Never Too Late : A Romantic Story

by Rachel Sabor

  Amy sat on the steps leading up to the side exit of The Rabbit Hole, and did her best not to cry. She found it difficult. Her arms wrapped around her legs, which were brought up to her chest. Her forehead rested against her kneecaps.

  She knew others - namely the group that was smoking right next to her - were watching and commenting, but she didn't care. Let them say whatever they wanted. Let them think whatever they wanted. Let them make their rash judgments. It made no difference to her. She was here, and she was alone, and she welcomed whatever harshness would follow. At least it offered something to bite back at.

  Brad wasn't even here. He was inside The Rabbit Hole, talking to someone prettier than her. He always spoke to people prettier than her. "You can't expect me to not talk to them," he would yell at her. Amy tried to explain that her problem wasn't that he spoke to them, but involved what he would later do with them, but he wouldn't listen. "You're just jealous.

  Jealous and clingy." She would insist she wasn't, but Brad would just tell her off and go back to his good time.

  This was how things worked with them. How they had always worked, and - in a fit of cold realization which stung more than any of Brad's words, Amy realized - how they always would.

  She'd met Brad two years ago, and he had been everything she wanted and needed. Someone solid, someone unfazed by anything or anyone. Strong, confident; full of life and action and passion. Only as the months had ticked by did Amy realize that those were convenient covers.

  Brad was nothing but a spoiled, head up his own butt, brat. He looked down on anyone or anything that didn't match with how he viewed the world. There was no empathy in him, just a desire to do things that made himself happy. Even Amy knew she amounted to little more than something he interacted with, and had no real feelings for.

  She knew, but she returned to him like an addict to their fixer. She knew what he would do, even if she sometimes had difficulty making herself realize it. Brad was an abuser, not physically but emotionally, and all the magazines and articles she read on the internet told her those kinds of people were just as dangerous.

  What was worse, Amy knew she'd go back to him. It was as if she didn't have a choice. The man was a vampire, and Amy his thrall. It sunk through her, as it had so many other times; the deep, bottomless sensation of hopelessness mixed with unhappiness. It bled her out, exhausted her, and made her lethargic. Nothing would change, she told herself. Nothing ever would. She said these things even as she ignored the small part of her logical brain that screamed at her to get herself together. It told her not to fall into this trap, to not beat herself down. But she ignored it.

  It was easier. Simpler.

  "You okay?"

  She looked up. Someone had walked out the side exit and stood next to her on the steps. He wasn't particularly tall, but he was handsome. Not in the Brad Pitt kind of way, but in the nice smile, decent hair kind of way. He had deep green eyes, and they regarded her with something short of pity, but not quite worry. He wore what she guessed was supposed to be a cheerful smile. His dark grey shirt was pressed, and his pants fit well. His shoes were dressy, but not too classy. He held himself well, she thought. Or rather, felt, since all of these observations were made in the space of a few seconds.

  "What?" She asked.

  "I asked if you were okay?" He leaned against the rails of the steps. "You don't look so great."

  She frowned up at him. "Thanks."

  "Hey, I'm just saying," he said with a shrug. "Crying on the steps isn't the best place to do it, you know."

  "Leave me alone," she snapped.

  He held up his hands defensively. "Sorry, sorry. Sometimes I don't think before I talk. I just saw you and thought you might need help or something. Are you okay?" He looked back at the door he had just left. "Did anyone in there hurt you or something?"

  She shook her head and unconsciously sniffed. "No, no one. I'm alright, just-I'm alright."

  He nodded slowly, as if he didn't believe her. "Do you have any friends in there? Want me to go find them?" The only people she knew inside were Brad and his new object of charm. She shook her head. "Well, you're not here alone, are you?"

  "No. Someone I know is inside."

  "Ah, guy trouble." She shifted away from him as he planted himself next to her. "I know that game."

  "You do?"

  He laughed. "No, not really. We guys can be real dicks sometimes though."

  "Yeah, you can."

  "It's all about our egos. We can't get enough of ourselves, so we don't think about how our actions affect others. Plus we only think about sex all day long."

  Amy found herself blushing, and tried to fight down the heat in her cheeks. "Sometimes I think that's all you people think about."

  The guy shrugged. "It pretty much is." He smiled at her. "My name's Cale."

  "Amy," she said after a few seconds.

  "Nice to meet you, Amy." He held out his hand and she took it. It was warm but not sweaty, and the shake he gave her was firm but not too hard. She smiled back at him.

  For all the strangeness of the encounter, and for all the horror stories of meeting strange men at clubs and in alleys, Amy found herself feeling better as she spoke to Cale. He didn't seem to have any expectations or issues. Of course, she knew that she only saw the barest part of his surface, and that below it existed all the insecurities and compulsions people had. But for the time being, she realized, she enjoyed being with him. He told bad jokes, he laughed at himself, and he made her laugh.

  Within a few minutes of sitting on those steps together, she had forgotten Brad. She forgot how she felt about everything in general. She found like she had found someone who got her.

  Someone who neither validated her nor rejected her. Just another person she could spend time with, and feel good with. It was nice.

  Then the door opened behind them, and a voice - curt and rough - broke into their rapport.

  "What's this?" Brad asked.

  Amy, kicking in some sort of natural reaction, turned and spun around. Brad didn't have a lot of muscles, but he'd been known to fight people before. He wore an Ed Hardy shirt and glared down at both Cale and Amy. Cale stood slowly and smiled right back at him. The two were evenly sized, but Amy immediately felt worried that Brad would attack.

  "Hey man," Cale said, still smiling. "I'm Cale. You're Amy's friend, right?"

  "You know this guy?" Brad asked, turning to Amy and sticking his thumb in Cale's direction.

  Though frightened, Amy couldn't help but mentally sigh a bit. The man was such a walking cliché.

  "We just met," she said. Now that she thought about it, where was the girl she'd seen Brad hitting on earlier? She tried to convince herself that this wasn't one of those times where Brad struck out and so settled for Amy. Of course, she knew it was, but she shoved that thought aside.

  Cale stuck his hand out, but Brad didn't go for it. He stood there, motionless, a face of hot rage and maybe embarrassment. He looked as if he were about to hit something. Amy slid past Cale and walked up the two steps until she was eye-level with him. "Brad, are you ready to go?" She asked.

  "You know," Cale started, "you don't have-"

  "Yeah," Brad cut in, swinging his arm around her waist possessively. He pulled her a bit closer than she needed to be, and looked down at Cale with a smug grin on his face. Cale's smile never left. "What'd you do for a living, bro?"

  Cale laughed. "I work for a bank, bro."

  "Corporate pig," Brad said. "It's people like you who ruined this country."

  "Wow, we're already going there, huh?" Cale shrugged. "Well, say what you will." He turned his back, did something with his hands, and turned back. He held out his han
d to Amy. "It was nice to meet you, Amy."

  Amy wasn't going to reach for the hand, but some small bit of rebellion inside her lashed out, and she reached across the small gap between them and shook it. She felt something slide into her palm. She didn't say anything to Brad, but closed her hand into a fist when she broke grips with Cale. "You too."

  Cale gave a mock salute and walked away. Brad shook his head as he left. "What a loser." Amy couldn't help but groan a little in her throat, but Brad didn't hear.

  As he led her away, into what would be a night of dispassionate sex and a morning of Amy hating herself, she snuck a peek at the piece of paper Cale had slid into her hand.

  "Seriously, it was nice to meet you." It was followed by a phone number. She crumpled it up, but rather than dropping it as she walked away, slid it into her pocket.

  #

  The weeks had all cycled around her and blurred together. In the midst of one her self-pity sessions, she came to the conclusion that her life meant very little. She had few friends, a boyfriend that was mentally absent and horrible, a family that stayed out of her way and also offered little advice or conciliation. Her part-time job at the coffee store gave her no real joy other than a sometimes steady paycheck, which she blew on things she didn't need or on nights out with Brad.

  Everything felt so crushed and dejected. She was stuck in the mind-loop of a truly hopeless person, someone who couldn't even see the light at the end of the tunnel because they didn't know which direction they were walking in, or were standing stark still.

  Her time had deteriorated into a vast amount of worrying, stress, and insecurities. So she had taken to the Internet to find out how to change things. She scrolled through websites and read about exercise or following passions or anything she could about taking control of her life.

  She despised the sites that told her to follow her dreams. Though she recognized her own cynical nature, she knew that those people were only in it to sell their own products. No one was perfectly happy, it wasn't possible. Even those who made their living by following their dreams, like writers or painters, had to deal with the day to day stresses that everyone else did. Even more than some. The term, "starving artist" cropped up in her mind. No one wanted to live a remarkable life more than her, but when she really thought about it, she had no passions. No dreams, no skills, no hopes.

  So, more out of desperation than charity, she volunteered to work at a good will establishment. Called, "Carrie Cares" - she had blanched at the name - the place handled visitations to soup kitchens, clothing distributions, and social programs designed to help those less fortunate. She stood outside the headquarters, a rather ramshackle looking building that looked like a converted school or warehouse, made of red bricks and blacktop for a parking lot. This was the first change she had initiated in herself in a long time, and before she could quit or convince herself to leave, she ran up the steps and into the building.

  The inside was cool but a bit musty. Long ago yellowed white walls cascaded down into long hallways. She reaffirmed the idea that this place had once been a school. Fluorescent lightings already caused her to feel nauseous, which didn't help as it compounded with how she already felt. A woman sat at a small reception desk in front of her, and she walked up, with her hands folded over each other. The woman was an elderly woman with short, gray hair and glasses, but she looked up and smiled and seemed content with her lot. Amy immediately wished she had something like that when she was this woman's age. "Hello, sweetie. Can I help you?"

  "My name's Amy," she said. "I'm here to volunteer."

  "Ah, wonderful." The woman asked for Amy's last name and began to dig through a small file she had on the desk. "It's always nice to see young people help with this kind of thing. Speaks well of your generation." She said this as she had her nose buried in the file. It didn't seem as if the glasses really did anything to help improve her vision.

  "Thanks," she said sheepishly. She looked down at her outfit. Jeans and a t-shirt. Was this the proper attire for someone volunteering? Was she going to be going to a soup kitchen today? Tomorrow? Was she even going there at all? All the questions did was make her uncomfortable, but she held her ground until the woman nodded with satisfaction and pulled loose a piece of paper.

  "Please read this over and sign." She indicated a couple of desk chairs that had been hastily shoved against the near wall, and handed her a pen. "Once that's done we'll get to work on placing you somewhere."

  Amy sat and read over the paper, which was a questionnaire. It asked simple things, like "Are you comfortable around people in less fortunate financial situations?" and "Would you be willing to go into neighborhoods that are considered by some to be unsafe?" Amy thought the entire thing worded the questions oddly, as if trying to weasel its way past her defenses.

  She wound up checking the "Yes" box more often than not, and handed the sheet back. The woman looked surprised as she read it over.

  "You're rather open to these experiences for someone who just signed up the other day." Amy shrugged. "Well, alright, let's get you started then." The woman turned to her computer, a weathered old Dell by the name on the side, and started clicking. For a few minutes she went on, saying nothing but an occasional, "Hmm," as she went. Finally, with a smile, definite nod, and a few accentuated keystrokes, she turned back to Amy. "We need someone to help organize our group's activities in the local area. Would you be willing to lend a hand? It's a great place to start. The people there would be able to help you and get you acclimated to the way things work around here."

  "Sure," Amy said, not at all feeling sure. "That sounds great."

  "Wonderful." She printed out a small piece of paper and handed it to Amy. "Head down this hall," she pointed to the left, "and at the end, head up the stairs, then turn right at the top and go to the fourth door on the left." Amy nodded along, trying to plot out the route in some sort of mental map. She thanked the woman and continued on.

  By the time she got to the top of the steps, she was lost. She scolded herself for not being able to follow simple directions, and they really had been nothing but simple. The halls, those seemingly simple, were anything but. Amy got the impression that the building was a box, but that inside the halls crisscrossed like a spider's web. She passed through what she thought was an empty hall, going over the woman's directions in her head again. She rounded a corner and bumped into someone.

  She inhaled shapely, jumping back and holding up her hands in reflex. "Whoa," the guy whom she'd ran into said. "Sorry about that."

  "No, no," she said, her heart rate lowering and her breathing calming, "it's my fault." She looked up at him then, and saw deep green eyes that looked surprised. "You?"

  "You?" Cale held a small box under his arm and against his side. Rather than the clothes he'd worn in the club, he had on simple jeans, and a decent looking button down opened over a white undershirt. It clung to him just a bit too tightly. "Amy, right?"

  "Y-yeah," she managed, then frowned. "What're you doing here? I thought you work in a bank?"

  "I do work in a bank," he said. "I volunteer here. No one works here, save for Carrie and the lady at the front desk. And I wouldn't really call it work."

  "Right," she said. "Sorry." Then she blushed. What was she apologizing for? For not calling him? He shouldn't have left his number for someone who was already taken. And she had clearly been taken, with Brad putting his arm around her like he had. "Hey, about-"

  But he cut her off. "Sorry about what I did that night," he said. "It was a bit out of line.

  I didn't mean to put you in a bad place." He seemed remorseful too. "Just thought you'd might like someone to talk to."

  "I do have people to talk to," she lied.

  He smiled and nodded. "Good, that's good." He seemed to consider the matter settled, as he juggled the package under his arm back to a decent height. "So I guess you've only just signed up?" She shrugged and nodded. "That's great. But you look a little lost."

  "Yeah," A
my said, "I was supposed to help people organize something or other."

  "Really?" Cale asked. "That's the group I'm in." He walked past her. "Come on, I'll show you the way. Misses Cameron, the lady at the front desk, can give some crazy directions sometimes."

  "I noticed that," she said, and felt a little better. Cale continued to beckon her, and she followed, happy at least, to have someone who knew where he was going with her.

  They wound their way through the halls, and Amy picked out a few landmarks she convinced herself she would remember for next time. The room they entered must've once been a classroom, as it had a number of discarded bits of desks shoved into the corner, and a marker board at the front. On it, in red marker, were a number of lists and arrows and times and dollar amounts. It all seemed like gibberish to Amy, but she figured it made sense to the people in the room, because they had gathered around each and were offering critiques and adjustments, while nodding their heads in agreement with one another.

  "Hey guys," Cale said. The group actually had more girls than guys. There were twelve of them in total. Eight girls, and four guys, including Cale. Most wore plain t-shirts and jeans, but a few wore things even more ratty. Those individuals also sported odd haircuts and facial grooming. None of them really seemed interested in Amy and Cale, but the rest turned and smiled. As Cale explained the situation of Amy's arrival, they each welcomed her in turn, and let her know that what she was doing was a great thing. Cale just smiled and watched as she got introduced to everyone, as if he were a proud parent.

  "So," someone who introduced himself as Jacob asked, "what brings you to Carrie's?"

  Amy found herself without a real answer. She wanted to find herself? That sounded ridiculous.

  "I just wanted to help."

  "Oh good," Jacob said, smiling across the room at Cale. "I thought you might be here to find yourself, like Cale over there."

  "Hey," Cale shot back, still grinning. "Don't pretend that's not why all of us are here."

  "Some of us have more altruistic motives than our own self-satisfaction," one of the oddly dressed girls said.