“Look. Look where you are,” I said. She’d stood beside me and the mist seemed to lift from her eyes.
“Okay,” she said.
First the Colosseum, then we ate pizza at a little shop near the Vatican. She cried when she stood in the Vatican underneath Da Vinci’s handiwork. She’d turned to me and firmly said, “These are not tears for him. These are because I’m here and I’ve always wanted to be.” Then she’d hugged me and thanked me for taking her.
We parted after that day, but when I got back to Miami I called her. We went out to dinner a few times. Very casually. Things didn’t move forward until I kissed her. I hadn’t planned on doing it, but we were saying goodnight outside of a restaurant and I just went in without thinking. It was months before we had sex for the first time. She was timid, hesitant. It took a while for her to trust me. But, she did. And I am not letting that go as easily as he did.
Chapter Fifteen
Six months before I saw Olivia at the music store on Butts and Glade, I bought a ring for Leah. It sat next to Olivia’s ring in my sock drawer for a week before I moved it. It didn’t feel right having them together. I’d bought an antique-style ring for Olivia. It was elegant. When things fell apart, I hadn’t known what to do with it. Sell it? Pawn it? Keep it forfuckingever? In the end, I couldn’t part with the past and it had stayed exactly where it was. For Leah, I chose princess cut. It was large and flashy and would impress her friends. I planned to ask her while we were on vacation in Colorado. We skied there twice a year. I was getting sick of the skiing circus with her ridiculous friends who named their children things like Paisley and Peyton and Presley. Names without soul. It was my opinion that if you called a child a pattern for long enough, they would become scrambled. My mother named me after a Biblical spy. He was all dash and dare. Needless to say, names meant something.
I suggested we go on a ski trip alone. Initially, she refused to go without ‘her people’, but I think she caught a whiff of engagement ring in the air and quickly changed her tune. The ski trip was a month away when I panicked. It wasn’t an inner, hidden panic either. It was a drinking binge panic in which I jogged six miles a day listening to Eminem and Dre, and Google searched Olivia’s name by night with Coldplay on repeat. I found her. She was working as a secretary at a law firm. I didn’t have the chance to find her; I got into a car accident and told my first life-altering lie.
The day I saw her, I was already two months deep in my amnesia lie and just hanging out in the general vicinity hoping to run into her. I’d never actually go into her job — Olivia took herself way too seriously to take that well, but I considered ambushing her in the parking lot. And I might have, had she not walked into the Music Mushroom that day. I was going to tell her the truth; how I’d lied to my friends and family, how it had all been because I couldn’t leave her in my past like I was supposed to. And in that split second when I asked her about the damn CD in her hand, she looked so panicked, so stricken that I fell deeper into my lie. I couldn’t do it. I watched the whites of her eyes expand, her nostrils flaring as she tried to decide what to say. At least she wasn’t swearing at me. That was good.
“Ummm.” That’s what she decided to say to me. I heard her voice for the first time and I couldn’t keep my smile. It rose at the corners of my mouth and ran right into my eyes like it hadn’t been lost for the last three years. She was holding a cello-wrapped boy band in her hand. She looked helluva confused.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.” It was cruel to play on her surprise, but I wanted to keep her talking.
“Er, they’re okay,” she said. “They’re not really your style.” I could feel her mentally retreating at that point. Her hand was already placing the CD back on its shelf, her eyes darting toward the door. I had to do something. Say something. I’m sorry. I was a fool. I’d marry you today, on this very day if you agreed to it…
“They’re not my style?” I repeated her words while I tried to formulate my own. She looked so forlorn in that moment that I smiled at her beauty more than anything else.
“What exactly do you think my style is?” I immediately recognized my mistake. This was the way we used to flirt. If I wanted to make any headway in her forgiving me, I had to cut the shit and-
“Umm, you’re a classic rock kind of guy … but I could be wrong.”
She was right, so right. She was breathing through her mouth, her full lips parted.
“Classic rock?” I repeated. She knew me. Leah probably would say my style was Alternative. Not that she knew anything about music; she listened to the top 100 like it was full of Biblical truths instead of clichés. I dragged my bitter thoughts away from Leah and back to Olivia. She looked scared. I saw her expression and it hit me. She wasn’t dragging anger around. She was dragging regret. Same as me.
There was a chance for us. Away from the old.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And then the lie came. I’d been telling the same one for two months. It came easily, pouring off my tongue like relationship poison.
You’re protecting her, I told myself.
I was protecting myself.
I was the same selfish f**k that pushed her too hard in the past. I started to walk out. To run from what I’d just done, when I heard her call after me. That was it. She was going to tell me that she knew me, and I’d tell her that I didn’t have amnesia. That the whole f**king charade had been about her. Instead, she took off down an aisle. I watched her dark hair bob as she weaved past people who were in her way.