Close to You Page 4

  Twelve years in the army, six deployments and a gunshot wound to the shoulder later, and it was over. I was a civilian now, a veteran, something I never thought I’d be. But this last deployment had nearly wrecked my entire world, and I was finally coming home.

  When it was finally my turn, I filtered into the aisle, following the line off the plane. Once in the terminal, I made my way to baggage claim, hardly paying attention to anything as I went. It was strange to be in an airport without my uniform on.

  Leaving the military was like a bittersweet goodbye. There were many things I liked about the army - the rigidity of it, the constant comfort of knowing exactly what to do and when to do it. The ease of following orders and giving them. And, as of the last couple of years, the knowledge that I was working for something, or rather, someone, and creating a strong foundation for the family I wanted to have.

  Standing in baggage claim, I regarded the people around me. I wondered if they had families to go home to. I wondered if they were here for a vacation, albeit an extremely cold one. The forecast was barely over 25 for the next week or so; I’d checked it before I came home.

  I had nobody to come home to, because Emily got called in. Being a nurse meant she worked insane hours, but I couldn’t begrudge her it. She saved people’s lives and it was her passion. I just wished she was here with me now. Was that selfish?

  It just wouldn’t feel like I was home until I saw her face, held her in my arms. Told her I was sorry.

  After grabbing my duffel bag, I flagged a taxi, knowing it would be an expensive trip but not caring. I gave the driver my address and sat back, eyes to the sky as he drove.

  At our apartment, I paid the cabbie and dug for my keys. The elevator was still broken, so I climbed up the stairs and stopped at my door.

  I could hear banging down the hall in someone’s apartment, and from someone else’s, the low, thudding sound of music leaking through the thin walls. Someone nearby was shouting in Spanish, and I sighed.

  Home sweet home.

  Inside my own apartment, it was cold. I didn’t take my coat off and went to the thermostat immediately. It was set at 55 degrees.

  Why would Emily do that? I turned it up, listening for the heat to kick on. When it did, I turned to head toward the bedroom.

  The first thing I noticed was the pictures. Most of the art that Emily had hung was gone, and I puzzled at that for a moment. I set my duffel on the bed and realized that every single piece of decoration, all the stuff that Emily had bought in an effort to domesticate this shit Brooklyn apartment, was gone. It left the room sad and bare, something I never thought I’d think. I had never had a problem with the apartment before her.

  I unzipped my bag, taking some socks and boxers and, going to the dresser, putting them in my drawer, which was tedious with only one arm. One of the knobs was still detached. It was one of those things I told her I would fix, but never did.

  My eyes fixated on the blank walls again. Why had she taken them down? Was she replacing them with something else?

  There was a picture of us in a frame on her nightstand, taken on our first date. I’d taken her to Coney Island, one of the most cliché places we could have gone, but I looked back on that memory fondly. I walked over to it, picking it up. Emily’s smile shined up at me from the picture, her eyes trained on the camera. Trained on me, now.

  I had put her through so much. Being deployed this last time had almost ruined us. I was lucky I still had her at all.

  Something pink on her nightstand caught my eye. A piece of paper, with something written on it. I set down the frame and picked it up.

  I can’t do this anymore.

  My mouth dried. My heart kicked into overdrive. I read the words over and over and over. I read them until they didn’t even look like words anymore.

  On the nightstand, where the paper had been, was Emily’s engagement ring.

  The heat being set to 55, the pictures and decorations being gone. Fuck, even her being called in.

  She was never going to pick me up from the airport. She left me.

  She left me?

  I dropped the paper and blindly searched for my phone, finding it on the kitchen counter. I dialed her number, one of the only ones I knew by heart, and held the phone up to my ear. Hoping beyond hope that she would answer and giggle this all away.

  “The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error…”

  “No, no, no…” I mumbled, refusing to believe it. She had just messaged me. How could her number be different?

  I dialed it again, my fingers fumbling.

  “The number you have dialed has been changed…”

  Tears sprang to my eyes at the cold and indifferent recording. I threw my phone across the room, not caring if I broke it. I slumped against the wall, rubbing my eyes and trying to calm my erratic breaths, forcing myself to evaluate the facts.

  Emily left me.

  I would never be able to tell her I was sorry.

  This was all my fault.

  Chapter 9.

  Michele

  It was an extremely slow Monday night at Catfish that evening. There were only a handful of people drinking, and I was idling my time by wiping down the liquor bottles littering the back wall behind the bar.

  I hadn’t seen Clint since that night Jacob had to help him to a taxi. He was usually here every other night, and I was worried about him, but I assumed, or hoped, that he had woken up the next morning and decided to give drinking a rest for a while. Since I started working here, I’d seen all manner of alcoholics - but it wasn’t my job to tell them no, unless they were getting out of hand.

  “Slow night, eh?”

  Jacob’s voice came from somewhere behind me, and I turned to see him leaning against the bar, broad forearms resting against it, fingers laced together. He was supposed to be carding people who came inside, but ever since I started here he’d had his eye on me. I shrugged, and put the bottle of vodka I was holding back in its place.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “So where do you live, anyway?” he asked, casually. As if it were perfectly normal to ask your coworker for their address.

  “Not far. Couple blocks away.”

  “Damn. It’s a nice neighborhood. Do you have roommates?”

  “Yeah. My friend and her boyfriend.” His scrutinizing gaze was making me uncomfortable. I turned away from him, busying myself with more liquor bottles, hoping he’d go back to his post.

  “Lila…” he started, and I cringed. Every time someone called me by my fake name, I remembered why I was here. A constant reminder that I was living a lie. “I want to take you to dinner sometime.”

  At his statement, I exhaled. Finally, I could put this to rest. I turned my head and gave him a smile, utterly fake and shallow.

  “Jacob, I’m sorry, but no.”

  He frowned. “Why not? Do you have a boyfriend, or something?”

  “No. I’m just not interested.”

  The look on his face made it obvious that this was difficult for Jacob to understand. He straightened up, his expression dumbfounded.

  “Excuse me? I’d like to order a beer.”

  The sound of a voice, new, yet somehow familiar, startled me entirely. I whipped my head toward the source and saw him - Iain. Sitting at a barstool, blending perfectly into the surroundings. The dim lights made his eyes hard to read, but I knew he was watching me.

  “Iain?” I asked, making my way over. I noticed that Jacob was walking back to the door, obviously chagrined. He hadn’t been watching the door closely enough and had let a new customer slip in unnoticed.

  I pulled a pint glass out of the cooler and waited, watching Iain, a look of recognition on his face.

  “Lila,” he said, giving me a bright smile. He looked genuinely pleased to see me, and my stomach flip-flopped despite myself. He was as hot as I remembered, and I forced myself to look cool and profes
sional, not letting myself smile in return.

  “This is… a surprise,” I said. “What kind of beer would you like?”

  “Have any IPAs on tap?” he asked, leaning forward, craning his neck to see the tap selections. I nodded.

  “I have a couple microbrews.”

  “Pick one. Surprise me.”

  I poured his beer and set it in front of him, taking his card when he offered it to me. I slid it through the system, catching his name embossed in silver.

  Iain Sheppard.

  His full name felt familiar somehow, like a melody long forgotten, surfacing again. But looking at him now, I was certain I’d never met him before that day on the street. And I didn’t know anybody else that lived in New York.

  “Do you like working here?” he asked when I returned his card to him. I found myself nodding, uncertain how to talk to him. If I was honest with myself, I’d thought of him more than I’d wanted to the last couple of days - I'd thought of the way he had looked at me, his brown hair swept back from the wind, his lips as he told me which train to take. I’d thought of his finger on the map, imagining that finger on me.

  “I do.” I stepped back a bit, watching him drink his beer. He nodded in appreciation.

  “That’s a good IPA.”

  “I’m glad you like it.” I wanted to ask him what brought him here, but I didn’t. I had told myself before that Iain probably had a girlfriend - but coming to a bar alone on a Monday night didn’t exactly make me feel confident about that idea. I regarded his handsome face again, wondering what his story was.

  “Did you end up finding Central Park?” he asked, another smile creeping over his face. He set his glass down, waiting for my response.

  “I did. Thank you.” I flicked my eyes over some of the other patrons. Most of them were talking, or watching The Big Bang Theory on the TVs spread across the bar. I heard the tinny laugh track intermittently filtering through the space.

  “Was it everything you’d hoped it’d be?”

  “I didn’t see very much of it, but I definitely want to go back sometime.”

  He didn’t immediately reply. I somehow had the feeling that my body and brain weren’t on the same page; my heart was flush in my chest, my skin humming from his presence. My brain was screaming at me to step away.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  My mouth dried. It was a lie I had told several times, but for some reason, telling it to him felt wrong.

  “Tampa.”

  He let out a low whistle. “You left a tropical paradise for this?”

  “Anything is paradise compared to what I left.”

  I turned away, my face reddening. Why had I said that? I had never intended to say that. I picked up the rag I was using to polish the liquor bottles, folding it into the smallest square I could. Then I let it loose again.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “No. I mean, thanks for your concern.” I turned to look at him, forcing a smile on my face. “So… where are you from?”

  “Brooklyn. Born and raised.”

  “Around here, then?” I probed, trying to figure out why he was in my bar tonight. Brooklyn was a pretty big place. It didn’t feel, exactly, like a coincidence that Iain was here tonight - although I supposed it could have been. Looking at him now, I told myself that I would have noticed him here before. But with the fog and haze I’d been living in the past several months, I could admit to myself that that was probably a lie.

  “Not far at all. I come to Catfish every now and then. You’ve poured me drinks before.”

  My face flamed.

  “I’m sorry, I -”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said, holding a hand up. “With the amount of people you see, it’d be impossible to remember everyone.”

  I nodded, noticing his beer was nearly empty. “Would you like another?”

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  Busying myself with getting him another drink, I considered telling him everything. Something about him made him seem trustworthy. He had no idea who Brandon was. He had no idea where I came from or what my life was like. Wouldn’t it be a relief to tell somebody? Wasn’t that what people said - that talking healed?

  “I was married,” I said suddenly, setting the glass down in front of him. He met my eye, and I saw something steadfast there. He was intrigued.

  “What happened?”

  I regarded him, wondering if I was absolutely idiotic to tell him about this part of myself. A stranger. A stranger I was attracted to, who had shown up in my life when I would have rather been alone.

  “Have you ever… been in a situation you didn’t know how to get out of?”

  Iain didn’t say anything at first, but he kept my gaze. I forgot where I was, what I was doing. It was just me and him. “Yes.”

  “Then you know how helpless you felt. Heart in your mouth, losing focus of all the light in your life. I felt that way for a long time.”

  I wasn’t sure what my words were doing to him, because he sat there so stiffly, his face giving nothing away. Then something flickered in his eyes, and my own eyes flicked to his lips, wondering what they would feel like on mine.

  “You left him then. Your husband.”

  His words abruptly took me back to the day I had left, the day I had come home from the grocery store and found him in bed with some vaguely familiar woman. Someone from the bank, I guessed. I remembered, vividly, the unseasonably warm October day, the stickiness of summer with an incongruous backdrop of orange and red leaves. The sickness I had felt when I heard the sounds of Brandon’s groans from above my head as I stood in the foyer was returning now. I shrugged.

  “It was mutual.”

  “And you decided to come to Brooklyn? Out of all the places in the world?”

  “All my life, I’d wanted to see this city. Now here I am.”

  His mouth curled into a sweet smile, and I saw warmth on his face that sped my heart.

  “Here you are.”

  One of the patrons came up to the bar with an empty glass. I excused myself to help them, refilling their drink and keying it into the system. I told my heart to settle down. I told my body that he was absolutely off limits, and I told my brain to stop worrying so much.

  “Lila, could you close my tab? You can run my card. I’ve got an early day tomorrow,” Iain said after I had taken care of my customer. I cashed him out and brought him his receipt.

  “Thanks for coming in. It was nice to see you again,” I told him. When he took the receipt from my hand, his fingers brushed mine, and something like sparks shot through me. Our eyes met.

  He looked like he was about to say something, but two more people came up, and I nodded and smiled at him before getting their requests, two Long Islands, which took a few moments to make.

  By the time I was done, Iain was gone. I felt that strange sense of loss again, knowing he had been about to say something to me but hadn’t had the chance.

  A $50 bill was peeking out from under his receipt. I blushed, knowing it was too much. His tab was only $16. On the back of his receipt was a phone number, and a scribbled note that read, I’d like to take you to Central Park sometime.

  Chapter 10.

  I didn’t call him.

  In another world, in another time - I would have been the girl to call him. As it was, my hand had shaken holding that piece of paper, staring at his bold, all capital letters handwriting. I wanted to call him. Immediately after reading those words, I imagined what it would be like to hear his voice so close to my ear. What would he have sounded like over the phone?

  It didn’t matter. I crumpled the note up and threw it away.

  But now, two nights later, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the distant sounds of the city at night. Now, I wondered if throwing his number away was a terrible decision. I had stupidly told him too much that night. But he had listened. And… I saw something in his eyes that told me he understood.

  And, clearly,
he saw something in me too. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left his number.

  Otherwise, he wouldn’t have stopped on the street to help me to begin with.

  Irritated with my own thoughts, I gripped my pillow and turned to the side, shoving it against my ear and trying to block out the noise. In Indiana, nighttime was near-silent; the only sounds were the occasional passing car or rain on the roof. It suddenly occurred to me that I haven’t known what silence sounded like since I came to New York City.

  Noise, though, was a small price to pay for freedom from Brandon.

  I’d like to take you to Central Park sometime.

  Unbidden, Iain’s words flashed across my brain, jarring me fully awake. I should have kept that paper, if only to look at it again. I wondered if he thought of me; I wondered if he asked himself why he hadn’t heard from me. He had felt it too, right? That spark when our hands touched?

  Just for a moment, too long, I imagined myself with him. I thought about where we would go, what we would do. I imagined his large hand in mine, heat soaking into my skin, an easy smile spread over his face. I thought of his body over mine, hovering, in the dark; I could almost feel his breath in my ear, that delicious feeling of movement within.

  No. I couldn’t think about that. I couldn’t have that.

  Oh, but how I wanted that.

  For the millionth time since I threw the note away, I tried to remember the numbers written on the page. But they floated mercilessly away, intangible and unyielding. I couldn’t remember what his phone number was.

  I told myself that it was better that way.

  xxx

  The next night, I was back at the bar, watching a game of pool progressing across the room. One of the regulars, Pete, was playing with someone I didn’t know. Pete’s long white ponytail was spread out over his denim jacket, the logo on the back faded from countless washes. He was always in that thing.