*Oh my, my posting "schedule" is a disgrace! I'm sorry, once again. Thank you SO MUCH for sticking with it! I love hearing from you!*

Tom had left and Chris was tired. Again confused, again a bit frustrated and again utterly exhausted. Why were things so complicated? What exactly was Tom saying and what exactly was she feeling? She still could not see through any of it. She would have to have a serious talking to with herself about it, was what she decided on while she was brushing her teeth. Nodding at herself in the mirror.

Then she went to bed and quickly fell into a dreamless sleep.

Tom walked to the Pub. He felt lost in an ocean of mixed emotions and mixed signals. Hurt and love, pain and forgiveness, and what did it mean that she had kissed him goodnight. Did it mean anything?

Tom again passed the pub, when he had reached it and continued walking down the main street of Cooper's Crossing. He didn't feel like talking to anybody, but he also didn't want to be jailed in his room alone.

Had he managed to tell Chris what he felt? Why he had acted the way he did? Did he even know that himself? After all this talking, after all this time - when it had only been a couple of days, he realized - of confusion, of not knowing what he felt, what Chris felt and what could be the outcome of all this, he felt empty and tired.

He kept on walking past the closed shops, but he slowed down. He really was tired. He was exhausted. He stopped.

And in that moment he actually felt the very first really clear feeling in a while and he could name it, too. He felt like he was missing his best friend. The one person he would turn to in a time like this. And that friend was Chris.

The next day Chris sat motionless at her desk. Before her was a patient's file, but she did not look down on it. She didn't even see it. She stared straight forward, but didn't really see anything. She was so deep in thought that she had forgotten that there even were such things as patients and files.

Without her wanting it, her mind had started day dreaming. And she was dreaming about Tom. About how it would be, if everything was different. How they could have lived - together - hadn't he gone to Africa. And at first the visions her mind created for her were pleasant. She wanted to stay with these. She and Tom, together in a little RFDS house, living together, working together... but then somehow, slowly, these pictures started to lose that good feeling and she also felt a bad consciousness, felt, that it would not have worked. Felt as if she was holding him back and everything started to feel wrong. In her vision now they weren't talking anymore, they didn't share so many jokes. Other people appeared in her head and only the scenes where she and Tom then had company felt alright.

Chris wanted these images to stop. She tried to go back to the beginning, when it had felt good and right to be with her best friend. But somehow she could not. She did not want to, but she realized why that was. That version of a past that never happened should never have happened. It would not have turned out well, Tom would not have been content with that kind of life and neither would she have been.

But still that longing in her, in her heart this time, not really in her mind, was something, that she could not ignore. She loved him. Still, and would always do so. After she saw that, it was not as hard anymore to own up to it before herself. So she loved him, but her vision of the past would not have brought them happiness. So was there a way? Chris was unsure and unable at that moment to exchange her pictures of a superficially perfect but unreal imagined past for another version.

But he had come back, hadn't he? He had come back and he had finally talked and she felt like she understood now, as much as she could, why he had left. And now he was back. Back in Cooper's Crossing and back with her. Chris tried hard to imagine what it could now be like. But she could not see it, she could not feel it. There was still a barrier in her had, some obstacle that did not let her go. Something that held her back and did not give her the freedom to just go ahead and imagine a different version of her and Tom.

And after a while it became clear to Chris, what that was. And it was much harder to admit it, than it had been to admit that she loved Tom, did love him and always would.

After running against the same wall in her mind again and again Chris was able to take a good look at it. And it was nothing else, but her anger, her disapointment and feeling of betrayal that made it impossible to actually forgive and love him.

She was still angry about the way he had left, and about the way he had not talked to her when he was away. And Christ had hated the position Tom and also the town had put her in, right when he came back. It was she who was expected to bring him to act social and remind him about his „obligations" to his old friends, to come to his welcome back party and all that. And it was she who was feeling disapointed in him and in the town after he left his party so abruptly. And it just went on like that. She didn't want to be in this position, but she inevitably was. And maybe that was what had stood between her and him ever since.

She was still angry. She had known that she was angry at him all the time, but on this day she finally saw that it was just that anger, that kept her from being with him now and letting herself love him, not matter what.