And now he lay on my bed. Drunk. He was such a beautiful boy. So very, very beautiful.
I took off my nightgown as he undressed. We lay there, our naked bodies touching. He was too drunk to have sex with me, we could both see that.
‘I don’t love Miranda. I love you,’ he said.
‘Miranda is a better choice,’ I told him. ‘I’m not good for you. I can only bring you pain.’
‘How can you say that? We had a magical time.’
‘We did.’
‘Why do you want to be with HIM? He’s really rather cruel. You have to see that.’
‘It’s over anyway. He broke up with me.’ I began to cry.
THE BOY held me. I began to sob.
And then THE BOY was making love to me, regardless of his drunken state.
It was so amazing to have him inside me. I think we both knew it was a farewell fuck. I could not allow THE BOY to stay in my life when all I was doing was hurting him over and over.
I loved THE BOY that night. We made love until the sun rose and then we made love throughout the day.
We were both so tender with one another. Oh, THE BOY. THE BOY. He had been a godsend. But I had to let him go.
He finally left. He kissed me once again, frantically, as he left my duplex.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you too.’
‘Goodbye then?’
‘Yes. You will be fine. Go back to Miranda. She’s as steady as a rock. I can’t help you. I will only bring you down.’
‘I’m willing to take the chance.’
‘No. I can’t do that to you. I can’t do that to anyone. It was what HIM did to me. It’s not playing fair with love.’
‘I love you.’ He kissed me again.
‘I love you too,’ I said, and then I gently pushed him out the door. ‘Now go!’
33
I have lost HIM …
And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince.
How do you get to the other side of love? Once it is over, once it has been buried, once the man has told you his exit strategy. How do you get to the other side of love? You are left in that place where everything seems wrong. Colours are dimmer; simple math is beyond comprehension; laughter makes no sense. You’ve fallen apart. Everything is catastrophic.
It doesn’t seem possible that love has left you. You’ve lived for days, weeks, months in a constant conversation with HIM.
But really, how do you get to the other side of love? How do you stop loving the man? You have already fallen (such a perfect description). FALLEN. And all the platitudes like ‘He was wrong for you’ or ‘It will heal in time’ mean nothing, NOTHING. You are just left with the abyss of pain and every now and then you text HIM, sweet little nothings. You tell HIM how amazing he was, how much you adore HIM. And then you wait for HIM to text you back. You wait all day, all evening. You read back the texts you’ve sent to HIM. They’re so endearing, so heartfelt. And of course he must sense the pain, of course he must, but he does not text you back.
How do you get to the other side of love when it is he who is in your head? There’s no one else. There is no one. You thought, Yes, of course this was it. Of course you would be together. How could you not?
You loved HIM: with your heart, your body and your mind. You just loved HIM. You recall the times when you would meet; that first glimpse. Yes. Everything stopped then. It was HIM. HIM. It was as it was supposed to be.
You loved HIM.
It could all be patched up. It was just a matter of human frailty.
34
POST SCRIPT
Fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Rebecca drops her daughter off for the afternoon. Lily loves visiting me. I am her godmother.
Lily is eighteen months old. She is a beautiful little girl and we have a special relationship. I love that she was named after me. Lila/Lily: I am her namesake.
Lily is a frequent visitor at my duplex. She loves working in the garden with me. I bought her a baby shovel and rake and the smallest set of garden gloves you’ve ever seen. Rebecca even found a pair of baby overalls. Sam comes to the garden as well. We’re three generations of gardeners.
Lily also loves playing with Esme and her daughter Phoebe. Lily has the other two kittens from Esme’s litter, Chloe and Daphne. She likes that the cats are from the same litter.
I live a life now with two cats, one child and a garden.
* * *
After everything fell apart with HIM, I took to my bed.
It was then that Sam and Rebecca began their Lila campaign. At first I wouldn’t have it. Who were they to not let me suffer alone? Why wouldn’t they let me mourn HIM in the only way I knew how? I thought staying in bed and not eating were perfect coping strategies. But Sam and Rebecca were insistent.
A week after my break-up with HIM, the two of them came over. They didn’t even knock; Sam used his spare key. My bedroom was dark, my curtains drawn. It didn’t matter that it was past three in the afternoon.
They walked into my bedroom and stood over me.
‘OK,’ Sam said. ‘There’s two ways this can play out. Either you get out of bed willingly or Rebecca and I lift you out of it. After that Rebecca is going to make sure you get into the shower. We’ll take it from there.’
I glanced at Rebecca, who nodded.
‘Well, fuck,’ I said. ‘Just leave me in peace. Neither one of you could possibly understand what happened with HIM. You both lucked out the first time around. I really thought he –’
‘Oh, shut up!’ Rebecca said. ‘We’re not here to talk to you about HIM. We’re here to get you to shut up about the bastard.’
‘God,’ I said, ‘what is this? Some kind of intervention?’
‘You could call it that,’ Sam said. ‘Now get a move on.’
I looked at them. I could see that ‘no’ was not an option.
I shrugged. ‘OK, OK,’ I said, throwing off my comforter. ‘All right already. I can take my own shower.’
‘That’s great,’ Rebecca replied. ‘I wasn’t really looking forward to the role of prison warden anyway. We can start on our house-cleaning venture at the same time.’
‘What?’
‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘You need to get clean but the apartment is dirty as hell. We’re going to clean it for you.’
By now I was standing up. ‘So it sounds like you guys have a plan here.’
‘Yes,’ Rebecca said in the sort of voice she would use to her baby rather than to me. She obviously thought it appropriate to my state of mind. ‘Operation Lila goes as follows: you take a shower. We clean up your apartment. We make you a nourishing meal. The three of us sit at the dining-room table and figure out what you should do with the rest of your life.’
‘Well, that’s all fine and dandy,’ I said. ‘Except for the thing about figuring out what to do with the rest of my life.’
‘I have some ideas,’ Sam countered. ‘Just take your shower. We’ll go from there.’
* * *
The water felt wonderful when I stepped into the shower. There were images of HIM and me there, and they were hard to forget. As the water splashed over my body, I ached for HIM. It had been so exhilarating when he’d made love to me in the shower. But I turned the image off. Let the water be the beginning of my benediction, I thought. Or I would do as Mary Martin did in the movie South Pacific: I would wash that man right out of my hair.
When I was done showering I towelled off and put on my terrycloth robe. I stepped out of the bathroom to find my two dearest friends vacuuming and dusting and generally cleaning the place up. They’d opened the curtains as the afternoon
sun filtered into my apartment. Wow.
It’d been a long time since I’d taken the time to appreciate something as simple as the beauty of sunlight.
Once they’d completed cleaning the apartment, Sam went back to his side of the duplex and returned with a vegetable soup he’d made from our garden produce. Then, while the three of us sipped the soup from our mugs, Sam spelled out his plan.
* * *
Now, many moons later, my best’s friend’s daughter and I have decided it would be fun to pick a bouquet of flowers for her mother. I let Lily pick out the flowers as I cut them with a pair of shearing scissors. I tell her the names of the flowers and Lily repeats them: daisies, cosmos, sunflowers, lace. Soon we have a bunch of them. Lily follows me back to my kitchen, where I find a vase for them. I put water in it and the two of us sit at the table and make the bouquet. Lily continues to repeat the names of the flowers. She likes the daisies the best.
We beam at each other.
We are still talking about the flowers when Rebecca returns to pick up her daughter.
* * *
Many things had changed in the last couple of years. Sam’s plan was multi-layered. First of all, he convinced me to quit my job at the college. He was right. I had long lost my enthusiasm for working there.
I sold the clothes and jewellery from HIM on eBay and made over $6,000. At first I’d fantasised about hiring a detective to follow HIM. I’d have loved to know what was real about his life and what was not. In retrospect, there were so many times I thought he was lying or not exactly telling me the truth or certainly not being fair to me.
I was very close to calling a private eye with the money I’d made from selling his gifts. But instead I gave the money to the Susan B. Komen Foundation, a charity established to help women with breast cancer.
Sam also urged me to take a stronger role in managing his apartment buildings. In return he began giving me a rather hefty salary. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘you’ll inherit the buildings.’
I went to see Dr Stern for the follow-up appointment. I confessed that I had not taken the medication or gone to psychotherapy. She did not berate me but she did encourage my beginning counselling. Later that week I met Lucy Sands, the counsellor she’d recommended. It hasn’t been easy in the least. Lucy felt that I was pretty hip to my own problems and so she has been more of a cheerleader than a therapist. She, like Dr Stern, believes in self-determination. She said I had painted myself into a corner in my relationship with HIM, but I had found a way out.
‘Why spend hours worrying about the fact that you called his wife and that it ended it for HIM? He wasn’t all that fair with you,’ she said. ‘And you caught HIM in a lie. Where was he exactly? Aspen? Utah? Mars?
‘Power is an aphrodisiac,’ she continued. ‘I have a feeling that he could have charmed the pants off me.’
And we both laughed.
We talked about my mother.
‘I believe you might want to work on some project in homage to your mom,’ she said. ‘Begin a journal. Consider sewing a quilt in her memory.’
‘A quilt?’
‘You can take classes in quilt-making plus you can meet some other people there,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s just a suggestion.’
I found a quilting class at a yard goods store near my home. I go there once a week to learn more about quilting. I love the other women in the class. It’s meditative to be there.
So I began sewing a quilt in memory of my mother. I appliquéd the flowers she and I loved in a myriad colours, hundreds of flowers. When it was done, it was incredibly beautiful. I use it every night. I lie on my bed and it comforts me.
I have become reconciled to the fact that my mother is no longer living on earth. But I will continue my journey and find joy with the people and things I love the most.
Sam and I also joined GUG, Guerilla Urban Gardeners. The group works together to plant gardens throughout the city. Over the span of about a month, a group of twenty or so members helped us plant a Native California garden in the front yard of our duplex and a self-watering flower and vegetable garden at the back. Our property flourished: a gardener’s dream.
After our yard was completed we accompanied the crew to other homes. We were greening the city, one yard at a time. Sam, a little uncomfortable with hard labour, appointed himself chef. When we’d break from the work, we’d find him in his kitchen offering to serve us freshly squeezed orange juice, or a batch of chocolate-chip cookies, or soup or salad.
Somewhere along the way, Sam and I decided we’d design a website on urban gardening. I named it Cultivateyourowngarden.com. The name was derived from Voltaire’s Candide. It’s the story of a man who travels the world experiencing a series of grand misadventures, only to discover that the answer to a good life is, in fact, to ‘cultivate your own garden’.
The website caught on. We are getting hundreds of hits daily and it is growing. We’ve been able to generate some advertising income from gardening companies and other websites.
Although I doubt I will get rich any time soon, it was remarkable how much better I felt to be working on something I loved so much.
Along the way, Jake moved back to Los Angeles and bought a home near ours. At first it was awkward to spend time with him and his wife, but then we all just eased into it. Sam’s and my duplex became the hub for all of us. Jake and I have had many talks, just the two of us. Ironically it was he who helped me most to let go of HIM. Jake reminded me I had loved and been loved before.
THE BOY too remains in my life. He married his girlfriend Miranda. I thought it was kind of impulsive on his part as he was still so young. Sometimes I blame myself for exposing him to a world that overwhelmed him. I have no idea whether Miranda knows that I was the other woman in THE BOY’s life. She and I never talk about it.
They look good together. She’s tall and thin and athletic like him. She transferred to a college nearby so she could be with THE BOY.
THE BOY works with Sam and me on the apartment buildings and he’s also part of our gardening group. Once, when we were at a new member’s home and were in the backyard, THE BOY and I both noticed that there was a hammock. We looked at one another and burst into hysterical laughter. A couple of people asked us what was so funny but we could hardly share our story.
I truly believe THE BOY loved me. He was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
But I have moved on. I’ve fallen in love.
It’s a good story too. Sam and I have a booth at a local farmers’ market on Tuesdays. We sell our produce and promote the Guerilla Urban Gardening group. Sam had wandered off to talk to some of his cronies there. He and the other older folks at the farmers’ market could talk for hours about how to grow an artichoke or asparagus. Boring. I was at the booth but it was kind of slow. I was reading Wuthering Heights when a tall, slightly gangly, spectacled man approached the booth.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I’m your Heathcliff.’
I looked at him, amused.
‘Well, actually my name is David Hatfield. But it’s close.’
It turned out he was an English teacher at a very progressive high school close to the farmers’ market. He was on his lunch break.
Of course, we immediately began talking about our favourite writers. He was late getting back to his school and took off running.
The following week he came by, and before we launched into a discussion about literature he asked me out for dinner for that weekend. We’ve been together ever since.
OK, we kissed almost immediately but I told him I wanted to do the ‘friends first’ thing. He agreed we would wait for three months before sleeping together. This certainly was new to me. My therapist had urged me to take it slowly.
The three months passed quickly and when we finally had sex it was very beautiful. He never once stopped gazing into my eyes while he made love to me. The sex keeps getting better and better. It’s different loving someone when it comes to sex. It’s a wonderful feeling.
David and I have been talking lately about my getting pregnant. We both agreed we’d name the baby after my mom: Justin or Justine. I so wish my mother was alive to meet David. And I would’ve liked it if she had lived long enough to be a grandma to my children. But her spirit is with me. I feel it every day.
David has said that he’d like to move in with me. As it stands now, he spends most nights at my place. The only one against it is Esme, who still vies for a place on my pillow every night. Life is beautiful.
Yet sometimes, at night, when David stays at his own apartment and I can’t sleep, I throw back my covers, yank off my nightgown, light a candle on my bedstand and look down at my beautiful naked body and yearn for HIM. HIM.
I imagine HIM coming towards me. Looking at his erection I’d feel exhilarated. I wouldn’t be able to wait until he was deep, deep inside me. It would only be moments before he’d be standing next to the bed. I’d have to sit on the side of the bed to say hello to his penis with my mouth. Kissing his cock. Kissing his cock. Soon we’d tumble together on the bed.
And then I’d be very wet, opening wide for HIM, HIM, and soon he’d be deep, deep inside me. Soon I would surrender to HIM. Soon he’d tell me he couldn’t get enough of me. Soon he’d thrust so deep I’d cry out in joy and pain. He’d continue to thrust his cock deep, deep inside me. Soon he would moan at that moment of his climax. HIM. HIM. HIM.
Kit Connor has always led a safe, cautious life. But when Kit’s friend points out that her erotic writing lacks something, she decides to attend a Sexual Healing group to improve her knowledge.
Kit expects to find the gritty underbelly of sex, and instead finds louche, laidback, sex-loving Dillon Holt.
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