by R. R. Banks
10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4...3...2... 1
Finally, my heart rate normalized, my breath returned to its steady pace, and I felt in control again. I had been told countless times before that these memories would always be with me and that I would never truly escape them. That never stopped me from trying.
I pushed away from the counter and turned the bathroom light off. I walked down the hallway to Jason's bedroom and knocked on the door with one knuckle.
"Jason," I called through the door. "We need to get going."
"I told you that I'm not going," he called from inside his room.
"And I told you that you don't have a choice," I said.
I heard a few stomping footsteps approach the door and it opened. Jason stared out at me with a look of exasperation on his face.
"Why? Why do I have to go with you to this thing? They're throwing the party for you, not for me."
"They're throwing the party to welcome me into the community. That means that they're going to want to meet you and welcome you as well."
"What if I don't want to be welcomed?"
"Again, you don't have the choice. And you need to cut the attitude."
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that I wanted to go hang out with some new friends tonight."
"New friends?" I asked.
I was surprised to hear Jason mentioning having made any new friends. He had only gone to one day of school, and when he came home he didn't have anything to report other than the fact that he didn't like his History teacher. He hadn't mentioned even meeting any new people, much less making any friends who he would want to spend any time with.
"Yeah," he said. "I met a couple of guys and they're going to be hanging out tonight."
"Well, I'm sorry, but we have something else to do. You can hang out with them another time. Come on. We've got to get going."
Jason let out another of his masterfully teenaged sighs but followed me out of his room and through the house.
There were already several cars in the parking lot at the community center when we arrived, and I was worried that we might be late. When we stepped inside, however, I saw that the people there were still scurrying around making preparations for the party. We had only been there for a matter of seconds when a bright-eyed woman rushed up to me.
"Oh! Mr. Allen! You're here!"
"Yes," I said, "but it's Garrett."
The woman smiled at me and extended her hand toward me. I took it and she shook it enthusiastically.
"Yes, Garrett, of course. I'm Sarah. I'm the head of the committee throwing the party tonight."
"It's very nice to meet you," I said. "And thank you for doing all this for me."
She blushed so deeply I wondered if that sentiment meant something different here.
"Oh, it was nothing. It's the least that we could do to welcome you here and show you how excited we are to have you as our fire chief. I have it on good authority that your firefighting career has been very impressive."
"Thank you," I said. "I'm happy to be here and look forward to serving the community in my new post."
"Come with me," she said. "There are so many people who want to meet you."
I started following her further into the room and Jason fell into step behind me. As we made our way through the room meeting other members of the committee and watching as the final touches were being put on the preparations for the party, more people started streaming in and soon the small room started to feel almost crowded. I turned to introduce Jason to one of the firefighters who would be working with me and found that he was no longer standing behind me. I looked around but didn't see him. At some point, he had disappeared into the growing crowd and I assumed that he had ventured off to hang out with his friends as he had planned, feeling as though he had fulfilled his obligation of coming to the party by at least coming to the community center with me and meeting some people. I was angry with him for going against what I had told him, but at the same time, I was happy that he had managed to meet people and make friends so quickly. I reminded myself that that was part of the reason why we were here in the first place, and I should be glad that he was assimilating into his new community, rather than trying to find any way that he could to go back to our old home. I couldn't be angry that he wanted to go out and enjoy himself. It was a good thing, and hopefully the first step on the right path. We just might need to have a conversation about his interpretations of my instructions.
Half an hour later I was standing with several older members of the community eating my way through a towering plate of dessert. I probably should have stuck with the vegetable tray and intriguing interpretation of a fruit sculpture, but my sweet tooth was hard to control when I was presented with an entire table of treats. I figured in the greater scheme of my character flaws, the occasional indulgence in far too many refined sugars and carbohydrates were the least of my worries. I would just spend some extra time in the tiny gym I was setting up in the house. Just as I expected they would, the people standing around me were asking questions and trying to figure out as much about me as they could. I was carefully navigating telling them about myself without delving too deeply into my past. I focused on my time in the military and the years that I had spent fighting fires rather than my family or my broken marriage. When they asked, I simply told them that my parents were dead, and I had no extended family. And it was just me and my son. Fortunately, they seemed satisfied. I was fairly sure that I wouldn't be getting as many bright smiles and encouraging pats on the back if they knew that the reason I was a single father was because I left my wife behind after she cheated on me with my best friend and made it abundantly clear that she had no interest in being a mother. Part of me hated that I was doing that. The fact that she was gone wasn't Jason's fault. It wasn't even my fault. Yet it left both of us marked, just as I had been marked by my father. I didn't want him defined by the past, but I didn't know how to escape it.
I was taking a bite of my third helping of a trifle that I had gotten from the table when I glanced up and saw a woman staring at me. She was across the room and people were passing in between us, periodically blocking her from my view. But every time that they passed, and she became visible again, I saw that she was looking at me. Her pale blonde hair was hanging to her shoulders and she wore a sweater over a dress that went nearly to her ankles. She glanced away, talking to the bubbly woman who had greeted me, then down at the food on the plate that she was holding. A few moments later, she looked up at me again. I stared at her, trying to remember if she was one of the people who I had met during the party. I couldn't remember talking to her, but there was something familiar about her face. I saw Sarah return to her side, looking frantic, and the woman followed her away deeper into the crowd. I continued to eat and meander through the party, going over the speech that I knew that I was going to make, in my head. I had been hesitant when they told me that they wanted me to make a brief speech. I had never been one to enjoy public speaking and I didn't really know what I should say to them. They had been insistent, however, and I had spent the last several days methodically trying to come up with a statement that would seem sufficiently friendly and grateful without leaving me up at the podium for more than a few moments.
I was debating over the way that I would wrap up my speech when I looked up and noticed the woman again. She was now standing next to the dessert table, but she was still staring intently at me. I was a few steps closer to her than I had been the first time I saw her, and she looked even more familiar. Suddenly she reached up and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, at the same time licking her bottom lip and a memory burst into my mind. This was the gorgeous, sultry woman I had the one-night stand with. It was shocking to see her standing there, but it was equally shocking to see her in such a different way. When she was at the bar, she looked nothing short of Lycra and leather-packaged sex. Now her face was fresher, her hair soft and without the styling product that it had, and the clothing she was wearing
was demure. The effect made her seem older than I would have thought she was when I met her and made her look like she hoped she could fade into the wallpaper of whatever room she happened to find herself in. I raised my eyebrows at her and her cheeks flushed. I knew that she recognized me too.
Making my way across the room, I didn't take my eyes away from her. I didn't want her to have a chance to disappear into the crowd. She seemed to be busying herself arranging the silverware and straightening the piles of napkins on the table when I approached and stood beside her.
"Hi there, Debbie," I said softly. "Are you here advertising your flea circus?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, her voice a hushed whisper.
I scoffed.
"Of course, you do."
She looked up at me sharply. Though the expression on her face didn't continue it, there was still hunger in her eyes.
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
I laughed.
"What do you mean what am I doing here?" I asked. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm helping with the party," she said. "Sarah is fantastic at coming up with ideas, but she gets a little flighty when it comes to actually pulling it all together."
"So, you are moral support?" I asked.
"Not entirely," she said. "I hung some crepe paper and I pushed a bunch of balloons that were apparently too blue to be blue into a back storage room. I also made a dessert."
She was adorable trying to explain her involvement in the party and I felt my stomach tightening. She had been sexy and exciting when I met her at the bar, but she was enticing in a different way now. She was cute, but not in the giggly, flaky way that so many women were. She was sassy, and I could see a spark in her that intrigued me.
"Which dessert did you make?" I asked.
She pointed to the nearly empty trifle dish in the center of the table.
"The trifle," she said. "It's my signature dessert."
"That was my favorite," I told her. "I had three servings."
"So, it's your fault that we're almost out of it," she said.
I shrugged.
"The other people just weren't fast enough."
She laughed softly, then quieted and continued to look at me for several seconds.
"So," she said. "I guess we managed to find each other again."
"I guess we did," I said.
"Well, if we're going to be in the same town, we should probably come clean."
Oh, lord. What did she mean by that?
"Come clean?" I asked.
She nodded.
"I happen to know that your name isn't Ethan," she said.
I withheld a sigh of relief.
"And you're not Debbie," I said.
She shook her head.
"My name is Gwendolyn," she told me. "And I don't run a flea circus."
"To be fair," I said, "you didn't say that you ran the flea circus. You said that you were the costume designer for the flea circus."
She laughed.
"Alright," she said. "Well, I'm not the costume designer, either."
"So why did you pick Debbie? You don't really look like a Debbie."
"I've been having a major craving for a snack cake," she admitted.
"A snack cake?" I asked with a laugh. "You can make a trifle like this and you reach for box snack cakes?"
"Hey," she said with mock defensiveness. "I might be able to layer, but I don't have anything on Little Debbie."
"Fair enough," I said.
I started to reintroduce myself to her, but I felt a hand on my elbow and I looked over my shoulder to see Anthony, the man who had hired me, standing behind me.
"I'm sorry, Gwendolyn, but I'm going to need to steal him for a minute."
She shrugged, and I smiled at her before following Anthony toward the podium across the room. I knew it was time for me to do my speech. By the time that I stepped behind the podium my nervousness at speaking in front of the group was gone as was virtually everything that I had planned to say. Fortunately, I managed to ramble on for a few minutes, elicited a few laughs, and walked away with the applause of the crowd I felt I had effectively convinced that if they happened to find themselves in a fire or other such an emergency, they could trust me to actually be there for them and help them out of it. Shaking hands and graciously accepting the congratulations and welcome wishes of the people who crowded up to the podium after I spoke, I made my way back across the room toward the dessert table to continue my conversation with Gwendolyn. When I arrived, however, I found the plate that she had been holding sitting on the edge of the table, and she was gone.
This wasn't exactly the reenactment of our last encounter that I was thinking about.
Chapter Six
Gwendolyn
I was still thinking about Garrett when I got to school the next morning.
Garrett. Not Ethan. Somehow that fits so much better.
Every thought about him made me feel a little bit woozy and I couldn't get my mind off the night that we had spent together. It was those thoughts, though, that had caused me to rush out of the party the night before, while he was still up at the podium speaking. I didn't know how I could possibly be so stupid that I didn't know who he was when I saw him. How could I possibly help throw a party to welcome the new fire chief in town, and then not recognize him when I saw him? Even more than that, how could I not know that I had already been his very own welcome committee in a way I'm sure the elderly members of the community were just not up for providing?
As soon as I saw Anthony leading him away from me and up to the podium to make his speech, I had felt my stomach drop. He hadn't had the opportunity to, so it was up to me to make the slow, embarrassing realization of who he was as he stood up there and thanked everyone in attendance, including me, for being so friendly and gracious. It wasn't that we had a one-night stand. It wasn't even that I had left the hotel in the morning before he was able to wake up. What embarrassed me is that he had uncovered who I really was. Now it made so much sense why he was more than happy to give fake names and create ridiculous stories for ourselves when we were still in the bar. He didn't have anything to cover up. Other than his name, he was essentially the same person that I had met in the bar. Gorgeous. Strong. Charismatic.
What was completely different was me. Yes, I had a fake name that was inspired by my favorite cream-filled snack cakes, not a little bit because from the minute I saw him I hoped that I might get a chance to be a little cream filled myself, but that wasn't the only thing that I faked. I was a complete construct when he met me in that bar. I was wearing clothing that I had only worn once before. I had packed on more makeup then I had probably worn cumulatively in the last month. I had a swagger and a confidence about me that had been fueled by my frustration and tension. It wasn't me he had met in that bar, or who he had brought back to the hotel, or who he had ravished and left blissfully satisfied. That was the person I had created. I couldn't imagine that he would feel the same way about me now that he knew what I usually looked like, or if he knew that I was just a quiet divorcee High School teacher who got excitement from binge-watching salacious TV far more frequently than I did from another human being.
It felt easier just to walk away from the party the night before. I was mad at myself for doing it, but at the same time, I didn't know how I would handle having him walk down from that podium and approach me again. My thoughts of him and our night together had only become more common and more intense as the days and weeks passed, and I knew that I still wanted him. But just as much as I worried about how he would react to the real me, I was tangled in my thoughts and emotions about who he really was. The night that we spent together, his intensity and strength had been thrilling and enticing. He was a fantasy, a sexy dream that I had managed to somehow will into reality. I didn't have to think about the type of person he was outside of that room. I didn't have to think about how that smoldering, bad boy vibe played out when we weren't in bed. It wa
s like I could go home and pretend that he wasn't even real. Now I didn't have that option. He was very real and very tangible, and I knew that the more time that I spent with him, the more I would learn about him, and the truth was I was afraid of what I might find.
I was all too familiar with men who carried themselves with that confidence and who had that alluring, almost irresistible bad boy persona. The experiences that I had had with that type of personality had left me with deep scars that no one could see, but that had shaped and influenced me. The thought of men like that made me bristle. I feared men like that. I couldn't trust them. The thought that Garrett could be anything like the other men in my life was enough to make me wish I had never seen him again. At the same time, however, I didn't get the same feeling from him that I had from the other men who had hurt me so much. Especially one. The one who I would never forget. The one who had changed me. Garrett didn't strike me as being like them. He was powerful and intense, but he didn't seem to have the same level of disregard for others. He walked through a room with absolute confidence and I had to admit that there was some arrogance in him, but he was also kind and friendly to those who were speaking to him.
Yes, our night together had been anonymous. He had lied to me about his name and about who he was. But that was my doing. I was just as much of a liar as he was. Our exchange had been light-hearted and consensual, fun and playful. There had been nothing about it that seemed manipulative or truly deceptive. It hadn't upset me then, but I was having trouble understanding how I should feel about him now.
I didn't have the same block of classes that day that I had the day before, which meant that I wasn't going to have to wonder if Jason Baxter was going to a show up in my classroom. The only time that I was supposed to see him was in the brief homeroom of the day, and I was a little surprised when he walked in just before the late bell rang. He walked in staring directly at me as if he wanted to make sure that I made eye contact with him and acknowledged that he was there. It wasn't the same as my more eager students who didn't get enough from maintaining impeccable grades and also felt the compulsion to add exemplary attendance, conduct, and citizenship to their string of accomplishments. Instead, it felt almost like a dare. It was as though he had shown up just so that he could have that brief moment of silent confrontation with me like he was making his move and wanted to see how I would react. I hated to admit that I was relieved when homeroom was over, and I saw him walk out among the other students. He wasn't my problem for the rest of the day and if he didn't show up to any of his other classes, at least I could say that he was there for mine.
