His head jerked up and his dull gray eyes locked with mine. His stare drew inward and a short sinister laugh flew from his throat. “A game that we’ll never get to play.”
I took a step back.
His smile vanished. “You’ll always be the fat girl who thought she meant something to me. You just couldn’t be the girl who fucked me and left me alone.”
Jake laughed.
Ben dropped the phone.
And Angie took three long strides toward Jesse and punched him square in the jaw.
I held my stomach. My lungs didn’t work. My eyes closed. And all the love I’d once had for the shattered man in front of me leapt from my chest.
***
I once knew a guy named Austin. I’d met him at a freeway gas station I worked at that had a small deli with fresh chicken and potatoes every afternoon. It was a summer when Interstate 35 was under a lot of construction. The convenience store was the only cheap place for miles around for the construction workers to come every day. I was nineteen years old.
Austin was a loner. He didn’t have many friends, but I always found more intrigue in people who were misunderstood. A twitchy fucker, he could talk for hours, never leaving a dull moment between us. He was funny. He made me laugh.
I hung out with him for several months. He didn’t sleep much, and when I started my overnight stocking position a few months later, he’d come visit me at my midnight break and sometimes again at the three o’clock ones. On my nights off, sometimes we’d go to a twenty-four-hour restaurant and sit and talk.
Austin seemed like a nice guy. Nice enough.
He always wore a leather coat, chain-smoked, and had a sharp nose and jaw. Though his lack of eye-contact was always unsettling.
I trusted him. I called him a friend.
It wasn’t until I sat at a booth in that twenty-four-hour restaurant one night that I discovered our friendship wasn’t at all what I thought.
A mutual friend of ours approached me cautiously. His name was Joe. Joe was a heavier guy, had big cheeks, and I only knew him because of Austin.
“Charlie? You have a minute?”
“Sure. Have a seat.” I knew something was wrong immediately. “Is Austin okay?”
He nodded and rubbed his cheeks. “I wanted to tell you something.”
It would’ve been strange for most people, but I was used to people confiding in me. A lot of crazy things came out when I offered my ear. His approach wasn’t unusual for me.
“Austin isn’t a nice guy. And you need to know that.”
I remember being confused. I remember wondering why Joe felt the need to tell me. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“He’s a dick behind your back. He calls you names. And you’re a nice person, I know you are. I don’t want him to hurt you anymore.”
Daggers hit my heart, stinging bile churned in my stomach, and all of my fears from my school years flashed behind my eyes. My chin quivered, but I demanded more. “What does he call me? What are the things he says?”
He was hesitant, but recognized the desperation in my voice. “Fat, fatty, disgusting. I’ll ask him what he’s been up to and he’ll say, ‘Oh, I just visited Fatty at work. I watched her eat her lunch. She’s so fucking gross.’” His eyes closed with the admission.
I cried for a long time when I got home that night. I hadn’t even been attracted to Austin. But he was someone I’d confided in. He was someone I’d let into my heart. I had him pegged all wrong.
My memory was long and there was a lot of scarring—years and years of abuse from people I’d let in. Hell, from people I hadn’t let in. I was sick of the assholes. I was tired of the people who always knew what to say in order to get under my skin.
I was always so concerned about disappointing people. My entire life revolved around the needy and helpless. I treated others as though their opinions of me were more important than my opinion of myself. I believed their perceptions; I lived their idea of who I was.
It had been easier than fighting. I avoided confrontation and accepted their quiet judgments. I’d fed the stigma because standing up for myself wasn’t something I thought I could do.
But not anymore. I was tired of it.
I was tired of crying. Tired of fighting. Tired of being sad and lonely and mad.
There’s only so far you can push a girl until she slaps you in the face and puts you in your place.
Because I deserved respect. I deserved love. I deserved happiness.
I was somebody.
My feelings were valid no matter who decided they weren’t worth anything.
Austin was wrong. Aaron Paulson was wrong. Jesse was wrong.
I sighed, remembering Jesse’s birthday, and slid the CD from its sleeve. It was the third time I’d exercised that day. The metallic silver shone across my palm and Jesse’s handwritten letters stared back at me.
Rx Bandits: Progress.
With every pound I lost, I shed a part of me that I’d held onto tightly for too long. Every insult. Every stare. Every quiet giggle. One by one, as the days passed, I discarded the pieces of me that I thought defined me and walked taller than I had the day before.
Almost a year had passed since I’d started at The Crimson. It had been three months since my first date with Ryan. Two months since I’d had sex with him.
And five weeks since he’d broken up with me.
Jess was right: all it took was the right moment, the right lighting. Ryan was almost everything I wanted him to be for my first. He was passionate, gentle, and kind. It could have been that the thrill was gone once he knew he’d gotten it. But Ryan hadn’t showed me that he possessed that cruel gene, like so many others had.
No one at work knew; I’d kept that part of my life a secret. The way rumors spread around the restaurant would have made it too easy to get back to Jesse. And he was better off unknowing.
But I hadn’t been hurt by Ryan. Initially, I’d cried for a few seconds after our breakup. Until I realized that it had more to do with the rejection than it did my actual feelings for him. It was probably the most uneventful and least dramatic breakup in the history of breakups. He hadn’t really even given me a reason why.
“It just isn’t working,” he’d said.
Because sometimes we didn’t have reasons why we felt the way we did. Sometimes, we just had to listen to our guts.
And every night since then, Jesse had come to me in my dreams. He crawled in bed behind me, wrapped himself around me, and for the first time since I’d met him, I was comfortable in his arms.
I never shook. I never worried. And I’d been able to sleep through the night, never shrugging away from him or coming up with an excuse to leave.
The only problem with that scenario was that Jesse wasn’t the kind of man who would do something like that. And reality only left me cold when I woke in the morning.
Jesse and I would always be opposites. Two people connected in the unlikeliest of ways.
Contrary forces acting complementarily.
Fire and water.
Absent and present.
Dead and alive.
Light and dark.
Always and never.
Everybody had a hero inside them. Given the right situation, they’d know what they needed to do. So when I refused to be the damsel in distress wishing for my knight to come rescue me, I realized that the knight had never existed in the first place. And that my only chance at becoming the person I wanted to be was to save myself.
I’d started off that year as someone who wound herself around the woes of everyone around her, on a direct path to self-destruction. And within eleven months, I’d begun to wind around myself instead.
Jesse was beautiful. He was my best friend. He’d changed my life.
I’d never be able to repay him for what he’d shown me, what he’d taught me, and how he’d flipped me upside down.
But I wanted him to change. He’d never be the man I wanted him to be. Behind the beautiful, br
oken man was a mean person. And I deserved more than that.
Because I was beautiful. In every way that counted.
I’d continue to make mistakes, and I’d probably fall back into my old ways at some point. There’s comfort in consistency that way. But now that I’d seen myself for who I really was, there was no turning back. I could never return to a life of self-loathing and playing the victim again.
Jesse’s behavior on his birthday only solidified it.
Angie had to take a few anger management courses for the outburst in order to keep her job, and the two of them weren’t scheduled to work with each other for over a month. But all was for the best. Jesse kept his distance, and I tried not to miss us.
I guess Jess was a meaner bastard than I’d ever given him credit for. Whether or not he remembered he said it was beside the point. Someone capable of thinking something like that wasn’t worth my time. The way he’d said it only made me think I was some kind of pity case. A demented fixation with the freak.
Perhaps it was all some sick game after all. A strange, absurd mindfuck.
I’d never let him take away what I had gotten from that friendship, though. He’d always be one of the beautiful ones who’d dared to spend time with me. And it was during our time spent together that I’d lost over a hundred pounds and begun to define myself. He wasn’t the first person to pick on me, and he wouldn’t be the last. He was just the first person to go through so much effort to make me feel like I was special: exactly what I needed, when I needed it.
Maybe I was the crazy one. Crazy because after all that had happened, I still loved him for who he was deep down. I held onto the half of the man I adored and discarded the rest. Pathological optimist, indeed. But that didn’t mean I’d forget the stuff about him that hurt the most. It just meant I’d already forgiven him for it.
Unfortunately it wasn’t something I could allow in my life any longer.
I rarely worked with him. Most of the time, I’d punch out just as he was walking in, or we were on opposite shifts. The few days our time at the restaurant overlapped, we did our best to stay out of each other’s way.
Once in a while I sensed him looking my way, and I fought the thoughts that crept into my mind, knowing where they came from. Our story isn’t over yet, I wanted to say, but kept my mouth shut.
If his thoughts were true, I knew what was left for us. There was only one place I wanted him to take me. One place I’d wanted him to take me since the moment I first saw him. And if he took me there, it would be our end.
Chapter Four
Jesse
Our story wasn’t over yet. It couldn’t be.
Angie and Ben claimed I’d said something the night I blacked out, but I couldn’t believe those words had come from my mouth. I owed her an apology. Shit, I owed her a lot of apologies. But she’d come this far with me, and I hoped to God I’d find the right opportunity to present her with the truth.
I would’ve felt better just to get it off my chest, even if she ended up slamming a two-by-four against my head.
Because Charlie needed to know.
I had to tell her.
When we stripped away all of the physical attributes—skinny, fat, tall, short, blue eyes, brown eyes, red sweaters, green shirts, scars, dimples, moles, and smiles—there was something underneath our skin that hadn’t given us a choice about being drawn to each other.
And that was the shit that mattered: the good that she’d squeezed from me when the well was dry.
The girl could’ve had a third ear and I still would’ve felt the same way. Her weight had never bothered me—not until she lost it all and became a fraction of the size she once was. But even then, I still didn’t care. Anyone worth something wouldn’t.
There may have been a few details—her birthday being one—that had slipped through the cracks. There may have been a couple of things I didn’t remember—useless things that didn’t mean anything, the trivial conversations people would have to make them feel like they’d contributed to the conversation—but in the grand scheme of things, they didn’t really matter.
That was the way the mind worked: Memories would shift and twist. We forgot the details and things in between, but retained the thoughts that impacted us the most.
But even with the months of our silence, conversation would have to be initiated by one of us. No way was our story over.
The opportunity hadn’t arisen. Right time, right place and all that. It was always going to be an issue. I could never seem to get it right.
But my patience wore thin, and something was going to have to happen soon. Maybe the break was what we needed. I knew I needed it, but I wasn’t sure about her.
Maybe for her I’d waited too long.
***
“It’s pretty slow tonight,” Ben said, stuffing bags with plastic silverware. “You can go home if you want.”
I nodded. “Good. The roads are shitty.” I tapped on the screen to punch out. “I hate March in Minnesota. Warm one day, snowing the next.”
“You need me to cash you out?” he asked.
Movement outside the swinging kitchen doors brought my eyes up, and I caught a glimpse of Charlie walking past.
Deep breaths.
“No. I’ll go up front tonight.”
“Okay,” Ben sighed. “But Angie is in the bar tonight. Keep your head down and keep moving. Don’t give her a reason—”
“I won’t talk to her,” I laughed. “I promise.” I walked toward the employee bathroom, stripping off my uniform shirt and grabbing my green T-shirt.
“Oh, hey! Before you go, Jess, I was going to ask you…”
I turned just as Angie walked in back and grabbed a plate to prepare a salad for one of her tables. Ben approached me, walking past her, and her eyes met mine. Her lips parted with a small gasp as she looked down to my chest, and her jaw tightened. But she didn’t speak and got out as quickly as possible.
“So,” Ben continued, “I’m sure you’ve heard that there’s an assistant manager position available back here.”
“Yeah?” I stretched the shirt over my head and pushed my arms through one at a time. “So what?”
“Well, I was hoping you’d apply.” He smiled. “You’re really the only guy I’ve got back here worth anything.”
I laughed, balling my uniform into my hand. “I’m not sure if that was supposed to be a compliment, but if it was, you suck at them.”
“For real, man. I know you’ve had a couple of rough times over the past year, but if you can keep that head of yours clear, I think you’d be pretty good at it. I didn’t tell Adam about the birthday present incident. I mean, not about my suspicions of drugs and stuff.” He shrugged. “As far as he knows, you were minding your own business when Angie…accosted you. If she hadn’t been working here for three years, he probably would’ve fired her.”
“Well, I appreciate that. I have no problem with Angie.”
“So?” Ben looked hopeful. “You’ll think about it?”
“Yeah. I’ll think about it.” I nodded. “But I have some stuff I need to take care of right now.” I held up my receipts. “I’ll let you know in the next few days.”
“Sounds good. Applications are due in next week.”
“Okay,” I said over my shoulder as I walked into the dining room. Pulling an envelope from my back pocket, I walked past the tables, straightening a few silverware settings before I got there.
The lobby was empty and only a few tables in the bar were occupied. Alejandro and the boys in the kitchen looked bored, and the only server on was Charlie. The snowstorm had driven the customers away and the hostess wasn’t around.
Charlie sat at table 26 wiping down the menus, and I stood at the front register waiting for her to look up.
Pieces of her auburn hair fell past her shoulders, but the majority of it was held up in a sloppy bun. Her skin glowed, and her small diamond stud earrings brought my attention to her neckline. I followed that to her unbuttoned co
llar and down to the small peaks of her breasts.
Charlie chewed on the inside of her cheek, wiping each menu in slow motion as her thoughts distracted her from her task. She stopped wiping to smile for a second, and she still hadn’t noticed me watching her.
She removed the smile from her face and shook her head from her thoughts. Then she looked around to make sure no one had seen her.
That’s when she saw me.
I dipped my chin and cleared my throat. She stood, and walked toward me. My heartbeat picked up and I tried to keep myself calm, but my feet were getting antsy.
She took a deep breath and paused in her stride just before she met me at the register. With a fake smile, she said, “May I help you?”
I nodded and set my receipts on the counter. “Can you check me out? Please.”
She licked her lips, and with a nod she stepped behind the register.
We were quiet—quieter than I wanted us to be. There was a piece of me that wanted to scream her name and beg her for things to go back to the way they were before. And the minute I thought it, she closed her eyes with a swallow.
“I…” I began, but stopped myself.
She slouched and looked up with glossy eyes. “Don’t, Jess.”
“I can’t let… I won’t accept… I…” I stuttered fiercely, trying to figure out what would get her to speak to me. But I started laughing instead, and I shook my head. “Can we start over?” I asked. “Hello, Charlie Johnson. My name is Jesse Anders. And I don’t know why it’s so hard to talk to you.”
Her eyes closed again as she fought her tears. When she opened them again, she stood straighter. “You know why it’s hard—”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted her.
“I know you are.”
I raked my hand through my hair and looked around the lobby. The sleet outside slapped against the windows and the soft music from the bar could be heard as it trickled into the space between us.
“Do you want to…” My voice faded.
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