“You know why.”
How had she known?
But I crossed my arms against. “What are you even talking about?”
Julie crossed the room to where I sat. She reached for me, and I braced myself for her touch. But instead of touching me, she reached past me, grabbing the neck of the tequila bottle and the shot glass and promptly leaving the room.
She came back empty-handed.
“You did this once before. In college, right after I broke up with you.”
“Did what before?”
“Don’t play dumb, Hope,” Julie said, but her tone was gentle. “You drank yourself into a hospital bed. I wasn’t going to let you do it again.”
I shook my head weakly. “I’ve never been one of those tortured artists with a drinking problem. I’m not about to become a stereotype.”
“Maybe you don’t have a drinking problem per se. But that doesn’t mean you won’t hurt yourself in other ways.”
The implication sounded ominous. I resented it but worried that she was right at the same time.
“I still don’t see what it has to do with my Christmas special,” I said,. “I did it to raise money for gun legislation, you know.”
“I heard the song you sang — the one from the Disney movie that the big Broadway star made famous. I can’t pronounce her name,” Julie said.
“Idina Menzel,” I supplied.
Julie waved her hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. I listened. I heard the way you sang it.” She paused. “You’re forgetting that I know you, Hope. And you’re forgetting that I’ve been listening to you play music since you learned guitar. I knew something was wrong from the first verse.”
I rubbed my eyes, which stung with dryness and a hangover. “So you flew all the way to Los Angeles because you heard me sing a song.”
“I flew all the way to Los Angeles because I was worried about you.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but — ”
“Nigel says you’ve been a mess ever since you got back from Georgia,” Julie said, interrupting me.
“Nigel likes to say a lot of things,” I grumbled.
We glared at each other for a long few seconds, caught in a kind of battle of wills. I wasn’t quite ready to admit how glad I was to see Jules, how much her unannounced cross-country trip had touched my heart, but for her part, she wasn’t ready to tell me the whole truth. There was something else to her visit, something she hadn’t said yet. I could feel it in her posture and see it in the look on her face, and I was as certain of it as she said she had been certain that I was falling apart.
She’d been right about her guess. Was I right about mine?
“Sit,” I said, gesturing at the futon. “Sorry about the mess.”
She pushed the pile of blankets and pillows aside and sat down.
“So,” I said, “you think you heard something in my song that indicated I was in trouble — ”
“I don’t think. I know.”
“ — and so you called up my personal assistant to spy on me, and then booked a flight out here.”
Julie leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees and lacing her hands together in front of her, as if in prayer. “That’s not quite the right order,” she said. “I booked the flight first. Then I thought I’d better double-check, so I called Mel. Mel said she hadn’t heard from you in over a week, and that you weren’t returning her phone calls. I didn’t call Nigel until my layover in Houston. I figured that someone should know I was on my way, and I didn’t want to call you, because…” She trailed off.
“You were afraid I would tell you not to waste your time coming all this way,” I finished for her.
She thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s exactly what I was afraid of.”
Neither of us spoke. Julie’s gaze dropped to her interlaced hands, her top thumb roving restlessly back and forth against the other one. Again I caught a glimpse of that something else she was wrestling with again, something that didn’t have anything to do with my daytime drinking and avoidance of everyone who cared about me.
“What’s bothering you?” I asked, my tone softening. “Besides me, I mean.” I rubbed absent-mindedly at my leg as she raised her head. The alcohol had dulled my injury’s constant throbbing, but not enough that I was comfortable.
“Karen, uh, Karen left me a few days ago,” she said, her voice hoarse. She cleared her throat. “Maybe Mel already told you.”
“No, I didn’t know,” I said. “It’s like Mel told you… we haven’t talked in a while. Did she… is it because we…”
Julie had kissed me. I’d wanted her to kiss me, to touch me, to hold me in that way that no one else could. And in the moment, I hadn’t cared about Karen in the least.
But now I felt a flush of guilt. Had I caused them to break up? Did I need to add the death of their relationship to the list of deaths I was responsible for? My hands itched for the tequila bottle, but it was gone.
“It doesn’t matter why Karen left,” Julie said. “She left and it’s over. I probably should have left her myself before now.”
I shook my head. “You don’t leave people.”
Julie cleared her throat once more. “Listen, Hope, I, uh — ” she began, but then stopped.
She leaned back, straightening out one leg so that she could reach into her jeans pocket. A crinkling orange-red packet emerged. Food of some sort, but I couldn’t read the label from where I sat. An airplane snack, perhaps? But why?
“I picked this up for you in Houston,” Julie said. She was suddenly self-conscious, avoiding my gaze. She tore open the packet and pulled a candy jewel mounted to a plastic ring. It was a Ring Pop.
“Julie,” I said with a sharp intake of breath. I laughed. “I haven’t seen a Ring Pop since…”
She held up a hand to silence me. “Yes, I told Karen that I kissed you. And I’m sure it was part of why she left, even though I told her it didn’t mean anything, that it was just nostalgia playing out. She didn’t believe me.”
Just nostalgia playing out. The words brought on a fresh stab of pain.
Julie took a deep breath and held up the Ring Pop. “But she was right to not believe me. I think you and I both know that.”
For a moment, I stopped breathing. Was she saying…?
I opened the drawer of my desk, reached to the very back until I found what I was looking for. I pulled out a plastic ring, one that used to have a candy mounted to its top.
Julie’s eyes widened. “Is that…?”
“Of course it is.”
#
JULIE ARON
The boy and girl are holding hands on the street
And I don’t want to but I think ‘You just wait’
It’s more than just eye to eye
Learn the things I could never apply…
I was fifteen, almost sixteen, when I gave Hope a Ring Pop. I was too shy to tell her the truth, so I had passed it off as a joke. I dropped to one knee before her and offered the candy ring up to her.
“Hope Caldwell,” I said in a serious voice, “will you marry me?”
“Julie Aron,” Hope said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
I slipped the plastic ring around her fourth finger, then watched as she made deliberately slow business of putting the whole thing into her mouth and sucking it. An involuntary shiver ran down my spine.
Well, I remember the time when I came so close to you
Let everything go it seemed the only truth
And I bought you that ring, it seemed the thing to do
Senior year in college, in between the first time I found out Hope had cheated on me and the second time, I proposed to her again, except this time I did it with more than a jewel-shaped candy mounted to a plastic ring.
I hadn’t gotten down on one knee. I’d said, “Marry me” as nonchalantly as I could while we sat together on a ratty couch inside our ratty apartment. A commercial played on the television across
from us; the footsteps of the neighbors above us made the ceiling above creak like an old house settling.
It wasn’t exactly romantic, but it took all the courage I could muster.
“What’s that?” Hope said, bringing her attention from the television screen to me.
“I said, ‘Marry me.’”
She gave a slight chuckle. “Sure,” she said, as if playing along with my joke. “Will the wedding be in Fiji or Hawaii?”
“I’m serious, Hope.” I reached in my pocket and pulled up the little velvet black box. I opened it. “It’s not the nicest ring,” I admitted. “But I figure that after we graduate, I’ll get a real job and we can upgrade it before the actual… Are you okay?”
“I can’t marry you,” she said, eyes starting to mist with tears.
I’d been expecting her to say something like that.
“I’m not saying we should do it right away,” I said, giving her the speech I’d prepared. “We can wait a while. Until school’s finished and we both get settled into — well, into whatever comes next. The ring is just a symbol. It’s what we mean to each other, a promise of where we’re going.”
They were the words I’d rehearsed in my head for several days. But somehow it had always sounded smoother in my head than it did in real life.
“But I can’t marry you, Jules,” she repeated. “I just — I can’t.”
What she didn’t say, what I would only find out later, was that she had fallen for someone else.
She got up from the couch, snatching up her keys from the table and accidentally knocking the open velvet box off my leg in the process. The ring popped out of its slot inside the jewelry box, and I bent hastily to gather it up before it could slip away to some place permanently unfindable.
“Hope, wait,” I called after her, but in the time it had taken me to scoop up the ring and put it safely back in its box, she walked out of the apartment, slamming the door hard behind her.
I’m just a mirror of a mirror of myself
All the things that I do
To the Hope of the present, I said, “I can’t believe you kept it. I can’t believe… did you really move all the way to Los Angeles with that?”
She smirked, toying with the remnants of the original Ring Pop. “Julie. It was the first time anyone proposed to me. Of course I was going to keep it.” She dropped her eyes, sounding more subdued when she added, “And it was from you. I’ve kept everything you ever gave me — well, almost everything.”
I looked at her, thinking of the cheap engagement ring of a dozen years earlier. I assumed that was what she’d meant.
I extended the Ring Pop to her. “If I asked you to marry me again, what would you say?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “That depends. Are you proposing with a Ring Pop?”
“I’m trying to be serious here,” I said, but I couldn’t help but grin.
“Are you saying the kiss in Georgia meant something to you?” she asked.
“I am,” I said.
“And you’re actually suggesting we try again?” she said doubtfully. “After all these years?”
I made sure I didn’t break eye contact when I nodded.
“But that’s crazy,” she said with a huff. “I broke your heart.”
“It mended,” I said with a shrug.
“You can’t just do that,” Hope argued. “You can’t just blow off all our history like it didn’t happen, like it’s just…” Exasperated, she waved her hands at me as if she was shooing me away.
“Like it’s the past?” I said. “We were just kids.”
“I cheated on you,” she said. “Twice.”
“And you’ve been blaming yourself ever since.” I rose from the futon, took a step closer to Hope before dropping to both knees in front of her. “I forgave you years ago. In part because we were both so young, in part because it wasn’t all your fault.” I took a moment to gather my thoughts. “I pressured you. I crowded you. I wanted things you weren’t ready for, and you did what you always do — you rebelled. And you ran.”
It took Hope a long time to answer, but I was determined not to speak again until she’d responded.
“I’m not the same person you dated in high school and college,” she said at last.
“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said.
She fell into silence again. “Where would we even start?” she asked.
“What about this?”
I stood from my spot on the floor in front of her and braced my hands on the arms of her chair, leaning over her. Hope’s face was only inches below mine, and I could hear her breaths coming in short, shallow puffs. I lowered my mouth to hers and kissed her.
18
Boxing Day, Part 3: “The Origin of Love,” Neil Patrick Harris (Hedwig and the Angry Inch)
HOPE CALDWELL
Last time I saw you
We had just split in two
You were looking at me
I was looking at you
It had been a long time since I’d had sex with someone I’d actually cared about. Even longer since I’d had sex with someone I loved.
I said before that I had easy access to sex because I was a best-selling recording artist.
Sex as an expression of love, though — that’s a different story. Sex as an expression of love, even between couples, that’s rare. Don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of couples who love each other, but even for them, sex is more often a playful sport than it is an outcropping of their love.
You had a way so familiar
But I could not recognize
’Cause you had blood on your face
I had blood in my eyes
Over the years, I had forgotten about sex as love. Even though it was called “making love,” it had stopped feeling that way long ago. Sex became just another itch to be scratched.
But on that late afternoon of December 26, when the sun was a spill of melting orange above the Pacific, Julie Aron leaned over me while I sat in my chair and said, “What about this?”
The kiss was at once tender, sweet, and achingly familiar.
That was the moment I remembered about sex as an expression of love.
As my nose brushed against the skin of her cheek, I smelled that scent that was uniquely hers. A locked compartment inside my chest clicked open.
My hands went to the small of her back, fists closing around handfuls of shirt and the jacket she’d never taken off. I pulled her, forward and down, pulled her into me, pulled her like I wanted her body to melt into mine.
“Julie,” I breathed, and now instead of pulling, I pushed her back, because I wanted to see her face. I wanted to look into her eyes. I couldn’t have said what I was looking for. But I knew I would recognize it if I saw it.
She took a half-step back. Her hazel eyes were clear and vulnerable, pupils wide in the dimness of a room lit only by the setting sun.
She searched my face. She was looking for something, too, I knew.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine
“I can’t keep trying to be apart from you,” she said. “That day in the beginning of November, when I thought maybe I’d lost you — ”
Her voice cracked. A single tear rolled down her cheek.
“Shh,” I said, putting a finger to her lips. “You didn’t lose me. I’m here.”
I pulled her forward again, this time with such force that she stumbled, almost falling into my lap. She kissed me harder, moved her hands from the arms of the chair to my face, cupping it with a gentleness that contrasted with the force with which she pressed her mouth against mine.
“I want more than trying again,” she said when the kiss ended, the words a tickling caress against my ear. “I want to be with you. I want to wake up next to you.” There was a short pause, long enough for a breath to be drawn and held. “I want you to marry me.”
“I know,” I said. “I
saw the Ring Pop.”
I felt her lips crinkle into a smile against my cheek, and I smiled back, squeezing her close but without the same manic desperation as before.
That’s the pain
That cuts a straight line
Down through the heart
We called it love
“I love you, Hope,” she said. “I’ve always loved you.”
“And I’ve always loved you,” I said. “I always will. I never wanted to hurt you.”
“It’s alright. That part’s over now.” Her teeth grazed down the side of my throat; I tilted my head back. Her lips danced a series of light kisses across the base of my neck, then she pulled my t-shirt down in an attempt to reach my breasts.
I moved to take my shirt off, but before I could, she scooped me up from the chair, startling a squeal out of me.
“There’s more space on the futon,” she explained, and before I could protest that I was too heavy, that she was going to hurt herself, she had crossed the room and laid me gently on my back. I felt the pads of her fingers slip beneath the bottom of my shirt, felt her hands curl around the band of the loose sweatpants I’d had on. For a brief moment, I almost felt self-conscious — to be found half-drunk and unshowered in the least glamorous clothes I owned. But then I remembered that this wasn’t anyone; this was Julie, and if ever there was someone I could simply be myself around, it was her.
Cool air touched the skin she unveiled, and I shivered. Her lips found their way to the inside of my knee, then up my left thigh. I braced myself for her touch to trigger a wave of pain where the scar of the bullet was, but nothing came.
This is what I’ve needed, I thought, and the realization startled me. This is the healing I’ve needed all along.
When her mouth reached the place where my legs met, her hands slid up the outside of my thighs, hooked around my panties. A moment later, the panties joined my sweatpants on the floor, and Julie’s lips brushed against the most tender parts of me. She slid her tongue between my folds, and just as I thought I would lose myself in the sensation, three fingers slipped inside me. My hips bucked and I let out a low moan.
I lifted my head to look down at her. Her dark hair still curved and fell in a soft sweep on either side around her widow’s peak as it always had, but now there were flecks of silver mixed in with the dark brown.
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