FEELS LIKE THE FIRST TIME

by Scott Hildreth

  I stood in realization, as I looked at the photograph, that although my mother never accepted me as that fatherly figure, she accepted me as her partner. Her partner in life. Her soul mate. Her significant other.

  I stood and stared. And thought. The reality hit me. Although I never accepted my mother as being enough, for not being a mother and a father, she accepted me as being her child and her husband.

  And I cried.

  Chapter 22

  ERIK. I couldn’t change who I had become, or who I was. I could, however, accept it and embrace it. Honesty, realization, and acceptance were the three steps that were required to allow us to work through our character defects.

  If we exhibited certain traits, characteristics, or behaviors that were inherent to who we were, we must be honest, admit it, realize that it is so, and accept it as being part of who we were. This honesty, realization, and acceptance allowed us to make adjustments in our life. Having this understanding to be who we truly were allowed us to embrace it, accept it, and live a healthy life. Denial led to an otherwise miserable existence.

  In taking my own personal inventory and being truly honest - I realized, and now was trying to accept, that I had developed through my psychosexual developmental stages, into a person that wanted to take out my frustrations, unresolved issues, and lack of acceptance of my mother, as a whole, on my sexual partners. This was part of who I was and was not going to change.

  I could be in a healthy relationship, I was certain of that. I was not a violent person. No one, in a relationship with me, would be subject to harm. But, it was important for me to know what it was that I would require of a partner. It was of further importance that I brought it to the attention of my potential partner, and get her acceptance of my desires as being part of what she wanted, desired, or required of me.

  I looked up at the disco ball, took a drink of my coffee, and realized; I was not broken, I was an individual.

  I grabbed my phone and sent Kelli a text:

  Erik Ead: What are you going to do when I tell you to do something?

  I placed my phone on the table and took a drink of coffee. The phone beeped. I picked it up and looked at the screen.

  Kelli: Do it, and smile.

  I read the text and smiled. I typed another text and pressed send.

  Erik Ead: What are you willing to do for me? To make me happy?

  I held the phone in my hand and turned toward Warren. He looked up from the espresso machine. Warren knew who he was. No different than me or Kelli, he enjoyed pleasing others. By serving them the best coffee in town. He embraced his inner being and loved who he was. He returned the smile.

  The phone beeped.

  Kelli: Whatever you tell me to. I will do anything for you to make you happy. ANYTHING.

  I typed one last message and pressed send.

  Erik Ead: I own you, Baby Girl. I own you, and I am proud. Know that.

  The phone immediately beeped. I looked at the screen.

  Kelli: :)

  I read the message and smiled. Warren looked at me and smiled.

  “What are you smiling about, Erik?” Warren asked.

  “Oh, this girl I’ve been seeing,” I responded.

  “Baby Girl?”

  “Yes, Baby Girl,” I responded, smiling.

  “What about her?”

  “Well, just trying to decide what to do with her, Warren,” I responded, looking at my phone.

  “Do with her what you do with all the girls, Erik.”

  “I’m thinking not, Warren…not with this one…” I responded.

  Chapter 23

  KELLI. My lease agreement was up in two weeks. As always, I had procrastinated as long as I could to consider moving out, making arrangements to move, and getting ready for grad school. I needed to make a decision about grad school, and I needed to do it now. I know my father would just die if I didn’t go to school and take over the family dealership. I didn’t want to disappoint him, and I didn’t want him to be upset with a decision I had made.

  I felt like Erik and I could be in a relationship and make it work if he would consider it. I knew we wouldn’t ever be in a relationship if I went to grad school at Columbia. He wouldn’t be able to, nor would I expect him to wait.

  So much had changed this summer. I had spent my entire life, sexually, needing no one. I had always felt like I could just roam from one man to another, using them for what I wanted from them, and that want was sex.

  I had always said, being single is smarter than being in the wrong relationship.

  Being with Erik wasn’t wrong. What I wanted a man to provide me wasn’t typical of a woman. I knew now, after talking to Erik in the coffee shop, that I was not broken. I was not weird, or strange. There was nothing wrong with me. I was just me, and I needed to accept myself for who I was. I needed a man to sexually treat me the way I liked to be treated without exposing myself to the dangers of abuse. When I found that man, I needed to hold onto him like he was my means of survival because he would be.

  Erik Ead was that man.

  When I was a little girl, my dad would sleep with me. I held his finger in my hand. I didn’t hold it because he was my dad, I held it because it gave me an assurance that he was there, and that he loved me. I told myself that as long as I had his finger in my hand, we were connected, and that he loved me. I never told him why I held it. I kept it a secret.

  When I would wake up in the middle of the night, sometimes it would be gone. I would reach around in the dark and find it, and grip it in my hand. Squeezing his finger was my way of telling him I loved him and knowing that he loved me.

  I thought about it, and I wanted to talk to my dad, and I wanted to talk to Erik. I owed it to my father to talk to him about this and to Erik. I opened my text screen and scrolled to Erik’s name, and typed him a text.

  Kelli: Part of me has been missing my entire life. I have lived with a void in my soul. You fill that void, and you fill it perfectly. I love you, and I don’t want to lose you. Life without you in it is not living. I need you in my life to survive.

  I read what I had typed. Love. We had not discussed love. Erik was a very deep person, and although he had a very sensitive side, and could be very caring, he was not one to be pressured into anything. In fact, he had proven many times through what he had done, and stories that he had told, that he would walk away before he would allow anyone to tell him or try to convince him to do anything.

  If I was going to consider losing the support of my father and staying here to build a relationship with Erik, I needed to know that he was at least going to be receptive to me loving him. I reread the message.

  If he was not willing to love me, or try to develop a love for me, I could not do this. I had to be a woman, and not a girl, and go to grad school. If he would love me, my life would be complete. He would fill my void, make me whole.

  I remembered the day he came into the dealership.

  It’s Erik with a “K”, Kelli.

  Enunciate.

  Follow me to my motorcycle.

  I pressed send.

  Chapter 24

  GENE. I had spent three years in Vietnam and seventeen more years after that god forsaken mess of a war was over in the U.S. Navy. Twenty fucking years. I lived on base, saving every penny I possibly could to try to spend my life succeeding at something.

  I never intended to do any of this, or to build any of this for myself. I had always intended on doing it for my family. My wife and my daughter - the two loves of my life.

  Women, to me, had always been like literature, and not like arithmetic. They weren’t something you could just calculate or figure out. They were un-fucking-predictable and always led you in a direction that you had no way of knowing where or how it may end.

  After my daughter was born, my wife began using heroin again. She had promised right after the war that she was done with it, and that she would never use it again. From what I saw in the war, people weren’t able to stop using heroi
n and stay off of it for any period of time. That fucking drug killed people and killed their soul if it didn’t kill them first.

  I bottle fed Kelli and tried to get Margaret some help to get off the drug. She couldn’t breastfeed because she had that damned drug in her system. That damned woman. Why she ever tried to start using the drug again – after being off of it for two years, was beyond me.

  When Margaret overdosed, I left Kelli with my parents, and took her body back to San Diego to be buried. I never recovered from losing her. She was the one woman I loved, and the only woman I loved. I was a firm believer that there was one person on this earth that we were meant to love, and that person, if we were able to find them, made life worth living. Without that person, we lived an incomplete life.

  After Margaret passed, my love for Kelli became so much different. Kelli was the love of my life. When I bottle fed her, I thought of Margaret. I spent many nights with Kelli while she was young, guessing at what to do to make her be as comfortable as she could be. She slept in my bed for three years, beside me.

  She got where she would hold my finger in her little hand while we slept. Sometimes, when I woke up in the night, I realized it was Kelli, reaching over me and trying to find my finger to hold so she could go back to sleep. When I finally decided that she was getting too old for me to have in bed with me, she cried like she was a baby again.

  I remembered going into her room, and sitting beside the bed talking to her, and trying to explain everything about why she couldn’t sleep with me anymore. It’s time for you to grow up and be a big girl, Muffin. Be a big girl for daddy and sleep in your room. Make daddy proud of you and sleep here like a big girl. I would hold my hand on the bed, and she would squeeze my finger until she fell asleep.

  After she fell asleep, I’d walk into the other room and cry. I’d cry for Margaret. I’d cry for Kelli, and I would cry knowing that the rest of my fucking life would be spent alone, except for Kelli. I could never have another woman in my life. There was one love in my life, and she was gone. No one on earth could ever replace Margaret.

  The military taught me plenty about life, and I have kept those thoughts with me throughout my life after the military. Discipline. Planning. Implementation. These things have provided me with a dealership that is recognized by BMW of North America as one of the greatest dealerships in the nation. These types of things weren’t handed to anyone. You earned them. I earned everything I have in life, and I earned this, fair and square, through hard work.

  When Kelli was in grade school, she stood out. Kelli always stood out from the rest of the kids in school. Really, truth be known, Kelli has stood out anywhere she has ever gone. The most beautiful girl in the entire world and smart, too. She was in third grade when they wanted to move her up a grade in school. I told them I would not consider it, because there was no telling what problems might become of it later. They could not provide me with any form of statistical data to support that there would be no problems in the future – from her being the youngest one in the class – so the answer remained no.

  Kelli never really dated anyone, and that had always made me happy. She had boys that were friends, but she had never been one to go out and date boys. She was in high school when boys started coming around, but she never had any interest in them to speak of. When she was twelve, I told her for the first time about my desire for her to run the dealership when she was older. We have talked about it every year since then, around her birthday. It was always something I looked forward to, letting Kelli know that she was the most important thing in my life, and that I wanted to give to her what my life’s accomplishment had been.

  A woman in a dealership had always, right or wrong, been looked down upon. There still weren’t too many women salespersons in a dealership - they come and go, but it was more of a man’s world. I never quite understood that, and I have had several women on my sales staff, but the men always threw a fucking fit about it, and sooner or later, the women would leave.

  Kelli being the owner of this dealership had been my goal since she was one year old. I thought, when Kelli was born, that I would sell it by the time I was fifty-five. Eventually, we would all move to another state and live through Kelli’s high school years in a place like California. Margaret and I retired, and Kelli going to school. Kelli would meet a good man, and live across town from us in a house with her husband. That dream was shattered by Margaret’s love for that fucking dope. God damned woman.

  My parents were the only ones that ever knew what happened to Margaret. When Margaret was on that damned dope, I told everyone she was a drunk. Everyone in town thought she was a drinker, and that she couldn’t get off the bottle. I could never tell anyone that my Margaret was a heroin junkie. I loved her too much to embarrass her like that.

  When she passed, I was in a trance. It was like I was in the war again. I have seen plenty of death, and might have a different view than most, but I never looked at what I did as being wrong. My parents, until their death, never quite agreed with me about what I did. I told them all along that I did it for Kelli and for my respect of Margaret.

  I found her in the bathroom and held her in my arms, there at the tub. She was in her white robe, the one I had bought her for Christmas. God damned slippers were on the floor beside her, her body all twisted in a mess there by the tub. I brushed her hair back and forgave her for leaving us and prayed to God almighty.

  I went in and woke up Kelli and took her to my folks. My folks and I talked, and I told them my plan. Although they never agreed then, or even later for that matter, they never said a word about it. Everybody knew Margaret as a drinker and would never question it.

  I dropped off Kelli and went to the dealership and got a used pickup truck. I went in the garage and got a body bag from my foot locker, and put Margaret in it, and put her in the bed of the truck. It was the winter of ninety-one.

  I packed some bags with clothes for both of us, put them in the truck, found Margaret’s dope and needles, and packed them into the glove box. I drove straight to San Diego in that truck with Margaret in the back. Twelve hundred miles. Twenty hours was what it took. I spent most of the time that I drove cussing and crying.

  I started smoking again on that trip. The thought of living a life without Margaret was more than I could fathom, and it didn’t sit well with me. When I got to Chula Vista, I got a hotel room off the highway and waited till morning. I called the police in the morning and told them that I woke up to her, cold and stiff.

  I explained that we had been driving all night and that I carried her in the room from the truck thinking she was asleep. They never questioned me, and said that she was dead when I carried her into the room. I explained that she must have taken a shot in Arizona at the truck stop.

  They searched the truck and found her bag with the needles, dope, and such, and confiscated it. After the autopsy was done, and they called to release her corpse, I buried her there in San Diego and never said a word to anyone but my folks.

  I told everyone that she left and never came back. For years, most thought one day she’d sober up and return. We’d been together for a few decades after all. Some, after a few years, started a rumor that I had paid her to leave, so as to keep from embarrassing Kelli. I let them say what they had to say, all the while knowing the fucking truth.

  I loved that woman and still love her today. I always told myself one day I would tell Kelli, but I was afraid that secret would go with me to my grave. There was not one single shred of benefit that would come from Kelli knowing that her mother died as a heroin addict. Not one.

  Kelli went on to have perfect grades throughout school. She never got involved in anything but track, and she loved to run. She would spend all of her evenings after school running and doing homework. Nothing ever made me happier than to see her succeeding at what she set as a goal.

  She got scholarship offers from all over the country, and chose to go to school in the state, at KU, so she could be closer to me. She
agreed to go to Columbia for her graduate school to get her master’s degree in business administration. We agreed all along that a woman in this industry would need that to be a success and to be perceived by others as being a success. She had my respect, but she would have to have that sheepskin to have the respect of everyone else.

  Being without her, and knowing that she would be so far away was something that was going to be tough for me. Losing Margaret took a good chunk of me when it happened. Losing Kelli was going to be tough, even if I knew she was in another state going to school.

  There were times when I wish that we could go back to the days when she held my finger in bed. Those days were long gone. Gone from ever happening again, but not gone from my mind.

  Kelli was and would always remain the only thing in my life that I loved.

  Chapter 25

  KELLI. Wondering what Erik was thinking drove me crazy sometimes. He didn’t talk too much when he was away from me, and thinking about what he might be thinking about was sometimes more than I wanted to think about. My mind got all jumbled with the possibilities of what he might be thinking, and whether or not I had done something to make him upset with me. He always told me when I asked him if he’s upset that he wasn’t. I didn’t ever want him to be upset with me, not ever.

  We needed to talk about my grad school, and about us, and he never responded to that text I sent him. I knew, knew, knew when I typed it that it was a bad idea. Even if I loved Erik with all of my heart, it was a really bad idea to send that text. It was so childish of me, and so irresponsible of me. Erik was the best thing to ever happen to me, and I didn’t want to lose him over a ridiculous selfish text message.

  Erik could spend the rest of his life with me and never tell me he loved me, and I would be happy – as long as I had him. Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock and make changes to some of the stupid things that I have done. This was one of those things.