Into the Darkness

“I’ll have a Corona and the lovely Charlie will have...” He waited for my response.

“A margarita, please. What can I say? I’m a sucker for punishment.”

He laughed, my insides doing a happy dance as his beautiful smile lit up the room. It was all fun and games now, but wait until I woke up in the morning with a splitting headache. It’s all about pacing myself, I can do this. Anyway, it was Monday night. Nobody gets drunk on a Monday, right?

We finished our drinks before our meals arrived. Julian was easy to talk to. He had grown up in a small town in Louisiana with his mother and sister. His dad left when Julian was three and he never saw him again. He went to Yale where he studied journalism and met Serena, his girlfriend at the time. He thought she was the love of his life but she changed colleges and they couldn’t do the long distance thing.

“Have you thought about contacting her?” I asked him. “Or should I say Facebook-stalking her?”

“I did think about contacting her for a while, but I moved to New York and well, life became hectic. I heard from a friend that she was in Boston but I think the book’s closed on that one. If it was meant to be we would have worked it out back then.”

He laid his hand on mine, gently caressing while he seductively looked into my eyes. My body starting to tingle all over, sex goose bumps, as I liked to call them. It had definitely been a while since someone made me feel this way. My mind was going crazy, wondering if it would be too slutty of me to say, “Hey, let’s skip dinner and do it like they do on the discovery channel.” Oh shit, seriously, what I am thinking? I wasn’t. I was a horny bitch who needed to get some baloney pony in my cooch…pronto. Damn Eric!

“Enough about me,” he said. “What about you?”

“I believe I have one get out of jail free card?”

“Yes, and I believe you used that last weekend.”

“Oh that’s right...when you fucked me in your bed. Oh no wait, was that the time against the wall? No, my bad, it was when you did me on your kitchen bench,” I said in my sexiest voice as I ran my foot up his leg.

“Nice segue but you ain’t getting out of this. I want to know more about you, Charlie.”

With a small pout I gave in. “I grew up in Carmel...”

“Really? I never figured you for a California girl.”

“Why? Because I’m not wearing Daisy Dukes with a bikini top?”

“Carry on, smartass.”

“I went to Carmel High. My dad was a truck driver so he was on the road a lot. It was just my mom, my older sister and lil’ old me until my sister left to go backpacking through Europe when I was fourteen. Mom and Dad split up when I was seventeen, then Mom moved back to Cuba to take care of my grandpa who was really sick. The rest is just a drunken frat night margarita haze before I landed here.”

“Somehow I can’t imagine a drunken Charlie in college.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’re just so…together. I’ve never met a woman as career driven yet still has fun in life, not to mention is unbelievably gorgeous. It’s refreshing.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“And back home? No serious boyfriends left behind? How were you not taken sooner?”

“How are you not taken?”

“Ugh, it’s impossible to argue with a lawyer. Seriously, how did Charlie Mason not break any hearts in Carmel?”

Almost choking on my drink, I let out a cough. He waited patiently for an answer. It was the skeleton in the closet that was happy to remain in hibernation. Tonight wasn’t the night to bring up the past, but we were at that point of the relationship when past relationship conversations were inevitable. Shrug it off, Charlie, it won’t invite any more questions.

I shifted my eyes to the painting on the wall, unable to make eye contact as I spoke. “I dated a few guys in high school. There was this one guy my senior year, the typical high school crush type of thing,” I said, laughing it off.

I think he could sense my discomfort and moved on. We chatted about his career, the stories he had covered, and of course we had a heated debate about American Idol. I enjoyed his company and for rest of the night we didn’t stop laughing at the stories he told of when he first moved to New York. I’m not sure if they were that funny or the margaritas had gotten the better of me.

We took a cab back to his place, where he made me forget the world existed. Twice.

…

My head pounded. In actual fact I felt like I had been dug up. Damn that visit to Margaritaville! My alarm rang and I somehow managed to hit snooze. I fell back asleep until the ringing started again. This time I ignored snooze and made a mental note to just set my alarm later tomorrow. Why did I waste my time hitting snooze a thousand times when I could have slept in that extra twenty minutes uninterrupted? I dragged my tired self into the shower, got changed and headed to the office.