I was a pinwheel of colors. I was the winner at the carnival. The boy I wanted wanted me. “Of course.”
And so we made plans. I’d take the train in on weekends to visit him, and we’d do all those things young couples do in New York. Walk through the Village holding hands, kiss by the fountain at Lincoln Center, bring a picnic to Central Park and find the most secluded spot. Then, when I turned eighteen at the end of the summer, we’d do more. We’d do everything. He would be my first, and there was no question I’d waited for the right guy.
We went to a restaurant in Little Italy the first weekend, and he touched my legs under the red-checked tablecloth the whole time, sending me into the most heated state. When we left, I pulled him against me and we made out in front of a closed hardware store next door, not caring who was walking past us.
Another time, we spent the afternoon in the Impressionist galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, where I showed him my favorite Monet, one of haystacks in the snow. He said he liked the way the artist crafted shadows in the sun. Then, Bryan pointed at the folds on a dress in a Renoir and mused that they seemed like diamonds. I looked at him, at the way his green eyes studied the painting, and it all seemed too good to be true – here I was with someone who was gorgeous, and funny, and who actually liked looking at art – but yet, it was true.
The next weekend he said he’d found the perfect store for me, and he brought me to a cobblestoned block in the Village and held open the door to a tiny little Japanese manga shop. I gave him a quizzical look. I wasn’t into manga.
“Just go in. You’ll see.”
After I passed the shelves of comics, I saw the most fantastic display. A wall full of Hello Kitty jewelry – bracelets and rings and hair clips and necklaces and keychains and every adornment imaginable with the cat.
Bryan was smiling, as if he’d brought me to buried treasure. “I thought you might get a kick out of it.” A nervous grin came next. “But then again, you make such amazing stuff this might all seem silly to you.”
I placed my hand on his arm. “I love it. No matter what I make, I will always love Hello Kitty. It’s a life-long kind of thing we have going on.”
“Good. Pick anything you like.”
I studied the displays, checking out a rhinestone necklace, a white and pink pendant, a silver and black chain. Then rings in all shapes and sizes. I showed him a cute, sparkly ring. “I do love this ring.”
I moved over to the necklaces. Bryan shifted closer and slipped his hand onto the small of my back, touching me underneath my tee-shirt. I closed my eyes because it felt so good I wanted to purr. The slightest touch from him was intoxicating.
“One more week until your birthday,” he whispered.
I leaned into him, savoring the feel of his body against me. That we were in a public place barely crossed my mind. All I could think of was him.
The girl behind the counter cleared her throat. I opened my eyes and managed to choose a sparkly number, with pink stones for the cat’s ears. It was kitschy and that’s what made it so adorable.
“Wait for me outside,” Bryan said.
I did as instructed and a minute later, he left the store, dropped a tiny white bag into his wallet, and then fastened the chain around my neck. “It’s just a little necklace, but I wanted you to have something from me. Something you liked,” he said, and he sounded so sweet and nervous too.
“I love it, Bryan. I totally love it.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
Then, his hands were in my hair, and he kissed my neck, my earlobe, my eyelids. I sighed and swayed closer. I was floating, I was flying, I was in Manhattan with the man I’d fallen in mad, crazy love with.
“Why aren’t we just in your apartment right now?” I whispered.
“Because if we are, I will not be able to resist you.”
“You’re not doing a good job resisting me right now.”
“I know. Can you even imagine what it’ll be like if it’s just you and me?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I can imagine. I think about it all the time. I’m so crazy about you. I want to be with you in every way.”
“Me too. Let’s go walk around NYU. You’re going to be there in just a few weeks.” He held my hand and squeezed my fingers when he said that, his touch a visceral reminder that we’d be together then. We wandered around the campus for the next hour, and with each building, dorm and classroom that we managed to find open in August, I grew more excited about college.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be here soon. It’s going to be amazing.” We walked along the outside of one of the dorms. “Did you love it here?”
“Yes. I loved it. College is everything they say it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s the time when you find yourself. When you figure out what you want. And when you have a ton of fun.”
“I can’t wait to start. I know I’m going to love it.”
“You are,” Bryan said, but there was something sad in his tone.
I looked at him. “Hey. You okay?”
“Totally.”
“Because you sounded…”
“I’m fine.”
But he grew quieter as we checked out the campus bookstore, and a cafe where I said I would probably do all my homework, and the library, which was speckled with students for the summer session. His mind was elsewhere, and he didn’t tell me where he’d gone.
At the station on Sunday night, I thanked him again for the necklace.
“You should always wear it,” he said before I caught the last train to Mystic. His voice was wistful, and when he kissed me goodbye, the moment had become melancholy. I didn’t feel like a girl who was returning in a week for her eighteenth birthday. I felt like a girl being sent off with only a Hello Kitty necklace to remember him by.
When I called a few days later to confirm our weekend plans, his voice was different. Strained and distant.
“I don’t think you should come in,” he said.
Something didn’t compute. We’d been planning this weekend for more than a month. “Why? Did something come up at work?” My shoulders started to tighten with worry.
“No. It’s just…I don’t think we should.”
“Should what?”
There were so many ways to answer the question, but the scariest one was the one he said next.
“I don’t think we should be together.”
I looked at my phone briefly as if it were a radio, mistakenly tuned to a channel I could no longer understand. I brought the phone to my ear and said the only thing I could think of. The thing I was clinging to. “But I’m totally in love with you, Bryan. One hundred percent and then some. And I want to be with you.”
Then I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
Words didn’t come.
The silence choked me. It was as if hands were on my neck, gripping me.
How could I have misread him so badly? He’d said he was falling for me. Where else do you fall but in love?
Then he spoke, and his words were sharp glass. “I have to go.”
Breaking the clasp in a single, fierce pull, I ripped off the necklace, then tossed it into the trash, stuffing it at the bottom of the can.
That was the last time I spoke to him.
Even now, five years later, those words rang through me. I could hear them, the pause before he spoke, the shape of each and every syllable. I have to go.
That’s exactly what he did. He left.
A preview of the first chapter of the full-length novel CAUGHT UP IN US (Releasing late January 2013)
He was my first favorite mistake.
I hadn’t seen him in five years, and now as he walked to the front of the small classroom, every muscle in my body tensed, and my brain went into hyperdrive as I told myself not to think of lights going down in movie theaters or of hot summer nights miles away from here tangled up in him.
Be strong. Be cool. Be badass.
I ran my index finger across the silver charm I made when I left for college, as if the miniature movie camera could channel steely resolve into me, as it had these last few years. Even though I’d absolutely moved on. That’s why it hadn’t even occurred to me that he might be here today, even though, technically, I suppose I should have known it was a possibility since he graduated from this same business school. We even walked around this campus together the last time I saw him, as we made plans with each other, as we made promises to each other.
Until he broke my heart and became a charm on my necklace instead — the very first one, and the inspiration for my jewelry — a cold, metal reminder that mistakes can make us better.
But I was safely on the other side now. I was over Bryan, over the anger, over the whole thing. I was totally fine, thank you very much. Except, as he neared the whiteboard with the name of the class, Experiential Learning, scrawled in blue marker on it, I was being educated on a new definition of the word unfair. Because I so wanted to be the girl who didn’t even notice he was here, but instead I catalogued every detail, from the slightest trace of stubble on his jawline, to the way his brown hair still invited fingers to be run through it, to how the checked navy blue shirt he wore had probably never looked quite so good as when it hugged his arms and stretched across his chest.
Bryan froze when he saw me. His green eyes hooked into mine for the briefest of moments, and maybe for real, or maybe just in my imagination, I saw a tinge of regret in them. But then he recovered a second later, and flashed a quick, closed-mouth smile to the class. Of course it wouldn’t bother him to see me here. He didn’t care about me then. He wouldn’t care about me now.
But I could pull off indifference too, so I looked away first. There. Two could play at this game.
Bryan stood next to the professor at the head of the classroom, along with the other business school alum who would be matched with my fellow graduate students for this mentorship program. In his trademark three-piece suit, spectacles and a silk handkerchief, Professor Oliver was his usual peppy self as he introduced the mentors. One of the gals ran a venture fund she’d started herself, another had been a superstar skateboarder then launched a line of skatewear that was now hugely popular with teens, one of the guys oversaw a firm that had designed some of the most successful iPhone apps, and another founded a health video service.
Then there was Bryan Leighton, five years older than me, and I already knew what he did for a living. I knew other things about him too. I knew what his lips tasted like. How his arms felt under my hands. How his kisses went on and on and I’d never wanted them to end. And like a snap of the fingers, I was back in time, no longer a graduate student, no longer in the first row of the classroom. I was just a girl fresh off high school graduation, wrapped around her brother’s best friend. Bryan was running his hands through my hair, and kissing my neck, and I shuddered. Everyone else, everything else faded away. He was the only one there.
I could have stayed trapped like that, beholden to the memory of the way he felt, the things we said. The words only I said.
I gripped the charm to break away from the past. I let a tiny kernel of latent anger in me start to come out of hiding. I needed that anger, because I needed to focus on the present, and there was no room for him, or those kind of memories, in it. I was a different person now. I was a savvy twenty-three. I’d already earned my bachelor’s degree from NYU, and now I was finishing my master’s degree from the same school and growing a business, all while paying the rent in a Chelsea apartment. I wasn’t that lovestruck teenager anymore. Besides, there was just a one-in-five chance I’d be paired with him. Wouldn’t it make the most sense for my professor to match me with the skatewear gal since we were both in the fashion business? I was a jewelry designer after all, with a line of necklaces already selling well online and in several boutiques around the city.
Professor Oliver rocked back and forth on his wingtips, full of energy, while he rattled off names of my classmates, then the mentor they’d work with. The first student was paired with iPhone guy. Okay, there was a one-out-of-four chance now. I crossed my fingers. Venture Girl was partnered off next with a different student. One in three. I made a quick wish on an unseen star. Professor Oliver read off the names of another student and the health video service guy. I took a deep calming breath. Clearly, the professor was saving me for the skateboard gal. She looked so cool too, so hip with pink streaks in her black hair and cat’s eye glasses. Yes, she’d be a perfect mentor and I’d learn so much about a business that wasn’t that different from mine.
I held my breath and hoped. But Professor Oliver called out someone else’s name for skateboard gal. My heart dropped, and I felt my insides tighten.
“And that means, Ms. Harper, that your business mentor for this semester will be Bryan Leighton. Allow me to officially introduce you two.”
Bryan held out his hand, as if it were the first time he was touching me.
“It’s a pleasure.”
“All mine,” I said, wishing there weren’t some truth to my words.
*****
One of the reasons I’d wanted to attend New York University’s Stern School of Business was for this class. Today would be our only day in the classroom. The rest of the semester we’d spend time with real businesses, tackling real issues, and gaining insight into how to make our fledgling little ventures better. Ever since a boutique owner in my hometown had stopped me at age nineteen and asked where I’d gotten my unusual and eye-catching charm necklace — I’d made it myself, I proudly told her — I had wanted to learn the ins and outs of building a bigger business. I never told her the genesis of my jewelry line. I never revealed to anyone but my best friend Jill that I’d started it out of rejection. That it was fueled by hurt. The charms were my way of taking something back, taking me back after Bryan’s callous brush-off. If I were a rock star, I’d have Taylor Swifted him and written one of those anthemic I don’t love you anymore songs. Instead, I did the only thing I could do. I turned to my one talent and uttered a quiet screw you, Bryan Leighton with my jewelry.
The boutique owner had started carrying my necklaces and the My Favorite Mistakes style had become a — well — a favorite in her store, and soon at my parent’s shop too, then at others in Manhattan. The trouble was my charms were all handmade. By me. And the grassroots nature was getting a little challenging. I needed practical skills and knowledge to grow, and I was more than ready to get them through this mentorship.
But that wasn’t the only reason I needed this class. My parents had stumbled into hard times when the tough economy hit the tourist town of Mystic, Connecticut where they ran a little gift shop and had for years. They took out a loan to keep inventory stocked, and I hated to see them struggling especially since the store was their nest egg, their third kid, their key to an eventual retirement. They’d worked so hard my whole life, putting my brother and me through college, weathering many storms of the financial and the health variety for years. Now they were within spitting distance of retirement, and I wanted to do all I could to make sure they could enjoy some well-deserved time off. I’d taken out loans to pay for business school, but they weren’t due for several years, so my plan was to ramp up my own business quickly to help pay off theirs.
So, really, was it so much for me to want to learn in a distraction-free fashion? Working alongside the man who’d broken my heart one summer night five years ago wasn’t conducive to focusing. Especially not when he looked even better than he did then. He’d had a sweet boyish face when he was in his early twenties. Now, he was twenty-eight and while the boyish charm was still present in spades, there was also a sophistication to his features, to his style, to his clothes. Five years running a corporation would do that to you. As I sat down next to Bryan, I did my best to put on my bulletproof vest even though I could tell his arms were even stronger and more toned, and that his forest green eyes could still reel me in with one look.
I gritted my
teeth. This was not going to work. Clearly, I’d need a new mentor. I had to graduate, and I had to succeed in this class. I tried to picture my strong and sturdy mom, from the way she’d managed her recovery from a car accident years ago with a tough kind of optimism, to how she could stare down an overdue loan notice by brushing one palm against the other and saying, “Let’s get to work.”
Work. Yes, work. I was laser-focused on work.
“This was my favorite class when I went here,” Bryan said, breaking the silence.
“Oh. It was?”
“Well, I guess it’s not a class, right?” he added, correcting himself, then laughed awkwardly. He must have been nervous. That made me feel the slightest bit vindicated. “What do we call it? A workshop?” I shook my head. “Not an internship,” he continued, and I shook again. “Practicum?”
I wanted to laugh at the word, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Instead, I shook my head once more.
But he was agile at playing both parts and picked up the baton of the conversation himself. “That’s kind of an awful word, isn’t it?”
“It’s dreadful.”
“Terrible.”
“Wretched.”
And as if no time had passed, we were back in banter, one of the things we’d always done well — play with words.
“Whatever you call it, the class was my favorite. When you couldn’t tear me away from the statistics and econ books, that is.” He flashed his lopsided smile that showed off straight white teeth.
He was trying to smooth over the past, but I wasn’t going to have it. I wasn’t going to let myself go any farther in the chatter, the conversations, the back-and-forth that had fueled us that one summer. So I didn’t respond, giving a curt nod instead.
The other students chatted with their mentors, and the buzz and hum filled the small classroom. I glanced over at Professor Oliver, who looked as if he were about to whistle a happy tune as he watched how well the initial “get to know you” session was going. But it didn’t matter if everyone else was getting along with their mentors. My success or failure would be based on what I accomplished outside of the confines of this classroom as I worked in close quarters with my mentor.
Caught Up In Him Page 2