For a number of reasons but those words don’t come out. Instead, I said, “I like it here.”
“But the league isn’t as good.”
I shifted in my seat, getting more uncomfortable. “I can ride the bench in the NBA, or be a star here. I choose to be a star.”
“Oh,” she said, and nodded. “So you’d rather be a big fish in a small pond?”
“You could put it that way, sure,” I said. “All I want to do is play.”
“You don’t think the NBA could use a shooter like you?”
I scoffed, looking at her. “Doing scouting research now, are we? What do you know about the NBA?”
She scoffed right back. “So what if I don’t know everything about basketball statistics? I’m in sports PR, Chandler, and I know enough to know talent when I see it. You’ve made seven three pointers in the past two games. One thing I know about basketball teams, they are always looking for shooters. And ones that never miss.”
“I’d rather play in the game than be a role player,” I repeated, and I knew I was getting prickly about it.
Her lips pursed as she considered my words. “So you’d never…you know. Move back to the States?”
“Why would that even be in the picture?” I asked, getting defensive.
“So…it’s not in the picture?” she asked, slowly. “Like…not at all?”
I raked my hand through my hair and squinted. “What are you getting at, Amy?”
“Forget it,” she said quietly, her expression carefully smooth.
“I won’t forget it. What”—I raised an eyebrow at her—“are you getting at?”
Her eyes narrowed at me. “Oh come on. Don’t sit there and act dumb, like you haven’t thought about what’s going to happen when my flight leaves tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I returned, not hiding my frustration, “I thought we were just enjoying tonight.”
A hanging silence that was nearly unbearable. We were right back to square one.
Amy broke it, and I knew I was fucking this up by the look on her face and the tone of her voice. “Is this week it?”
“This was a great week,” I said, trying to even out my own voice. “Isn’t that enough? For now? Why the rush to figure it all out? Why not take things slow?” My words only seemed to make things worse.
“So you’re just going to pretend like you have no idea what’s going to happen between us once I leave?” she asked, her voice…empty.
I shook my head at her. “I told you, we’ll Skype. We’ll see what happens. I’m not going to just try out for the NBA suddenly, just because a girl I’m in l—because a girl I like lives an ocean away.”
She took a big bite of her steak so she didn’t have to say anything for a minute.
“Okay,” she finally said. She wasn’t angry in the way she said ‘okay’, which was quite possibly the worst answer to anything I’d ever asked. I saw sadness, hurt, and disappointment in her eyes. But I looked down at my plate, my thoughts and feelings still unsorted and not yet unpacked about Amy and me.
The rest of the meal was relatively quiet. I knew what Amy was getting at—she wanted me to come back to the U.S. But the fact was I couldn’t up and leave my life here for a girl—no matter how much I loved her. I just…couldn’t. That wall in me was standing firm and I wasn’t going to flip a switch, roll over and suddenly become the Chandler she wanted. She’d understood that about me at one time. Now? Everything was different, everything had changed. I just didn’t know what it meant for either one of us.
Later that night in bed, we didn’t use ties or ropes like we’d planned. No, we spooned and fucked slowly, intimately, gradually into the wee hours of the morning. We fell asleep in each other's arms in a pool of sweat.
* * *
“Chandler. Chandler!” Amy poked me. I had enjoyed feeling her skin on me all night, and I was currently confused as to why she was no longer naked in my bed so I could wrap my arms around her little body.
“Babe, what are you doing up? Come back to bed.”
“My flight leaves in an hour!” she shouted back to me, frantically throwing every last one of her clothes into her bag.
“Oh, fuck.” I jumped out of bed, still groggy from our late night sexscapades. “I’ll start the coffee while you’re getting ready.”
“Fuck the coffee!”
I nodded, still half-asleep. “No time. Fuck the coffee.” I turned to my dog, who was lying on the floor lazily wagging her tail. “Sorry Jess, I’ll take you out when I get back.”
We sped to the airport. I weaved through traffic and probably pissed off a lot of drivers, but we made it in a record fifteen minutes to the Barcelona airport. When we arrived, I put the flashers on and jumped out to grab Amy’s luggage.
She hugged me fiercely, like I was the last person on earth.
“See you on Skype, soon?” I asked.
She hesitated. “Yes.” She paused. “Chandler, I feel like we left things hanging in the balance a little.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I soothed. “We don’t have to plan everything in one night. We’ll chat over Skype. Okay?”
She took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “Okay.”
“Now, go catch your fucking flight. You might have to flirt with some security guard to get moved through fast.”
And just like that, I watched the love of my fucking life leave me. She turned, and waved, a sad smile on her face before she completely disappeared from sight. It wasn’t until I realized she wasn’t coming back that it hit me. The numbness, the emptiness, at not waking up to her tomorrow morning.
“I love you, Squirt,” I whispered.
But she was gone in the flesh, and I could already feel the weight of her absence.
Twenty-Seven
Amy
The flight home was like déjà vu from five years ago, when I was in college. Except this time, we’d consummated things. Yet boarding the plane and heading back to the cold winter of Chicago after a little over a week with Chandler had felt oddly anticlimactic.
I was happy to be back with Andrea and running our small business, but something kept gnawing at me, and I couldn’t quite verbalize what it was.
Andrea and I stood close together in our new office as we stared at the whiteboard. With a little seed money from Mr. Yerac, we’d put a down payment on the first month’s rent for our boutique storefront so that we wouldn’t look like serial killers by inviting clients back to our homes. Not that we invited a ton of people back to our office, but we needed it just in case. “And I think if you can handle the back-end of the business, I can take the in-person meetings for now,” she said, tapping the marker on the ‘Andrea’ column of things.
I blankly nodded my head. “Yes, back-end. I can take the back-end.”
She capped the marker and set it down on the whiteboard. “Amy, what the H-E double hockey sticks is with you lately?”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Seriously? You can’t say the word?”
“Oh, whoops. Force of habit. I’ve gotten used to saying that around Tate. But seriously, what’s up with you? Is it him?”
Reluctantly, I nodded. “It’s…him, yes. Since I’ve been back we’ve been Skyping. But I just haven’t felt the same. I’m having flashbacks to my old, shitty, long distance relationships. I know it’s only two weeks, but we can’t do this forever, you know? But I’m trying to be patient. I’ve been thinking about going back on my meds.” I sighed. “I thought I could win the battle with anxiety. But I guess it’s just time to throw in the towel.”
I plopped on our couch, the one decent furniture item we had splurged on for the office.
“So you’ve Skyped every night for the past two weeks. What are you worried about, exactly?”
“Sure, we Skype, but where is this going? Are we going to Skype for another four years, and then I’ll find out he was cheating on me like David?”
“Oh God, please. Don’t let one bad apple spoil the whole bunch for y
ou.”
Except, they’ve all been bad apples—except for Chandler. “I can’t help it,” I said instead. “He’s great, yeah, and our connection was true. But he’s a lady killer at heart. You should see him in a room with women. They give him the ‘I want your babies’ look like it’s a reflex. He says I have nothing to worry about. But I always worry. Plus, we want different things in life and he won’t budge. I’m not going to spend my entire life trying to change him when it won’t happen.”
Andrea sat down on the couch next to me. “Do you trust him?”
I bit my lip. “I think I do. That’s the crazy thing. I do trust him but part of me thinks I shouldn’t. He hasn’t even asked to make our relationship Facebook official.”
“Really?” she said, dryly. “Facebook official? That’s what you’re worried about?”
“Well, he doesn’t have a Facebook, but still.”
She shook her head. “You are a little off-kilter right now. I have never, ever seen you this worked up about a boy—not even David and you were really into him. Are you going to make it?”
“I don’t know.” I smiled and hung my head in an exaggerated fashion, drawing out the syllables. “I just want him to live here, or me to live in Barcelona and we can be happy and I can have lots of Chandler babies.”
Andrea’s eyes grew wide. “Holy shit. I thought you told me that you weren’t sure if he wanted babies.”
I leaned my head back. “That might still be true but we never went into that since a lot of other stuff came up first. In any case, I do want babies, and lots of them. Specifically ones that look a lot like him, and me a little. And I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, because all this happened after just one week!”
“You know, it is a little crazy.”
“So you think I should break up with him?” I was suddenly on edge.
“No. Actually, I was going to say to trust your instincts.”
I looked over at her. “I can do that.”
“So do it,” she ordered. “And stop moping like you don’t have choices.”
I smiled, sitting up in my seat and feeling better. “Thanks, Andrea. I needed that.”
“Happy to help.” She grinned, standing up and holding out her hand to help me up. “Now let’s get the heck to happy hour so I can have a virgin daiquiri or two,” she said, hand on her baby bump.
**
Every time I fired up my computer to talk to Chandler, a surge of dopamine went through me and I suddenly felt a sense of calm wash over my body. He was still my go-to drug. My nicotine patch. And a very sexy one at that.
A nagging feeling of dread seemed to always permeate through me in spite of this new found happiness. For me, it was greater than anything I’d ever experienced. However, there were days and nights—mostly when I let my thoughts wander too far off shore—where I felt lonely, and wanted to desperately text him in the middle of the night just to have him text back ‘yes, I’m thinking about you.’
We tried our best to make plans in the immediate future but not address the far future. I worried what would happen if one of us asked the other to come live with them, and it turned out that the other didn’t want to come? Our connection would be severed forever.
As it was, the Skype sex was hot. Chandler had the uncanny ability to make me wet with just a few words. It was truly an incredible feat. My body was addicted to him. My heart loved him.
My mind however—oh, how my mind loved to play tricks on me.
One night I was at the office. Andrea had just left, and I was wrapping up some paperwork that was tedious but instrumental in clearing the red tape out of the way for our PR company to do business. It had been a ridiculously busy day where I’d gotten lost in my work and forgotten to go to lunch.
A Skype Mobile call showed up on my phone from Chandler, which perplexed me a little, because we had decided we wouldn’t be Skyping tonight. Either way, I picked it up and answered.
“Hola, Señor sexy,” I spoke in a low, sultry voice.
There was no immediate answer and there was no picture. Instead, I heard riotous laughter. Some of it was Chandler’s and some of it was a woman’s.
My heart sunk through my stomach and all the way down to my feet.
“Chandler? Chandler!” I yelled, this time as loud as I possibly could. No answer.
As a butt dial, I had two choices, hang up right now, or listen intently to the dialogue and try to piece together what the hell was going on.
No way in hell was I ending this call. I turned the volume up on my receiver and put the phone to my ear as best I could.
“Muy, muy lindo,” I heard Chandler say. Very very pretty? What the fuck?
The female voice spoke. “Sí, lindo como tú. Siempre sabia que pasarará.” My damn Spanish was still a little rusty, so I had to look up the last part of the phrase on my desktop computer. Phone pressed to my shoulder, I quickly Google translated the part I didn’t understand. Yes, pretty like you. I always knew this would happen.
My blood ran cold, and then even colder when I heard glasses clink and a salud get said. There was silence, and a low rumbling of voices in the background. Were they at…a restaurant? A bar? Who the hell was this girl?
Suddenly, I heard a baby crying in the background, and then Chandler’s unmistakeable voice. “Ohhh mi hijo!” The baby’s cries stopped as someone—Chandler?—picked it up and patted it on the back.
“No pensé que era posible para mi tener un bebé. Es todo gracias a ti, Chandler. Todo por ti.”
I translated as fast as I could, writing down anything I couldn’t understand immediately so I wouldn’t forget.
I didn’t think it was possible for me to have a baby. It’s all thanks to you, Chandler. Everything because of you.
My pulse sped up to ramming speed and my heart tried to break out of my chest. I could not believe my ears. It was like a movie or something. My worst nightmare: Chandler, cheating on me and all the while playing me. I was such a fool, a damn hopeless fool.
Chandler chuckled. “Gracias,” came his reply.
I felt faint. Ill. My heart beating so fast in my chest that it made breathing normally difficult. I was past angry or heartbroken. I was just numb from shock, and I felt my knees give out. My eyelids fluttered, and then everything went black.
Twenty-Eight
Chandler
I loved the Spanish style of eating out late at night, even with a recently born baby. It was the middle of the week and the hole-in-the-wall restaurant was fairly sedate. Doña Maria's son, Mateo, was just three months old and she wanted some air from her baby daddy, so we arranged a meet up after my flight back from my game in France earlier in the evening.
The meet up with Doña Maria was unexpected, but appreciated. I’d felt off for the last couple of weeks, partially due to Amy’s absence. I no longer felt like going out every night. Maybe my party lifestyle was coming to an end? Surprisingly, I felt at ease about that.
I didn’t feel at ease, however, about the envelope that I’d been carrying around with me since the night Amy had given it to me. I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to know who my father was. Maybe it could help my psyche to know him, sure. Maybe I’d learn how he had a hard life, wanted to be there for me but couldn’t.
Somehow, though, I didn’t see a tender moment happening to us. I had a feeling that it would be rather anticlimactic.
I blocked my own issues out of my mind as I sat on the patio with Maria. She somehow attributed the fact that she was able to have a child in her forties to Amy and me. In between news about her newborn boy, I had gushed about my whirlwind week.
I’d known all along that would happen, she had said, in so many words. In fact, she went as far as to say that the spark between Amy and I had been evident, even when we were in college and living abroad together. She insisted that she thought we were hooking up constantly, and was actually surprised when I told her that no, we had never hooked up until just a few weeks ago after our chance encounter
on the plane.
And she said that, she and her boyfriend, now fiancé, had been inspired by Amy and me in a way she couldn't quite put into words. Looking at us, she just knew we were bound for love, and, as she kept joking, marriage.
"It was only for a week and a half that we were together. I feel like this conversation may not be appropriate." I stopped myself short of going into detail about my sex life with Amy.
"Por favor, Chandler. Dime los detalles. Quiero detalles. Details."
"You want details? Well, the details are, I’m fucking in love. And I’m also fucked. What am I going to do, convince her to uproot everything she’s built in her twenties and move here? Her life is in Chicago. My life is in Barcelona."
"So why no do not start life a new, the two of you, together in one place?"
Her grammar wasn't perfect, but in spite of that she sounded wise as hell. In fact, maybe her slightly improper grammar made her sound smarter, like a Spanish Yoda of sorts. Was it really that simple? I stared at Maria’s son, who stared right back at me with a mischievous look in his eyes.
Kids. A family. Marriage. Being a husband. A father…all things I’d sworn off without even a second thought. My decision had been made as a teenager but they’d been my motto for over a decade. Sitting here, I was thinking that I was running away for reasons I wasn’t even sure of anymore. I had told Amy we had to stop running or we’d repeat ourselves. And we had, but this time, knowingly. And I knew that was mostly on me. Amy wasn’t going to put herself out there if she already sensed I wouldn’t.
When Mateo gurgled-giggled, I snapped out of it, and found Maria watching me just like she always has. "I just…I don’t know,” I said, helplessly. “I have no friends in Chicago. I’m a country boy everywhere but in Barcelona."
"You make friends easily," she said, knowingly. “Excuses.”
I grinned, agreeing. "Good point, on both accounts. But I would have to do something else besides basketball. And I like basketball."
The Casanova Experience: A Friends to Lovers Romance (Ballers Book 2) Page 25
