Free The Carlton Club by Katherine Stone

didn’t wear her ring. Mark still wore his, although he might, would, have removed it before his date with Kathleen. If he had remembered.
    Had Janet been dating? he wondered. Had she made love with someone else, too?
    “You look just like you looked the day we met,” Mark said finally, gently.
    “Do I? I feel better now. About the way I look.”
    “How about everything else?”
    “I don’t know. How do you feel?”
    “I still don’t understand,” he said slowly. “Maybe I have been more distant and preoccupied. I didn’t realize we hadn’t made love for four months.”
    “You were so moody at home. Leslie says you’re not that way at work.”
    “Leslie? We shouldn’t get her in the middle of this,” Mark said with an edge to his voice.
    “I know. I agree.”
    “I don’t think I’m moody at work or at home.”
    “There are days when you come home and don’t even speak to me. At all. And when I try to touch you, you pull away.”
    “Not many days.”
    “Many, many days. Day after day. Night after night.”
    They sat in silence for a long time, an eternity of thoughts and memories and questions without answers.
    He could have walked over to her and held her and made love to her, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He didn’t know who she was. She was the woman who had yelled at him in a rage a month before, but she looked like the sixteen year old girl with girl with whom he had fallen in love eleven years ago. She was the woman, not the girl. He didn’t know her.
    He had to find the old Janet. To retrace the steps. Then he could go to her. He wanted to go to her. To Janet. To his Janet.
    “Do you remember the first time we made love?” he asked without looking at her.
    “Of course,” she answered, tears flooding her eyes.
    Mark looked at her then, his own eyes glistening.
    “What were you thinking?”
    “What?”
    “What were you thinking when we made love? It was a big step and we never talked about it. What were you thinking?”
    “I was thinking what I always thought when you touched me,” she said very quietly. “I was thinking, I love you. I love you.”
    “ Janet ,” he said emotionally. But still he couldn’t move to her. He looked at his hand and the scuffed, eighteen carat gold band he had worn for the past five years. “Why aren’t you wearing your ring?”
    “Because the ring is a symbol of you, of us. It means we’re together. I have to feel how it would be without you. To feel the loss.”
    “How does it feel?”
    “Awful. Empty. Sad.” A small part relief, she thought. She didn’t want to think that, but it was there. In her mind. In her heart. A part of the way she felt.
    “So we should try again.”
    Janet nodded, crying.
    “No?” he asked, confused.
    “Yes. But it’s still too soon. We are here, crying because we can remember how much we loved each other eleven years ago, but we can’t even touch each other now.”
    “But we both want to try, don’t we? I do,” Mark said.
    “Yes.”
    “I have clinics in December.”
    “Clinics?”
    “It’s new. To give everyone a break. Nine to five on weekdays. No night call. No weekends. No holidays. I’ll be off for Christmas, for your birthday. Should I move back in then? In three weeks?” Mark asked carefully.
    “OK,” Janet said believing it would never work. Not now. Not in three weeks. Not ever. But they had to try. She had to try. Maybe she was wrong.
    Kathleen called Tuesday night.
    “I learned something about you,” she began.
    “Kathleen!”
    “Yes.”
    “What did you learn?”
    “You told me you went to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then what I learned is that you’re a cornhusk.”
    “Cornhusk er .”
    “No, those are the other guys. You’re a cornhusk. Or you have a corn—”
    “Kathleen, it’s not even close to what you think it is.”
    “I know, but it sounds like it should be, doesn’t it?”
    “I don’t think you can discuss such things over