by L. D. Davis
My shoulders shook with the force of my weeping. Leo stepped toward me, looking stricken and helpless as he watched me, but I put my hand up to make him stop. I shook my head and he deflated. He looked like I just put my fist into his chest and ripped out his heart, his lungs, and everything he needed to exist.
“I won’t come back this time,” he said, his voice remarkably calm considering the expression on his face. “I will never come back for you. Is that what you want?”
No, but I had done enough damage already.
I nodded so slightly, I wasn’t sure that he saw it, but his face stiffened again. He had seen it. He got his answer.
He said nothing more before walking out of my bedroom. A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and slam shut. I knew he was really gone then. My body became grounded and dull and I was pretty sure my heart slowed to a lifeless, dead stop.
Chapter Eight
One year after I forced Leo out of my life, I met Xander. Well, I didn’t meet Xander as much as I acquainted myself with him. We passed each other on campus over the years, but we never actually spoke besides the obligatory pleasantries if we happened to be in close proximity.
During the summers, the student population was significantly less than the fall and spring semesters. I didn’t carry a full schedule during the summers, but I still took an extra class or two so that I could finish my classes ahead of schedule and have more time to work until I officially got my degree. When I wasn’t in class, I was working at either the school library or a small diner not far from campus. That summer, Xander started coming in every morning for breakfast. He was always alone and seemed content to be alone as he sipped his coffee and read his newspaper. Whenever I’d stop by his table for a refill or to take away empty dishes, we would chat. I liked listening to him talk. He had a fading British accent that I liked to hear. He had moved out of England when he was eight, but he had not completely shaken the accent.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he said one day after about two weeks. He slid out of his booth and handed me a few folded bills.
“I’m off tomorrow,” I said with a happy sigh. “From both jobs and no classes.”
His eyebrows had popped up over his light brown eyes, and a warm smile spread across his handsome face.
“You know what that means, right?” he asked me.
“That I can wear my ugliest pajamas all day long without shame?”
He laughed. I smiled. I liked his laugh. It was rich and deep, but not so loud that it drew the attention of others.
“It means that I don’t have to eat breakfast alone tomorrow,” he said, watching me with a light smile.
I understood his meaning immediately. Man, he was cute. His blond hair was dark and wavy and he had dimples in his cheeks when he smiled. Dimples! He had an average build, but I liked his look.
“No, you don’t have to eat breakfast alone.” I smiled.
His grin was heartwarming. “I’ll see you here tomorrow morning, same time I always come in.”
He had started to walk away, but I stopped him with a gentle touch to his arm. “Xander?”
He looked at me expectantly.
“Can we meet at Denny’s instead? I really don’t want to come into work on my day off.”
He chuckled and patted my hand. “Sure. See you tomorrow morning at eight a.m. at Denny’s.”
After I had cleared off his table, I unfolded the money he had given me and was surprised to find a small note folded inside.
“Tabitha, I’ve been coming in here every day for two weeks eating these crappy pancakes, trying to get up the nerve to ask you out. Really, the pancakes are disgusting, but when I sit down you have my order memorized and you say ‘Good morning, Xander. Are you having your usual?’ and I like hearing you say that while you’re smiling at me and pouring me a cup of that god-awful coffee. I like our little routine, even if the food sucks. Maybe we can eat sucky food together someday?
Xander”
I laughed, hard and loud, and people were definitely looking at me. I laughed so hard that tears came to my eyes. It was the first real laugh I’d had in a very long time. I folded the note and tucked it into my pocket.
It was time for me to take a break, which usually consisted of a cup of the ‘god-awful’ coffee and a mediocre blueberry muffin, but when I was about sit down in my usual spot in the corner, I glanced out into the parking lot after a clap of thunder sounded nearby. It was pouring outside and I almost missed the rather familiar car. It was Xander’s car. I had seen him getting in and out of it almost every day for two weeks. It had only been a few minutes since he walked out, but I expected him to be gone already.
I don’t know what possessed me to do what I did next, but I left my coffee and muffin at the table, grabbed the umbrella I had stowed behind the front counter when I came in that morning, and dashed outside into the storm. As I dashed to Xander’s car, the passenger’s door was thrust open. I halted and stared for a moment. Did he see me coming?
I made my feet move and without thinking about it too much, I closed the umbrella and slid into the seat and closed the door. I looked over at Xander, who was looking at me with an amused expression.
“What are you doing out here in this rain?” he asked, shaking his head.
Oh, god. I didn’t know what I was going to say when I got out here.
I cleared my throat and fidgeted with my thick braid. “I’m on my break.”
“Yeah? So, why are you out here on your break?”
“I guess I’d rather be out here than in there drinking a cup of god-awful coffee.”
He sighed. “It really is the most disgusting coffee around.”
I laughed, and then he laughed.
“Denny’s pancakes will be good,” I promised.
His shy smile made my heart pitter-patter. My heart had not pitter-pattered since Leo had been around…
“How long do you have for your break?” Xander asked.
“I have another twenty minutes.”
“A lot can happen in twenty minutes,” he said as he put his hand on the back of my seat and leaned toward me.
“Like what?” I asked as my breath caught in my throat.
He stared at me intently and I was suddenly feeling rather giddy, but I bit my lip to keep myself from giggling.
“We can discuss why the hell the food here is so terrible and how the place manages to stay open,” he said with a big grin.
I laughed again.
We talked for the rest of my break, but we didn’t wait for breakfast. I went to his apartment that night and after that, we were always together.
“I can’t believe you’re moving three thousand miles away,” Leslie said a little more than a year later.
Just before our one-year anniversary, Xander proposed and asked me to move to San Francisco with him. He had been offered a job there a couple of months before, and I was so sure that our relationship would come to an end. I wanted him to take the position, but I didn’t think I had what it took to be a part of a coast-to-coast relationship. Fortunately, I didn’t have to find out whether I had it or not.
“It’s exciting, and scary,” I said to my old friend.
We were sitting in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I was there for a week, getting myself sorted before my big move. Our relationship was still very strained, but surprisingly, they all seemed genuinely disappointed that I was moving so far away.
“I can’t believe you’re engaged either,” Les said, shaking her head. “I don’t even know him. It feels weird that I don’t know your fiancé.”
“You just met him before he flew out three days ago,” I said as I taped up another box.
“Yeah, but I don’t know him really. I just know what you tell me when we talk.”
Which wasn’t very often. I was losing her a little more each day to her new life and new friends. My guilt for what happened between me and Leo still clung heavily to me, and I still believed losing her was
some kind of punishment. I had tried to tell her about Leo three times, and each time she had cut me off and changed the subject. It almost felt like she knew what I was going to say and didn’t want to hear it, but that was impossible. Only Leo and I were aware of what happened between us and I doubted that Leo told anyone.
I looked at her, taping up one of my boxes, and knew that I had to at least try to tell her again, even though I was clearly past it. I guess I was past it. I was engaged to another man and about to start a new life with him.
“Les,” I said a little while later.
“Hmm?” She was distracted as she thumbed through our old yearbook.
“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” I said as nervousness began to creep up. “We should have had this conversation a long time ago, really.”
She looked at me. It felt like her blue eyes were seeing right through me.
“Is this about Leo?” Her head tilted slightly to one side.
Did she know?
“Yeah,” I said and took a deep breath, preparing to speak.
“I don’t want to talk about Leo,” she said briskly before I could talk. “I don’t want to hear anything about him.”
I was a little taken aback by her tone and insistence.
“You may want to hear this,” I suggested, but she shook her head.
“I don’t want to hear anything about him, Tabitha. You don’t understand, or maybe you do. Yeah, I’m the one that broke up with him after high school, and I have a boyfriend now that I really love, but Leo was my first…” She sighed and looked down at the yearbook on her lap. I followed her gaze and saw that the page was open to a picture of them together. They were voted favorite couple our senior year. They were wrapped in a tight, loving, happy, smiley embrace in the photo.
When Leslie looked up at me again, her eyes were gleaming with unshed tears.
“Leo was my first for everything. My first real boyfriend. My first real kiss. My first sexual partner. The first person to make me feel that…that happy, elated, full-heart feeling.” She smiled sadly as her hand floated to her chest. “He was the first boy I ever loved, and…” She sighed again and blinked back her tears. “And I can’t hear whatever it is you are going to say to me about him right now, Tabitha. I would rather be dead, dumb, and blind than to sit here and endure whatever it is you are about to tell me.”
I nodded my understanding quickly and held back my own tears.
She looked back down at the yearbook and flipped to the back where all of the random pictures were. She seemed to be looking for a specific one as she turned page after page, only skimming over the faces. After a couple more pages, she stopped and stared for a moment before touching the picture she had been looking for. It was a picture of Leo and me. It wasn’t a shot we posed for. Leslie was taking random pictures for the yearbook that day, and it was she who had caught that moment in the crowded hallway between classes. Leo’s arm was wrapped tight around my neck and his mouth was open like he was about to take a bite out of my head. My mouth was wide open with laughter at something unseen in the photo, but I knew Sandy was a couple of feet away making me laugh. Years ago, when the yearbooks were issued, we laughed at the picture. It had been funny, but looking at it now, I saw it differently. We looked like a couple, Leo and me—a silly couple, but a happy couple. We didn’t look any less like a couple than Leslie and he did at the front of the book.
Leslie closed the book carefully. She put it inside of a nearly full box of high school memorabilia and taped the box shut. As the fat black marker spelled out the general contents of the box, it made a loud squeaking noise, the only noise in the room. When she finished, she took a deep breath and met my eyes.
We simply looked at one another for a long minute, leaving all of the unsaid shit hanging in the air between us.
When Xander and I first moved to San Francisco, things were difficult. Our first apartment was horrible. Our car was stolen and totaled, I couldn’t find secure work and Xander was working very long hours. Things were hard for the first year and a half, but we were happy, and things improved over time. Xander got a promotion with better working hours, I found a decent job in hospital administration, and a few magazines started publishing some of my short stories. After two full years on the west coast, we moved into an apartment we didn’t have to share with roaches and rats and we each got new cars with the best alarm systems.
In our third year in California, my first book Grind was published and released, and to my surprise, it had landed on the New York Times Best Seller’s list. Xander had received yet another promotion and we purchased our first home together. A date had been set for a spring wedding for the following year and we had just dropped a deposit down on a beautiful venue we would have never been able to afford even two years before. With our careers in full swing, an active social life and plenty of friends, and our wedding on the horizon, the life Xander and I had made together was very satisfying. So, I was completely blindsided when I came home from a book signing in Los Angeles after a long weekend and found Xander moving out of our home.
“I don’t understand,” I said as I watched him carelessly stuff his clothes into a large duffel bag.
Xander did not look at me when, in his faded British accent, he said, “What don’t you understand, Tabitha? I am leaving. This isn’t working for me. There is nothing else to understand.”
I pushed my long, dark tresses out of my face and held it back with my hand. I was so baffled by his sudden departure. “What changed? What changed so quickly that I didn’t even notice?”
When he didn’t answer and continued with his packing, I stepped toward him with my eyes narrowed. I fisted my hands at my sides and my hair fell back into my face, partially obscuring my view of him.
I tried not to grit my teeth when I spoke to him in a tight voice. “We just bought a house, Xander. We just put a deposit down for our wedding. I asked you if you were ready to do this and you assured me that you were. I gave you an opportunity to back out and you told me you loved me and this was what you wanted—that I was what you wanted. Were you lying the entire time?”
His eyes stayed focused on the task at hand. “I was ready,” he said. “I did want this and I did want you. Now I don’t. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
His tone was soft, but the words were cold. They were an icy, sharp blow to my chest. He sounded so detached, like his mind was already on whatever it was that was taking him from the life we had made together.
“Xander,” I said in a whisper with a hint of pleading. “Just tell me the truth. Tell me what happened. Everything was fine. We were fine. We were more than fine.”
Xander paused. Slowly, his head rose and he met my eyes. He had eyes the color of golden honey. My heart used to flutter when he looked at me with those orbs, but now I was struck by the various emotions in them: love, regret, sadness, fear.
“We were never fine, Tabitha,” he said softly. Even as the shock registered on my face, he repeated his admission. “We were never fine.”
I sputtered, trying to ask too many questions in one word, and in the end asked nothing, but he answered me anyway.
“I thought we were fine,” he said. “I thought we were more than fine. I thought we were great. I loved you—I still love you—so bloody much.” He covered his heart with his hand and said, “I felt such a fire for you inside. My love for you was an inferno, incinerating me, burning me from the inside out, and I loved every damn second of it.”
I was shocked into silence. Those were my words, the words I used in Grind.
I feel such a fire for you inside. My love for you is an inferno, incinerating me, burning me from the inside out, and I love every damn second of it. Burn me. Torch me. Ignite me over and over until I die and I will die a very satisfied, scorching death.
I stood there, with my hand on my throat, swallowing hard repeatedly, staring at Xander. I understood. I knew what he was trying to say, but I had to allow him to
finish. I needed to hear it.
“You don’t burn for me, Tabitha,” he said with so much sadness and bitterness that it became a tangible tangle of emotions. “I read your book, and I realized that these romantic notions, these earth-shattering emotions you described in your novel are real—somewhere inside of you, they are real, but they’re not for me. They never were. They never will be. I don’t know who they are for, but I can’t stay here and pretend that we are fine. I want to marry all of you, and I am not getting all of you. I am only getting this small, cold portion of you. I woke up this morning and understood that I don’t really know who you are. You don’t burn for me,” he repeated, shaking his head slowly. “And quite frankly, that rather doused my own flames.”
I could have argued, I could have fought for him. I could have told him that those words I wrote were just fiction, that the emotions were the result of watching way too many British period pieces, reading too many romance novels, and listening to sappy love songs. I could have told him that it was my job to make the reader feel those emotions, and he couldn’t judge my love for him by what I had written for entertainment. I could have told Xander that I burned for him.
But if I had said any of that, I would have been lying.
“You know,” he started as he zipped up the bag. “I just want to know who it is. Who is it that makes you feel like you can happily die ablaze? Who is this man that will have all of you?”
He looked at me, waiting for an answer, but I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t tell him about the boy I had sent away the year before I met him. Instead, I said, “I did the best I could. I am doing the best I can. You can’t really believe that I don’t love you or that I am purposely holding myself back from you.”