Read Take Me All the Way for Free Online Page B

player.
    And not a princess.
    So finally she said, “Okay.”
    The group of friends standing around her broke out into big smiles, and Cami’s face lit with relief. “You’ll work with him?”
    â€œSure,” Tamra said. Even if a bit stiffly.
    Freeing one hand from her clipboard, Cami reached out to warmly squeeze Tamra’s arm. “Thank you! And I’m sure he won’t be so bad. Just a little rough around the edges, that’s all.”
    â€œHey, heads up—can you all move it? Heavy bush coming through.”
    Everyone standing with her raised their eyes in time to indeed find another big bush headed their way, and as the Neanderthal dropped it heavily to the ground between them, they all took a quick step back.
    Tamra looked up to see his broad shoulders and cargo shorts already walking away—then flicked her gaze to Cami, who smiled nervously.
    F LETCHER McCloud knew he made it look easy. He made it look easy to be happy and mild-mannered all the time. He made it look easy to have faith—constant faith—that his wife was coming back. And he believed that with his whole heart.
    But the truth was . . . there were moments when he began to doubt.
    Only moments, though, and that was the important thing. As long as he came back to believing, as long ashis crises of faith were short-lived, infinitesimal blips in his brain, it would all be okay. Kim’s note had promised him that very thing, in fact.
    Standing in the living room of his beach cottage, he found himself studying the gifts he’d bought for her since she’d been gone. Pieces of jewelry he’d known she’d like, small and sometimes silly keepsakes he’d picked up on a lark—like the little stuffed parrot that had reminded him of the real one that had once sat on her shoulder during a stint in Key West and how she’d suddenly loved parrots after that.
    Now he reached in the back pocket of his shorts and drew out his wallet, and from it the note Kim had left for him upon her departure.
    I’m sorry, Fletch. I love you, but I just have to go. Don’t let this hurt too much. Everything will be okay.
    Kim
    It would only be okay again—fully okay—when Kim came back. And that was how he knew deep in his soul that she would.
    Some days it was still hard to believe she’d left him. They’d been happy. Or at least he’d thought so. They’d spent the previous ten glorious years traveling all over the country, living simply but comfortably from the money his tightrope act drew in.
    Kim had been his assistant. He still missed that, even now. He missed looking down at her from atop the rope, feeling that perfect connection, looking into the eyes of the one woman who got him, who understood him, who loved him.
    For the first month after she’d gone, he hadn’t been able to walk the tightrope. He’d simply been unable to regain his balance, mentally or physically. Everything in our heads, and in our hearts, was linked to how our bodies operated.
    He’d only started to perform again by tricking himself, telling himself Kim was in the crowd watching him, cheering for him. When he remembered she wasn’t really there, it all felt emptier, hollow, and he came to understand that what he’d taught himself to do as a boy, through painstaking practice and faith and repetition, he’d eventually begun doing . . . for her. He’d realized that when he climbed up onto the tightrope every day or night, in every city or town, at every street fair or carnival, it had been to impress his wife, to show her the magic she inspired in him.
    Even now, each night when he ascended to the rope, he scanned the crowd looking for her, and each and every night, he believed he would find her there. And when he didn’t, he simply pretended that he did, that she had come back and was watching him, and that was what enabled him to keep his balance.
    He flinched when a