Read The Beginning: An eShort Prequel to the Bridge Online
Authors: Karen Kingsbury
The Beginning: An eShort Prequel to the Bridge (7 page)
He smiled and kept playing, kept singing, while she leaned against the wall and watched. When the song ended, he lowered his guitar and looked right through her. “I was beginning to think you were a figment of my imagination.”
She tried to think of a witty response, but her laughter came first. “You’re a music student?”
“I am.” He stood and shook her hand with his free one. This close, his eyes looked bluer than they had in the auditorium. “Ryan Kelly. They had me in the wrong class. Just got it all worked out.”
“So you’re in here?” Her heart soared.
“If I can catch up.” He gave her a half grin and raised his brow. “I might have a few questions.”
She felt her eyes start to dance. “I might have the answers.”
And like that, it started.
Neither of them lived on campus. He couldn’t afford the room and board, so he lived in Franklin with an older couple, family friends. She lived in a house her parents owned in Brentwood’s McGavock Farms. Her dad had bought it well below market value. He hired a crew to renovate it before school started, with plans to keep it until she left Belmont, when he would sell it for a profit. For now the house was staffed with a housekeeper and groundsman, a married couple who lived upstairs. Molly had a suite on the main floor, adjacent to the music room, where she could practice and study. Dorm living was out of the question.
“Communal living is not suitable,” her dad had told her. He tried to soften his expression. “You don’t know anything about that lifestyle. This way you’ll be safe.”
From the beginning, her feelings for Ryan were anything but safe. And since her parents’ staff would’ve reported her for having a boy over, Ryan’s idea was perfect from the beginning. “I know of this bookstore. New and used books in an old house in downtown Franklin. It has a reading room upstairs that no one uses. My home away from home.” He smiled at her, and the sparkle in his eyes touched the depths of her soul. “It’s called The Bridge.”
Molly was intrigued, and from that first study session, The Bridge became a private world for Ryan and her, a hiding place for the two of them. Sure, there were other patrons, but Belmont students didn’t drive that far, and Molly loved the anonymity.
The store was set up in an old house that once was a hiding place for Union soldiers during the Civil War. The floors were old weathered pine, and the walls and doors had settled so that they didn’t quite line up. The place smelled of old books and rich leather, and Molly loved everything about it.
The Bridge was run by a man named Charlie Barton, a friend to the people of Franklin. Charlie kept fresh-brewed coffee on a table near the front register where he hung out, quick with the right suggestion of a book or an insightful conversation. Once in a while his wife, Donna, joined him. The couple would sit with Molly and Ryan near the fireplace and listen. Really listen.
“Tell me about your classes,” Charlie would say. Then he’d pull up a chair as if he had all day to hear details about music lectures and science tests and the English lit reports they were working on.
Donna would sometimes pull Molly aside. “That boy’s in love with you,” she’d say. “When are you both going to admit it?”
Molly would laugh. “We’re just friends. Seriously.”
“Hmm.” Donna would raise her eyebrows. “I guess we’ll see.”
By the end of the first semester, Molly felt closer to Charlie and Donna than she felt to her own parents.
“I’m never going back,” she told Ryan more than one afternoon while they were at The Bridge. “They can’t make me.”
He would grin at her, his eyes shining in a way that stayed with her still. “No one can make us do anything.”
It took only a few study dates to learn all there was to know about each other. Molly told him things she hadn’t told anyone. How her life back home suffocated her and how she had never considered crossing her parents or disobeying them. She told him about Preston and her father’s corporation and the plans he had for her.
He was honest, too. “I have a girlfriend back in Carthage.” He watched her, looking for a reaction. “We’ve dated since our sophomore year of high school. Our families attend the same church.”
Molly felt the sting of the news, but she didn’t let him see. She couldn’t date him, anyway. He would be her friend, nothing more. Knowing about his girlfriend back home only made him safer, giving her permission to get as close to him as she wanted.
In the beginning, Ryan talked about his girlfriend fairly often. “Her dad’s a farmer,” he told Molly one day when they were studying at The Bridge. “He’s giving her two acres, so later . . . you know, we can live there.”
Molly nodded, thoughtful. She didn’t look away, didn’t waver in her connection to him. “How will you be a professional guitar player in Carthage, Mississippi?”
His quiet chuckle was colored with discouragement. “I wouldn’t be. Everyone thinks I’ll come back and teach music at the high school.”
“What about you?” Her voice grew softer, the quiet of the store’s living room encouraging the conversation. “What do you want?”
“It’s a good Plan B, teaching music. I like Carthage.”
It hit her then how much they had in common, their lives already planned out. Suddenly she couldn’t stand the thought. “No, Ryan!” She took hold of his shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You can’t settle. You have to go for Plan A. Tour the world with the top country bands and play that beautiful guitar of yours.”
“Me?” He laughed again, but his eyes showed a hint of adventure that hadn’t been there before. “What about you? None of this Preston and San Francisco for you, Molly Allen. You have to play violin for the philharmonic.” His laughter faded, and he’d never looked more serious. “No matter what they want for you.”
Like that, their dreams were set. They promised to push each other, to never settle for anything but the place where their hearts led. They took turns commuting to Belmont, and they shared a ride every day from the beginning. Ryan would pull his truck up at the corner of McGavock Farms and Murray, where she’d be waiting, out of sight of the staff. He’d take her to school and then to The Bridge when classes were done.
Homework wasn’t all they did at The Bridge. They also found books, classics that spoke deeply to them.
Gone with the Wind
and her favorite, Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
. From the beginning Molly related to the heroine and her determination to do the right thing, even at the cost of love. They read
Jane Eyre
aloud to each other, and once in a while, on the drive to The Bridge, they would quote lines to each other.
“‘I’m asking what Jane Eyre would do to secure my happiness,’” Ryan would say in his best English accent, quoting Rochester.
“‘I would do anything for you, sir.’” She would quote Jane in her own Victorian accent, stifling the giggles that always came when they were together. “‘Anything that was right.’”
When they weren’t quoting Brontë’s novel, they sang along with the radio and talked about their classes and dreamed of the future. For two wonderful years they never talked about the one thing that seemed so obvious at the time, the thing that could’ve made all the difference. They never talked about whether their friendship was a cover for the obvious.
That maybe they were in love with each other.
As the video wound down and Sam curled up on the floor beside her, as her tears slid down her cheeks the way they did every time she watched the film, Molly couldn’t help but think the one thing she would always think this time of year.
She should’ve said something.
Click here to download your copy of Karen Kingsbury’s new novel,
The Bridge
.
 | Karen Kingsbury The Bridge Click here to download. |
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Copyright © 2012 by Karen Kingsbury
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First Howard Books ebook edition September 2012
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ISBN 978-1-4767-1355-7
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