Chapter Seventeen
Braxton
“You mean to tell me you can’t even remember where you went after the fight last night?” asked Nick. “Must’ve been a hell of a night.”
We had both slept late and missed our flight home, and now we were seated at a window booth in the dining hall, hungover and hungrily eating breakfast tacos with salsa. My head felt like it had been cracked open, and even the slightest noises were magnified. The sound of a chair scraping against the wood floor had nearly driven me out of my seat.
“I can remember some things.” I could still feel the warmth of Jaimie’s body against mine, though I wasn’t entirely sure it hadn’t all been a dream. “I think I may have slept with somebody.”
“Slept-slept?” asked Nick with a look of surprise. “Who?”
“The president’s assistant, the redhead—Jaimie, I think is her name.”
“But you’re not sure? That seems like the sort of thing it would be good to remember.”
“Yeah. I kind of wish I could go ask her, but I don’t want to make things awkward. She probably spent the entire night in her room and won’t even know what the hell I’m talking about.”
But there were certain images I couldn’t shake: the two of us sitting out by the pool with our feet in the water… Jaimie slipping off her kimono as I ran my hands through her hair…
“Sometimes it can be hard to piece together what happened,” said Nick, who was methodically breaking up his last taco into squares with a fork. “My last year of high school, I slept over at a friend’s house. We weren’t dating or anything, although we had messed around. We split a bottle of rum and then I crashed on her couch. I don’t think we did anything, but by the middle of the next week, she was telling everybody we had slept together.”
“Yikes.”
“And she was so insistent about it that I started to wonder if maybe we really had slept together and I just couldn’t remember it. A couple months later she called me in tears saying she was pregnant, and would I be willing to take care of her and the baby and of course I freaked out. I was seventeen; I was nowhere near ready to be a dad.”
“So what did you do? Did you encourage her to get an abortion?”
“No, of course not.” Nick looked offended at the suggestion. “Everybody believed her at first. But the weird thing was, as the months wore on, she never got any bigger. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t miscarry, and she never had a baby. What I think happened is this: she invited me to her house that night and got me drunk because she wanted to gaslight me into thinking we had slept together.”
“Oh. Tricky!”
“It was, it was a very clever trap. She knew if I thought she was pregnant and I was the daddy I would feel obligated to marry her. That’s all she was after: a ring on her finger.”
“Seems like an awfully convoluted way to go about it. Why didn’t she just ask you out?”
Nick shrugged wildly. “I don’t know, don’t ask me to explain how this woman’s brain worked. She grew up in a family where it was considered socially unacceptable for the girl to ask the guy out.”
“But she didn’t see anything wrong with using a fake pregnancy to trick you into marriage?” This story got more and more bizarre the more I thought about it.
“Apparently not.” Nick reached for his iced tea. “I had to cut off all contact with the girl after that. I hated to do it, but my family insisted on it. When you’re seventeen, you kind of think, maybe you can keep them around, but sometimes it’s best just to sever all ties.”
I was silent for a minute staring out onto the sun-drenched patio. A crow descended from overhead with a flutter of wings and began pecking at some loose crumbs at the base of an umbrella-shaded table.
“Everything is so quiet this morning.”
“Afternoon,” said Nick. “It was well past noon when I finally managed to drag you out of bed.”
“I’d probably still be lying there if it wasn’t for you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Did I dream that we were up onstage and women were throwing their shirts at us?” I opened a package of butter and spread it over a plain tortilla. “Were we really on TV?”
“Unless we both had the same dream,” Nick replied.
“Somehow it doesn’t seem quite real. It feels like something out of someone else’s life. Do you ever feel like that when good things happen—that maybe you don’t deserve them, that you’re robbing someone else of the joy that should be theirs by right?”
Nick rubbed his eyes, looking tired. “I think sometimes you get caught in your own head too much. I almost hope you went down on that girl last night. Might do you some good.”
“We may never know what truly happened,” I replied and began humming a spooky tune.
“Maybe that’s for the best.”
“Maybe. But if these are memories and not dreams I was having, it seems like I ought to call her and follow up. She’s probably waiting to hear from me.”
Nick dismissed the notion with a shake of his head. “Did you follow up with the last girl you slept with?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go. You don’t even owe her a phone call.”
But of course, that had been different. That other girl had been nothing to me. And with only vague memories of the night before, it was hard to say how much we had bonded, but I could remember a distinct sensation of pleasure, and I felt, even now, a yearning for the warmth of her body.
“You know what would be weird?” said Nick. “If you called her tomorrow and asked her out. And you ended up falling in love and getting married and then, ten years down the road, you got to talking about how you first met, and it turned out she didn’t remember anything that happened last night. It was all just a dream that you had.”
“Shit, she might not remember it anyway. If I was drinking, she was probably drinking, too.”
“Maybe she drugged you with some potion to make you forget.”
“Yeah. Did it ever occur to you,” I asked, “that maybe your girl did that to you?”
Nick’s face paled, and he was silent for a minute.
“Anyway,” I added, “I’m not in a hurry to be getting back to Boulder. I almost wish we could chill here for the next week instead of going home, but I’m afraid the hotel bills would be prohibitively expensive.”
“More than we can afford,” said Nick. “And we’ve already got a flight booked for this afternoon.”
“I know, but I’ve fallen a little bit in love with this place: the tacky decorations, gaudy light fixtures, tourists in terrible clothing. It’s like Texas, but more.”
“Remind me never to visit Texas,” Nick muttered.
“It’s not so bad there. If I ever get married, we’ll have a big Texas wedding in Sulphur Springs, and I’ll invite you down.”
“Please do. I’m eager to meet your brothers.”
“As they are to meet you. Every so often Mom will call me and ask if I’ve found a girl yet. I always tell her, ‘No, but I’ve got Nick.’”
“I’m not sure whether I should be flattered.”
“You definitely should be. I’ve been with several girls, but I’ve only got one Nick.”
“I’m sure if I combed through your memories I would find someone else named Nick who was close to you at one point.”
“If you could do that then maybe you could tell me what went down last night.”
Nick shook his head. “No, I think I would just leave that one a mystery. Every life has to have a few mysteries. I think it was Tolkien who said that.”
“Or did he?” I waited a beat before adding, “I wish there was a button on my phone that could play the X-Files music whenever I needed it. That would improve my life greatly.”
“I’m sure there’s a way to make that happen.”
Feeling full, I folded up the last of my tortilla and laid it down on my plate. It was a pleasure just to sit there luxuriating in the warm sunlight.
“I’ve fought with just about everyone in my life at one time or another,” I said. “How is it that I’ve never fought with you?”
Nick seemed taken aback by the question. “I guess you never wanted to. Or maybe I never had anything that you wanted.”
“I guess not. Girlfriends come and go, but it’s nice to know that there’s one stable relationship in my life.”
“I love you too, Braxton.” It was hard to tell, from the tone of his voice, how seriously he meant it.