Where You Go

by Claire Cain

  “Ok, let me know when you’re home.” I smiled at him as he swung the door shut, feeling a swirl of disappointment, relief, exhaustion, and elation.

  Chapter Fourteen

  My phone was in my hand before I even thought to grab it. I dialed and waited until I heard Ellie’s sleepy voice on the other end of the line.

  “Why, in the name of all that is sacred and beautiful, are you calling me at midnight?” Her voice sounded tired and disoriented but mostly extremely annoyed. I liked my sleep, but Ellie was a bear if she didn’t sleep. She was an ideal college roommate for me because, like me, she never partied, required silence to read, and needed at least eight hours of sleep to function.

  “Luke just left. I think we’re dating now.” I heard the words and felt a trill of nerves run through me.

  “What? He’s back? You’re dating? Tell me everything!” She perked up, her determination to get caught up winning out over her frustration over losing sleep.

  “I was leaving Rosita’s and literally ran into him. He looks so good. We hardly even talked about his training, but it must have been the eat-protein-and-spinach-and-workout-so-you-look-like-a-marble-statue training because wow. He saw me brushing off Rick—”

  “Ughhh, this guy needs to get a clue,” she interjected.

  “I know. I think he finally got it. So Luke saw me reject him and then basically told me I should be dating him, not Rick, and—”

  “Oh my Goooooo—”

  “I know! I know. So, I basically said, ‘Yeah, I agree’ and then he kissed me, and then we had to talk about the whole him leaving without telling me. Turns out he didn’t find out until the day before the ball and didn’t want to tell me before the ball, and then when he did tell me I acted all too cool for him because—”

  “Because you were devastated he wouldn’t tell you and ask you to be his girlfriend or fiancée or mother to his future children…” She couldn’t help but interrupt me, and I couldn’t help but smile at her runaway train of romance. Ellie was perpetually ready to find the love story in my situation, and she’d been rooting for me and Luke since I met her freshman year.

  “Ok, crank it back a notch there, killer. Anyway, we cleared the air, it was both of us just being stupid, and it sounds like essentially wanting the same thing, but being scared to risk our friendship. So… I think we’re dating now.” I could tell my face was beaming from the smile I wore.

  “You think you’re dating now? What does that mean?”

  “We haven’t been on a date since he left and obviously not since we mutually agreed to officially date each other. And he didn’t formally submit an application to be my boyfriend or anything. But I feel like we left it at that—he clearly didn’t like me dating Rick, and I assume that extends to other people. And then I kind of made it awkward at the end…” I trailed off, thinking about the last few minutes of our time together.

  “How did you make it awkward?” she asked, and I could hear her skepticism. Ellie had endless faith in me, despite my persistent ability to prove her wrong when it came to my interactions with and feelings for Luke.

  “Well, I told him I thought we probably shouldn’t sleep together.” My mouth felt dry as I thought about his response, and I prayed silently he really did understand and agree.

  “Wow, ok. I can see that being a little awkward, but you know what? You needed to say something if that’s how you felt,” she confirmed.

  “I know. It might have been better to say something not like, in the heat of the moment, and not like three minutes after we decided to go for it with the whole dating thing, but… I’ve never had great timing with him. And I felt myself get so caught up in him, like… I couldn’t think of anything else, until I did, and I felt terrified of losing him if something happened. I don’t think I could be his friend if we, I mean, if we were…” My voice had gotten softer as I felt the fear of losing him all over again.

  “I get it. I do. And I know that you felt like that dynamic was confusing in your relationship with Marcus, even after you were engaged, especially when you felt like you didn’t want to be engaged anymore. I understand why you said it, and if Luke is as awesome as you say he is, then he’ll understand.” Her voice was firm and affirming, and I loved her so much in that moment.

  “I miss you El. I want you to come visit me. I need to look at your face when I talk to you.” I sounded whiney, I knew I did. I’d known she’d be the biggest thing missing in my life when I moved. We saw each other often when I lived in the city.

  “I miss you too. I need a break from the city—I am feeling so burnt out and over basically everything. So maybe I can start looking at tickets. Maybe over fall break? That’s the second weekend in October, I think.” She sounded thoughtful and I realized she meant it.

  “Really? Oh, my goodness, yes. When you can come, I will be here. I haven’t taken vacation days, and I’m not planning on taking many at Christmas anyway, so I could totally take a day or two! Please come. I’ll buy all your food and won’t charge you rent for the couch. It’s an unbeatable deal.”

  “I’ll look. It could be very good timing for me.”

  We hung up soon after that, and I felt sure she’d come. She was my best friend and seeing her after months apart would be soul-restoring. I felt hopeful and excited and relieved that I finally had something good to tell her in terms of Luke. I told her how I missed him, and how much I disliked the date with Rick, and how I wanted Luke. She didn’t need me to tell her that—she probably knew that better than I did at this point because she wasn’t blinded by my irrational fear of the change of status in our relationship, but still. She knew it all, and I knew she was rooting for us.

  I heard my phone buzz as I was getting in bed.

  Luke: Home safe and sound.

  I liked hearing from him right before bed. It felt cozy and like he was mine to end the day with.

  Me: Good. Glad you didn’t fall asleep at the wheel.

  Luke: I’ll call you tomorrow so we can make plans.

  Me: Ok. Night Luke.

  Luke: Night Al.

  I couldn’t stop beaming around my room. He hadn’t called me Al since we were about eleven. He started calling me Al because I got my hair cut short, and even though I thought it was an adorable pixie cut, he said I looked like a boy and called me Al. At first, I didn’t like it, but as we got older, he kept calling me Al, even when my hair had grown out and I’d gone through puberty and was unmissably female.

  I went to bed feeling hopeful and excited with an undercurrent of nervous anticipation. I pushed away the bigger questions. I didn’t think about where we could go, and whether I could actually love him, and what I’d do when he inevitably moved to his next duty station. I locked those away and let myself have at least one night of just simmering in the happy.

  The next morning as I scrolled the headlines over breakfast of a blueberry muffin and some scrambled eggs, Luke called.

  “So, are you free next weekend?” Hearing his gruff voice, unused so far today if I had to bet, felt like the perfect way to begin a Saturday. Then I remembered I was working the event for St. Marks school all next weekend.

  “Unfortunately, no. I’m working the whole weekend. I have an event Saturday and I’m helping Janie with her event Sunday. It’s going to be a long couple of weeks.”

  “Well crap. I want to take you out, but I can’t come during the week this week or next, and it sounds like you’ll be swamped anyway.” He sounded genuinely disappointed and I won’t lie—I relished it.

  “What about the next weekend?” It would be a long time to wait to see him, but I knew the next ten days would be madness at work.

  “I have this tournament thing…” He sounded a little… something. Shy? Chagrined? I couldn’t tell over the phone.

  “Tournament? Are you jousting someone?” I teased.

  “Yes. Whoever wins gets to marry the princess and inherit the kingdom.”

  “Wow. You Army folk really are all about trad
ition.”

  “If you want, you could come. It’s not formal like the ball, but it’ll still be work. I got tasked to do it because I’m one of the only guys who is level two certified from the battalion staff,” he said like I knew exactly what he was talking about. I did not, but the why didn’t seem all that important.

  “Certified in what? What is the tournament for?”

  “Sorry, I fall into Army speak easily and forget you don’t know everything.” I felt a little bump of disappointment in that and realized I wanted to be able to understand this other language so he didn’t have to worry about explaining everything all the time. “It’s a combatives tournament. Kind of like wrestling but a little more interesting in the later rounds, more like MMA. But I won’t get that far. It has been a long time since I’ve done anything in the way of training. My buddy Harrison—you met him at the ball—he’s amazing and it’s awesome to watch him just destroy people.” He sounded enthusiastic at this point.

  “Well, I do love a good destruction of my fellow man.”

  “It’s not too violent. There’s not usually blood and no one gets hurt, just a little dinged up, at least until those final rounds. But it’s fun, and it’s exciting, I promise. No pressure, you’d have to drive up here and everything, so—”

  “Luke, I want to come, and I can absolutely drive up there. I haven’t seen much of your life, and you’ve been to my house several times now. I’d love to see where you live and maybe you can show me where you work too.” As I was talking I realized just how little of Luke’s life I had actually seen. I’d gotten a small taste of the Army tradition at the ball but still had no sense what an Army base or an office building (were they office buildings? Did they just run around in the woods all the time?) or anything else looked like. And I was more than a little curious to see what Luke’s living situation was like.

  “Yes, I’d love to show you around. It’s not glamorous, but Fort Campbell is cool. It’s a pretty typical big Army post. I’ll send you directions next week, and in the meantime, I guess we’ll just… text?” He sounded unsure and my heart responded by jumping in my chest. Even on the phone, he was adorable.

  “Yes, of course we’ll text. And we can talk on the phone sometimes, too, if you want.” I felt the same trepidation. It was strange to decide that we were dating, but not actually get to date yet. But maybe the distance and time apart would help us adjust to this very new phase. Maybe it would give us confidence.

  Or maybe it would just make me even more awkward and nervous when I did show up to see him wrestle people on his turf surrounded by other soldiers and Army wives.

  Because that wasn’t at all intimidating.

  Work was insane. It was insane the week rolling up to the event, and the event itself was typical but enjoyable insanity, and the week after was, shockingly, a bit insane. I felt… say it with me now, insane.

  Part of the insanity was that I felt growing satisfaction with the tasks and processes of work but an antsy feeling I couldn’t pin down nagged at me. I had been warned it took some time to settle in and that I needed to give it a good six months before I made any judgments. I’d been there a little over three, and I didn’t think it was that I wasn’t settled.

  I liked Nashville well enough—much more than I’d expected to so soon, actually. I liked the people. I liked my boss quite a lot and the accounts I was assigned were exactly what I was looking for when I’d made the move. They were the kind of smaller, interesting events I wanted and could never get a hand in at FixEvents in New York because I was tasked with corporate, typically one person on a team of at least ten, and that was all the company did. I liked my little team with Willa and Scott plugging away at the nonprofits with me.

  I loved the little private school fundraising gala we put on. It was exactly what I was looking for when I made the move to Burney and Wilks in Nashville, and even one of the upcoming projects they teased me with during the interview. I’d basically made a lateral move in pay, but I was guaranteed the position of non-profits and education team leader, which I was so excited about. It didn’t hurt that cost of living was significantly lower in Nashville, so it felt like a raise in some ways.

  I had a smaller focus, and that focus had purpose, or at least more than what I felt I’d had after over three years at FixEvents where I was stuck calling vendors for the cheapest champagnes and best deals on menus for 350 for a bunch of Fortune 500 dudes to congratulate themselves on being wealthy.

  Ok, so it was possible I was a little cynical.

  When I left FixEvents, my boss, Brenda, swore to me she was going to get me back. I laughed it off and took it as the compliment it was, not thinking she’d meant it since I was a realist and recognized that while I was good at what I did, I was not irreplaceable. Already I knew I couldn’t even entertain going back, but I’d started getting messages and quick emails from friends there saying my replacement wasn’t hacking it, and Brenda had openly said she was working on an offer to lure me back.

  She’d need to double my salary and give me weekends off. This, I knew, wasn’t happening. So… no real temptation there (never mind the fact that a return to New York would undoubtedly be the end of me and Luke before we’d begun).

  To say I was done with New York was putting it lightly. I missed Ellie, but I didn’t miss the old job.

  But I was beginning to find that the new job wasn’t all I’d hoped it’d be. Or, maybe it was exactly what I’d hoped it would be, but what that did for me, and how that helped me or changed me or filled me up wasn’t what I’d thought it would be. My mind knew that work wasn’t all there was, and it couldn’t be the thing to give me meaning and purpose, but my heart felt I’d come to Nashville to work and. Work and a life. Work and a partner. I wasn’t there yet—not yet. And the usual exhilaration I felt during these busy times was missing because of my impatience.

  Maybe part of that was the lack of certainty when it came to Luke. As much as I tried not to let it, my concerns about the future, about where our relationship could go, were ever-present in my mind. It was impossible to ignore, and in the sweetest moments of my job—when the party was in full swing and things were going best, or just after we won a bid for an event, or seeing someone on my team blow their part of a presentation out of the water—after these moments, I always thought of Luke.

  I’d think of how I wanted to talk to him about that. I’d think of his work and wonder whether he loved it like I loved mine. I’d wonder what his favorite parts of his job were.

  And then, inevitably, I’d wonder how much longer he’d have that job, be in that place, be close enough for me to see, even if it was only every few weeks. And that? That was where I got sad and shut down the thoughts and then couldn’t shake the sense of impending doom about us before we’d ever even gotten going.

  I moved to Nashville to free myself up for a relationship, and here I was, entering one that likely didn’t end in marriage, but instead ended with a big fat Dead End sign when he moved away in a number of months or years. Would I move with him? Would I follow him around and lose myself? I cringed away from that every time, but it kept coming back.

  My phone buzzed on the bathroom counter as I rinsed my face of makeup, and I grabbed it, my heart already beating a bit faster as I dried off and then accepted the call.

  “Alex Moore’s phone, how I can I help you?” I answered in my most nasal, secretarial voice.

  “I’m looking to speak with Alex. Or, really, I should call her Lexy because I know she loves that.” I could hear the smug smile in his voice. He knew I’d been called Lexy by Calvin Cranford in the fifth grade, and it drove me up the wall.

  “Sir, I think you have the wrong number.” I plunked down on the couch in my living room and ran my hands over Lemon who was snoozing on the cushion next to me.

  “No, no, Lexy Moore. Sexy Lexy as she was always called around town. Or maybe you know her as Alexandra. Sometimes she likes to be more formal.”

  I laughed lightly.
People always assumed I was Alexandra. “No, sir, there’s no one here by that name.” I felt myself relax a bit. I’d been wound tight for ten days straight and was so ready to see him. Two more days.

  “Ah, then, maybe Alessandra? Alessandra Vittoria Moore, is she in?” He said it just right. Just the way it was meant to be said. He said it with the accent just right, pronouncing every letter individually instead of anglicizing the names. Juuuuuust right.

  I almost died. I almost melted into a little puddle and slipped away, soaked up by my medium-pile carpet.

  I cleared my throat in order to find my voice. “Yes. Yes, I’m here.” I couldn’t say anything else since I’d so recently liquefied.

  “Good. I was beginning to worry.” He sounded pleased with himself, but I hoped he had no idea how much his saying my name had affected me.

  “Your accent’s still good,” I said, still a little breathless, and kind of hoping he might say it again.

  “Grazie, cara. Non ho mai smesso di parlare Italiano.” His voice was unbearably smooth and seductive, and his speaking Italian, my language, the language of my family, my bones, felt like an assault on my reason. He said I never stopped speaking Italian. We’d spoken a little as we grew up, my mom always trying to teach him some when he came over, but I didn’t realize he could speak it.

  “I don’t think I knew you could speak Italian that well.” Panting? Who, me? That wasn’t a thing real people did, so no. I wasn’t having a full body response to his voice layering me with words in my mother’s language.

  I ran a hand over my face and fluttered my eyes to focus and return to Earth.

  Just another day—nothing to see here.

  “Well, it’s rusty. I wouldn’t trust myself for much more than to order a good meal, but I always loved the language. It reminds me of you and your mom and being at your house when we were kids. I brushed up on it now and then over the years, I guess because it made me feel connected to you.” He sounded so painfully sincere I almost felt embarrassed by it, except I then felt totally and completely like mush and had no time for anything else.