The Rider List: An Erotic Romance

by Charles, J. T.

  “What?”

  She’s sipping her drink through a straw. When she lets it go, it has a ring of lipstick around it, and my mind awkwardly recalls images of last night with Evan. Was I wearing lipstick? No, I don’t think so.

  Stacy is saying, “Tonight, at The Windjammer. Remember?”

  I’d forgotten. She had texted me yesterday about getting tickets for a double show at The Windjammer, a beachfront music club. She once hooked up with the lead singer of the band performing there. A guy named Keenan. That was years ago, before Trent, and the guy never called her back. Surprise, surprise.

  Before I can say anything, she leans close to me. “Trent isn’t going, so I can flirt with Keenan.”

  I squint at her. “You’re not serious.”

  She leans back. “I’m not going to do anything with him. I’m just going to tease him. Payback’s a bitch. Hell, he probably won’t even remember who I am. That’ll just make it more fun.”

  “You do know you’re a lunatic, right?”

  “Oh, totally.”

  A guy behind the counter calls our order number. Stacy tells me she’ll get it, and she’s back within thirty seconds placing our grilled salmon salads in front of us.

  She stabs a piece of the fish. “I still can’t believe that guy the other night.”

  Without looking up from my food, I say, “What about him?”

  She laughs. “What about him? I know it’s been over six months for you—sorry, I won’t bring his name up—and that’s a long time but you haven’t lost the ability to detect hotness, have you?”

  If only she knew.

  I squash the subject by asking her about work. She always has an interesting story about someone who works at the law firm or a client. I’m always interested in hearing her stories. She tells a good one, and she’s funny, but sometimes, like now, I do it to stop her from talking about the name she bought up without actually saying it: Wyatt.

  . . . . .

  After lunch, I pick up Sophie and Kendall.

  “How was the movie?” I ask, when they get in the car.

  Kendall is her usual quiet self. I don’t think she’s rude, she’s just shy and quiet. She looks at Sophie, as if deferring to her for an answer.

  Sophie scrunches up her face and shakes her head. “Lame.” She looks down at her phone, then nudges Kendall’s elbow. They both look at the screen and laugh.

  They don’t want to go to the grocery store with me, so I drop them off at home and go by myself.

  I get back home and start unpacking the bags when Sophie and Kendall come into the kitchen to root around for snacks I might have bought.

  Sophie’s looking in a bag when she says words I don’t think are real. “Wyatt called.”

  Is this some kind of joke? I think. That’s actually where my mind goes at first—I try to minimize the impact of the news by momentarily telling myself Stacy is fucking with me. Maybe she called and told Sophie to tell me that. But…no. Stacy wouldn’t do that. It’s real.

  “Wyatt?”

  Sophie nods as she opens a box of microwaveable popcorn.

  “What did he say?”

  She shrugs. “Not much. He asked if you were here. I told him no.”

  I watch her as she puts the bag in the microwave and starts hunting for the quick-start button for popcorn. I step over and touch it for her.

  She looks up at me. “What?”

  “He called the house phone?”

  Sophie nods, walks over to the table, sits down and picks up her phone. She and Kendall resume texting or Snapchatting or whatever they’re doing.

  “That’s all he asked?”

  Sophie nods. “Yep.”

  . . . . .

  Wyatt Fuller was my boyfriend of almost four years. When people talk about finding “The One” well, Wyatt was my “The One.”

  We both grew up in the Charleston area, but went to different schools all of our lives and our paths never crossed. We met when I was a freshman at the College of Charleston, and Wyatt was a sophomore. I didn’t have a boyfriend, he didn’t have a girlfriend, and we kept finding ourselves at the same parties, and sometimes ran into each other at various restaurants and clubs downtown.

  The getting-to-know-you stage lasted almost my entire freshman year. Wyatt was patient, fun, interesting, and always stable. I never saw him get overly angry or excessively happy about anything. He never demanded to know where I was when we weren’t together, never asked about a guy he might see me talking to.

  It seemed like we were headed for a great friendship, and then things shifted to blatant flirting right at the end of my freshman year. By the end of June, we were inseparable. Even on nights when I had to stay home to watch Sophie because Mom was at work, Wyatt would stay there with me rather than go out with his friends.

  Sometimes, in quiet moments with no one else around, I’d think: I have found a perfect, flawless guy.

  It was something I was sure didn’t exist before I met Wyatt because before him, I’d had a pretty standard dating history in high school, one semi-serious boyfriend (as much as high-school relationships can be considered serious at all), and that was it.

  The only other male figure in my life was my father. He always worked a lot, but he made a point of not missing school events and summer swim team meets. He made it to school plays and chorus events that I was involved in. He was a great dad.

  He wasn’t physically or emotionally abusive to me, and of course not to baby Sophie. But sometimes I’d hear my mom and dad arguing late at night and he would raise his voice. But so would she. It didn’t seem like anything out of the norm, even to my eleven-year-old ears. And mom later confirmed that it wasn’t that bad, just typical disagreements between a husband and wife.

  That’s why it was so shocking when he left us. I was eleven, and it was just after Sophie was born.

  Mom has never talked much about it, and I think it’s as much a mystery to her. All I know about my father is that he lives in Florida, he’s remarried, and Sophie and I have two half-brothers.

  I never talked about this with friends. A single mom with two kids wasn’t strange, so it’s not like I had to answer for being in some kind of socially outcast family situation.

  But I did talk to Wyatt about it when we were getting to know each other, and a little more in-depth once we started seriously dating.

  His mother and father were still together, so he had no idea what it was like growing up with a single parent. I didn’t mind his questions. In fact, just the opposite. I welcomed them. After all, he was interested in knowing everything about me and it was a feeling I’d never had from a guy before.

  It was a storybook relationship for three and a half years. We met when I was a freshman, still losing weight, and the thought of a boy interested in me, at that age and as self-conscious as I was, well…it was like a fairy tale, and it remained that way all through college.

  Wyatt graduated and landed a job in Seattle, which meant he’d be on the other side of the country for my senior year. I missed him so much that it was a few months before I realized that his absence from my life for that year wasn’t the biggest issue.

  The impending problem was: what would happen when I graduated?

  My finishing college didn’t mean Wyatt was coming back. And considering how I was basically a second mother to Sophie, there was no way I could pack up and move across the country to be with him.

  It didn’t matter whether I’d be able to find a job in Seattle. The experience with my father made family infinitely more important to me, and I’d made my mother a promise that I would be around until Sophie turned sixteen, the age when my mom said she’d feel comfortable leaving Sophie on her own at night.

  We have a small extended family and most of them are in central Florida anyway, but even if we’d all been in the same town, I still would have kept that promise to my mom.

  Wyatt was understanding. At first, anyway. He came home for Christmas of my senior year and we spe
nt a lot of time talking about the issue.

  He said he loved me, he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, and we’d figure something out. That attitude vanished by the second Valentine’s Day we weren’t able to spend together in person.

  We talked a lot over FaceTime, and I’d gotten used to it. It was strange at first, not only because we couldn’t reach out and touch each other, but because he looked different.

  He’d always had slightly shaggy hair, like a stereotypical surfer’s hair, and he was always brushing it out of his eyes. I loved that hair. Now that he was in the business world, the Wyatt hair that I loved was gone, traded in for a conservative cut, parted on the left side.

  We were a couple of thousand miles apart but thanks to the magic of FaceTime, I had planned a Valentine’s dinner for us. We would eat and talk, each of us with a candle in front of us.

  Lame? Maybe. But I thought it was cute, and so did Wyatt so that was all that mattered. What little chance there was at romance that night, though, dissolved when the call started.

  I was sitting in my room at my desk, a candle flickering off to my right, my phone propped up straight ahead of me. The plate in front of me held angel hair pasta with shrimp, our favorite meal that we shared often back when he was in town. Wyatt had made some himself, the first time he’d attempted it.

  “I miss you so much.” I could see it in his expression. He was being genuine. It wasn’t some kind of empty statement made on a special night. Plus, Wyatt was never like that anyway. He said what he was thinking and you always knew he meant what he said.

  “I miss you, too. I wish I could visit.”

  This was about a year into his new job in Seattle, and we’d had this exact conversation several times. They were always filled with sad longing. But this was different. I knew it when his eyes dropped from the camera and he looked straight down.

  When he looked back up he said, “We always said we’d be together.”

  “I know.” It hurt to look in his eyes. Hurt even more that I couldn’t see them crystal clear, as if he were here. The deep blue was just darkness on my screen.

  “So move here, Audrey. It’s been a year. I’m settled. My job is stable. We can actually get married instead of just talking about it.”

  “Can we talk about this later—”

  “No.” He cut me off, something he rarely did. “What’s the difference in talking about it now instead of later?”

  “I thought we were going to enjoy a Valentine’s dinner together.” I was getting angry. This was my idea, and he’d loved it, and now he was ruining it.

  I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, sliding my hands under my legs.

  Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know…”

  “You don’t know what?”

  He looked straight into the camera. “I thought you loved me, Audrey.”

  I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. “What?”

  He said nothing.

  “It’s not that I don’t love you,” I said, lifting my hands and leaning on the desk. “I can’t believe you said that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You know I can’t move there now. I can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  I pushed the plate of food aside. My appetite had vanished. “Can’t.” My voice was stern, harsh. “And won’t. So both.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “It’s more like you won’t.”

  I let that sink in for a moment. I couldn’t believe this was happening. “You know what? You’re right. It’s more that I won’t. I could come out there, but would you want me there knowing the whole time that I would be thinking I should be back here?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I picked up my phone. “I’m going to hang up. I’ll call you in a little while.”

  I didn’t wait for him to say anything before ending the call.

  Twenty minutes later, he called. Not on FaceTime, just on the phone. I’d had time to think about what had just happened and it didn’t take me long to realize what was going on.

  He was questioning my love for him. He was making it conditional upon whether or not I’d move all the way across the country and leave my mom and sister, when all along he knew how important this was to me.

  We’d talked about it over the years we were together so many times. He had to know it. It’s not like he didn’t understand where I was coming from.

  He just wanted what he wanted, and he was willing to go so far as to question my feelings for him after all this time. He was willing to guilt me into moving there. He was willing to wound me, break me down, all so he could get what he wanted.

  I didn’t understand how or why he had changed like that, but that’s what the end result was. So when he called back, I didn’t let him speak. I told him I couldn’t talk to him right then, and I hung up and silenced my phone for the rest of the night.

  Sleep was sporadic and fitful that night. I just kept running all those thoughts through my head and arriving at the same conclusion. I must have cried out every last tear in my body.

  I broke up with him the next day. The call was short. Wyatt was angry.

  He called again twice that week and we kept saying the same things over and over. I don’t know why I entertained the idea that he could rectify the situation.

  I guess I was hoping he would somehow magically make those hurtful comments disappear. But he didn’t. I finally told him I couldn’t do it anymore, that nothing he was saying would change my mind. We hung up, both of us angry.

  His mother had called me after she got news of the breakup. She wasn’t judgmental about my position on everything. She didn’t condemn his behavior either, though. And she said I should always remember that Wyatt truly loves me.

  I didn’t argue with that, even though I had come to believe differently. I’d never once questioned his love and commitment to me until he questioned mine and tried to guilt-trip me. Nobody who truly loves someone would do that to them.

  I hadn’t heard a word from Wyatt since that last phone call. That was almost six months ago. I had changed my number because I’d feared he would try to call and I just couldn’t take it. He knew our landline number at the house but he’d gone all these months without trying to contact me.

  Now he’s calling again? What’s this all about?

  Chapter Eight

  Evan

  The main goal in coming here was to unwind, relax, take it easy, quiet my life down. But in the hours when Audrey isn’t around, I start to get easily bored. I check online for things going on locally and see there is a band called Three Figures playing at The Windjammer, which is a short walk from where I’m staying.

  Three Figures is a band from Savannah, Georgia, south of Charleston. They had opened for us a few times on some our dates in the south. I liked their music and the guys were always cool. I figure maybe it will do me some good to get out of this house and go do something, so I head down there about 9 p.m., an hour before Three Figures is supposed to take the stage.

  I go to the bar and take a seat at the end, facing the stage, and order a beer. The place is starting to fill up. No one recognizes me. Even people I make eye contact with don’t hold it for very long, which they would if they suspected that I look familiar. Perfect. Anonymity test completed, I can relax and enjoy the night.

  When the band comes on, the place is full. People are jammed into the large, open area in front of the stage. There’s a crowd three people deep around the bar.

  The music starts. The guys sound really good.

  There’s a gaggle of girls right in front of the stage, arms in the air, and I can hear their woooos and yeahs when the music quiets down.

  One girl in particular is standing right in front of the lead singer, a guy named Keenan who I don’t know all that well. He seems to be concentrating on her, looking down, almost like he’s singing to her.

  I’d never noticed it from this vantage point. I’d always bee
n the one onstage. Not as the lead singer, but as the guitarist, and I’d often find a girl to flirt with. Get close to the edge of the stage, act like you’re playing just for her. It was showmanship. The crowd loved to see things like that. It’s interaction without having to physically interact.

  Watching the band perform and the crowd react, I find myself feeling nothing. No urge to get back up on the stage anytime soon. No desire to be in the spotlight again. I’d just be happy to have inspiration strike and be able to write a song or two again.

  At one point between songs, Keenan goes to the edge of the stage and gives that girl his guitar pick. She throws it back at him. He looks stunned, but picks it up, shrugs, says something to her that I can’t make out, and walks away from her.

  Impressed by how Three Figures sounds, I’m reminded of why we chose them to open back then. I’m on beer number three when they finish their short set and it’s time for the next band.

  I’m sitting at the bar when I hear my name.

  “Evan?” It’s a guy’s voice.

  Shit. I turn in the direction of his voice. It’s Chris, the drummer for Three Figures.

  “Holy shit, dude. What’s up?” He extends his hand and I shake it.

  “Just came to see you guys.”

  “Really? What are you doing in Charleston?”

  It’s the last thing I want to talk about.

  Before I can say anything, he says, “Hey, I saw what happened in Indianapolis.”

  “You saw it?”

  He nods. “YouTube. Someone in the audience caught it on video. Didn’t look good at all.”

  “Didn’t feel good.” This is the first I’m hearing of anyone having video or pictures of the incident.

  “I bet,” he says, edging closer to the bar. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “They never said what it was. I mean, I’m not trying to pry or anything.”

  “Yeah, it’s all over. I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  He slides a ten across the bar and tells the bartender he’d like a Bud Light. “Understood, sorry I asked.”