That’s the way I’ve felt about him from the beginning, and the reason it’s so hard to just walk away. I remember the first time I ever saw him. We’d just moved to the neighborhood. Our home was the largest and most palatial on the street, but when it was built, the owners had placed it close to the street with most of the land in back. So that I could sit in my living room window and see anyone passing by.
Always a reticent child, I’d been sitting in that window seat, wiling away another summer day with nothing to do but read and gaze out the window at a pair of birds that were chasing each other through the branches of the hundred-year-old magnolia tree out front.
I’d had the window cracked a little to let the breeze in, preferring that to the artificial coolant of the AC, that’s why I was able to hear the voices as they came down the sidewalk. He’d been with a couple of his friends, and they were rubbing each other about something or another.
I’d looked up just in time to see the sun glancing off his dark hair as he had his head thrown back, laughing at something. I felt a tight knot in my tummy, and my heart raced as my eyes stayed glued to him. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, still is.
After that day, I’d sit in that window longing for the sight of him, wanting to recreate that moment again and again. And then I’d searched him out, me, the quiet as a church mouse you never know that I’m there I’m so quiet me, had gone in search of the Adonis who’d stolen not just my heart but a big part of me that day.
It’s probably something that should’ve faded by now. People have crushes every day, but for me, it never did reach that stage. Instead, it just kept growing and growing, and the fact that I never got to see him only made it worst. Now we’ve come full circle, and he’s still out of my reach.
Derrick
I had to fight like hell to get out of that hospital. I thought they were in the habit of kicking people out these days, but they seemed to want to keep me there for what was little more than a headache. A concussion wasn’t the end of the world, and I needed to get home to my girls.
Dad had touched base with the cops, and there was still no word on where Lauren had gone. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her at this point. I was pissed, yes, but in my mind, all I saw was the girl I’d met in college all those years ago.
The fun-filled adventurous spirit who could sometimes be moody but never harmful or hateful to anyone else. We’d sort of fell into a relationship, I guess. Both of us were more interested in getting our degree than the rest of our peers who saw college as a place to escape their parents and live wild and free.
Me, because I came from a long line of successful architects and wanted to make my family proud, and Lauren because she was the first one in her family to make it that far up the education ladder and she wanted something more for herself.
It didn’t bother me that we didn’t come from the same social background; in fact, I didn’t ask. When one of my roommates introduced us, we’d started out as friends who grew close over time, not the greatest love story in the world, but those feelings grew with time.
In my world, you go through college, get a respectable job, find an equally respectable partner, and settle down to have kids. I’d left my wild and crazy days behind me when I left high school. I figured I’d done enough indiscriminate fucking to last me a lifetime, and it was time to settle down.
And why not with the girl I’d just spent three years of my life building a relationship with? And then the twins came along, and I thought my life was complete, and it was. So why was everything coming apart at the seams now?
Everything had been going so well and on track. Not that I had a blueprint in my head of how I wanted my life to go, nothing that stringent. But growing up in a home with two parents who loved each other and showed it, always having been taught the sanctity of marriage and what it means to be a man, I thought I was doing pretty okay.
Lauren and I didn’t even really fight with each other. There was never a time when I slammed out of the house in a huff and had to go down to the bar to hang with the guys until I cooled down. She’d never said a cross word to me that I can recall, not anything major anyway.