by Ana Sparks
“Want us to order for you?”
I shook my head, avoided her jeering gaze.
“No, I’ll wait.”
“You sure?” she asked and I said nothing. Then, the waitress was gone and I was on the phone, calling him—the jerk, the liar, the idiot—no, I was the idiot.
He picked up on the fourth ring.
“Kristin I’m so sorry.”
“Are you coming?”
Silence.
“Are you coming, Clark? Tell me right now, are you coming?”
Silence, then, “No.”
I ended the call and then stood up. My family had heard everything; no one was meeting my furious gaze. Tears were prickling at my eyes; I had seconds before they fell.
“He’s not coming,” I told them, before I turned on my heel and left. I could hear them calling after me, so I didn’t walk, I ran. I ran out of the restaurant, full of the people who were staring, who probably knew me, recognized me, knew what was happening even now. My latest embarrassment, my most recent making a fool of myself.
I couldn’t take it.
I ran through the parking lot and down the street, reflecting dully that once again history was repeating itself, and that I should have learned my lesson the first time. As my legs ached and my eyes poured, I cursed myself. For believing him again and again. For opening my heart enough to be hurt again.
As I ran, I scanned through my phone until I found his number. I deleted it, then blocked him. Then, I made a promise to myself: never would I forgive him. This time, this was too much. Never would I forgive him for this.
Chapter Fourteen
Clark
I woke up at dawn. That was when the workday begun. When did it end? When my head hit the pillow, that was when. That was the price of success. That was the price of this life I led.
I reminded myself of this as I ate my breakfast in the car that was taking me to my office. Today was the same as all the other days, the days since her. I would be productive, complete each task, go to sleep with the help of a few pills. Wake up, work, sleep then repeat.
Today, Carla was on the phone.
“It’s your brother,” she said and I went to my office to pick it up.
“Clark, it’s Eugene,” he said. He paused.
“Yes?”
“I’m outside, come meet me.”
I glanced at the window. It was sunny out, but I really wasn’t in the mood for another one of the biannual familial reprimands.
“I’m afraid I’m terribly busy, Eugene. Can’t get away, little brother.”
“Okay, I’ll come up,” he said and then hung up.
I glared at the phone, then, with a sigh, I leaned back in my chair with my hands behind my head. What could be up with Eugene? He’d never demanded his way into my office before. In fact, I hadn’t spoken to him at all in months. A knock on the door, then Eugene was inside my office.
“Shut the door behind you, please,” I said and he did so. Whatever the hugely big deal was, I didn’t want Carla taking notes to use against me when I finally got around to firing her.
“I know,” Eugene said, striding up and stopping at my desk. I couldn’t make out what kind of expression he had on his face. “Clark, I know,” he said, more forcibly this time.
I stared at him evenly.
“You know what?”
“I know what you did for that girl.”
I chuckled, and then cocked a brow at him.
“Which girl?”
“Kristin Blair.”
My smirk fell and I turned my chair so that it was facing the window. It had been two months since my last conversation with her; two months since she’d blocked me from her life.
“What do you know?”
“I know that you gave her a million dollars and went out with her for a few dates. I know that you messed up again, missed her family dinner. And I know that you’ve regretted it ever since.”
I addressed my answer to the impassive rectangles of buildings outside.
“You don’t know anything.”
Now, it was Eugene’s turn to laugh, a jarring, high-pitched sound. I could almost see his wide nose scrunched up with it.
“Clark, I saw you.”
I wheeled around to rise and face him head-on.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“That night, at prom, I saw you. How you came home all hollowed-out like. How you spent weeks in your room, made the family phone bill astronomical because you were nonstop calling a certain girl who wouldn’t answer, how you snuck out with the family car to try and get her to see you. I remember, Clark. I saw you.” His face was defiant, insistent, but I only shrugged.
“That was a long time ago.”
Eugene shook his head.
“That was a long time ago, but I saw what it did to you. How you threw yourself into the work even more, how you haven’t let anything come between you and it since. No, not since…”
I strode over to the door, ripped it open.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Eugene. I don’t know what you heard—”
“I talked to Billy.”
“I don’t care. You can leave now. I don’t have time for this.” But Eugene didn’t budge.
“I don’t care either. I’m going to say what I came here to say. And what I came to say, Clark, is that I’ve been quiet—we all have—as you’ve slipped further and further away from us, as you’ve thrown yourself into work so deeply, we’re lucky if we get a text every six months. But not for this girl—this woman. She’s different and you know it. I’m not going to sit here and say nothing while you mess this up too, Clark. You probably already have, who knows. But I just wanted to say, that me, that none of us agree with this, with you using work to avoid feeling, with you pushing everyone else away.”
Now, Eugene strode up to me, staring into my face, his bulging eyes insistent. I didn’t meet his gaze. His words were stupid, ridiculous, clasping at me with sticky hands and pathetic grasping fingers. I wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t answer him—couldn’t.
“Just think about it,” Eugene said before he strode away.
I slammed the door behind him and stormed back to my chair. Too bad Eugene had come for nothing. Because I wasn’t going to think about it. Not for a second.
I opened my laptop to the article on a Sacramento news site that had caught my eye: Local IT Whiz Makes It Big, with a picture of Kristin smiling oh-so-happily underneath. My gaze hovered over her beautiful face and then, slowly, I closed my laptop.
I had an idea.
Chapter Fifteen
Kristin
Three months wasn’t so long when you thought about it. That’s what I told myself as I woke up after once again dreaming of stupid Clark Denton. Him, pinning me to the bed, kissing me, touching me. And to think I had thought the dreams had stopped.
Shaking myself, I rose to find Romeo and Juliet sitting on the end of my bed in the exact same position, staring at me as if they were deliberating whether I would make a good meal nor not.
I went to their food bowls to find them empty. This was less-than-surprising. Both had simultaneously, at some point in the last two months, decided to get fat; no matter how much food I piled into their little smiley-faced bowl, they gobbled it down in record time. The funniest part was that they were growing fat perfectly in sync, their cuddling lick-fests apparently only enhanced by the extra rolls.
After I had doled out more food for them, I opened the fridge to get some food for myself. Inside was a big slice of cake from Harmony’s birthday party the day before. I stared at it for a good minute before I reasoned that if dreaming about the man who had broken your heart and humiliated you didn’t warrant a nice big piece of chocolate cake, nothing did.
I opened the window and sat down in my old favorite spot, cake in hand. I gazed over the trees and reflected over the past few months. Really, I shouldn’t feel all that bad about my dreams about Clark; it wasn’t as though I could co
ntrol them. And, when you looked at what I could control, what I had accomplished over the past few months, it was nothing less than astounding.
Three months ago, I had been broken, dejected, betrayed, and ruined. Three months ago, I had lost all hope and still, I had gotten back up. Still, I had kept on trying. And it had paid off. I had built my own IT business, started volunteering for the local homeless shelter, and successfully avoided getting back in touch with Clark or Veronica despite their repeated attempts. Veronica’s attempts at reaching out had involved family manipulation, while Clark’s had consisted of constant calls from different phone numbers, as well as driving by my apartment building repeatedly. And, despite the pang in my heart whenever I heard that familiar voice on the other line or saw that familiar red sports car, I had stayed strong. I blocked each new number, and began to leave my building by the back entrance. And I had gotten on with my life.
I finished my cake and took one last breath of fresh air, then hopped off the window and returned to my laptop. It was Saturday, but I liked to get my emails over with before I set off for the day. A quick scan of my inbox revealed something from my old high school. Attention, Class of 2007, the subject line read.
I clicked on it and read it through:
Grass Valley High School would like to welcome back all students of its graduating class of 2007 for a reunion. Food, drinks and music will be provided. Many of the former staff will be present. We hope to see you there!
I moved the cursor over to the delete button, but couldn’t quite click it.
Why should I go? I asked myself. Did I really want to go back to the school where I was still doubtless remembered as the girl who was stood up at prom and now, tried to auction off her virginity?
Because, I told myself, of what you did, despite that. To show them that these setbacks hadn’t broken me. On the contrary, I had built myself up in spite of them. I was the owner of a successful business. I had everything to be proud of.
I closed the tab, and then my laptop. In any case, I didn’t have to decide whether to go or not now. The rest of the day I spent wandering round the neighborhood, stopping in shops and browsing through things I didn’t need. A nice long walk through the forest raised my spirits, but the whole day, I felt indelibly as if I was avoiding something.
In the middle of the night, out of a dead sleep, I sat up straight in bed.
I stumbled through the dark to my laptop and opened it. Reopening my email tab, I found the reunion email and RSVP’d.
YES.
“There,” I told myself as I lay back in bed. “I’ve done it.”
Chapter Sixteen
Clark
Is this really going to work?
As the limo zipped along the highway, I shook the thought away for the fifth time. This was going to work, it had to. I’d tried just about everything else to get in touch with Kristin at this point.
But showing up at her building unannounced, demanding that she come with me to our high school reunion—wasn’t it a bit much? Gazing out the window revealed the sky was an ominous-looking grey. I looked away. Maybe this all was a bit much, but I had to try.
The closer we got, however, the more the question returned, the more the anxiety closed up my throat. By the time we pulled up to the familiar off-white apartment building, I was practically hoarse and had almost crushed the corsage box in my hands. When I got to the building receptionist, I parried requests to call Kristin’s apartment with the old man’s stoic refusal to do anything that “wasn’t by regulations,” before finally paying him off with a fifty.
“Tell him there’s something here for her,” I told him as he rung her, and he did so.
Sure enough, a few minutes later, Kristin was walking into the lobby. Her gaze stopped on me, and her face fell. I was speechless. Kristin looked even more gorgeous than I remembered. Maybe it was just not seeing her for so long, or maybe it was the chiffon and jeweled mint glory of a dress draped around her body, but I was utterly frozen. Until she turned around to walk away from me.
“Wait,” I croaked, and she paused.
“Is that…is that the dress you were going to wear—”
“For prom, yes,” Kristin declared, whirling around to deliver me an icy glare.
I nodded dumbly and Kristin demanded “What are you doing here Clark?”
I looked at her sheepishly. Judging by her enraged reaction, I was beginning to wonder that myself.
“Well?” Kristin asked and the words poured out of me.
“I just wanted to see you. I thought that maybe, I don’t know, you were going to the reunion too. And if you were then maybe I could give you a ride.”
Kristin’s frown didn’t budge and showed no signs of doing so, so I continued.
“It’s just a ride. You can ditch me when we get there, if you want.”
Kristin’s glittering eyes surveyed me coolly, while I tried to give her an easy, reassuring smile. Apparently appeased by what she saw, she nodded and strode ahead of me outside. At the door of her building, however, she’d stopped.
Turning to me with a smile, she said, “Oh Clark, you didn’t!”
Clearly, she had spotted the limo waiting outside for us. I took her arm with a shrug. “It seemed appropriate.”
At the limo, I waved the driver aside and opened the back door myself so she could climb in. I climbed in right beside her and the driver pulled away from the curb. I glanced over to see that Kristin, for all her indifferent bravado, was clearly flustered at sitting so close to me.
“So…” she said, staring determinedly out the window, “Why would you bother going to the reunion?”
Edging a bit closer, so our knees were touching, I asked, “What do you mean?”
She turned to look at me, her gaze flicking down as soon as it met mine.
“Why bother?” she said to her sparkly nails. “When everyone knows your success already, what’s the point?”
I put my hand on her arm. Leaning towards her, in her ear I whispered, “I have some unfinished business there.”
While I waited there, so close to her, Kristin stayed immobile. Her hand was trembling, her body urging her to do what her mind was clearly so against.
But all she said was a quiet “Oh,” so I moved my hand away.
The rest of the ride was more enjoyable and Kristin opened up when I asked her about her company’s recent success, and we even shared a laugh about our cats.
“They’ve gotten crazy fat!” Kristin exclaimed and we burst out laughing.
“No way,” I said.
“What?”
“My cat, Nala. She got fat, too. I think the maid has been slipping her treats.”
Kristin laughed some more.
“Both Romeo and Juliet are chunky, now they cuddle in all their blobby glory. We should have a cat playdate sometime.”
At her artless suggestion, she fell silent, her gaze flicking back to the window.
“Yes,” I said softly, taking her hand, “Yes, we should.”
Kristin said nothing. Her hand was trembling, but she didn’t move it away. The limo rolled to a halt and the driver came over to the door and opened it. I waved him away once again.
“We’re going to need a minute.”
Kristin said nothing, and I took her other hand.
“Kristin, please. Just hear me out. Whatever happens tonight, whether you even want to talk to me after you step foot out of this limo, I just wanted to apologize. I want you to know how sorry I am for failing you like that. For disappointing you and proving that all of the horrible things you thought about me after prom were true. For embarrassing you and hurting you again, when you were the last person I ever wanted to hurt.
“After that night, after prom, I wanted to explain it to you, but even now, Kristin, my darling, I’m afraid there’s no explaining it. How utterly different I feel in your presence—how light, authentic…how free. How your laughter is contagious and your smile even more so. How, after we reunited this
past year, as my thoughts turned to you more and more, an equally powerful current rose within me—that of fear.
“Yes, Kristin, I feared you and what you did to me. And that night, that stupid, horrible, mistake of a night, as I sat in my office, as I watched the clock tick from 5:50 to 6 pm, I was afraid. I was afraid of going to you and losing myself, of giving into the overwhelming affection that I could already hardly resist. And so, I sabotaged it. I sat there and, while everything in me urged me to go, fear urged me to stay. I thought of the weeks after the prom, the breathless, painful weeks that I only got through by using work as a drug to escape the pain, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take that helpless feeling again. No, I couldn’t bear it; I wanted you out of my life; I wanted this horrible vulnerability gone for good.”
Kristin’s hand stopped trembling.
“And I almost got my way,” I continued, “You know, I almost pulled it off. As I sat there, and 6:20 became 6:25, I had almost convinced myself that I was doing the right thing; sparing you the disappointment of being with me. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from calling you and begging for your forgiveness; but I was even a bit grateful for your refusal to talk to me. I was actually relieved. As the days passed, I figured that was it; that I’d gotten away with it, that all I needed was a few more days, and you’d be out of my system.”
I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it.
“But Kristin, I was so wrong. Because, you see, hours stretched into days, stretched into weeks, stretched into months. You want to know what changed with all this time, all this distance? Not a damn thing. If anything, I missed you all the more, I ached for you—a physical urge there was no escaping. I realized that I hadn’t gotten you out of my system at all, I had simply thrown away my last chance at happiness.”
And then the words were out and Kristin’s eyes were shining. I let go of her hands and helped her out of the limo. Taking the corsage out of the box, I tied it on her wrist.