Message in a Bottle Read Free Page B

first drawn them to each other. Looking back, Theresa felt that David became a different person altogether, although she couldn’t pinpoint the moment when it all began to change. But anything can happen when the flame of a relationship goes out, and for him, it did. A chance meeting at a video store, a conversation that led to lunch and eventually to hotels throughout the greater Boston area.
    The unfair thing about the whole situation was that she still missed him sometimes, or rather the good parts about him. Being married to David was comfortable, like a bed she’d slept in for years. She had been used to having another person around, just to talk to or listen. She had gotten used to waking up to the smell of brewing coffee in the morning, and she missed having another adult presence in the apartment. She missed a lot of things, but most of all she missed the intimacy that came from holding and whispering to another behind closed doors.
    Kevin wasn’t old enough to understand this yet, and though she loved him deeply, it wasn’t the same kind of love that she wanted right now. Her feeling for Kevin was a mother’s love, probably the deepest, most holy love there is. Even now she liked to go into his room after he was asleep and sit on his bed just to look at him. Kevin always looked so peaceful, so beautiful, with his head on the pillow and the covers piled up around him. In the daytime he seemed to be constantly on the go, but at night his still, sleeping figure always brought back the feelings she’d had when he was still a baby. Yet even those wonderful feelings didn’t change the fact that once she left his room, she would go downstairs and have a glass of wine with only Harvey the cat to keep her company.
    She still dreamed about falling in love with someone, of having someone take her in his arms and make her feel she was the only one who mattered. But it was hard, if not impossible, to meet someone decent these days. Most of the men she knew in their thirties were already married, and the ones that were divorced seemed to be looking for someone younger whom they could somehow mold into exactly what they wanted. That left older men, and even though she thought she could fall in love with someone older, she had her son to worry about. She wanted a man who would treat Kevin the way he should be treated, not simply as the unwanted by-product of someone he desired. But the reality was that older men usually had older children; few welcomed the trials of raising an adolescent male in the 1990s. “I’ve already done my job,” a date had once informed her curtly. That had been the end of that relationship.
    She admitted that she also missed the physical intimacy that came from loving and trusting and holding someone else. She hadn’t been with a man since she and David divorced. There had been opportunities, of course—finding someone to sleep with was never difficult for an attractive woman—but that simply wasn’t her style. She hadn’t been raised that way and didn’t intend to change now. Sex was too important, too special, to be shared with just anyone. In fact, she had slept with only two men in her life—David, of course, and Chris, the first real boyfriend she’d ever had. She didn’t want to add to the list simply for the sake of a few minutes of pleasure.
    So now, vacationing at Cape Cod, alone in the world and without a man anywhere in the foreseeable future, she wanted to do some things this week just for herself. Read some books, put her feet up, and have a glass of wine without the TV flickering in the background. Write some letters to friends she hadn’t heard from in a while. Sleep late, eat too much, and jog in the mornings, before everyone got there to spoil it. She wanted to experience freedom again, if only for a short time.
    She also wanted to shop this week. Not at JCPenney or Sears or places that advertised Nike shoes and Chicago Bulls T-shirts, but at little trinket stores that