The Coleridge Project: Chapter 5
Emily Chandler’s stomach had knotted during the entire lecture she gave for her introductory Western art class. When she was done, she sped through the students’ questions at the end, anxious to call Bill and make sure he was okay. Earlier, before leaving the restaurant, she had stopped to look over her class notes for her planned lecture and had walked outside a half minute or so after Bill, and that was when she thought she saw that man following him. The man had been on the other side of the street from Bill, and maybe she had only imagined what she thought she saw, drawn more to the man’s unusual appearance than any nefarious task he was involved in.
The man was thin, well-dressed, and had the pinkest skin Emily had ever seen, almost like bloodied ham. It was his eyes that freaked her out. No bigger than dots but they were the cold-blooded eyes you’d see on a snake, not on a human. Maybe that was it. That it was those eyes that made her imagine him skulking after Bill. Still, as soon as her class cleared out, she ran to the nearest payphone and called Bill. She needed to hear his voice.
When Bill answered his cellphone, she immediately felt stupid over what she had imagined. The last thing she wanted to do was make him think she was crazy, and instead of mentioning the odd-looking man, she told Bill how much she enjoyed having lunch with him and wondered whether he’d like to meet for dinner. She badly wanted to see him with her own eyes to convince herself that he was okay, but as she realized how forward she had acted, she blushed deeply.
“I’d like that,” Bill said. His voice sounded apologetic as he added, “The story I’ve been working on just exploded on me, and I’m probably going to be stuck here late.”
“I wouldn’t mind sharing a midnight pizza.”
“That sounds great,” Bill said. “I’ll call you when I know what time I can get out of here. How about we meet near your place in the North End?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t wait to see you later.”
Emily told him the same. As she hung up the receiver, she felt a little stupid, but also relieved and glad that she hadn’t mentioned to Bill her paranoid thoughts about him being followed. She tried to figure out why she imagined what she did, and all she could come up with was some sort of hysterical fear of losing the man she was going to be marrying.
The thought stopped her.
The man she was going to be marrying…
She’d known Bill less than twenty-four hours and she was already allowing herself to have thoughts like that. Maybe she was crazy after all. It wasn’t as if she was looking to get involved in a relationship. Far from it. She and her mom had made too many sacrifices so that she could continue her studies in Boston for her to let anything sidetrack her plans.
She understood fully that she was susceptible to trying to fill the emotional and physical void that her father had left her, and that made her overly cautious about allowing herself to enter into any romantic relationship. She was twenty-nine and there’d been very few times since high school that she had let her guard down, and even those times she knew at an intuitive level that the men weren’t right for her and those relationships never lasted long. Yet here she was already allowing that thought about Bill to enter her head. But it was something that felt right, and she couldn’t keep from smiling when she thought about it. If she were being honest with herself, this was something she knew the moment their eyes locked in that North End restaurant.
Love at first sight.
Yeah, right.
The idea of that was just as crazy as thinking that odd-looking man had been following Bill.