In the shower, I closed my eyes and could see Chance hovering over me in the early hours of the morning. It was our third go around, and very different from the first two times. Our desperate, frantic race to be together was behind us, and we slowly poured emotion into every beautiful movement. I’d had sex before, but until that moment in time, I’d never really made love.
The warm water of the shower washed over my skin, and I replayed those last few moments over and over. “You’re an amazing woman,” Chance said. “Thank you for making my fantasy come alive. I hope all of your dreams come true. You deserve that, Aubrey.” In the moment, I’d thought it was a beautiful sentiment. But suddenly, an intense urge to vomit gurgled up from my stomach, and my eyes flashed open. He was saying goodbye.
Chapter Eleven
I checked out of both our rooms and sat in the lobby for six hours. It was ridiculous of me to do. All of his clothes were gone; he obviously had no intention of returning when he’d snuck out while I was sleeping. Yet for some reason, I refused to leave. Sitting on a leather couch in the bustling grand atrium, I stared at the hotel entrance doors. Maybe he’d change his mind? Maybe he’d hopped on a bus and made it half way to California and then regretted leaving? What if he came running back, and I wasn’t here? Then, I remembered he had my phone number and hadn’t called me. Reality was sinking in even deeper.
A couple walked arm in arm through the front doors. She was wearing a tight white dress and wore a long veil, carrying a round bouquet of red roses. He was wearing a suit with his undone tie hanging loosely around his neck and a rose pinned to his lapel. I watched as he pulled her to him for a long, passionate kiss before heading to the reception desk smiling. Tears rolled down my cheek. It wasn’t the first time today.
“Just get married?” An older woman carrying a tub overflowing with quarters sat down across from me. She had white hair styled in a big puffball that looked like it could withstand a typhoon. The blank look on my face was a dead giveaway that my mind was somewhere else.
“I’m sorry?”
Her eyes pointed down to my hands. I was absently twisting the ring on my finger. My wedding ring.
“Uh. No. It’s not a real wedding band. It was…a joke.” The joke was on me.
She nodded. “Would have been married fifty years next week.”
I assumed she lost her husband. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
“You said ‘would have’. Did your husband pass away?”
“Hell no. I’m not that lucky. Bastard turned out to be a liar, cheat and a gambler.”
“So what did you do?”
“Pulled up my big girl panties, kicked him out and divorced his ass almost forty years ago.”
I smiled. It was the first one since my shower this morning.
“There you go. Pretty girl like you, that smile should always be on your face.”
“Thank you.”
“So what did the bastard do?” The name she used for the man who wronged me didn’t go unnoticed.
I shook my head. “He left without saying goodbye.”
“Sounds like he’s a coward.”
I was crushed and felt like a fool. But she was right, and I was only making matters worse by sitting around waiting for him—I knew he wasn’t coming back for me. I hated to admit it, but Chance was a coward. A selfish prick who didn’t have the balls to even say goodbye. I let out a frustrated sigh and stood. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Reminding me to pull up my big girl panties.”
The owner of the pet boarding place greeted me with a smile. “Overall, he was very good. Scared the heck out of us when he dropped to the ground at one point. But then we remembered what you said about the occasional fainting. We gave him a bath, so he should smell fresh and clean for your ride back.”
Esmerelda Snowflake ran into my arms before circling around me repeatedly. He seemed flustered. Taking him by a leash, we walked out to my packed car in the parking lot. This was the final stop before leaving Vegas.
I was walking around in a daze. None of this seemed real. At any given moment, I still half-expected to hear his voice coming from behind me.
AH-BREE.
“You didn’t think I’d really leave you, did you, Princess?”
My chest felt full, like it could burst any moment, but shock was preventing me from letting out the sadness and despair held captive inside of me.
I let Esmerelda into the back and took my place in the driver’s seat, unable to garner the energy to start the car. Looking behind me, I said, “This is it. It’s just us now. Are you ready?”
The goat startled me by jumping through the center console and into the front. I watched as he sniffed the passenger seat repeatedly and let out a few loud, frantic “baa” sounds. It seemed like he was really trying to communicate something to me.
I wondered if he sensed that Chance wasn’t coming back. Animals are funny that way.
“He’s gone. No more Chance,” I said, rubbing the back of his furry head gently and swallowing the pain of my words. I repeated in a whisper, “He’s gone.”
The animal started circling around in the seat until he finally stopped and rested his head down.
Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.
What sounded like a whimper escaped him. He couldn’t be crying.
As the sounds got louder and louder, I came to the conclusion that he was. This sweet animal wanted Chance and either understood what I just said or had a sixth sense.
When he looked toward me with his sad eyes, it was at that moment that I finally let go. Everything came pouring out as I leaned my forehead against the steering wheel and sobbed. In just a little over a week, I’d found my greatest happiness and suffered my biggest heartbreak. It felt like I was born again only to be destroyed by the very thing that gave me a new lease on life.
Even though we’d slept together less than twenty-four hours ago, Chance seemed so far away now, like it was all a dream. The soreness between my legs from our one night together—our first and last—was the only evidence that it was real.
I wiped my eyes.
Big girl panties. Big girl panties. Big girl panties.
When I finally developed the courage to drive off, it seemed I had a new copilot. Esmerelda stayed curled up into the passenger seat.
As we passed a sign that read, Leaving Las Vegas, I wished that the saying were true, that everything that happened in Vegas stayed there. I knew better. What happened to me in Vegas would be something that would follow me around for a long time to come.
Chapter Twelve
Two months later and doing my best to settle into my rented bungalow home, I’d come to the conclusion that losing Chance felt a lot like a death. Not only that, I’d pretty much experienced the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.
Back in Vegas, at the first realization that he’d left, I was definitely in denial. Throughout the rest of the ride to California, though, anger had started to set in more and more as I focused less on the idea of losing him and more on the simple fact that he’d ditched me.
The bargaining phase hit me shortly after arriving in Temecula and stayed for about a week. “If only I hadn’t thrown myself at him.” “If only I’d told him how much he meant to me.” I blamed myself for his leaving.
The fourth phase didn’t take long to overshadow all the other stages. Depression was the hardest. It got the best of me for at least a month and a half. Aside from work, I did nothing but come home and wallow in the fact that I would never meet anyone that made me feel like Chance did. Despite how things ended, I truly felt that he’d ruined me for all other men. I’d wake up sweating in the middle of the night, painfully aroused from vivid and recurring dreams of being fucked hard by him as he told me over and over how sorry he was, that he loved me, that he’d made a mistake. I’d then cry myself back to sleep. While the depression never fully went away, a
s each day passed without any word from him, it gave way to the final stage of grief: acceptance.
As hard as it was, I finally reached a point where I had to accept the fact that he was never coming back for me. I had no choice but to move on with my life. That meant considering getting back into the dating scene even if it killed me. One thing was for certain. There was no way I was going to be able to get over him by continuing to lie in bed at night, reliving how it felt to have him inside of me.
I still longed for him. That might never go away.
If there were such a thing as a sixth stage, it should have been aptly named, Purge that shit. I decided that just being in my car was too painful. More than half of our relationship took place inside that BMW. Every time I would look over to my right, I’d hear his laughter or see him sucking on a Pixy stick. Sometimes, I swore I could still smell him. The spirit of Chance would always be alive and well in that car.
When I got to the dealership to trade it in one sunny Saturday afternoon, I was feeling very emotional.
I’d finally settled on an Audi S3. As I was leaving to get into my new car, the woman who’d assisted me with the trade-in called after me.
“Ma’am!”
I turned around to find her holding the Barack Obama bobblehead in her hand. My chest tightened.
“You forgot something. I just pulled it out of your old car. There’s a little adhesive left on the dash, but we’ll remove it. I thought you might want it.”
I almost took it from her. Almost. Fighting the tears that were starting to sting my eyes, I held out my palm. “Keep it.”
In the months after Chance, letting new things into my life seemed to be a bigger challenge than throwing old things out.
Jeremy Longthorpe was the CEO of a tech company and also a client of mine. We’d spent countless hours together working on a patent application for one of his recent inventions.
Even though he’d made it clear that he was interested in me, I pretended not to notice any of the hints he threw my way. He was really sweet and good-looking enough in a quirky-with-glasses kind of way. Going out with him could have also been a slight conflict of interest, even though the firm had no written rules against dating clients.
The truth was, I just didn’t feel ready. My mind was still very much preoccupied with memories of Chance. As much as I tried to rid the physical evidence of him, what remained thereafter couldn’t be destroyed as easily no matter how hard I tried. Although he’d hurt me, Chance was still taking up residence inside my head and in my broken heart.
Spending extra time with Jeremy was at the very least, a distraction. He was supposed to be meeting me at the office one Friday evening for a late-night work session. He’d called from the road to let me know he was running a little late and to ask me what kind of takeout I wanted him to bring.
My response was, “Something fast-foodish and really bad for me. It’s been that kind of day.”
“You got it,” he said. He was so nice.
The smell of something fried made its way to me before I even noticed him walking through the maze of cubicles and into my corner office. Jeremy was carrying two grease-laden bags. “Since you weren’t specific, I got a few different kinds of bad food.”
“Thank you. I’m starving.”
He slid some papers to the side to make room. “Why don’t we just enjoy our dinner before we get to work?”
“Okay,” I said, rummaging through the bags.
He’d brought food from Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Popeyes.
Popeyes.
I just couldn’t escape it. Chance was everywhere. Calling dibs on the chicken bites, I started to dig in when Jeremy reached over and grabbed one. “Hey, lay off my bites,” I joked. I remembered saying something similar to Chance the first day we met. Little reminders that came in waves unexpectedly like that always seemed to bring the pain back in full force.
I suddenly stopped eating.
Jeremy put his sandwich down. With his mouth full, he asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Were you mad that I took one of your chicken bites?”
I half-smiled. “No, no. It wasn’t that at all.”
He leaned in. “What is it?”
Looking down, I said, “It’s nothing.”
“Aubrey, clearly it’s not nothing. You were eating like a machine, and you suddenly stopped. What happened?”
The look on my face probably gave me away.
“You can talk to me, you know,” he said.
I wanted to tell someone. I hadn’t told anyone. Not one single person knew about what happened to me.
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Over the next hour, I told Jeremy everything that went down between Chance and me. He listened intently without passing judgment, and it felt so good to let it all out.
Nodding slowly with his arms crossed, Jeremy’s mouth curved into a sympathetic smile. “Well, this explains a lot.”
“Meaning?”
“Why you shut down whenever I insinuate that we go out.”
“You noticed that, huh?”
“Yes. I notice everything about you.” He looked down, almost embarrassed for having admitted his feelings in a roundabout way. When he looked up, he said, “I really like you, Aubrey.”
“I like you, too. I don’t want you to think my hesitation has anything to do with you.”
He placed his hand on my arm. “Look…now that I know the reason why you’re closed off, I think it’s even more important that we go out. I promise, I’m not going to expect anything. Let me just be your friend. And if things turn into more, fine. If they don’t, worst case scenario, we’ll have had a good time together.”
I smiled. “So, you’re asking me out more directly this time.”
“Yes. I’m asking you to take a chance. Go out with me.”
Take a chance. I hadn’t used Chance’s name when telling the story. So, I found Jeremy’s choice of words ironic.
“Take a chance, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Jeremy. I will.”
Part II
Two Years Later
Chance
Chapter Thirteen
CHANCE
My hands were balled into fists as I sat on my bed, bopping my legs up and down. I’d dreaded this day every bit as much as I’d longed for it. The closer it got, the more my apprehension about leaving this place grew. Looking around at the Spartan gray walls, I could hardly believe that this was really it. Today was the day.
Cracking my knuckles, I got up and paced.
“What the hell is wrong with you, man?” my cellmate Eddie said. “This is what you’ve been waiting for.”
“You’ll see how it feels when your day comes.”
“Yeah. Fucking ecstatic is how I’ll feel. You want to trade places? I’d give my right nut to be in your shoes right now.”
“I know you would. It’s not that I’m ungrateful to be done. It’s just that nothing is the same as when I came in here. This place…it’s become my normal. Walking out of here is gonna be like walking into a big black hole. At least here I know what to expect.”
“It’s been two years, not forty.”
“A lot can happen in two years, mate. I’ve learned that all too well.” When the words came out of my mouth, my heart immediately felt heavier. Two years ago, I had a mother. Now, I didn’t. My mother was dead. God, it was so painful to think about her not being around anymore. That was reason enough to want to stay in here and hide from reality.
Mum had suffered an aneurysm while driving about a year ago. The fact that I was locked up and couldn’t say goodbye to her when she was clinging to life at the hospital was something that I would never forgive myself for.
There were a lot of things I couldn’t forgive myself for.
Eddie’s next question threw me for a loop. “Are you gonna try to find her?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
I ran my hands through my hair in frustration. Why did he have to bring her up? “No,” I said adamantly.
“No?”
My tone was more insistent. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s been two fucking years. She’s probably married by now, maybe with a baby even. Oh, and there’s that minor detail of her hating my guts and wishing I were dead because I broke her fucking heart.”
I never intended to tell Eddie about Aubrey. I never intended to tell anyone about her, especially the details of how I left her.
One night, I had apparently been talking in my sleep in the middle of a dream, saying things like, “Aubrey, I’m sorry. So fucking sorry.” I’d woken Eddie up, and he dragged it out of me. The dreams were recurring and continued to happen on and off, to the point where Eddie had dubbed them “Aubreys.” “You had an Aubrey again last night,” he’d say.
“You don’t know for a fact that she wishes you ill will.”
“What does it matter, Eddie? Even if she’s not married, the whole point of sneaking out that morning was to make her hate me so that she’d move on with her life and not wait two whole years for me while I was stuck in this hell. Why the fuck would I have broken her heart intentionally only to go back and try to be with her again?”
“Aren’t you even curious about her?”
Fuck.
Of course I was.
Shrugging my shoulders, I let out a deep breath and sat back down on the bed, staring at the wall. “I hope she’s happy and that she’s moved on. I really do. But I sure as hell don’t want to put myself through witnessing that firsthand.”
“Well, it’s your decision. I just don’t want you to regret it later. From what I can see, that shit traumatized you.”
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