Spring was nearly over before the doctors announced Jerry’s cancer was responding to treatment. I left Quinn and Jerry curled around each other on their couch and took a cab downtown with every intention of drinking myself stupid. If I was extremely lucky maybe I’d get laid.
By the time I finished my fifth scotch and beer chaser…I’m sure it was my fifth…or maybe the tenth. It was a neat number like that. Anyway, after that many, getting laid had become a remote possibility. Crying into my beer looked far more likely.
“Come on,” said a voice at my shoulder. “I’ll take you home.”
I turned my head — when had it got so heavy? I grinned stupidly at the man beside me. “Your eyes are the same color as Mike’s.”
The creases at the corner of the violet-blue eyes deepened. “Is that so?” A hand under my elbow helped me off the stool and I stood, swaying, grinning at the eyes.
“Yep. His crinkled at the edges too.” I leaned closer to look. “But his crinkles never stayed.” I swayed. “Just like him.”
“Come on, Eli.” He tugged me toward the exit.
“No, wait. I can’t leave.” I planted my feet and slid, swayed, nearly toppled into him before he held me steady again.
“Why can’t you?”
“I don’t go home with strangers.”
“That’s good to know, but I’m not a stranger.”
I peered myopically at him. “I don’t know you anymore.”
“You know enough.” He tugged me again. “I’ll get a cab for you.”
“How come you’re not a stranger?” I tilted my head up and leaned closer to get a better look. My chin landed on his chest and I breathed deeply. “You’re not Mike. He wears Armani.” I rubbed my nose into his shirt. “Pussy.” Strong arms held me tight and shuffled me out of the club. The fresh air, cold after the heated bar, made me dizzy.
“I don’t wear Armani anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Armani is for pussies and suck-ups and people who are trying to be something they aren’t.”
I giggled. “Yep. That’s Mike.” I sighed and burrowed closer. “He wasn’t always like that.” I shrugged and stumbled, but the man-that-wasn’t-Mike steadied me. “Or maybe he was and I just never noticed.”
“He wasn’t always like that,” the man said.
“Jerry’s okay, you know.” We stumbled and staggered down the street toward the cab rank.
“Is he?”
“We nearly lost him, but he’s okay.” I burrowed my head into the warm chest again. “It sucks, you know, that people like that have to go through that sort of thing and people like I-don’t-want-you-anymore-Mike gets to be big-time CEO just like he always wanted.”
“Does that suck?”
“Yep. You…He left me you know. Just walked out one day.”
“Why?”
“Because he was an asshole. The job was more important than us. We knew it would be hard at first but we just had to hang in there, you know, but he didn’t. The first time there was a challenge, he walked away.” I burped and then groaned. Burping was never a good sign when I’d been drinking.
“Shit. Don’t you vomit on me, you shit.” He tugged me sideways into another bar. “The bathroom’s this way. Think you can make it?”
I burped again and slapped my hand over my mouth.
“Fuck. Come on.”
I flew. I know I did. I didn’t feel my feet touch the ground but then it wasn’t my feet that was churning and burning and billowing up into my mouth as the bathroom door slammed open. Another spasm hit me as the cubicle door opened in front of me and it burst between my fingers and all over the bowl in front of me. I dropped to my knees and let it overtake me.
A faucet turned on behind me then a cool, wet cloth landed on the back of my neck and dribbled water into my collar. It helped. Finally, my stomach stopped heaving but I didn’t have the strength to move. I listed to the side, intending to lean against the cubicle wall for a while.
“Oh no, you don’t. You go sideways and no one will be able to move you until you wake up with a hangover.” Arms grabbed me from behind. I groaned as the movement tipped my stomach into somersaults again. I tried to help but my feet wouldn’t work the way I kept telling them too.
That’s when I knew I was too drunk. “Fuck,” I groaned.
“Yeah.” Another wet cloth rubbed roughly over my face and water ran over my hand, then a shoulder jammed under my ribs and I was upside down. I could do nothing but groan. “Don’t vomit down my back or I swear to God I’ll dump you on the kerb and leave you there.”
I didn’t remember anything else until I landed on a bed. My tie was removed and my shirt unbuttoned. Cool air tickled my toes when my shoes came off and slowed the spinning in my head.
“There’s a bucket on the floor beside you. Whatever you do, do not vomit in my bed.”
Darkness engulfed me.
I woke to light stabbing through my eyelids, cold air on my left cheek and a burning furnace under my right. A low buzzing filled the room and my dick vibrated. I pushed away from the furnace only to realize my pillow had been hot. Now cold air bit at my right cheek too and my phone fell out of my pocket, still vibrating and buzzing.
“Answer that will you?” my pillow grumbled.
My eyes shot open, pain stabbed directly into my brain and turned my stomach over at the same time. “Oh, God,” I moaned, clawing at the covers, needing to escape.
“Shit.” A hand pushed my shoulder. “Bucket beside the bed. Roll, damn you.”
I rolled, barely took the time to locate the bucket, and vomited. Beneath me, perfectly aligned and squashed between my dick and the bed, my phone vibrated again. A hand shoved its way underneath my hips. The next stomach spasm lifted me so the fingers barely brushed my cock before grasping my phone and pulling it out.
“Eli will call you back when he’s finished throwing up all over my bedroom.”
I hung over the edge of the bed, drool stringing from my mouth to the stinking mess in the bucket. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe shallowly so I didn’t go off again.
“You finished for now?” There was barely a pause before the bed rolled and I groaned. “Shut up. You did this to yourself.” I was dragged to the edge of the bed. “Come on, let’s get you into the shower.”
The water was cool and after a while I was able to take the painkillers that came with a glass of water. Eventually the spray was turned off and I opened my eyes to see Mike, tall and broad and tanned, dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. “I’ll bet you’re CEO now.”
“You’d win but only until the end of the month.”
“What happens at the end of the month?”
“I hand the company over to the new CEO and walk away.”
That didn’t make sense to me. Mike was only forty, same as me. Selling up and walking away hadn’t been in the plans until fifty. Then it hit me and I nearly vomited again.
“Oh God, you’re dying.” I looked up at him through the shimmer of tears suddenly streaming from my eyes. All this time, I was waiting to be living in another life, one where we could be together, and it was never going to happen. I struggled to my unsteady feet and lurched at him. “I won’t get to keep my promises if you die,” I wailed.
Mike grunted as he landed against the wall under my weight. “What the hell? You’re still drunk, Eli. Come on.” He threw a towel around me and dragged me from the bathroom. “I changed the sheets and emptied your bucket. Get back into bed.”
I crawled across the mattress and fell into a soft clean-smelling pillow.
A loud noise outside woke me and I surged from the mattress, landing on my feet. I stood swaying, staring at the unfamiliar bed in the unfamiliar room. “This isn’t my bed.”
“No, it’s mine.”
I turned to look at Mike, lounging in the doorway. I struggled to focus on the brilliant hue of his eyes. “Yours?” I turned back to the bed. “Where’d my bed go?”
“I expect
your bed is still at your house. Right now you’re at my house.”
“Your house?”
“I didn’t know where you lived and you weren’t in a state to tell me.”
On the bedside table, my phone lit up, the buzzing and vibrating shaking it closer to the edge. Mike lunged and grabbed it before it fell, then answered. “Yeah, he’s here but he’s not making much sense yet. Hang on.”
He put the phone in my hand and, when I just stared at it, he lifted my hand so the phone was at my ear.
“Eli? Eli? Are you there?”
“Quinn? Why are you ringing me?”
“You said you’d come over for breakfast this morning. We got worried when you didn’t show. You haven’t been home.”
“No, I went out.”
“Eli, are you alright? You sound…you didn’t get drugged did you?”
“No, no, I don’t think so. Just drunk.”
“Drunk? But you don’t get drunk. You haven’t had more than two drinks at once in the whole time I’ve known you.”
“Last night I did.”
“But why? Jerry’s going to be okay. We’re going to be fine. Why would you need to get drunk last night?”
“I don’t know, Quinn. Look, can we postpone breakfast and maybe make it brunch or even lunch today?”
“Eli, it’s after six in the evening. I’ve been trying to call you all day. The only reason I haven’t rung the police is that whoever is with you let me hear you snoring last time.”
That made my eyes open wide. I glared at Mike. “I don’t snore.”
“He said you’d say that,” Quinn chuckled. “Who is he? He seems to know you well. Why haven’t you told me about him? I thought I knew all your friends.”
“You do. I have. He doesn’t know me at all.”
“What?”
“Quinn, I have to go. I’m really sorry about breakfast this morning. I didn’t intend to get quite as drunk as I did. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” I hung up before Quinn could get any more questions out. I had told him about Mike but until I found out exactly what was going on, I couldn’t talk to Quinn about it.
“Here, put this on.”
I turned to find Mike holding a soft robe out for me. I threaded my hands into the sleeves and let him put it on me. “Why are you here, Mike?”
“I live here.”
“Don’t be obtuse. You moved to L.A. You were working your way up the ladder until you got where you wanted to go. Why are you here, in this town, right now?” I looked around the room. “You’re living here, not just visiting.” I stared at him, forcing myself to maintain eye contact, no matter how much the light hurt my head.
“I decided I wanted another life.”
I almost vomited again but staggered to the bed and sat on the edge instead. Another life. That’s what he’d said all those years ago. “In another life we would have worked.” I lifted my head and glared at him. “Is that what you’re talking about?”
Mike froze. I don’t think he even breathed for the long moments it took him to answer. “Yes.”
I surged to my feet, ignoring my pounding head, my churning stomach and rancid mouth already watering in anticipation of the next purging. When I spotted my clothes, neatly folded over the chair under the window with my shoes beside, I threw off the robe and began dressing. “Well, fuck that.” I didn’t bother to do up the buttons on my shirt or tie my shoes, just checked I had my wallet and my phone and stormed out of the room.
“Eli, wait.” His footsteps thundered down the hallway as he caught up to me and grabbed my elbow.
“Let me go.” I ripped my arm from his hold as I searched for the front door. It wasn’t difficult to find. The house wasn’t as large as I thought it would be considering his income bracket. My feet slowed as I walked through the living room, my breath catching in my throat.
It was our house. It was the house we’d dreamed about and planned when we were twenty-two. I rounded on him. “You built our fucking house?”
“It’s what we always wanted.”
“Fuck you. We planned this together, for us. You threw ‘us’ away, so you don’t get to have the house. It doesn’t work that way.”
“I was wrong.”
“Damned right you were wrong, you bastard. You and your ‘in another life’ bullshit. You were so greedy for what you wanted for yourself, you didn’t realize we already had everything we needed. We already had the life that would work. You walked away from that, without even attempting to work through the first hurdle we had. You didn’t even want to talk about it. You just decided it wouldn’t work and walked away. Now you’re back, sixteen bloody years later, to say you made a mistake. Well you got that right, you bastard. You made one hell of a mistake.” I had finally reached the front door and pulled it open. “You made another mistake coming here. All the money in the world can’t buy you a time machine. You can’t go back. You can’t suddenly fulfill promises you broke years ago.” I rounded on him, not surprised to find him right behind me, and shoved him hard in the chest. “If you miss me so damned much, play those fucking CDs you took with you.” I ran down the steps and out onto the footpath before pulling my phone out to call a cab.
He didn’t come after me.
Quinn cornered me in my office when I arrived at work the next morning. I didn’t give him a chance to speak.
“Can we talk about this later, Quinn? I have those contracts for MacQuarrie Holdings to go through before the meeting at the end of the week.”
Quinn stared at me for several moments before responding. “We’ll have lunch. I’ll come by for you so don’t leave without me.” It was the warning it sounded like. If I tried to duck out of it, Quinn would hound me mercilessly. He’d make a public scene if he didn’t think anything else would work.
I sighed. “I’ll be here.”
Quinn’s response to Mike’s sudden reappearance in my life wasn’t what I expected. “You were there, Quinn. You know what he did and how it messed me up. Why are you so blasé about him coming back now? It’s been sixteen bloody years.”
“It does make me wonder,” he said as he leaned his chin on his fist. “Why now? Why hasn’t he come back before now? Was it the merger with Wilson’s a couple of months ago?”
“Exactly,” I retorted, my anger once again building. I knew it was illogical. If I was truly over Mike the way I kept telling everyone, and myself, I wouldn’t be anywhere near this angry now. “If he knew it was such a mistake, why did he stay away for so long? It’s not as if I’m difficult to find. Hell, I’m the top fifteen spots on Google.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Of course I did,” I paused, and then forced myself to be brutally honest. “I probably didn’t give him a lot of time to respond, though.”
Quinn chuckled as he picked up his sandwich and continued eating his lunch.
“It’s not funny. I was angry. The bastard built our house.” At Quinn’s raised eyebrows I explained. “The house we planned to build together.”
Quinn put his sandwich down with such martyred acceptance on his face I choked on my drink. “Shut up,” he said, looking longingly at his lunch. “I’m hungry, but you’re obviously more important to me than my stomach today.” He took a sip of his drink. “So, is this house anything like the one you built ten years ago? You know the one I mean — the house you live in and have an unhealthy obsession with planning a rock garden you never actually build.”
The heat flooded my face and I ducked my head to take another drink I didn’t really need to try to hide it.
“If it’s okay for you to build the house, why isn’t it okay for him?”
I glared at my friend and boss. “It’s not okay because he walked away from it. He told me he didn’t want to live with me anymore, that he couldn’t do it, and he walked away without so much as a backward glance. He gave up all our dreams when he did that, Quinn. He doesn’t get to take them back.”
“They weren’t just your dreams, Eli. They
were his as well. If he wants to hold onto a few of them, that’s none of your business.”
I gasped, then choked and coughed as a small amount of liquid went down the wrong way.
“None of my business? This is my life, Quinn. Of course it’s my business.”
“It’s not your life anymore. Mike hasn’t been a part of your life for sixteen years. What he does, where he lives and what type of house he builds has nothing to do with you.”
I gasped, my throat tight and eyes burning, just like they did the day Mike walked away. It was all the same. I wasn’t over him, I hadn’t moved on. Not one bit. I hadn’t done anything but bury the hurt under the mist that had become my life. “Oh God, I’m such an idiot.” I pushed away from the table and rushed from the café, ignoring Quinn’s call.
That evening I sat in my car outside Mike’s house. I went there to think but my mind wouldn’t work. A kaleidoscope of images flashed around in circles, all of them fragmented and overlapping until I wasn’t sure which ones were past, present or dreams of a future I’d never stopped wanting.
A tap on my window made me jump, my heart thudding, an echo of the rhythm of the tapping. I looked out to see Mike’s blue eyes, dark in the fading light but no less compelling. I lowered the window a few inches.
“Come inside,” he said.
I shook my head and raised the window again as I returned to staring at his house, noting how similar it was to mine, how all the trees in the front were the same, just younger. The window frames were a different color. Mine were blue, like his eyes. His were black with matching security screens. The passenger side door opened and Mike sat beside me. I hadn’t expected it but I wasn’t surprised.
The silence in the car thickened as we sat there. Eventually, I heaved a sigh and turned to look at him.
“I can’t decide where to put the rock garden,” he said quietly. Somehow beginning this conversation where our last life finished seemed appropriate.
“I can’t either. I’m beginning to think a rock garden isn’t the right thing.”
In Another Life Page 2