“Girl, I told you. You need to let that guy go. He’s back home now. You know he probably has like ten girlfriends back near that base he lives at. Trust me, I lived in San Diego, all those military guys want is some woman to wait for them while they’re deployed. Then when they get back, boom! Dump city!” Miranda managed to blurt all that out while applying mascara to her long eyelashes in the rearview mirror of the car. We were on our way to lunch again on a particularly boring Tuesday.
I looked sideways at her. “You shouldn’t stereotype all military guys like that, Miranda, I mean, really. They’re not all bad. A lot of them have families and stuff.”
She snorted. “Yeah, after they’ve already screwed everything that walks!”
I sighed and decided I wasn’t going to argue. It’s not like I had a leg to stand on with my argument. Riley had called once, texted twice, and emailed me four times in almost six weeks.
But who’s counting?
Miranda had been on me for the entire nine months he was gone. She wanted me to hook up with guys with her while her baseball boyfriend was out of town, but I just couldn’t. Aside from Travis (Miranda had been pretty mad at me when I let him go), I flirted and even made out with one guy on the dance floor once after too many shots, but I really hadn’t been with anyone else which surprised her, but it surprised me even more. I had been objecting with my heart what my head and body were trying to overrule.
Later that evening I was putting Aiden to bed and I heard my cell ring. I saw Riley’s face on the caller ID and answered, plopping myself on the bed, sitting cross-legged.
“Hi,” came his sultry voice on the other end of the line, and my stomach clenched with excitement and happiness.
“Hey, sexy. What’s up with you? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”
He was quiet for a minute and then spoke, “I know. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Look, Riley… I can see what’s happening here. You’re home now, back to reality. No more living in the fantasy land you got to live here.”
I could hear him blow out a breath. “It’s really not like that, Cara. I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking, and since you can’t move here, and I obviously can’t move there, I just don’t see this working.”
This was a rehash of conversations we’d previously had and I was tired of hearing it. Yet, my heart still beat painfully in my chest and I nodded. “I know, but I just want to see you. Yet, I don’t know what the solution is here. I guess until my son gets older and I can move without him forgetting about everyone here…”
He cut me off. “You’ve thought about moving here?”
I paused and blew out a breath. “Yes. Since my sister lives there I would know someone, and I’d like to be able to afford a house one day for my son, but there’s no way I can here, it’s too expensive. The problem is my entire support system is here, including Aiden’s dad. It’s not an easy choice, nor is it one I will make lightly, Riley.”
“I understand,” he said quietly, then paused a long time before he spoke again. “Look, I think it’s only fair to tell you I’ve met someone here.”
I closed my eyes and gasped, putting my hand over my mouth to keep the sob that jerked in my chest from erupting. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak.
“Are you still there?”
I forced in a deep breath and kept my voice somewhat steady. “Yes. But what do you want me to say to that?”
“I’m just trying to be honest here. Look, I won’t lie to you. While I was overseas, I thought about you every single day. You’re all I thought about, in fact. I looked forward to your emails and lived for the phone calls I was able to make. I was always in a bad mood until I could hear your voice. Hell, I had even picked out an engagement ring and everything, but I was so unsure, I just didn’t know…” he trailed off.
At that, the sob couldn’t stay down and it lurched out of me like a clutch being popped on a new stick-shift. I let out a squeak as a tear fell and splashed onto my bare legs. I shook my head. “Now why did you have to even tell me that, Riley?”
“Because I never thought you believed me when I told you I loved you all those months I was deployed. I told you, but you never seemed to buy it. You sure didn’t ever tell me you loved me.”
“But I did,” I whispered. “I said the same back to you, every time. But after you hung up,” I confessed.
Another long pause hung in the air, followed by a long sigh, and he finally spoke again, his voice hitched with emotion. “There will always be a part of me that loves you, Cara. You’re unforgettable and I’m probably going to regret this, but I don’t see how else it can work.”
“Especially when you’ve met someone else, right?”
“Now that, I didn’t plan,” he said somewhat defensively, but quietly.
I shook my head again and wiped a hand across my cheek to clear the itchy tears.
Damn if I hadn’t heard that line before. “One never does...”
I heard him sigh. “Goodbye, Cara. Thank you.”
He hung up and I chucked my cell phone on the bed with force.
It felt as if my heart had been squeezed with a vice and ripped from my body. No, that’s not right. If it had been ripped out, I wouldn’t still be feeling its pain. My chest physically hurt, a suffocating, crushing feeling, similar to drowning. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. And I was angry, so very angry. Livid at myself for falling for this soldier boy who I vowed I wouldn’t fall for. For letting him plow into my heart and hold it in the palm of his camouflaged hand and take it with him halfway around the world when that wasn’t part of the plan. I was meant to let him go after the summer was over; but I guess, as they say, the heart wants what the heart wants. We can’t choose who we fall in love with, we can only control the actions that come after. Those clichéd words offered me very little comfort and I still struggled to breathe through the crushing weight on my chest.
I wiped away the endless stream of tears and pulled my iPod from my nightstand, scrolling ‘til I found the Garth Brooks track I was looking for. As “The Dance” crooned into my ears, I tried to let go of the burning, crushing pain in my chest, but it hung on for dear life, attaching itself to my soul.
CHAPTER 17
Four months later
I drove my little Acura down the windy mountain road that would take me to the large prison complex. My stomach was a bundle of nerves. I couldn’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be nervous on their first day at a new job. I pulled up to the front gate and showed my ID to the correctional officer manning the gate and he handed me back my ID with a smile, pushing a lever to raise the large orange barrier arm that had been blocking my entrance.
While I still worked for the prison system, I had received a promotion to the prison in Colorado. Yes, I had applied for it. My ex and I had been fighting more recently and I just couldn’t take it anymore. My mom and stepdad were talking about making a fresh start and moving back to Colorado, too (they had moved there ten years ago, hence the reason my sister still lived here, but then had moved back to California when I had Aiden). After a particularly nasty court battle where my ex filed a motion to keep me in the state, he lost and I was granted permission to leave and take my promotion, with a very ugly visitation schedule that was going to cost me a fortune in plane tickets for visitation.
At least he still wanted to see his kid, I kept justifying to myself, as I thought about Miranda and Ashlynn and her prick of an ex.
I had quickly found a nice apartment on the west side of Colorado Springs that had two bedrooms and was fairly new, and even had a nice swimming pool and gym.
I had not contacted Riley. After his phone call all those months ago, I had decided it was best to scrub him out of my life – make a clean, even break – one I felt would heal faster than a slow, ripping tear. So I deleted him from Facebook, removed his number from my cell phone, and as I refused to change my email address (God, what a pain in the ass that is!), I did remove hi
m from its address book. I hadn’t received any emails from him, so it wasn’t like he was looking to contact me anyway.
All of these things did absolutely nothing to make me stop thinking of him, however. Every day, something would remind me of him and I would fall apart again, then have to force myself to climb back out of my dark pit.
Miranda was none too happy at me for moving. But after my breakup, I will hand it to her, she was a rock star.
“I’m so sorry, honey. I’m so, so, sorry. I know I gave you shit, but I could tell you loved that boy. He was a good guy, I could tell,” she had said, trying to comfort me after I had gotten a grip and called her.
I shook my head. “I don’t know what happened, I really don’t.”
She laughed humorlessly. “The military happened, babe. It’s the way it is. It’s a volatile life, not everyone is cut out for it, not even the people in it sometimes.”
I nodded as she’d hugged me.
She really had been my rock through all of it, even though she hadn’t been supportive at first. I thought she’d be happy we were over, but she seemed genuinely sorry and I was grateful.
She had come out for a long weekend with Ashlynn and helped Aiden and me move in and got to see where I was going to work. It was sweet of her, as I know things were hard on her too with being a single mother with no help.
As I parked my car in the employee parking lot, I walked up the massive stone steps that took me past a large flag pole and saw a group of men in Kevlar and helmets, clearly getting ready for some sort of training. I felt like a raw piece of steak being dangled in front of the proverbial dog as I walked by. I smoothed some hair behind my ear and kept my face down. I’m sure they were just wondering who the new person was.
This prison was quite different from the one I worked at in California and I realized after my first day was over that I was going to have a lot of adjusting to do. Male inmates are very different from females and come with a new set of problems, along with being easier in some ways. For instance, they will take “no” for an answer, as I learned quickly. Females always want to know “why?”
I picked up Aiden from his first day of daycare at the new facility and the director told me he did great, interacted with the other children well, and didn’t cry. I was hugely relieved and was so glad he loved his new daycare.
I opened the door to my little apartment and sighed when I saw how much unpacking I still had left to do.
Grateful for central air, I turned it on, and after changing into some shorts, I made a snack for Aiden and began unpacking some boxes. I’d been here two weeks and had yet to get everything unloaded. My laptop was still packed and I rummaged through boxes until I found it. Of course the cord wasn’t in the same box so I had to look through four more boxes to find it.
Who packed this, anyway?
I plugged it in to let it charge, and after it booted up, I searched until I found the wi-fi for the apartment complex and connected to it. As I pulled up the Internet, I unpacked some more and then sat down on my bed with my laptop in front of me.
I had emails in my Yahoo account, which I never check, and pulled them up out of curiosity. I had four emails from strange addresses and I contemplated deleting them without reading them, but I was able to see the first line of the emails and I saw the words “Match.com” and I groaned.
Miranda had signed me up for Match without me knowing and then she showed me later on and we laughed at some of the responses I’d gotten. When the free trial was over, we’d both forgotten about it.
I read all four emails, and three I deleted but the fourth intrigued me a little. This guy was smiling with warm brown eyes, a goatee and a black cowboy hat. He said he was just looking for a nice girl and he had “no preference” on whether the person he met had kids already or not.
He piqued my interest a little and I stared at the screen and wondered if I should return his email. His name was Kevin, and while he looked a little on the stocky side, he did look very nice in his photos and he just seemed so… normal.
I got up from the bed and decided I would do my nightly chores of unpacking, cooking, cleaning, caring for Aiden, and then make my decision after that.
As I went on with my chores, I chastised myself for thinking about going out with someone I met on the Internet. Then I thought briefly about Riley and I was still in my ‘anger’ stage of grief and quickly flicked his perfect face out of my mind. Of course I had wondered if I would run into him when I moved here, but for all I knew, he had left and been stationed elsewhere, or maybe he got married to that girl. I had no idea and I had to constantly resist from Internet stalking him to find out. He never was real active online anyway so I knew I’d be wasting my time.
Thinking of Riley made me angry and I decided I needed to get out and meet new people from around here. I only knew my sister so far, and I knew I’d make new friends at work, but that was almost an hour away and not everyone lived around here.
I put Aiden to bed and went back online and reluctantly decided to respond to Kevin. By the time I woke up the next morning, I had a very nice email from him, inviting me out for dinner.
I thought dinner was a bit of a commitment but I wasn’t sure how all this Internet dating worked, so I agreed. I had a date for Friday and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but I did have a slight bit of excitement at the thought.
***
By the time Friday rolled around, I had been hit on twice and asked out three times by various male coworkers. The prison I worked at was a complex, meaning three prisons on one site, almost 1,000 employees. I had met so many new people this week, that aside from the caseworkers in my unit and my new boss, there was no way I was going to remember everyone’s names – not to mention the inmates who constantly stared at the new girl walking around. It was a stressful week but I told myself I just needed to get used to it.
My younger sister, Katelyn, was a college senior and we weren’t very close due to our being almost five years apart in age, but she loved Aiden to death and was more than happy to watch him for me on Friday night as I went on my date with Kevin. After I’d moved here, I’d filled her in with everything that had happened over the past year and she was just so happy to have some family around again, that I could tell we would be become even closer now.
With butterflies trying to fly out of my stomach and up my esophagus, I parked my car and walked into the bar and grill type restaurant we’d agreed to meet at. I was thankful the GPS on my phone helped me find it on the first try, as I had no idea where anything was around here.
Kevin said he’d be in his black cowboy hat and a black button-up shirt. I had on cropped denim pants with a pink button down shirt and pink tie up espadrilles with a rather large cork heel. It added two or three inches and it was on purpose that I wore these. If Kevin was not still taller than me with these on, I probably wouldn’t see him again. I loved tall men and had my standards, as shallow as that sounded.
I was seated in the waiting area when he walked in. He spotted me immediately and smiled, walking over and shaking my hand as I stood. We were about the same height, he was maybe a smidge taller. He had a friendly face, and was a bit pudgy but I wasn’t going to be that shallow and sit there and judge him or overanalyze him. It was just dinner.
He seemed very happy to meet me and as we ate dinner, we chatted very easily, and he was very sweet and pleasant. He asked about my son and my move from California and my divorce and he loved hearing about my job.
Kevin worked in the shipping and hauling business, but I didn’t quite understand exactly what he did and mentally realized it didn’t matter because I probably wouldn’t be seeing him again. Super sweet guy, but zero chemistry.
Zero.
I insisted on paying half the check so I wouldn’t feel indebted to him in any way and we parted with a hug.
As I lay in bed later that night, I was touched with a twinge of disappointment that there hadn’t been any sparks with Kevin. He definitely w
asn’t my type, as sweet as he was, and I really hoped he found someone because he seemed like a great catch. Just not for me.
I felt hot tears sting my eyes as I lay awake, looking at the ceiling. The urge to look up Riley was getting stronger and I had to beat it back with a stick, reminding myself that if I should be careful what I wish for and that I might not like what I find. I just couldn’t afford more hurt, and I became half terrified and half hopeful that I would run into him.
I sat and wondered what his reaction would be if I did run into him or somehow get ahold of him and tell him I lived here now. Maybe he’d leave this other girl for me? After all, I had him first. I did think that was a selfish way of thinking, and the other girl, whoever she was, didn’t deserve this type of pain either.
I fell asleep with the thought of justification that maybe I should look him up online to see if he still even lived here, and that if he had been moved or maybe deployed again, that I could breathe a sigh of relief and not worry about it.
CHAPTER 18
There’s a saying that goes: “Never find your honey where you make your money.” It may be cute and funny, but it’s actually a worthwhile cliché. Case in point: Michael West, a very cute Lieutenant I agreed to go out with.
We had gone to dinner and a movie on a particularly uneventful Saturday night – our first date. He was charming, funny, and smelled really good. Not to mention he was smokin’ hot. He was about six-foot-two with sky blue eyes and a dark brown buzz cut. From what little flesh I could see, he had a few nice looking tattoos on his arms and something on his chest that peeked up above his T-shirt. However, he did have the same macho attitude most of the men in my industry had, but I was used to it. Work too long in prisons, and you become hard-edged and untrusting. I couldn’t say I didn’t have some of those qualities now too from having been employed in the industry for three years now, but I liked to think I still kept a softer side when I needed it.
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