wished I were more selective.  I noticed the hard looks from him whenever he was home on leave, evaluating my boyfriend of the moment, his dark eyes ever watchful.  The fact that he paid any attention to me at all was both wonderful and the bane of my existence.  He was taken, you see.  Neil had a girlfriend that just wouldn’t let her claws out of him.
    He would never look at me as a woman while she was wrapped around his cock.  That was what I believed anyway.
    I had run through a slew of guys since he first went off to war, while Neil had stuck with Cora and been her loyal man.  Why, I do not know.  I couldn’t stand her and knew she messed around with others blatantly behind his back whenever he was deployed.  I often wondered how he couldn’t see right through her.  Or if he did see, and didn’t care.  I figured his mates had been telling him what she was doing when he wasn’t around.  Ian had to know and should be telling him, I reasoned.  Was Neil with Cora just for the sex?  Ugh.  I hated to think about them together, and at the same time I tried to forget about him.  Forget that he would never belong to me.  Forget that our time could never come.  Forget about ever having the man I loved all for myself.
    The following summer after I finished school, was when we crossed over into a new and strange territory together.  The “ringing” of our proverbial bell came to pass, as it were.  The spark that started a flame, that