by Tia Siren
Edward shook his head. “I don’t expect her to. Did I tell you I went to see her?”
“No. You did? You took my advice?”
“I did.”
“What happened?”
“Her husband answered the door.”
“Naw! She’s married?”
“Apparently so.”
“Awe, shit. Sorry, man.”
“Why? It’s not like we had any sort of relationship. She was a good time,” he shrugged. He didn’t even buy it. He wasn’t sure why he expected his best friend to. Even if she was a one-nighter, he wouldn’t have talked like that about a woman. He had the utmost respect for the female species and their beauty.
“I know how much you liked her.”
“It’s no big deal. Really. She did to me what we do to most women. I guess I had it coming.”
The rest of what Joseph said was background noise to Edward as he began to wonder if he would ever find a woman who was willing to settle down with him.
“…so I’ll see you Monday.”
“Absolutely. Have a good weekend,” he nonchalantly said as his partner disappeared from his office.
He shut down his computer knowing he wasn’t going to get anything done and left his office. Instead of driving home, he walked up the block toward the beach that he was able to admire from his window every day. There was a small park up ahead within a good walking distance so he took his shoes and socks off and walked up the beach in that direction. The sand was warm under his feet and he let his toes dig in as he walked slowly along the coast line. When his feet hit the soft grass, he went to the first bench he saw and sat down, looking out toward the ocean.
The water was calm, serene, much like he was at the time. If only he were happy. His success was one thing but it wasn’t everything. His track record with women was only impressive to young guys who aspired to be like him. But in all honesty, he was embarrassed to admit to it to the woman he would hope to settle down with someday. It seemed as though every woman he got to know saw him as good looking and when they learned of his success, they automatically labeled him a player. He shook his head and wondered how he was supposed to change that. He hated labels and judgments.
A young couple walked toward him, their arms intertwined and their eyes locked on each other. Something about them made him want to watch them. They had that real love aura about them. He leaned back and smiled as the young man pointed out toward the ocean. The woman on his arm jumped up and down as if he had personally given her the beauty of the water for her to keep in her pocket. She was beautiful, simple and unadorned. She wore no makeup, no flashy clothes that revealed too much and she seemed genuinely happy with whatever life had offered her. Edward couldn’t help but feel a jealousy toward this man. Yes, he was rich and extremely successful and yes, he could pretty much have any woman he wanted but he wanted that. He wanted the genuine love of a woman the way this woman loved this man. To Edward, this man was richer beyond imagination than Edward had ever been.
He watched as they ran to a small wooden fence that bordered the beach line close to the water. She leaned against it as he imprisoned her to it with his arms on either side of her. She beamed with a smile Edward has never seen on a woman. He leaned toward her and kissed her deeply. They lost themselves in each other, their arms wrapping around the other, intertwining themselves and morphing as one, living in the moment, not caring about the world around them. She wrapped her legs around him and he lifted her to the top of the fence, burying his face into her long, naturally flowing hair. Her fingers fed up into his hair as her head slowly moved backwards. Edward was completely entranced with the couple. He was no longer on a bench on the beach overlooking the ocean. He was surrounded by their lives and their love. The way they touched each other seemed drenched in the endorphins given off by a first touch or a first kiss, but it had the existence of long lasting love. Of a love that lasted forever. Edward envisioned this couple fifty years into the future, still holding hands, implanting small kisses on each other’s face or walking slowly along a stone path, still shoulder to shoulder and as in love as they were just a small distance away from him.
“Amelia, I love you.”
She cupped his face and smiled at him. “I know.” She closed her eyes and pulled his face to her chest. “I love you, too. So very much.”
“How can we do this?”
She pulled him back from her and looked at him for a long time. “Seth,” she said, shaking her head. “I love you so much that it aches deep down inside. I don’t want you to worry about things you have no control over. We can get married tomorrow if you want to. I don’t care about the money. We don’t need it.”
“Things cost money. Money I don’t have. How can I possibly provide for you and give you a life of happiness?”
“If you think money will make me happy, you don’t know me at all.” She dropped her arms from him and let them hang at her sides.
“It’s just…. I’m supposed to be able to give you anything you want.”
“And you do,” she said, cupping his face again. “Seth, what I want is what is in here.” She pressed her fingertip into his chest. “No one can love me the way you do. I can pick some wild flowers for my bouquet. We can get married right here in this little park overlooking the ocean. It’s perfect. All we need is a minister.”
“But your dreams. I want to give you what you dream of.”
“A big wedding is not what I want anymore.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I want you. Only you. Maybe in five or ten years we can get remarried again, have that big wedding you want to give me. But right now,” she pulled him closer “I just want to be yours.”
Edward swallowed the lump in his throat and looked away for the first time. He got up from the bench and walked closer to the beach, following the shoreline where the water met the sand. His heart ached for someone that special in his life. When he looked back toward the couple, they had moved from the wooden fence to the very spot he sat on the bench where he experienced the sort of love he wanted in his life. Seth sat almost exactly where Edward did and Amelia was on his lap, her legs on either side of him. Their kisses became more intimate, more in depth of each other and their bodies moved in tune with each other’s. Edward took a few steps closer, drawn to their raw emotions for each other, he needed to see more.
Her arms pulled him closer to her as his hands were underneath her jacket caressing her breasts through her thin dress. He watched her body as her hips moved back and forth on his lap, her head going back momentarily, her hair falling behind her and cascading across his knees before being thrown forward again as she returned her lips back to his. Her fingers disappeared underneath his jacket as the heat grew between them. Edward quickly looked around to be sure they had the privacy he wished they had. He wanted to be a part of their involvement, to watch from a distance and experience their love as if reading their story in a romance novel impossible to put down. Anyone else privileged to catch them in such an act would only see it as live pornography they were able to witness then get off to later on. He could see it and take it for the beauty it represented.
He stepped closer, careful to keep his distance and keep out of sight. They fumbled as if they forgot what to do. She leaned back then they came together again, their bodies moving in unison. Edward parted his lips, lost in the events that were taking place before him. They were fucking each other on that bench, oblivious to their surroundings and unconscious of the eyes upon them. He felt his own cock stir and he immediately turned away, leaving them alone to create their own memories he hoped they would reminisce in years to come.
He walked back toward his car with a newfound determination and an idea of what he wanted in life. How he was going to get it was something he needed to work on, but he had some ideas and he wasn’t going to let anyone, including Joseph, hold him back.
Chapter 6
“Mornin’.” Joseph walked into Edward’s office car
rying two cups of coffee from the corner café. He handed one across the desk to Edward and sat down as he carefully sipped out of his own.
“Good morning,” Edward reciprocated. “Thank you.” He nodded as he held his coffee up.
“So, was your weekend as uneventful as you had hoped?”
“It was,” he said smiling. He leaned back in his chair and mentally prepared himself for his Monday morning ritual of coffee and listening to all Joseph had to say. “And how was yours?”
“Went out with a couple of sweet honeys, caught a movie and a little bit more if ya know what I mean.” Joseph was leaning forward and smiling his debonair smile.
“All too well.”
“Did you give my ideas any thought?”
“I did.” Edward looked forward at his computer screen.
“And?”
“I think we should do it.”
Joseph jumped up and slapped his hands together. “Beautiful! My man, this is going to put us over the top. Ha! Ha!” He spun around and sat back down. “I have some plans drawn up in my office. I’ll get them emailed over to you so you can take a look at what I have.”
Edward nodded, still not completely into the plan, but giving Joseph what he wanted to hear. He fiddled with his pencil, his thoughts still on the couple he saw in the park. “Do you ever think about your life?”
Joseph looked at him inquisitively. “Sure, all the time. What do you… why do you ask?”
“Do you ever wonder where you will be in twenty years, thirty years, fifty years?”
“I imagine I’ll be retired someplace on my own island surrounded by pretty ladies. You know, like Hugh Hefner.” He laughed but didn’t get the same reaction from Edward. “Why you getting all philosophical on me? What’s gotten into you lately?”
Edward shook his head. “Don’t you want to settle down some day? Find a nice girl and get married? Couple of kids, maybe a dog or a bird or something? Take family vacations and grow old together?”
“Man, you are much too young to be going through a midlife crisis.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I think I’m just growing up. I’m tired of the night life all the time, different women in my bed, not knowing who is calling me when my phone rings. I want to be able to smile when my phone rings knowing who is on the other line and knowing she wants to see me as badly as I want to see her.”
“Fuck that. I am not ready to be a one-woman man. All that nagging and bitching, expected to do shit for her all the time, remembering birthdays and holidays. Because heaven forbid you forget. You might as well march your ass out to the dog house cuz that’s where you’ll be sleeping for the next week.”
“I’m okay with all of that.” He caught himself smiling at the thought.
Joseph leaned down and looked at Edward with his eyes narrowed and his lips pursed. “Where is my best friend? What the hell did you do with him?”
“I’m still here. I guess I just want more out of life. Money and success isn’t everything.” He looked toward his window and out toward the beach. “I want to find love.”
“Now you are sounding like a cheesy Hallmark card. But hey, if that is what you want, I doubt you will have a problem finding it. I can list at least ten girls who would jump at a life with you.”
“No. They want a life with my money and the fact that it’s with a successful man. It isn’t love, true love. The kind that makes you want to give it all up for the chance to see them again. I’ll never find that in the situation I’m in right now.”
“And what sort of situation is that, exactly?”
“Rich, successful, attractive. They see all of this and they label me, expecting nothing but a lavish date and a good night of sex. But it ends there, with every one of them. I’m tired of it.”
“So what are you going to do? Go broke and get ugly?” Joseph laughed at his own humor.
“No, but I do know I need to do something different. All of this doesn’t make me happy anymore.”
“What about Sasha? She was into you. Whatever happened to her?”
“Sasha,” he chuckled. “I don’t know what she is doing these days.”
“You dated her for like, what? Six or seven months, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” His voice was nonchalant as memories of his ex-girlfriend surfaced.
Sasha was a fiery redhead with silky hair down to her waist. Her porcelain face was perfectly round with the smallest dimple on each side of her full pink lips when she smiled. Edward and Sasha had a great time together in the seven months they were together, but it felt like a friends-with-benefits sort of relationship. They never talked about getting serious or settling down. They would take trips together and get themselves into trouble by doing stupid shit and getting caught. They would make love in the strangest places and brag about it to their friends. They would take social media pictures of themselves in peculiar places and make their friends try to figure out where they were or what they were doing. Edward found himself smiling as the memories came flooding back.
“Remember the time she and I flew to Paris? We went to dinner and crashed that elegant dinner party involving some political organization. Sasha told the maître de we were with the son of the key speaker and they believed her. We ate gourmet food and drank expensive wine for free. By the time they realized no one knew us, we were running out the back door and into a torrential down pour, laughing our asses off. She was wearing a white dress that evening and the rain….” He remembered it like it was yesterday. “I could see her body perfectly through the drenched material. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. The image of her body stuck in my mind for months after that. God, she was beautiful.”
“Man, you are giving me a woody.”
“We fucked behind the monument of some dead guy in the side yard of that place after that. It was some of the hottest sex I had ever had.”
“Call her up. I bet she would love to hear from you.”
Edward took a big breath and lightly shook his head. “She was crazy. Made me do things I wouldn’t normally have done. She was fun, but that was all.”
“That was all? Seriously?”
“I didn’t love her. You can’t force that.”
“With a woman like that, you could learn to.”
“She didn’t love me either.”
“How do you know that? Who broke up with who?”
“I caught her screwing one of my buddies out back of his place one night when she thought I was working late.”
“Awe, man. Did you freak out on her?”
“No. She doesn’t know I was there.”
“You never told her?”
“Nope. Dated her for a few more weeks until she decided to call it quits.”
“And you never told her you knew.”
“No.”
“Man, I would have went off on her ass!”
“What was the point? I knew we weren’t going to stay together. We were just having fun. Friends with benefits.”
“Maybe now. Maybe she has changed. Gotten her fun out of her system and is ready to settle down. Wouldn’t hurt to call her up. Hook up with her. See what happens.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were thinking of hooking up with her.”
“It’d be nice,” he said, licking his lips. “But, naw. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“We just didn’t click. Yeah, she was all of what you say, but if she doesn’t love me and I don’t find myself wanting to be with her, why bother trying to keep a relationship going? I don’t want to work at a relationship to get it to where I want it to be. Shouldn’t it be a natural thing? A natural feeling?”
“Dude, you’re living in a fucking fairy tale.”
“Maybe I am, but I know what I want.”
“Yeah, I know. You want more. Well, my friend. I don’t think you will ever get what you want.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’ve got a reputation and everyone who is anyone knows exactl
y who you are. You can’t change that.”
“So, I can’t change in their eyes? No matter what I do from here on out, I will always be a player? A gigolo? Is that what you are saying?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. We are a rare breed. Young, successful, sexy as fuck and a good time. People come to us for social status. It is who we are and it is who we will always be.”
“No! You are wrong.” Edward stood up abruptly. “People change all the time.”
“You are fooling yourself, man. We are not husband material.”
“I’ll fucking show you,” he said pointing at him. “I’m not going to let some God damned label rule how I will live my life.” He threw his pencil he was still holding on his desk and stormed out of his office, leaving Joseph there by himself with his mouth open at his buddy’s most recent blow up.
Joseph went back to his office and didn’t see Edward the rest of that day.
The next morning, Edward was already deep into his work when Joseph walked into his office.
“Morning. Where did you go yesterday?”
“I took off, did some errands, worked a little from home. I had to get out of here.”
“Okay, man. I hear ya. So, you all better now?” He handed him a coffee.
“Better in what sense?” he asked, still edgy.
“The way you stormed out of here yesterday, I would have thought you were PMSing or something.”
“Real funny. And no, I’m not better. I was being serious about everything I told you yesterday. Why can’t you understand that?”
“It’s part of the stereotypical cloud that society has put us under,” he said unwittingly. “We aren’t susceptible to changing the course of our lives.”
“You really don’t believe that… do you?”
“Relax, I was just bull shittin’ you.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said, his eyebrows raised.
Joseph looked at Edward in a new light. “You’re serious.”
“Now he hears me.”
“You really want to do this.”