She padded over to the small bathroom at the rear of the store and toweled off her neck one more time. This summer heat was brutal and with the air conditioning on the fritz, she was finding it impossible to stay dry.
"I freaking hate this humidity," she muttered to herself while nervously tidying up the shelves in front of her. She peered closer into the mirror for what felt like the fifteenth time that hour and sighed deeply. All the work she'd put into applying her makeup just so and then blow-drying her hair was for nothing.
Pulling her hair back into a casual twist, she clipped it high enough off the nape that she no longer felt the wet strands on her neck. A facecloth removed what was left of the mascara running under her eyes but nothing was going to change the slightly feverish tint to her skin. She nervously ran a tongue over her lips and could taste the salty sweat.
"Oh, just swell." She told her reflection. "Why couldn't this be happening in the dead of winter instead?"
Impatiently flicking off the light, she re-entered the main space of her small store. She'd spent the day cleaning up even though she knew he wouldn't be paying attention to any of it. Fidgeting was more like it though, moving one item here and then uselessly back again.
She repeated in her head more than once, "This is demented. Demented, demented, demented."
Melanie had been talking to herself in this vein off and on for the past week, with the tension ratcheting up a few notches the closer she got to this date. By the time this morning had arrived, the tension in her body was near overwhelming. Her mind couldn't focus on anything but the clock mounted high on the wall. She knew she'd spoken earlier to clients as they came in, but damn if she could remember a thing that was said or bought.
All that mattered right now was that Robin would come through her front door... so soon. Here, in her place, after all this time he would be standing just a foot or two from her. A few tantalizing moments and then? He'd be gone again.
"ARGH!" She cried up to the ceiling in frustration. "I am FUCKING losing it!"
When she was being honest with herself, she could quietly admit that she'd lost it on his account decades before. It was hard to believe that those heady days of university, music, parties and few responsibilities were almost 20 years gone now. Harder still to reconcile that wild adventurous child with the woman she was now: settled, active in the community, and a mother.
A wife. Married.
He too was married, with a gorgeous little boy whose grinning face often showed up on his Facebook wall. Oh yes, they'd reconnected online a few years ago in the way that old acquaintances do -- it turned out he was a friend of a friend and so what could one do but accept the request?
What made it stranger still was when his wife Jennifer "friended" her as well, adding a surreal element to it all. She had met her back when he and Jen had already been dating for a while. They were all part of a group loosely connected in some ways through classes, running in to one another at parties and bars. But with Melanie and Robin's shared history, she couldn't help but be aware of his girlfriend at the time.
For whatever reason, it must have made some sort of sense to Jennifer to virtually hook up again and they'd all stayed in touch in that casual way of 'like'ing one anothers shared links and bon mots.
The strangest partto Melanie was that there were so many reasons to allow an authentic friendship to develop between the two women. Moments would crop up while reading Jen's status updates, or recipe postings, or quirky photos when Mel could ruefully admit that she liked this woman. She felt genuinely connected to her somehow and yet she knew she could never acknowledge or pursue it in real life. You can't develop a relationship with someone while running the risk of somehow letting slip that you've had a secret connection with her husband, can you?
Especially if said 'connection' was intensely sexual in nature, and had taken place two decades ago. Back in the day when now husband and wife were supposedly exclusively together.
The truth was that Mel tried not to think about her long-ago affair with Robin very often. After all, she was in her 40s now and more than happy with her husband and children. What would possibly be the benefit in dredging up old memories? You can't go and compare the insanity of hormone-driven passion with the stability of family, of love and trust established over time.
Could you?
Okay, so they'd had their crazy fling. Luckily they had come to their senses before they were caught, and life had gone on. They had been in their early twenties after all and, hey, wasn't that the whole point of being young and stupid? Making dumb-ass mistakes and learning from them?
Thinking back to those heady days, she couldn't even fathom what had possessed her to flirt with the intriguing yet unavailable guy at that party. She'd seen him around often enough on campus, and usually he was with a dark-haired woman she presumed must be the girlfriend. But on this particular night he was all on his lonesome and she spotted him leaning up against a wall, drink in hand. Their eyes made contact and she suddenly found herself standing in front of him, far closer that a passing acquaintanceship should.
"Hello, Mel-a-nie", he had said to her pointedly, toasting her with his plastic cup as he drew out her name.