“Yeah,” I’d told her, unable to keep the quake out of my voice. “It meant you were really gone.”
I’d never been lower than that night, alone in a Dallas luxury hotel room with some stranger over me, saying things that meant nothing. Things meant to fill the air with energy, to take the edge off, words that were a balm for emotion. I’d felt no real pleasure, no emotion at all, nothing that would take away the bone-scraping loneliness that Aly had left behind.
There had been nothing to hold onto at night. No sweet scent taking up space in my head. No soft, pliable body to keep me grounded. Nothing in my heart but the memory of her lips and the sound of her laughter. Even with a girl whose name I hadn’t bothered to remember moving over me, I’d still felt Aly’s vacancy. No one could fill it. Not then. Not now.
It hadn’t been Aly’s fault. I’d made sure she knew that. At my most basic level, I was weak. I was a pathetic asshole who’d let my woman leave. I didn’t chase after her, only took what she offered whenever we were together. I’d never acknowledged that our lives had been about me, my career, what I needed and when. I hadn’t even considered how she felt, how much she worried.
Ridiculous as it sounds, I’d texted her. An hour ago, on the night she got engaged. Not surprisingly, she still hadn’t answered. It was late, and she’d had a big day with the recital and the proposal and all. Still, I kept my phone where I could see it. Next to me on the patio table my phone flashed with an email alert I ignored and the light from the screen brightened against the darkness, illuminated the pavers at my feet and shot out toward the deck beyond my parent’s backyard and the lake that ran behind it. The water was still, black like a magpie’s head with a sliver of purple waving along the shoreline, reflecting the low light from the moon.
This place was home. Where my family lived, where the sweetest memories of Louisiana came from—my life here had been about loss for so long as I kid I wondered if I could come here, sit out on this patio watching the waves and the distant activity from across the lake, without feeling all that loss.
Then Aly had come along.
She replaced every shred of pain with her laughter and love.
Now I could sit out here and not think about losing my first love, Emily, at sixteen, right out on that lake. I could relax, stare out toward the dock lined with a string of soft yellow lights that danced off the water and not be reminded of anything but the taste of Aly’s mouth and the number of times we’d disappeared for hours on end into the pool house across the patio.
My parents had transformed the lake house over the years, from the place my mother spent her adolescence wanting to escape, to the comfortable upscale home that didn’t seem too ornate or too formal, like it had been when Mom was a kid. The fancy marble floors and lavish columns from her youth were gone, replaced with cedar posts and hardwood floors. It was more farmhouse than luxury mansion now and my parents took great pains to keep it that way. There was a pool off to the side of the patio, for when the lake was too high or the water too choppy, and a stone fire pit in the center of the patio where we’d spent years roasting marshmallows and having impromptu sing-alongs.
The large house on the lake had been a prison for my mother, but she had escaped, with me in her belly and my father having no idea I existed. Over the years after their reunion, the memories of the lake house had been replaced by my brother and sister’s laughter, by their bickering, and by miles of indulgent toys and books. Ohana had finally come to the lake house, fired by promises broken, then rekindled with time and the love my parents created together. Mom had substituted the bitterness and loneliness of her childhood with a family of her own making—one with a power strong enough to displace the past.
Something I still hadn’t found a way to do for myself.
The vibration from the guitar in my hands echoed against the silent night, grew louder as I continued playing. “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. It was a song I’d taught Aly. It meant something to us once. Now it was another memory in the full bank of them that kept her present, kept her real to me. Sometimes I thought they’d be the only thing of Aly I’d ever be able to have again. Christ, I hoped that wasn’t true. When my phone finally sounded with a text alert and I jerked the small silver device in my hands and read her message, I thought maybe my chances were gone.
Ransom: Bye week. I’m in town until Friday. Lunch?
Aly: We’re getting a jump on competition. Busy all week.
I thought that was all I’d get. She had a life. She had responsibilities and I wasn’t part of any of that anymore. Expecting her to accommodate me was stupid and selfish. But just when I’d almost convinced myself that she’d forgotten me, forgotten that she loved me once, Aly sent another message, one that hinted I wasn’t completely out of her thoughts.
Aly: Everything alright?