Anything Less Than Everything

by Adkins, Heather

  “So, you’re going to do it, right?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” I said. “I mean, I already told her I would. It’d look pretty bad to back out.”

  “Good,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’ll be great. So what else exciting happened today?”

  “Nothing,” I said, but I hesitated too long before answering, and he saw through it immediately.

  “What happened?”

  “My mother,” I said finally. “But I’m not talking about it. The day got better as it went, so I’d rather not go backward.”

  “And now it’s great, right?” he said, his voice teasing.

  “Of course. I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” I teased back. This friendly flirting was my favorite part of our friendship. So many of our talks were serious in nature, even if they were positive, so it was nice to just joke around, to laugh.

  “Hang on a sec,” he said. I could hear another guy’s voice and Aaron saying, “No, man,” in response to something he’d said. Finally Aaron sighed and came back to me.

  “Brandon is demanding that I let him talk to you. You can say no.”

  “It’s okay,” I answered. “Put him on.”

  I heard the phone change hands and Aaron saying something, but I couldn’t quite catch the words. “Hey, Brookie.”

  “Hey, Brandon. What’s up?” I knew Brandon the way I’d known Aaron that night at Nana’s: by his stat sheet. I hadn’t known they were roommates at the time, though, and I was actually surprised by that when Aaron told me. Aaron was a quarterback; Brandon a linebacker. Aaron seemed cool and in control in interviews; Brandon was little boy silly. So much about them, at least on the surface, was opposite.

  “Nothing much. Aaron’s watching me like a hawk, afraid I’m going to embarrass him.”

  “How would you do that?” I asked.

  “Hmmm. Well, I could tell you the story about the time locked himself out of the dorm room freshman year wearing nothing but a towel. Or maybe start listing all his bad habits, like drinking juice straight from the jug, or talking in his sleep, or letting people take his phone when he’s not paying attention (ouch). But I promised I wouldn’t do that.”

  At this I couldn’t help but laugh. Brandon, B, as Aaron called him, was apparently the same in real life as in the press room. He’d always been one of my favorite players, so I was glad for this.

  He asked me several questions, interview style, such as my favorite color (green), kind of music (anything but country, which shocked him since I'm from Nashville) and favorite play in football. Aaron had obviously been bragging about my football IQ. When I answered the bootleg, he gasped in mock horror.

  “But that’s a quarterback’s play. I thought you were a defensive girl. I’m hurt, Brooke, really. I don’t know if we can be friends.” I laughed at his silliness.

  I couldn’t help but notice, though, how different his questions for me were from Aaron’s. Brandon’s were all surface--which was fine--but Aaron’s uncovered truths about me that I didn’t know existed or at least hadn’t planned to share. Whether they were about types of weather or favorite school assignments or what I wanted to be when I grew up (Ha!), the questions caused me to open myself to him, and in turn learn more about my friend--and myself.

  I knew what he was doing, of course, even as I opened my mouth to answer, but I didn’t mind. Aaron was someone whom I wanted to allow in. That scared me a little, but the feeling of security I got when we spoke to one another made the risk seem worthwhile. And to think had it not been for a dreaded family dinner and one of my sister' shook-up plans! It need would age happened. Or that I'd almost walked away from it.

  I heard a muffled exchange on the other end before Aaron came back on the line.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s nice to put a voice to the people I’ve been hearing about. In a way it helps me know more about you.”

  “Don’t you know enough? I’m scared if you learn too much more you won’t want to talk to me anymore. Especially if B keeps making up stories meant to make me look like an idiot.” He was joking, but that had been exactly what I’d been afraid of, except in reverse. But for now he was still calling, so he obviously had a high threshold for drama.

  “No,” I replied. “I think there’s still more about you I need to uncover. And what you see as embarrassing, I see as endearing.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. “But go ahead. What do you want to know?”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  I took a deep breath. There was one part of Aaron’s life that he had kept quiet on. Something that the events of the week had brought to the forefront. His love life. He certainly knew everything about mine, yet he’d never volunteered any information about girlfriends. He was easily the most popular guy on campus, so this omission struck me as odd. Sorority girls surely giggled as he passed through the courtyard; athletes from the women’s teams had to be making extra trips to the training center on the chance of seeing him. But nothing.

  I wasn’t sure why I was so curious, but his lack of details on this subject bugged me, especially since the only evidence of a love life was those disastrous pictures. Maybe it was because he was privy to details of Spencer’s and my relationship that no one else knew. Maybe I wanted to even the playing field.

  “Why don’t you date?” It came out a little more abruptly than I intended, but it didn’t seem to faze him. He had to know it would come up eventually.

  “I date,” he said.

  “Oh yeah? When?” Unless he was taking girls out between the hours of two and four in the morning, he was lying. He spent every day working or working out, every night talking to me.

  “Well not lately, but I’ve dated girls before.”

  “So why not lately?” I could sense him squirming a bit, which made me just a tad proud. Usually it was I on the hot seat; reversing that role was fun.

  He sighed, and I pictured him pinching his temples with his hand before running it down his face. “Do you seriously need a reminder of what happened the last time I came remotely near a girl?”

  “I’m not worried about that right now. I’m just asking in generalities.”

  “Okay,” he said finally, “you probably don’t remember this with all that was happening at the time, but that day on the boat, after that idiot ex of yours showed up to hurt you again? You asked how I knew so much about relationships.”

  I remembered every word of that conversation. I had focused on it intently in an effort to not completely lose it. “You said that guys weren’t the only ones who could be jerks.”

  “Yeah. My last girlfriend was a jerk. It’s made it hard to trust girls, or to even care about finding someone right now.” I could understand that.

  “Can I ask what happened?” I couldn’t imagine anyone hurting Aaron, not because he was invincible, but because who would want to?

  “Her name was Becca. We started dating near the end of freshman year. Nothing serious, just movies, parties. When school started back in August, things got more serious, but it was hard because of football. I didn’t have a lot of time for her, which I felt bad about, but that was--is--reality.

  “So things got worse as the season moved on. It didn’t help that she hated football, and came to the games only to socialize. It’s a huge part of my life, especially during the season, but she refused to talk about it, watch it, anything.”

  “So why were you dating her if she hated what was most important to you?” I interrupted.

  “Initially because she was pretty, which I know makes me sound like such a guy, but she was nice and fun to be around. It was only as we spent more time together that I realized how incompatible we were.”

  That sounded like lots of college relationships. The next part, though, I did not see coming.

  “Instead of dumping me and moving on, she tried to find a way to make football go away. It was the thing that kept us ap
art. So towards the end of the season she told everyone that she was pregnant.”

  Um, what? When I didn’t actually say anything, he continued.

  “Her idea, apparently, was that if she was pregnant that I would have to quit the team, so we’d have more time together, that football would go away.”

  “Oh. My. Goodness.” It was all I could say. How else do you respond to something like that?

  “It gets better,” he said. “She was pregnant, but Brooke, I need you to believe this, it wasn’t mine. That’s, well, we never...I’ve never...done that.”

  Aaron was a virgin. I was not surprised by this, that he #27 Shared my values, but it was honestly something I’d never thought about one way or another.

  “So I had a choice to make: either deny it and look like a jerk who shirks his responsibilities or go along with it and look like a jerk who gets girls knocked up.”

  “Great options,” I said.

  “No kidding. I’m not ashamed of not ever being with a girl. It’s something I’ve chosen. Something I want to wait for until I’m really ready. But at the same time, I don’t feel the need to go around telling everyone, either, and I really don’t feel like being the butt of every locker room joke”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I pulled away, stopped taking her calls, walking the other way when I saw her on campus. Like I said, I looked like a deadbeat, but I couldn’t let her ruin my life or help her lie.

  “She got sloppy with her story, though, and eventually it came out that the baby was some guy’s from the community college across town. She left school, and I never spoke to her again.”

  I tried to picture this girl, but it only infuriated me. Who did something like that?

  “I’m still trying to figure out how she thought this would make your relationship better,” I said. “Obviously she knew it wasn’t yours, and she knew that you knew. Did she think you’d just go along with it?”

  “I don’t know. I’d never had someone I cared about--and I did care about her--try to make me look bad before. Even though now it’s obvious we were wrong for each other, at the time I really wanted it to work.”

  I wanted to find this girl and shake some sense into her. Actually, I wanted to hit her, not that I was the hitting type. Did she not realize that she had one of the most amazing guys ever as a boyfriend? That I would kill to have Aaron for a boyfriend? I mean, someone like him.

  I didn’t know what to say. It saddened me that Aaron and I had something like this in common, but it also bonded us together in a way.

  “I’m sorry she hurt you,” I said. It didn’t seem like enough, but it was all I had.

  “I am, too. It was over a year ago, and I’m over it, but it hasn’t made it easy to want to let girls close, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “And the coaches did a good job of keeping it quiet, plus no one was really talking about me in the press yet, but people knew, and it made me question the intentions of any girl who seemed interested. Maybe it still does.”

  “I know.”

  “So that’s why I don’t date much.”

  “But Sunday?” I asked, finally ready to hear what happened.

  He sighed again. I knew he didn’t want to talk about it, but that he felt he owed me an explanation. “Remember Carson?”

  “Oh.” So he’d been set up. That explained so much: his complete lack of knowledge on why I was mad, the one-sided PDA.

  “Yeah. I rarely go to parties anymore, but I’d promised the guys I would go to this one. I didn’t know who this girl was, and wouldn’t have ever had contact with her again had she not taken my phone and, well...”

  “I guess that didn’t exactly restore your faith in relationships, huh?” I asked.

  He let out a laugh devoid of humor. “It’s hard enough to date when people aren’t watching you or trying to get something from you. Add in a few vultures looking for popularity they think I can get them, and it’s not really worth the trouble.”

  “Not even for the right girl?” I asked. He’d been quick to tell me that relationships were as uncomplicated as finding the right person. I needed to remind him to take his own advice.

  “For the right girl,” he said, “I’d do anything and everything.”

  Chapter 14

  The Fourth of July. For most it’s a holiday; for retail, it’s mayhem.

  Dwell was packed when I arrived at 10 am, a half an hour before I was scheduled. People were crowding the aisles, clamoring for deals on last minute decorations for their cookouts, scoping out the new fall merchandise that had just arrived. Nearly all of them had light blue cards in their hands—fliers for the class I was teaching in an hour.

  I found Caryn in a back corner, trying to help a customer decide between a bronze and a tortoise shell mirror. When she glanced up and caught my eye, she excused herself from the customer and walked over to me. “Do you have everything you need?” she asked.

  “I think so,” I replied, “except maybe some Valium.”

  Caryn smiled. “You’ll do fine, honey. You teach teenagers, for goodness sakes. This oughta be a piece of cake compared to that, right?” You would think, but in fact, talking to a few adults for twenty minutes was way scarier to me than thirty seventeen-year-olds. It was probably the subject matter. I hardly felt like an expert in home décor, even if Caryn constantly praised my work and asked for my input.

  “We’ve had lots of people asking about it,” she continued. “Go make sure you have everything ready. We’ll take care of things out here.”

  She had already placed a table beside the display room I’d be making over. It stood empty and ready for me to transform the space for fall. I was glad I had come in the night before and organized all of my products. All I had to do was move the baskets of accessories to the front of the store and put them in the correct order. Customers kept stopping me, asking where they could find glass vases, or where we kept the throw pillows. Of course I answered each question, pointed out directions. As a result, though, even with all my careful planning, I barely finished setting up in time.

  Mom entered the store with Jill in tow five minutes before eleven. I saw her walk over to the display area, take a flier, help herself to the refreshments Caryn had provided. I backed into the storeroom, making sure she didn’t see me. Deep breaths, Brooke. My mother’s presence only added to my nerves. Was she here to watch me go down in flames? To be able to say I told you so? I grabbed a bottle of water from the mini fridge. Then I dug around in my purse for my compact and lipstick. If I was going to fall on my face, I could at least look good doing it. A flashing light on my phone caught my attention, so I took it out and touched the screen to life. A text message. From Aaron. Even before reading it my heart started returning to a normal rhythm, my breathing slowed. I know you’ll do great today. Can’t wait to hear about it! Now I was ready. I pulled my new monogrammed apron over my head, tied it around my waist, and headed out to meet the waiting crowd.

  It wasn’t until the store closed that I was finally able to remove my apron and catch my breath, though the class had ended three hours earlier. When I had left the safety of the storeroom, I’d walked out to the sight of people crowded into the aisles, craning their necks to catch what was going on; we’d run out of chairs long before Caryn introduced me to the audience. She’d hung in the back, watching, observing customer reactions more than my demonstration. My nerves vanished as soon as I began and saw so many people furiously scribbling notes, hanging on every my word. I didn’t lose my train of thought once. Everything I needed had made it to the table. Nothing fell. Afterwards a long line had formed with people asking questions, wanting help finding products to give them the same look with different colors or in a different size. My mother touched my arm as I led a middle-aged woman to the floral section.

  “Brooke, I had no idea you had such an eye for decor, dear.” I smiled, embarrassed. I wasn’t used to praise from my mother. “You were great. Really great.�
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  “Thanks, Mom,” I replied. “Um, I’ve gotta go help this lady. But I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Yes, I’d like that,” she said, squeezing my arm. “How about lunch at the tea room?” The tea room was Mom’s favorite restaurant, a tiny place she only went on special occasions. I nodded, smiling.

  Back in the present, Caryn stood at the register, counting the day’s take. “Amazing,” she said, shaking her head. She looked up at me. “Do you have any idea how much we did in sales today?” By the look on her face and tone of her voice, I assumed it was good, but she didn’t give me a chance to guess or even ask. “In the two hours following your demonstration we sold as much as we did in the past two days. Amazing,” she said again.

  That was irrefutable proof that I had done a good job. Caryn was right: I’m a teacher. I teach. Apparently, the content was irrelevant. I left Dwell with a lightness to my step. I killed the demonstration and Mom was being nice. Hopefully the cookout I was heading to would be equally as wonderful.

  I guess two out of three isn’t so bad.

  I should have known, really. Jill had been keeping her distance since the Carson incident, but she insisted I attend this party with her. The one that, despite her denials, was sure to have guys she was itching to set me up with. I tried for days to get out of it, using every excuse I could think of. I failed. In the end I agreed to go for lack of something better to do. Marcie was vacationing at the beach with her sisters; everyone else I knew seemed to be out of town, as well. And so I went. I was actually in a good mood despite my reservations. Fireworks, food--it couldn’t be that bad. Right?

  We arrived around 7:30. People filled every square inch of Leighann’s yard, and the smell of charcoal welcomed us, invited us closer. Jill immediately found Dave and left me to my own devices.

  I didn’t know many of the guests--it was more Jill’s crowd than mine--but I did see a few acquaintances from high school, and even one I’d had some education classes with in college. I stopped and spoke, smiling and being polite. But that was about as far as I could get: being polite. I had never had much in common with these people, and had even less so now. Nothing against them; we were just different. Met of them were still regulars on the party circuit while I had a career that kept me planning and grading papers most nights. They were young, or at least young at heart, while I was the boring old woman. Despite my best efforts (and, yes, I really did try), I could not get the conversation to move beyond pleasantries.