by Lisa Levine
By the time morning came, I was calmer and less frenzied than I had been the night before. Layla woke up next to me, and before she left for the day, we had sex again. After she had gone, as I sat and drank my coffee, I realized that hooking-up with Layla last night was a moment of both emotional and physical weakness. I also realized immediately that I shouldn't have done it and instantly regretted it. I was exhausted and overwrought, and as I sipped my steaming cup of caffeine, I came to realize the most important thing of all. Last night had served as a catalyst for me to see something that I had been afraid to really see.
I was in love with Ivy.
It was so much more than desire, or friendship, or just wanting to be with her. I was actually and truly in love with her. She was the one I had been searching for this whole time. I wanted to be with her forever; to talk to her about every stupid little thing during our day like best friends do and to make love to her every single night as lovers do. I didn't ever want to be with anyone else, only her. I might have been afraid of it before, but I wasn't afraid anymore. I knew what I wanted, and it was Ivy.
I stood up so fast that I nearly spilled my coffee everywhere. I was going to go to the bookstore today and tell her. I was going to stand in the middle of that store and shout loud enough for everyone to hear that I loved her. And then I was going to steal her from her shift and work—I'd pay Ben for the inconvenience it cost him and owe Bridget a favor for covering Ivy's hours—and I was going to bring her back to my apartment and make love to her in the way that she deserved to be made love to.
I felt like this was the first day that I had woken up to it and brushed away all of the fears and insecurities and worries about what could go wrong. Nothing was going to go wrong because I had always been meant to be with Ivy, and now, I finally knew it.
I got dressed quickly, leaving my T-shirt partially untucked out the top of my jeans because I knew that Ivy would tuck it in for me, and I wanted to feel her hands on me all of the time. Then I grabbed my keys and headed to the bookstore. On the way there, I texted her and told her that I was coming and that I really needed to tell her something. She didn't text me back, so I had a feeling that she was still upset about last night.
If she knew what had happened after I had dropped her off at home last night, she would have been even more upset. I would never keep any secrets from her again ever. It wasn't something that she and I did, not even as friends. But this one I had to keep. Sleeping with Layla last night was a mistake, but it was a mistake that woke me up to realize how much I really just wanted to be with Ivy. It was such a hurtful mistake, though, and I knew that it would crush Ivy if she ever found out about it. So I would keep just this last secret to myself, and it would never happen again. There was no need for either of us to ever feel the way we both felt last night again. It was time for us to jump into this head-first in every possible way, and I was ready.
When I got to the bookstore, my phone buzzed, and I looked down to see a text from Ivy.
Good, I sighed to myself. Maybe she wasn't still as upset as I had thought. But when I opened the text, her message just read, "Don't bother."
I didn't like the way that sounded, and it filled me with a nebulas dread. I got out of the car and ran inside to talk to her. I was excited and worried and filled with an overabundance of emotion that I wanted to pour out all over her until she knew exactly how much I loved her, and it erased all doubt in her mind.
I looked around and saw Ben first. "Ben, do you know where Ivy is?" I asked in a frenzy.
"I don't think now is a good time for you to come talk to her here," he said. "The bookstore is supposed to be a quiet and peaceful place for our customers to enjoy. I don't think the drama helps business."
"What are you talking about?" I asked. "I need to talk to her; where is she?"
Bridget came up behind me before he could answer me again, and just as I turned around to ask her the same question, she slapped me in the face so hard that it stung my skin.
"What the fuck was that for?" I shouted at her.
"How could you?" she hissed at me. "That girl is in love with you, you stupid fuck. All Ivy has ever done is love you. How in the hell could you do this to her?"
I held my cheek as I felt the widened look of shock grow in my eyes. "Bridget, I have no idea what you're talking about! Where's Ivy?"
"She's covering a shift in the café, making a latte for the woman you had sex with last night."
17
Chapter Eleven (Ivy)
Maybe she was talking about someone else, I tried to tell myself as I ducked my head down behind the espresso bar and worked on making Layla and her two friends their ridiculously frivolous lattes with at least a dozen modifications. It couldn’t be Easton that she was speaking of. I was with him last night, and then we both went home. As far as I knew, he hadn’t even seen her in weeks. It has to be someone else.
“I’m telling you,” she bragged to her friends. “He is hung like a horse, and size absolutely does matter. So does what he does with it. I’ve never had such amazing sex in my life. And last night was extra amazing. I don’t know what had gotten into him, but he was like a catatonic beast. We had sex four times between last night and this morning, and it was the wildest and intense sex that I have ever had. I mean, I’ve had sex with him before, but I had no idea it was going to be that good when he called and asked me to come over.”
I finished the lattes and got a sick feeling in my stomach. It was the kind of feeling that you know something bad is about to happen, and even though you try to ignore it or pretend it away, you can’t.
“Thanks, dear,” Layla said as I set down their lattes on the table in front of them.
I looked up from the café and saw Easton walking toward me from across the bookstore. For a second, I was hopeful that everything was fine and that this little annoying encounter with Layla wasn’t anything to worry about at all. I reached for my phone to send him a quick text to warn him that Layla was sitting here in the café, but then I realized I had given it to Bridget to borrow earlier this morning and had forgotten to get it back.
“Why are you still standing here?” one of Layla’s friends asked me, and I realized that I was still hovering over their table after having delivered the lattes. I guess I had gotten sidetracked when I saw Easton and just kind of froze there for a minute.
“Sorry,” I said as I turned around to leave.
“Wait,” Layla said.
I turned back to face her to see what she could possibly want now.
“Was it that way when you had sex with Easton, too? I mean, I’m assuming you guys have had sex by now. Was it as incredible as he was with me last night?”
I felt all the blood rush from my face and knew that I was either going to pass out or be sick or maybe both.
“What is wrong with this girl?” Layla’s friend said as I started to turn and run in the other direction before I threw up on their table.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Easton start to run, too, as soon as he saw me make a fast move to get out of there.
“Ivy, wait!” he screamed across the bookstore.
I ran through the store, out the back door, and down the street where I then proceeded to throw up behind a trash can in an empty alley. Then I stepped out onto the other side of the alley and flagged down a cab to take me home. I told the driver to drive around for a while and handed him my credit card to pay for however much it might be. I didn’t even care. I knew that the first place Easton would go look for me was my apartment, and not being there was all that I cared about right now. I leaned my head against the back of the seat and closed my eyes to cry.
Never in my entire life had I felt so crushed and betrayed. I had lost my best friend and my boyfriend; I had lost everything that I loved today. How could he have done this to me? I knew that I shouldn’t have done what I did at the restaurant last night. I even started to realize last night while I had lain in bed that maybe Easton was right, maybe h
e was trying to protect and cherish our relationship, and that was why he had been waiting to have sex with me. But now I knew that after he had left the restaurant, he had called up Layla for a hook-up and had sex with her not just once but multiple times throughout the night. The worst part about it was the visual imagery that I couldn’t wipe clean from my mind, the image of Layla’s hands all over Easton’s naked body and of him inside of her. I felt sick again, but instead of throwing up again, I just cried.
“You okay?” the cab driver asked me. “You want me to take you somewhere in particular now?”
“No,” I said as I shook my head. “Just drive.”
18
***
By the time I had gotten back to the apartment, Bridget was there, and I had racked up quite a bill on my credit card. She came running to the door and hugged me.
“I was so worried about you!” she said as she squeezed the air out of me. “You didn’t have your phone on you, and Easton said that he saw you run out of the store, and I knew you were upset. You’ve been gone for so long, where have you been?”
The mention of his name felt like hot daggers cutting through the meaty parts of my lungs, and I tried to suck a breath in, but I couldn’t because I didn’t want to fall apart again.
“I was just riding around in a cab,” I answered as we walked inside. “I just didn’t want to be at home yet.”
“Because you thought Easton would come here,” Bridget said as she sat down with me on the couch and wrapped us both up underneath a fuzzy blanket.
“Did he?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Several times. And he asked me to give you this.”
Bridget pulled a folded up note out of her pocket and handed it to me. I didn’t want to read it, at least not yet. I took it and set it on my lap beneath the blanket. Then she handed me my phone back. It vibrated as soon as she put it in my hand.
“It’s been going off all day,” she said. “I had to put it on silent.”
I looked down at the home screen and saw that there were literally hundreds of missed calls and texts, all from Easton. I didn’t want to read or listen to any of them, so I set the phone on the coffee table face-down.
“Are you going to read the note, at least?” she asked. “It looked like it was handwritten.”
I looked at her in surprise. “You don’t even like him,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say his name. “Why would you care whether or not I read his note?”
“You’re right,” she said. “I didn’t like him. In fact, I’m still on the fence about the guy. And what he did to you was a horrible and inexcusable thing. That being said, I’m not sure he actually did it to you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Ivy, that man is beside himself right now. That much I can tell you. He chased after you, and then when he couldn’t find you, he came back into the bookstore. By that time, Layla and her pack of ditzy mutts had left. Easton sat down at one of the café tables and cried.”
“He cried?” I said in astonishment. I’d never seen Easton cry, not in all the years that I’d known him.
“He knows he screwed up. Like I said before, he was scared. I’m not making any excuses for his truly shitty choices and behavior, but I think the reason he slept with Layla had more to do with keeping you as some sort of “protected virginal princess” than it had to do with him not wanting to have sex with you. I think he wanted to make love to you so bad that it made him go a little crazy. Don’t get me wrong; he was an ass for doing it. But I can tell you one thing.” Bridget leaned forward to put her eyes directly in front of mine. “That man loves you.”
I didn’t know what to think. All I wanted to do was sleep. I curled up on the couch as Bridget got up, and she tucked the blanket all around me. I held the note in my hand under the blanket, and the intermittent buzzing of my phone vibrated against the couch where I had dropped it. After a while, I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
When I woke up, I didn’t feel any better. I still felt betrayed and full of sadness and alone. I couldn’t call my best friend to come over and talk about it with me and hug me while I cried because my best friend was the problem. This was exactly the thing that I thought both Easton and I were afraid of. I didn’t know why he had been more afraid of it than me; he was the one who had caused the problem. Maybe he knew that would happen; maybe he knew he would screw this up, and that was what had scared him and made him want to go slow. Maybe I shouldn’t have pressed the issue so much.
I wondered whether or not he was even capable of acting differently with me than he had with so many other women. Maybe he wasn’t, and maybe he knew that. Regardless, I had now lost my best friend, too, and I felt completely empty and broken.
Bridget was great, but she wasn’t Easton. She wasn’t the one person in the world who knew all of my deepest secrets, and who had been there through all of my darkest moments. I didn’t really know how to carry on after this. Going back to work seemed like a horrible idea because Easton would just show up there, and I couldn’t bring myself to see him without feeling like I would die inside.
There were several knocks on the door over the course of the next few days and at least several hundred more missed texts.
“If you don’t look at those notifications soon, your phone is going to implode,” Bridget teased. She was trying to make me feel better, but it just wasn’t working.
Ben had been awesome about giving me some time off from work, so, for the most part, I just stayed in the apartment and stayed quietly lost in my thoughts. Bridget was starting to worry about me, but I just wanted to avoid Easton and spend time alone feeling miserable as I tried to sort through my feelings. It wasn’t until the middle of the night one night that I looked at the now-crumpled-up note on the coffee table that I’d been carrying around with me or days and decided to open it.
“Ivy,
I know that you probably hate me right now. And I know that you are feeling alone and lost. I know because I am feeling that way, too, and the two of us are connected. We always have been, and we always will be, no matter which one of us is trying to push the other away.
What I did was very, very wrong, and I am more sorry than you will ever know. I want to tell you why I did it, not so that you’ll forgive me, but just because I think you should know.
I am in love with you, Ivy. I am so utterly and irrevocably in love with you that I can’t think straight. I can’t even breathe without finding myself wanting you. I can’t speak without wanting to call your name. I can’t concentrate on anything other than how much I want to be with you…forever. Here I thought that I needed to try to find someone to be with, and there you were right in front of me the entire time.
When I found out you were a virgin, I’m not going to lie; it scared me. It made me think that maybe you had been waiting this whole time—for me. I don’t know if that is true or not, but even the possibility of it being true in my mind scared the shit out of me. Let’s be honest; I don’t have the best track record with women. You of all people know that. When I thought about how many times that I had told you about the women that I slept with and how you patiently listened to my egotistical conquests, it made me sick to my stomach to think that I had put you through that. It made me feel as though there was a pit burrowed right through my chest when I thought about how you and I could have been together this whole time, how I could have been making love to you and hearing your laughter and looking at your smile each and every day of my life and not just on our Saturday “best friend dates.” All of a sudden, I felt as if I had missed out on something beautiful and important that I was too blind to see before, and now that I could see it and maybe even have it, I was terrified of doing something to ruin it and lose you.
So, I resolved not to touch your virginity until I had my act together. Until I truly could say unabashedly that I knew I loved you and could promise my full commitment to you and you alone. It took me a minute, I’ll admit, and for that I am
sorry.
Here comes the part that neither of us wants to talk about…
That night after the restaurant, I was dying. I pulled myself away from you because I didn’t want to do something that would tarnish what we had. I know that I ended up doing exactly that anyway, but it wasn’t my intention. I wanted to save you and to save us, for the perfect moment that you would always remember. I wanted to be the man you hoped I could be, and I wanted to see myself through your eyes. Having sex in the front seat of my car wasn’t the way to go about it.
That night was a comedy of errors between the waitress and the feelings of insecurity that both you and I were having. I thought that I could redeem it by bringing you home with me and talking until we fell asleep, and it just didn’t end up that way. By the time I got back to my place, I was physically and emotionally on overdrive. If I had my way, I would have driven to your apartment and gone into your bed and had sex with you until neither of us could see straight. But again, that’s not the way that I wanted things to be between us, not for your first time. So, I made the stupidest and worst decision of my life, and I called Layla because I knew it meant nothing. I knew that I could release all of the sexual angst that had been pent up in my body and that it would mean nothing to me and nothing to her. The gravest part of the error was that it would mean something to you, something awful.