Crushed (2 page)

“I’m Melinda, by the way. Melinda Brand.”

The name struck me in the face, and I saw her grinning like she knew something I didn’t.

I checked the piece of paper she had given me and it confirmed it. Instinctively I turned to look back at my parent’s house, where I had thought Melinda Brand was supposed to be.

“Wait. Melinda, Melinda?”

“Melinda, Melinda.”

“
The
 Melinda?”

“The one and only.”

“The Melinda I thought I was ignoring as she sat in my parent’s house waiting while I insensitively chatted up the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid eyes on? 
That
 Melinda?”

“Stop. Now you’re making me blush and I fucking hate it when that happens.”

“And you swear like a sailor. I’m thinking we skip dinner and elope.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Herb. There’s a long line ahead of you.”

“Wait—what were you doing walking up to the wrong house, Melinda, Melinda?”

“Shit, this be da wrong abode?” she said with a sheepish smile.

“Harvard, my ass.”

“I do genetics, not geography.”

That night, I broke my promise to Melinda.

It wasn’t just dinner, drinks, conversation, and the time of her lives. That night we planned the
rest
of our lives together. Chose names for our unborn children, and picked the wall colors of their rooms. Pathetic, right?

Ten years later, the seeds of love Melinda and I had planted that night sprouted into everything we had both dreamed of. We added three monkeys to our cast of characters, our love was flourishing, and our careers were soaring high.

Melinda was heading a research team funded by Google to wrestle Alzheimer’s to the ground. Keeping it in the family, the artificial intelligence start-up I had founded with my college buddy Earl, from our dorm room at MIT, was acquired by Google. If Earl and I never wanted to work another day again, we didn't have to. But we really wanted to. Good thing Google hired us both for even more obscene money to build the brains of future robots.

Before we knew it, the years rolled by and Melinda and I were getting invites to our fifteenth high school class reunion.

The historic geek in me panicked at first until I looked in the mirror and couldn’t see the ugly caterpillar I once was but the butterfly I had become. Since I only ever knew Melinda as the hot, brainy Harvard head-turner, I found it impossible to believe she too had belonged to my people and was feeling the same heat. No matter how successful or beautiful your metamorphosis, memories of high school have that ability to randomly terrorize you.

In the end and after we had dissected it six ways to Sunday, we agreed we owed it to our fellow geeks to show the rest of our class just how fine we had turned out. But who was I kidding, one of the main reasons I wanted to go to that stupid reunion was for the slim chance Ashley would be there. A part of me secretly hoping she would have somehow turned into a crazy cat lady living on welfare.

I had never spoken of my teenage love-life to Melinda, and never wanted to probe hers. I figured there wasn't much to report on either side. Just like me, Melinda sowed her oats in college after she too had blossomed, making up for lost time. Except of course I had Ashley’s skeleton lingering in my closet.

There are times when you couldn't script a happenstance better than real life. At some point in the evening during the class reunion, Melinda and I found ourselves chatting to not other than Mr. and Mrs. Balantine, Ashley and Jake. There we were the four of us sipping delicious Brunello red and nibbling on blinis.

I swear to God I would have taken out my checkbook and donated a million dollars to charity for the gift of looking into Ashley’s eyes when it finally dawned on her who I was. Of course we were all adults now, and a few bottles between us later, we were immersed in grown up topics like kids, schools and nannies.

As much as I would have liked Ashley and Jake to have turned into loser middle-aged morons, both of them were still quite attractive in their mid thirties and had done relatively okay in life.

One thing however had changed. That confidence once flickering in their eyes during high school had been switched off. I had a theory why. When you grow up beautiful and popular in high school, leaving that artificial environment to step out in the real world presents a major shock to your system. In the real world, your good looks and social skills are minor weapons in your overall arsenal of life tools. Being smart, being successful, being empathetic, standing up for what you believe in, and being a productive, caring member of your community weigh much more.

For the heartthrob jocks and bombshell babes like Ashley and Jake, real life can be a bit of a burden. I am not suggesting if you were born pretty it automatically makes you hollow in every other respect. All I am saying is that it takes getting used to when you realize you need other things of substance to move you forward in life.

Ashley and Jake were happily married, but painfully average in every sense of the word. Okay, maybe even above average if I want to be fair. She started her career after college as an onscreen reporter for a local network, and worked her way up until she became the evening news anchor. She was even a bit of a celebrity in her community, she was proud to say.

Jake on the other hand sold some banal industrial automotive components for some non-descript Irish company. Not sure I quite understood what, or cared, but apparently he was good at it. By any standard, they had done well and probably earned decent money, lived in a big house and could afford whatever they wanted to enjoy.

But they weren’t working to cure Alzheimer’s or building an improved iteration of the human brain. They were bland, unrecognizable upper middle class fodder—the polar opposites of the gods they once were in high school.

Melinda and I however had started life as underdogs. Our appearance and confidence came after high school. We never counted on our looks or charm to get us anywhere in life, but when we did acquire them, they were just a late-blooming bonus.

As the night came to an end, relief and closure radiated through my heart. Finally I was going to let go of my Ashley Sakowski demons.

What a shame that life is never so straightforward, though, with always a new curve ball coming your way when you least expect or want it.

As Melinda and I starting saying goodbye to Ashley and Jake—right at that awkward moment when you’re deciding whether to shake hands, half-hug, or go European and plant cheek kisses—Ashley took the lead and embraced me tighter than I expected. At the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Jake doing the same with Melinda, to even things out perhaps and make everyone feel less awkward. But I’ll tell you what did feel weird: Ashley surreptitiously planting a little note with her number in my jacket pocket.

There’s nothing worse than the tiniest bit of doubt contaminating a confident moral position you've taken. There I was basking in my victory over Ashley and everything she stood for back in high school, when she introduces this little chink in the armor. What could she possibly want with me that she couldn’t say in the open and before our spouses? Did she want to acknowledge or speak about our notorious three-week history? Apologize maybe?

Here’s the bigger problem, though. No matter how successful, how accepted, how loved, how beautiful, how secure I had become, the minute Ashley had shown a renewed interest in me, irrational and incongruous ideas sprung in my mind. My little head was eager to play, my crushed heart was desperate for a second chance, and my bruised ego was after blood.

I’ll spare you the mundane details of how the brain justifies the unjustifiable, and will jump to the point of the story where I am about to walk in the restaurant to meet Ashley for dinner. As I moved between the tables towards her, I felt the wound in my soul carved out by this woman reopening.

Ashley wore a lavender strapless dress like a model in a lifestyle magazine selling something divine and exquisite. With every step in her direction, the illusion of control I thought I had was evaporating fast like uncorked vinegar. Sex and love hormones were wreaking drama on my body. My head giddy, my pulse raced, and every pleasure sensor in my brain lit up. This was going to be a disaster.

Dinner turned out to be a delicious four-hour concerto of riveting emotions in which Ashley played every note masterfully.

First, she disarmed me by apologizing for being so forward, and explained that what she had to say concerned only the two of us. We had unresolved history, she called it. She saw no need to hurt our spouses.

All she wanted was to hold my hands and look me in the eye and say sorry for being such a cruel bitch. Her words, not mine.

Then she gave me the explanation I had once-upon-a-time yearned for. A heart-felt confessional about how she was suffering panic attacks at the time, and the funky meds she was on had forced her to behave oddly. Still, she was accountable for her actions because she did intentionally hurt me, and it was time to come clean after all these years.

I didn’t mince my words about how I had felt then, but, and I really meant it when I said it, I held no grudges. If anything, I thanked her for emotionally vaccinating me early in life.

If our conversation had ended then, there was every chance I would have never thought of Ashley Sakowski again. But the rest of the evening took on an even more unexpected turn. She didn’t just open her heart but she laid it on the table.

Jake was an okay guy who provided for her and their two girls, but the fire between them had long been extinguished. Even if he was cheating on her, she didn't have the courage to poke around. For many years she’d been feeling invisible, and conflicted by her desire to stay for the girls or leave to satisfy her unfulfilled need to be loved and desired.

Who would have thought I would find myself giving life advice to the woman I once held responsible for all my miseries? I cannot kick someone when they’re down on their knees begging. Regardless of how much they had hurt me.

“You need to find a job or career you are really passionate about. It seems to me you just ended up in television right out of college because it was easy,” I counseled her.

“You hit the nail on the head. My real passion is behind the screen. I never want to be a pretty face again. My dream is to write and produce shows. I know I can’t change the world the way you and Melinda plan to, but I don’t want to be stuck in prime time purgatory for the rest of my existence.”

What if girls like Ashley who were total dickheads in high school are just regular people underneath it all, dealing with their own insecurities, dreams and fears? She ends up as a television anchor because everyone expected her to monetize her good looks. Yet there she was bearing her heart and telling me she wanted to be loved for greatness other than that of her cleavage.

The more we spoke, the more I enjoyed it, and the more I enjoyed it the sooner I realized Ashley was nothing like the monster I had made her out to be in mind. Whatever she had done to me in high school, funky meds or not, we were seventeen for the love of God. Who knew anything back then?

Then it struck me. I didn’t have to sleep with Ashely, fall in love with her again, or hurt her to settle the score and expunge her from my system. I could just as well extend her some compassion and let her go.

I wish she had stopped there when we were both still ahead.

For the next three weeks Ashley pursued me with frightening determination.

Life was too short to waste on a relationship less than explosive, she said of her own marriage, and by allusion mine.

We owed it to ourselves to be with the people who made us the happiest and who excited us the most. If only she had been smart enough to recognize my worth back in high school, she would have saved herself ten years of blandness with Jake, she confessed. I was the one she really wanted to be with, and given the opportunity, she would show me that I too would want to spend the rest of my life with her.

“How?” I said.

“Sex, of course,” she said casually. The ultimate litmus test.

By tasting her, I would realize beyond any doubt why we could never be apart, she rationalized. The more I tried to talk her out of it, the harder she came on. Just the one night together was all she was asking for. If I didn’t enjoy it, well at least I would achieve closure knowing I finally had her, after all those years. Win-win, she described it.

Any time a story reaches the point of a no-strings-attached sexual proposal from a woman to a man, what happens after that will never please everyone. But I want you to know that when I walked into the Palace Hotel in San Francisco to book a room for Ashley and I, the thought process that had led me there was not entirely based on unfettered animal instincts. You’re probably judging me in a negative light because the honorable thing to have done would have been to squarely turn her offer down and get on with the rest of my life. And I don’t blame you for thinking that. But stick with me, things are about to get a lot more interesting.

Ashley strutted across the lobby of the hotel and time shifted to slow motion. Show-stopping is the best way I could describe the vision of her body floating towards me. Her caramel hair was tied in a pony tail that danced around, catching the afternoon rays of the sun. She wore the shortest black tunic dress with no sleeves like it was her skin. The last time I had seen her legs was during track and field day in high school. They had now become the legs of a woman, having been spread open to allow life in and then back out. Long, tanned and sculpted with enough tone to excite any man with blood flowing through their veins.

I was nursing a Highball sitting cross-legged on a leather chair when she stopped in front of me, her knees pushing into mine. She extended one hand to take mine so we could go up, and with the other one she pressed a finger to her lips to indicate the time for words had now officially ended. Only action would ensue for the rest of the night.

I am not the sort of guy to kiss and tell, but there are some details of what happened between us that night which I feel you need to know.