By the time I tucked the kids into bed and kissed them all, Lucy felt better but I had never missed Grady more. I ached with my grief. I felt it in my bones. I couldn’t think from the weight of it.
Everything reminded me of him.Everything.The house. The furniture. My room. My bed. My kids.Myown skin.I couldn’t escape this pain. And even though I didn’t want to, not really… I needed a break. I needed just a small reprieve from the endless pressure of it.
So I’d waited for the kids to fall asleep, then grabbed the baby monitor and made sure the front of the house was locked up. I slipped out the back patio door and breathed in the warm night.
Grady had built a fire pit in the back yard and set some Adirondack chairs around it. He and I had never spent much time back here alone, which was why I chose this place tonight. I needed to escape his memory for a little while and this was the only place I could think of without abandoning the kids completely.
With four kids, we had always been too exhausted after the chaos of bedtime to trek out here when they finally fell asleep. We’d spent our nights cuddled on the couch watching our favorite sitcoms. Or if he had work to do, I would read next to him while he tapped away at his laptop. We always meant to come out here, but it never happened.
I relaxed into the chair and stared out at the dark backyard. A floodlight had clicked on when I first came out here, but it didn’t offer light beyond the edge of our property. No houses stood behind us to bounce back any light. Beyond our fence sat a nature preserve of thin forest with gangly trees and the tiniest creek. The land grew wild for a few miles, keeping builders from purchasing the land and turning it into something habitable.
I had loved that about this neighborhood when we decided to build here, but now it felt lonely. I wanted activity to watch and fill my thoughts. I wanted to spy on my neighbors so I could occupy my head with assumptions about their lives and forget about my own.
The landscaping lights to Ben’s backyard clicked on and I heard his sliding glass door swish open before his tall figure appeared in the frame.
“Liz!” Ben’s voice boomed through the quiet night and my spiraling thoughts.
“Hi, Ben.” I cursed the floodlight for destroying any hopes of invisibility. He probably wanted to go for a swim, but now felt awkward about it. My yard was at a significant slope. The part closer to the house was higher than his and that gave me a great view into his backyard, even though there was a fence.
“I didn’t want to scare you again,” he grinned at me. “I thought I should give you some warning.”
“Thank you,” I tried to laugh. It fell flat.
“Want some company?”
I could honestly say that was the very last thing I expected him to say.But how to decline politely?Ididn’twant company. I didn’t even know why he offered.
“I have wine!”
Well, that changed things. “Alright,” I conceded. “Bring the wine!”
He disappeared into the house and I had two minutes to severely regret my decision. I didn’t want to spend my peaceful evening sharing wine with my weird next door neighbor! I didn’t even want to spend tonight with myself.
I had come out here for escape.And now this…
This didn’t feel like escape.
This felt like punishment for my reluctance to be nice to the guy.
Yet…I had been wishing for a glass of wine.Desperately.
Damn, why was I such a lush?
I heard the gate open and the crunch of his feet as he padded his way over. He paused when he reached me, looming tall and dark, waiting for me to acknowledge him.
I looked up to his smiling face and felt myself relax just a bit. I didn’t understand my reaction. He usually made me so uncomfortable that my rudeness was unforgivable. But tonight, he felt like relief. He felt like… a breath of fresh air.
Maybe I had been more afraid to spend time with the thoughts in my head than the harmless man that lived next door to me.
He held out a stemmed glass. The floodlight glinted off the shiny surface. I twirled the glass in my fingers while Ben pulled a corkscrew from his pocket and went to work opening the bottle. The glug-glug-glug of wine pouring into my glass was the only sound that broke our silence.
Eventually he pulled the bottle back, after a very generous pour, filled his own glass and slid gracefully into the seat next to me. His long legs extended in front of him and he draped his arms over the chair as though he’d sat here hundreds of times before.
I gave him a double take before I allowed this reality of him to set in. He was the cool kid in school, the cool kid wherever he went. He had the natural ability to feel at home wherever he was. I could see that about him. And now the arrogant grin made sense.
“Thanks for the wine,” I finally broke the quiet that he didn’t seem in any hurry to end.
He looked over at me and smiled. “You looked like you could use some company.”
