by A. K. Evans
I sent off my response indicating I’d meet her at the restaurant and returned my attention to Cal.
“Good luck,” he said. “I know you’ll be fine.”
I held his gaze for a few beats before I smiled at him and replied, “Thanks, Cal. Thank you for everything.”
He sent that same smile my way. “Anything for you, Sam. Call me and let me know how it goes, okay?”
I nodded. “I will.”
“See you later.”
“Later.”
With that, I gathered up my things and gave Cal one last look. Then, I turned around and left. I had a million things running through my mind regarding the current state of my friendship with Cal, but I couldn’t deal with any of them.
I had to tackle my issues one at a time. Up first was my mending my friendship with Demi. Then, maybe we could get to a place where she’d be able to help me figure out how to fix things with Cal.
“I’m sorry.”
My declaration seemed to catch Demi by surprise. We’d just been seated at the restaurant and had given our entrée selections to the waiter. The minute he walked away, I offered my apology.
Demi quickly got over the surprise. The tension in her shoulders melted away, and she replied, “I’m sorry, too.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I insisted.
Nodding, she maintained, “I do. I was out of line a couple weeks ago. You’re my best friend, Sam. I feel the way I do about things, but I should have figured out a better way to handle it.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. But you weren’t wrong,” I told her.
Confusion washed over her. “What?”
I attempted to swallow past the lump in my throat. “I broke things off with Mitch a little over a week ago.”
Demi’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?” she wondered.
I took in a deep breath and blew it out before I launched in and told her what happened. Demi listened intently, hanging on to every word I said until I finished. Once I did, she said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Sam.”
“You were right,” I remarked as I lifted a mozzarella stick appetizer from the plate the waiter brought over somewhere at the tail end of my story. “And I feel horrible.”
“Why?”
God, I wasn’t sure I could handle this. I’d treated her horribly, and she was being so supportive of me.
“You knew,” I started. “You saw what I couldn’t see, and you tried to talk to me about it. I wouldn’t hear anything about it. Demi, I pulled away from you, from Cal, and in the end, you were both right to be wary of Mitch.”
“That’s our job,” she returned. “As your friends, we’re supposed to be looking out for you.”
“Maybe that’s true, but I’m supposed to be your friend, too,” I countered after I’d swallowed a bite and taken a sip of my sparkling water. I was trying to balance the unhealthy food choice with a sensible drink selection. “And when you tried looking out for me, I refused to listen.”
Demi offered a sympathetic look. There was no way she could deny what I was saying since it was the truth.
Likely deciding it was best to just let it go, Demi asked, “So, are you really okay? I mean, I know I might have had my issues with him, but it doesn’t change the fact that he was part of your life for nearly a year.”
“Eight months,” I clarified, pressing my fingers that were covered in fried food grease into my napkin. “And you might find this strange, but I’m actually doing okay. I was hurt, obviously, by what he did. Not including me in such a big decision was awful for him to do. But if I’m being completely honest, I think the more time I’ve had to digest all of this, the more I realize that this situation was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“There’s more?” she pressed.
Nodding, I confirmed, “You get the basic gist of it. That’s why you were fighting so hard to get me to see what I was refusing to see. But yeah, there’s more. And honestly, I’m just mad at myself for it taking me this long to figure it out.”
I paused a moment to get my temper under control. Then, I continued, “I gave up so much of who I was and what made me happy for a man who couldn’t be bothered to include me in his plans for the future. I mean, I guess from his perspective, he was including me by just expecting that I’d go and not picking up to leave without me. But if what we had between us was a true partnership, he would have wanted me to be part of the equation when it came to planning a future. Without that respect from him, I was simply a girl along for the ride as he found whatever happiness he wanted. He didn’t care about mine. If that isn’t the biggest waste, I don’t know what is.”
“It’s not a waste if you learned something,” she assured me. “At least you now know what you won’t accept or tolerate in another relationship. And while I’m sure it’s going to take some time for you to get to a place where you’re no longer heartbroken—”
“I’m not,” I cut her off.
“What?” she asked.
Just then, our waiter returned with our entrees. He set them down, picked up the empty appetizer plate, and confirmed we didn’t need anything else before he took off again.
As I looked down at my food and assessed it, I thought for a moment. Then, I lifted my gaze to Demi’s and corrected myself. “Okay, I’m heartbroken. But it’s not for the reason you might think. I’m not feeling sad over the loss of Mitch. Yes, I cared for him, and I’ll even go so far as to say I loved him, but it’s really hard to feel torn up over the loss of someone who manipulated me. All the heartbreak I’m feeling now is about what I lost because I was with him.”
Demi smiled. “Well, look on the bright side,” she urged. “Now that you can see that, you can do what you’ve got to do to get back to being Sam.”
She had a point, and it was a good one. In fact, I’d been doing my best over the last week to take stock of what I lost in my relationship with Mitch. While I was certain I wouldn’t get everything back that was me, I knew if I focused on the most important—Cal and Demi—everything else would fall into place.
“Yeah. My biggest focus right now is you and Cal,” I revealed.
“We’re here,” Demi returned.
“I know. But until you and I ended up here tonight, we weren’t in a good place,” I pointed out.
“We would have worked it out eventually, Sam. You need to get back to being you. Cal and I aren’t going anywhere.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“We’re always going to be here,” she said.
Shaking my head, I inquired, “What do you mean I need to get back to being me?”
“You said it yourself. You lost Sam when you were with Mitch. You need to get Sam back,” she said.
“Right. That’s why I’m working on fixing what I broke with my friends,” I pointed out.
Demi let out a laugh. “I love you, Sam. But you aren’t Demi and Cal. You’re Sam. And Demi and Cal liked Sam before Mitch. The Sam who hated her job as an event sales director. The Sam that called or texted or talked about her thoughts and ideas. The Sam that had dreams of running a successful T-shirt business. That’s who you need to find again.”
Until she said it, I hadn’t even thought about the T-shirts. I gave them up. For nearly a whole month now, my store had been shut down. And for at least three months, I hadn’t designed a single shirt.
“I’m not so sure about that anymore,” I told her.
“What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “I have no desire or ambition to do that anymore,” I confessed. “If there was one good thing I could say about Mitch, it’s that he does know business and finance. He knows money because he worked with it regularly. And he saw what my business wasn’t doing.”
“So what?”
“So… it’s kind of a waste to spend that much time and money on something that isn’t going to go anywhere,” I replied.
Dem
i eyed me for a few moments as she considered how to respond. I didn’t think she’d be able to say anything to me that’d make me go back on my decision to stop making shirts. But after she’d taken several bites of her food and a sip of her drink, she said, “Cal knows business.”
That came out of left field.
“What?”
“Cal’s been running a successful business for more than two years now,” she started, telling me something I already knew. “Maybe he doesn’t work in finance, but he does know all about hard work and determination. Even he thinks that you giving up your dream was a mistake.”
“I don’t know,” I murmured.
“You need time to think about it. Take it. But I think you need to get back to it,” she said. “And if you find yourself considering it and need a little extra push… just think about me. I’ll do anything for a new job. I think my current one is going to send me either to crazy town or prison very soon.”
I burst out laughing. For the first time since my breakup, I laughed for a long time. For at least a solid minute, I didn’t stop laughing. When I started to settle down and wiped away the tears, I couldn’t get over how light I felt again.
And even though I didn’t necessarily have a plan to reopen my T-shirt business, it felt good to know I could count on my best friend to be by my side again, no matter what came my way. I only hoped I’d be able to give her back the same.
Eleven
Samantha
It was one question.
Just one.
I could do it.
And I only needed to start with a single word.
The fear overwhelmed me. It had been so long since I’d done this. What if… oh, what if he didn’t want this?
I alternated between biting my lip and chewing nervously on the inside of my cheek as I debated what to do and continued to pick up my phone and put it down.
No, no. I had to do this. I needed it back. Desperately. And I hoped he wanted it back just the same.
Picking the phone up from my desk one last time, I got to the screen I needed before my fingers flew across the keyboard.
Me: Question.
As soon as I hit the button to send the text, I set the phone down and looked away. It was going to drive me crazy.
It was Thursday, late afternoon, and it had been two days since my dinner out with Demi. I had an hour left before I was scheduled to leave work and decided to take a quick five-minute break since I’d been working my booty off all day long. This time of year was brutal, and I had plenty to keep me busy.
Before I had a chance to get myself even more worked up about it, my phone buzzed on the desk. Nerves shot through my body at the sound.
I picked the phone up again and saw his response.
Cal: Shoot.
Relief. Nothing but sweet relief. Just like that, like nothing had changed between us, he fell right back into that rhythm. I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve someone like him, but I couldn’t have been more grateful.
Me: How do you feel about pineapple on pizza?
Almost instantly, I received his response.
Cal: Nope. Plain cheese, pepperoni, or mushroom.
Me: Have you ever tried it?
Cal: Pineapple?
Me: Yes.
Cal: Yes. And it’s fine on its own. It does not belong anywhere near a pizza. Ever. Don’t tell me you like it.
Me: I’ve had it. It’s not something I go out and order regularly or anything. But if that was all there was to eat, I wouldn’t turn it down.
Cal: #barf
I couldn’t stop myself from smiling from ear to ear.
God, I missed this. I missed it so much.
It wasn’t about the question I asked; it was about the feeling the conversation with Cal gave me. While I hadn’t ever sent Mitch texts like this, I’d occasionally tried asking him stuff like this in person. He hated it.
If Cal felt the same, I never knew it.
He always entertained my questions, and he never made me feel bad about being who I was.
Just as I was about to tap out a response, I heard someone yelling somewhere outside my office. While it wasn’t exactly uncommon to have the occasional rowdy hotel guest or two, I knew this wasn’t that.
Concerned, I set my phone down on the desk and moved across the room to the door. I didn’t know what I’d expected to see when I walked out, but it definitely wasn’t what I ended up stumbling upon. That was for sure.
Demi and one other front-desk employee were standing behind the front desk watching in horror as a woman, who looked like she was in her late twenties, had a baby cradled against her chest and wrapped in one of those fabric slings. The woman’s face was red, tears were rolling down her cheeks, and she was yelling at another hotel guest.
It was clear the other guest was not a stranger to her.
In fact, they were well acquainted.
But given his current state of dress, I didn’t have a good feeling about what was going on.
The man was standing in the lobby in nothing but a wifebeater tank top and a pair of boxer briefs that were all stretched out and baggy on him. He was trying to reason with the woman, but she was having none of it.
Walking up behind Demi, I whispered, “What’s going on?”
Demi did not hesitate to share.
“This poor woman walked in here and told me she’d forgotten her room key,” she started. “She showed me her identification and credit card, so I made her another key for the room. As it turns out, she never checked in. She just realized that her credit card was being used at a hotel. The next thing I know, she’s down here yelling at him, and he’s not only panicking but also in some serious need of his clothes.”
I wanted to laugh. I really did.
But I was concerned about the woman. She was obviously distraught, and while I couldn’t be absolutely sure, I had to believe her baby was new. Very new. The baby was tiny.
The hotel entrance doors slid open, and a few people walked in, but I couldn’t pay any attention to them because I was riveted to the couple in front of me.
And sure enough, just a moment later, I’d gotten confirmation I was right about the baby’s age.
“You son of a bitch,” the woman shouted. “I can’t believe you. While I’m at home struggling to take care of our five-week-old daughter on my own, my husband is here screwing some bimbo.”
Demi gasped.
Yikes.
This was not good.
“He did not,” Demi seethed. “Tell me he did not do that.”
The woman, still clutching her baby close to her even though the sling was already doing the brunt of the work, confirmed, “He absolutely did.”
“Bastard,” Demi hissed.
“Baby, please,” the husband begged, taking a step toward his wife.
She took a step back. “Don’t you ‘baby’ me,” she ordered. “I just saw something that no wife, let alone a new mother, needs to see her husband doing. You just lost me, so I hope it was worth it.”
“I promise it was just sex,” he declared. “It didn’t mean anything. Please, Chasey, we’re a family.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she countered. “Just sex? Just sex?! Are you serious right now?”
“Chasey, baby, it’s been a long time,” he tried to reason with her.
“I’m literally going to lose my mind,” Demi muttered under her breath.
“A long time?” Chasey repeated. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Aaron. I was put on pelvic rest for the last eight weeks of my pregnancy and then managed to push a baby out of my vagina just five weeks ago. I should be more understanding of everything you’ve been through over the last thirteen weeks. What was I thinking? How insensitive of me, during all of that, not to be concerned about you getting your dick wet.”
This had gone from bad to worse.
“Excuse me, miss?”
At those three words and the voice they came from, my eyes were pulled away from the husband
, whose response I’d been waiting for. And when I saw who had spoken, I nearly lost my mind. With all of the excitement of what was happening between the husband and wife duo, I missed seeing who had walked in.
My Violent Heart.
My Violent Heart was here.
In our hotel.
My Violent Heart was only one of the hottest industrial rock bands in the world, and just like that, all six members of the band were here in the lobby. Killian, Cash, Walker, Holland, Roscoe, and Beck. There were four other individuals with them that I assumed were their security or managers or something, but I didn’t know their names.
Beck had walked up to Chasey and gotten her attention. In fact, he’d gotten her attention so much that her mouth had dropped open as she stared at him in awe.
Likely having been used to that reaction, Beck ignored it and asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Chasey hesitated a moment but eventually shook her head and said, “No. I just found out my husband is cheating on me. Actually, correction. He’s now my soon-to-be ex-husband.”
“Do you want me to kick his ass?” Beck offered, a glint in his eyes and a smirk on his face.
“Hey!” Aaron shouted. “You can’t do that! I’ll have you arrested for assault.”
Completely unfazed by Aaron, Beck looked over at him and ordered, “Shut up, dickwad. I’m talking to your wife.”
Chasey leaned toward Beck and reminded him, “Soon-to-be ex-wife.”
His lips twitched as he returned his attention to her and said, “Why don’t we go for a walk outside? You don’t need to be around this douchebag any longer, not when you’ve got this sweet little baby in your arms.”
Nodding slowly, still looking seemingly stunned that she was talking to the guy who played the keyboard and synthesizer for My Violent Heart, Chasey turned and started moving toward the exit with her baby in her arms and Beck at her side. On their way out, Beck looked at one of the people who’d walked in with the band and said, “Make sure that guy doesn’t try to follow us.”
With that, Beck and Chasey were gone. Aaron stood there, completely dumbfounded.
My eyes went back to the band because I was still in disbelief that they were there. That’s when I noticed the lead singer, Cash, had his eyes pinned on my best friend.