“Oliver.”
“Go. Please, January!” he said in a such a commanding and urgent tone that I turned and hurried to leave as if I had just stepped over a border and had the patrol chase me away.
I didn’t see Oliver for the rest of that day, not when we barbequed outside in the evening, not when I helped everyone get their rooms ready for the night.
His car was gone.
The cabana was crowded with the three of them there, and I desperately needed a shower. I went into the house and climbed the stairs. That same feeling of emptiness told me that Oliver wasn’t home yet. I was glad the boys had only come here for a day, because I couldn’t stay here anymore, not with Oliver being the human equivalent to mercury.
I showered in the amazingly beautiful and spacious shower of the room he had arranged for me, and as I stepped outside the bathroom, covered in a large, soft white towel that I had found in the closet, I could feel that I wasn’t alone on that floor anymore. Peering through the window that faced the same side as his, I found that the light from his bedroom washed out to the balcony.
Oliver was home.
If walls pulsated as hearts did, he could have heard and felt my heartbeats that night. He was so close and yet so far away, like the moon whose light washed into the darkened room I lay in.
Chapter 26
Oliver
What do you do when the words of a man half your age punch you in the gut?
You walk away.
She’s the one.
She had always been.
But usually, I wasn’t sitting and facing that fact, gazing into its beautiful blue eyes, or standing in a kitchen with her, or recalling daily what it had been like to touch her, be inside her, not as a twenty-year-old memory, but a freshly painful one.
I couldn’t stand being in the same space with January without taking what I wanted, without it being reflected in my eyes when I looked at her. So, I told her to go, and sometime after, when even being in the same perimeter was too much, I took my laptop and went to work in Mocha & Chino, a coffee shop outside of town.
The merger was complete and signed, and I had emails and phone calls to tie a few loose ends.
“Call me when you have a minute,” my lawyer texted.
“Corbin hasn’t pressed charges; he’s only threatening. If he wanted to do it, he’d do it by now,” the man who handled all my legal matters said when I returned the call. “He had his lawyer call me and the man pretty much hinted that it wasn’t going to happen.”
I was silent on the other end of the line, gazing through the coffee shop window at the traffic on the road below.
“It’s good news, Oliver,” he continued.
“I know.”
“Merger’s final, he knows he lost that one, so he has no incentive to go after you, not even revenge. He knows it’d blotch his name just as much as yours and that it’d end up in a fine at most. It’s not worth the time and energy he’d spend on it.”
It was good news, but I wasn’t feeling happy. From a respectable, cool-headed businessman I was again a violent beast with an explosive fuse and looming assault charges. I had spent years escaping that fate, and now it had caught up with me again.
I went back to a house where I knew I’d have to spend a night with the woman who had opened the Pandora’s box that was my feelings just a few doors away.
When I parked in the garage next to the beaten-up car she insisted on driving and calling Pretty, and past the newer Toyota Camry her kids had arrived in, I thought about the two hours I had spent with that family. Meeting the amazing people that were her kids, how they resembled her but were also different, how they interacted with each other, with her, I thought about the man who could have had all of that but had given it up. The man who was supposed to join them tomorrow.
How could anyone pass on the chance to be with her? With these kids? A real family. How could anyone not see in January what I saw? I didn’t know that man, but I would have given a lot to have had the chance he’d had all those years ago.
The pool house lights were on, and happy voices drifted outside. It looked, sounded, and even felt like a home. She had made it that.
On my way into the house opposite it, I thought about that night when we had been twenty-two and I had offered her, pleaded with her, to leave with me. Live with me. It was then that she had told me about her husband and kids. Knowing now what I hadn’t known about myself then, I didn’t think her life would have been better off if she had accepted my plea. I had been a mess back then and still was.
Passing by the closed door at the top of the stairs, I could practically feel January inside it. Smell her.
