Chapter 7

When the sun finally blazed its way into my window, I felt around the bed for Marcus. My eyes were still closed, but I quickly could tell that he wasn’t there. A deep sigh of sadness filled my lungs.

Then my hand ran across a note that was in the empty spot next to me.

The note read: Beautiful girl. I didn’t want to wake you.

He was gone.

After having a fabulous night with a guy, the last thing I expected was that he would totally disappear. But yet that was exactly what happened with Marcus. After finding his note lying next to me after we had sex, he was gone.

I went to his house the next morning and knocked on his door. I kept my eye out for days afterward to see if he might be coming home at a weird hour or something, but he was gone. No goodbye. No explanation, he was just gone.

My heart sank as I thought about the night we had spent together and how wonderful it had been. His muscular hands on my body, his lips on my skin; it had been perfect. I really didn’t know what had happened and why he had totally disappeared.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I wasn’t prepared to deal with it. Obviously, I didn’t know Marcus well; we had only been neighbors for a short time, but I liked him. I found myself thinking about our night together often.

I turned my attention to Stanley for several days in a row. He was a gem and tried to distract me. The thing that I loved about Stanley and my relationship was that he knew how much I enjoyed having other men in my life and how happy it made me. So Stanley didn’t get jealous of this and instead encouraged it. He liked when I was happy, and that was just one of the reasons we worked well together.

Remembering Marcus and his strong arms wrapped around me as he carried me down from the woods, I could still, very vividly, recall his smell that night, a musky mix of sweat and shower gel. My mind could get lost remembering how he had ripped my clothes off and carried me up to my bed. Marcus was different in every way from Stanley. I wanted them both, and I wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

My head still had the scar from where I fell while taking the final picture for my art show. My ankle also was still healing from that fall. Every time I looked at either of the wounds, my mind went back to that night.

I could still remember the feeling of his lips on mine. The sweet taste of his tongue as it entered and searched with mine. It was hard to think about anything else than that night I had with Marcus. How was a girl supposed to move on when a guy just totally disappeared on her?

I didn’t know anything about Marcus. Not his last name or what he did for work, and certainly I didn’t know where he had gone. I felt like a teenager again, the rejection of a boy not calling. It was all-consuming for me.

While developing some pictures one afternoon, I decided I had to go snoop around his house a little more. He hadn’t come or gone for at least a week, and I didn’t feel nervous at all that he would come home. I had woken up at all hours of the night to look and see if he was coming home, but he never did.

My mind raced with the thoughts of what was going on. How could someone feel so right when he was here and so wrong when he was gone? I certainly didn’t like the feeling I was getting when he was away.

As I walked over to his house, I looked into the front window. There was the same furniture as before, and nothing looked lived in at all. In fact, the whole house looked pretty empty. Or at least as empty as it had before Marcus had come.

Suddenly, it hit me; what if he never came back?

It bothered me. The thought of never getting to see Marcus again made my stomach churn. I don’t know why I had become attached to him so quickly; it wasn’t something I normally did. But then again, I didn’t normally sleep with guys I had just met either.

I was starting to understand why my friends got so crazy when men didn’t call them back. For so many years I had dated one man in a loving relationship; it had worked out great. Then after losing him, I had several men in my life and those relationships had happened very organically as well. But this thing with Marcus was confusing and not like anything I’d been through before. It was horrible to be second guessing how smart I was or how beautiful; all over a guy who didn’t call after having sex. I felt absolutely ridiculous.

As I made my way around Marcus’s house, I kept peering into the windows to see if there was anything unusual going on in there. For all I knew he could be dead in there for the past week and I was getting mad at him for not calling me. I didn’t really know if he had left the house, and I figured I should at least check to see if his Jeep was still around.

The garage seemed a good place to go check next. The last time I had looked in there it was totally empty, and Marcus had just moved into the house.

I let my hand slowly twist the door handle to the garage, and I pushed the door all the way open without going inside. It was difficult to see in there, and I knew I was going to have to turn the light on. I thrust my hand into the doorway and felt around on the wall until I ran into the light switch.

The garage looked empty, except there was one box on a shelf in the corner.

I walked over to the box and took a deep breath. It would look pretty bad if Marcus happened to come home right as I was going through his things in his garage. I ran over to the door and looked around one last time. There were no cars and no one even near the house.

The box was loosely shut without any tape or anything over it. I certainly wouldn’t have cut through the tape to look inside, or at least that’s what I told myself as I started to open the box.

Historically, I had never been a super curious person. I let mysteries remain and often figured that if something was important enough, I would be told about it eventually. But that was for silly small town secrets. This felt like a bigger secret that I needed to get to the bottom of.

I don’t know what exactly I was expecting to see in the box, but I felt disappointed when I opened it and just found clothes. I pulled out a shirt and some pants, both black. In fact, most of the clothing in the box was black. The fact that all the clothing was black seemed odd since I don’t think I had seen Marcus where any black at all since he had moved in.

As I closed the box up, there was a noise outside the garage.

My heart sank, and I froze. I stood still and waited to see what the noise was from. My heart pounded in my chest, and I could feel my mouth getting dry as I tried to swallow. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath.

I listened intently as I walked toward the doorway and peered outside.

Then out of nowhere, a cat ran away from the side of the garage. I breathed a sigh of relief and shut the garage door behind me. I had to get back to my own garage and finish developing my pictures for my big gallery show. It didn’t matter if Marcus ever returned; I still had a life I needed to continue living.

I had to stop worrying about this guy that I hardly knew. My show was right around the corner, and I absolutely had to make some decisions on the pictures that I would be using. I had changed my mind at least a dozen times in the last few weeks, but it was finally time to make the decisions so they could prepare the gallery for my pictures.

***

As the days continued to pass, I had to just give up on Marcus. He was a nice guy, and I did have feelings for him, but any guy who would disappear like this wasn’t right for me. I needed more than this.

One of the things that confused my friends a lot about my new lifestyle was how any guy was okay with it. But there was a simple answer to that; if a person truly stopped being selfish and thought about their partner, a situation like the one I had in the past wasn’t so far-fetched. Most men lived for their jobs. The family and home life were always a second priority, and relationships caused a lot of friction because of this.

But in my world over the last few months, that had not been an issue. Each guy could work as much as they wanted with work or school or whatever, and I didn’t mind. There was always someone available to meet my needs, have dinner with, enjoy a walk with. It was the perfect world for me.

The hallmark of my relationships was that the men were kind and caring, though, and Marcus clearly was not that sort of guy. We had never talked about the type of life I liked to lead, but I already knew he wouldn’t have adapted to it, so maybe it was better that he was gone.

I felt like an independent woman and waiting on a guy to show back up just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I was starting to feel desperate for him, and no girl ever wants the stench of desperation on her, so I made the decision to stop thinking about Marcus.

Of course, that quickly turned into trying to stop thinking about him, then thinking about him a little and then all the way back to thinking about him all the time again.

I settled in with my preparations for my photography exhibit. Every time I thought I had my list of pictures complete, I kept changing my mind and looking through more and more pictures. This was my first big show, and I didn’t want anything to mess it up. Not even a broken heart over a one-night stand could distract me from my objective.

Then, at about midnight a week later, I was developing pictures in my garage again, and I heard someone pull up outside. I ran to my garage window and looked to see who it was. Sure enough, it was Marcus.

He pulled his Jeep into the driveway and then got out and went into his house. He was dressed in black. I could hardly see him in the dark, but he looked different. There was no smile and nothing about his demeanor seemed pleasant at all. He had a bit of a shaggy beard, and his hair was tussled and looked unkempt. He looked scary to me.

Even though I was mad as hell at him for disappearing and not calling me, my heart still raced as I watched him. He had some power over my body that I just couldn’t put my finger on.

After about thirty minutes, I went quietly back into my house. Surely now that he was home, he would reach out to me again. Perhaps he would stop by in the morning and tell me some elaborate reason why he couldn’t call me?

Wait! What was I doing? I was already trying to give him excuses for why he wasn’t able to call me. How pitiful was I? I shook my head and tried to think about something else. When did I become this girl that cared so much about what a guy thought?

Before I met Marcus, I was doing so well at building myself up to be more independent. But then I found myself sitting in the dark of my kitchen waiting to see if Marcus would come over. Even though it was the middle of the night, my brain actually thought he might come running over to say hello and apologize.

I sat for about twenty minutes before finally deciding sleep was more important than staring out my window in the middle of the night.

When morning came, the first thing I thought of when I opened my eyes was what Marcus was doing. I hurried and got dressed and went outside to do yard work that I absolutely didn’t need to do.

I’ll be honest; I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know what internal urge drove me to want Marcus to come over, but I did. I desperately wanted him to come and find me and tell me a fabulous reason why he had been unable to talk to me.

After about an hour working in my yard, I heard Marcus leave his house and make his way over toward me.

“Have you been behaving yourself?” he said as he slapped my ass.

I slowly turned around, and there he was in all of his handsome glory. His hard muscles tugged on the blue shirt he was wearing, and his gray shorts hugged him in all the right places.

I tried not to take in every piece of him, but I couldn’t stop myself.

He smiled at me with that mischievous grin, and my body reacted with excitement to every last nerve ending.

“Yep, you know it!”

I turned back to work on the weed pulling in my yard. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me ogle him.

“Well, I’m going for a run, enjoy your day.”

With that, he was gone. Off and running down the street like the last two weeks had not even happened. But there was awkwardness between us. He had to have felt that; there was no way around it.

I threw my gardening tool down and stormed back into my house.

How dare he just pretend like nothing was off? What an arrogant ass! He knows it’s rude to have sex with someone and then utterly disappear; he has to know that!

He seriously just slapped my ass like nothing was wrong. It was amazing to me that he could even have a conversation with me and not mention that he had been gone for almost two weeks. It didn’t matter how hot he was. Any guy who wouldn’t try to at least make up some sort of excuse was too full of himself for me to worry about him.

I went back into my house and tried to get rid of some of my anger. But the more I cleaned and organized the house, the angrier I got. In this day and age, how could any guy still be such a jerk?

I just had to call Willow.

“Hey girl what are you up to?” Willow said when she answered.

“Guy trouble. I need you ASAP.”

It didn’t matter what day of the week it was or even what time of day. The fact that I had a guy and there was trouble was so exciting to Willow that she was over to my house in less than ten minutes.

She was practically in a full blown sprint when I watched her get out of her car and make her way up to my door. We were long past knocking in our friendship, and she thrust the door open with a force of excitement.

“Who is he? How long have you known him? Have you had sex?” Willow said breathlessly as she fell onto the couch.

“His name is Marcus; it’s that neighbor who moved into the house next door, known him about three weeks, although he’s been gone for the last two… and yes we did, right where you are sitting.”

“Isabella! Eww!” Willow said as she jumped off the couch and moved over to a chair.