Dragon of Central Perk

by Sarah J. Stone

  “True. I just really hate that he hasn’t come to me. I just thought he would. I guess I need to know I mean that much to him,” Susan confided.

  “Men can’t read minds any more than we can, baby. He might be thinking that you’ll only shoot him down after what he has done. I really don’t know how I feel about all of this. I still think it is creepy how he stalked you, but maybe he had reasons for it that neither of us can understand, and I know you care about him still. Just do what you feel like you can live with.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I will. Now, let’s get this check taken care of and go try on some clothes. Maybe you can find something to get Dad’s mind off golf tonight,” Susan said with a wink.

  “Oh, good grief,” her mother replied, waving her off as she dropped some cash in the folder the waiter had left. “Let’s get out of here.”

  After a long day of shopping, she went home with her mom to eat dinner. They were still busy in the kitchen when her father came in.

  “Well, what a welcome surprise! Both of my favorite women in one place,” he called out.

  “Hey, Dad. Good to see you, too. How’s my coffee shop?” Susan replied.

  “Wow, honey. That place is so busy these days. All the changes you’ve made have really paid off. I might have to take it back from you, I loved it so much. Really got the adrenaline pumping during those peak hours,” he told her.

  “You can’t take it back. Besides, it would cut into your golf game too much. Mom says you’re really getting into the swing of things,” Susan told him.

  “Oh, so you women have been talking about me behind my back, huh?”

  “Since the day I was old enough to say my first words,” Susan retorted.

  “That guy came in looking for you today,” he said out of the blue.

  “What guy?” Susan asked, shooting her mother a look of surprise.

  “The one you were dating, I reckon. I was surprised that he’s so much older,” her father told her.

  “Okay, yeah. There is that. What did he say, though, Dad?”

  “He asked if you were off on your honeymoon,” he laughed.

  “He did not,” Susan said, her eyes wide.

  “Yeah, he did. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. You didn’t get married behind my back, did you?” he asked.

  “Dad, of course, I didn’t. You know my friends were getting married this weekend. That’s why you were watching the shop!” she told him.

  “They did? No, you didn’t’ tell me. You just asked if I would watch the shop because you had some friends in town. You didn’t say anything about a wedding,” he told her, picking at the chicken her mother just pulled from the oven until she slapped his hands away.

  Susan looked at him with a puzzled expression. He was right. She hadn’t told him or her mother until earlier today. She had been afraid she would have to explain it to them and hadn’t thought her dad would really understand.

  “Well, what did he say after that?” she asked.

  “Fool asked me if I was sure. Of course, I was sure. I’d know if my own daughter was getting married!” her father scowled.

  “Did he say anything else?” she asked.

  “No, he just ordered a drink and sat in the corner staring out the window. Hey, by the way, do you care if I watch the shop one more day? I have some buddies coming into town that want to stop by and hang out there. I thought I could just do another day and spend some time with them while helping you at the same time,” he said.

  “Sure, Dad. That’s fine, but I’ll probably be in for a while just to check on some things,” she said. She really didn’t need to. She had complete trust in her dad, but she thought that maybe if she hung out there for a while, she might run into Paul. If her dad was there as a backup and he wanted to talk, then she wouldn’t have to worry about leaving the shop unmanaged with just the staff in place. It was a long shot, but she could hope.

  “Don’t trust the old man?” he asked with a frown.

  “I trust you completely, Dad, but I still need to check some computer entries and order some stuff I forgot to get going before I took a couple of days off. One more might put me in the hole on some of my ingredients.”

  “All right then, I’ll see you whenever you turn up tomorrow. Now, let’s eat. It smells good, and I’m starving!” he told her, taking his place at the table.

  Chapter 22

  The following morning, Susan took her time getting dressed, even curling her hair for a change so that it hung in long, flowing tendrils instead of being cinched up in a ponytail or a loose knot as she did so often. She chose a bright red shirt and dark jeans, finishing them off with a cute little pair of wedges. After carefully applying her makeup, she looked in the mirror at herself. If Paul Brennan did show up, she intended to at least show him what he had been missing these past months.

  “Wow, you look stunning this morning,” her father said as she walked behind the counter. Susan had already taken a cursory look around the dining area and found that Paul was nowhere to be seen.

  “Yeah, I had to run some errands before I came by and didn’t want to look all frumpy,” she said. “I’m going to do a quick inventory and go back to my office to place an order.”

  “Alright, honey,” her father replied as he began to ring up the next customer.

  It was true that she did need to get an order placed, but she could have just as easily done it tomorrow. Since she was here, she might as well get it over with. She ran through the items stocked in front before moving into the kitchen area, once again scanning the dining area before disappearing behind the kitchen doors. After another inventory back there, she returned to her office and picked up the phone, calling several different vendors and placing the necessary orders.

  She checked some emails since she hadn’t been checking it from home, and her father didn’t like to fool with it. She found a handful that needed to be answered. Though she didn’t get much email here at the shop, they did have a webpage and patrons would sometimes email them from there, or other local businesses would send invitations to community events, mostly charity gatherings that they wanted contributions for. She went ahead and dealt with all of them so that she didn’t have to tomorrow.

  Once she was done, she returned to the front and saw that there was still no Paul. She thought about going home. This was stupid and fruitless to wait around and see if he turned up again when he knew where she lived and when she would be here all day for the rest of the week if he had anything to say to her. However, her mother’s words about meeting him halfway rang in her ears, and she decided to hang out a while long and wait.

  “I’m going to fix myself a chai latte and just hang out for a while, Dad,” she said.

  “Okay, honey. I’m going to go over and talk to the boys for a bit, but Della has the register, and I’m here if she needs me. It’s slowing down a bit now.”

  Susan made her usual soy chai latte and took a seat in the corner where Paul had always sat when he came here. People were beginning to thin out, and she watched them leave little by little until there was only the group of men her father new and a couple of new people that came a little while later. She watched the people walking by on the sidewalk and wondered about their lives, whether they were happy or sad. Did they have love in their life, or was she the only one feeling lonely?

  “I believe you are in my seat,” came an unexpected voice from her right, causing her to jump a little. It was Paul. Where had he come from? He wasn’t in the shop when she had come out from the back and she would have seen if he had come through the front door since then.

  “This seat was empty when I sat in it,” she countered, her stomach lurching and her heart pounding against her chest.

  “I know the owner. I can have you relocated to a different table,” he said without a trace of humor in his voice. If anything, he looked nervous and sounded a little unsure of himself.

  “I know the owner’s father. I can have you carried out the
door by your collar and tossed into the street,” she said with a dry smirk. “Besides, you don’t even have a drink. These tables are reserved for patrons, not bums off the street that just wander in looking for a place to sit.”

  He reached forward and picked up her drink, tacking a sip from it and making a face. “That is horrible!” he complained. “Who made that for you?”

  “I made this for myself!” she told him.

  “No. I’m going to speak to someone about this. I’ll be right back.” He sat her drink down on the table and went over to the counter. She sat looking at him, completely confused. Was this his way of making up? Sneaking into her shop and starting a mock argument over seating arrangements and drink selections? Moments later, her returned with another cup of chai and handed it to her. “Here. Try this, instead.”

  Susan took the cup and sipped from it. She laughed a little as she sat it back down on the counter. It was the same hot chai, except he had it made with regular milk. She sat it back down on the table and pushed it toward him.

  “That is unacceptable. It contains milk,” she said.

  “Exactly, and it tastes twenty times better!” he informed her.

  “The soy chai tastes just fine!” she defended.

  “No, it doesn’t. You’ve just been drinking it so long that you’ve forgotten how good the real stuff tastes,” he countered. Susan sat looking at him. She knew he was right. The regular chai did taste better, but she wasn’t giving in that easily.

  “You, sir, can take your cow chai and go sit on the other side of the room,” she told him.

  Suddenly, his face was serious as his eyes squinted at her. He leaned down toward the table and said quietly, “Do I really have to, blue eyes?” Susan felt the force of this simple question ripple through her body, sending tendrils of excitement along her nerve endings and causing her stomach to do a complete somersault, or so it felt.

  “No.” It was all she managed to say. She watched as he slid into the chair beside her and pulled his cup of chai closer to him, seeming to hold it for reassurance of some sort.

  “Susan, I’m sorry. This isn’t the way I meant for all of this to go,” he told her.

  “I don’t know how you meant for all of this to go,” she said.

  “I know you don’t, and I don’t want to talk about it here, with these people around and with your father looking at me like I’ve robbed his cradle. Can we go for a walk? I want to show you something,” he told her. She nodded, and they prepared to leave the shop. Susan nodded silently to her father that she was okay as they stepped out.

  Chapter 23

  They walked several blocks without saying a word. Finally, Susan couldn’t take it anymore and broke the silence. “I don’t understand why you did what you did and why you couldn’t have just told me what happened. You just waited for me to find out on my own and be devastated by it,” she told him.

  “I know. I didn’t realize just how much that must have hurt until I walked into your shop and was told you were getting married. It felt like someone had punched me in the gut,” he admitted.

  “I was never getting married,” Susan told him.

  “Yes, I found that out later,” he replied.

  “My father told you when you asked about it later. Here’s a weird question. If you thought I had gotten married, why did you still come back in looking for me again?” she asked.

  “No, I knew you didn’t get married before that. I saw you in the park. I saw your friends get married,” he told her.

  “Oh, my God! What is it with you and the constant stalking?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t stalking you, Susan. I was walking Stella,” he said.

  “Since when do you walk Stella yourself?” she retorted, not sure if she believed him.

  “Since I realized how stupid I have been about many things. I’ve let the memory of someone cloud everything in my life to the point that hardly anything made any sense. I realized how pathetic it was that I couldn’t even bring myself to walk my own dog because Miranda and I used to walk her together,” he said.

  “So, you admit that you are too hung up on Miranda to function with someone new,” Susan said.

  “I don’t know, Susan. What do you think? Did it seem like I wasn’t functioning with you? If you hadn’t found out about her by accident, would anything about me have tipped you off that something was wrong?” he asked.

  “It’s hard to say. At this point, I can’t remember what I had noticed before and what I only realized after I knew. It all blurs together, and then I just get angry or sad and can’t really wrap my head around it anymore. I met this great guy and thought we really had something special going, but then I found out that he had apparently been stalking me for months because of my eyes. Did you even realize that my eyes weren’t brown like hers?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’ve always known your eyes were blue,” he said.

  “What? How?” she said.

  “At the hospital, before the surgery. I saw you when you came in. They were scarred horribly, but I could still see the magnificent blue color around the edges. I could imagine how beautiful they must have once been,” he said, looking embarrassed that he had been there even back then.

  “I wondered if you knew about the contacts, or if you thought the brown color was hers,” Susan told him.

  “I couldn’t see them for a long time behind the dark glasses and mostly from a distance. When I finally saw you in contacts, I thought at first that they were hers. They were a very similar color and it almost spooked me, but I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed anything other than the fact that you weren’t in glasses anymore, but I had done all sorts of research on the procedure while you were recuperating and knew that they couldn’t have taken on her color. I assumed they were contacts and wondered why you chose to cover up such beautiful eyes,” he said.

  “I didn’t like seeing the little dots in my eyes where the stitches had been and the clear lenses weren’t enough to hide them. Plus, the darker contacts where specially designed to protect me from getting too much light. My eyes were very sensitive for a long time,” she told him.

  “It’s funny how things begin to make sense if you just take the time and talk them out, isn’t it?” he said with a weak smile.

  “Yes, it is,” she replied. They walked a little further in silence and Susan began to wonder where they were going, but he only told her she would see in a few minutes when he asked.

  “I know that I owe you a lot of explaining. What I did must seem so strange to you. I wish I had done things differently, Susan. These weeks without you have been pure hell. Not long after things went so bad for us, I got a call from the authorities in Uganda. My sister was very ill. She had contracted some disease in the village she was working in and it was resisting antibiotics. I was afraid I was going to lose her, too. I hopped on the next plane down and ended up having her med-flighted elsewhere so they could properly attend to her. Without her, there was no doctor in the village, and she would have died,” he said.

  “Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Paul. Is she better now?” Susan asked.

  “Yes, she is just fine. She’s back in the States now. As soon as she is well, she will go back, and I will worry about her all over again, but it is what she does. She didn’t like that I took her out of the village, but she conceded that many more will die there if she isn’t better so that she can get back to them and treat their illnesses. I can’t fathom the dedication it takes to go back to something like that once it has almost killed you,” he told her.

  “No, me, neither. She must be an incredibly special woman,” Susan said.

  “I found something, Susan. I found someone who could help her, with just a touch. It was amazing. She could have saved Miranda if I had known and that only made things feel worse for me. I had a lot of time to think and it was all so hard, but it all led me back to you. It all led me back to my feelings for you.”

  “Paul–”

  “I tried to call you
many times while I was gone, but I could never get through. I would get busy signals or messages telling me all the circuits were busy. After a while, I decided that maybe it was best that I leave you alone and let you get on with your life. I had to do a lot of soul searching to consider if what you had said to me was true. Had I really pursued you because you had a small piece of Miranda, or had it been something more? I spent a lot of time thinking about that,” he told her.

  Paul stopped and turned to her. His eyes seemed tired and his shoulders slumped. He looked incredibly vulnerable, and her heart broke all over again, for both of them. They had both been through so much in their lives and wasn’t this just another torrid chapter of bad endings for them? It was such a mess that she wasn’t even sure there was anything more he could say to make it better at this point.

  He was quiet as he pushed open a large iron gate and reached for her hand, pulling her into the poor lighting of the lamps that stood in intervals but didn’t put out much light. She had been here before and wasn’t pleased about being here again, especially at night. She peered down a lengthy line of concrete markers. Exactly twelve markers down was where you would find her other love, Dan.

  “Why are we at the cemetery?” Susan asked as they made their way along the path that led away from where Dan was buried, now flanked by his mother who some would argue died of a broken heart, rather than cardiac arrest.

  “You will see in a moment,” he told her, but that was all he offered as he continued to lead her along the path to the newer section that had been added on several years ago when space had begun to fill up in the original plot. They stopped at a single monument with the name Miranda Ann Philipps on it. She had been only twenty-nine when she died, and Susan felt saddened by anyone having died at such an early age. She thought of Dan, who had barely been eighteen when he died, and her heart ached for him.

  “I was going to break off our engagement. Things weren’t going well between us. I had planned to sit down and talk to her, but before I could, she came home crying. She had been to the doctor because she was having some difficulties that worried her. They found a mass on her lungs. There were tests and consultations. It was lung cancer, and it was already advanced. She was devastated. There was no reason for it. She didn’t smoke, hadn’t been exposed to anything cancerous that she was aware of, and yet, here she was,” he said.