Chapter 14
Hayden
“Wrapped more times than a bad Christmas present.”
~ Nora O’Sullivan
I pulled into a parking space under a large tree that provided ample shade for my truck. It wasn’t even noon and the temperature had already reached triple digits on this hot and humid Texas summer day. I glanced down at the clock and saw that I still had five minutes before I had to go in. Just enough time to finish the podcast. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and listened to the woman I’d never tire of hearing.
“Basically my takeaway from this week’s adventures in dating is that if a date is putting me to sleep, wine is not the answer and that I have twenty-six bones in my foot and ankle, over a hundred ligaments and tendons, thirty-three joints, over eight thousand nerves, and a quarter of a million sweat glands.”
The host chuckled. “Well, at least this date was educational.”
“Yes, it was. And actually, it’s funny. So, I ended up with a migraine the next day, and I got a foot massage, because sometimes that helps, and the whole time, all I could think about was I wonder which tendon he’s pushing on or how many bones is he pressing right now?”
“That was not what she was thinking about.” I told Ranger as he slept stretched out on the seat beside me.
“Did it work?” the host followed-up.
“Did what work?” Jade responded.
“The foot massage? Did it help with your migraine?”
“Oh…yeah…it…um…did the trick.”
Hearing Jade stumble over her words was something that didn’t happen often and I liked knowing that I’d had something to do with it.
“Great! So what is on deck for next week?”
“Speed dating,” I answered. I’d seen the info on her fridge. It was at a bar in Dallas.
“Next week is speed dating.” Jade’s tone didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic.
“Well, that should be interesting. I want to thank our guest Jade for being here today, and remember if you have any party planning or marketing needs contact 50/50 Consulting. We’ll be back next week with hopefully some interesting stories from Jade’s first time speed dating!”
The music outro played and I turned off my engine. Ranger’s head perked up and then he followed me out of the truck. As I walked across the parking lot, my mind wandered to the place it always did. Jade. I wondered what she was doing right now. Was she having a good day? Was she having a bad day? Was she thinking about me? If she was, what was she thinking about?
Tonight she’d be at Dive Bar here in Dallas. The name was ironic, it was an upscale hipster bar. But other than that, I had no idea what her plans were. What her daily life was like.
It had been a few days since I’d spent the night at Jade’s. She’d emailed me about her ideas for Hero Rescue but it had all been purely professional. No mention of what happened before I left. She was trying to put distance between us, which I’d expected. Thankfully, I was a very patient man.
I opened the glass door and walked inside the office building that sat in downtown Dallas. I turned down the first hall and entered the second door on the left. I took my seat in the far corner and Ranger dutifully sat beside me. I picked up a magazine and started flipping through it just before the door opened.
“Hayden, Ranger, come on in.”
Dr. Holly Rice held out her arm as both Ranger and I walked in. As I walked past her I noticed, like I always did, how nice she smelled. It was the faintest scent of flowers and cinnamon. It wasn’t as overwhelming as a perfume, it was subtle, maybe a lotion or a shampoo. Whatever it was, it always had a calming effect on me.
I took my usual seat on the oversized leather chair that sat in front of the window that overlooked a private garden. The entire space was very Zen. Ranger plopped down at my feet and Dr. Rice sat directly across from me.
She was gorgeous, smart, and sweet. She had supermodel looks with a girl-next-door charm. With light brown hair, hazel eyes, and olive skin, she reminded me of a young Christy Brinkley. And yet even if I’d met her under different circumstances, I wouldn’t have been interested. Jade consumed me.
Pen in hand, she started our session. “So, how have things been going since we met last?”
A lot had happened in the month since I’d seen Dr. Rice. I took a breath. “They’ve been going good. I’ve been busy.”
“Busy?” She looked down at her yellow notepad, the one that she always kept on her lap and scribbled on during our sessions. “I have down that you were going to have a few weeks off between projects.”
“I was going to but I found a property for Hero Rescue and so I’ve been renovating it.”
“Wow. And how has it been going?”
“Great. I’m hoping to be operational within the next couple of weeks.”
I told her about the grand opening and a few of the dogs from local shelters that I already had my eye on.
“And how has your sleep been with all of this increased activity?”
When I’d first started going to therapy I was lucky if I got a couple hours of sleep every night. Between my anxiety and my nightmares when I lay down in bed it was a marathon just to make it to the morning. But with a lot of work and Ranger, I’d been doing much better.
“I haven’t gotten much sleep the past couple of weeks but not because of anything PTSD-related.” My sleepless nights were attributed to a blue-eyed, black-haired girl that had my mind in a constant state of chasing its own tail.
“So, is it all the changes then? Is your schedule not allowing you to get enough sleep? In the short term that’s okay, but long term it can be detrimental to the progress that you’ve made.”
“It’s not because of the rescue. I reconnected with someone and it’s, she’s been on my mind. I mean, she’s always been on my mind, but now that we’re on speaking terms it’s been…more.”
Dr. Rice flipped through the pages of her notes. “Have you told me about…”
“Jade. No, I haven’t.”
She lifted her head. “And who is Jade?”
“Jade is my ex-girlfriend. We dated when we were teenagers, before I enlisted.”
She adjusted her glasses. “I remember you telling me that you’d never had a significant romantic relationship.”
“I haven’t. Not as an adult.”
“So you don’t consider your relationship with her serious because you weren’t adults at the time?”
“No. I mean, yes, I do consider it serious. We had to keep our relationship a secret because at the time, she wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend until she was sixteen, but it was serious. We were together for two years. She lived next door and we went to high school together. We saw each other every day.”
“Two years. That’s significant. How did you feel about her?”
“I loved her. She was…” I tried to describe what Jade had been to me. “She’s like sunshine. She brightens up any room and people are drawn to her. She’s special…I wanted to marry her.”
“What happened?”
“I left. I joined the Army.”
Her head tilted slightly. “And you mutually decided not to continue your relationship.”
“No.”
“So you did try and make a long-distance relationship work?”
“No. But it wasn’t a mutual breakup. I decided that it would be better if we broke up.”
“Why?”
“We were too young.”
“I see.” She nodded as she wrote something on the paper. “And how did she feel about that decision?”
“She was upset. Really emotional. And I can’t really blame her. About a month prior, she’d had a miscarriage.” I wasn’t sure how to finish. My heart was racing, I’d never dared to tell anyone that before.
Her head tilted. “She was pregnant?”
I nodded. “But we didn’t know until she was miscarrying. She started having cramps and her parents were out of the country, so I took her to the clinic.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“And Jade?”
“She was about to turn sixteen.”
“And how long after that did you decide to enlist?”
“About a month later, on my eighteenth birthday.”
“Did Jade know that you’d planned on enlisting on your birthday?”
“Yes.”
“You two talked about it?”
“No.” I started feeling defensive. It wasn’t a new feeling, I’d often get defensive during sessions. But this was different. This wasn’t about me or my emotional health. This was about Jade and my relationship with her. “But everyone knew that I’d always planned on going into the Army.”
“Okay, we’ll come back to that.”
She must have clocked my change in demeanor. Whenever I started acting defensive, she’d move on to something else.
“You said that you wanted to marry Jade. Did you express that to her?”
“We talked about getting married. Well, she talked about it. She talks. A lot. Not in a bad way, though.”
“It sounds like you still have a lot of affection for her.”
“I love her.” There was no hesitation in my answer. “I’ll always love her.”
“And does she feel the same way?”
I grinned. “If she does, she’s not happy about it.”
“You said that the two of you recently reconnected. How long had you been out of touch?”
“Since I left.”
“You two didn’t talk or keep in contact during your time in the military?”
“I wrote her letters for the first year. She never wrote back.”
“So, when you moved back home, you started speaking again?”
“No. I gave her time after I came home to get used to me being back. I knew that if I tried to push myself into her life, she’d push back. I had to give her space.”
“So you’ve been back, living in the same small town for a year and you’ve just now started talking again?”
When she said it like that, it sounded ridiculous. But that’s because she didn’t know Jade. “Yes, because I knew that she needed time.”
“And now she’s had enough time?”
“I think so.”
“Did you initiate communication or did she?’
“I did.”
“Why? What made you choose now, specifically?”
“I saw her on a date with someone else.” I answered honestly.
Again, her brows rose. “How do you think she felt about that?”
“She was…irritated.” I didn’t know how else to explain it.
She wrote down more notes. “Let’s talk about your relationships since Jade. You told me that you’ve never been in a serious committed relationship.”
“As an adult. No.”
“But you’ve dated people.”
“That’s a generous term.” I hooked up with women. My career had me traveling a lot.
“But you still love Jade.” It was more of a statement than a question.
“Yes.”
“So, in a sense, you’ve been in a committed relationship. You’ve never let anyone else hold the place that she held in your life.”
“I guess.”
“Have you told her that?”
“She wouldn’t care.”
“You don’t think she cares about you?”
“No. I don’t think she cares about what I have to say.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“I’m willing to wait.”
She nodded. “And what about her? If you had to guess, how do you think she feels about waiting?”
I grinned. “She has a lot of virtues, but patience isn’t one of them.”
“So, she didn’t want your relationship to end when you were teens and you didn’t consider that. You say she wouldn’t like waiting now as an adult and you’re still not considering that.”
“She was too young to know what she wanted.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I really believe that if we’d stayed together, it would’ve meant her throwing her life away. I was gone. I wasn’t going to let her waste the best years of her life, finishing up high school and going to college, missing me. Being alone. That’s not what she deserved.”
“Don’t you think she would have liked a say in that?”
I started to argue, but I stopped myself. I’d never thought of it like that. The truth was, I’d never explicitly told her that I was planning on enlisting on my eighteenth birthday. As I sat in that overstuffed leather chair I realized something I wasn’t sure I’d ever admitted to myself. I went to the recruiter’s office because I was scared. I was scared because things were so real between Jade and I. We’d almost started a family. And that had scared the shit out of me, both for how close we came and for how sad I was that we hadn’t.
So I left. I hid behind the fact that I’d always planned on joining the Army. That everyone, my parents, my brothers, my friends, my guidance counselor all knew that was my plan. I’d justified my actions all these years but the truth was, I’d been a scared-shitless kid.
All this time, I’d always believed that I’d been the mature one. I’d been looking out for her best interest. But the truth was, I wasn’t doing what was best for Jade. I was doing what was best for me.
Doing what was best for Jade would’ve been talking to her about my decision before I’d signed my life away. Doing what was best for Jade would’ve been trying to make a long distance relationship work, even though I was terrified she’d end up resenting me or leaving me.
How had I been so blind for so many years?
And more importantly, how in the hell was I going to make it right now?