I went to his house the next morning and knocked on his door. I kept my eye out for days afterward to see if he might be coming home at a weird hour or something. But he was gone. No good bye. No explanation, he was just gone.
My heart sank as I thought about the night we had spent together and how wonderful it had been. His muscular hands on my body, his lips on my skin; it had been perfect. I really didn’t know what had happened and why he had totally disappeared. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before and I wasn’t prepared to deal with it. Obviously I didn’t know Chris well, and we had only been neighbors for a short period of time; but I liked him. I found myself thinking about our night together often.
I remembered his strong arms wrapped around me as he carried me down from the woods. I could still, very vividly, remember his smell that night, a musky mix of sweat and shower gel. My mind could get lost remembering how he had ripped my clothes off and carried me up to my bed. My head was still healing from where I fell while taking the final picture for my art show. My ankle also was still healing from that fall. Every time I looked at either of the wounds my mind went back to that night.
I could still remember the feeling of his lips on mine. The sweet taste of his tongue as it entered and searched with mine. It was hard to think about anything else than that night I had with Chris. How was a girl supposed to move on when a guy just totally disappeared on her? I didn’t know anything about Chris. Not his last name or what he did for work and certainly I didn’t know where he had gone. I felt like a teenager again, the rejection of a boy not calling. It was all-consuming for me.
While developing some pictures one afternoon I decided I had to go snoop around his house a little more. He hadn’t come or gone for at least a week and I didn’t feel nervous at all that he would come home. I had woken up at all hours of the night to look and see if he was coming home, but he never did. As I walked over to his house, I looked into the front window. There was the same furniture as before and nothing looked lived in at all. In fact, the whole house looked pretty empty. Or at least as empty as it had before Chris had come.
Suddenly, it hit me. What if he never came back?
The thought of never getting to see Chris again made my stomach churn. I don’t know why I had become attached to him so quickly; it wasn’t something I normally did. But then again, I didn’t normally sleep with guys I had just met either. I was a one man kind of gal and this fling had me feeling like I had made a big mistake.
I was starting to understand why my friends got so crazy when men didn’t call them back. It was horrible to be second guessing how smart I was or how beautiful…all over a guy who didn’t call after having sex. I felt absolutely ridiculous.
As I made my way around Chris’s house, I kept peering into the windows to see if there was anything unusual going on in there. For all I knew he could be dead in there for the past week and I was getting mad at him for not calling me. I didn’t really know if he had left the house and I figured I should at least check to see if his Jeep was still around.
The garage seemed a good place to go check next. The last time I had looked in there it was totally empty and Chris had just moved into the house. I let my hand slowly twist the door handle to the garage and I pushed the door all the way open without going inside. It was difficult to see in
there and I knew I was going to have to turn the light on. I thrust my hand into the doorway and felt around on the wall until I ran into the light switch.
The garage looked empty, except there was one box on a shelf in the corner.
I walked over to the box and took a deep breath. It would look pretty bad if Chris happened to come home right as I was going through the things in his garage. I ran over to the door and looked around one last time. There were no cars and no one even near the house.
The box was loosely shut without any tape or anything over it. I certainly wouldn’t have cut through the tape to look inside, or at least that’s what I told myself as I started to open the box. I had never been a super curious person. I let mysteries remain and often figured that if something was important enough I would be told about it eventually. But that was for silly small town secrets. This felt like a bigger secret that I needed to get to the bottom of.
I don’t know what exactly I was expecting to see in the box, but I felt disappointed when I opened it and just found clothes. I pulled out a shirt and some pants, both black. In fact most of the clothing in the box was black. The fact that all the clothing was black seemed odd since I don’t think I had seen Chris where any black at all since he had moved in.
As I closed the box up there was a noise outside the garage.
My heart sank and I froze. I stood still and waited to see what the noise was from. My heart pounded in my chest and I could feel my mouth getting dry as I tried to swallow. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath.
I listened intently as I walked toward the doorway and peered outside.
Then out of nowhere a cat ran away from the side of the garage. I breathed a sigh of relief and shut the garage door behind me. I had to get back to my own garage and finish developing my pictures for my big gallery show. It didn’t matter if Chris ever returned; I still had a life and I needed to continue living.
I had to stop worrying about this guy that I hardly knew. My show was right around the corner and I absolutely had to make some decisions on the pictures that I would be using. I had changed my mind at least a dozen times in the last few weeks, but it was finally time to make the decisions so they could prepare the gallery for my pictures.
Chapter 12
As the days continued to pass I had to just give up on Chris. He was a nice guy and I did have feelings for him, but any guy who would disappear like this wasn’t right for me. I needed more than this.
I felt like an independent woman and waiting on a guy to show back up just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I was starting to feel desperate. I made the decision to stop thinking about Chris. Of course, that quickly turned into trying to stop thinking about him, then thinking about him a little and then all the way back to thinking about him all the time again.
I settled in with my preparations for my photography exhibit. Every time I thought I had my list of pictures complete, I kept changing my mind and looking through more and more pictures. This was my first big show and I didn’t want anything to mess it up. Not even a broken heart over a one night stand could distract me from my objective.
Then, at about midnight a week later; I was developing pictures in my garage again and I heard someone pull up outside. I ran to my garage window and looked to see who it was. Sure enough it was Chris.
He pulled his Jeep into the driveway and then got out and went into his house. He was dressed in black. I could hardly see him in the dark but he looked different. There was no smile and nothing about his demeanor seemed pleasant at all. He looked scary.
Even though I was mad as hell at him for disappearing and not calling me, my heart still raced as I watched him. He had some power over my body that I just couldn’t put my finger on.
After about thirty minutes, I went quietly back into my house. Surely now that he was home he would reach out to me again. Perhaps he would stop by in the morning and tell me some elaborate reason why he couldn’t call me?
Wait! What was I doing? I was already trying to give him excuses for why he wasn’t able to call me. How pitiful was I? I shook my head and tried to think about something else. When did I become this girl that cared so much about what a guy thought?
I was doing so well at building myself up to be more independent. But then I found myself sitting in the dark of my kitchen waiting to see if Chris would come over. Even though it was the middle of the night, my brain actually thought he might come running over to say hello and apologize. I sat for about twenty minutes before finally deciding sleep was more important than staring out my window in the middle of the night.