“Sure. Anyway, mom. I just wanted to know how you were doing?”
“Oh, wonderful. I’ve joined a bridge club. Debbie Marshal is my partner, at least when she isn’t taking that horrid teenager of hers into therapy. Dennis is his name. He might have schizophrenia.”
This was how she spoke all the time about other people. I sighed, noting that I could not go rushing back to this woman, to this life. But my mother kept going, telling me about everyone at the church I had grown up in; who was pregnant, who was gay. It didn’t matter who it was, I learned about them.
Finally, after thirty minutes, my mother told me she had to go. American Idol was on and her favorite singer was in the top four.
I told her that it had been lovely speaking with her. I hung up the phone and swore to myself, beyond anything else, that I would never return to Indianapolis, even if that meant I would have to sleep in the hallway of this apartment building, bow down and became Jackson’s daytime nanny, or do anything else in the world.
I could not return.
CHAPTER NINE
The next morning, I knew the demolition crew was coming to destroy my precious brick dance studio. I woke up early, feeling the complete devastation of the day. I couldn’t believe that the place in which I had truly felt like myself—at least in the days after I had learned that becoming a real dancer would never happen for me—was going to be gone forever. I wondered what that meant for my identity. I wondered what would be left of me when the place was knocked to the ground.
I walked to the studio slowly, trying not to allow tears to glimmer from my eyes. I wanted to stay fresh, vibrant. Perhaps after I watched the destruction of the building, I could rush up and down Le Moyne Avenue and apply for jobs, tell them my sob story. Perhaps someone would take pity on me.
I approached the building, noting that a great bulldozer was parked out front. It was off; the great ball of steel was hanging still and stoic in the air. A bunch of men stood on the outside of the building, holding clipboards and pointing at things. They wore hard hats, and they looked very serious, very important. I decided to stand on the other side of the street, leaning up against a stop sign and watching the way the light gleamed off the glass of the studio for the last time. I remembered how well the light had entered that place, how beautiful it had felt on the inside—especially during the previous winter. It had been my only happy place, especially in the sheer cold. The snow had piled up outside, and us dancers had been inside, creating a world that was all our own.
I stared at the men outside the building again, wanting to rip them apart with words. “Don’t you know what you’re doing?” I wanted to scream at them. “You’re destroying dreams of young children and hopes for older women! You’re destroying my dream of continuing my passion! You’re destroying so much! Can’t you understand?”
But I knew they would never hear me over the striking of the great steel ball, over the anger of the whirring machine.
One man in the center was rather tall, sharp-looking. He held a great clipboard, and he appeared to be talking to everyone else, giving the most orders. He looked so sleek, so important. I looked down my nose at him, hating everything that he was. A corporate snob, certainly. Someone who wouldn’t understand anything I truly cared about.
Suddenly, however, the man turned. The sun glinted against his yellow construction hat. His suit—finely cut—traced his muscles, his firm, taut chest. He smiled at the crew before him, revealing those wolf-like teeth.
My jaw dropped. Drew, for some god-awful reason, was stationed before my dance studio, helping to bring it down.
He was moving his arms wildly, speaking with a broad smile on his face. I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Had he only been sleeping with me to get to my place? But that didn’t make sense! Was he going to build his bookstore here? But why here?
I remembered how I had met him mere blocks away at that coffee shop. I remembered how he had been scouting for a place for his bookshop. Femme Fatale. Why hadn’t anybody told him that was a terrible name for something? Why hadn’t anybody told him that he needed to take his bookstore and shove it?
The fire was burning in my stomach. I scratched my boots against the pavement beneath me. I longed to tear him apart. I remembered how well he had fucked me the evening before, and I felt hot, angry. I felt used.
I stormed across the street, unable to stop myself. Drew stopped speaking to the people before him as I approached. His face grew surprised, distracted. He smiled at me, removing his yellow construction hat as I approached. Sensing my anger, his smile started to filter off. He frowned.
“Drew,” I said. I stomped my foot a bit, trying not to make a scene. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”
Drew held up his hands to the other guys. They all smirked at him, murmuring “trouble in paradise,” to each other.
I led Drew to the side alley next to the studio. I looked up at him with broad, orb-like eyes. I wanted to start crying. “Drew. Drew. How could you do this to me?”
“Do what? Not text you? I have been so busy. So tirelessly busy trying to get this place up and running.”
But I was shaking my head vehemently. “No. How could you have bought my dance studio?” My voice shook as I spoke. I pointed behind me, at the sad-looking building on the corner of Le Moyne Avenue. I knew it was the perfect location; I knew it was a place he would have wanted, regardless of anything else. Perhaps he had chosen me, squashed me on purpose.
But he was shaking his head, frowning. “I didn’t even know you had a dance studio until the other night. I didn’t even know this place WAS a dance studio. The owner told me that it had been several different things. A craft store. A home good store. A health food store.” Drew shrugged before me. “I didn’t know it was yours.”
I started breathing heavily, wanting to crawl into a shell and hide. I could feel the eyes of all the construction workers behind me. “This was my home,” I told him simply. I shrugged, feeling tears wafting down my cheeks.
But Drew just shook his head. “I have a business plan. This is where it’s happening.” He licked his lips subtly, feeling the tension in my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
I backed away from him, feeling the ultimate betrayal. I walked back out of the alley, touching my hand to the glass on the exterior of my beautiful studio. I remembered the hundreds of times I had entered and exited the door, the way the bell had jangled. I remembered, then, that I hadn’t grabbed the bell.
I turned toward Drew, almost ominously. I grabbed my keys from my key ring and deposited the key in the lock, opening the door. Sure enough, on the other side, jangled the small bell I had bought at a local craft store—a store that had since gone out of business. It had been my first decoration for the goddamned place.
I jangled it in the air as if it meant everything to me. I frowned at Drew as I did it, as if everything in the world that was wrong was his fault.
And with that, I turned on my heel and walked sternly back to my apartment. I knew, in my heart, that I couldn’t watch the place get torn down. I couldn’t watch the place fall. I couldn’t watch each beautiful brick become unattached from one another. I couldn’t watch my very heart, my very soul rupture before me.
Jangling all the way home I walked slowly, serenely, feeling at one with the spinning earth. Everything bad that had happened in the past couldn’t affect me anymore. Once, I had been a dancer, the finest at Butler University—and one of the finest in the country. I remembered the way my arms had pivoted through the air, the way my face had looked upwards toward my slender hand during the final pose. I remembered the way they had risen in Clowes Hall, the auditorium, and cheered for me with resounding applause. I remembered my mother, finally proud, spewing over and over again that I—and I alone—was her daughter.
But it all couldn’t go on. A busted knee had happened; a bad audition had happened. Nobody had wanted me, after all those years of continual pirouettes, days of starving myself. Nobody had wanted me�
�not even myself.
And yet in these past few weeks, I had thought things were starting to look up. This brilliant man—this Drew—had wanted me. He had taken me bungee jumping, and I had been able to feel the serene power of flying, of jumping to a sure death and coming up strong and energized. I had been able to enjoy a beautiful dinner with my best friend, her husband, and this new man—Drew—who seemed to fit in the equation perfectly. Never had anything come together so perfectly before. Never had my heart beat so perfectly in tune with another’s.
Finally, I arrived at my apartment building. It had started to rain in the cold October air, and I felt the ice-like pellets along my cheek as I opened the great apartment door. I stomped up the steps, two at a time, feeling the anger fuel me all the way to the top. I tore into my apartment, feeling the tears already brimming.
Boomer was stationed at the coffee table, blinking up at me. He meowed in that way; like he knew something was wrong, like he knew the world was ending. I collapsed next to him, allowing him to bounce up on my lap and nuzzle my cheek.
“It’s just you and me, Boomer,” I whispered to him. “It’s just you and me.”
That night, I spent a long and heavy sob-session with myself. I poured wine glass after wine glass; I ate ice cream from the carton. I cried with Meg Ryan as she lost her own, privatized bookshop in New York City because of Tom Hanks’s dumb, large, Fox Books. I hated Tom Hanks, American hero, more in that moment than I hated Drew. Why were the attractive men in the world trying to ruin the dreams and the beautiful lives of American women?
The wine continued to almost pour itself, streaming from the bottle like water. Boomer kept meowing at me, worried. I felt like I was becoming a part of the couch in those moments, and I remembered Kevin, my very first and last boyfriend—the pot smoker from Indiana. He had become a part of the couch, a part of the pot world, because he had felt he didn’t have a place in the regular world anymore. I hadn’t been able to understand it.
Every little thing he did had an element of “I don’t care” to it. When we went to Mexican restaurants, he scarfed down burrito after burrito without even saying a word to me. I patted his back, always, telling him to slow down; but there was a hunger in him that could not be quelled by anything in the world. He had dissatisfaction, and he knew it. So he sought to replace that dissatisfaction with something else.
Every time we had hung out at his apartment, he had wanted only to sit and watch television. I had tried to engage him in anything, like board games or sex. But he had wanted only to rest there, smoking casually from a bowl, and watching whatever was on television.
When he had told me he was dropping out, I had been relieved. This was the perfect time to dump him, to replace my dissatisfaction with our relationship with something else; with more dancing, perhaps, or more studying. He had told me he had wanted to give up for a long time, and he wanted me to tell him he was free.
And so I told him. “Kevin. You’re allowed to do whatever you want. You’re allowed to give up if you want. You shouldn’t; I should add there’s so much the world has to offer you.” I had been so hopeful, so sure of myself.
But now, laying there, drinking my sixth glass of wine, I was no longer so sure of myself. I understood that the world had nothing to offer me. It didn’t want to offer me sex, at least without taking something eternally important away from me. It didn’t want to offer me success. It didn’t want to offer me love.
Instead, it wanted me here—so much like Kevin—engaging with television shows, with a depressive alcoholic substance, and with as many Cheetos as I could find at the local convenience store.
And this was how the loathing commenced the next several days. I wondered; what I could have done wrong, how I could have proceeded differently. But, beyond anything else, I simply wondered how I was going to survive the following few days.
The next day, I left the apartment only once. I took a long, long walk out to the lake, not even bothering to walk through Wicker Park to see what had been done to my beautiful corner.
On the beach I stood in the sunlight, trying to feel hope again. I listened as the lake swarmed up on the rock, then the sand. It was brilliant, the way the sun lit the tops of each wave. But to me, it all felt the same as it ever had been before. Usually, this sameness of nature is a comfort for people. “We live, and we die—and the earth goes on.” That sort of spiel.
However, this time, I understood the sameness of the waves as a sort of knowledge that nothing in this world would ever go well or change for me.
I watched as small children played along the boardwalk, their parents rushing up behind them to capture them in their arms. I watched as old men walked somberly down the boardwalk, making a strange juxtaposition between the fresh-faced boys and girls running this way, then that on the boards.
I tried not to focus on the lovers, both young and old. One lover of my life had given up on the world, had retreated to the darkness of the living room. Another lover of my life had pushed headfirst into everything the world could give him—even taking things that didn’t belong to him.
I didn’t know which was worse. I stood, uncertain, as the waves crashed. Where was the world going to take me next?
Part 3 of Hooked comes out February 6th
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Once complete the Broken series will consist of 5 books in total.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 Claire Adams
Hooked #2 (The Hooked Romance Series - Book 2) Page 6