“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I say into her ear.
“Well, talk in that voice for one.”
I force myself not to laugh. I can see the goose bumps on her exposed skin. Obviously, my old tricks still work.
“So, you have a hand fetish and you get turned on by the sound of my voice?”
“I never said I had a hand fetish!”
“Really? So you just get turned on by the sound of my voice?”
She wiggles to get away from me, and I have to use both arms to hold her in place while I laugh.
When she finally relaxes again, I gather her hair and swipe it over her left shoulder. I kiss the exposed skin on her neck, and she shivers. I kiss an inch above it and her head tilts to give me better access.
“You shouldn’t — we-” Her voice trails off.
“I love you,” I say into her ear. She tries to jerk away, but my arms are still wrapped around her.
“Don’t, Caleb…”
She’s suddenly snapped out of her little daze. Her shapely legs are struggling to gain leverage so she can get away from me.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not right.”
“It’s not right for me to love you? Or it’s not right for you to love me back?”
She is crying, I hear her sniffle.
“Neither.” Her voice, which is high on emotion, cracks. Cracks my reserve, cracks my game, cracks my heart.
When I speak, my voice is husky. I stare out at the water. “I can’t stay away from you. I’ve been trying for ten years.”
She sobs and drops her head. She is not trying to get away from me anymore, but she’s trying to put distance between us. She leans forward and immediately I feel a loss. I’ve gone so many years without her, I refuse to allow her to try to space me out. I have her trapped and I’m going to take advantage. I wrap my hands in her hair, winding it around my fist, and then I gently pull back until her head is resting against my chest. She allows me to do all of this and doesn’t seem to mind the bondage.
Bondage. I’d love to give the love of my life a well-deserved flogging.
I kiss her temple, which is the only thing I can reach, and entwine our fingers, wrapping my arms around her. She snuggles against me and that familiar ache starts in my chest.
“Peter Pan,” I say.
There is five seconds of silence before she says, “When I’m with you, every emotion I can possibly feel comes spilling out. I drown in them. I want to run to you, and I want to run away.”
“Don’t … don’t run away. We can do this.”
“We don’t know how to love each other the right way.”
“Bullshit,” I say against her ear. “You’re full of love that you can’t get out. You can’t say some things. I’m okay with that now. I know it’s there. We’ve hurt each other. But, we’re not kids anymore, Olivia. I want you.” I let her go and spin her around so she’s kneeling between my spread legs.
I cup her face with my hands, threading my fingers into her hair and laying them flat behind her head. She can’t look away from me now.
“I want you.” I’ve said it before, but she’s not getting it. She still thinks I’ll leave her. Like I did.
Her bottom lip quivers.
“I want your babies, and your anger, and your cold blue eyes … “ I choke on my words and I am the one to look away. I bring my gaze back to her face and realize that if I can’t convince her now, I’m never going to be able to. “I want to go on anniversary dinners with you, I want to wrap Christmas presents with you. I want to fight with you about stupid things and then hold you down in my bed and make it up to you. I want to have more cake batter fights and camping trips. I want your future, Olivia. Please come back to me.”
Her whole body is shaking. A tear spills down her cheek and I catch it with my thumb.
I grab the back of her neck and pull her toward me so that our foreheads are touching. I run my hands up and down her back.
Her lips are moving, she’s trying to formulate words — and by the look on her face I can’t tell if I want to hear them. Our noses are parallel, if I bump my head half an inch forward — we’d be kissing. I wait for her.
Our breath mingles. She has my shirt in a vice grip between her fists. I understand her need to clutch something. It is taking every ounce of my self-control to keep from crushing us together.
Both of our chests are rising and falling like the waves. I nudge her nose with mine, and that seems to break her reserve. She wraps her arms around my neck, opens her mouth, and kisses me.
I haven’t kissed my girl in months. It feels like the first time. She’s up on her knees, leaning over me so that I have to tilt my head back to reach her lips. My hands are under her dress on the back of her thighs. I can feel the material of her panties on my fingertips, but I keep my hands still.
We kiss slowly, just with our lips. We keep pulling back to look each other in the eyes. Her hair creates a curtain between us and the world. We kiss behind it, as it falls around our faces, blocking everything out but each other.
“I love you,” she says into my mouth. I smile so big I have to pause in our kissing to recompose my lips. When we start using our tongues, things get heated fast. Olivia likes to bite when she kisses. It really, really does something for me.
My heart is in my throat, my brain is in my pants, my hands are up her dress. She pushes away from me and stands up.
“Not until the divorce is finalized,” she says. “Take me back.”
I stand up and pull her toward me. “All I heard was take me.”
She laces her arms around my neck, her teeth latching onto her bottom lip. I study her face.
“Why don’t you blush? No matter what I say — you never blush.”
She smirks. “Because, I’m a fucking badass.”
“Yeah, you are,” I say softly. I kiss the tip of her nose.
We make our way back to my car. As soon as we shut our doors, Olivia’s phone pings.
She lifts it out of her purse, and immediately her face darkens.
“What is it?” I ask.
She looks away from me, her hand frozen midair, still clutching the phone.
“It’s Noah. He wants to talk.”
I spin my wedding band on the sticky countertop. It becomes a blur of gold and then does a little dance before falling flat. I pick it up and do it again. The bartender at the shitty dive I wandered into looks at me with his dead eyes before sliding another beer in front of me. I didn’t ask, but a good bartender can read his patrons. I pick up the ring, put it in my pocket and take a long drag of my beer.
She doesn’t know I’m back in town. I don’t know if I’m ready to tell her. I checked into a hotel near the airport four days ago and have been slumming around at the local bars since. He’s back in the picture. I know she’s seeing him. I’m not even mad. I left her. What did I expect? It started out slowly. I contracted more and more jobs overseas, leaving for huge chunks at a time. It was financially good for us. But, then I was gone for her birthday, gone for our first anniversary, gone for Thanksgiving. I didn’t know that being gone would put such a strain on our relationship. Absence was supposed to make the heart grow fonder. Isn’t that what they said? Olivia never complained. She never complained about anything. She was the strongest, most self-reliant person I’d ever met. Despite all my gone-ness, the kicker to her was when I missed the verdict at Dobson’s trial.
But, Caleb isn’t gone. And he’s the first person she ran to when she was afraid. I wanted it to be me, but I’m not even sure I’m emotionally available enough to do that. I’m a career man, first. Always have been. My mother raised my sister and I on her own. I often fantasized about what it would look like to have two parents instead of one. But, not because I was desperate for a father … I wanted my mom to have someone to take care of her, because she took care of us.
For the most part I like being alone. When I turned thirty-eight, I suddenl
y had this urge to have a family. Not the typical family with kids, I just really wanted a wife. Someone to share coffee with in the mornings and to climb into bed with at night. It was picturesque and beautiful, this image I had in my head — of a house and Christmas lights and dinners together. It was a good dream, except very few women take the child variable out of theirs.
I’m not a romantic, but I can enjoy a good story. When Olivia told me hers on that flight to Rome, I was enthralled. The thought that real people got themselves into these situations where love dominated rational thought was something I was entirely unfamiliar with. She was so honest, so hard on herself. I’m not the type of man who believes in fast love. This is a fast love culture, where people fall in and out of something so sacred you wonder if it has the same meaning it did a hundred years ago. But, when Olivia said those words “I fell in love under a tree” I just about lost it and asked her to marry me right there. She was my opposite, but I wanted to be like her. I wanted to fall in love underneath a tree, fast and hard. I wanted someone to forget me and then remember me in their soul, like her Caleb did.
I immediately thought we were dually matched. Not like souls. Just perfect pieces that needed to fit together in order to see the whole picture. I was a compass to her. And she was the person who could teach me to live. I loved her. God, I loved her. But, she wanted something I wasn’t willing to give. She wanted a baby. When arguing turned to bitter fighting, I left. When she wouldn’t budge, I filed for divorce. That was wrong. Marriage is compromise.
I take care of my tab and step into the warm air. We can compromise. Adopt. Hell, we could open an orphanage in a third world country for all I care. I just can’t do it, have my own. There’s too much risk involved.
I need to see her. Enough hiding. I take my phone from my pocket and text her.
Can we talk?
It takes three hours for her to respond with:
O: About what?
You and me
O: Haven’t we done enough of that?
I have something new to put on the table.
Twenty minutes go by before her single text comes through.
O: Okay
Thank God. I’m not going to let him take her from me. He let her go in Rome. He broke her heart … again. That night, when Olivia and I parted after dinner, I went back to my hotel and thought about my life. How empty it was. I think I’d already made the decision to change it by the time she called my room, crying. I caught a cab to her hotel and sat with her while she mourned him. She told me it was the last time, that she could only bend and break so many times before the damage was irreparable. She hadn’t wanted me to touch her. I wanted to. I wanted to hold her and let her cry on me. But she’d sat on the edge of her bed with her back straight and her eyes closed, and cried silent tears that flowed like rivers down her cheeks. I’d never seen anyone deal with their pain with so much restraint. It was heartbreaking; the way she wouldn’t make a sound. Finally, I’d turned on the television and we’d sat with our backs against her headboard and watched Dirty Dancing. It was dubbed in Italian. I wasn’t sure about Olivia, but I had a sister and I’d seen it enough to know the dialogue by heart. I was still there when the sun came up. I cancelled my appointments, made her get dressed, and took her to see Rome. She fought me at first, saying she’d rather stay at the hotel, but then I’d ripped open the drapes in her room and made her stand in front of them.
“Look. Look where you are,” I said. She’d stood beside me and the mist seemed to lift from her eyes.
“Okay,” she said.
First the Colosseum, then we ate pizza at a little shop near the Vatican. She cried when she stood in the Vatican underneath Da Vinci’s handiwork. She’d turned to me and firmly said, “These are not tears for him. These are because I’m here and I’ve always wanted to be.” Then she’d hugged me and thanked me for taking her.
We parted after that day, but when I got back to Miami I called her. We went out to dinner a few times. Very casually. Things didn’t move forward until I kissed her. I hadn’t planned on doing it, but we were saying goodnight outside of a restaurant and I just went in without thinking. It was months before we had sex for the first time. She was timid, hesitant. It took a while for her to trust me. But, she did. And I am not letting that go as easily as he did.
Six months before I saw Olivia at the music store on Butts and Glade, I bought a ring for Leah. It sat next to Olivia’s ring in my sock drawer for a week before I moved it. It didn’t feel right having them together. I’d bought an antique-style ring for Olivia. It was elegant. When things fell apart, I hadn’t known what to do with it. Sell it? Pawn it? Keep it forfuckingever? In the end, I couldn’t part with the past and it had stayed exactly where it was. For Leah, I chose princess cut. It was large and flashy and would impress her friends. I planned to ask her while we were on vacation in Colorado. We skied there twice a year. I was getting sick of the skiing circus with her ridiculous friends who named their children things like Paisley and Peyton and Presley. Names without soul. It was my opinion that if you called a child a pattern for long enough, they would become scrambled. My mother named me after a Biblical spy. He was all dash and dare. Needless to say, names meant something.
I suggested we go on a ski trip alone. Initially, she refused to go without ‘her people’, but I think she caught a whiff of engagement ring in the air and quickly changed her tune. The ski trip was a month away when I panicked. It wasn’t an inner, hidden panic either. It was a drinking binge panic in which I jogged six miles a day listening to Eminem and Dre, and Google searched Olivia’s name by night with Coldplay on repeat. I found her. She was working as a secretary at a law firm. I didn’t have the chance to find her; I got into a car accident and told my first life-altering lie.
The day I saw her, I was already two months deep in my amnesia lie and just hanging out in the general vicinity hoping to run into her. I’d never actually go into her job — Olivia took herself way too seriously to take that well, but I considered ambushing her in the parking lot. And I might have, had she not walked into the Music Mushroom that day. I was going to tell her the truth; how I’d lied to my friends and family, how it had all been because I couldn’t leave her in my past like I was supposed to. And in that split second when I asked her about the damn CD in her hand, she looked so panicked, so stricken that I fell deeper into my lie. I couldn’t do it. I watched the whites of her eyes expand, her nostrils flaring as she tried to decide what to say. At least she wasn’t swearing at me. That was good.
“Ummm.” That’s what she decided to say to me. I heard her voice for the first time and I couldn’t keep my smile. It rose at the corners of my mouth and ran right into my eyes like it hadn’t been lost for the last three years. She was holding a cello-wrapped boy band in her hand. She looked helluva confused.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.” It was cruel to play on her surprise, but I wanted to keep her talking.
“Er, they’re okay,” she said. “They’re not really your style.” I could feel her mentally retreating at that point. Her hand was already placing the CD back on its shelf, her eyes darting toward the door. I had to do something. Say something. I’m sorry. I was a fool. I’d marry you today, on this very day if you agreed to it…
“They’re not my style?” I repeated her words while I tried to formulate my own. She looked so forlorn in that moment that I smiled at her beauty more than anything else.
“What exactly do you think my style is?” I immediately recognized my mistake. This was the way we used to flirt. If I wanted to make any headway in her forgiving me, I had to cut the shit and-
“Umm, you’re a classic rock kind of guy … but I could be wrong.”
She was right, so right. She was breathing through her mouth, her full lips parted.
“Classic rock?” I repeated. She knew me. Leah probably would say my style was Alternative. Not that she knew anything about music; she listened to the top 100 like it was full of Biblic
al truths instead of clichés. I dragged my bitter thoughts away from Leah and back to Olivia. She looked scared. I saw her expression and it hit me. She wasn’t dragging anger around. She was dragging regret. Same as me.
There was a chance for us. Away from the old.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And then the lie came. I’d been telling the same one for two months. It came easily, pouring off my tongue like relationship poison.
You’re protecting her, I told myself.
I was protecting myself.
I was the same selfish fuck that pushed her too hard in the past. I started to walk out. To run from what I’d just done, when I heard her call after me. That was it. She was going to tell me that she knew me, and I’d tell her that I didn’t have amnesia. That the whole fucking charade had been about her. Instead, she took off down an aisle. I watched her dark hair bob as she weaved past people who were in her way.
My heart was beating fast. When she came back, she had a CD in her hand. I glanced at it: Pink Floyd. It was my favorite of their albums. She’d bought my lie and she’d brought me my favorite CD.
“You’ll like this,” she said. She tossed it to me. I waited for her to tell me that she knew who I was. But, she didn’t. I was overcome by every goddamn thing I had ever done to her, every lie, every betrayal.
Here she was trying to heal me with music, and I was lying to her. I walked. Walked. Right out.
I had no intention of ever seeing her again. That was it. I had my chance and I blew it. I went back to my condo and put that CD on, turning the volume all the way up. Hoping it could remind me of who I was. Who I definitely wanted to be again. Then I saw her again. That wasn’t planned. That was kismet. I couldn’t help myself. It was like every second, minute, hour I’d spent away from her over the last three years came to slap me in the face as I watched her knock over a display of ice cream cones. I bent down to help her pick them up. Her hair was short, barely reaching her shoulders. It was cut at an angle, the front longer than the back. The very tips looked like they could slice your fingers if you touched them.