We find ourselves in a bar called Dixie. Bras hang from the ceiling like medals. He opens a tab for happy hour and keeps me with an endless supply of cheap American beer. It’s not great, but it’s okay. It takes about half a beer but we set ourselves at ease. He tells me about his not-girlfriend. I tell him he is kidding himself. He smiles with the corner of his mouth and admits that he probably is.
“The thing is… this is going to sound… I just know that I’m never going to want to marry her, so…”
I nod.
“Well. You say she’s not your girlfriend but you practically live with her and judging by the constant text messages she sends you, she’s not exactly comfortable with you hanging out with me…”
“We talked about it. We are on the same page. I am free to do what I want.”
“So, if you were to hook up with someone else…”
“Yes?”
“Would you feel guilty?”
Hesitation, “I guess I probably would.”
“So then she’s your girlfriend.”
“She is not my girlfriend.”
“If you say so.”
We take long swigs of beer and change the subject. We reminisce about Corfu. I tease him about his drunken confessions to me. He says he remembers. I’m surprised. That he remembers and that he would admit to it. We laugh until the floor tips slightly as I make my way to the bathroom.
At the show they stamp the inside of my arm in red and we take up residence next to the bar. I make friends with the girl dancing next to me in her white tank and fedora. Effortlessly cool. I think how I wish I could pull off a fedora. She gives me her number. I make friends with the bartender who slides free shots to me every once in a while and tells me how we should hang out after. I tell him sure but never get around to giving him my number or name. I make friends with a girl in the bathroom who retrieves my phone when I drop it on the sticky floor. They all keep buying me drinks and I just love Portland so much. The openers are upbeat. I catch eyes with a guy at the other end of the bar and when he sees he puts a hand possessively at the small of my back and brushes the hair off my face and then we are kissing in the crowd. I pull away and laugh, never having expected this.
We retreat outside where the cool air greets us, drying the sweat on our skin. I sink down next to him cross-legged on the pavement. We share a cigarette. He starts telling me things I don’t need to hear so I stand up suddenly and tell him I can hear Gaslight Anthem starting and I’m going in because that’s what I came for. He nods. I go to buy another drink and realize I’ve had plenty so I change my mind. I retrace my steps and look for him leaning against the building but he’s gone. I’m convinced in my heart that he’s abandoned me. I’m texting him, asking where he is. I can feel stress tears gathering behind my eyes when he appears next to my side.
“I thought you left.”
“No. Never.”
I take his hand and lead him back into the center of the crowd. Fedora-girl hugs me when she sees me and asks where I’d been. We dance, hands in the air next to each other. He keeps a hand at my waist or on my back. Always. I notice that he stops answering the buzz and glow of his phone.
After awhile we get tired of the noise and heat so we leave. Wandering toward the waterfront we find a bench. He sits and gestures for me to join him. I drop my purse in a heap beside him and straddle his legs. He laughs but when I shrug and go to move he pushes down on my hips and keeps me trapped to him. We kiss and we kiss and we kiss. The occasional passer-by never distracting us. His hands on the skin of my back. Tasting of beer and smoke and good music. I stop to catch a breath and lean my forehead against his.
“So, do you feel guilty?”
“No. God, no.”
Later, we sit on the back of his truck. He is telling me that the thing is he can’t see himself marrying me, either. I laugh.
“Seriously? Is that what you thought I wanted?”
“No. I guess not. I don’t know.”
“Well. It’s not. Not at all. I just want to have fun. Can we just have fun?”
Yeah, he says. We can just have fun. He lays back and pulls me with him. I settle into his shoulder.
“I’m just no good with relationships.”
The lights of the city and my phone chiming in my pocket. I’m not sure who said it. We lay still and silent with plastic ridges digging into our skin; both of us miles away thinking the same thing about someone different.
We’ve already broken up and gotten back together twice. We’ve passed the drama and the doubt. I have already made the mistakes that will shape what we become and you have forgiven me every step of the way.
This is before we stop having anything to talk about. Before you encourage me to follow my dreams and before I realize those dreams take me in the opposite direction to yours. This is after I emotionally leave you and then find my way back again but before we get a puppy and spend weekends laying in bed three-way cuddling for hours.
Here in this moment we are in between the beginning and the end. I haven’t yet realized that the habits we are forming will soon become memories. The things I am saying to you now will someday be the things I look back on with nostalgia and wonder when they started to fade.
You are holding me and I am perfectly content. But simultaneously I am a year ago pushing you against the wall, possessing you with me eyes, daring you to give in to temptation. I am here, now, cuddled into the space between your ear and your shoulder, but I am also a year later, staring at the floor and giving up. I am on a beach running ahead but glancing back to make sure you are there, chasing me. I am hugging my knees to my chest reading your texts and trying to breathe without sobbing. I am running into you accidentally at a club while secretly out with another guy. I am telling you I love you for the first time. I am telling you I don’t love you anymore.
I am climbing out of the other man’s bed and leaving in the middle of the night before he wakes up. I am calling you as I walk home. I am straying and you are waiting patiently for me to come home.
I am making you dinner and laughing at a joke you tell. I am shrieking as you chase me into another room. I am sighing as you lift me against a wall. I am melting as you kiss me…all…down…my…chest. I am whispering your name.
But, I am also crying silently while we make love and then turning away when you discover the tears.
I am in the past, the present, and the future. Mixed up and jumbled until I can’t tell which way is up. I am drowning in your love because I can’t find the surface. You are the best and the worst I have ever known. I keep leaving but the path always returns to you. Until, I can’t remember why I ever left in the first place.
He was engaged when I met him. He had just asked V (she had once been his high school sweetheart) to marry him over dinner with a ring she had picked out herself. He told me because I asked him (I am deeply interested in real life love stories). We worked together at a video store. For me it was a part time job with easy access to time wasting material. For him it was a means for extra money while he made his way through student and substitute teaching. I wasn’t particularly attracted to him at first; I had a boyfriend and things were going well, at the time. But, I flirted anyway (because that’s what I do). We became friends.
The trouble started when I suggested we exchange books. I was horrified that he had never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because the humour reminded me so much of his own. That started a back-and-forth exchange of novels which became an exchange of inside-jokes which morphed somewhere along the line into one step short of an affair.
I used to live for the nights we worked together; the brush of his hand against mine. I flirted recklessly, without heed, without any sense of responsibility for his relationship or my own.
Then one night on a drunken staff outing we found ourselves at the bar: touching, laughing, bantering. I pulled him into an empty stairwell and changed both our lives. It didn’t matter that he was planning an increasingly frustrating wedding or that I was on my way to Florida with my boyfriend. All that mattered was that in the moment he was the perfect man for me. So I kissed him. Long and deep and everlasting. Beautiful Gobstopper kisses.
Afterwards, I couldn’t believe what I had done. He disappeared and I was left searching for my jacket with the help of his brother, J. I felt like a sinking ship, desperate to hold on to anything that might float. So I made out with him, too.
