Winter Love Songs

by Eliza Andrews

  My sweet friend. All she had ever wanted was to belong somewhere, an abandoned child who needed to know she was loved. And it took a brush with death to figure out that there wasn’t a stage or an audience big enough to erase the scars inside her heart.

  The thought choked me up. I sniffed.

  “Are you alright?” she asked.

  I glanced over, realized she’d been watching me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head, working the muscles of my jaw to keep the tears at bay.

  “Jules.” Her tone was part amusement, part concern. “I’ve known you since the fourth grade. I can tell when you’re upset about something.”

  I forced a smile. “I guess that’s true.”

  “So tell me what you’re upset about.”

  I lowered her leg back to the couch, placed a pillow beneath her knee. I ran the tip of my index finger lightly across the scar on her thigh. “I guess I just got to thinking about…”

  But I didn’t want to tell her the truth, that I was crying for her. For her loss of Charles, of twelve of her fans, possibly of her career. And most of all, I didn’t want her to know I was crying for the loss of the dream that had sustained her since childhood — that she would be loved one day, so loved that whole stadiums would chant her name, and she would love them back.

  I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “I just got to thinking about how close I came to losing you,” I said at last.

  “Aww, Jules,” she said. She sat up with a wince, put her hand on mine, trapping my fingers against the scar halfway up the side of her thigh.

  Still I couldn’t look at her, for fear that I would begin to cry in earnest. So I looked down at her hand on my hand, my hand on her thigh.

  “Why did you forgive me?” she said after a moment.

  I chuckled. “Which time?”

  “All the times, really,” she said wryly. “But I meant college. After we had broken up for good. I didn’t think you’d ever forgive me after how I hurt you, I didn’t think we’d ever be friends again. But you did forgive me. And we were friends again… for a while.”

  Until you stopped talking to me for five years was left unsaid.

  I thought back to our college years, remembering Hope’s tearful confession that I was right, she’d been cheating on me. I remembered how we both cried, how I’d screamed at her, how I’d wanted to break something, how she’d begged me not to leave her, and how I agreed I wouldn’t.

  But then came the second time she admitted cheating on me. That memory was much more painful.

  I’d left her that time. I’d left and I’d sworn we would never date again. And we hadn’t.

  Yet somewhere along the way, I forgave her. Melody had always said, “Hope is hopeless.” And it was true. Hope had the talent, the natural charisma, the natural beauty that drew people to her like a flame draws a moth. But something about the scars she carried inside also made her reckless, self-destructive, impulsive.

  It took months for me to realize that Hope had never intended to hurt me. Hell, she probably hadn’t even intended to cheat on me. She’d done it not out of malice but because of she simply didn’t always understand herself.

  “I forgave you because… I know you never meant to hurt me,” I said.

  Her face contorted with pain. For a moment I thought it was her leg. I tried to take my hand away, but she pushed down, keeping it there.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” she said. “You are the last person on Earth I would ever want to hurt. But I know I did anyway. I regret it all the time, you know. Even after all these years, I…”

  I gave her fingers a gentle squeeze as she trailed off. “It’s in the past. Almost fifteen years ago. If you can believe that.”

  She laughed. “Not quite fifteen years. We were twenty when we broke up for good. We’re thirty-three now. Don’t add more years than we have to.”

  “Twenty when we broke up, yeah, but — ”

  I stopped abruptly. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to finish my sentence, which was going to be “But twenty-eight the last time we slept together. Then five years of silence.”

  It didn’t seem to matter that I hadn’t finished my sentence. Hope seemed to know what I was going to say. She laced her fingers with mine, gazed at me. And the electricity was instantly back, just like it was when she opened Mel’s front door and found me standing there on the porch. But this time, my hand was already in hers, and she didn’t look away.

  As if of its own accord, the hand that wasn’t laced with hers made its way to her face. I brushed a thumb across her cheek. Her skin was warm, flushed almost.

  Like a moth to a flame. My palm cupped the side of her face.

  “Julie,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I need you.”

  “I know,” I whispered back. “That’s why I’m here. Right here.”

  She turned her face, kissed the heel of my palm. “I never deserved you,” she said. “I still don’t.”

  I didn’t answer with words. I leaned forward, letting my lips meet hers. The electricity was no longer in the air between us; now it coursed into me, flowing from her body into mine, from my body into hers. We made a complete circuit, energy joining us together.

  The kiss deepened, grew more intense, and the heat that had seemed to radiate from her cheeks earlier now seemed to come from her mouth, her fingertips, the hollow of her neck. My lips moved from her mouth to her jaw, her neck, her collarbone. Her chest. She squeezed my other hand, the one she still held, tightly. Fingernails dug into the back of my hand.

  “I never stopped needing you,” she whispered. “I think I always will.”

  I kissed her again, and Hope tugged my other hand up, guiding it under her dress, onto the smooth spandex of her shorts. I could feel the heat, there, too; I could feel the way the crotch of the spandex was growing moist. I cupped her there; she pressed my hand in place.

  “Hey, Julie? Have you seen — oh, Jesus.”

  My head snapped up. Melody stood there in embarrassed horror at the foot of the stairs a few feet away, one hand still on the bannister.

  I sat up straight, wiped the corner of my mouth with the back of my wrist. Hope pushed her dress down hastily.

  “Never mind,” Mel said. She spun back around and headed up the stairs.

  Shit. What just happened?

  Vertigo seized me for a moment, as if I was drunk. But then the cold facts of reality snapped into place: I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t do this, and I needed to leave. Right. Now.

  I wasn’t a cheater. All the times with Hope before, when we’d been broken up but still fooled around, neither of us had been in a relationship.

  I couldn’t do this to Karen. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. I stood up.

  “I’m sorry,” I said without looking at Hope. I didn’t know to whom I was apologizing. Hope, maybe? Karen? Myself? Maybe all three. I wiped a hand down my face. If I looked down, I would see her. I would see her face. I would see the vulnerability and the want in her eyes, and I —

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I should… I should go. I’m gonna go.”

  I picked up the resistance bands from the floor, avoiding the eyes that I knew were following me.

  “Julie?” she called from the couch, but my hand was already on the door.

  I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t slow down. If I did, my resolve would evaporate, and I would touch her in all the ways I wanted to touch her. In all the ways I was convinced only I knew how to touch her.

  I jogged down the porch steps, practically leapt into my car. Pandora started playing automatically — and too loud.

  Scar tissue that I wish you saw

  Sarcastic mister know-it-all

  Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you ’cause

  With the birds I’ll share

  Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hope and I had been in high school when the Californication album came out, and we’d hated “Scar
Tissue” despite the radio airtime it got.

  We couldn’t figure out the chorus for the life of us. Hope insisted it was “With a bird’s eye view;” I argued it was either “With the burden shed” or “With the burden shared.”

  That was what Hope and I had together: scar tissue and a shared burden. A burden of history that we never seemed to be able to outrun. I shut the radio off.

  With the birds I’ll share this lonely viewin’

  With the birds I’ll share this lonely viewin’

  15

  Early December, Part 2: “Long December,” Counting Crows

  I owe Karen the truth.

  That was what I thought when she came home that day, tired from a long day at work, complaining that her lower back was bothering her again, asking me with a pouty face that I used to find cute if I would massage her shoulders and neck.

  “…so then Ray was like, ‘The contract with India? We canceled the contract with India. We hired them three weeks ago and all they manage to produce was a spreadsheet,’” Karen said while I stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. Massaging Karen juxtaposed with an image of massaging Hope’s injured thigh a few hours earlier.

  I owe Karen the truth.

  “So I said, ‘Well, it would’ve been nice if someone would’ve bothered to tell me that the India contract had been canceled.’ I arranged my whole week around that conference call!” She sighed. I dug my thumbs into the space between her shoulder blades and her spine. “Ow! Too hard.”

  “Sorry.”

  A beat passed.

  “You’re awfully quiet today,” she commented. “Hard day?”

  I should tell her.

  “No. Uneventful,” I said. No. I can’t tell her. It will only hurt her, and it’s not going to happen again, anyway.

  “Did you see your pop star?” Karen asked, adding a healthy dollop of sarcasm to her question.

  “Yes, but I wish you wouldn’t call her that,” I said. “She’s not a pop star to me. She’s just Hope.”

  “Wasn’t that the title of her last album — Hope? I always find that so self-aggrandizing, when musicians name albums after themselves.”

  A few silent seconds passed.

  “You think I’m being too hard on her, don’t you?” Karen asked. “You always defend her. You always — ”

  “I accidentally kissed her today, during the therapy session.”

  The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them, before I could think through the consequences. At least it was out in the open.

  Karen stiffened beneath my hands. “You what?”

  “I kissed her. I don’t know what happened. I’m so sorry.” I spoke in a rush now, my confession taking on a momentum all its own. “We had just finished her therapy session, and I was massaging her thigh around the bullet scar, and we started talking about the past, and — I don’t know why it happened. Our eyes met… and we kissed.”

  Karen spun around. Time seemed to stand still as her wide blue eyes pierced me with an emotion I interpreted as something between shock, hurt, and pure fury.

  Her eyes look like chips off a glacier, I thought. Like ice daggers.

  “Massaging her thigh,” Karen repeated flatly.

  Then one hand flashed out, and before I knew what was happening, she slapped me across the face as hard as she could. My head rocked to the side.

  I lifted my hand to my face automatically, covering where it hurt.

  I’d cupped Hope’s face with this same hand only a couple hours earlier.

  “I knew this was going to happen,” Karen snarled. “I knew it. I knew sooner or later that woman would destroy us.”

  “We’re not ‘destroyed.’ It was a single kiss,” I protested weakly. “Nothing else happened.”

  She jabbed an accusatory finger at me. “You never stopped loving her.”

  “Karen,” I said, trying to reason with her. “I haven’t been with Hope in a long time.”

  “You’ve never loved me the way you loved her,” she said as if I hadn’t heard. “You’ve never even looked at me the way you look at her.”

  “The way I look at…” My brow furrowed. “How do you know how I look at her? You’ve never even met her.”

  My cheek still hurt. I didn’t know whether I should feel guilty for kissing Hope or angry at Karen for hitting me. Or maybe both.

  “I’ve seen,” Karen said, shaking her head back and forth. The cold blue eyes took on a wild sheen to them. She looked a little unhinged. “I’ve seen the way your face changes when you see a photo of her. I’ve seen what you look like when you see her on TV. I’ve seen.”

  “You’re being paranoid.”

  “Being paranoid?” She snorted. “Julie, you just told me you kissed the woman, and I’m the one being paranoid?”

  “It was a kiss. A single kiss.” Shame dropped my eyes to the floor. I knew it was more than a kiss — or it would have been, if Melody hadn’t walked down the stairs at that moment. “Yeah, we have a history, okay? And she’s struggling right now. And I don’t know… I guess I wanted to make her feel better and I just — I got confused for a second.”

  “Oh my God,” Karen said. She covered her face with both hands, laughed as if there was a private joke I hadn’t heard, shook her head again. “You got confused?” she said when she took her hands away. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “You got ‘confused’, Julie? That’s your excuse?”

  “I… I’ll give her some space, Kare,” I said, not attempting to answer her rhetorical question. “I’ll tell her I need the rest of the week off from physical therapy. Alright?”

  “A week off, of course. That’ll fix everything,” Karen said, throwing her hands in the air. She began pacing through our living room, snatching things from surfaces as she went. A magazine sitting on an end table. A pile of junk mail next to the door. The e-reader I’d left on the couch the night before.

  I knew what she was doing. Karen cleaned when she was stressed. The times our home had been the cleanest had coincided with our ugliest fights. When we’d fought at the beginning of November about our Christmas plans and the gym I’d wanted to open, the house had been spotless for nearly two weeks.

  “Karen…”

  I stepped around the coffee table and reached out, trying to close the distance between us, but she bustled away in the other direction, arms full of odds and ends that she’d decided to relocate or throw away.

  “Karen, please,” I said as she moved from the living room to the dining room. I trailed a few steps behind. “What do you want me to do? I told you about it. I could’ve kept it a secret. But I didn’t. I told you because I respect you and I love you and you deserved to know. And it’s not going to happen again. Alright? It’s not going to happen again.”

  Without looking at me, she dumped her bounty of mail and magazines and electronics on the dining room table and began sorting everything into piles.

  “You don’t know yourself,” she said without looking up. She shook her head back and forth while she talked. “You don’t see yourself. You’re never going to let her go. I’ve been thinking about leaving you for months anyway and this just — ”

  My head snapped back as if she’d slapped me a second time.

  “Wait. What? You’ve been — what do you mean you’ve been thinking about leaving me for months?”

  She put her palms flat on the dining room table, leaned her weight forward as if the table was the only thing holding her up. “I’ve said it before. I want to be with an adult, Julie. Not an overgrown, gullible, head-in-the-clouds teenager who still chases cockamamie schemes instead of a real career.”

  “So it’s about my gym?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Your gym.” She rifled through the mail that she’d dumped onto the dining room table, produced a ripped-open envelope. She waved it at me, brandishing it like a weapon. “Have you bothered to look at the credit card bill? I added it up — over a thousand dollars on gym equipment. Not to mention we’re still
paying off the two thousand dollars you spent on that ridiculous ‘entrepreneur’ seminar.”

  “It wasn’t ridiculous,” I said, hurt. “You supported me going to that. You told me that if I was going to go into business, it was worth educating myself. Now you’re taking it back?”

  “Now I’m thinking you spent two thousand dollars on a seminar, and for what? Where’s this gym you’ve been talking about for the past three years?”

  “It takes time to — ”

  “No wonder we can’t afford to go to Tybee Island for Christmas,” she said, talking over me. “Everything we earn goes to Julie’s make-believe gym!’”

  “Make-believe? I’ve been building my clientele, establishing a name for — ”

  “And now, to top it all off, the girl you’ve been in love with since you were fifteen years old shows back up in town, and after five years with me, you’re making out with her.” Karen threw the credit card bill onto the table.

  “We didn’t make out,” I said, even though guilt burned in my gut. “We kissed. That was all.”

  Karen didn’t reply. She wrapped her arms around her stomach protectively and dropped her gaze to the piles she’d created on the dining room table. The blue ice daggers of her eyes seemed to melt a little.

  “Five years,” she said softly. “I’ve put five years of my life into you.”

  I crossed the room, taking her into my arms and kissing her temple, then her forehead, then the tip of her nose. She dropped her face onto my shoulder, sobbed quietly.

  “I’m sorry, Kare,” I said. “I’ll go over there right now. I’ll tell Hope I can’t work with her anymore, okay? She’ll understand.” I squeezed her to me.

  Five years, I thought to myself. Five years since I told myself I would forget Hope Caldwell once and for all. I needed to stick to my promise.

  #

  One hour later, my tires crunched against the gravel drive at Melody’s house. I had driven here in silence, without Pandora, without anything but my own conflicted heart to sing to me.

  Andrew and the kids had decked the house out for the holidays. Multicolored Christmas lights spiraled around the porch railings, outlined the roof. In the yard, an inflated glowing Santa Claus and his reindeer rocked gently in the night breeze. It had gotten noticeably colder in the past week; the weatherman had even floated the possibility of snow flurries for the weekend. Snow was unusual in Georgia for this time of year; the possibility of flurries in early December suggested it might be an especially cold winter.