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Especially over a relationship that had barely gotten off the ground.
No, she was doing the right thing. I was also doing the right thing. Everyone could go to bed at night and know they were doing what they were supposed to do.
So why did it suck so bad?
I missed her like hell. I missed her being on campus. I missed her being in my bed. I just missed knowing that she was somewhere nearby, and not five or so hours away on a giant university campus.
I shook my head. I needed to focus. I had a couple of classes and a test to study for today that I was positive I wouldn’t actually study for if I just brought everything home. It was a business ethics test, the class she’d taught before she left. Just knowing it was still her course plan material but not taught by her meant that I was incredibly disinterested. I had checked out a bit, and though my grades were fine, I was worried that wouldn’t last long unless I got my head back in the game. I decided to take most of the afternoon and study on campus rather than going home.
The student commons was cram-packed as I walked in and immediately regretted going inside.
The crowd of kids pushing their way through the narrow doors lessened some as I approached. Being a community college, there weren’t any athletes around to take up space and throw weight around, so someone as big as I was stood out a bit, and people tended to clear a path. I often felt bad about that, but it wasn’t like I could help it. Every bit of me was hardened and muscular from years of working my ass off in the fields and with the horses.
Once in the courtyard, I made a beeline for the cafeteria, thinking in the back of my mind how appropriate it would be for today if they were just closed for some reason. It would go along with my luck at this point. Thankfully, they weren’t, and I ducked inside to the wonderous smell of bacon, eggs and toasted bread.
“Morning,” a cheerful voice said from behind the counter.
“Morning, Stella,” I said. She smiled her million-megawatt smile like she did every morning that I came in and waved.
“How you doing this morning?” she asked. “You want your usual?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Nodding, she went about piling the plate high with the things I ordered each time I came in. I didn’t know if she was able to do that for every person that came in or if I was a special case, but I marveled at her seemingly perfect memory and how she could build a plate that looked the exact same each time, down to the droplets of syrup that were always in the same spots.
Stella was an increasingly rare type of person in this world. Cheerful, clearly a hard worker, talented and friendly. I knew she had worked her way up in the cafeteria to the point that she ran it now, and she could clearly start her own restaurant at any time if she wanted. The only stumbling block to that might be funding, since I could see it being hard to sell a sixty-some-year-old woman starting a restaurant from scratch in rural Texas, but I had no doubt she would be successful if she did.
It actually started wheels turning in my own mind. Part of the whole point of going to school was to learn what I felt like I needed to know to expand my operations even further. I wanted to put a restaurant on the property and have someone run it so we could artificially extend the town out into the unincorporated land just past the town limit at the edge of my property. If we could make the other end of Murdock thrive, I felt like I could help make the city as a whole thrive again, like it had seemed to when I was a kid before the economy hit the skids.
As I sat with my food, my stomach making gurgling sounds in anticipation, I tried to zero in on ideas for what I would do with a restaurant and how I could sell it to Stella to get her to leave the college. It worked for a little bit to get my mind off Kristen, but even still, I would get excited about the prospect, and my first thought was to text her and tell her all about it.
We had continued speaking since she had been gone, though we couldn’t seem to connect every day. Usually, we would send text messages that the other would respond to at some point, and I made sure we actually spoke to each other a couple times a week. But it was difficult. Every time I talked to her or we did a short video call, it hurt all over again.
When I finished my breakfast, I dropped off the plate and waved to Stella before heading to my first class. My backpack slung over one arm, I crossed campus and saw little spots where sharp memories of embracing Kristen bubbled up. A place where we’d sat for a picnic. A place where we’d kissed because the courtyard was empty, and we were locking up her office before leaving. A place where we exchanged notes as we passed each other, and I ran back to my next class to read them.
I still had them folded up tightly in my wallet.
One class bled into another, and before long I was eating lunch and preparing to go study in the library just beside the commons. I found myself sitting by one of the fast-food places, an unappetizing looking burger and fries on the table in front of me and realizing that I knew I had been to classes today, I just couldn’t remember anything about them. I might as well have just stared at a wall all day for how much good it had done me.
I tried to shake it off, caffeinating myself with a sugary soda and shoving fries dipped in barbeque sauce down my throat.
Eating quickly, I packed up the rest of my things and headed for the library next door. At least I could get something accomplished today if I could get some of my studying done. I had index cards, my laptop, several pens, and one of the last remaining physical books in the college for the course. I planned on getting it all in my head before I left with a simple memorization technique and then going home to work in the field all day while quizzing myself. I had a feeling it would work.
But on the way to the library, my brain went right back to Kristen. It stayed there as I sat down and methodically pulled out all my things and sat them on the desk around me. By all rights, I should have been set up and ready to go, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about her. I had to see her. Soon.
Maybe I could take a trip up there as a surprise. I could even do it today. It wasn’t like I had classes the next day, since that was my day off, and a five-hour or so drive wasn’t too bad. I could do that rather quickly, go spend the night with her, then come home in time to finish studying for the test. Maybe she could even help me study, using the ‘assign terms to parts of my body’ technique she had used once before when neither of us wanted to get out of bed or put on clothes, but I had a test in the morning. It had worked extremely well, even though I’d had a hard-on the entire test.
That was it then. I was going to go see her. I was going to drop in as a surprise, and by the time dinner rolled around, we would be sitting in a restaurant near campus up there.
I closed the book and was about to reach for the laptop when the door opened, and my eyes went to it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and for a moment, I could only blink.
14
KRISTEN
The look on Camden's face when he first saw me was everything I'd hoped for as I was driving back home. I didn't know for sure how he was going to react to me coming back, so I'd decided not to tell him about it. I wanted the opportunity to explain the whole thing to him face to face rather than telling him about it over the phone.
Once everything was settled with the coordinator at Van Hope, everything moved even more quickly than when I’d first gotten the new position. We had to piece everything together from scratch, building the vision I had in my head without much to go on but the idea.
