Message in a Bottle - Nicholas Sparks [130]
In his own quiet way, Dawson had made her believe that anything was possible. As she drifted through the cluttered garage, with the smell of gasoline and oil still lingering in the air, she felt the weight of the hundreds of evenings she’d spent here. She trailed her fingers along the bench where she used to sit for hours, watching as Dawson leaned over the open hood of the Fastback, occasionally cranking the wrench, his fingernails black with grease. Even then, his face had held none of the soft, youthful naiveté she saw in others their age, and when the ropy muscles of his forearm flexed as he reached for another tool, she saw the limbs and form of the man he was already becoming. Like everyone else in Oriental, she knew that his father had beaten him regularly, and when he worked without his shirt, she could see the scarring on his back, no doubt inflicted by the buckle end of a belt. She wasn’t sure whether Dawson was even aware of them anymore, which somehow made the sight of them even worse.
He was tall and lean, with dark hair that fell over darker eyes and she’d known even then that he would only become more handsome as he grew older. He looked nothing like the rest of the Coles and she’d asked him once whether he resembled his mother. At the time, they were sitting in his car while raindrops splashed over the windshield. Like Tuck’s, his voice was almost always soft, his demeanor always calm. “I don’t know,” he said, rubbing the fog from the glass. “My dad burned all her pictures.”
Toward the end of their first summer together, they’d gone down to the small dock on the creek, long after the sun went down. He’d heard there was going to be a meteor shower and after spreading out a blanket on the planks of the dock, they watched the lights in silence as they streaked across the sky. She knew her parents would be furious if they knew where she was, but at the time, nothing mattered but shooting stars and the warmth of his body and the gentle way he held her close, as if he couldn’t imagine a future without her.
Were all first loves like that? Somehow she doubted it; even now, it struck her as being more real than anything she’d ever known. Sometimes, it saddened her to think that she’d never experience that kind of feeling again, but then life had a way of stamping out that kind of passion; she’d learned all too well that love wasn’t always enough.
Still, as she looked out into the yard beyond the garage, she couldn’t help wondering whether Dawson had ever felt that kind of passion again, and whether he was happy. She wanted to believe he was, but life for an ex-con was never easy. For all she knew, he was back in jail or hooked on drugs or even dead, but she couldn’t reconcile those images with the person she’d known back then. That was part of the reason she’d never asked Tuck about him; she’d been afraid of what he might have told her, and his silence only reinforced her suspicions. She’d preferred the uncertainty, if only because it allowed her to remember him the way he used to be. Sometimes, though, she wondered what he felt when he thought of that year they spent together, or if he ever marveled at what they’d shared, or even whether he ever thought of her at all.
Contents
FRONT COVER IMAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER