Saturday, April 24, 2010
IT WASN’T UNTIL I was on the plane when I remembered, I hadn’t fucking called Blake.
Damn it.
The previous night—hell, the whole day before—was a major clusterfuck. First, with Aly showing up to the meeting, and being her normal number-crunching, buzz-kill self, she brought the energy level down a little too far.
Then later in the afternoon, when I thought I could do damage control, she followed.
Then she drank.
Then she hit on the customer.
Then the customer hit on her and kept pumping her full of shots. It wasn’t my place to put an end to it, so all I could do was watch. I wasn’t upset that she and the guy were hitting it off. If I’d thought that was what it really was. Clearly, it was something else.
When she did shots, she’d look at me as if trying to make me jealous. Which wasn’t happening. She sat on his lap, giving me coy, two-can-play-your-game smiles. She wasn’t interested in him at all. So when he tried to go back to her room with her, that’s where I had to step in.
He’d been handsy. She’d been handsy. Both of them had too much to drink. But I wasn’t about to let some stranger go up to her room, not when she honestly expected me to step in and put an end to it. Which I would do—only not for the reasons she thought. The fact was, he didn’t strike me as a gentlemanly type if she changed her mind.
So when I told him she was going to her room alone, he didn’t take it very well.
“Who’s gonna to stop me? You’re not ’er dad? She can do what she wants,” he slurred.
“Well, I work for her dad and I’m telling you, you’re not going up.”
Then he shoved me.
He was a customer, so I let it go. I told Aly to get her things and that I’d walk her up. When she saw him shove me, and me turn around to ignore it, I saw realization of what her behavior had caused flash in her eyes. She knew it had gone too far.
So much fun. Not.
Thankfully, we walked out of the bar without it escalating further. Well, with the guy—my never to be, new customer—anyway. Things with Aly escalated rather fast. In the elevator, she was all over me. She smelled like a bar rag as she tried to put her arms around my neck. All I could do was continually remove them, and tell her to knock it off.
Just as I got her into her room, that’s when I got the text from Blake. God, I’d missed her and I was lucky that Blake—through all of our drama—was never that big of a drinker. And when she was drunk, she was sweet and silly. Not sloppy and pathetic.
While I messaged Blake, I listened to Aly vomit. That was actually the highlight of the night. At least, if she threw it all up, I didn’t have to worry about her choking on it in her sleep and I could, with good conscience, leave.
Helping her into bed, fully clothed, I told her, “If you ever show up at one of my meetings again, I’ll sell my shares and leave Bay Brewing. And if you don’t get it through your head that I don’t want to be anything more than friends and coworkers with you, I’ll leave anyway. I mean it.”
“You won’t do that,” she mumbled, as she rolled over.
I turned off the light next to her bed and assured her, “Just watch me, Aly.”
Then I left.
I woke up late, and since Aly was a big girl and not at all my responsibility, I didn’t contact her in the morning. After a quick shower, I headed straight for the airport. For the first time in months, I wanted to get home so damn bad. Mostly because Blake was going to be there, too.
I was serious though. If Aly kept pulling shit like she had the day before, she wouldn’t have to worry about me only quitting Bay Brewing—a place I fucking loved. She’d have to worry about me being her competition. It was a decision I didn’t want to make, and one I would hate telling Marc, but the facts were: I loved my job, but I didn’t love his daughter. Whether I did my job with them or against them, I’d be fine. The last thing I needed was another hurdle to jump with Blake.
Her dumbass husband wasn’t following through with their arrangements. By him not seeing Dr. Rex, which was his ridiculous idea in the first place, my patience was running thin. Every bone in my body wanted to tell Blake to call it off when she’d asked me if she should. But I just kept thinking, I didn’t want her to doubt her decision to leave her marriage. She was doing what she’d said she would, and when the time was up, she wouldn’t have to carry that guilt around too. She had a surplus of guilt already.
Thankfully, he never showed up. Not one time so far. He was stalling. He may have dumbly underestimated how patient we were. We’d waited a long time to be together. His feeble attempt at drawing out their divorce was soon going to be for nothing.
I was tense on the flight, but I felt better knowing that by the end of that night we’d be sleeping in the same bed. My bed.
I just hoped I didn’t have that fucking dream again.
When I finally pulled up to my brother’s house, my shitty attitude began to lighten. You’d have to be a cold-hearted prick to show up at a first birthday party with a chip on your shoulder. Besides, today I was going to be with the people I loved most. My family and Blake, at the same time.
No false pretenses.
No hiding.
And I wasn’t about to let a shitty work issue put a damper on how long I’d been waiting for that day to happen. Both the real Bay Area fog and the metaphorical kind had lifted, and it was going to be a beautiful day.
Walking up, I followed the trail of blue balloons and the sound of music that led around back. I opened the door on their backyard gate and heard, “There he is,” come from Audrey. It was a full-fucking-circle moment as I walked around the side of their brick house. There was my family. My nephew and godson. And the girl I’d dreamed of sharing with my family. They all sat around watching a toddler throw a ball.
Everything else faded away. I ran my hand over my mouth and took a minute to memorize it.
My family always knew there was something out of my control with her. It finally happened. Sometimes they would quietly watch. A few times they told me I should just get over it. But whatever their opinions were at the time, they were always there. Seeing her with them, laughing and talking, undid a lot of pain and hurt we’d been through.
It was different. We had nothing to hide. We could show people our love and not keep it stowed away like we were ashamed of it. It was as if my resolution to stick by Blake was justified. Validated. Worth the agony and effort.
I loved her. She loved me. We were an us.
She stood up from the picnic table, which was covered in a safari animal plastic thing, and walked straight to me. It was kind of swift and she kind of bounced. Then she kissed me in front of all of them and I more than kissed her back. She didn’t pull away or try to stop me. As I eased up on her, recovering from the overwhelming moment, she took my hand. I was home.
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that brand of pride.
“I’ve missed you,” she said into my shoulder and kissed my shirt.
I kissed the top of her pretty hair and told her, “I’m sick of missing you.”
Then she smiled up at me and said, “We’ve got this.” And again it really felt like we did.
As we sat at the picnic table, where she’d been sitting when I came in, I announced to all watching us, which was everyone, “This is my girlfriend, Blake.”
My dad sat back in his folding chair and wrapped an arm around Carmen, smiling. “We’ve met Blake, but it’s nice of you to finally introduce us,” he said. I wondered if he could see how much it meant to us.
I wished my mom were there, too. She would have loved seeing how big Foster was getting and how great Cory was at being a dad and husband.
He had his shit together and I really looked up to him for that. Even though he was only twenty minutes older, he’d always been the older brother I needed.
Later Blake and I played on the blanket with the birthday boy, while everyone talked and listened to Troy strum on his guitar.
We watched Foster eat cake like a maniac.
Everything was right.
As the party died down, I wondered if that would be how our lives looked in the future. Then realized, maybe some of what I was waiting for was already there. Out in the open for everyone to see.
While Blake told Foster happy birthday one last time, and helped Micah put him down for a nap, I put her bags in the back of my car with mine. I fucking loved it. When she came out of the nursery, with a finger over her mouth telling me to hush, I quietly asked, “Do you want to get out of here?”
“Yeah,” she whispered back.
After we told everyone we were headed out, Micah and Cory walked us to their front door and told us goodbye. My brother wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulder as they stood at the door watching us go. I could only imagine what they were saying to each other. I liked to think they were cheering and happy for us, but they were probably just calling us dumbasses for how long it had taken us to get where we were.
Dumbasses we had been.
Regardless, we were dumbasses leaving our godson’s first birthday together. I hoped we left the second, third, and all of his birthdays the same way. Together. In the future, I hoped we’d get one invitation, arrive in the same car, and bring one gift. I looked forward to some weird shit.
The car ride was comfortably quiet until she asked, “Where are we going?” I didn’t have any plan or destination. I’d simply been driving, enjoying the warm spring day with the windows down and her beside me.
“I don’t know yet. Where are we going?” I asked, repeating her question and being ornery. My hand lightly squeezed her bare leg.
She covered my hand with hers and said, “Somewhere you love. Somewhere I’ve never been.”
I knew just the place.
The brewery.
In all of the time we’d known each other, I’d never taken her there. She’d never seen one of the places I was most proud of. Plus, the brewery was just fucking cool.
“I’ll buy you a beer.”
She looked confused, but smiled. It was early afternoon, and after having cake and ice cream, the look on her face said beer wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted.
“Beer? I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t feel like going to a bar, Casey.”
“We’re not going to a bar,” I shot back.
She looked at me, eyebrow cocked, and shook her head. “Okay.”
She turned on the radio and scanned the stations for something that caught her attention. If you would have told me what song was going to come on, I would have told you to fuck off, but chance is like that.
Sometimes songs pick you.
When I heard the intro’s opening drum beats, I immediately knew what song it was she’d stopped on. That damn Led Zeppelin song haunted us.
She looked up and then at me and guffawed. The laugh that bellowed out of her was almost delirious. Her head fell back onto the headrest, and she wrapped her arms around her stomach as she giggled without care of how she sounded or what she looked like. It turned into a coughing fit, finally catching her breath, somewhere around the first chorus.
“Oh my God. This fucking song,” she exclaimed, as she looked at me, face red, eyes wet from crying through her laughing fit. “It’s never going to leave us alone.”
A breeze flowing through the car filled my nose with her scent. Then she began singing at the top of her lungs, laughing and looking carefree and dazzling.
As I went back and forth, looking at the road then back to her, I couldn’t wait to get to the brewery to kiss her. Really kiss her.
Then I couldn’t wait. I pulled over into the first parking spot I found on a downtown street lined with shops and offices.
Her eyes darted around looking for where it might be that I was taking her, but nothing caught her attention. Perplexed, she looked me.
I turned the key toward myself and killed the engine, turning to face her.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi there,” she replied. She looked so much like the first time I’d listened to that song with her. Hair perfectly wavy and untouched after being wet, mischievous and sexy as anything I’d ever laid eyes on. It took my breath away. She was back. I couldn’t see guilt or shame in her eyes. She looked like first-night Blake. Come-up-to-my-room Blake and there she was, back with me, after all that time waiting for her.
A moment passed where she realized it too. We were going to be okay.
We unclicked our seat belts at the same time and lunged for each other.
There was no kissing. No flirt in our touch. My arms wrapped around her center, and hers around my neck, and we hugged.
We sat like that, squeezing the hell out of each other forever.
“Would you do it all again?” she asked into my neck, and then giggled like it was a huge joke.
“Do hobby horses have wooden dicks?”
She pulled away and ran her hands across my cheeks and held my face merely inches from hers.
“When are you going to get new material?”
“When it stops working.”
Then I kissed her beautiful fucking face off.
I made a mental note to write those old rockers a thank you. That song was magic and it worked every damn time.