“Nothing. You’ll see in a minute.”
He furrows his brow. “I thought since you write so much in yours that you would need a new one soon. There’s a little bonus feature, though.”
“It’s much nicer than the one I have now,” I observe. I flip it open and thumb through the pages. “Oh,” I gasp. I glance up at him and see a little secret smile waiting there.
“I don’t want you to look at it all now. I hope that you’ll enjoy it when we aren’t together. You know as a reminder of me.” He shrugs on this last thought.
“I don’t need any physical reminders of you,” I choke out. “You’re my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night. And, yet somehow, you manage to consume almost every single thought in between as well.” My eyes are brimming with unshed tears. He helps me by running the pad of his thumb across my bottom lashes. I’m such a cry baby. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” He asks.
“I’m very emotional lately.” I shrug. How do I put everything that I’m feeling into words that don’t make me seem like a freak?
“I like emotional,” he declares. “Emotion is underrated.”
I laugh and get up to retrieve my present for him. “Don’t mind the hideous bag,” I tell him. “We’re not all talented artists like you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbles.
He takes out his first gift. “It’s a blank piece of paper. Um…you shouldn’t have,” he jokes.
Be brave, be brave. I chant. “I want you to design a tattoo for me.”
He raises an eyebrow at me. “Really?”
“Yep, I want you to sketch a happy rose and a sad rose for me. The bitter with the sweet.” I run my fingertips over his sad rose. “I want to have those tattooed on me,” I hesitate for the briefest of moments, “along with your name.”
He stares at me for so long that I start to get really nervous. Is this too much too soon? I wonder. We really haven’t even discussed where this is going. “Michael?” I finally prompt him.
“Lorraina, I…” He pulls his eyes from mine, finally. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“You could say, ‘Sure, Lorraina, I will design your first and only tattoo for you,’” I suggest.
“It’s forever,” he reminds me and meets my eyes again.
“This is forever,” I correct.
His lips crush down on mine so unexpectedly that I cry out with a mixture of pleasure and pain. His tongue charges against my mouth, demanding entrance. I thread my fingers through his hair as I allow him to overtake me with his scorching kiss. I marvel for a moment about how intense my feelings are for him. Then, I lose all thoughts as he changes gears yet again and demolishes them all with a sweet, soul-stealing kiss.
He pulls back and grins my favorite lopsided smile. He looks like a little boy when he smiles like this. “I love it when you smile,” I tell him.
“I love you,” he counters.
“And I you. OK.” I clap my hands together like a little kid. I’m suddenly very excited for him to see our journal. “On to the rest of your present! I know the blank piece of paper is overwhelming, but I did spend a little money on you,” I kid.
“Alright, what do we have here?” He takes out his journal and laughs. “It looks like the one I bought for you.”
“Great minds…”
“Yep.” He winks at me. “I love it.”
“Well, there’s a little more to it than the obvious.” I flip it open to my first memory. I read the title of it aloud but let him read the memory for himself.
“Oh, baby,” he whispers and flips through to glance at the ten or so memories written down. “This is unbelievable.”
I feel a little self-conscious when he starts to read another one in earnest, so I place my hand over it and shake my head at him. “Save this for later.”
“Argh…OK.”
“I was hoping that you could journal on our memories as well. Let me see things through your lens. Wanna know how this came to be?” He nods his head at me.
I tell him how I came to find his cards and how the cashier told me he would be playing at Mona’s that night. I tell him about how I went home that night reliving our past in my mind and how I saw it in a completely different light. I tell him that I felt the need, the drive to see him and make him mine and that I was completely overcome with longing for him. I tell him that I’d never felt that way about anything or anyone before in my life.
“And I finally faced the truth as to why I had denied you for all those years, why I had hidden my feelings from the both of us,” I admit.
“Why’s that?” His voice cracks a little.
I take a deep breath and finally acknowledge, “Because you were the best friend I’d ever had. Because your intensity scared me. Because I was so young and I wasn’t ready…Because I was in love with you.”
“Well, it’s about time you owned up to that,” he chuckles and kisses me again.
……………………………………………………….
I find myself riding along the beach with the top off of the Jeep. I love the weather here. It’s Christmas and it’s seventy degrees at six o’clock in the evening. When Guns ‘N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” comes on the radio, I crank it up and belt it out as loud as I can. Michael laughs at me and joins in. It makes me feel infinitely younger. I’m excited to see another part of Michael’s routine, especially since he’s assured me that it doesn’t have any physical requirements like his tortuous outdoor habits.
I’m surprised when we pull in the Navy Retirement Home. I knew it existed, but I had never been here. “What are we going to do here? Do you have a family member here?”
“No, not really,” he replies. “A while back, a friend of mine told me about his uncle being here and how it could be depressing, so I started coming here to play a little for his uncle every now and then. I enjoyed it so much that I started coming down once a week.”
Will wonders never cease where he is concerned? It blows my mind how kind and considerate he is. He was always that way, but this is a whole new level of compassion. I’m incredibly moved. “That’s really remarkable of you, you know that, right?”
He grimaces, “I think I get more out of it than they do.”
Spoken like a true philanthropist. “You never could take compliments. You need to get that figured out because pretty soon the world is going to be paying you compliments,” I chastise him.
“What?” He blanches.
“You’re too amazing for me to be allowed to keep you all to myself,” I predict. He just rolls his eyes at me. I can’t resist leaning in and paying my respects with a lingering kiss.
And he is truly amazing. He picks his guitar and tells stories and listens to stories and weaves his songs in with the stories. If it is all possible, I fall even more in love with him.
Chapter Twenty-three
Confessions
The next few days pass in a flurry of gigs, nightclubs, wonder, excitement, tenderness, journals, food, Mass. Every second that I’m away from Michael, I count down until we will be together again. He only leaves me when he has to work one of his many jobs. Fortunately, one of his jobs allows him to sit behind a counter so he can call me during that time. I’m able to squeeze a few visits in with Ginny while he’s at work. I’m so tempted to tell her about him, but I’m just not ready for the interrogation. I want our relationship to remain as untainted as possible.
I make up for lost time with him by writing about our recent memories that we’ve made, which cause me to digress to memories of long ago. I treasure every moment I get to spend with Michael, knowing that our spell will be broken by secrets and miles soon enough. Michael has been so unexpected, refreshing. I’ve never met anyone so honest with himself and others. I hope to emulate him.
“Whatcha writing over there?” I’m pulled from memories of the last few days. I glance over and smile at him. We’ve been lounging on his balcony, enjoying the sounds of
the waves and comfortable silence.
“I’m journaling about our last few days together,” I reply. “What about you?” We’ve both been alternating between reading and writing. He’s using the journal I gave him. So sweet! Admittedly, it has been hard for me to concentrate, though. Every time I hear his calloused fingers scrapping across the turning pages, I imagine them on me.
“Right now, I’m working on some lyrics.”
“Aah…I would love to hear them.”
“You will when they’re ready.” He gives me his secret smile. Maybe they’re about me, I muse. “Sit tight. I wanna show you something. I’ll be right back.”
“’K,” I reply quickly as he has suddenly dashed into the apartment. I wonder what he’s up to.
He returns with an old black and white marble composition book. “What’s this?” I sit up a little so that I can examine it more closely and shift to give him room on the chaise.
“This,” he says, framing the composition book in his hands playfully, “would be the play you wrote when we were in ninth grade English.”
“Are you serious?” I gasp.
“Yep.” He’s glowing with excitement. He must get how much this means to me.
“Michael,” I say his name and it’s full of wonder, “how did you get this?”
“I quite artfully persuaded Mrs. Barfelt to give it to me after she graded it. It wasn’t easy,” he continues, “She really wanted to have it as an example of student work.”
I open it up and read the title page, “The Diary of Anne Frank—In Action: A Play by Michael Bang, Kimberly Cline, Lorraina Dabney, and Clinton Ross.” I laugh as I remember us all getting together to plan our project. No one knew what to do because we’d never been given full creative license before this moment. It had been all worksheets and bookwork up until that point in our academic careers.
“I remember how you ever so democratically placed our names on it in alphabetical order even though you did most of the work. You surprised me so much with this,” he tells me. “I was so used to you being so logical about everything. I’d never seen you really let go and be creative. And, then, BAM! Everyone in our group is floundering, wondering, arguing about what on earth we’re going to do. You just wandered over to the window with your hands on your hips, looking out like you were studying the most complex of views. Then, you turned around and said, ‘We’re going to write a play based on Anne’s diary.’ It was genius. Your face lit up like Christmas. The imagination I saw dancin’ in your eyes was magical. I fell in love with you all over again.”
Tears have sprung to my eyes at his description of that moment. He’s made it feel like it just happened yesterday. “I think you are remembering it with a bias slant. I don’t know that it was all that dramatic,” I kid.
“Oh, it was. Trust me.”
“That’s when I started writing in earnest,” I remember. “I’d written a little over the years but just for me and only little snippets. After we performed that for the class and Mrs. Barfelt graded the hard copy, she pulled me aside and drilled me with questions.”
“Like what?”
“She wanted to know how I went about writing it and stuff. I told her that Anne’s diary is so vivid that I could just see it, ya know? Anyway, she seemed happy with my answer and told me that I was an excellent writer. I was so shocked. I figured out years later that there was already a published play version. I guess she was afraid that I’d copied it. Anyway, other than my singing, I don’t think anyone had ever paid me a compliment like that one.”
“You’ve barely let me hear you do anything more than hum,” he complains.
“That’s because I sound like a screeching, sopping wet cat compared to you,” I tell him in all seriousness.
“Pssh…” he asserts and fiddles with the notebook, “So, did you start writing more after this?”
“Yes,” I whisper. I am suddenly very sad. He must sense that because he puts his finger under my chin and tilts my head up for a light kiss.
“What did you write?” he questions against my lips.
Goosebumps make quick work of covering my body down and back up again. “Hmmm? Umm…poems and stuff.” He places a kiss on each of my cheeks, on the tip of my nose, and then his lips find mine again for another feather light kiss.
“Why did you stop writing?”
His spell is broken. “How do you know I stopped?” I pull back and ask him.
He frowns and places his hands on the arms of the chaise, surrounding me. “I just know. So, why?” Crap. When Michael wants something or wants to know something, no pat answer will do. He’s tenacious, gum on the bottom of my shoe.
“I just…did. I got busy and preoccupied with school. I will have basically finished two degrees, Summa Cum Laude, in four years, one of those degrees is even in English; and I work almost full time. There just weren’t enough hours in the day.”
“You know what I think?”
“What’s that?”
“I think that’s what you were born to do—write. You are gifted. Reading your memories back reminded me of what a great storyteller you are.” My gaze has drifted down, and he pauses to bring it back to meet his. “Look at me,” he demands and I immediately comply. “Not many people have this gift. You have to share it with the world. If not, withholding it is the most selfish thing you will ever do,” he finishes passionately. Hmm…Selfish begat selfish.
“Thank you for believing in me,” I mumble.
“Now, how do we get you to believe in yourself?” he wonders.
I swallow hard and tell him, “I’ve written more this last week than I have in years. We may be on our way there. Don’t give up on me.”
“Never,” he promises.
I try to change gears in this suddenly serious conversation, “You know, I never did figure out how you managed to get classes with me that year. P.E. I could understand, but Advanced English I and Spanish. I would think for someone who failed the year before you would have been in less…challenging classes.” He throws his head back with laughter. I laugh with him but smack in the stomach with the notebook too. He’s laughing at me. “What? Why are you laughing at me?” I grumble.
He barely pauses long enough to squeak out, “Did you just figure that out?”
I take in a deep, indignant breath. “No,” I protest, “I just didn’t want to give you the satisfaction of knowing that I wondered about it.”
He makes a motion of chopping my nose off my face. “Nose to spite face!” He accuses.
“Yeah, yeah, I know!” I concede. “Anyway, now I want to know.”
“I got my mom to take me up to registration early so that I could have some one-on-one time with my counselor. I assured her that the only way I would apply myself, as they had been asking me to do for years, was if I could be in advanced classes that year. I assured her that the only reason I failed the year before was because I wasn’t academically challenged. She was putty in my proficient hands,” he finishes maniacally.
“It’s a good thing we went to a small school,” I say. “Or it wouldn’t have been quite that easy.” I feel the need to take him down a peg or two.
“Oh, I would’ve found away. I was highly motivated,” he assures me with a glint in his eye.
………………………………………………………
Michael leaves to go get Chinese takeout. I remain sitting on the balcony, staring out at the waves and the vastness of the Gulf. It wasn’t too long ago that I swore I would never be back to this area. That if I could get out, I would never return. I even dreamt of living in a well-visited, touristy area so that my family would come and see me; and I wouldn’t even be required to visit them here. Now, look at me, contemplating a life here with Michael. It’s crazy how quickly my life has changed. I thought I would never find anyone. I never really wanted to find anyone. I wanted to devote myself to my chosen career, have a nice house, have a few friends. That was going to be my life. All I can think of now, though, is
having that career but devoting myself to my relationship with Michael. The career used to be the main course; but, now, it had been relegated to nothing more than a much ignored, yet required, side dish.
“That was delicious,” I tell him as we finish our General Tso’s Chicken. “So, anything planned for tonight?”
“No, not really. What would you like to do?”
“Well, I wouldn’t really like to go visit my father, but I think that I need to.”
“OK. Do you want to go alone or would you like me to go with you?”
I contemplate this a moment. “I think it would be good for you to go, but I have to warn you he was very angry with me the last time I saw him. I’m not really sure what to expect.” That thought leads me to another. “Have you seen him lately?”
“No, he stays to himself since he got out.”
“Aah…yes, his illustrious prison sabbatical,” I say acerbically. He had been arrested and had served some time for assault and battery. “Nice.”
“Alright, I guess there’s no time like the present. Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” I reply.
………………………………………………………
We pull up outside my dad’s place, and I am astounded by how absolutely trashed my old homestead is. When I lived here, it was a real deal, living, breathing, working farm. Now, it was like a ghost town, and my dad was the only living occupant. Seeing it eases the ache I feel for my old way of life because nothing even resembling my childhood home still exists.
Michael kills the engine, and we sit in silence for a minute or two. Finally, I take a deep breath and release it. “I think it might be better if I go and judge what kind of mood he’s in, OK?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll wait here. Let me know if or when you want me to join you.”
I squeeze his hand and let it go quickly. If I don’t move quickly, I may never have the courage. I make my way up to porch and raise my hand to knock on the door. A snarl stops my hand mid-air. I turn my head to look at the mangiest pit bull I’ve ever seen. “Hi, puppy,” I coo. “Aren’t you a poor little thing?” I continue in my little singsong voice. I crouch down and let him sniff my folded hand. He immediately decides I’m not harmful and rests his head on his paws, keeping his eyes trained on me less I become a threat. I ease back up and rap on the door.
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