My relationship with my mother isn’t much better than the one I have with my father. In fact, I think it’s a tad worse. Growing up, it was my nanny who raised me while my mother raised horses and raised glasses in toasts to nothing. When we moved to Manhattan, she replaced the horses with more booze and pills and that’s pretty much been the status quo ever since.
At least my father made attempts to parent me, to care about the persona I put out there, to want me to succeed, even if just in his image. My mother…I’m not really sure if she knows who I am half the time.
I don’t think she’s ever hugged me.
“Maura,” my father says as he walks right on front of her, obscuring her view of the void she was staring at in the middle of the room. “Linden is here.”
It takes her moment to look over at me and then another moment for her eyes to open wider in faint recognition. Despite the fact that she’s drunk, she looks beautiful. Maybe a little too thin, but pale, long-necked and elegant, even in silk pajamas.
“Linden, my boy,” she says. “Happy birthday.” She smiles and pauses. “How old are you again?”
“Thirty, mum. And thank you.”
She nods politely and takes a sip of her drink, her eyes going spacey again. Believe me, she’s much better this way, in her calm, mellow, morning buzz than she is in the Exorcist-ish, demon-possession kind of rage she gets in later when she’s drunk off her ass and hates the world.
“I was just telling Linden about the present,” my father adds and the produces the key, dangling it at her like she’s a child. “Do you remember? The flat? He’s very interested.”
Whatever outrage I felt about the lie is over. My mother isn’t even going to remember this by the end of the day.
“That’s wonderful,” she says, her voice pleasant but monotone. She’s saying the words, acting her part, without taking anything – including me – in.
I don’t stay long after that. Uncomfortable small-talk turns into awkward goodbyes, all punctuated by promises to stay in touch, to “think about” things.
As I’m out the door, my father says soberly, “Son, just remember. If you’re going to put your roots down somewhere, you should at least know what you’re capable of growing.”
I don’t even let myself dwell on that. By the time I get back to my place, I am a complete fucking mess and it’s only one in the afternoon.
I need to escape my mind, these damn shackles that have spread their rusted hold on me over the morning. I pace around the rooms, staring at the things I know they have bought me in the past. I text James and then seconds later dial him, but the phone goes straight to voicemail.
Tapping my phone against my thigh, I briefly think about Nadine. But I don’t want to answer her questions, I don’t want to spend a day with her pretending everything is all right and I’m the man she thinks I am, that toughened pilot who doesn’t really care about anything. I don’t want her to see my face and the mark I know my parents have stamped there even from such a brief encounter.
I go to text, think better of it, and then just outright dial Steph.
She answers on the third ring. “Hey!” she says brightly and something about the sound of her voice feels like a balm on the wound.
“Hey,” I say, and clear my throat. “What are you doing right now?”
“I was going to go into the store and do some merchandising for tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Wow. Even on Sundays with the store closed, she’s still working. I’m both proud of her and disappointed that she’s busy.
There is a pause. “Do you want to come with?”
I swallow. “No, no, it’s fine.”
“You wouldn’t have called me if everything was fine. I know who you were with this morning,” she says. “Come on. I’ll pick you up in a half hour.”
Even though I don’t want to impose on her day, I find myself saying yes and it isn’t long before I’m standing on the street, waiting for her and anxiously drumming my fingers against my thigh. Her red Mazda 6 pulls up – something she bought the day she got the loan for the business – and she honks the horn despite seeing me there. I think she just likes the sound.
I open the passenger door to climb in, hit by her familiar smell, and see a bottle of Wild Turkey buckled-in the seat.
“Uh,” I say, nodding at it as I lean on the door frame. “I wasn’t aware someone had shotgun already.”
“It’s for you, cowboy,” she says. “I know you probably need it.”
I grin at her. “You’re the best friend ever.”
“Don’t I know it.”
I get in and she watches and waits for me to unscrew the cap and take a shot straight from the bottle before she pulls the car out. The fluffy skull she has hanging from her rear-view mirror swings back and forth as she expertly navigates San Francisco’s one-way streets. There’s nothing sexier than watching a woman drive a stick well. Wearing a short, pleated skirt that shows off glowing thighs helps too. My balls tighten as I imagine what it would be like to run my hands up that smooth inner skin.
I feel her eyes on me and look up just as she looks back to the road. A small smile tugs on her lips. She totally just caught me checking her out.
And she seems to like it.
It takes me a second to remind myself that this is inappropriate. You know, her being with Aaron, me with Nadine. And the fact that we’re friends.
But I’ve never been anything if not inappropriate.
“Want to talk about it?” she asks me and for a moment I think she’s asking about me checking her out and for a moment I almost do want to talk about it. Then I realize she means my parents.
I stare at the bottle in my hands. “Maybe in a bit.”
“Did you at least have fun last night?”
“I did while I was there.”
She opens her mouth to say something else but then closes it. Her lips have a soft pink sheen to it that makes me want to bite them. Actually she looks beautiful and radiant despite the fact that she was out late drinking last night too.
“You look good,” I find myself saying to her.
I could swear she blushes and that alone makes me want to say more nice things about her. I’m afraid if I start, though, I’ll never stop.
“You know, despite the hard drinking and approaching middle age,” I quickly clarify.
“Ha ha. So how does it feel to be older?”
I shrug. “It sucks.”
“Back pain? Broken hip?”
“Something like that.”
“Guess I have a lot to look forward to.”
I sink back in my seat and stare out the window as the narrow houses and storefronts whip past. “October will be here before we know it. You know you have, let’s see, six or seven months to change your mind about Aaron.”
That gets her attention. She whips her head to stare at me incredulously. “What?”
“The pact. You remember.”
She rubs her lips together, blinking a few times, looking so fucking adorable. “Of course I remember…I just…”
I shrug as casually as I can. “The offer is still on the table, baby blue. You’re almost thirty, then we both will be. If you end up kicking pretty boy to the curb by then, you know where I am.”
She searches my face for as long as she can before she nearly rear-ends the van in front of us. When she recovers, she asks, “What about Nadine?”
“I’d give her up for you,” I tell her, staring at her relentlessly until she’s forced to meet my eyes again, if just for a second. “I’d give up everything for you.” Though I think I’m being completely serious about this, I’m not sure how much good it will do me if she knows that. So I smile at her, a big shit-eating grin, until she eventually returns the smile.
Now she thinks I’m joking. I wish I was. But at least I’m safe.
We’re safe.
“How about you keep drinking your whisky there, cowboy,” she says and just like that I can feel the door shutting on
our conversation. It’s for the best. It has to be.
And I was happy, I swear to fucking god I was, until my father started planting seeds of doubt in my head. Because what he said about my roots and having something worth growing, well that was kind of true.
Why stay in San Francisco unless I saw my potential here? Not just with my career but the bigger picture – love, marriage, kids, all that kind of shit you ignore your whole life just fucking away until you’re forced to look at it.
A while later we’re in her store. I’m leaning against the counter, taking small swigs of deliciously burning whisky, feeling loose, and flipping through a men’s catalogue. Unfortunately, Aaron is the model on every single page. All this time later, I can’t really figure out what she sees in him. I mean, I know he’s good-looking, I suppose, or enough to be a model. But he dresses like a teenager, like he’s halfway out the door to go surfing, he rarely wears shoes and he laughs like a hyena.
Steph is a hardworking, intelligent woman. They can’t possibly have anything to say to each other on a daily basis, which makes me think that their relationship is based purely on sex. I know there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but even entertaining the thought makes me want to be sick.
“So how did it go? How were your parents?” Steph asks, looking over a rack of clothes at me. She obviously caught the grimace on my face and thought I was thinking about earlier.
“Oh you know,” I say. “Horrible.”
Her brow furrows in concern. “That bad?”
I sigh and put my head in my hands. “You know what’s funny? It’s that when I was younger, I thought my relationship with my parents would change, evolve. You know, stop being full of bullshit. But it hasn’t.” I look up at her, knowing I can tell her almost anything. “I see them differently now. The way I think of them, relate to them, has totally changed. But they still treat me like I’m some fifteen-year-old punk. They still think I have no idea what I’m doing in life, that I need them every step of the way, that they have the bloody right to interject and control me.”
“What were they trying to do?”
“Get me to move.”
Her eyes widen. “Where?”
“New York. They bought a place and want me to live there.”
“But why?”
“I guess because Bram isn’t turning out quite the way they wanted,” I say with a shrug. “I don’t know. My father is one of those people who is very concerned about the image of family, about legacies and all that shit. He can recite to you our family tree and all the notable Scots that we’ve come from. Everyone in this McGregor line seems to have some hand in politics or some other roles of power and whatever. My father obviously had hopes for Bram with him being the oldest, but he just pisses away his time. So now he’s realizing that I’m all there is. He wants me to be like him.”
She puts a jacket away on the rack and then comes over to me, folding her arms across her full chest. I try not to stare at her breasts.
“You know, most parents would be absolutely thrilled to have a son who is a helicopter pilot,” she points out.
“Well I don’t have most parents. They don’t really think it’s much of an accomplishment at all, to be honest. It’s not distinguished or intellectual enough.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you need your brain to fly one of those things.”
“Steph, are you calling me intelligent?’
She shoots me a cheeky grin. “Crazy, huh? You better appreciate my kindness while it lasts. Speaking of…” she trails off and then disappears into the storage room in the back. While she’s rummaging around, I entertain the brief fantasy of following her in there, locking the door behind me and cornering her up against one of the shelves. I want to press myself against her, just so she knows what she does to me, I want to slide my hands up under her flimsy top and cup her breasts, squeezing them until she moans, then take off her shirt and suck on what are sure to be perfect, pink nipples.
I want to tell her all the filthy things I think about, be real, raw and unfiltered. I want to make her cheeks flush from my dirty mouth and her body squirm with desire.
Jesus. I step back behind the counter more to make sure my erection is covered and try to ignore the building lust. I have to stop thinking about her this way, but I’ve also being telling myself that for years and years. One day I’m afraid I won’t be able to help myself and it will probably ruin one of the best relationships – if not the best – I’ve ever had.
But fuck, what if she feels the same way? What if she wants me as deep inside of her, fucking her brains out 24/7, as I do?
For one heady moment, I swear I’m going to do it. I’m going to march right into that storeroom, kiss her madly, fuck her up against the wall and let her know how I really feel.
I take in a deep breath and ready myself.
I can do this.
She comes out of the storeroom, holding a large box and a sheepish smile on her face. The moment is gone. I won’t do anything.
I am a coward.
A horny, fucking coward.
“Here you go,” she says, placing the box on the counter with a thunk. “Your birthday present.”
I lift it up. It’s heavy. “You shouldn’t have,” I tell her, feeling both bad that she bothered and touched that she did.
She shrugs playfully. “Whatever. It came into the store a while ago and I just thought of you. Had it in the back waiting for your birthday to come around.” I stare at her and she quickly taps the top of the box. “Hurry up and open it, would you?”
I open the flaps and peer inside. It’s a black leather jacket.
“Holy shit,” I say, slowly taking it out of the box like it’s made of gold. I hold it up. It’s pretty fucking dope and I’m not that much of a fashion kind of guy. It’s moto-style with banded strips down the arms, just enough detail to make it interesting.
“Look at the back,” she says.
I turn it over. At the back of the neck in small silver stitching it says “L. McGregor.”
I eye her, feeling stunned at the personalization.
She blushes and looks away coyly. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” I whisper.
“Like this is a big deal. It’s not. I saw the jacket and thought it was suited for a macho helicopter pilot. So I had it stitched with your name. I dunno, I think I was going for a Top Gun kind of look. Maybe we could start calling you Iceman.”
She’s trying to play this off and maybe I should let her but damn if this didn’t mean a lot to me. My heart does a flip in my chest. This just made getting out of bed on this hellish day totally worth it.
How could I ever move away from this woman right here?
I swallow hard and try and think of something to say. But only the simple truth will do.
“Thank you. It means a lot.”
She reaches over and slowly punches my arm. “You’re welcome.”
I slip into the jacket, admiring the way it fits like a glove, and do a shot of Wild Turkey to put my mind back in the right place.
I hope it stays there.
CHAPTER EIGHT
30
STEPHANIE
You know your day can’t possibly go well when you wake up with water leaking on your forehead, like some form of Chinese water torture.
I open one eye just as another drop hits it.
“What the fuck?” I quickly wipe my face as I sit up and away from the droplets. I look up at the ceiling where a giant bulge has formed and water has started to run out from it, dropping straight down onto my bed.
Just fucking great. I bought the tiny apartment in the Mission district two months ago and already it’s falling apart. Before I would have been renting so I would have just called up the landlord and let them deal with it. Now the apartment is entirely my own, entirely my problem, and bearing the brunt of the fall storms we’ve been having.
Happy fucking thirtieth birthday to me. He
re’s a new decade full of responsibility you didn’t remember signing up for.
I sigh and get out of bed, wishing Aaron had stayed the night so he could help me. Then I remember his tendency to disappear when shit gets hard (as in, anything more than posing in front of a camera) and know that calling Linden would actually be a better idea. At least that’s a man that gets shit done.
But I don’t call him. I know his girlfriend hates my guts and I can’t imagine my plea for help would go down well. Besides, it’s my apartment, my responsibility. I’m thirty now. I just need to put on my big girl panties and handle it.
The surprising thing about turning thirty, other than having such a rude awakening, is that it’s not as devastating as I thought it would be. I think twenty-nine was a lot worse, just as I think thirty-nine will be worse than forty. By the time that magical/terrible year approaches, you’ve already made peace with it.
I, however, can’t seem to make peace with the fact that I’ve bought a leaky condo. I suppose it was kind of my fault since I went for the smallest, cheapest option in a somewhat dodgy area of the district, but buying property in San Francisco is ridiculous. If it wasn’t for my mom co-signing the mortgage (apparently the banks don’t like the self-employed) and the fact that it was a private sale through my mom’s friend’s nephew, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it.
It’s home, though it’s not exactly the type of home I imagined I’d have at thirty. It’s 600 square feet, one bedroom with a box-sized den and an even tinier balcony that overlooks a pretty church and homeless people on park benches – a far cry from the historically revered, three-story Victorian done up in ice-cream shades, with backyard garden, that I hoped I’d end up in. I also hoped I’d have a bunch of kids running around the house and a husband and neighbors who would drop by all the time. Maybe my husband’s hot brother-in-law would rehearse his underground band with The Beach Boys in the garage.
Come to think of it, I think my entire thirties were based on episodes of Full House. Not exactly realistic.