Chapter Twenty-Two

"I'm just going to leave my shoes here," I remarked, adjusting my rose-colored sunglasses as I waited for him to finish. "There's no need to carry them with me while we're walking."

Paul turned to me as he stuffed his socks inside his shoes. "I don't think that's a good idea," he said.

"Why not?"

"Do you realize how fast my shoes will disappear if anyone recognizes me while we're here?" he laughed. "They'll be on the auction block tomorrow morning selling for a few hundred quid, I'm sure."

I smiled. "Very well," I said, picking up my shoes and dangling them from the tips of my fingers as we walked towards the water's edge. It was turning out to be an absolutely stunning night. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a sunset as lovely as the one we were watching at that very moment, with colors so vibrant and diverse that no artist could ever replicate them in a painting. The sand felt very warm beneath our feet, since it had been baking in the sun for hours and hours that day. I was loving every moment of this, just walking along with Paul, not saying a word and enjoying some well-needed peace and quiet from all the rushing around and commotion of the past two weeks.

"Fancy a swim, then?" Paul remarked, watching the white-capped waves crash onto shore as we neared the water's edge.

"No, thank you," I said. "I'm even afraid to go into Lake Michigan when it gets choppy. This is even worse!"

"Oh, yeah?"

I nodded. "My dad took me with him when he went sailing with Mr. V from the hotel once. We went way out away from shore, and me and my dad were going to swim. I hadn't been swimming in any water deeper than four feet at that point in my life, so when I jumped in and a wave cracked me in my face and I couldn't feel the bottom, I got a bit understandably frightened as I realized I was swimming in a few hundred feet of water."

"What were you expecting? A wading pool?"

"I don't know--I was only five," I shrugged, wriggling my toes as wet sand squished between them. "I was lucky I already knew how to swim…I'd already had a year of swimming lessons at the Pine Lake pool by that point."

"Laurie would've been fish bait," he joked, poking me in the side with his finger. He stopped jabbing me after a moment, then put his arm around my back and let his hand rest against my hip as we walked. I returned the favor and rested my right hand on his shoulder.

"Paul?"

"Hmm?"

"I just wanted to let you know…thank you so much for inviting me with on this tour," I said after realizing that I'd never really thanked him or the others for their efforts. "I don't know if I've told you that in the last couple of weeks with everything being so crazy and all…"

He smiled a tight-lipped smile. "Well, it's about time, you--after all the hundreds of pounds you've cost us in airfare and lodging…"

"Oh, right," I scoffed. "You'd be crying your poor lonesome heart out if I hadn't come with."

He stuck out his tongue at me, and I reached up to pinch it between my thumb and finger, but he was too quick. He kicked out his left leg and nearly knocked me off-balance, catching me in his arms just before I slid backwards into the bubbly sea foam rushing onto the sand. I reached for his shoulders to brace myself, but instead ended up yanking him down into the sand with me.

"Argh!" I shouted as my hair got smushed into the soft sand and muck we'd been walking through. "It'll take me a week to get all this crap out of my hair."

Paul had nearly collapsed on top of me as he burst into giggles. "Thank god you weren't born a mermaid," he remarked once he finished his outburst.

"I second that," I said, "especially considering the fact that I nearly gave myself a stroke when I went swimming with my dad like I told you."

I felt his soft fingertips gently brushing the wet wisps of hair off of my forehead as he gazed down at me. "What?" I asked after he stared at me for a full minute. "Has my face gone green or something?"

"Laurie?"

"Ye-es, Paul? I'm right here, you know," I said, patting his shoulders with my hands.

"Laurie, I…er, that is…"

This was beginning to worry me. The only times he got this goofy was when he was about to ask me someth--oh, jiminy-crickets! Not that! Not a marriage proposal!

Every limb in my body went stiff as a jolt of adrenaline hit my bloodstream, and right away Paul could feel that I'd tensed up. He jumped back away from me like he was a spring, kneeling in the soft sand next to me.

"Did-did you catch a chill, luv?" he said, overzealous to change the topic, further evidenced by the way his face had gone completely pale by that point.

"Y-yes, I did. I, uh, I…think I hit that water a little too fast," I said, struggling to sit up and succeeding only after squishing my hands into more muck to support myself.

"Perhaps we'd better get you back to the car, then," he said, leaping to his feet and offering me his hand so I could get up without getting any more messy.

And get you off the hook, I thought as I dusted the sand off my legs. I shook my hair off roughly to get that muck out of it as we walked briskly back to the car, which was the only vehicle in the blacktopped lot by that point--everyone else had abandoned the beach for the night. Paul opened the passenger door for me; I sat on the edge of the seat and slid my shoes back on as he slowly walked around the car to the driver's door and messed with the lock. Lauren Ashley Donaldson, what have you gotten yourself into this time? I thought nervously. You just might have overdone it this time and actually caught a man…and he's so attatched to you that he may not ever intend to leave your side again. If it were a year or two from now, well, it would be a different story…but right now, when you're still in school? What are you going to do?

Paul finally got into the car, but didn't start it up right away. He rolled down his window, played with the radio for a few minutes, lit up a cigarette, and began puffing away nervously, flicking the ash from it out the window instead of into the pull-out ashtray on the dashboard. The sunlight was just about gone at that point, and there were no streetlights near us, so we were in blessed darkness inside the car as we just sat there, looking out at the crashing waves on the beach.

I felt Paul's hand pinch my knee after a few minutes, and I returned the gesture by patting his hand. I was absolutely dying to ask him exactly what he had wanted to ask me earlier just for peace of mind, but I didn't want to get him all nerve-wracked again. If he didn't want to ask me yet, well, fine, so be it; I didn't want a forced proposal from him.

"Shall we go find something to eat?" Paul asked, starting up the car. "I'm famished."

"Sounds good to me," I said, locking my sunglasses inside my purse as we pulled away from the beach parking lot. "I could go for a good greasy burger and fries right now…though it'll probably give me indigestion for a week or so."

It wasn't difficult at all to find a greasy-spoon restaurant near the beach--I'm sure places like that made a bundle of money every day what with all the kids hanging out at the beach. There were only a few customers inside the place when we pulled into the lot and shut off the headlights on the Cadillac, so I asked Paul, "Do you want to go inside and sit down for a little while? It looks like they have the air conditioning on, so it'll be nice and cool."

He nodded, checking for his wallet in his pocket as we got out of the car and followed the walkway to the doors. The cool air inside the restaurant hit our bodies the moment we walked inside; it felt almost too cold for me in the sleeveless blouse and pink mini I was wearing. I folded my arms in front of me to try and keep warm as Paul ordered our food for us. While we waited for our burgers to fry, he looked at me and said, "Are you still cold?"

I nodded. "I really should have brought a jacket with me," I said. "I didn't think it was going to be this chilly in here."

"Oh, sure," he laughed sarcastically as he slid his jacket from his shoulders. "Nick me coat from me again…sure, I understand…"

"Thank you, sweetest," I grinned as he rested the jacket over my shoulders. I slid my arms inside the sleeves--of course they were too long for me--and rolled up the cuffs a little bit. Oh, if I could keep this coat I could forever have something that smelled of that mix of tobacco and aftershave, I thought. Of course, to have the real person would be even better…but, hey, beggars can't be choosers!

The girl who had taken our orders set our red plastic baskets with the burgers and fries wrapped in white wax paper on the counter in front of us without so much as a second glance at Paul. We each took our own basket and walked to a table in the corner of the place, away from the door and windows.

"Hey, Paul, do you remember when we got ice cream from Petersen's last winter?" I asked, just remembering an amusing story that I had wanted to tell him and the others for nearly a year now.

"Of course," he said, unwrapping his sandwich and pouring a good dollop of mustard onto the beef patty. "Eating ice cream in a freezing-cold car--what a way to make yourself ill."

"Well, do you remember that girl that served the ice cream?" I said. "The one that thought she recognized you from somewhere and didn't figure it out until you started singing?"

He nodded, his mouth full with a big bite of the sandwich.

"She turned up in one of my literature classes at Rosary that fall," I giggled. "Her name is Sue Pembroke or Pembley or something like that; she just graduated this term. She never said anything to me, but she'd always give me this funny look, like she thought I was the girl that she saw Paul McCartney with, but she wasn't sure enough to come over and strike up a conversation with me about it."

Paul grinned. "That would have been interesting to see," he said, flipping through the music selections on the jukebox at the corner of the table. "Aah…nothing I'd want to spend a dime on…"

I nearly drowned my french fries in a lake of ketchup after smacking the bottle of Heinz too hard. "Eek! I didn't want that much!" I said, capping the glass bottle. "If you want any of this for your fries, go ahead, or it'll just go to waste."

"Okay," he said, staring out a nearby window at the traffic rushing past the restaurant. "Don't mind if I do…"

"So, what are you going to do when you get home?"

"Probably start packing."

"No, not here home; I meant London."

He shrugged. "Don't know…it'll be the first time in a long while since I've had a nice long break. Maybe I'll go on holiday somewhere, get away from the city again."

"I'll be in the middle of some crazy senior seminar while you're out seeing the world," I sighed. "I'll be so glad when this year is over with and I can go look for a job or look into graduate school or something."

I swiped a few fries from his basket once I'd finished my own. "What should we do after this?"

"Actually, I'm in the mood to go swimming back at the house," he said, livening up a little bit. "It'll give us a chance to get away from the others--I think there were plans for a party in the works when we left the house."

"With that Nina Prescott girl there?" I questioned. "I've seen the types of parties you guys have put together--isn't she a little young for any of that?"

"Of course she is; she's probably long gone by now," Paul said. "We may be careless, but we're not stupid. Do you think we'd let her sit 'round with all of us carrying on the way we do and she's only fifteen years old? It would be as if we brought your sister Claire on one of our acid trips."

I couldn't help but laugh at that one. Claire on acid? Oh, god forbid! She'd swear that her glass ballerinas on her shelf were chasing her around the room or something!

"Laurie, I said that we'd go swimming at the house," he explained, crumpling up the wax wrapper from his burger. "We don't have to go into the party if you don't want to."

"Well, you know my answer on that," I said, collecting all our trash and piling it into one basket. "I don't go for that sort of thing at all."

"I know, I know," he said. We dumped our trash in the garbage can and set the baskets on the little shelf above it. "That's fine, luv."

The drive back to the house in the hills took us less than half an hour, since the rush-hour traffic that had held us up earlier in the evening had subsided greatly. The house was ablaze with lights from nearly every window as we pulled into the driveway behind nine or ten other cars parked near the front door. The sounds of very loud music could be heard outside the door as Paul opened the door for me and we walked into a smoky, busy party scene.

"There must be nearly fifty people here!" I exclaimed above the deafening music as we wove our way through the crowd to the stairs. "I hope there aren't more outside on the patio--I don't want to have an audience while we're trying to swim."

I was just stepping onto the bottom step of the staircase when Neil caught up to me and Paul. "Eh, Paul, can I have a word with you for a mo'?" he asked.

"Sure," Paul said. "Laurie, go on upstairs and change; I'll follow you there in a minute."

I nodded, not even bothering to strain my voice above the din of the party below. I quickly scaled the stairs and locked the bedroom door behind me securely before I dug out my black bathing suit from my suitcase. Before I changed out of my clothes, I took a peek outside the curtains at the patio below. Surprisingly, there was no one outside that I could see, and the swimming pool was all lit up from lights built into the tiles along the edges.

I was just pulling the straps of my bathing suit onto my shoulders when there was a knock at the door. "Who is it?" I asked.

"It's Paul."

I opened the door to the bedroom and Paul walked in. He found his swim trunks in his suitcase and went into the bathroom to change and wash up before we went outside to go swimming. While I was waiting, I started collecting all the junk I'd left laying around the room over the past few days: clothes, hair accessories, all the stuff I'd bought for my sister and my parents and Paul.

I was just sliding the writing porfolio for Paul into my suitcase when he came out of the bathroom. Slamming the lid shut quickly, I said, "Oh, ready to go?"

He gave me a funny look, then a smile. "Okay, what are you hiding?"

"Nothing," I said, snapping the locks shut on the case. "Never you mind…and keep your short little nose out of there."

"Fine, fine, fine," he said, tossing one of the towels he was carrying back into the bathroom. "Get your own towel, then."

"Ha; already got one," I said, holding up the fluffy beach towel that I'd had in my suitcase.

We crept down the stairs to the kitchen and walked to the patio through the side kitchen door instead of the sliding patio doors. The noise from the party inside was still pretty loud, but at least no one inside would see us from inside--the curtains were drawn closed in front of the sliding glass doors.

I tossed my towel onto one of the deck chairs and stood at the edge of the pool, watching as Paul jumped straight in. I stepped down the ladder into the water instead of leaping right in and freezing like Paul did.

"Cor! This water isn't as warm as I thought it was going to be!" he cried after surfacing from underneath the water.

"Well, then don't go jumping in like an idiot," I laughed, splashing a wave of water his way.

I paddled around the perimeter of the pool, around the deeper end and back to the more shallow end where Paul was leaning his shoulders against the edge and kicking his feet above the surface of the water. "I wish I had a pool like this at home," I commented, leaning next to him and letting my feet float upwards. "My dad wouldn't get one for us, though; he said that no one was around to take care of it…plus him and my mother were always afraid that Claire would fall in if she went to play in the yard."

Paul made a face. "Well, then, why couldn't they just watch her?"

I shrugged. "That's the same thing I used to tell my mother all the time. But then she left me babysitting Claire for one afternoon when I was about eleven years old and Claire was four and I saw just how hard Claire was to keep up with. The little brat knocked over one of my mother's potted plants--and, boy, did I get it when she got home!"

"You got in trouble for it?" he said increduously.

"How quickly you forget that I got in trouble for Claire locking us out of the house during that tornado," I laughed. "She's my mother's baby--always has been, always will be."

"Sounds like my brother," he said. "He would always go running to my mother if something happened--"

"And what did you do?" I said with a crooked smile.

"I was usually the one that caused the problem," he said with a wicked grin. "I would always catch hell for it. 'Course, if we both did something wrong, I'd weasel me way out of it and Michael would get the spanking…and I'd be yelling from the other room, 'Tell Dad you didn't do it and he'll stop!'"

I giggled. "Wish I would've thought of that when I was younger!"

Paul leaned over and kissed me just then, a very loooong, delicious kiss. When I finally opened my eyes again, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and returned the kiss. He pulled me close against him and we floated along in the pool kissing each other. I started missing moments like that even before they were over with, but I tried to keep that thought out of my mind as much as I could as Paul's lips drifted across my cheeks and down my neck.

We stayed outside for the duration of the party, which was, surprisingly, not very late at all, just about midnight or so. Paul and I snuggled together beneath two towels on one of the deck chairs, looking out at the night sky. Not many stars were up there, but it was still just so wonderful, Paul's arms around me, a slight breeze rustling the leaves on the trees nearby, and the sounds of some slow music from inside as the party wound down. That song "I Only Have Eyes for You" was on the radio or on the record player, and Paul was softly singing along with the tune as I started drifting off to sleep.

A little while later I felt Paul lift me up and carry me inside the house. I opened my eyes after a few seconds, taking note that the living room was dark and everyone was gone.

"Mmm…party's over," I said quietly as he set me on my feet.

"Yes, and so is the free ride," he whispered. "Come on; up the stairs, now. We've gotta get an early start tomorrow for the show."

"Two more left and that's it," I mumbled as I followed him upstairs to our room. "Just two more left…"

And would that proposal come again before those last two shows? I thought as I drifted off to sleep. What am I going to do if it doesn't? But…what am I going to do if it does?

Continue to Chapter 23

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