The Night We Met

“My Cup Runneth Over.” He sang the whole song directly to me.

It didn’t mean anything. How could it? We’d just met. He’d never seen me in the morning. Or any other time of day, for that matter.

And never would.

Still, I listened to every cadence, every lilt and syllable, and knew that this was a night I’d never forget.

“I have to go,” I said, standing to put on my serviceable short black coat as he made his way back to the table. “I don’t want to miss my curfew.”

“I’ll see you later,” Nate told his friends, standing behind me. I wasn’t sure what was going on until he followed me outside.

Nate walked me home. The couple of blocks had seemed insignificant when I’d traversed them with crowds of people earlier that evening. Now the quiet stretch of road, cloaked in the darkness of night, seemed far too intimate.

Nate kept a respectful distance, his jacketed arm not even bumping into mine.

“The guys told me about this cliff you skied today,” I began. “They said you’d have won a medal if you’d been in the Olympics.”

“In case you haven’t figured it out, they exaggerate.”

“But not many skiers make it over that particular drop-off upright, or so I hear.”

“Plenty do. And plenty fall, too.”

“How’d it feel, to be flying in the air like that? Were you scared?” I’d had butterflies in my stomach listening to Arnold talk about it.

“Truthfully?” He glanced down at me.

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else would probably figure I’m crazy, but I have a feeling you’re going to understand this. As soon as I started that run, I was so busy being aware of the wind gliding by—almost as though it was holding me up—and the crisp cold against my face, I didn’t even think about landing until it happened. And then it was like any other slope. You do what you have to do to stay on your feet.”

What he’d just described sounded like a moment of pure, spiritual bliss. Such intense involvement in the here-and-now that you were actually taken beyond it.

I’d petitioned to join a convent so I could learn how to have moments like that. There was something about this man, something deeper than anything I’d encountered in normal life, that was reaching out to me.

Almost as if he had answers to some of the mysteries I so desperately wanted to solve. Subconscious answers, maybe. But had them, just the same.

“I’ve enjoyed talking with you, Eliza Crowley,” he said as we arrived at the heavy iron gate in front of St. Catherine’s.

“And I’m glad I met you, Nate Grady.” There didn’t seem to be much harm in admitting that. I was never going to see him again.

“My flight back to Boulder leaves tomorrow evening,” he said unexpectedly as I slipped through the gate and shut it behind me. “Any chance you could get away before then? Maybe we could take a walk.”

Looking at him through the iron bars, all I could get out was, “I…”

“I’m sure you’re on a pretty rigid schedule.” He seemed to take pity on me. “It’s okay if you can’t. I won’t be offended.”

“I’m…I have…an hour free after lunch.” I finally stumbled over the words. Who on earth was this woman uttering them? “We could meet down at the corner and walk through the gardens.”

They weren’t owned or tended by the sisters of St. Catherine’s, but because the city park was so close, many of the sisters went there. I’d be in plain sight. Protected.

This could in no way be considered a date.

And until I moved out of college student housing into the main house, I was free to come and go. Curfew aside, of course.

“Great,” he said. “What time?”

“One?”

“I’ll be there.”

I spent the next two hours lying awake in the long room I shared with seven other college students—three of them, like me, soon to be postulants—my nerves buzzing with energy and life. And with guilt…Going to that bar had been so completely out of character for me. And everything that had followed even more so.

My favorite fictional heroin flashed into my mind, a woman whose inner strength and sense of right and wrong had always spoken to me. My mother had read Jane Eyre to me as a child, and since then, I’d reread it often. Did the feelings I was trying so hard to comprehend bear any likeness to those experienced by Jane Eyre when she first met Mr. Rochester? I hoped not.

My attraction wasn’t physical or romantic. At a time when I felt lost between past and future, when I was no more than an in-between, having left behind who I was and not yet arrived at who I was going to be, Nate Grady saw a person.

I wanted to talk to him one more time.

Chapter 2

One Sunday a month, the novices at St. Catherine’s were permitted visits from their parents and siblings. That next day was one of those Sundays and with all the extra people milling around in the grounds, my departure went unnoticed. I wasn’t required to stay on the premises—not until I moved from the dormitory—but on Sundays I rarely left, choosing to study with the sisters rather than involve myself in secular activities on God’s day of rest.

Still, I wasn’t doing anything wrong in meeting Nate and didn’t really understand my relief at being able to escape unseen.

He was waiting at the entrance to the park, dressed in dark slacks, a white shirt and long, skinny black tie. His hair was neatly parted and combed to one side.

“I feel kind of silly, shivering in this sweater while you’re not even wearing your jacket.” He’d slung it over his shoulder in a way that looked casual and rakish—sexy—at the same time. I rejected that thought immediately.

“It’s nearly seventy degrees,” he said, falling into step beside me without so much as an inappropriate glance at my knees, revealed by the navy plaid jumper I’d worn to Mass that morning. Granted, I was wearing my usual dark stockings. “I can’t remember January ever being this warm. Not in my experience, anyway.”

“One year, when I was about twelve, it hit ninety-five in January. My folks cooked hamburgers on the grill and all my older brothers and sisters were there. We played Marco Polo in the pool in our backyard.”

“It’s going to be about twenty-five degrees when I get home tonight.”

His words stopped the smile on my lips—and calmed my heart. He would be leaving soon.

And I was never going to see him again.

“Did you bring anything memorable with you from Mass this morning?”

We’d been talking for almost an hour and I was beginning to feel as if Nate was an old friend. Still, the intimate query into my spiritual life threw me.

And yet it thrilled me. Other than the sisters, no one had ever engaged me in conversation about this most personal aspect of my life.

I had no idea how to answer him.

“My Bible,” I finally said, inanely.