“The next day he didn’t call me for the first time in weeks.”
“The jerk! After you worked so hard not to get used? He was one of those assholes who’s just in it for the chase,” I growled, upset on her behalf about something that happened probably thirty years ago.
“Hush, now, girl. The story’s not over yet. He didn’t call that day, and he didn’t call the day after. On the third day I had to go to work, and I was dreading it, I’ll tell you. But I sashayed in there like I owned the place and just ignored the hell out of him. I flirted with every male customer that came in, and I didn’t speak one word to him all day.
“Finally, at the very end of my shift, I was clocking out when he came up behind me. He stood close and talked right into my ear, you know, breaking down my defenses just by breathing the same air I was.”
I thought about Nick standing behind me on the beach while he taught me to surf, and I knew exactly what she meant. I sighed, remembering his chest rubbing against my back, his breath in my hair.
Leesa kept going. “He said, ‘Can I please talk to you?’ I told him if he needed to talk to me so badly maybe he could have picked up a phone sometime in the last three days. But he begged, so I finally agreed to let him walk me out to my car on his break.
“As we walked down the block to my car he told me something, girl. He told me that he had been lying for all of our relationship. He’d been seeing other girls the whole time. I’d made him so mad when I told him I’d only date him if he quit the other women that he’d been stringing me along from the beginning.”
“Oh, Leesa, he was even worse than I thought.”
“The only problem was that somewhere along the way he’d fallen for me. He said the reason he didn’t call was actually because he was afraid to tell me that he’d been seeing other women. He said that he’d realized all he wanted was to be with me, and he’d made a huge mistake. Then he told me that lying with me in his arms was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to him. He loved me.”
I looked at her for a moment, processing what she’d told me. “But, he lied, Leesa, and I know you didn’t end up with him, because you’re married to Raoul.”
Leesa gave me that wise woman stare that she had perfected at some point in her life and shook her head. She took her calloused hand, thickened by years of working with hot dishes and splattering oil, and patted me on the cheek. “Oh.” She laughed. “You are so stubborn, you won’t even see the truth when it’s thrown right at you. I didn’t end up with him? I’ve been in his arms every night for thirty-five years, girl.”
“Nooo!” I gasped. “That was Raoul? It couldn’t be! He’s so in love with you, Leesa, there is no way Raoul ever cheated on you!”
“He most certainly did! He was running around with those other women for two months when I dated him, and he just about lost me because of it. But, eventually I forgave him, Lyndsey. He told me that he loved me, and I already knew I loved him, so I forgave him. My mama had taught me that love is something you don’t throw away, because you never know when you’ll see it again. It’s too rare in the world, and we need to cherish it and forgive it and honor it.”
I was stricken speechless. I sat still, listening to the quiet whirring of the kitchen appliances.
I thought about the look on Raoul’s face every time he saw Leesa. He loved her so deeply; sometimes it physically hurt to watch it. But now it was as if everything I’d ever known about Raoul and Leesa was turned upside down.
“Lyndsey,” Leesa said as she placed her hand gently on my cheek to turn my face to her. “That man has been faithful to me for thirty-five years, and was unfaithful for two months. If I hadn’t forgiven him I would have missed out on my whole life.”
I looked at her, astounded at the real history of two people I thought I’d figured out a long time ago.
She smiled at me and went back to stirring the sauces on the stovetop. “You know what I wish the most for you, girl?” she said.
I stood up from the stool, struggling to compose myself after such revelations. “What?”
“I wish you’ll find someone to love like I did all those years ago. He won’t be perfect and neither will you, but you’ll love each other, and practice forgiveness and honesty and you’ll have a long, happy life together.”
I opened my mouth to respond but she cut me off. “No, listen for once you stubborn girl. I’ve watched you for three years, and I know you haven’t found most of these boys interesting. But, this new one—Nick? I can see the way you look at him, and more than that I see the way he looks at you. There’s something special there, I can tell. No matter what you think, you deserve it, Lyndsey. You need to let yourself try.”
I felt the familiar sting behind my eyes, and I shook my head, stopping it before it became real. “I don’t know Leesa, I think I’m kind of done with men for this lifetime. Jack’s a good substitute though.” I tried to sound as light as possible.
“You know that’s not true, girl. Jack’s a good friend, but he’s no substitute for a man to love.”
“I don’t need to be in love, Leesa,” I said.
“No,” she answered. “But it sure does help.”
Nick
Gabe and I usually spent Friday afternoons at the beach, and this week was no exception. After a quick lit class early in the morning we headed back to our apartment, grabbed our boards and hit the beach. Most of the time Kelly’s fiancé, Ian, joined us, but today it was only Gabe and me and a crowded beach.
“Crap, man,” Gabe bitched as we came in from a set of really weak waves. “The swell’s backed way off, even though Surfline said it’d hold out for at least another hour. Guess we’d better sit it out and see if it picks up.”
“That’s cool, I’m ready to crash out for a while anyway,” I answered as we drug our boards up the beach to where our stuff was stashed.
Gabe tossed his board on the ground and flopped down on a towel, rubbing his hand across his wet hair to get some of the water out. “Crash out?” He scoffed. “More like you’re ready to lay in the sun and watch the girls strolling by.”
“Nah,” I said lying down on my stomach. “I’m really wiped out. I stayed up way too late studying for that chemistry exam that I probably blew to hell anyway.”
“You wouldn’t be so wiped out if Lyndsey walked by in a bikini I bet.” He shot back.
I lifted my right arm and gave him the appropriate finger gesture.
“Seriously, man,” he persisted. “When are you going to tap that?”
I rolled over on my back and sat up so I could look at him. He pissed me off when he did this—acted like a player who didn’t give a shit about girls. “I’m not going to tap that, Gabe. She’s great, but she’s turned me down more than once, and it’s for the best. I’m not ready for all that anyway.”
“You know what? You’re never going to be ready, Nick. None of us are ever ready. You find somebody, you want them, you do it. It’s as simple as that. The rest of it happens however it happens and no one is ready for it. Life’s not like that.”
I was speechless for a second. “You want them and you do it?” I scoffed. “Seriously? I mean I’ve had some one-night stands, but even I was never that calloused, man. Do you even bother to ask if they’re willing to join you, Gabe?”
“What the hell, Nick?” He kicked sand at me with his heel. I put my hand in front of my face to avoid the flying grains and flipped him off yet again. “I would never be with someone who didn’t want to be with me too, and you know it. I’m not only talking about the sex, I’m talking about being with someone. You know, dating them, whatever. If you want to see them and they want to see you, then do it. See each other. Fuck . . . or don’t fuck . . . whatever, but stop this crap about not being ready. Lyndsey’s a really hot girl, and she’s smart and sweet too. You should be doing something about it instead of sitting around saying you’re not ready. You never now when the opportunity won’t be there anymore.” His face was set, unreadabl
e, and he looked past me down the beach.
Gabe had been my best friend since we started high school. We’d enlisted together after graduation, we’d served in Afghanistan together, and he’d been the first one to get to me after what happened to Aubra. We’d had arguments, even thrown some punches over a girl once in the tenth grade, but never had he been so up in my shit as he was right there on the beach, at 2:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in Hawaii. I wondered how much of this was about me and how much was to do with the woman he’d gotten involved with in Afghanistan after I got discharged. He’d never told me the details, but I could tell that something bad had gone down and he was nowhere near over it.
I looked at him and scowled. “She turned me down, Gabe,” I ground out. “When are you going to process that? It doesn’t matter what I want or don’t. She’s not interested.”
He pulled his glasses down on the bridge of his nose and looked at me over the lenses. “Uh huh.”
I stood up and paced back and forth at Gabe’s feet, churning up grains of sand as I went. “What the hell is so difficult to understand about that?”
Gabe lay back down on his back. He was used to my anxiety fits, and didn’t seem to care much if he was the cause of one right now. “What I understand is what I saw in the backseat of my car last week. You and Lyndsey all snuggled up, touching each other all over and whispering. I even heard you go all caveman with some crap about ‘oh, if anyone every hurt you, Lyndsey, I’d have to kill them.’”
I sat back down on my towel and threw Gabe the harshest evil eye I could muster. I don’t think he noticed. He probably had his eyes closed under his sunglasses.
“I don’t believe for one second that she’s not interested in you,” he continued, “and I don’t believe for one second that you’ve been serious when you’ve asked her out. Girls can tell, dude. They can tell when you’re not serious, and they don’t go for it.”
“You’re the one who told me to go out with her a few times just to get laid. It’s pretty tough to be serious if that’s what you’re after.”
“But, that’s not how you feel about her is it?” He turned his head to look at me. “Your approach and your intent have to match up or no one’s going to buy it.”
I drew my knees up and hung my arms over them, dropping my eyes to the sand beneath me at the same time. A really ballsy seagull hopped over to the corner of my towel and tried to snag the granola bar that was sitting there. I snapped my fingers at it and it unfurled its wings and squawked at me. “I don’t know how I feel about her. I just know that I’d be bad for her.”
Gabe turned his face back up to the sun and sighed. “Nick, when are you going to let it go? Aubra was the victim of a problem that lived everywhere around her. You may have been the trigger, but the problem was sitting waiting for anything at all to set it off. If you hadn’t stumbled into it, someone or something else would have.”
I ran my hand through my hair. “She told me to stop chasing her, Gabe. She knew what would happen if we kept seeing each other, but I wouldn’t leave her alone. I kept coming after her, and I got her killed.”
“You were barely twenty years old, Nick, and you loved her, right?”
I sat for a moment, listening to the ocean as it roared in to the beach, and remembered the sound of the gunshots as they’d rung out in the square next to Aubra’s house. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the memory.
“I don’t know if I loved her, that’s part of the problem,” I admitted. “I was so used to getting what I wanted, I thought she was just more of the same, you know? I’d always gotten whatever girl I chased, so I assumed I’d get her. But, shit, what if I did that to her and it wasn’t even because I loved her, it was only because I was a spoiled jerk?”
Gabe rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand. “I know you cared about her, Nick. Whether it was love or not, you would never have done it if you’d really understood what could happen. It was hard for all of us when we first got there. We couldn’t imagine a place where people would do things like that to each other, to their own families, their own children. None of us got it.”
“Well, I got it. Loud and clear.”
“Look, I know it was horrible . . . I was there. But, this isn’t Afghanistan, and Lyndsey’s not Aubra. It’s not always going to be life and death, dude.”
My own voice sounded weak to me, and I was embarrassed for Gabe to hear how scared I was. “What if I screw up and do something to hurt her though? How can I trust my own judgment? I got a girl killed, Gabe.”
“That’s not going to happen here. Someone’s heart might get broken, but trust me, you can go on with one of those,” he said matter-of-factly.
I stood up and looked out at the water. “Too late for that, dude. Mine’s busted permanently.” I grabbed my board and headed out to the waves, leaving behind Gabe and the memories of a dark-haired girl with big brown eyes and the life draining out of her in vivid crimson.
* * *
While I saw Lyndsey twice every week in math class, I’d never figured out how to get closer to her there. We’d sit next to each other—or I’d sit next to her really—my heart beating a little staccato of hope the entire time. If I were lucky she’d let me walk her to her car, but I could never get her to warm up enough to risk asking her for anything more than that.
Strangely, she was different at The Grill. She seemed more in her element there, chatting with customers, relaxed and happier. Due in large part to my obsession with her and in smaller part to the best selection of beer on the island, I spent as much time at The Grill as I could. I’d made some headway with her in that environment, even getting her to hang out at my table sometimes after her shift was done.
A week after Gabe unloaded on me, I pulled into the parking lot of The Grill, and noticed that there were very few cars there. This was a good thing for my purposes, but it also meant there wouldn’t be anything to take the focus off of me and my grand plan to ask Lyndsey out—for real this time. In the days since Gabe had called me on my shit I’d decided to give it a shot. As frightening as it was to think about being in someone else’s life, Lyndsey was special and I knew her kind of special didn’t come around very often.
I walked through the muggy air and entered through the deck doors. I saw a couple of tables full of older men watching sports on TV, and Raoul cleaning up behind the bar. We hung out at The Grill so frequently that Raoul had taken to calling Gabe and I the Dos Amigos. We had our own seats at the bar where we could talk incoming swells and the day’s drops with him and I could still see Lyndsey as she made her way back and forth from her section to the kitchen. Even Leesa would come out from the back and say hi when Gabe and I stopped in.
I took my usual seat at the bar and shook hands with Raoul.
“It’s one of the Amigos.” He smiled.
“How’s it going, Raoul?”
“Pretty well, we had a good lunch rush but they got out fast so we’ve had a quiet afternoon. What are you up to?”
“Oh, you know, taking a study break, thought I’d grab a beer.”
“Uh huh,” he muttered as he picked up a mug and put it under the tap. “That, and you thought you’d see if you could scare up Lyndsey.”
“Well, if I’m gonna have a beer it makes sense to have it where the prettiest waitresses are,” I answered as he handed me the full glass with a perfect head of foam on it. I smelled it before taking a sip, reveling in the sweet scent of wheat ale.
“Yeah, I’ve got some pretty waitresses here, but I only ever see you looking at the one.” He winked at me.
I felt my face heat up and I took another big swallow of the cold microbrew. Raoul had told me the bar top was made of polished monkey pod wood, from a forest on Oahu. It felt smooth under my fingertips and I remembered how smooth Lyndsey’s skin felt under those same fingertips when I was teaching her to surf. Raoul stood there and examined me.
“Alright, yeah, maybe I’ve got a thing for one particular waitress,” I
admitted.
“So, are you ever going to take the plunge?”
“I want to, man, I do. I don’t know if she’s going to go for it though.”
Raoul leaned forward, elbows on the bar. His eyes seemed tired, and he had dark circles under them. But, there was an urgent energy coming off of him that wasn’t in sync with his appearance.
“There’s a lot more to her than you can see,” he said. “I know she looks like a typical college girl, but she’s been through something—even I don’t know what all exactly, but it’s made her a lot older than most girls her age.”
I nodded, thinking that was something she and I had in common—this aura of damage that floated around our heads like cursed halos. Maybe it was one of the things that drew me to her; we were both trying so hard to be “normal” when really we were anything but.
“What happened to her mom, do you know?” I asked.
“Not sure of the details. She died a few months before Lyndsey was supposed to graduate, and so Lyndsey took the GED and got out of Dodge . . . or Albuquerque as the case might be. I’ve always had the impression there was more to the story than she let on, but she’s not sharing, so I let it go.”
“Does she ever have guys around? I mean, date, or anything?”
Raoul lifted one eyebrow at me and I put my hands up with an “I’m innocent” expression on my face.
He sighed. “No. No, there’ve been a lot of guys in here watching her, but I’ve never seen one get as far as you have, son.” He smiled at me.
I couldn’t help but smile back, a little bit of pride crept through my throbbing heart. “Well, what can I say?” I lifted my arm and flexed my biceps, showing off.
“The question is,” Raoul smiled a little menacingly at me, “are you worth it?”
I cleared my throat. “I’d like to be . . . sir.”
“Mmhmm,” he mumbled as he went back to wiping down the bar top with a damp rag. “I hope you are, because I love that girl like she’s my own, and I won’t always be here to watch over her. She needs good people around her, and love and respect. You feel me?”
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