So I wave goodbye and blow a kiss, then I turn and head toward the bakery for my shot of caffeine. And since we never got to have breakfast, I order something quick and tasty to scarf down before I reach the office and start my day.
This thing I feel in my heart is too complicated to label. Too scary to admit. And too permanent to give. So I swallow it all down, push it to the side the way I’m so skillfully able to do, and, thinking about Jason and his Maria – thinking about the pain he feels after decades of loss – and thinking of my mom after she lost Stanley, I’m able to remind myself why I can swallow my feelings down.
The risk is too great. The pain too traumatic. And since I have such a good record of losing men in my life – first, the father I never knew, and then the father I did – I choose not to take the risk.
Go to work, Allyson. Then come home, and continue this wild affair with the guy who was probably voted in his graduating class as ‘least likely to ever settle down’.
He’s the safe bet, the easy choice. And though he says he loves me, I know love can so easily be mistaken with lust.
For now, I’ll enjoy the passion he throws at me. I’ll absorb it, and love it, and smile for it, and hell, I’ll probably even perform for it. But when it’s all done and gone, I won’t bleed for him the way Mom bled for Stanley, because I’ll have protected my heart. I’ll have been proactive and smart.
Ally
Time Passes
Summer in a small town really does go the way the movies portray it. The running around at the lake, the squealing laughter, and the wild, passionate lovemaking at the end of each long day.
Work keeps me moving from nine till around six or seven each night, but I’m only at the office until five, so that last hour or two is done with a laptop on my legs, and my feet in Luke’s lap while he massages them and I work on my paper.
Maybe I look and feel like an adult in most facets of my life, but until this paper is complete, I’m still a student, still young and in need of that validation from a professor and a college.
But hell, things could be much worse. I could be stuck inside my hotel room, all alone, while I hammer out these words. Or worse yet, I could have stayed in the city and never have come here at all. That would mean missing out on the weekly dinners that Sonia invites me to. That would mean missing out on witnessing how she and Christopher interact, the way he loves her dearly, the way he’s a senior citizen, but his eyes and mind… they still belong to that twenty-year-old rogue who went away to war and came home a changed man. It would mean never knowing Sonia, she herself an old woman, but her brain as alive and sharp now as it ever was.
When dinner is served in the Rivera dining room, and all three of us are seated, all I have to do to be transported to another time is close my eyes and listen. Listen to the words they speak to each other, the joking, the teasing. The laughing… the giggling. Because Sonia still giggles for her husband.
If I’d never come to this town, I’d have never met Rob, the man who is identical to mine, but just as Emma said, the confusion is gone almost immediately once you meet them both. These days, I can pick them apart as though I was raised with them and know their every nuance.
If I’d never come here, I would have missed out on watching Rob and Emma tiptoe around each other, how he watches her when she’s not looking – he has a special interest in her backside, as rounded and sculpted as it is – and she watches him too, but she’s far less subtle about it.
She watches his dick, and encourages the wearing of gray sweatpants.
Jason has attended sessions every single Wednesday since the first, and as time wears on, the stories of his Maria grow more animated, more detailed and in depth, and for every session he attends, I fall a little more in love with the woman he loves. He’s able to speak in such a way that he’s not drawing Sonia and I toward him. He doesn’t seek to make us love him, but to love Maria. He’s on a quest to keep Maria alive long after he lost her.
The tragedy, I’ve since discovered, is that she has not passed away. She was sent away. They were separated when they were still young, pushed into other parts of the country, and he was too young himself to do anything about it.
He still loves this woman, this ghost, and that might be more tragic than if she had in fact passed away.
September made way for October, for Halloween. Luke dressed up as Dracula, he forced me to be his bride, he bit my neck a lot, and then I met the children of the estate. The elementary-school-aged children who wanted to trick or treat, and thrilled at the idea of Luke being a bloodsucker.
That was also when I met those sexy, sexuality-questioning, fighting warriors from the canvas print in the photography studio window. Turns out, the women I was semi-lusting after, are just two more that Luke has declared his undying love for.
One is his cousin by blood. The other, a cousin by love.
November means Thanksgiving, which, according to Luke’s family, means weird sweater season, where the sweaters are to be as discreetly salacious as possible. The dirtier, the better, but the kids can’t read them and understand, or you’re disqualified.
It also means frigid cold winds, swapping out my iced coffee for the hot version, driving my car to work or risking frostbite, and at the end of the month, the first snow.
It’s like I’m living a movie: the summer romance, the wild abandon I allow myself to feel, the adventure, then the winter, which almost feels even more magical.
The nights Luke and I spend bundled up, sitting outside on his balcony or mine, as snow slowly drifts to the concrete parking lot down below. Luke will sit sprawled out on a chair, and then I’ll lay on top of him, because although getting a second chair would be the logical, easy solution, neither of us want to give up the excuse to snuggle, to hug for hours and sync our hearts.
Maybe it’s because he is a Hart. Maybe that’s why it’s all so easy, so effortless to verge in a direction that terrifies me, or maybe it’s watching Sonia and Christopher play out beside us. Perhaps it’s listening to Jason about his Maria. Love seems to be all around, and that doesn’t even account for Luke’s mom and dad. His aunts and uncles. It seems love is quite literally in the air, so all Luke and I have to do is breathe, exist, allow it to bewitch us.
And at the end of the year, I guess I’ll have to choose. Am I going left? Or are we going right?
One ends with me taking a leap of faith and trusting someone else to care for my heart. The other ends with me following the plan, going home again, back to my life, to my friends, to my mom and the codependent relationship we share, to my cat who now thinks Mom is his new owner, and her pillow is his bed.
I have a whole other life somewhere else, and a whole lot of reasons not to abandon it for a guy who, after his initial ‘You’re mine and I love you’ talks, remains somewhat silent on where he falls when it comes to commitment.
Just as I suspected, love and lust are confusing, and Luke is a passionate guy.
I made the right choice a couple months ago by keeping my lips closed when words like love and forever were being tossed around. I enjoyed us for what we are – passion and lust, spontaneity and wildness. I didn’t ruin us by falling in love. But rather, I enhanced what we have by maintaining that slight independence and not tainting us with feelings that cannot last forever.