Thief

But, Caleb isn’t gone. And he’s the first person she ran to when she was afraid. I wanted it to be me, but I’m not even sure I’m emotionally available enough to do that. I’m a career man, first. Always have been. My mother raised my sister and I on her own. I often fantasized about what it would look like to have two parents instead of one. But, not because I was desperate for a father … I wanted my mom to have someone to take care of her, because she took care of us.

For the most part I like being alone. When I turned thirty-eight, I suddenly had this urge to have a family. Not the typical family with kids, I just really wanted a wife. Someone to share coffee with in the mornings and to climb into bed with at night. It was picturesque and beautiful, this image I had in my head — of a house and Christmas lights and dinners together. It was a good dream, except very few women take the child variable out of theirs.

I’m not a romantic, but I can enjoy a good story. When Olivia told me hers on that flight to Rome, I was enthralled. The thought that real people got themselves into these situations where love dominated rational thought was something I was entirely unfamiliar with. She was so honest, so hard on herself. I’m not the type of man who believes in fast love. This is a fast love culture, where people fall in and out of something so sacred you wonder if it has the same meaning it did a hundred years ago. But, when Olivia said those words “I fell in love under a tree” I just about lost it and asked her to marry me right there. She was my opposite, but I wanted to be like her. I wanted to fall in love underneath a tree, fast and hard. I wanted someone to forget me and then remember me in their soul, like her Caleb did.

I immediately thought we were dually matched. Not like souls. Just perfect pieces that needed to fit together in order to see the whole picture. I was a compass to her. And she was the person who could teach me to live. I loved her. God, I loved her. But, she wanted something I wasn’t willing to give. She wanted a baby. When arguing turned to bitter fighting, I left. When she wouldn’t budge, I filed for divorce. That was wrong. Marriage is compromise.

I take care of my tab and step into the warm air. We can compromise. Adopt. Hell, we could open an orphanage in a third world country for all I care. I just can’t do it, have my own. There’s too much risk involved.

I need to see her. Enough hiding. I take my phone from my pocket and text her.

Can we talk?

It takes three hours for her to respond with:

O: About what?

You and me

O: Haven’t we done enough of that?

I have something new to put on the table.

Twenty minutes go by before her single text comes through.

O: Okay

Thank God. I’m not going to let him take her from me. He let her go in Rome. He broke her heart … again. That night, when Olivia and I parted after dinner, I went back to my hotel and thought about my life. How empty it was. I think I’d already made the decision to change it by the time she called my room, crying. I caught a cab to her hotel and sat with her while she mourned him. She told me it was the last time, that she could only bend and break so many times before the damage was irreparable. She hadn’t wanted me to touch her. I wanted to. I wanted to hold her and let her cry on me. But she’d sat on the edge of her bed with her back straight and her eyes closed, and cried silent tears that flowed like rivers down her cheeks. I’d never seen anyone deal with their pain with so much restraint. It was heartbreaking; the way she wouldn’t make a sound. Finally, I’d turned on the television and we’d sat with our backs against her headboard and watched Dirty Dancing. It was dubbed in Italian. I wasn’t sure about Olivia, but I had a sister and I’d seen it enough to know the dialogue by heart. I was still there when the sun came up. I cancelled my appointments, made her get dressed, and took her to see Rome. She fought me at first, saying she’d rather stay at the hotel, but then I’d ripped open the drapes in her room and made her stand in front of them.

“Look. Look where you are,” I said. She’d stood beside me and the mist seemed to lift from her eyes.

“Okay,” she said.

First the Colosseum, then we ate pizza at a little shop near the Vatican. She cried when she stood in the Vatican underneath Da Vinci’s handiwork. She’d turned to me and firmly said, “These are not tears for him. These are because I’m here and I’ve always wanted to be.” Then she’d hugged me and thanked me for taking her.

We parted after that day, but when I got back to Miami I called her. We went out to dinner a few times. Very casually. Things didn’t move forward until I kissed her. I hadn’t planned on doing it, but we were saying goodnight outside of a restaurant and I just went in without thinking. It was months before we had sex for the first time. She was timid, hesitant. It took a while for her to trust me. But, she did. And I am not letting that go as easily as he did.

Chapter Fifteen

Six months before I saw Olivia at the music store on Butts and Glade, I bought a ring for Leah. It sat next to Olivia’s ring in my sock drawer for a week before I moved it. It didn’t feel right having them together. I’d bought an antique-style ring for Olivia. It was elegant. When things fell apart, I hadn’t known what to do with it. Sell it? Pawn it? Keep it forfuckingever? In the end, I couldn’t part with the past and it had stayed exactly where it was. For Leah, I chose princess cut. It was large and flashy and would impress her friends. I planned to ask her while we were on vacation in Colorado. We skied there twice a year. I was getting sick of the skiing circus with her ridiculous friends who named their children things like Paisley and Peyton and Presley. Names without soul. It was my opinion that if you called a child a pattern for long enough, they would become scrambled. My mother named me after a Biblical spy. He was all dash and dare. Needless to say, names meant something.

I suggested we go on a ski trip alone. Initially, she refused to go without ‘her people’, but I think she caught a whiff of engagement ring in the air and quickly changed her tune. The ski trip was a month away when I panicked. It wasn’t an inner, hidden panic either. It was a drinking binge panic in which I jogged six miles a day listening to Eminem and Dre, and Google searched Olivia’s name by night with Coldplay on repeat. I found her. She was working as a secretary at a law firm. I didn’t have the chance to find her; I got into a car accident and told my first life-altering lie.

The day I saw her, I was already two months deep in my amnesia lie and just hanging out in the general vicinity hoping to run into her. I’d never actually go into her job — Olivia took herself way too seriously to take that well, but I considered ambushing her in the parking lot. And I might have, had she not walked into the Music Mushroom that day. I was going to tell her the truth; how I’d lied to my friends and family, how it had all been because I couldn’t leave her in my past like I was supposed to. And in that split second when I asked her about the damn CD in her hand, she looked so panicked, so stricken that I fell deeper into my lie. I couldn’t do it. I watched the whites of her eyes expand, her nostrils flaring as she tried to decide what to say. At least she wasn’t swearing at me. That was good.

“Ummm.” That’s what she decided to say to me. I heard her voice for the first time and I couldn’t keep my smile. It rose at the corners of my mouth and ran right into my eyes like it hadn’t been lost for the last three years. She was holding a cello-wrapped boy band in her hand. She looked helluva confused.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.” It was cruel to play on her surprise, but I wanted to keep her talking.

“Er, they’re okay,” she said. “They’re not really your style.” I could feel her mentally retreating at that point. Her hand was already placing the CD back on its shelf, her eyes darting toward the door. I had to do something. Say something. I’m sorry. I was a fool. I’d marry you today, on this very day if you agreed to it…

“They’re not my style?” I repeated her words while I tried to formulate my own. She looked so forlorn in that moment that I smiled at her beauty more than anything else.

“What exactly do you think my style is?” I immediately recognized my mistake. This was the way we used to flirt. If I wanted to make any headway in her forgiving me, I had to cut the shit and-

“Umm, you’re a classic rock kind of guy … but I could be wrong.”

She was right, so right. She was breathing through her mouth, her full lips parted.

“Classic rock?” I repeated. She knew me. Leah probably would say my style was Alternative. Not that she knew anything about music; she listened to the top 100 like it was full of Biblical truths instead of clichés. I dragged my bitter thoughts away from Leah and back to Olivia. She looked scared. I saw her expression and it hit me. She wasn’t dragging anger around. She was dragging regret. Same as me.

There was a chance for us. Away from the old.

“I’m sorry,” I said. And then the lie came. I’d been telling the same one for two months. It came easily, pouring off my tongue like relationship poison.

You’re protecting her, I told myself.

I was protecting myself.

I was the same selfish f**k that pushed her too hard in the past. I started to walk out. To run from what I’d just done, when I heard her call after me. That was it. She was going to tell me that she knew me, and I’d tell her that I didn’t have amnesia. That the whole f**king charade had been about her. Instead, she took off down an aisle. I watched her dark hair bob as she weaved past people who were in her way.

My heart was beating fast. When she came back, she had a CD in her hand. I glanced at it: Pink Floyd. It was my favorite of their albums. She’d bought my lie and she’d brought me my favorite CD.

“You’ll like this,” she said. She tossed it to me. I waited for her to tell me that she knew who I was. But, she didn’t. I was overcome by every goddamn thing I had ever done to her, every lie, every betrayal.

Here she was trying to heal me with music, and I was lying to her. I walked. Walked. Right out.

I had no intention of ever seeing her again. That was it. I had my chance and I blew it. I went back to my condo and put that CD on, turning the volume all the way up. Hoping it could remind me of who I was. Who I definitely wanted to be again. Then I saw her again. That wasn’t planned. That was kismet. I couldn’t help myself. It was like every second, minute, hour I’d spent away from her over the last three years came to slap me in the face as I watched her knock over a display of ice cream cones. I bent down to help her pick them up. Her hair was short, barely reaching her shoulders. It was cut at an angle, the front longer than the back. The very tips looked like they could slice your fingers if you touched them.

She wasn’t the Olivia I remembered with her long, wild hair and the untamed look in her eye. This Olivia was smoother, more in control. She weighed what she said rather than letting it spill out. Her eyes didn’t have the same light they used to. I wondered if I’d taken that from her. That hurt me. God — so much. I wanted to put the light back in her eyes.

I went straight to Leah’s. Told her I couldn’t do what we’d been doing. She took it as me saying I couldn’t be in a relationship with someone I didn’t remember.

“Caleb, I know you feel lost right now, but when your memory comes back everything will make sense,” she said.

When my memory came back, nothing made sense. That’s why I lied.

I shook my head. “I need time, Leah. I’m sorry. I know this is a mess. I don’t want to hurt you, but I need to take care of some things.”

She looked at me like I was a knock-off purse. I’d seen her do it a million times. Disgust, confusion at how someone could settle. Once she’d made a snide remark in the grocery store while we stood behind a woman sifting through a stack of coupons. She’d had a Louis Vuitton purse slung over her shoulder.

“People who can afford Louis don’t clip coupons,” she’d said loudly. “That’s how you can tell it’s a knock-off.”

“Maybe people who clip coupons save enough money to be able to afford name brand purses,” I’d snapped back. “Stop being so shallow and judgmental.”

She sulked for two days. Claiming I had attacked her rather than defended her. We fought about how she put things above people. It was a turnoff to me to watch someone place that much value on a thing. After she stormed out, I had two days of peace, during which I seriously considered ending things with her.

Until she showed up at my condo with a pie she’d baked, full of apologies. She brought one of her Chanel purses with her, and I watched in fascination as she pulled scissors from her purse and cut it up in front of me. It seemed like such a sincere and contrite gesture, I softened. She hadn’t changed. Neither had I, I guess. I was still in love with another woman. Still faking it with her. Still too unsure to do anything about it.

But, now I was tired.

“I have to go,” I said, standing up. “I have to meet someone for coffee.”

“A girl?” she asked right away.

“Yes.”

Our eyes locked. Where I’d expected to see hurt, maybe tears, she only looked angry. I kissed her on the forehead before I walked out.

I might have been doing this in the wrong way, the selfish way, the damn cowardice way — but I was doing it.

Chapter Sixteen

I drop Olivia off at her office. On the ride over, she barely says two words to me. After what just happened between us I don’t know what to say either. I know one thing for sure — Noah wants her back. I could almost laugh. Join the club, motherfucker.

He’s been gone for three months and is finally getting withdrawals.