Coming Home (Norris Lake Series) Read Free Page B

had found what it meant to feel truly fulfilled as a woman, something no man had ever done before.  He made me forget about wanting sex and found instead a place where passion, sex and love all came together without wanting any of it.  The feelings I had that night were an inevitable tide racing forward that I couldn’t and didn’t want to stop.  It was that day that I fell in love with Ben. 
    The years of school passed and we studied.  We talked about house plans and chose names for children that we would eventually have.  I dreamed of red headed twins and our future; little league games leading eventually to graduations and grandchildren. 
    At one point, I moved in with him and his brother, Joey, but it was short-lived.  One evening we received a call early in the morning hours.  It was the hospital calling to tell us not to hurry because Joey was dead; a car wreck victim. 
    Ben took it hard and distanced himself from everyone who cared for him.  He was never the same.  Eventually we grew apart.  My coop education in Houston, leaving him alone in Knoxville made him easy prey to other women and drove one too many spikes between us. 
    One fall I came back from Houston to visit him.  He lived in a third story apartment on campus.  He welcomed me with open arms.  My eyes were opened to what truly happening when the woman next door stopped by to say hi to him and I could hear their passionate argument through the closed door.  It was then that I realized that she and he had a relationship that was more than just next door neighbors. 
    We half-heartedly tried to make it work when I moved back to Knoxville for my final semester at the University of Tennessee.  I had a condo about three miles from campus across from the Peninsula Insane Asylum.  Ben was working at the Half Shell which was an oyster bar on Kingston Pike.  I came into the Half Shell one night to see him and he broke the news to me.  He wanted to date other people.  I was upset and stormed out of the bar vowing to marry the first man who asked me. 
    I went from there to a bar where I met a man in a navy uniform.  He looked at me across the bar and before I knew it he was standing at my elbow wanting me to dance with him.  He was 6’4” with dark hair, blue eyes, and devastatingly good looks.  Dominic asked me to go home with him and I did him one better.  I took him home with me to my condo.  He stayed well into the early hours of the morning. 
    It was a Friday and I suggested that we go to Gatlinburg for the weekend.  We spent an ideal weekend walking the streets of Gatlinburg and looking through the shops then retreated back to the chalet for more sex – sex in each bedroom, on the deck and several times in the hot tub.  None of it was as heart wrenching as with Ben, but Dominic was beautiful like a Greek god and it was a way to forget that my heart was breaking.  I didn’t talk to Ben once during the weekend. 
    After the good times were over, Dominic and I went back to my condo, the one that Ben and I had once shared.  Ben had been looking for me and realized that I was gone.  He had gathered his things, the clothes and some of the furniture and left.  I cried myself to sleep shouting to myself “good riddance.”  He didn’t want me and gone were all of my stupid girlish fantasies. 
    Years later I heard that he had become a Blackhawk pilot and was deployed to the middle east.   I was happy he’d achieved his dreams.  Six months after that, I saw one of his friends at a party and heard he’d died in a chopper crash.  A part of me died, just like my dreams.  I never spoke of him again, but thought of him often, wondering what my life would have been like had fate treated us differently. 
     

 
    Chapter 2
     
    Dear Diary,
    It’s cold today.  Grandmother says the clouds look like snow but father says that the signs aren’t right yet. Grandfather passed away two weeks ago and I miss him very much.  He gave me