“Coffee tomorrow morning. You can come to me.” I was ready to do a little negotiating of my own.
“No problem. You name a time and a place, and I’m there.” I rattled off a time, and the name of a café far enough from work that I’d be unlikely to bump into any colleagues, but near enough as to not be too far out of my way, or take up too much time getting there and back.
As I was about to hang up the phone, he caught me off guard.
“Oh, and Mel?”
“Yes?”
“Fair warning. This isn’t a social call. I’m looking for answers and closure, so be prepared to talk.”
Closure. The hard edge to his voice threw me. The sweet boy I loved was well and truly gone. But what had I expected? I didn’t know this person. I known a teenage version of him. A version blissfully unaware of what I was about to do to him. I’d more than earned the shade he was throwing my way. As you sow, so shall you reap. The draconian phrase reminded me of my father, and a cold shudder ran through my body.
“Uh…sure…okay. See you tomorrow.”
He hung up without saying goodbye.
I couldn’t believe I was going to do this. I was going to face my demons, and no doubt Beck’s too. In public. Tomorrow. I must have been crazy, but I didn’t feel I had much choice. He had my iPad, which I needed, and worse still, my passcode. I’d agreed to meet him as much to try to stop him from prying into my shit as anything. If he did, this whole debacle would take even more of a wrong turn, and fast. The trouble was that now that I had committed to meeting him, I wasn’t sure I could handle the reality of what that meant.
Rather than brood any further at my desk, I decided to head home for date night. I was so mentally and physically exhausted there was slim chance of me getting anything else done at that point, anyway. I figured I’d hang with Sam, do Monday Mac ‘n’ Cheese, and chill out on the couch.
Then when I’d had a chance to unwind a little (and maybe sunk a glass or two of red wine), I’d pull my notes from today’s meeting from the cloud and work on my response to Martin for the morning. I wasn’t about to let Tyler Beckett’s childish behavior derail me more than his physical presence already had.
Beck
I hung up the phone well aware I had just behaved like a complete douche. Eighteen-year-old me wouldn’t have pulled that shit, yet here I was pushing thirty, and acting out like a spoiled child. I didn’t know if it was delayed shock, or residual anger, or a potent combination of both, but I found the words had fallen out of my mouth before I could clamp my jaw shut tight enough to trap them.
I’d spent my adult life cautiously navigating the world—never revealing too much, never giving too much, most importantly of all, never feeling too much. Two hours in Mel’s company, and already I could feel the thick fabric I’d so carefully woven to blanket my senses, unraveling at the seams. I was doing and saying things I couldn’t seem to control, and worse still—in the case of our “encounter” in the hall—I was fucking loving it.
Almost too late, I remembered I had a date that night, as I did most Mondays. Lydia, a gorgeous accountant I’d met at a bar few weeks previously. It would be the third date, and statistically speaking, with my track record, also the last. I headed to the restaurant—an intimate trattoria close to her apartment—lady’s choice—straight from the office, hurriedly changing shirts just before walking out of the door.
My head wasn’t in the game as I went through the motions, letting our pleasant banter largely wash over me, while running and re-running my earlier encounter with Mel over and over in my mind. That was nothing new—nod, laugh and smile in all the right places, and nobody even noticed. The difference tonight was that I had a boner that would put Mr Biggs to shame, and it had nothing to do with my beautiful date.
I guessed most of operated at a certain level of superficiality in life, so it was kind of to be expected. Or something. I had no idea. I just knew that I didn’t go on dates because I really wanted to listen to the inane details of other people’s lives. And no, it didn’t take a therapist to see that I had issues, and to guess where they might have stemmed from.
The only people I didn’t bullshit that way were the other gods. They got my full attention, and until today, the raw, unedited version of me, even when they didn’t want it. I was invested in our friendship, and in our business, in a way I wasn’t with anyone or anything else in my life. Thanks to Mel, I had learned the hard way that with most people, going all in was like trading real, hard-earned cash for fool’s gold—a recipe for disappointment.
Dinner skipped along at a pleasing pace, and the conversation flowed easily, but I couldn’t recall what had been said mere moments after the words had left our mouths. Pleasant yet forgettable. Lydia was good company—intelligent, articulate, funny, a little cheeky, and extremely easy on the eye—the perfect woman. For someone else.
Third. Date. All the signals were there. The easy and frequent laughter. The batting of the eyelids and twiddling of hair. The lean toward me. The repeated licking of lips while staring at mine. The frequent touching—my hand, my arm, even the tip of my nose. The shared dessert. Small intimacies building toward the greatest intimacy of them all.
On the sidewalk outside the restaurant as we waited for the valet to retrieve Lydia’s convertible, she turned to me expectantly, eyes half-open, head tilted back. Crunch time. As I slipped my hand to her waist, and leaned downward, I wasn’t sure what I would do, until my lips hit her forehead. Her eyes flew open, a look of consternation on her face. You and me both, babe. You and me both. She opened and closed her mouth a few times before clamping it shut, looking at me expectantly. Fair enough. I at least owed her an explanation.
“It’s been great getting to know you, and I’ve had a lot of fun. But…” But what?
But I’m being haunted by the ghost of summer past. But my head’s not in the game, because my heart suddenly wants in on the action, after too many years on the bench. But I’m almost thirty years old, and only ten seconds ago did I realize life is too fucking short to waste it screwing nice women I don’t give a flying fuck about. But I’ve been in love with another woman since I was eighteen, and I can still smell her on my fingertips. But you’re not her. You’ll never be her, and every minute spent with someone who isn’t her is a wasted minute I could have spent making her mine.
“…for reasons I can’t go into right now, it’s not going to work out between us, so I don’t want to waste any more of your time pretending otherwise.” She couldn’t have looked more shocked if I’d told her I had an extra ball, and a vestigial tail. In fact, she would probably have been less affronted if I’d dropped my pants and shown her both.
“But you—”
“I know. Total dick move. Which is why I’m doing this now, before I make any more of them. Dick moves, that is. I’m sorry. It’s better this way Trust me.” From the disgust on her face, it was a safe assumption that she’d sooner have handed off her firstborn child to the son of Satan than trust me.
Just then the valet swung her car to the curb-side. Saved by the beep. The death stare Lydia gifted me suggested that she might “accidentally” push me into oncoming traffic, so I resisted the urge to walk her to the driver’s side door, as I normally would. As she screeched away at speed, she flipped me the bird, and very narrowly missed running over my wing-tip clad toes. I couldn’t say I hadn’t earned her wrath.