by A. E. Radley
But then there was the second time a year later. That memory was much more painful, one I didn’t want to revisit.
I’d left her that time. I’d left and I’d sworn we would never date again. And we hadn’t. But somewhere along the way, I forgave her. Melody had always said, “Hope is hopeless.” And it was true. She had the talent, the natural charisma, the natural beauty that drew people to her like a flame draws moths. But something about the scars inside her also made her reckless, self-destructive, and impulsive. In the months and then the years after our final break up, I realized that Hope hadn’t intended to hurt me. Hell, she probably hadn’t even intended to cheat on me. She’d done it not out of malice but because of she didn’t always understand the power she had over people.
“I forgave you because… I know you never meant to hurt me,” I said.
Her face contorted with pain. For a moment I thought it was her leg. I tried to take my hand away, but she pushed down, keeping it there.
“I didn’t,” she said. “You are the last person on Earth I would ever want to hurt. But I know I did anyway. I regret it all the time, you know. Even after all these years, whenever I think about it…”
I gave her leg a gentle squeeze as she trailed off. “It’s in the past. Almost fifteen years ago. If you can believe that.”
She laughed. “Not quite fifteen years. We were twenty when we broke up for good. We’re thirty-three now. Don’t add more years than we have to.”
“Twenty when we broke up, yeah, but — ”
I stopped abruptly. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to finish my sentence, which was going to be “But twenty-eight the last time we slept together.”
It didn’t seem to matter that I hadn’t finished my sentence. Hope seemed to know what I was going to say. She wrapped her fingers around my wrist, gripping tightly. I recognized the expression on her face, recognized the corresponding quickening of my own pulse.
As if of its own accord, the hand that wasn’t resting on her thigh made its way to Hope’s face. I brushed a thumb across her cheek. Her skin was warm, flushed almost.
Like a moth to a flame.
“Julie,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I need you.”
“I know,” I whispered back. “That’s why I’m here. Right here.”
She turned her face, kissed the heel of my palm. “I never deserved you,” she said. “I still don’t.”
I didn’t answer with words. I leaned forward, letting my lips meet hers. The same electrical surge I’d felt the moment our eyes had met on Thanksgiving coursed through me, from my body into hers — or from her body into mine. I couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter; all I knew was that we made a complete circuit, energy joining us together.
The kiss deepened, grew more intense, and the heat that had seemed to radiate from her cheeks earlier now seemed to come from her mouth, her fingertips, the hollow of her neck. Her fingernails dug into the tender flesh of my wrist.
She broke the kiss long enough to whisper into my ear, “But I never stopped needing you. I think I always will.”
I kissed her again, and Hope tugged the hand squeezing her thigh upward, pulling me up her dress, across the smooth spandex of her shorts. I could feel the heat, the moisture pooling through the crotch of the spandex, and I cupped her there while she pressed my hand in place.
“Hey, Julie? Have you seen — oh, Jesus.”
My head snapped up. Melody stood there in embarrassed horror at the foot of the stairs a few feet away, one hand still on the bannister.
I sat up straight, wiped the corner of my mouth with the back of my wrist. Hope pushed her dress down hastily.
“Never mind,” Mel said. She spun back around and headed up the stairs.
Shit. What had I done?
I wasn’t a cheater. All the times with Hope before, when we’d been broken up but still fooled around, we’d both been in between relationships. I’d never crossed the line like this before.
I couldn’t do this to Karen. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. I stood up, feeling light-headed and numb.
“I’m sorry,” I said without looking at Hope. I didn’t know to whom I was apologizing. Hope, maybe? Karen? Myself? Maybe all three. I rested my forehead against my hand for a moment, covering my eyes. Hope was staring at me with wide eyes when I took my hand away. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I should… I should go. I’m gonna go.”
I picked up the resistance bands from the floor, avoiding the eyes that I knew were following me.
“Julie?” she called from the couch, but my hand was already on the door.
I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t slow down. If I did, my resolve would evaporate, and I would touch her in all the ways I wanted to touch her. In all the ways I was convinced only I knew how to touch her.
I jogged down the steps, practically leapt into my car. Pandora started playing automatically — and too loud.
Scar tissue that I wish you saw
Sarcastic mister know-it-all
Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you ’cause
With the birds I’ll share
Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hope and I had been in high school when the Californication album came out, and we’d hated “Scar Tissue” despite the airtime it got.
We couldn’t figure out the chorus for the life of us. Hope insisted it was “With a bird’s eye view;” I argued it was either “With the burden shed” or “With the burden shared.”
That was what Hope and I had together: scar tissue and a shared burden. A burden of history that we never seemed to be able to outrun. I shut the radio off.
With the birds I’ll share this lonely viewin’
With the birds I’ll share this lonely viewin’
EARLY DECEMBER, PART 2: “LONG DECEMBER,” COUNTING CROWS
I owe Karen the truth.
That was what I thought when she came home that day, tired from a long day at work, complaining that her lower back was bothering her again, asking me with a pouty face that I used to find cute if I would massage her shoulders and neck.
“…so then Ray was like, ‘The contract with India? We canceled the contract with India. We hired them three weeks ago and all they manage to produce was a spreadsheet,’” Karen said while I stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. Massaging Karen juxtaposed with an image of massaging Hope’s injured thigh a few hours earlier.
I owe Karen the truth.
“So I said, ‘Well, it would’ve been nice if someone would’ve bothered to tell me that the India contract had been canceled.’ I arranged my whole week around that conference call!” She sighed. I dug my thumbs into the space between her shoulder blades and her spine. “Anyway, what was your day like?”
I’d been unusually quiet during her story, I realized.
I should tell her.
“Uneventful,” I said. No. I can’t tell her. It will only hurt her, and it’s not going to happen again, anyway.
“Did you see your pop star?” Karen asked, adding a healthy dollop of sarcasm to her question.
“Yes, but I wish you wouldn’t call her that,” I said. “She’s not a pop star to me. She’s just Hope.”
“Wasn’t that the title of her last album — Hope? I always find that so self-aggrandizing, when musicians name albums after themselves — oww! Not so hard!”
“Sorry.” I eased up on her back but kept rubbing. A few quiet seconds passed. “I accidentally kissed her today, during the therapy session.”
The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them, before I could think through the consequences. But at least it was out in the open now.
Karen stiffened beneath my hands. “You what?”
“I kissed her. I don’t know what happened. I’m so sorry.” I spoke in a rush now, my confession taking on a momentum all its own. “We had just finished her therapy session, and I was massaging her thigh around the bullet scar, and we started talking about the past, and — I don’t know why it happened. Our eyes met�
�� and we kissed.”
Karen spun around. Time seemed to stand still as her wide blue eyes pierced me with an emotion I interpreted as something between shock, hurt, and pure fury.
Her eyes look like chips off a glacier, I thought. Like ice daggers.
“Massaging her thigh,” Karen repeated flatly.
Then one hand flashed out, and before I knew what was happening, she slapped me across the face as hard as she could. My head rocked to the side a little as it absorbed the blow. I could still feel the sting of her fingers after her hand dropped back to her side.
I lifted my hand to my face automatically, touched where it hurt.
“I knew this was going to happen,” Karen snarled. “I knew it. I knew sooner or later that woman would destroy us.”
“We’re not ‘destroyed.’ It was only one kiss,” I protested weakly. “Nothing else happened.”
She jabbed an accusatory finger at me. “You never stopped loving her.”
“Karen,” I said, trying to reason with her. “I haven’t been with Hope since we were kids.”
“You’ve never loved me the way you loved her,” she said as if I hadn’t heard. “You’ve never even looked at me the way you look at her.”
“The way I look at…” My brow furrowed. “How do you know how I look at her? You’ve never even met her.”
My cheek still hurt. I didn’t know whether I should feel guilty for kissing Hope or angry at Karen for hitting me. Or maybe both.
“I’ve seen,” Karen said, shaking her head back and forth. The cold blue eyes took on a wild sheen to them. She looked a little unhinged. “I’ve seen the way your face changes when you see a photo of her. I’ve seen what you look like when you see her on TV. I’ve seen.”
“I think you’re being paranoid.”
“Being paranoid?” She snorted. “Julie, you just told me you kissed the woman, and I’m the one being paranoid?”
“It was a kiss. A single kiss,” I said. My eyes dropped to the floor, ashamed of myself again. “Yeah, we have a history, okay? And she’s struggling right now. And I don’t know… I guess I wanted to make her feel better and I just — I got confused for a second.”
“Oh my God,” Karen said. She covered her face with both hands, laughed as if there was a private joke I hadn’t heard, shook her head again. “You got confused?” she said when she took her hands away. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “You got ‘confused’, Julie? That’s your excuse?”
“I… I’ll give her some space, Kare,” I said, not attempting to answer her rhetorical question. “I’ll tell her I need the rest of the week off from physical therapy. Alright?”
“A week off, of course. That’ll fix everything,” Karen said, throwing her hands in the air. She began pacing through our living room, snatching things from surfaces as she went. A magazine sitting on an end table. A pile of junk mail next to the door. The e-reader I’d left on the couch the night before.
I knew what she was doing. Karen cleaned when she was stressed. The times our home had been the cleanest had coincided with our ugliest fights. When we’d fought at the beginning of November about our Christmas plans and my career and my wish to save money for my gym, the house had been spotless for nearly two weeks.
“Karen…”
I stepped around the coffee table and reached out, trying to close the distance between us, but she bustled in the other direction, arms full of odds and ends that she’d decided to relocate or throw away.
“Karen, please,” I said as she moved from the living room to the dining room. I trailed a few steps behind. “What do you want me to do? I told you about it. I could’ve kept it a secret. But I didn’t. I told you because you deserved to know and because it’s not going to happen again. Alright? It’s not going to happen again.”
Without looking at me, she dumped her bounty of mail and magazines and electronics on the dining room table and began sorting everything into piles. “You don’t know yourself. You don’t see yourself. You’re never going to let her go. I’ve been thinking about leaving you for months anyway — ”
My head snapped back as if she’d slapped me a second time. “Wait. What? You’ve been — what do you mean you’ve been thinking about leaving me for months?”
She put her palms flat on the dining room table, leaned her weight forward as if it was the only thing holding her up. “I’ve said it before. I want to be with an adult, Julie. Not an overgrown, gullible, head-in-the-clouds teenager who still chases cockamamie schemes instead of a real career.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Is this about my gym?”
“Your gym.” She rifled through the mail that she’d dumped onto the dining room table, produced a ripped-open envelope. She waved it at me, brandishing it like a weapon. “Have you bothered to look at the credit card bill? I added it up — over a thousand dollars on gym equipment. Not to mention we’re still paying off the two thousand dollars you spent on that ridiculous business seminar.”
“It wasn’t ridiculous,” I said, hurt. “You’d supported me at the time. You told me that if I was going to go into business, it was worth educating myself. Now you’re taking it back?”
“Now I’m thinking you spent two thousand dollars on a seminar, for what? Where’s this gym you’ve been talking about for the past three years?”
“It takes time to — ”
“No wonder we can’t afford to go to Tybee Island for Christmas,” she said, talking over me. “Everything we earn goes to Julie’s make-believe gym!’”
“Make-believe? I’ve been building my clientele, establishing a name for — ”
“And now, to top it all off, the girl you’ve been in love with since you were fifteen years old shows back up in town, and after five years with me, you’re making out with her. In less than three weeks.” Karen threw the credit card bill onto the table.
“We didn’t make out,” I said, but in my mind’s eye, I remembered hearing Melody’s voice and looking up in horror to see her standing at the foot of the stairs. What would have happened if she hadn’t chosen that moment to come down? Guilt burned in my gut. “We kissed. One kiss. That was all.”
Karen didn’t reply. She wrapped her arms around her stomach protectively and dropped her gaze to the piles she’d created on the dining room table. The blue ice daggers of her eyes seemed to melt a little.
“Five years,” she said softly. “I’ve put five years of my life into you.”
I crossed the room, taking her into my arms and kissing her temple, then her forehead, then the tip of her nose. She dropped her face onto my shoulder, sobbed quietly.
“I’m sorry, Kare,” I said. “I’ll go over there right now. I’ll tell Hope I can’t work with her anymore, okay? She’ll understand.” I squeezed her to me.
Five years, I thought to myself. Five years since I told myself I would forget Hope Caldwell once and for all. Three years since I moved in with Karen. Five years was too long to throw away on a single kiss.
One hour later, my tires crunched against the gravel drive at Melody’s house. I had driven here in silence, without Pandora, without anything but my own conflicted heart to sing to me.
Andrew and the kids had decked the house out for the holidays. Multicolored Christmas lights spiraled around the porch railings, outlined the roof. In the yard, an inflated glowing Santa Claus and his reindeer rocked gently in the night breeze. It had gotten noticeably colder in the past week; the weatherman had even floated the possibility of snow flurries for the weekend. Snow was unusual in Georgia for this time of year; the possibility of flurries in early December suggested it would be an especially cold winter.
Frost crackled under my boots as I made my to the porch. A light came on as I neared and the door opened, the promise of warmth spilling out from inside in the form of yellow light.
Good, I thought, Hope saw me coming. She would come out here to talk, and she would say she understood, and we would find a way to get past this. A way to be normal friends. Adu
lts, to use Karen’s words.
But it wasn’t Hope who greeted me at the top of the stairs; it was Melody. And her face was troubled.
“She left,” Mel said. “Packed up her things as soon as you went home today, said she needed to get back to Los Angeles, that she and some producer person had made arrangements to start recording again.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Then I glanced over my shoulder, searching the yard for Hope’s rental car, but found nothing. Why hadn’t I noticed it was gone when I pulled into the drive?
“I’m sorry,” Melody said. “I wish I hadn’t come down when I did.”
I found my voice. “It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have… we shouldn’t have…”
Mel put a hand on my forearm. Her hand was warm from being inside.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” she said. “I like Karen. And I know you love her. But despite everything — the shooting, her injury, her depression — Hope’s happier now, with you around, than I’ve seen her in a lot of years.”
I didn’t say anything, just let out a long breath that I didn’t know I’d been holding.
“You should go to her,” Mel said. “Tell her you’re still in love with her. That you never stopped being in love with her. She’s waiting for you to say it.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. “I haven’t been in love with Hope for years. What happened the other of day… it shouldn’t have happened. It was impulsive.” My eyes wandered down the porch, like I might find an explanation for what had happened with Hope amongst the spiraled Christmas lights. “And it was only a single kiss.”
Mel made a face — amusement or disdain, I couldn’t tell. “Do you really expect me to believe the same thing you told Karen?”
I tried to say something — I didn’t know what — but all that came out was a sigh. Mel gazed at me expectantly.
“I need to get home,” I said. “Karen will be waiting for me.” I turned to leave.