“Yeah.”
“I’ll figure out a way for everything to work. I promise.” He would too.
We said our good-byes, and I looked at the time. Two hours. I had two hours before I had to leave, and it wouldn’t be forever, but that didn’t stop it from hurting. I wasn’t sure I could handle it when I had to leave. No. I was pretty sure I couldn’t. I’d have to think of something, but right now I had to do something even harder. I had to tell Stan that I was leaving.
I climbed down the staircase and found him in the kitchen arranging cookie dough onto large trays.
“Hey.” I stepped inside enough for him to see me, but not enough for me to be breaking any kind of health code.
He looked up at me with a smile on his face only for me to watch it vanish. He could see this wasn’t a social visit even with my everything is wonderful smile slapped on my face.
“Glenn called and I need to leave for a bit.” A week. So much more than a bit, but compared to what was on the horizon, just a blip.
“When?” He set the cookie scoop down and stepped around the table, taking off his gloves and throwing them in the trash on his way to me.
“Two hours.”
“I hate your fucking job,” he mumbled, and right then and there, I did too.
He walked past me and out the kitchen door, and I followed, stopping short when I saw he was not heading upstairs, but over to the front counter. He came back to me a minute later and took my hand, leading me back to the apartment.
“Is this what it’s always like?” he asked, breaking the silence that had grown between us on our way up. “I mean, calling and saying drop everything right now?”
“No. This is the first.” Although even if it had happened earlier in my career, I wouldn’t have cared. I lived for my job back then. It was everything I ever wanted all handed to me on a silver platter. Except it wasn’t everything I ever wanted, it was all I knew to want. How things had changed.
“Oh.” He pulled his shirt up and over his head. “I need to shower. I smell like Om, and I told them I needed to leave for the day so I’m de-workifying myself.” And just like that, he walked out of the room.
Part of me—no, most of me wanted to follow him in there, to wash his hair, kiss him all over, show him how much I was going to miss him. But he didn’t want that. He needed the time to process, and I got it.
I took out a pan and some shrimp I’d purchased the day before. If I was going to leave I could at least make him dinner. By the time the bathroom door cracked open, I had a simple shrimp pasta dish waiting.
“What smells so good?” He came out in a t-shirt pulled over his growing belly and a pair of pajama pants—or as he called the outfit, home clothes.
“I know it’s way too early, but this was what I had planned for dinner, and I thought maybe...maybe we could eat together?”
“I could eat.” He reached up to grab plates from the cupboard, his rounded belly slightly exposed. Damn, that was a good look on him.
“I really didn’t know.” I dished up the pasta onto the plates he handed me and brought them around to the table as I told him the story, leaving out the part about my contract. I didn’t want to give him false promises if nothing could be worked out.
“This is delicious.”
“Thanks.”
That was pretty much our entire conversation as we ate our lunch slash dinner. There was nothing to say. I was leaving.
It hurt so much and it was only a week. What was it going to feel like later when it was a month or more. How did people leave the people they loved?
Loved.
I loved Stan.
Holy shit.
I was in love with him, and not because of the baby or the dancing or his perfect ass. I loved him for his strength, his compassion, his intelligence, his ability to ask for help when he needed it, the way he put me in my place, the way he loved our child, the way he...they way he...everything.
“I love you,” I said almost to myself, knowing he wouldn’t hear me as we said goodbye.
I loved Stan.
Full. Stop.
Now what was I going to do about it?
Twenty-Three
Stan
I leaned against the doorway, one hand on my growing bump, and stared at the empty drawer in my bedroom. It was the one I’d given Chet while he stayed in my place. It hadn’t been shoved back, and the emptiness echoed the gaping hole inside me. It may as well have had a blinking, red neon sign announcing, ‘He left.’
My eyes swam with tears. I’d gotten so used to falling over him in the kitchen as I made tea in the morning, and his dirty socks were thrown not in but near the hamper. But right now, I’d bury my face in those filthy socks. I missed him so much. Okay, backup a minute. Nope. There’d be no sniffing. But I’d admire them from a distance and shout at Chet to pick them up.
Thinking back to the previous evening when he’d been flinging things in his bag, I shivered as I recalled the air sizzling and crackling with tension. If he hadn’t had a plane to catch, I would have ripped his clothes off and climbed on top of him. I’d needed a connection, but there was a car out front and the driver was bugging Chet with messages.
But neither of us had said a word while he packed. Each item he put in the bag hurt as if it were a piece of my heart snapped off, piece by piece. I’d been overcome with anxiety, wondering if I’d ever see him again. Being pregnant, my hormones were all jumbly. No, wrong word. As a coffee man I knew the perfect description. They were percolating!
But Chet, being the alpha that he was, threw me a curveball as he said goodbye. I closed my eyes and rewound the three little words he’d spoken though my mind. “I love you.” And then he was gone except for a quick text that read, You danced your way into my heart.
He was such a sap. And I loved it. I replied with, I danced as if I’ve never danced before.
But as I lay in my empty bed, hugging a pillow and staring at the ceiling, my thoughts were question after unanswered question. Does he want us to be together? But as I spoke the words in my head, my therapist’s image popped into my thoughts. “I know. I know,” I said out loud. “I’m being passive.”
Okay. Let’s start again. Do I want us to be together? “Is that better?” I yelled. But the therapist in my head didn’t answer. Sneaky! I had to figure it out for myself.
How can we be equal partners in a relationship and parent our child when we’re not in the same place? I wasn’t about to ask Chet to give up his job, and I wasn’t resigning from my position. I’d seen friends do the long-distance thing. It worked for some, and for others, the time apart shredded the fabric of their relationship until there was nothing left except bitterness.
Chet and I hadn’t discussed a future. There was that pesky being apart thing getting in the way again. The ‘I love you’ suggested a future, and I was ready to embrace it.
The next morning as I sat drinking my flat white before the café opened, a hand waved in front of my face. I glanced up to see Charlie hovering over me. “Not a disaster, is it? I haven’t even finished my first coffee.”
He sat opposite and pushed an espresso toward me. “Though you might need something stronger.”