by Amber Nation
I was ready to have a shower and a set of clean clothes to change into and that wouldn’t be possible until I had my luggage in my grasp. Mom told me that I could borrow an outfit of hers but even her jogging suits seemed a little before my time. So I forewent freshly laundered, outdated clothing for the wrinkly t-shirt and jeans that I had worn on the plane, threw my hair up in a messy bun on top of my head, grabbed a set of car keys from my dad and jetted out the door before my mother was any the wiser.
After double parking at the airport entrance, I rushed inside to see if my prayers had been answered and my luggage had made it to the correct airport. I really hoped for the airline’s sake that it would be there. After having to wait in a monstrous line, while having to pee, no less, I was eventually able to speed-walk to the bathroom with my hot pink rolling suitcase trailing behind me.
The first bathroom, which was the closest, was inevitably closed for repairs so I picked up my speed while hearing the wheels of my suitcase fall into each little divot of the concrete tiled floor beneath me. When I finally found a bathroom which was open for business I breathed a major sigh of relief.
Leaving the stall, I walked up to the sink to wash my hands. I briefly chanced a glance at my unruly hair as it was falling down from the messy bun I had placed it in and my makeup less face, disgusted at what was staring back at me. I seriously hoped for my sanity and lack of embarrassment that I didn’t run into anyone I knew, but I should’ve known that the one day you look a fright you will run into everyone you know, including the least expected.
I tossed my used paper towel into the trash bin on my way out of the restroom and cut directly in front of a crowd as I tried to make my way to the front doors. I didn’t falter my pace until an extremely large frame stopped right smack dab in front of me causing me to halt in place, my sneakers making a squeaking sound on the floor.
Huffing with annoyance, I blew a stray hair out of my face and looked up to the rude stranger only to be graced with a huge smile of someone who wasn’t a stranger at all.
“Dean?” I exclaimed with disbelief and excitement.
“In the fucking flesh,” he boasted with almost as much enthusiasm. His voice was deeper than I remembered and his stature and height had changed drastically in 15 years. He was a giant then, even though he was always on the skinny side, but he had gotten even taller and filled out his shirt extremely well.
His smile faltered as he crossed his arms in front of his chest and wrinkled a brow, “Eden Richardt, is it really you or a figment of my imagination? Hell must’ve definitely frozen over for you to step foot back in Oregon after fifteen long years.” His rudeness was well deserved but it stung more than I anticipated. I knew I shouldn’t have expected open arms when I came strolling back into town but it was a nice thought. From the look on his face, I’d hurt him deeply and that wasn’t at all my intention.
“Dean…The only thing I can say is I’m sorry and even then that won’t be nearly enough. I was young and naïve and with what happened all those years ago, I couldn’t stick around.”
“Eden, what did happen?”
“It really doesn’t matter now. It’s so great to see you though.” I lifted up an edge of my mouth in a small smile. I wasn’t expecting him to return it but it took me completely by surprise when his arms engulfed my small frame and he squeezed me tightly in an all-encompassing hug.
“Even though I don’t know what happened, I can’t stay mad at you for long. It’s too damn good to see you, babe,” he spoke into my hair which made me remember that I looked like a downright mess which made me tense up a bit before relaxing into his embrace. The magnitude of how much I had missed him didn’t hit me until that very moment.
“Listen, I have to go. I just now got my luggage even though I landed yesterday. But I’m sure I’ll see you around and definitely at the reunion.”
He looked like a kid who had lost his puppy and I could tell that he was on the verge of dredging up things from the past that I didn’t want to rehash in my disheveled state. Or more like a person from the past.
I pulled my cellphone out of my back pocket as I quickly walked off and scrolled down to Julia’s name. She answered after a few rings.
“Hey! I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon, how’s it going?”
“Well my plane ride sucked and then the airline lost my luggage. So I had to come back today and of course I look like junk and ran right into one of my old best friends, Dean.”
“Oh shit,” she said, knowing just exactly my meaning behind my freak-out. “Well at least it was just Dean and not Baylor.”
“Too true,” I replied. I was still walking towards the exit doors at the front of the airport and ended up walking along one of those moving sidewalks that was headed in the opposite direction. There were several people on it, quickly passing by me and I tried to keep my head down so I didn’t have to make eye contact while I was chatting with Julia. After a break in people I briefly looked up and was looking directly into a pair of incandescent green eyes which had been featured in more dreams in my lifetime than I cared to admit.
“Uh, Jules, I gotta let you go,” I said faintly as I began lowering my phone from my ear.
I could hear her yelling into the phone, “You better not hang up on me!”
I was transformed back into that naïve girl from fifteen years ago with a crush on her best friend. My heart was beating wildly in my chest as his eyes never strayed from mine. All my movement had ceased and I was standing in place, but he was still coming towards me on that moving walkway. Raising my hand which still had my phone in its clutch, I did a simple wave and smiled. Although it wasn’t how I had wanted our reunion to play out, I would take what I could get. I mouthed his name, “Baylor,” but he still seemed to be in a trance, almost like he wasn’t expecting me to be in this airport, or even to be in Oregon. Somehow he managed to look the same as he had all those years before, yet all grown up at the same time. His brown hair was neatly gelled and styled and he had the slightest hint of scruff on his chin. I felt my stomach tighten as I looked at him and remembered the feel of his lips on mine.
The walkway moved past me and he pivoted to keep looking in my direction. Since my life revolved around music, I was instantly hit with the feeling that the song ”Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds should have been playing throughout the airport at that moment.
Would he call out my name?
Did he even recognize me?
I started out with the biggest smile plastered on my face only to end up with a feeling of utter despair, all while he looked dumfounded as if I were the last person on earth he wanted to see.
At the end of the walkway a girl with bright blonde hair yelled, “Daddy!” which made his attention waver from me to her and there was no doubt in my mind that she was his daughter.
I was severely confused and hurt. I just couldn’t understand his lack of emotion from seeing me; he was the one who sought me out wanting to reconnect. It wasn’t as if my beauty stunned him into silence; I was dirty and wearing the same wrinkled mess for the second day in a row. I sighed deeply in resignation and continued on to my father’s car out in the drop-off lanes. I wasn’t so sure that my decision to come back home was the best option.
Hearing a faint noise coming from my phone, I realized that I was still connected with Jules. I replaced the phone to my ear only to jerk it away at her constant yelling.
“Julia! I’m sorry,” I tried to get in.
“What the hell is going on? One minute you were there then nothing!”
“Baylor, I just saw Baylor,” I yelled, trying to be heard over her incessant chatter.
“Oh shit!” She screeched, “What happened? I didn’t hear any words exchanged.”
“That’s because there weren’t. He acted almost as if he didn’t know I’d be here which doesn’t make any sense, because he sought me out.”
“Maybe he was just stunned to see you so soon? You know, completely thr
ew him off kilter to see you standing before him.” I supposed she could be right. I shrugged my shoulders by way of a response, as if she were standing right in front of me. Once I made it outside of the airport I let her go promising to call her again if there were any more interactions with my past.
I slid my phone back into my pocket and looked up at the lined cars in the loading/unloading zone and was hit with another wave of nostalgia. Sitting there parked just three cars up from my fathers, was Baylor’s ’85 maroon Camaro. Call it instinct, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was his. I couldn’t believe that he still had it after so many years. The body had more wear and tear such as a little rust on the bumper, but I imagined him taking care of it with precision and grace. With a man like Baylor taking care of it and showing it the attention it deserved, it was no wonder it still ran.
“Eden?” the sound of a woman’s voice hijacked me from the lust-induced state I was in after seeing Baylor and his car as she came up and pulled me in for a friendly hug.
I slowly looked to the left and then to the right wondering who the hell this wackado was and why she was invading my personal space.
She finally released me from her clutches and I was able to take the first real look at her face, trying to wrack my brain to place where she knew me from, and then it dawned on me, “Marcie?”
Whirling a hand in the air, as if to say, the one and only. “I know, I look different. After college I lost the glasses.” That was it, the defining factor! “It’s so great to see you! Hey, a bunch of us are going to Tillie’s Tavern tomorrow evening if you’d care to join us?”
I knew that I had nothing better to do so I promptly accepted her invitation and we exchanged cell numbers. I couldn’t resist wondering in the back of my mind if I would run into Baylor there as well and we’d finally get our chance to talk.
Chapter 4
Baylor
“Daddy!” I heard Norah yell which pulled me out of my gawking trance. Was that…? Was Eden really standing in front of me? I couldn’t actually believe it. I almost wanted it to be a mirage or a figment of my imagination due to the idiotic way I just stood there frozen in time, watching her as I passed by.
The walkway ended and Norah ran in my direction. When I craned my neck to look back where Eden had been standing just seconds ago, it was empty, she was gone. I knew my expression was dumbfounded when I focused back on Norah who was running my way with Dean trailing behind her.
“I found Uncle Dean!” she exclaimed as she leaped up to give me a brief hug.
Dean took in my surprised and no doubt flushed expression and his lips upturned into a sly smile as he pointed a finger at me, “You saw Eden too, I can read it all over your face!” Norah immediately dropped her arms as she tried to look behind me searching for the object of my teenage obsession.
“She’s already gone,” I admitted with a hint of sadness and defeat in my voice. “She surprised me; I honestly didn’t think that she would come back. I couldn’t even find the words to speak to her or even attempt to move.”
“I talked to her right after I got off my plane,” Dean muttered and my eyes instantly snapped up to his. “Yeah, I saw someone who I thought was her rushing to the bathroom so I hung back and waited until they came out. When she emerged I knew it was her, she was in a disheveled state, but it was definitely Eden!”
“What did you say to her?” The desperation in my voice was unlike any I had ever heard, but I had to know what was said between them. Did she mention me?
“She mentioned that she came in yesterday but had to come back today to retrieve her luggage. I was stupid and tried to ask what happened all those years ago, she clammed up and took off. She did say that she was going to the reunion.”
So many different thoughts and scenarios were playing in my mind. Did she bring her husband along with her for the reunion? What did happen all those years ago? I didn’t know if I would ever get my chance to ask her, but as long as she was alone I would make it my mission to actively seek her out.
Dean was dying to go to Tillie’s Tavern, so the next evening Norah went to Polly’s house for a sleepover so we could go. It wasn’t unheard of for Norah to stay at Polly’s on a school night, but once she heard that Eden was actually in town she asked to stay for the entire week. She wanted to be ‘out of my hair’ in case I ran into Eden to see if there were ‘any feelings still lingering after all these years.’ I couldn’t contain my laughter after those exact words left my daughter’s lips. I didn’t know where she got her intelligence from, it definitely wasn’t from her mother and well, to tell you the truth I don’t think it was from me either.
Pulling open the thick wooden door to the oldest tavern in Oregon, the smell of beer permeated the air while the drunken singing of karaoke threatened to burst my eardrums. I had forgotten that it was Monday and karaoke was on the menu; if I’d remembered I would have chosen another place. Dean came up behind me and slapped his hand on my back, “Damn, I’ve missed this place.”
I would miss this place too if I had moved away. The beer was cheap, and the down home cooking by Tillie herself was top notch. Roll all of those amazing factors in with the ambiance and you had a place to call home. The entire structure of the building was held up with exposed wooden beams that ran parallel on the ceiling and vertical into the floor. Over the years the long wooden bar itself had been replaced several times, but they always tried to make it look authentic to the time period. Several beers were on tap and I didn’t hesitate in dodging people on my way to order a pitcher for the two of us.
I reached the bar, and saw that Tillie’s granddaughter Maisie was working behind it with a white towel tossed over her shoulder and her perfect tits on display for everyone to see. Her normal attire was always a black tank top and that night was no different; once she realized it was me standing there her entire demeanor changed and a flirty smile graced her lips. It was no secret that Maisie had a thing for me, as she tried to get me to go home with her every time I came in. She was beautiful enough in her own right but I couldn’t focus enough to appreciate the beauty that was before me. Not with the fact that I had seen my first true love yesterday and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to get her off of my mind.
From behind me I heard the song changing and a bunch of women giggling from up on the stage. I turned just in time to see Eden and Marcie both take microphones from off the stands, place them up to their lips and began singing their song.
Marcie’s eyes had to constantly stay on the screen that was feeding her the lyrics but Eden seemed to know them by heart as she danced across the stage. She had always made it a point to stay up to date with all the upcoming music back in high school, since she wanted to go into Radio Broadcasting. I wondered if that’s what she ended up doing.
”Kiss” by Prince was their song of choice and it made me chuckle when Eden made kiss noises during the beat of the song. I could tell from all the way back at the bar, which was on the other side of the tavern from the stage, that she was more than a little inebriated and she had absolutely no idea that I was in attendance. So I took the opportunity to perch my ass on one of the unoccupied barstools and watched with amusement as she flaunted herself around the stage. At different points during the song, she and Marcie would glance at each other and end up busting out in a fit of giggles.
Dean came over to where I was sitting and leaned up against the counter, “I got us a table over there,” he pointed and I just nodded my head, not taking my eyes off of the stage. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he asked.
There was no hesitation on my part, “Even more so than I remember.” Her hair was still the same chestnut color, but it looked like she had added some highlights and layers to give it a bit of definition. She was wearing a black dress that hugged her curves and accentuated the most glorious pair of breasts that I think I had ever seen; those were definitely new and Maisie now had some competition in that department. But I would almost bet that Eden’s were all rea
l, all her, because that was just the type of person that she was. Maisie’s on the other hand cost her a pretty penny to look that good.
She tipped her head back and laughed and just seeing the action of her smiling made my heart ache. What had happened to cause us to lose all that time?
The song quickly ended and I didn’t want to see her free spirit exit the stage. It was almost as if she could read my mind, even though she had no idea I was there. She held up a finger and spoke into the microphone, “One more! I want to do one more song.” She looked at Marcie to gauge her reaction and she shrugged a shoulder and went along with Eden’s request.
She hurried down off of the stage in her heels which was another first for me to see and went to type in her request onto the computer. Once she was settled back in place on the stage her choice started playing on the speakers.
”Do What You Want” by Lady GaGa came on, and it was unclear to me why she would’ve picked that song, but it was sexy as hell. Watching her sing about doing whatever you wanted to her body, I couldn’t shut off my mind from the numerous places I imagined that I could take her. I finally moved from my place at the bar and went to the table that Dean had saved for us and took a seat. It wasn’t long until Eden’s eyes glanced past our table and then landed back on us, causing her to falter in her words. She stood rooted in place and began singing again with absolutely no emotion. I wished like hell that she wouldn’t have noticed us; it was almost as if the life was sucked out of her. As soon as that song ended, she rushed off the stage and to her table on the other side of the building.