by JD Hawkins
Thankfully I find some more alcohol quickly, and a spot on a bench shrouded in darkness that allows me to play wallflower. I almost fall to my knees and thank the Lord when the dinner call finally comes and it’s time for everyone to seat themselves.
Yet even here, I find that I’m not safe from my father’s intentions. He sits me across from both him and Grace at the table—too far to really carry on a conversation with them—but between two more ‘eligible’ bachelors.
The guy on my right keeps reaching for something whenever I grab my glass, forcing our hands to brush so he can shoot me a slightly-creepy smile. The guy on my left cracks jokes about everything from the flower arrangements to the folded napkins, even putting on an obnoxious show of getting a ‘cleaner’ set of silverware from the poor server for the purpose of what he thinks is my amusement. When I tell him he’s being a dick he seems to interpret it as flirting.
My father watches from the other side of the table with a proud smile, completely oblivious to the torture, and seeming to interpret the exchanges and looks I’m having with these two men as some kind of segue to intimacy.
I make it through dinner by chewing every bite so long I can’t respond to either of them, and then make it through the series of speeches by keeping stony faced despite left-guy’s constant leaning into me to whisper rude jokes about the speakers.
When the speeches are done, a live 4-piece orchestra assembles on stage and starts to play. The diners get up and take to the floor to dance, or begin mingling around the tables. Left-guy and right-guy must have gotten the message by now, because when I turn down their offers to dance they actually leave me at the table, finally alone and in peace.
I sit there in a posttraumatic haze, pushing food around my plate until the caterers come to clear the tables and take even that diversion away from me. Sipping my martini, I watch the others dance—too drained to get up and leave, too wary to actually speak to anyone. The songs are fun, surprisingly. Orchestral versions of upbeat hits from my teenage years—no doubt Grace chose most of the playlist. But it gets harder and harder not to think about the past…about him…
They say you’re never lonelier than when you’re in a crowd, but I’d add to that being out of a job, recently-single, and surrounded by men not even your family could convince you to like.
Suddenly I sense the air change, some shift in the energy of the room. I notice a few people turning their heads around, as if searching for something. I scan the flower beds and manicured trees, straining a little to grasp at some strange sawing sound in the distance. I notice some of the waiters looking panicked, talking hurriedly with each other and running off. Some of the other guests notice too, and in the still air I can sense the rising tension that’s suddenly coming from everybody.
Before anyone can figure out what’s going on, however, the sound grows loud enough to be unmistakable, and from a far corner of the outside area some gleaming beast draws everybody’s attention. Some of the mingling crowd parts and I look at where the other people are focused, the motorcycle’s chrome reflecting the millions of twinkling lights, the black-suited figure with just enough cool restraint in his movements to quell the panic in the air.
I can hardly believe what I’m seeing right now.
It’s Teo.
Everything stills in shock and awe, and for a moment the only thing moving is the bike as it revs up and starts to weave between the rose bushes, manicured hedges, and flower beds. Finally it comes to an abrupt stop beside the stage, Teo manipulating his motorcycle like a stuntman. In an elegant, single move that feels like a flourish, he steps off the bike and pulls his helmet off, tossing his head to shake out his hair just for good measure. With a wry smile, he straightens a crease in his tuxedo blazer, and there’s a sense of giggling relief among the guests. Trickles of laughter and claps, even a few whistles, as if they half-believe this was part of the night’s entertainment.
It’s not that they remember him—most of the crowd is completely different from the one at the barbecue—but there’s something magnificent about him. The confident ease with which he now stands, as if gatecrashing a fancy fundraiser on the back of a Harley is just another Friday night for him. An ease that seems to compel all the waiters and guests to just laugh it off. I almost believe for a second that it’s not actually him standing there, that this is all just a daydream, the effect of too many martinis and too much self-pity, but there he is.
In a tuxedo, no less—something I never thought I’d see him wear—and now carrying a small bouquet of flowers as tenderly as if it were a delicate bird. I see him whisper something to a waiter, who hurries off. As Teo scans the guests, I drink in the sight of him.
“Hey,” left-guy’s voice says behind me, “you still sitting here all by yourself? You don’t want to—”
“Beat it,” I say without looking at him, finally finding the tone and firmness that gets him to leave me alone.
Teo’s eyes find mine, and we both smile. He moves toward me between the dancers, who seem to part for him. His large frame in that well-fitted tux seeming to emit some charismatic force field that clears the path between us.
I push my chair back as he rounds the table and stands in front of me, looking as impressed with me as I feel about him. We look at each for a few moments, as if adjusting once again to the energy between us, the intensity of the connection that always seems to exist—no matter how far apart we get.
“You’re beautiful,” he says.
I can feel myself blushing, and my eyes drop to the small bouquet in his hand. “What is that?”
“A corsage,” he says. “For you.”
“For me? What for?”
He takes a second to gaze at me again, now that I’m a little closer, and then brings the corsage to my hand, slipping the elastic over my wrist carefully. It’s small and delicate, the colors complementing each other—it reminds me of one of his tattoos, and I have no doubt he chose every flower himself.
“Look, Ash. I didn’t come here to fight or argue or force you to listen to excuses—I came here for the dance you still owe me.”
I let out a small, surprised laugh.
“The dance I owe you?”
“Prom. I wanted it as much as you did.”
He holds out his hand.
“Just this dance,” he says.
I look from his eyes, to his hand, and take it. I lift out of my chair as if light as air, the fatigued loneliness of a few minutes ago gone now, replaced by a sense I’m the most elegant, beautiful woman in the room, convinced by his eyes.
He leads me toward the dance area, and I feel almost frightened at how easy it is to forget everything that went wrong between us when that face is so close, near enough to kiss. But then again, it doesn’t even seem like the same Teo in that tux, holding my hand so gently, his hair neatly combed to one side.
The music stops, and then a few seconds later starts up again, and I let out that surprised little laugh once more.
We never really had a ‘song,’ but the one that’s playing now is as close to one as we could get. A slow guitar ballad we’d listened to on repeat the months before prom, sitting at the lake with my head on his shoulder. I’m sure he asked them to play it, but I can almost believe the universe is willing things into place now.
“Shall we?” he says, and I nod, letting him lead me to the center of the patio.
There’s a brief crackle of electricity between us, a single moment of dizziness as I recognize what’s happening, that I’m dancing with the guy I left so determinedly, and at an event I wish I wasn’t at, but it fades as soon as he clutches me to his body, and as soon as we start swaying in sync to the gentle beat.
It’s just a dance, just my head on his chest, his arms around my waist, but it feels like a revelation. As if we could actually rewrite the past and make all of it never happen, as if this dance we never got to have might be the start of the future we always wanted.
I look up at him, and he kisses me
, as softly as the first time. A fragile, lingering kiss the makes my entire body swell, the entire world contained in that meeting of the lips. I’m eighteen again, with my whole life ahead of me. A life with Teo.
But the song is over too quickly, the chords fading sadly. We sway a little longer and then Teo pulls back, my hands trailing down his arms as he separates his body from mine.
“Thank you,” he says.
“What are you doing?” I say, as he steps back.
“I’m leaving.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to ruin this moment.”
I take a second to look at him, to see that he means it. A pain in his eyes. A guilt and shame behind the happiness of the dance.
“So take me with you,” I say, and grab his hand to leave.
“Ash?” I hear Grace’s tense voice call behind me.
I turn around and see my sister there, a question in her eyes. She glances from me to Teo, concerned and slightly confused.
“It’s ok,” I say, seeing my father begin to storm toward us from inside the hall. I plant a quick kiss on her cheek. “I’ll explain later.”
“Be safe,” she calls after me.
We move quickly away, toward the motorcycle, and I mount it after him—grateful that I wore pants tonight instead of a dress. Teo buckles the helmet under my chin and then I grab onto him as he makes the bike rumble between our legs, then launches us forward, back into the dark flowers and trees. I think I almost hear my sister call behind me again, but I just want to be away from the hall now, away from all those people.
I squeeze his front, press my face into his shoulder, shielded from the wind by his broad back, watching the world turn into a blur, dream-like. We sweep through the city as if it were our playground, leaving cars and shops and palm trees behind, out onto the winding roads, up into the canyons. I start to wonder if Teo just wants to ride forever now—and I start to wonder if I would even mind.
We ride where the roads are empty, away from the oncoming evening lights, until the city sprawls out beside us, off into the distance and down below. The sky streaked with golden-lined clouds, the disappearing sun making the air around us cool and still.
24
Ash
Eventually, Teo slows down at a spot where there’s nobody else, by the fence behind the Hollywood sign up in the hills. He slows to a stop, then kills the engine—making the silence around us suddenly intimate.
We get off the bike, but he barely lets me get away from him, pulling me close once again to kiss me long and slow.
This time, when we break apart, his face looks at me with devotion, eyes darkened with guilt, lips parted as if he’s searching for the right words to express something so deep.
“You won’t like what I have to tell you. But I owe you the truth,” he says. “And you owe it to yourself to listen.”
“Teo,” I say, tensely. I can sense this isn’t going to be good, and though I want to head it off, to bury it again, I know neither of us can bury anything anymore. “If this is about what happened at the barbecue—”
“It’s about way more than that,” Teo says, with a seriousness that grabs my attention.
I take a deep breath, bracing myself. I can see he’s feeling that abstract pain that always rolled close to the surface, the pain that always threatened to eat him alive.
“I’m gonna tell you why I left that night,” he says. “I’m gonna tell you everything. But I need you to trust me.”
My body shudders at the words, at the prospect of finally hearing this. I can barely speak, careful not to say or do anything that might stop this moment from happening.
I nod.
“That night, prom,” he begins, “I always meant to come. Always. Picked up the rental tux that afternoon, had a corsage waiting in the fridge. But something happened. I was putting that tux on—the one you helped me pick out. I remember it like yesterday. I ain’t gonna lie, I was scared. Going back and seeing all those guys from school, with you on my arm. Scared in a good way, though. Scared like you when you’re doing something awesome for the first time. Shit—I never tied a bowtie in my life, and I sure as shit wasn’t getting it right then. But I was going anyway. I never considered backing out.”
He stops himself and takes a deep breath.
“Then my dad came home drunk, hours before he said he’d be there. I wasn’t expecting that—him coming home early, not the drunk part. Soon as he saw me he went wild, baiting me into a big argument.”
“Why?”
Teo laughs sadly.
“Not like it was out of character. But…something about seeing me in that tux…I don’t know. I thought about it a lot, and I think…I think he didn’t like seeing me try to do something better. Didn’t like the idea that I was trying to dress nice, to get a good girl, to live life a little better than him. Jealous, maybe. Or scared that he was gonna lose me—as weird as that sounds for a dad who treated me like shit.
“Anyway, he was spoiling for a fight, and I was already pent-up from all the shit going through my head that night, and we ended up getting into it. Bad. A real big one, maybe the biggest. Trashed half the trailer, blood all over us. He lost a tooth, I had a black eye for a month. Only reason we stopped was the police showed up and hauled our asses to jail. Some neighbor called the cops on us.”
He pauses, as if to swallow down the bad memory. I put my hand on his arm, rub his tricep to let him know he’s not alone.
“Maybe you remember, maybe you don’t—but I was on probation at the time for all those graffiti and traffic tickets the cops loved giving me. It’s not like my dad was gonna press charges, but still—it wasn’t good. I was eighteen—no problem tossing me in for a long sentence now that I was an adult.
“So I sat there in that cell, thinking of what a fuck-up I was. How dumb I was to get into that fight, how I should have just walked away, got my ass out of that trailer and over to you. I thought about how I only ever seemed to realize my mistakes once I’d made them, and it was too late. That’s when your dad showed up.”
“My dad? At the station?”
Teo looks at me, then nods slowly.
I feel my confusion creasing my brow. “What was he doing there?”
“He knew about us, Ash. I don’t know how, or when he found out, but he knew. And he didn’t like it. He came into the cell and gave me this long speech about how I was going to fuck up your whole family. About how well Grace was doing on the city council, and how you were capable of doing great things in your future, but I was going to ruin everything.”
I gasp, needing to look away and take a moment. My dad… And yet as much as I want to think there’s something Teo got wrong, that maybe he misunderstood, I know—from both the look in Teo’s eyes, and the things I’ve always tried to ignore about my father—that Teo’s telling the truth.
“You ok?” he asks.
I nod and take a breath. “Yeah…yeah. Go on.”
“He offered me a deal. Five grand to leave the city and never speak to you again.” Teo pauses. “I told him to stick it up his ass. He said he could give me more, I asked him how much he could fit there. Then he got nasty. Told me if I didn’t leave he’d make sure I did a full bid—ten years, no parole. I wanted to think he couldn’t do that, that there was at least some justice in the system. But I know it would have been easy for him. Shit, he walked into that station like he owned it—and the chief treated him like a king.
“I told him that even if I did time, you’d wait for me. That he’d have a daughter visiting prison two times a week. He laughed at that, and said you wouldn’t be his daughter anymore if that happened. He’d pull everything, he said. The scholarship, your car, your savings, everything he ever bought you. Said he’d rather you weren’t his daughter at all than watch you become trailer trash like me.”
“Fuck,” I say, feeling like I’m about to vomit, shaking so much I have to lean back on the bike. I hold my head, trying to stop the feeling of being spun aro
und.
Teo pushes some hair behind my ear, his cool hands the only thing that soothe some of the tension, his touch the only thing I can orient myself on.
“Go on,” I say, determinedly.
Teo hesitates, just to be sure, before he continues.
“He gave me a few minutes to think about it. Left the cell. I was about as fucked up as I’d ever been, sitting there on that hard bunk, holding a blood-soaked tissue to my nose. I thought about you waiting there, on the corner like we planned. I never saw your dress, but I could imagine how beautiful you looked. In the moonlight, smiling as you waited. A person so perfect all the shit in the world couldn’t touch them—shouldn’t touch them.
“And there I was, in a dirty police cell. Blood all over my tux, bowtie choking me, barely able to look out of one eye, staring down a decade of prison time. Broken. It was pretty damned hard to deny what your dad was telling me—that I didn’t deserve you, that I’d only drag you down. And that was that.
“I didn’t take the money. But I let him bail me out so I could leave that night—just like he wanted. I thought it was what I wanted, too. To save you. I stopped home to change my clothes, pack a bag, and then rode out of there so fast the tears didn’t leave tracks.”
I grab him, hold him tight, as if afraid he’s about to leave me again. Anger swirls through me, anger at my father, enough to wring his neck. It’s drowned out only by the waves of shame, all the times I hated Teo, presumed and doubted him.
“I’m so sorry, Teo,” I splutter desperately into his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Teo laughs sadly again and rubs my back, firm and deep.
“I’m sorry,” he says, pulling me away so he can look in my eyes again. “I never should have left you. I’ve regretted that night ever since.”
“What choice did you have?”
“I could have told you. We could have kept it to ourselves again. Or I could have come back, written a letter, waited until you left home and got back in touch with you—but I did nothing. The longer I stayed away, the more I believed that I’d done right by you. I told myself that I didn’t have a choice anyway, but not doing anything is sometimes the worst choice you can make.”