by Gabi Moore
I looked at his confused face. His gorgeous, perfect, confused face. How often I had stared at that same faultless configuration of eyes and nose and lips before? How often I had babbled incoherently, had begged him for mercy …or for more. I had to be honest with him.
“I bumped into Anthony,” I said miserably.
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Mark, I think it’s time you and Nicky met already.”
He looked at me, stunned.
“Okaaay …that seems a bit out of left field,” he said and smiled warmly.
“Can you just take this seriously, please?” I said. He held up both his hands.
“Kat, woah, can you just calm down? I’d love to meet Nicky, you know that. It’s just that…”
“What?”
“Well, we wanted to be sure, remember? It’s a big deal to--”
“Do you want to or don’t you?” I interrupted. His smile dropped.
“Kat, is this about Anthony? Did he say something…?”
“He didn’t say anything, but maybe he made me think. Maybe I need to actually just cool it a bit with the mid-life crisising and take stock for a second.”
He looked down at the tablecloth.
“I’m sorry, that sounded harsh. It’s just …it’s time now, isn’t it?”
“When you’re ready, Kat. We don’t have to rush though. I’m having so much fun with you…”
“Yeah, but is that all?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you only like the ‘fun’ parts of me? At some point we have to be serious about--”
“Do we? Do we really have to be serious?” he said and gave me a naughty smile. I don’t know why, but it irritated the hell out of me.
“Yes. We do, actually. I have a kid. That’s just the reality, right? You wouldn’t …you wouldn’t come to a restaurant and eat there and then claim you don’t want to take things too seriously just as soon as the bill comes along, right?”
“Kat, what on earth are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about commitment. I have responsibilities…”
He frowned and leaned back in his chair.
“Are you even listening to me?” I said. I hadn’t shaken the feeling at all. In fact, it was like Anthony had left a dark shadow over me and I could run out from under it.
“Damnit, Kat, what do you want me to say?” He was rubbing the back of his neck, looking around with irritation. “I said I’d meet Nicky, didn’t I?”
My cheeks burnt.
“Is it really such a chore? Is it such a compromise?”
“I told you already, I haven’t been with a woman with a child before, so this is kind of new for me, I don’t know how it’s supposed to go, can you cut me some fucking slack here?”
I didn’t feel hungry anymore.
In the end I was just a middle aged divorcee with a young child and now, let’s be honest, I was unemployed and moving into a smaller apartment. I didn’t blame him for balking. It was easy for him; he didn’t have a tiny human being that depended on him for everything. He could work whenever the hell he wanted, living it up and stupid expos and whatever…I suddenly felt like an idiot. What had I expected? That I would stupidly in love with some bad boy character and then, what, he’d drop everything to have a boring life with me and my daughter? My head was a mess.
“I think I’m just going to go home,” I said, and stood up.
“What? Kat we had a date.” He quickly rose with me.
He looked so handsome, even with his eyebrows knotted like that. Even now, even with this weird shadow over me, he still looked like the handsomest man I had laid eyes on. Though I felt like I wanted to cry, there was still some part of me that ached just to look at him, like every cell of my body remembered instantly who he was, and the delicious things we had done to one another…
“Kat don’t go.”
But I had to. I didn’t like any of this. I had to think. I had to plan. And just like that, the crushing weight of my old life came thundering back, catching up with me all at once.
Chapter 20 - Mark
Calling up an ex for relationship advice probably wasn’t the wisest choice, but I fully admit it: I had no idea what I was doing. Not with Kat, not with any of it.
I was in over my head and for some reason, Valerie popped into my mind. She’d know. She did already know what an idiot I was. I could chat to her honestly about failing Kat since, well, I’d kind of failed her in the same way.
Some people call it ‘commitment phobia’ but that doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s not that I’m afraid of commitment. I’ve just never seen a convincing argument for it …or even heard anyone explain exactly what it’s supposed to mean. The promise to keep on pretending you love someone, even after you don’t anymore? A legal contract? A vow you make that nothing will ever change?
I think I’m right to be suspicious. In any case, it was kind of funny that she pitched up at the studio that night eagerly babbling about her upcoming wedding. The woman I’d never expect to get hitched and settle into married life was now showing me pictures on her phone of her bridesmaid’s dresses. She wanted to coordinate the color with the new turquoise flower tattoo she had on her collarbone. It was crazy.
I laughed and we got to work on our beers. I knew she was going about the wedding partly for the distraction. For my sake.
“Looks like we’ve lost another victim to the wedding industrial complex,” I said. She laughed and shrugged me off.
“Yeah, more or less. Anyway …what’s up with you? I’ve been thinking about you lately, wondering if you were doing OK,” she said at last, and put away her phone.
It was easy to talk to Valerie.
So I did. I launched into a story about Kat and I, about asshole Anthony, about her wanting me to meet her daughter, about the fight we’d had at the restaurant …and she listened quietly to it all.
“So what’s the problem?” she asked when I was done and took a sip of my beer as a kind of full stop.
“Well, she’s going on and on about commitment and stuff… it just freaks me out. I’m not sure what she even wants from me. Everything was so great. We were having so much fun. Now she’s pushing this thing with her daughter, getting all serious on me.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So commit to her then,” she said and smiled.
I laughed.
“It’s not that simple. I don’t know if we’re …if we’re there yet. If we’re ready. Why mess with a good thing, you know?”
“Mess with it?”
“Yeah, well, why suddenly add all these expectations and obligations onto everything? I thought that’s what she liked about me, that I didn’t do any of that crap, you know?”
She nodded thoughtfully.
“Hey, Mark?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
I laughed.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, think about this, what do you want from her?”
I thought about it for a moment.
“I just want to enjoy her company. I want us to have fun. I want her to trust me and to …just enjoy each other. That’s it.”
“That’s it? Dude, think about what that actually costs her, to do all that with you. You told me she’s coming to expos with you now, that she quit her job, that she even called off her engagement for you. And you accepted all of that gladly. You encouraged her even, and now you’re telling me you don’t know if you’re ‘there yet’? That you don’t know if you can budge out of your comfort zone even a little and try and meet her half way?”
“Yeah, but she chose to do all those things…”
“Man, she’s already committed to you. Lucky you! For some reason she thinks you’re awesome and can’t get enough of your oblivious ass.”
“So what? What does commitment even look like? She doesn’t want to marry again, s
he knows I’d rather cut off my right arm than get married …so what? What does she want?”
“My advice?”
“Yeah, I guess I did ask for it,” I said and gave her a wry smile.
“My advice is to ask for whatever she needs, and just give it to her. That’s it. Not hard.”
“Sounds dumb.”
“It’s smart. Think of it this way. She wants to let go with you. Think about how quickly she dropped that other guy, about how she keeps coming back to you. How’s the sex with you guys?”
“Amazing,” I mumbled.
“Exactly. She wants that. I’ll tell you a little secret: every woman wants that. To let go. To give a man her everything. I don’t care who she is, she wants to go all that way with him. She’s desperate, just waiting for someone she can truly open up with, someone she can be as much of a slut with as she wants… but she’s not going to do any of that shit if the guy’s not willing to do the same. If he’s not willing to make her feel safe. To feel completely chosen and wanted. You’re asking her to push her boundaries, to be all vulnerable with you, to take the risk of letting you into her heart and mind …but you’re still on the fence about whether she’s worth it or not?”
“But …well, I guess …it’s just that.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said again, and gave me a mischievous wink.
“Fair enough. Really, I get it. But I don’t want to be tied down, you know? I don’t want to be caged…”
She burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Dude, you don’t have to tell me the gory details, but if you’re anything like you used to be, you’ve totally tied that poor woman up, haven’t you?”
I blushed.
“You’ve literally put her in a cage!”
I laughed.
“They’re different cages,” I said, trying to defend myself.
“Nah, they’re really not. You’re asking her to let go. But she won’t let go unless she knows she had something solid to hold onto when she comes back…” she said, contemplating the peeling label on the bottle.
“When did you get so wise, huh?”
She raised her beer to me and took a drink.
“When? Man, I’ve always been this wise,” she laughed.
We sat in silence for a while.
Maybe she had a point. I couldn’t fault Kat at all. She had completely given herself over to our experiences together. Sure, she’d had her doubts, but it suddenly occurred to me how she hadn’t let them stop her. How I had pushed her and she had come, every time, to meet me right up against the boundary, fearless. Would it really hurt so much, to just meet her damn kid? The thought turned my blood cold, but I couldn’t deny that Valerie had a point. What was I so afraid of? And hadn’t Kat already gone way, way further than me in confronting her fears?
Valerie and I drifted away from the conversation and back to her and her new guy. I felt like I was an anthropologist, standing on the outskirts of some elaborate alien mating ritual and having no earthly clue about what the hell I was looking at. But she seemed happy. Really happy. Of course I wanted Kat to feel that way, too.
I drank in silence and listened to her going on about this and that, comfortable for a moment that the spotlight wasn’t on me anymore.
“You’re right, though,” I said eventually, once there was a pause in the conversation. “I’ve been a dick about everything. I’m going to do whatever she needs, whatever she wants to feel safe with me.”
Valerie smiled proudly. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it, I know this kind of thing is new for you.”
I knew all Valerie’s dark secrets. And she knew mine. She knew that despite my work, despite the people I did business with and despite the fact that women were constantly drawn to me because of it, I was in truth laughably inexperienced. There had been a handful of casual girlfriends. There had been Valerie. And now there was Kat. Nobody would ever guess it, and I was happy to go along with their assumptions.
I thought of Kat. About her fragile her collarbones looked when she was naked. Of how small her hands seemed as they stroked over my chest and neck. And yet she was the strongest, most passionate woman I knew. It made me ache somewhere deep inside. I wanted to protect that. Valerie had, in her own way, made me realize that. I had preached about following intuition to Kat, but I suppose I could stand a dose of my own medicine.
“Do you ever feel like your life is just guided by fate sometimes? Like there’s just some invisible force guiding it?”
She stared meditatively at her fingers as she spun her engagement ring round and round her finger.
“Nah, of course not. No such thing as fate. You always get to choose,” she said after a long pause. “But there might be guardian angels along the way, helping out. I don’t know, I could believe that” she said and smiled sweetly at me.
It was late when she left and I was fast developing a huge headache. A mountain of empty green bottles littered the table but I told myself I’d clear everything away in the morning. I grabbed my phone and fired off a message to Kat.
Mark: You’re 100% right. I’m sorry. I’m in this for the long haul. I want to do whatever it takes to convince you of that. I can’t wait to meet Nicky
I typed it quickly and sent it without double-checking anything. Then I lay in bed, thoughts and images drifting in and out of my consciousness. It started to seem kind of hot. Half-asleep, an image flitted into my mind. It was her, in bridal white …and chains. Her beautiful, milky breasts. The sexy way she’d always shiver and bear down those first few seconds I entered her. Her lips. Her unbelievable ass.
Her image dissolved into symbols and impressions. Maybe committing could be hot. Maybe there was something erotic about claiming someone, about the ceremony and ritual of the thing. I wanted her to trust me with everything. With her life. With her soul. With her body. I reached down and stroked an idle hand over my engorged cock, and pictured her lips over me. My phone buzzed on the bedside table.
It was Kat.
She’d sent nothing but a string of emojis and hearts in response. I threw down the phone and stroked myself slowly to a deep, dreamy orgasm, then slipped easily off to sleep.
Chapter 21 - Kat
“May I have the credit card you used, ma’am?” she asked and extended a manicured hand.
If organizing a wedding was stressful, it was nothing compared to un-organizing it. I rummaged around in my purse, pulled out a card and gave it to her. She returned a tight smile and fiddled with the computer in front of her.
“Ok, just a few more things I need from you, ma’am. Now as I’ve already explained to Mr. Burgess, Littlefield Willows will only be refunding the price of the venue less the booking fee and a 40% cancellation charge, which means--”
“I’m sorry, 40%? I’m pretty sure I was told it would be 10%?”
She tightened her already tight smile.
“Yes, ma’am, you’re absolutely correct, but that applies to postponed events only, whereas a full cancellation forces us to take 40%.”
“Well, you’re not forced…” I muttered as I took my card back from her.
“Pardon me?”
“Nothing. Just …it’s a lot of money.”
She nodded, thought for a moment then handed me a brochure she pulled from under the counter. People were already lining up behind me in a queue.
“There is this, however, which you might like to consider. Seeing as you and Mr. Burgess didn’t opt for any of our insurance options, we can’t help much with the fee. However, we do have a new program where you can effectively pass on your wedding date to another couple independently and settle the fee that way.”
She handed me the brochure. I gave it a confused look.
“So …you basically sell your wedding to someone else?” I asked, incredulous.
Her laugh was forced and too high pitched.
“Yes, something like that, ma’am! I mean, it does offer a way for people to recoup
some of the losses in the event that a wedding should, you know…” she gestured towards me like she was alluding to some strange but unmentionable sickness I had.
I forced a smile. It’s all red carpet and complimentary canapes when you’re signing up, but a 40% kick in the teeth when you cancel and a patronizing nudge over into the second hand wedding market. Bizarre.
“I’m sorry, I think I’d really just like the refund right now, please. I don’t have a lot of time to be sorting all this out.”
The cashier gave me a pitying look. “Of course, ma’am,” she said, and continued to fuss with the computer.
I waited impatiently.
“That’s a very pretty tree necklace.”
I turned around to find the source of the voice. It was a pretty young woman with bleached hair and great big blue tattoos all over her neck and collarbone.
“Oh, thank you. It’s …it was a gift from someone.”
The woman was behind me in the queue but quickly came to stand beside me.
“Boyfriend?” She touched her fingers to the necklace Mark had given me the first expo we did together.
“Something like that. Maybe. I don’t know, right?”
She smiled warmly and winked at me.
“Oh it’s like that, huh? I got you.” She leaned in close to me and dropped her voice. “Now don’t be alarmed or anything, but I’m something of a psychic. Just a little gift I have. Had it since childhood. But I can see things, you know? I can just tell, the guy that gave you this, he’s a bit of a strange one, isn’t he?”
I looked at her, a little shocked.
“You could say that,” I said cautiously. The cashier eyed us as she sorted some documents for me to sign.
“I’m seeing a kind of scruffy looking guy. A builder? Makes things from wood? Name of Mike maybe…?”
“Oh God, Mark, yes that’s right,” I said, a little stupefied.
“Well, I can see it all very clearly, he loves you, a lot,” she said emphatically.
“He does?”
“Oh yes. That’s very clear. And you should be patient with him. It’ll be worth it. It might not look like it now, but he has wounds of his own, you know?”