Rooms - James L. Rubart [57]
“Hey, you, how’s life?” Micah stood and brushed a strand of her brown hair back from her face.
“Always fascinating. And you?”
“Same.” His warm eyes invited her, drew her in.
“Beach walk?”
“Sure.”
After reaching the beach, they headed north toward Ecola Creek. A mild wind tickled their faces as the sand squeaked under their feet, but the breeze had only a hint of coolness. The coastline was nearly empty. Three kites struggled to rise in the soft wind, and in the distance two young families poked in the tide pools at the base of Haystack Rock.
They ambled down the beach and talked about nothing. The waves lulled them into silence until Micah brought up the subject she didn’t know how to respond to.
“I need to ask you something. It’s not a big deal.” Micah kicked the sand. “Actually it is, but it’s a weird question, and I don’t know where to start.”
Here it comes. Sarah clenched her hands. She’d suspected he wouldn’t drop the question till he got an answer. “The beginning always lends clarity,” she finally answered, glancing at him from the corner of her eye.
“When you came over for dinner, I said you were beautiful. Your answer flew by me at first, but the next day it smacked me like a wave in the face.”
She stared at the gray sand, her heart pounding. It wasn’t the question she expected. It was worse. Sarah knew exactly what he was about to ask. That night at dinner she’d let it slip. She thought she’d gotten away with it. Obviously not.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“It was your response to me saying ‘you’re beautiful.’ You remember?” Micah stopped walking.
She stopped as well, dropped her head, and pushed up a little mound of sand between her feet and Micah’s. “Let’s say I don’t.”
“You asked about Julie and me.”
Sarah nodded, watching the sand at her feet.
“I hadn’t told you her name.”
Sarah started walking again.
“How did you know her name was Julie?”
A tinge of warmth blossomed in her face. She felt Micah following her. A flock of gulls soared overhead and squawked at her—as if on cue—demanding she speak. But Micah broke the silence first.
“And the day we rode up to Indian Beach together? The ‘praying for me for years’ comment still has me curious, too.”
Great. A double shot of as-awkward-as-they-come questions. Sarah kept walking as she looked out over the gray waves toward Tillamook Rock Lighthouse sitting a mile offshore. To be that isolated right now would be heaven. She stopped but didn’t turn when she spoke. If there was any hope of a future with Micah, she had to tell him, but she didn’t have to watch his reaction to her outlandish reasons.
“Five years ago, right after I came to Cannon Beach, I stood alone at Hug Point and watched the sun drop into the ocean. This indescribable peace settled around me, and in that moment I felt like God told me something. Something I’ve believed at times with everything in me and other times thought I made up inside my own head.”
She hesitated. Should she drop it or plunge in all the way? She plunged. “He said one day I would fall in love with a man I barely knew down here in Cannon Beach. He’d be on a journey back to God and I’d be part of it. Then, clear as a flash of lightning against a black sky, I saw the name Julie in my mind. It didn’t take much to realize there would be a Julie somehow connected to this guy. So I’ve prayed for years . . .” She trailed off. What more could she say? Silence surrounded her as she steeled for Micah’s reaction. Had she said too much?
Since that dinner at his house, Sarah had known it was Micah. She was drawn in, without logic or explanation. Oh, the man he could be if he would choose life!
He was bright, funny, handsome. But what drew her was more. Deeper. It had God’s fingerprints on it. Rick said not to push it and not to hold back. Which one had she done by answering Micah’s question? She feared the former.
Tears pooled in her eyes as she stopped walking and fixed her gaze on the horizon where the ocean and the