Read Emily Franklin - Principles Of Love 06 - Labor Of Love for Free Online Page A

nods. I nod back. Oh, like all I have to do is say I want to go to Harvard and-- boom--I'm in. Thanks--thanks so much--the college process really was a breeze! I'm practically choking on the tightness of the air.

    "I'll see you for dinner," Charlie says, giving a rather offi cial nod to his parents and to Parker. Charlie and his brother exchange a look that means something but what exactly I don't know.

    I stand up and wonder how I'm going to get back to town. It would be easy to exist in a bubble out here, forget my life at the caf�, the life that's waiting for me. At least, it would be easy if the Addisons welcomed me with open arms. But with Mrs. Addison pretending not to notice my unkempt hair, my scratched-up and now-enflamed skin, my unworthy last name (read: The Bukowski clan did not come over on the Mayflower--we do not have entire buildings named after us), leaving sounds good.

    "Well, thanks very much for having me. Especially spur- of-the-moment." I feel like doing a curtsy as though I have an audience with the queen, but I don't. Instead I try to memorize all of the details I can so I can report back to Chris with accuracy--the cylindrical glasses, Parker's ef fortless but domineering presence, Charlie's . . . what--his apathy? Not just that. The veil that's been drawn over him.

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    With a jolt of worry it dawns on me that this person--the guy who sits and says little, the gorgeous but ineffectual one who defended me but in a way that made it clear I had to be defended--might be the normal Charlie.The person he was before he dropped out of Harvard and became an island- bound fisherman in touch with the sea and himself.

    "A pleasure to meet you, Love." Mrs.Addison shakes my hand.

    "We'll see you again soon?" Mr. Addison shakes my hand and looks at Charlie. "The Silver and White dinner?" Charlie's lips go in clench mode again and he nods, so Mr. Addison looks back to me."Silver and White, then."

    "Lovely," Mrs. Addison says and without another word, whisks her firstborn, Parker, into the cavernous house to change for tennis.

    Silver and White? Harvard? What? The whole interac tion at the Addison abode feels foreign and filled with con fusing ideas and issues, which is what happens, I guess, when so much is left unsaid.This reminds me of how Charlie was all that time in between our first getting together the fall of my sophomore year, and the incommunicado period that happened afterward. He never said what really happened when I thought he'd stood me up; he never cleared up my assumption that he was a local fisherman rather than a Harvard castoff taking a break from the moneyed set. Only

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    when directly asked by me this summer were all of those mysteries unraveled. Just like Parker, he speaks only when directly confronted. Maybe that's the Addison way--this casual air of elegance that appears very easy when in fact it's all a cover.

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    �H o?" In the passenger seat of Charlie's red pickup, bouncing along the sand-edged roads on the way back into Edgartown, I can almost shrug off the weirdness we left be hind at his parents' house.

    He sighs, one arm resting on the open window, the other steering. Meaning, no arm for me."So . . . now you see it."

    I turn so I'm facing him. Even though he's got eyes on the road and hands to himself and the car, I can at least at tempt some closeness. Isn't this the same guy who called me right away after I went to LA? Who kept saying how much he missed me? "Now I see what?" I wait."Charlie?"

    Without warning or signaling, he pulls the truck over to the right side of the road, putting the gears in park before answering me. "I am so sorry, Love."The visor, which has a habit of falling down, does, and Charlie whips it into place

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    with more vengeance than befits the action. "Man.They're incredible, aren't they? Two minutes back in their clutches and I'm like a friggin' droid."

    I lick my lips and pivot so my