Even though Kyle tried to keep his spirits up and not let on to her how disappointed he felt, he was sure at least some of it must have gotten through to her. Oh, they were friendly enough on the long drive back to Wychbold, but somehow a distance had seemed to grow between them. It was all too clear that the good days might be coming to an end; he didn’t like the thought and was pretty sure she didn’t either.

It was getting close to the time for her Sunday night update when she dropped him off at his apartment. They shared a quick kiss, but it lacked some of the passion of the ones they’d shared the last two nights.

As was often the case, Chelsea had to work Monday night, so they didn’t get together except for their routine late phone call. After a look at the weather report convinced him that Tuesday was out of the question for photography, they decided to get together at her apartment that evening to sort through the pictures taken over the weekend. She even offered to cook dinner for him, something that didn’t happen very often.

After dinner they spent an hour or more going through the photos, and they’d gotten some good ones, and enough to build her supply up for a long time. But after a while they both got tired of it. “The heck with this,” she finally said. “We can do this any time, or I could do it by myself if I had to. We both know what we really want to do, so let’s do it.”

Though they’d had a lot of sex over the weekend, this time there was more melancholy in it than there had been. The specter of what might be coming was hanging over them and they both knew it. All too soon the time came when they both knew they had to wrap it up for the night, since they both had to be at work in the morning.

“We might as well not plan on getting together tomorrow night,” she said as he was getting dressed. “I’ve got to work late again, and then come home and throw things together for the trip. I want to get an early start on Thursday since that’s a long damn drive. I want to go straight through so I can have a good night’s sleep before my interview.”

“Probably a good idea,” he agreed. “Look, I guess that means I won’t be seeing you before you go. All I can say is drive carefully, and good luck.”

“I will, Kyle. I promise. Look, try to not let it eat at you too badly while I’m gone. I may not get the job, and even if I do it may not be forever.”

“I suppose,” he said, “Damn it, Chelsea, I’ve come to love you, and it’s not easy to contemplate having to give you up.”

“I’ve come to love you, too,” she said, taking him in her arms. “But damn it, these things happen, and we knew it might this time. I didn’t want to let things get too serious because I knew this had the chance of happening. Now we’re just going to have to live with it.”

“I guess, but I can’t help but think I’m losing you,” he said.

“‘’Tis better to have loved and lost,’ you know. Kyle, in case you’re wondering, I’m having those feelings too. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but we had some good times, and maybe we can have some more.”

It was still hard for Kyle to go out to the pickup and go home. Very hard. While her leaving for the job in South Carolina wasn’t a done deal yet, and in fact there was only one chance in three that it would happen, there was an inevitability to it that made things seem a lot more final. If it didn’t happen this time, he knew it would soon, and he had to accept it.

The next day at work for him was dismal indeed. He couldn’t keep his mind on what he was doing, and what he was doing wasn’t a big deal, anyway – more busywork than anything else. When lunchtime rolled around, rather than going to the lunchroom he pulled up a browser on his office computer, and spent some time looking around for job prospects around Columbia, South Carolina. It wasn’t far away from Arlington, and it seemed like it was a big enough town that there ought to be something in his field. He didn’t find much, but he wasn’t looking deeply, either.

The job at Mercer-Howe had never been all that appealing to him, but it was there when he needed a job, and he’d been here for a couple of years. Realistically, it was an entry-level job. To make things worse, there didn’t seem to be much opportunity for advancement, at least not if he stayed in Wychbold. Oh, there was the possibility of something opening up in a few years, but it was a few years that he wasn’t sure he wanted to do the same thing, and away from here would be better.

There was a slight possibility that he could transfer to a different Mercer-Howe plant, one a little closer to Arlington. He wasn’t familiar with the various plants the company owned, but a little bit of research showed that the only possibility that got him closer to Arlington was a small town near Memphis, which wasn’t enough closer to make any real difference.

Maybe it wasn’t worth worrying about it right now. After all, Chelsea might not get the job, and even if she did, she had said she might not be there long. A quick look at a map program showed that it was indeed a hell of a long drive to Arlington – far enough that getting down there for a weekend wasn’t worth consideration. He’d no more than get down there than he’d have to be heading back. A three-day weekend though, and possibly flying looked like it might be more of a possibility, but then it was still not going to leave him much time with her. It wasn’t hopeless, but it was bad.

Finally, the long, dismal day dragged to a close. He went home and tried to think about what he would have for dinner, but cooking didn’t hold much interest. Finally he grabbed a tray meal out of the freezer more or less at random, put it in the microwave, and wound up eating the results even though he didn’t like them very much.

There wasn’t much to do after that. He thought about going out for a beer or two but realized that also didn’t interest him. He had a book about the European colonization of Africa in the late 1800s that he’d started reading some time before and hadn’t made much progress with; now seemed like a good time, so he settled into his easy chair with it. Although it had its moments, it wasn’t holding his interest either; his mind kept wandering away to Chelsea, and how hopeless it seemed right now.

Not long after nine he got a call from her. “I thought I’d better call now, since I want to get to sleep,” she said. “I hope you’re doing all right tonight.”

“Reasonably well,” he told her, not wanting to let on about how bored and disheartened he was. “It was kind of a dull day at work and it’s sort of carried over.”

“I wouldn’t have minded getting out a couple hours earlier, but I was there by myself, even though only two or three people came in,” she reported. “I’ve got a long day ahead of me. Kyle, I’ll be back before you know it.”

Yeah, you’ll be back, but then all too soon you’ll be gone again, he thought but carefully did not say. “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you.”

“Same here. Wish me luck, Kyle.”

“I hope you have it,” he said. “I know this is what you want.”

The next two days at work were no better. He didn’t even bother to consider looking for a job elsewhere – there were just too many unknowns.

Saturday was a little better, but only a little. It wasn’t a bad day, although not a good enough one photographically to have considered going out to do photo shoots if Chelsea had been around, which she wasn’t, of course. As it was, he decided to go out to the storage shed and get the Triumph prepped for winter. There really wasn’t a great deal involved with that, other than to get the top up, put gas stabilizer in the tank, and then cover it with the fitted tarp he’d removed for his first trip with her. He spent some time vacuuming it out and picking up a few odd bits of trash that had accumulated here and there. Even taking his time the job only lasted him a couple hours.

While he was at it, he decided to get his “back roads” bike put up for the winter, as well. He had used it very sparingly all summer long, occasionally riding it to work when he felt like he needed the exercise, but just seeing it again reminded him that he’d been riding it when he met Chelsea for the first time. Since then, he hadn’t made a one of his evening landscape photography runs with it – he’d taken a few photos when he’d been with Chelsea, but only a few. He hadn’t done much with his art photos all summer, but maybe now that winter was right around the corner he might be able to work on processing some of them. If she weren’t around, he’d have plenty of time to do it.

He spent the rest of the day desultorily cleaning his apartment – some things had been put off since he’d been spending most of his spare time with Chelsea. That and a few dozen pages of the Africa book got him through an otherwise very dull day.

That evening he was trying to read more of the book and nodding off with every page when Chelsea called. “I just got in,” she reported. “That’s an awful long drive, Kyle. I sort of wish now that I’d asked you to go along just to keep me company.”

“I could have done it, I suppose,” he replied, thinking that he might have been just as glad she hadn’t asked. It might have done nothing more than to drag out the agony of what couldn’t be. “I’ve got vacation time at work, and we haven’t been doing much of anything, anyway. So did you get the job?”

“Yes, I got it,” she replied. “It’s about what I expected. The town is a little smaller than I hoped, and well, I’m not sure how much I like it. I thought all the way back about calling them up and turning them down after all. In the end I decided I’d better take it. I mean, who knows when something that good is going to come my way again?”

There it was – just what he’d been expecting. He may have been hopeful it wouldn’t happen, but somehow he had realized they were faint hopes. “Well, good for you,” he said, trying to inject a positive note. “Is the money going to be worth it?”

“I think so,” she said. “Assuming the website keeps growing the way it has, and if I can live as cheaply down there as I am here, I think I can get the rest of my student loans paid off in a year or a little more. It’ll be good to not have them hanging over my head.”

“That’s good,” he told her. He had student loans to pay off too, and they were an ongoing concern. If he stayed in this job in Wychbold, she would be a lot closer to having hers paid off than he would. “That’ll free things up for you quite a bit. Did you see about getting an apartment or some other place to live?”

“I did. Actually, it’s a small house, and within easy walking distance of the library. The place is tiny, but it’s big enough for me. It’s unfurnished, but with what I have here I should be able to get along. Kyle, I need to ask a big favor of you, and under the circumstances I’m not sure if I should be asking it.”

“What’s that? Helping you move?”

“Yes. I thought about it on the way back, and if we stack your truck and my car to the rafters, I think we can get everything in. They’re paying me a relocation allowance, so I can pay you to come along, I thought about renting a truck, but that means I’d have to deal with my car.”

“You could put the car behind the truck, either on a tow dolly or on a trailer.”

“Maybe you could, but I couldn’t,” she replied. “I wouldn’t need a real big truck, but it would be bigger than anything I’ve ever driven, and then I’d have to deal with a trailer. I’ve never pulled a trailer and don’t want to have to deal with a truck and that, too.”

Kyle wanted to tell her no – with her moving so far away, it felt like it was time for him to begin cutting ties with her. It was now going to happen whether he liked it or not. But even though it now looked like there was no chance of getting anywhere with her in the long run, he still liked her enough that he couldn’t turn her down. “What kind of time frame are we looking at?” he asked.

“Toward the end of next week,” she said. “Bernice, my boss at the library here knew that this was coming down and she’d be willing to cut me a little slack on my two weeks’ notice. That would allow me to be at work down there two weeks from Monday.”

“I suppose I can make that work. Like I said, I’m not doing all that much at the plant, and I do have vacation time coming. I mean, I’d have to check to be sure, but I don’t doubt that I can work it out.”

“Great!” she replied. “Look, Kyle, I’d like to invite you over tonight so we can celebrate a little, but I’m absolutely bushed from the drive. I came more or less straight through, and only stopped for gas and a couple of drive-throughs. Maybe tomorrow we could get together. I need to push right ahead with packing stuff, but there’s not much I can do right away. We could find the time to have a little fun.”

“Works for me,” he said. He really wasn’t all that enthused, mostly because he knew what it would mean, but on the other hand, why pass up the opportunity? Face it, he thought. She’s going to be a long time gone, and the chances don’t come along every day. “I was just thinking about heading for bed myself,” he went on. “I’ve been having trouble keeping my eyes open tonight.”

“Sounds good to me. I’m going to have a nice long shower, a drink of something cold and alcoholic, and then crash myself.”

Kyle managed to spend a lot of time with Chelsea over the next ten days. Some of it was doing fun things, especially but not always in bed, but much of it was also spent packing up the things in her apartment. Being a book nut, she had a lot of books, of course; those were among the first things to get packed. Her collection of swimsuits also got packed, although a little more slowly, mostly because every now and then she had to model one for him, and sometimes he got to help her take it off and let things go where they might.

That didn’t happen real often, and though they had fun when it did, the fact that these fun days were coming to an end always hung over him. He could wish it wasn’t so, but he felt he was losing her with this move, and the sense of loss was always present, hanging over him like a rain cloud.

On the Wednesday before she was to leave, both of them took half-days off to finish packing her up, and loading his truck and her car. By careful packing, they managed to get everything in, although there was stuff on the front seats of both vehicles. When Kyle had first considered the trip, he’d thought that at least they would be going together so they’d have that much more of their dwindling time, but he soon realized that they’d be driving in separate vehicles. That would make the trip seem even longer.

It was getting dark when they finished loading. There was one good thing about that, and it was the only good thing he could think of: since her apartment was now empty, she would spend the night with him at his place. Besides, since she was leaving, if there were any snarky comments about her spending the night with him, it wouldn’t matter since she’d be gone the next day. They went out to dinner since they both were too tired to want to cook anything, then they drove the vehicles over to his place.

It was not the greatest night they’d spent together, even though it was only the third; fatigue and the sense of finality combined to make it an almost sad occasion, with few of the thrills they’d enjoyed in the past.

Early the next morning they were up and running, wanting to get on the road and get it over with. There wasn’t much to do; Kyle had already packed a small suitcase and put it in the truck. “You know,” she said as he locked the door behind him and walked with her out to the waiting vehicles. “I’ve enjoyed my time here, but I’m not going to be sad to leave Wychbold behind. I am sad that I’m going to have to leave you behind, though. Kyle, you’ve been very good to me, and I wish it could have worked out better.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes, I guess. Maybe I can get down and see you once in a while. I figure if I can take a vacation day and drive all day both ways, we can at least have a day together.”

“I hate to say this, Kyle, but that’s not going to happen very often. The way the schedule works in Arlington, I’m going to have to work on Saturdays, so that means if you came down on Friday, we still wouldn’t be able to have much time together.”

“If I came down on Saturday and back on Monday, we could have Sundays,” he persisted.

“Well, that might work,” she said. “Look, the other thing is that we’re going to have to be real careful about my reputation down there. I mean, it’s going to be just as bad as here if not worse. If the rumors got going here and cost me my job, really, it would have been a case of ‘big deal.’ It didn’t happen. But Arlington is a small town, a lot like Wychbold, and I’m told the rumor mill is even worse there. I believe it, too. The gal I’m replacing got caught up in a deal like that. I don’t want to say she had to leave the job, but from what I’m told she was damn glad she did. She didn’t want to put up with any more of the shit going around.”

“You’d better hope they don’t find out about Chastity White, then.”

“No fooling,” she shook her head. “I guess it’s good that we’re so far ahead on the photos that it’s not going to matter for a good long time, but I don’t think I even want to risk taking any selfies anywhere around Arlington. I mean, not even anywhere close. That’s not all bad. Maybe it’s the wrong time of year, but I didn’t see much that impressed me as being good places for setups, anyway. Maybe next spring I can get a few days off. We could go up in the mountains somewhere, maybe when the rhododendrons are in bloom. We could get some really neat shots.”

“Well, maybe,” he shrugged. “It’s something to try for.”

“I think it is for me, too. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but if you think Wychbold is straight, you haven’t seen good old Bible-belt Arlington yet. Even though I’m happy to leave here, I think I’m going to be even happier to leave Arlington. Like I said, Kyle, I’m going to have to be even more careful there than I am here.”

“I get that impression from what you’re saying,” he said. “Are you still sure you want to do this?”

“No I’m not, but I’m stuck with it now. Look, Kyle, what I’m saying is that while I’m looking forward to you coming down and visiting me, we’re going to have to be more careful than we’ve been here. Like, I don’t see any reason why we can’t spend the night together again tonight, since we decided to stop at Knoxville and not drive all the way through. But I don’t think you’d better plan on staying with me at all in Arlington, not even if you’re helping me move in. There’s a motel in town, and I think you’d better plan on staying there.”

“Well, I crap,” he replied. “You know more about it than I do. Let’s get some breakfast before we leave town, maybe at Becky’s Café. Then, maybe we’d better be getting some miles on.”

“Yeah, we’d better,” she sighed. “Kyle, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for it to work out this way.”

“I know you didn’t,” he said. “But I still wish it hadn’t.”

“That makes both of us.”

It was a long day’s drive, and they were tired when they pulled into the motel on the edge of Knoxville where they had reservations. They were tired, and after dinner they went more or less directly to bed. Both of them felt like fooling around with each other because they knew it could easily be their last time for a while, if not forever, but they were too tired to do much about it.

They pulled into Arlington toward the middle of the next day. At first glance it seemed to Kyle like it was a nice enough little town, in some ways like Wychbold, except that it seemed like the churches were a little more prominent. That was his own impression and not something he’d picked up from Chelsea.

They found her little house without too much difficulty, and immediately started unloading things and carrying them inside. A couple of people from the library board showed up after a while and helped them with the project, and soon they had the vehicles unloaded. They were nice enough to take Kyle and Chelsea out to dinner at a small restaurant in town, which proved to be nothing special.

The people from the library board were a little on the snoopy side, and appeared to want to know just what Chelsea and Kyle’s relationship was, but they were able to make the point that they were “just friends” and let it go at that. After dinner, the group went back to the house and helped Chelsea unpack, although Kyle got the idea that they were really watching to make sure that nothing untoward happened.

Before it got too late, Kyle gave her a good-bye hug – no kiss – and went out to his motel room. It was not exactly the nicest motel room he’d ever been in, but he wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it a dump. It wasn’t far from it, but not quite there.

The next day Kyle and Chelsea worked on unpacking the rest of her things. Kyle got her computer all plugged in and working, making sure her Internet connection was good – she’d need it to make the Chastity White upload that weekend.

Finally, along toward the middle of the afternoon there wasn’t much left to do. “Chelsea,” he said. “I’m thinking that if I hit the road now I could spend the night in Knoxville, or even somewhere north of there. I sure don’t want to spend the night at that motel on the edge of town again if I don’t have to.”

“I can’t blame you,” she sighed. “I hate to see you go and leave me here all alone, but that’s how it has to be.”

“We could stretch it out a little longer, but it wouldn’t change a thing,” he told her as she fell into his arms – none of the library board was present and they were inside, so she could dare to do that. They shared a long, heartfelt kiss, but now they knew it was really a goodbye kiss.

It went on for a while before they broke apart. “I guess this is it,” she said. “Kyle, let’s not lose touch. Call me, e-mail me. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but let’s at least stay friends.”

“I’ll do that, Chelsea,” he said. “Whatever happens, I won’t forget you.”

They were still a while before he went out and got in his truck. He sat down behind the wheel, belted himself in, and then in the privacy of the cab said a heartfelt “Shit!”

Then, wishing it wasn’t over but sure it was, he started the truck and began the long, lonely drive back to Wychbold.

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