by Alona Jarden
"Don, open the door!" I knocked on it firmly. "I'm not going anywhere, so you'd better just open the door and let me in."
"I'm sorry," he immediately said as he stood in front of me with his teary eyes.
"Yes. I've heard your apologies before." I smiled at him and went into his house again, without waiting for an invite. "I'll start by saying that everything that happened here before wasn’t very nice of you."
"I agree," He shook his head, yet went on excusing himself. "But sometimes I'm just so tired of being nice all the time." He closed the door behind me.
"Well, that makes perfect sense because sometimes, I'm so tired of being sensitive, which makes me act like a real bitch." I sat down on the sofa in the living room and tilted my head to its side. "Now tell me a little bit about her."
"About Sarah?"
"Yes."
"I don't know if I can." He cleared some of the snack wrappers off the couch and sat down in front of me. "Even if I wanted to talk to you about her, I'm not sure where to start."
"Start at the very end and go back as far as you can." I leaned back and listened to him for several hours.
He told me how Sarah loved to munch on Cheetos during the last few months of her pregnancy. A big smile covered his face as he described how she washed one snack pack after the other down with peach-flavored soda.
Little by little, the tears ceased to drop, his fake smile looked like it was coming from a genuine place, and his life experiences with Sarah were bursting out of him with dizzying flux. He pointed to different pictures around us, told me all about the memories that were behind them, and breathed at ease. It seemed that every piece of furniture, sculpture, or design had some logic and argument that Sarah took into account, and it was obvious that he'd held onto all that since it helped him keep her present in his life.
"She sounds like an amazing woman."
"She was. She was an amazing woman."
"It's okay to say that you still love her, Don."
"She's dead." He was as if ashamed to admit it.
"Casper, the friendly ghost is also dead, and I proudly admit that I love him."
"But I love you, Michelle." He took my breath away and went on. "I understand that it's hard for you to accept that, and we promised that we wouldn't take our relationship in a romantic direction for now, but you have to understand that I have no problem admitting that I still love Sarah. I do. Of course, I still love her. She was my wife, and she will always be my wife. What's hard for me to admit aloud is the fact that I love you. That's the only thing that’s made my life difficult in recent days."
There was nothing to say, so I leaned over and pressed my lips to his almost immediately.
I knew it was the wrong moment to renew the romantic nature of our relationship, yet I was tired of pretending that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to happen. I was tired of waiting for a sign and always doing the right and calculated thing. I was tired of struggling with my desires, which, to tell the truth, have long been about kissing him.
At first, Don flinched and stepped back. His gaze carefully examined mine with much thought for a short while, then he closed his eyes again and pressed his lips back to mine.
I don’t know how long we remained like that, clutching and detaching our lips from one another. As if reclaiming our breath, we looked around, closed our eyes, and looked at each other again like these were the first steps we took toward each other. Like we hadn’t already lost our way once on a drunken night.
Don's palm reached behind my back as his tongue glided gently over mine, and my head spun. I touched him. Every part of him. I slid my hands from his pretty face to his broad shoulders, to his rounded waistline, and I wasn’t as disgusted as I thought I would be. On the contrary. I was suddenly filled with passion for him. I was filled with wants and desires to continue and drift off with him to experiences I never thought I would dare to face, and I sighed with pleasure when his touch made it clear that he felt the same way.
Hours later that day, I opened my eyes, and darkness was all around us.
Don was asleep beside me, in his wife's and his bed, and a happy smile came across my face as I remembered all that happened in the last hours between us.
I looked at his calm closed eyes and hoped his sleep was full of pleasant dreams. Although we explored one another in what I could only describe as a burst of longings, he remained in his clothes, as I remained in mine.
Just as it was wrong to sleep with him two months ago out of drunkenness, so it was wrong to do so out of sadness or grief.
Images of Don's kisses going down my neck were pleasantly replaying in my head, and I giggled to myself. I never needed to tell him where to stop, as he never made it close to any of my imaginary boundaries. He moved his lips from right to left, leaned carefully over me, flatteringly stroked the curves of my body, buried his head in my chest, my stomach, my neck and then returned to kiss my lips for a while, making it redundant for me to ask him to.
Maybe that was the reason I felt so complete and assured as I stared at him leisurely sleeping beside me. He made it easy to wake up without feeling confused, agitated or heavy-hearted in his wife's and his bed.
"Good morning, sunshine." He suddenly opened his eyes to the extent of a very small and weary crack.
"It's not morning yet, Don. Go back to sleep."
"I don't want to sleep." He pulled me closer to him. "I don't ever want to go back to sleep again. I slept long enough. No more," he managed to say before closing his eyes again and falling asleep with me wrapped in his arms.
"I'm sorry, Adam. I slept at my boyfriend's last night." I mixed the salad ingredients I made in Don's kitchen.
Three more months had passed by this time, and I was used to spending my nights with Don, waking up late and calling him my boyfriend.
"Michelle, that’s not okay."
"I know, Adam. I overslept."
"This is the third time you missed out on a workout this month," Adam scolded me.
"I know, and I'm sorry. I don't understand what's with me. I've been so tired lately," I lied. I knew exactly what was causing me to be so tired, and he was still snoring in the bedroom.
"Well, come on. Go get organized and get here ASAP."
"I wish I could, but I'm calling to cancel for today. I have an early meeting at work, so..."
"Michelle, you've been letting your training go, and it's a shame. Don't be surprised if you won't see any results again this week."
"I promise that tomorrow I'll show up on time and without any excuses," I swore and closed the conversation with him.
"I really don't see why you continue to go to the gym with such intensity." Don, my steady boyfriend, came out of bed and sat down in front of me at the breakfast table I had set for us.
"I'm determined to lose the weight, um... No, no. I meant to say I'm determined to be healthy!" I laughed with him.
"Isn't this healthy enough for you?" He waved the pile of baby spinach leaves scrawled on his fork. "Do you know that in an article I read, it said that baby spinach leaves are picked violently from its parents before it was even done breastfeeding?"
"Is that so? That's just plain vicious." I giggled.
"I know! That's why I thought you should know about it. Every time you make a salad, you're actually supporting the baby spinach leaf kidnapping industry. My God," he said, grimacing in disgust as he put the leaves in his mouth, "think about the massacre!"
I smiled, shared breakfast with him, kissed him goodbye, and left for work.
It had been a little over three months since we became a couple. He was my boyfriend for all intents and purposes, and I was his girlfriend. From the moment I achieved Ian's challenge and agreed to admit aloud that I had fallen in love with Don, everything else just seems to work itself out.
I took advantage of the openness between us, which began on the third anniversary of his wife's death, to share my desire to take things slowly, and indeed, it seemed we were finally o
n the King's Road.
We fell asleep together, fully dressed, in each other's arms, almost every night since.
Occasionally, we gave in to a burst of passion that dragged us to the depths of ways I never dared to walk in, but even after returning to the straight and stable road, I felt that we had traveled exactly the distances I could bear.
"I don't see why you're still stressing out before every weigh-in, Michelle. I can see on your face that you lost a lot of weight." Noel greeted me with coffee mugs she had prepared for both of us.
"I freak out because I can't understand what the hell is going on with me. How can it be that Don and I eat the same things, exercise in the same way and yet, he continues to drop the weight so radically while I... I roughly stay the same give or take a few single digit pounds." I wondered if she could see I was lying, since every week, after seeing the disappointing results on the weigh-in, I would gobble up some stuff that was definitely on Ian's 'prohibited' list. "I lose half a pound at best and then gained it back at worst," I finished in my claims about my body, which lately hadn’t caused me much happiness in the form of weight loss.
"And what about your coach's explanation?" Noel kept trying to encourage me. "He said that muscle weighs three times as fat, right? You're exercising a lot, Michelle. Maybe you're dropping fat tissue, but gaining muscle mass?"
"If I ever do believe in such ridiculous argument, shoot me, okay?"
"It's not that far-fetched, Michelle. You must see some results from your hard work. I'm sure you've dropped some sizes in your clothes."
"There are some results, but that damned scale... Damn them and damn him! Ever since I got a boyfriend..."
"While we’re speaking of him, when will I meet this boyfriend of yours?" Noel complained about me not wanting to mix what I had with Don with the rest of my world.
"Not yet." I breathed deep. "I'm not ready for it yet." I added and paused.
She knew better than to keep pushing me to that corner. This wasn’t the first time that she'd asked to finally meet Don, and she also wasn’t the only one who was intrigued about him.
I explained numerous times to her, to my mother, and to everyone who wanted to get to know Don that our relationship was still not in a stable enough position to be exposed to the outside world.
While I believed that to be the absolute truth, I wondered if there would ever come a day when I'd feel ready to introduce myself as his girlfriend to everyone that mattered to me. Especially if the results of our hard work would continue to be shown in the same direction as they had for the past three months.
Every week, as we each took turns on the scale, we found that Don shed between eight and eleven pounds while I was more or less stuck in weight.
I just didn't understand how it could be.
I took the healthy diet regimen more seriously than he did. Well… almost as seriously as he did. I mean… At least as far as he knew, I took it seriously because without disclosing it to anyone, I occasionally strayed from it. But I did take very long walks, and I did a lot more exercise to atone for my sins. Still, as we stood side by side and looked in the mirror, the eighty-eight pounds that came off Don made him very close to being the man he was in the pictures still hanging on the walls of his house and I looked about the same as I did when we met, though I had actually shed forty-three pounds from my weight, not that it made any difference in my appearance.
Why? Why the hell can't I get to the amazing results I reached before I brought him back to my life? Do I have to be lonely and miserable to achieve them? What the hell?
Chapter 22
Don
"Do you know you're even prettier when you whine?" I kissed her nose. "We both knew this day would come. You wouldn't have accepted dealing with it even if it arrived in a year’s time."
"Who are these 'we' you claim that knew about this superfluous day coming? You and the voices in your head? Because I didn’t take part in any discussions about meeting your parents today."
"Oh, would you pipe down? I promise you're going to have a great time." I opened my car door for her and lightheartedly continued. "You have no reason to fear meeting them. They’re harmless."
"It's not just about meeting your parents, Don. I hate meeting parents in general. They always have a compassionate look on their faces when they see me."
"Nonsense." I tried to dismiss her words, although, in recent years, I had come to know that look she was talking about whenever someone who knew me from before Sarah's death saw what I’d done to myself, yet I continued to pretend that her first meeting with my parents was meaningless. "It'll be fun. You'll see."
"You should at least try to look reliable when you lie." She frowned at me. "Maybe your family isn’t as crazy as mine, but I'm sure family gatherings are never fun in any family."
"They are in mine. I swear it, okay?"
I was able to change the topic of conversation just for a few minutes before a brief silence quickly brought Michelle's concerns back to our short distance drive.
"I honestly think it's too soon. Why would they even want to invite me to your father's birthday party?"
"What do you mean 'too soon'?" I was glad we were already halfway there, and that going back wasn’t a valid request anymore. "My mom has been begging me to meet you for months now."
"Months? How many months?"
"She's been asking about you from the first day I told her about us."
"And when was that? How soon did you decide to tell her about me?"
"She heard your name two days after I joined the support group."
"What could you possibly have to tell her, two days after you first saw me?"
"Michelle, it's time for you to get acquainted with my family. It's been over eight months since we met, and my mom is dying to get to know the girl who lets me touch her boobies."
Michelle coughed slightly, then got very quiet.
I'd been trying to initiate a get together between her and my mother for weeks, whether an organized or a spontaneous meeting. I tried to convince her to come to every Friday dinner, I invited her to my cousin's wedding, I kept on trying and asked her time and time again to join me in our families activities, but she insisted that I wait for her to be more complete with her outside looks. She claimed that the first impression was very important to her and feared that her current state would leave a negative one on the important people in my life. No matter how many times I told her she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, she couldn’t see herself through my eyes. In that matter, as with almost every other matter, Michelle listened to Michelle and only to her.
"Crap!" She moved uncomfortably in her seat.
"What is it? Is your back bothering you again?"
"Yeah. It's really annoying. I thought it would pass by now. I already missed two workouts because of this weird pain this week."
"And what did the doctor say about it? How long can it last?"
"Eh... The doctor? He said that… Ummm…"
"You didn’t go to the doctor, did you?"
"Ummm... No. I overslept and missed the appointment." She looked down, and a guilty smile crept up to her face.
"Missed the appointment, uh? Who do you think you're fooling?"
"Why do I have to go to him, anyway? I know what he'll say. Obesity! He's said it enough times to me already."
"And maybe this time he'll say something else? Maybe there really is something wrong with you?"
"What could possibly be wrong other than my being overweight? I've dropped about sixty pounds, but that's not enough to make him believe I'm on a real diet."
"You know..." I'd been struggling to find a way and tell her that she hadn't really been on a steady diet and workout plan for a while. "It wouldn’t be accurate to say that..."
"Oh, shut up!" Her smile hinted that she knew exactly what I was about to say. "I'm not going to a GP who claims that my very being weighs on me and that my body is collapsing under its own burden rather than
taking my complaints seriously."
"Then change doctors or..." I began resolutely, but then didn’t go on and Michelle was smart enough not to urge me to finish that sentence.
A lot has changed in recent months. Since we started dating officially, she'd been able to get her weight loss obsession into more reasonable proportions. On the one hand, I was very happy that I was finally able to talk to her about things besides calorie counting or new workout methods, but on the other hand, it was hard to ignore the fact that her spirit fell every time the slowdown in her results was noted in the weekly weigh-in.
"Ugh..." She suddenly curled up in her seat again. "God damn. This pain is just…"
"Enough, Michelle. Either go to the doctor or stop complaining about it."
"I can complain about anything I want." She crossed her arms like the little immature child that she sometimes was.
"Not to my ears, okay?" I took a deep breath and continued. "I too have boundaries, and you are very close to crossing one of them. Either take care of yourself or stop complaining that you're hurting. I'm serious."
"You can be serious and draw imaginary boundaries for yourself, but I was born with a feminine birth-given right to complain my ass off. You, as a man, have a born right to listen. You can feel sorry for me and say, 'oh, no, that sounds horrible,' but you can't tell me not to complain. That's just the way nature goes. Open Wikipedia and see for yourself if you don’t believe me, but do your manly part and support me."
"I'll support you." I nodded, and a dull pain in my stomach convinced me to schedule an appointment with my awesome GP without telling her about it as a new plan of action started building in my head. "From now on, I'll support you."
"Support me, how?" Her eyes gleamed at me.
"If you're in pain, I'll say 'oh, no' and will finish by calling you 'my beautiful Michelle.' Is that supportive enough for you?" She smiled leisurely at me, and I continued. "I also promise to ease your back pain with a pampering oil massage when we get home."