My Better Life
20
Gavin
Ten days.
Ten days of bliss, mixed with pure torture. I still don’t remember my past. I don’t remember anything about my life from before. But that doesn’t matter. The desire to remember has faded along with the purple bruise on my face. It’s gone. And I’m happy. Somehow, I expect I’ve never been happier in my entire life.
Jamie was right. Working with Big Tom is a good job. Bringing home a paycheck for my family is rewarding. I only wish I made more, because I see how tired Jamie is when she comes home from cleaning houses all day, and shuttling people around in the station wagon, and picking up waitressing shifts at the bar. More than that, every morning, I hear her alarm at four, and then I pretend to still be asleep when she tiptoes out to the barn to work on her art.
When she’s out in her studio, I wander through the house, finding things to repair, and then start on making the kids’ breakfast and sack lunches. Tanner has trouble with math, so I’ve started writing math problems on his napkin, and when we play baseball I have him run stats and keep score. I think when I was a kid I must’ve had trouble with math too, because having him jump and run and throw a ball while reciting his math facts comes naturally to me. I try to figure out ways to help him learn, and I try to think of ways I can earn more money so Elijah can be on that little league team he told me about. Maybe I can also figure a way to help Jamie.
She still hasn’t shown me her studio or her glass. I must’ve really hurt her. But I want to help her dreams come true.
She hasn’t opened up about her art, but she’s shared other things. Every night, after the kids are asleep, we sit in the kitchen and I ask her questions. It’s like that old game, twenty questions, but the answers always lead to me wanting to make love to her.
What’s my favorite food?
Cornbread.
Yours?
Peach pie with loads of vanilla ice cream. At that I imagined her licking melted ice cream from her lips.
What’s my favorite song?
“Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” She said this with a devious smile, so I think she was joking.
Yours?
Gymnopédie Number One. It reminds me of fog rolling over the mountains, it’s pretty like that.
I resisted the urge to kiss her pert mouth and asked, what’s my favorite color?
Cerulean. To that, I said I had a revised favorite color, that it was now lavender blue.
She smiled, and I asked, what’s my favorite thing about you?
Kissing me. She blushed bright red at that.
Your favorite thing about me?
She unconsciously stroked her fingers over her lips as she thought about her answer.
And just like every other night, I ended our conversation abruptly by excusing myself to take a shower before bed. A very, very cold shower.
Ice cold.
In fact, in the past ten days I’ve taken an ice-cold shower every single morning, specifically because hearing Jamie rustling in her sheets, sighing in the dark, and creaking in the bed makes me so hard that I’m out of my mind imagining what it’ll be like making love with her.
Then in the afternoon, when I get off work, I take another freezing cold shower, because seeing her after being away for twelve hours sends a shot of lust straight through me. All the fatigue from the day is gone and I’m ready to take her behind the stone barn and make love against the wall.
But that’s not all. After dinner, once we’ve cleaned the dishes and put the kids to bed, we talk. And the intimacy of sitting in the kitchen, her low voice stroking over me, her lavender blue eyes turning dark and needy, talking about anything and everything, it makes me harder than the handle of a cast iron pot. And right when I think I’m about to lift her onto the table and make love to her like I’m certain I’ve done hundreds of times before, I say goodnight and go stand under an icicle shower.
It’s been bliss and it’s been torture.
I hope soon she says we know each other well enough to make love again. I’m nearly out of my mind with wanting her. I imagine it almost every second of every day. It seems to me that I’ve already connected with her in every way possible except that last one. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have to wait. But for her, I’ll wait as long as it takes. Even forever.
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