Authors: Kristen Kehoe
I was lost at that first meeting, but, looking at Kari, I felt like she could help me find myself. She was strong, it showed in the sturdy set of her shoulders and the way she held the eyes of everyone in the room rather than looking over, around, or down as so many did. She challenged all of us to complete our steps, and I wanted more.
I went to meetings for two weeks, not seeing her again until the last one at the end of that second week, and I decided right then that I wanted her to be the one to help me off the ledge when I needed it. A year and a half later, she’s not only telling me how to survive, she’s making sure I know I can, that I’m stronger than anything or anyone I’ve ever let hold me down, my fears included.
“You there, Blondie?”
I nod and then clear my throat. “Yeah, I’m here.”
She sighs over the phone and I hear the heartache in it. “Life’s a real bitch, hon, that’s why we tried to tune it out. Now, you can’t tune it out but you do have a chance to change what you hear. How’s everything with your mom going?”
I think back to the past few times I’ve visited her. The conversation hasn’t exactly flowed, but the silences are less tense and our rhythm feels more natural, less like a forced routine. And, oddly, she’s picked out a new color for her nails every time. Whether I should or not, I’m taking that as a sign that she wants to be something different than she was too, something more.
“Of course she does,” Kari says when I tell her this. “Blondie, listen to me. Just because we’re adults doesn’t mean we think everything we do is right. Shit, half the things we do are unplanned, and even the half we plan don’t always turn out right. Your mama might not be able to say what she’s feeling, but she’s glad you’re there and, from everything you’ve told me, she wants to make things right, just like you.”
I release a breath. “Thanks, Kari. I’ll find a meeting tomorrow, but this helped.”
“That’s why I’m here. Let me know when you find a meeting. And Blondie?”
“Yeah?”
“One day at a time, remember that. You just survive one day at a time.”
“What about all those days ahead that you can’t see, but that you know are waiting for you?”
“You treat them like you do any other pushy person and tell them to fuck off until you’re ready.”
The laughter is a relief as it rolls out of me. One day at a time. I can do that.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jake
Murph answers on the second ring, his voice cutting out as I hear the echoes of other voices around him.
“Handsome Jake? Is it really fucking you?”
I laugh and step out onto the balcony, angling my body so I can see the front door and Cora when she gets home. She had some things to do after work, like she has a few times since the morning we woke up and realized our time together was ending. I think she’s going to AA meetings, but since I sense that it’s private, I don’t ask, I just make dinner and wait for her to get home.
Now, I’m standing here after my final workout with the trainer and I’m calling the guy I consider my best friend, because I’m getting my dream back, but in the process, it’s breaking my fucking heart. Not that I’ll tell him that — I’m hurt, not a woman.
“Just calling to tell you only a pussy hits a double and three RBIs against Cal State. I expected a homerun and some stolen bases, but here Twitter’s telling me you’re barely scoring these days. I hope Mia isn’t too disappointed to realize you can’t find home plate.”
“Leave my wife outta this, Pitch, and say that from the mound next time. I bet I can still hit you.”
“You might just get a chance sometime soon,” I say and there’s a pause.
“Hold on,” he says and I hear a few muffled thuds and a curse before a door opens and closes. “Jake?”
“Who the hell else would it be?”
“Jesus Christ, you did it. You’re coming back.”
“That’s actually why I’m calling. I finished my rehab today — at least, everything that I can do on my own. The rest needs to be done with a team, and with the trainers down there. Got a room I can use?” I ask and he laughs into the phone.
“Fucking A, just under ten months. I knew you could do it. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Probably more like twelve when it’s all said and done, but, yeah, you told me.”
“Well, Jesus, when are you coming down here? Our schedule’s in full swing, but Mia’s here and your room’s still open. We need to celebrate, have a welcome home party.”
I nod and watch the front door. “Yeah, soon, I just have some things I need to take care of here first.”
We’re both silent a second and then I hear Murph blow out a breath. “Shit, I wondered if that would be the case. Does she know?”
I give in and shut my eyes, pressing the fingers of my free hand to them. “She knows I’m healing and that it’s only a matter of time before I go.”
“What did she say?”
I shake my head and open my eyes. “Nothing. Blue knows I can’t stay, just like I know I can’t ask her to wait. Won’t ask her to,” I add.
“But does she know you want to stay? Jesus, Jake, have you told her how you feel? Because I can’t even see you and I know after a ten second pause exactly how you feel about her.”
Fucking Murph, reaching the dream that disappeared isn’t enough, he thinks I deserve the girl too. For the last ten months, other than Cora he’s been the only person to text me, to continually encourage me, even when I ignored him those first few months after I moved. And still, as much as I want to do as he says, I can’t. “No, I haven’t told her. And before you ask, no, I’m not going to tell her. Shit, I’ve taken enough from her, Ryan, I can’t leave her with the pressure of my feelings too. We’re both just getting back on our feet — it was selfish enough of me to force myself into her life and make her care about me. If I tell her how much I love her and then walk on her, what’s it going to do to her?” I know what it’s doing to me: killing me, slowly, with every thought I have of walking away.
“Why can’t you just ask her to wait? Tell her you want to be with her but you need to try this too. It’s not like you’re leaving the country.”
I shake my head, the image of my dad in various stages of depression and self-pity throughout my life popping up and running through my mind. I’d been honest the day I told Cora the minors were like war. Bad pay, a horrendous schedule, and no certainty of ever making it. Six months of traveling with maybe ten days off, hours a day at the field and a paycheck per year that’s lower than the national poverty line. How do you bring someone into that with the hope that loving each other is enough?
“I can’t, Ryan. Waiting works for some, like you and Mia. What you have, it was here before, and it’ll be here after. Blue and me… I can’t risk her, man, I can’t risk losing her while I’m somewhere else, or worse, coming home broken and taking my failure out on her, hurting her because I couldn’t be the man I wanted to be.” I think of what it would do to me to know that Cora relapsed because of me, that she went back to being someone who couldn’t see her own worth. Someone who couldn’t look at me and see that she was loved. My chest contracts at the mere thought. I might have been able to risk myself, but not her, never her.
“My dad never got out of the funk, Murph, he never stepped up and did anything else when the minors killed him, never got over losing the dream. You saw me when I thought I was done — it was girls and booze, all day every day. What if I fail and it changes me, changes who I’ve become since I’ve been with her? What will that do to her if she’s waiting for me and I come home a used up bastard, or worse, don’t come home to her at all?”
My heart is beating too fast and I have to work to take slow breaths, in and out, while there’s silence on the other end of the line. I know he sees my point or Murph would have already told me I was being an asshole, to get over myself and go get my girl. Part of me was hoping he would say it so I could do just that, be selfish and ask Cora to wait for me, to love me even though I’m not nearly good enough for her. To belong to me because she’s made me a better version of myself than I ever thought possible. But he doesn’t. Instead, he blows out a breath and agrees with me. Bastard.
“You’re right, Jake. I wish you weren’t but it’s not fair to ask her to wait knowing what lies ahead, not when you’re both so unsure of yourselves. And not when she’s already had enough people use her and then forget about her.”
My fingers tighten painfully on the phone and I want to rage at him that I’m not like any of those people, that I would cut my fucking arm off and never throw a baseball again before I used her, but I can’t, because we both know that I followed her here because she did something that no one else could and made me care again. Before I even knew her, Blue snuck past my defenses and made me feel something and I’ve held onto that for long enough — falling in love with her doesn’t change the fact that I saw something I needed and I took it, it just makes it that much fucking harder to walk away.
“Shit, Murph, why does it hurt this goddamn much?”
His silence tells me he’s remembering his time without his own girl, that awkward in between high school and college time when no one has their shit figured out and even loving someone doesn’t mean you can have them. “Because it’s real. It doesn’t matter if you were always going to walk away, Jake, you fell in love and it’s like being hit by a line drive, right between the eyes. You don’t always recover, and even if you do, that hit stays with you and echoes through you every now and then, so real you can feel it, and it hurts all over again.”
His words are still playing in my head minutes later when Cora opens the door and steps through. I stay where I am, watching her as she drops her keys and purse on the bench just inside the door, then walks a few steps to the couch where she rests her hand and leans down to slip off one heeled sandal before switching feet and doing the other. When she straightens, I slide open the door and we lock eyes.
The air between us electrifies as it has every time we’ve been in the same room in the past few weeks. The urgency that has pushed us to be together as much as possible comes to a boil and spills over and, all of a sudden, the air is thick with not only need, but understanding, heartache, grief. A minute passes and then two, but neither of us moves as we stare at one another, our bodies fighting the magnetic pull that’s urging us together as we acknowledge what’s happening.
“When?” she finally asks and I step inside, closing the door behind me.
“Soon. Tomorrow.”
She nods and I stay still, waiting to see what she wants. My heart is thumping against my chest so hard I can hear it in my ears, and my breath is backing up in my lungs. When she steps toward me, I have to fist my hands to keep them at my sides, still uncertain if she’s going to touch me or slap me. But then she’s cupping my face in her hands and meeting my eyes, a small smile on her lips as she raises to her toes and presses her mouth to mine.
“Then let’s take tonight.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cora
Tomorrow.
His words vibrate down to my core and settle in the pit of my stomach. The dread, the pain, the hurt… we knew this was coming and still, the pain is worse than either of us could have predicted. But I won’t have him regretting leaving, won’t have him feeling sad to be chasing the dream that he’s worked so hard to get back, just as I won’t have him regretting coming here in the first place. Pain or not, I wouldn’t change any of it.
When I see him go to speak, I shake my head, my smile firmly in place though my cheeks ache with the effort.
“Jake, there’s nothing left to say, we both know that. This is your dream, something you thought you lost but can now have. It’s everything you’ve ever worked for, everything you’ve ever wanted.”
His eyes are devastated when they look at me and I know what he’s thinking
. But what about us?
I stop him before he says something he’ll feel forced to see through, something that I’ll want to believe even though I know better. Who understands better than I that sometimes you have to make a choice.
“We never made any promises, Handsome Jake, and we both know too well that life can change. People can change. I’m grateful I had you,” I tell him and my breath catches in my throat, hitching until I have to stop and swallow. “You and I got what we needed from each other, let’s not make it into something it was never meant to be.”
He’s processing my words and what they mean, for him, for me, for us. I know he understands that I’m telling him he needs to go, to make his future and be the person he was meant to be. It feels like the air has been sucked out of the room, making it difficult for me to draw breath, but I work on it, slowly breathing in and out as I watch him, memorizing every feature since this might be my last time.
It hurts to think that, right down to my bones, and it hurts to know that what we are is temporary because I let myself believe, for even a second, that we could have more. But more than the hurt is the fear that if I don’t let him go, if I beg him to stay and try to make it work, what we have will be tainted by regret or blame. That eventually it will make both of us feel nothing more than mild contempt for the other person, and I won’t risk that.
It’s not a selfless act that has me letting him go; no, it’s fear that if I try to keep him and balance our worlds together, we’ll one day end up like the parents we both claim not to need, stuck in a relationship that eventually causes us to despise one another, or worse, causes one of us to need more than the other can give. I can take watching him leave now if it means we don’t ever look at each other or back at what we were with regret, that we have this memory of what it felt like to be alive together.
I think I can survive as long as I know we have that.
Needing somehow to show him everything I can’t say, I rise to my toes and press my lips to his. My fingers sink into his hair and bring him closer, molding us together as we make that much needed contact. For perhaps the first time since we’ve been together, I let everything I’m feeling translate into my touch. I don’t hold myself back, don’t try to slow myself down; instead, I take everything I need and give him everything I have, hoping that I can show him without saying the words exactly what he means to me. Words are too easy at times, too simple. What we have isn’t simple; he’s the first person to touch me and feel more than my body, the first person in my life to ever reach inside of me and see who I really am, the heart that beats inside of me, and he’s the only person I’ve ever wanted to give it to, free of expectation.
Jake showed me that love isn’t a balancing of scales, it’s a gift, one that’s given and accepted freely, one that makes looking at someone and saying goodbye easier because you know deep down it’s the only thing that will allow them to truly be whole.
When he wraps me up and lifts me, so reminiscent of our first time together, I have to battle back the tears that spring to my eyes. I wind around him, my legs anchored around his hips, my arms around his neck as I take my lips on a journey of face and neck while he carries us into the room we’ve shared for months now.
Neither of us says anything as he stops at the side of the bed and I slide slowly down his body until my feet touch the floor. The time for words has passed, and now we’re looking at each other, standing pressed together as the dying light pours through the open window and invites in the sounds and scents of the outside world. A world we made our own for just a little bit.
For a second, I’m transported back to those early days we were together when we would love playfully, when he would shush me and tell me the neighbors would hear and then do exactly what he had done the second before to make me cry out. It didn’t matter if there were thousands of noises coming through the windows and surrounding us or nothing at all — for those brief periods of time, all we needed was each other and what we felt when we were together.
Hoping I can remind him of that now, I take my time undressing him, my fingertips brushing lightly over exposed skin, my lips exploring each new piece of flesh I uncover. His shirt falls behind him as I push it over his head and my lips immediately find the smooth skin of his chest, resting over his heart. I reach for the top button on his shorts and he grabs my hands, shaking his head even as his mouth comes down on mine.
He takes the power easily, his mouth demanding, his touch consuming as he strips me of my dress, laying me back on the bed as his lips go to work covering every inch of me. He’s tender in his assault and so thorough, letting no part of me feel left out, covering me with his body as his fingers take their own journey from my breast to my stomach and more, the sensations so overwhelming I can barely breathe.
“Don’t forget this.” He speaks the words against my lips, his tone fierce and urgent, and I shake my head. Never. We can’t have it all, but we have this, and it’s special. No matter what happens, neither of us will forget. When his mouth closes over my breast and his fingers press into me, I’m thrown from the cliff, my back arching and my body breaking apart as he works me ruthlessly over the next peak as well.
Shattered, I lay there when he shifts away to get a condom, my lungs burning and my limbs weak, and then he’s back, his forearms bearing his weight as he rests over me and waits for my eyes to meet his.
“Was it worth it?” he asks and I don’t pretend to not understand. Were we worth it, the pain we both know is coming, the opening up of secrets and pieces of my life buried? Was everything we did over the past five months worth this moment?
I look into his eyes, my own free and clear of tears, my hands going to his face. “Yes.”
His forehead drops to mine, his body shuddering for a heartbeat before he’s moving, rocking inside of me and taking me to that place where it’s only us. I hold onto him, bring his lips down to mine and take everything he has to give me one last time.
~
In the morning I wake alone, his ratty Yankees T-shirt and a note on the pillow beside me.
“…I might not be alive now, only for you…” You saved me from myself and gave me back my dream, I’ll never forget that. Yogi wanted to stay. Check to cover the rest of the year is on the counter. Be happy, Blue, and remember you’re not alone. xoxo
I stare at the piece of paper, something that most people would have sent in a text. Not Jake.
My Jake
, I think. The poetry reading, paperback holding, pen using, cat owner with brown eyes and a heart bigger than most. He wrote me a note to keep, something I can take out over and over to trace the words that will protect me against loneliness.
Curling into his pillow, I don’t cry. I breathe him in and let his scent fill those places inside that are already lonely without him. Then I grab his note and get up to feed the cat.