At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(37)
Gracie was the only one who never made him feel angry or unsettled. Her dreams for him were even better than his own. She believed he could do anything he set his mind to doing and when he was with her, he believed it too. What she thought about him mattered more than he'd ever realized. He wanted to be her hero in every way.
The sound of Noah's voice on the phone filled Gracie's heart with a kind of happiness unknown to her before that first blissful summer. She couldn't afford to phone him very often, but she wrote to him every day, long stream-of-consciousness letters that touched on everything from the injured dog she had been unable to save, to how many children they would have after they married. They weren't officially engaged yet—that would mean coming clean to their families and neither one of them was ready for that—but the commitment was rock-solid, just the same.
Gracie applied herself to her schoolwork with the kind of intense dedication she brought to every endeavor. Nothing in her life came easy; she accepted that fact as one of the givens. In a way she was glad that Noah was far away in Boston because she would never have been able to concentrate with him close at hand. Noah was one of the lucky ones. He learned quickly with little effort. Gracie had to bite her tongue on more than one occasion when he talked about blowing off the whole thing and getting a job down there in Philadelphia. "Rich boy talk," she'd called it once. After seeing the look on Noah's face, she never said that again but the thought lingered.
Still she knew she was right. Only someone born into privilege could toss aside his education, secure in the knowledge that he could pick it up again any time he liked. When you were on scholarship you didn't have that luxury.
Sometimes Noah drove down from Boston for the weekend and Gracie found herself torn between her love for him and her need to work. She'd set herself a rigorous schedule which included starting her pre-med courses a year early but that all depended upon her ability to maintain top-notch grades. And since even full scholarships didn't cover every need, she worked part-time as a waitress at a nearby coffee shop.
Noah teased her about her work ethic. She tried not to look askance at his casual attitude toward education but she couldn't help herself. He'd been given so many gifts. Parents who loved him. A beautiful home. Every opportunity money and privilege could buy. She couldn't be blamed for feeling the tiniest bit jealous every now and again, could she? Sometimes it seemed to Gracie as if he had turned his back on everything she'd ever dreamed of.
They saw the world through very different eyes, yet back home in the shadow of the lighthouse, their differences fell away. Lying together in the sand in a wash of moonlight, they understood each other in a way impossible for anyone outside their magic circle of two.
And it was magic. No other explanation for the intensity of their connection was possible. Their bodies knew each other intimately. Some nights as she lay there in Noah's arms, Gracie found it impossible to tell where she ended and he began. She loved the way her hand looked against his bare chest, the sight of his fingers as he traced the line of her thigh. She had always felt competent but he made her feel beautiful as well. They fit together so perfectly that Gracie was sure they had been made for each other. They didn't need anyone else. Their time together was so precious, what they felt for each other was so intense, that there wasn't room for anything else.
The most amazing thing of all was that nobody knew about them. Idle Point was a small town and small towns were notorious for gossip. Both the Chases and the Taylors had been the subject of much discussion over the years, but somehow Noah and Gracie remained just beneath the town's radar. Laquita Adams had seen them once coming out of a motel two towns over, but since Laquita was there with a married teacher she had no room to talk. Gracie and Laquita exchanged embarrassed hellos each time they met but neither one acknowledged the incident.
Much of the old crowd had scattered. Don was working a fishing boat out of Key West for the summer. Joe and Tim were traveling through Texas. Joann was in summer school in New York; Terri was working as a counselor at a resort in Boothbay Harbor. Everyone, it seemed, was someplace other than Idle Point.
Noah complained about the sameness of Idle Point but Gracie took comfort from that very fact. All around her things were changing at the speed of light and the fact that Idle Point remained as immutable as its rocky coastline gave her a sense of security and history that only Gramma Del had ever provided. She loved knowing that the bank had stood at the corner of Main and Promontory Point since the turn of the last century and that it would still be standing there at the turn of the next.