It was a good thing that Eli didn’t interrupt my thought process because if he had, I would probably have just put my fist into his face, not because I was pissed, but because I needed something to make me feel better. I needed to find something that could not only keep me from saying the next words that were going to come out of my mouth, but that could also make it so that those words weren’t even true. I needed a fucking miracle, and since I didn’t believe in those, I was pretty much shit out of luck.
“I think I love her man.”
“Love her? Really?”
“Shit. Shit. I really think I do.”
“Well, then I get why you’re so pissed. What are you gonna do?”
“I don’t have a fucking clue. What am I supposed to do?”
“I can’t tell you that, brother,” Eli answered slowly, all of his typical jocularity long gone. “Nobody can. If you’re gonna stay, you’ve got to come to that on your own. Otherwise, you’ll always be pissed off for being here. If you’re gonna do it, do it the right way. Don’t stay and then be pissed off that you’re here. That ain’t fair to anyone.”
I got so close to saying I would stay. I could actually feel the words on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to say it. It wasn’t that I liked Ashville any better than I ever had, but I wanted the fucking turmoil inside of me to stop. The only way that was going to happen was if I came to a decision. I wanted it to be the right one. I wanted to be the guy who chose the girl and not the rest of it, the money and the cities and all of the rest. I could feel those words on the tip of my tongue when the only other person in Eli’s shop decided it was time for him to speak up.
“Who gives a shit?”
“Can it, Beatty,” Eli said in a warning voice, glancing up at the scraggly old man now limping towards us. “I don’t think he asked for your opinion.”
“I don’t give a shit what he asked for or what he didn’t ask for. I’ve got something to say, and I’m going to say it. Who gives a shit if you think you love this girl? You think that love is going to mean anything twenty years from now when your whole life amounted to nothing, and all you have is a woman you can’t stand anymore to show for it? Because, you’ll regret it, son. This town will kill you, if you let it. It did me, and it’ll do the same to you. If you’ve got the chance to get out, then do it. Who cares if you love her? Find another girl to love. Get the fuck out of Ashville, boy. Do it while you still can.”
Chapter 19: Fay
“Hey,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
I should have known right then and there that something was wrong. I should have turned and left, just gone and hidden myself away until Neil was past whatever mood had him in its grip and come back another time.
If I had been smarter, if I had been more experienced maybe, that was exactly what I would have done. But when it came to men, experience was something I just didn’t have enough of. When Neil opened his front door and looked at me with a dead, cold expression in his eyes, I should have turned and gone straight back home. Instead, I stayed. I thought I could make things better. It was a rookie mistake, and it was one I would cringe over for a long time to come. It was like any stupid thing a person did. I would think on it and wonder why I hadn’t seen that things were going to go bad.
“Hey! You’ve come by to see me so many times at the diner, and I thought it might be nice if I came and did the same for you. Is that okay?”
“It’s fine. You can come in if you like.”
He didn’t exactly slam the door or anything, but he didn’t look excited to see me either. As I followed him inside, I searched my brain for what on earth I could have done to piss him off. It had only been two days since his visit to the diner, and that wasn’t a lot of time. But I also hadn’t seen him or heard from him, and from the way things had been going between us, that was strange. I mentally went through the sex we’d had at the diner, trying to figure out if I had done something wrong there, but from my perspective, everything had been pretty much perfect.
The only thing about it that had been off at all was that desperate look in his eyes, and there was no way that could have been my fault. Whatever was going on with him was about him, not me. I repeated that to myself over and over again as I followed him into his kitchen, where he silently pulled out two glasses and an already open bottle of wine.
“Isn’t it a little early?” I asked uncertainly, looking at the clock on his stove and seeing that it was only two o’clock in the afternoon.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Neil, what’s wrong? And please don’t say nothing because I can tell something’s bothering you. Did I do something? I don’t feel like I did, but if so, please just tell me, and we can talk about it. But you’re making me nervous, the way you’re acting.”
He looked at me as he took a sip of his wine. He looked at me with such a horrible expression that I felt compelled to take a pretty big sip of my own glass. I wasn’t much for day drinking, but something told me that this was the kind of conversation that was going to call for it. When I looked behind him and saw his suitcases packed, I knew I was right.
Even before I looked back into his eyes, there were tears springing up in them. I wanted to ask him again what was happening, but I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t trust myself to speak, and I wasn’t too sure that it would have made any difference if I had. Whoever this man was standing in front of me, he wasn’t the Neil I had been spending my last month with. This man was cold and so closed off to me that we might as well have been total and complete strangers.
When he spoke, I could hear the same hard edge in his voice that I saw in his face, and the hopelessness that was starting to build up inside of me threatened to explode into full blown panic. The only thing I could think about was Courtney’s words. She had told me not to believe in those stupid love stories. She had told me not to put all of my eggs in one basket, and I had been so sure that Neil would be different this time that I had chosen to ignore her completely. I could only imagine what her face would have looked like if she had been sitting there with me, and the thought of it made me feel ashamed.
“Look, Fay, I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to be brutally honest. Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t tell me you don’t want to talk about it. Just tell me the truth, okay? Let’s just lay it all out on the table.”
“All right, then ask. Ask what you need to ask, Neil. I have a feeling you’re going to, whether I want you to or not.”
“Are you ever going to leave Ashville? Are you ever going to get out of this shithole?”
“It’s not, Neil,” I answered so quietly I wasn’t even sure he could hear me, “It’s not a shithole. It’s our home.”
“No, that’s bullshit, okay? It’s your home, but it’s not mine. I get that you want me to give up my whole fucking life and move here, but it isn’t going to happen.”
“But I never said that, Neil! I don’t understand why you’re acting this way. I never asked you to stay!”
“Sure, not yet, but you were going to, and we both know it. You didn’t want me to go when I was eighteen, and you don’t want me to now.”
“That is so, completely unfair.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I’m going. My bags are packed, and I already called to have my plane fueled up. I’m out the door, and I need to know if you have any intention of leaving here.”
“Just like that? No time for me to think? No time for a discussion? You’re just gone? It’s just done?”
“That’s it, Fay. That’s the way it has to be for me.”
If he had slapped me in the face, he couldn’t have hurt me more than he did with those words. I loved him. It was something I had suspected before this awful meeting, but now that he was telling me that he was leaving, I knew it without a shadow of a doubt. I loved him, and for the second time, he was leaving me.
All of a sudden, I was sure I was going to have a complete meltdown if I didn’t get out of his house.
I stood up abruptly, so quickly that I knocked my glass of wine onto the floor where it shattered into tiny pieces. Under any other circumstances, I would have stopped to clean it up, but at that moment, I couldn’t stop. It was like I was being chased by something terrible, and the worst part of it was that the something chasing me was inside of me. So instead of cleaning it up, I ran out his front door and just kept running. Some silly, naive part of me kept expecting him to chase me, and it was something I held onto up until I got to the diner.
When I walked inside and saw Courtney staring at me, I knew it was all over. I collapsed into a heap on the floor. She hurried towards me, scooping me up as best she could and cradling me in her arms. Dimly, I could hear the man from the nature magazine somewhere behind her, asking what was wrong, and if there wasn’t something he could do.
Of course, he would be here to witness my fall. Why wouldn’t he be? It was like the last nail in my coffin, the last bit of proof of Courtney having been right this entire time. Maybe if I hadn’t been such an idiot, hadn’t been so sure that it would be Neil and nobody else, I wouldn’t feel so much like I was going to die. I would have done what Courtney told me to and learned that there were all kinds of decent guys out there, and it wouldn’t feel like Neil’s leaving was the end of my chance at love. There were plenty of maybes, but none of them changed the fact that my heart was breaking. Instead of subsiding, my sobbing only grew worse, and Courtney pulled me in tighter, doing her best to comfort the comfortless.
“What is it, Fay?” she whispered fiercely into my ear, rocking me like I was a distraught child and not a twenty-six-year-old woman. “What’s the matter? What happened?”
“You were right!” I sobbed, feeling like it would kill me to say it out loud. “You were right the whole time!”
“Right about what? I don’t understand, lady. Right about what? What’s going on?”
“Right about Neil. He’s leaving. He’s getting on his stupid private plane, and he’s leaving. For all I know, he’s gone right now. He’s leaving, and he’s not coming back. He’s not ever coming back.”
The two of us sat there that way for a long time, Courtney only getting us both up to take me out onto the porch and call somebody to come and work for the both of us. She snagged a bottle of liquor, and the two of us passed it back and forth, getting drunk and feeling like shit. When we heard the incredibly loud sound of a plane taking off and flying away, we didn’t say a word.
Chapter 20: Neil
“What the hell, boy?” Eli asked. “I thought you were long gone. We heard your plane take off, brother. It’s not like there’s a bunch of them coming in and out of Ashville.”
“Who do you mean by we?”
“I mean everyone, man. That was what, a week ago? Everyone knew you were gone the minute you took off. The whole fucking town was talking about it. Even if I had somehow managed to miss it all, Courtney would have filled me in on it. We’ve been spending a lot of time together. I think I might have something there.”
“Good. That’s good. Try not to fuck it up, okay? It’s the worst goddamned feeling in the world when you do.”
I wasn’t sure if Eli was right about the timing of everything or not. The time since I had gotten onto my plane and flown away from Ashville was all mostly a blur. I could vaguely remember speaking to Fay with a nasty, asshole tone, and her running out of my house in tears.
At the time, it hadn’t mattered to me, not any of it. The only thing I could think about was that old man’s words, telling me to get out or else I would regret it for the rest of my life. I had been so sure he was right, I hadn’t once stopped to think that maybe it would be the other way around. I hadn’t stopped to think that maybe I would regret losing Fay for the rest of my life, although I was sure that a much smarter man would have seen that immediately.
I had been such a jackass that I had actually convinced myself that there were plenty of women out there just like Fay, that she was nothing all that special. It had taken me about two days to realize how wrong I was, and once I had realized it, I had known I had made the biggest mistake of my life. And I had done it for the second fucking time! I had done it for the second time, and how many times did I think I was going to get away with it, anyway? Just how many times did I think I was going to be able to walk all over her and break her heart before she was done with me once and for all?
I wanted to ask Eli these questions and more, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t ask because I was terrified of what answer he would give me. So I settled on a question I hoped he would recognize as a stand in for all of the rest of them.
“How is she, Eli?”
“Come on, man. Why do you ask me that?”
“Because I want to know, Eli. Christ, why else would I ask?”
“How do you think she is? You acted like a jackass, man. I’m a guy, and even I could see that. She’s been a wreck. She threw out all of those romance books she used to like to read. And you should hear the way she talks now. It’s not good, man. Courtney’s been having to work to keep her from turning into a constant partier, doing all of those things she’s always avoided. It’s been hard.”
“Shit.”
“Why are you here, Neil? I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to have you, but why are you here really? Because if you’re just going to fuck with her head, don’t. Courtney’ll kill you, and she’ll want me to help, and I don’t want to be in the middle of that. And Fay’s a good girl. She doesn’t deserve any more of this shit. No more, all right?”
I nodded at him, but I wasn’t really listening. I was already half out of his shop and headed down the street towards the diner. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears, could feel it going so hard it felt like it might actually explode. For the first time, I was confronting the very real possibility that I was too late to make any difference, and it was a possibility that scared the shit out of me.
There was also a pretty good chance that Courtney was going to claw my eyes out, but that was something I was willing to take. I shoved my hand deep down into my pocket, kept it there for comfort, and shoved open the door to the diner. The first person I saw was Courtney, and she was very clearly not happy to see me.
“Oh no! Hell no, Neil. Not again. You’re not doing this to her for a third time. I’ll go to jail before I let you do that.”
“Please, Courtney. I’m not here to hurt her.”
“Ha! Oh really? And I’m just supposed to believe that? You’re so full of shit. You know that? I tried to warn her. I knew you were only going to fuck her up, but she was so sweet that she didn’t believe me. She believed in you, Neil. That’s what she believed in, and instead of caring about her, you went and broke her heart. Not only that, but you did it for the second time. Why don’t you just get the hell out of here, Neil? Why don’t you just let her try to get over it without you messing things up for her?”
“Is she here or not, Courtney?”
“Wow, you really just don’t give a shit, do you? Just looking out for yourself, and that’s it.”
“No, that’s not it at all. All of those things you said? You were right. You were right about all of them, and I’m here to fix it, not make it worse.”
“How are you going to fix it? And you better be able to tell me, because if you think I’m just going to trust you, you’re out of your fucking mind.”
I don’t know what kind of answer I would have come up with to something like that, but I never got the chance to figure it out. That was the moment when Fay emerged from the back, her eyes wide at the sound of our voices. I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but we must have been being pretty loud because Fay looked like a deer in headlights before she even saw with her own two eyes that it was me standing in the diner with her best friend.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Her voice was flat and lifeless. Courtney gave me a look that really felt like it could have murdered me before going and putting her arm around Fay,
who was pale with dark circles under her eyes. Even in the short amount of time since I had gone, I could see that she had lost weight, and I felt my stomach drop. I had done that to her. I was the reason she looked so messed up, and if she would let me, I would do whatever I could to make it up to her.
“I’m here for you,” I said.
“Do you want me to make him leave?” Courtney interrupted, looking up at Fay’s face anxiously, “Because I swear to God, I’ll do it.”
“No, that’s okay. Maybe just give us a minute?”
“No. Hell no. I’m not going anywhere while he’s here. He’s done enough already.”
“That’s okay,” I said quietly. “It’s fine. You can be here for what I need to do. Maybe it’ll even help you to feel better about me.”
I had no doubt that she would love to tell me that would never happen, but I didn’t give her the chance. The hand I had kept safely in my pocket all through the walk from the barber’s shop and through the confrontation with Courtney as well, came out. In the palm of my hand, I held a little black velvet box, and with it, in plain sight, I got down on one knee. I saw Courtney’s eyes widen as Fay gasped, her hands flying up to her neck and grasping the necklace she had hidden beneath her shirt.
“What are you doing?” Fay asked.
“Oh man, if you can’t tell, I must not be doing it right.”
“But you left,” she said confusedly, her eyes starting to fill up with tears again. “You said if I didn’t leave Ashville, it was over, and I haven’t changed my mind on that. So there’s no point.”
“You don’t need to change your mind. I’ve changed mine. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know what I was thinking all of those years ago when I left, and I don’t know what I was thinking when I drove you out of my house. All I know is that there’s nothing out there better than you. There’s no place, no person, nothing in the world better than you. And I love you. God, I love you so fucking much.”
Yours Forever Page 43