Coming Home to You

by Liesel Schmidt

  “Um, sure. Sorry,” I said, shaking my head at my own idiocy. “I’m not usually so rude. I was just caught a little bit off-guard, is all,” I explained, attempting a lame smile. “I was expecting…someone else.”

  Realization dawned in the Shower Guy’s eyes.

  “You were expecting Neil,” he supplied.

  I nodded.

  “Neil moved out and sold me this place. I’m Jack, by the way,” he said, offering his hand and bridging the distance between us.

  “Zoë,” I replied, taking his hand. “I used to live here. Sort of. Until very, very recently, actually,” I said, not that that really explained anything.

  His grip was firm, his hand sturdy and capable-feeling as it clasped mine. It was probably the only thing that kept me from losing my balance and doing a face-plant right there, the way I felt I might do at any moment now. My legs were proving to be a little less than reliable, slightly on the wobbly side.

  Neil had moved out? When? Why hadn’t Ray told me?

  Neil himself could have told me when we’d run into each other at the bookstore a few weeks ago, if he’d wanted to. Obviously, he hadn’t thought his future plans needed to be run by me for any reason. Because the reality was this: as much as I felt I knew Neil, I really didn’t know him.

  I realized I was probably holding onto Jack’s hand a little harder than I meant to, and I pulled back hastily. Maybe a little too hastily. Now I had to worry that he thought I was disgusted by having to shake his hand. Great.

  Too many thoughts were flashing through my head right now, none of them really holding still long enough, all of them probably glaringly obvious on my face. I shook my head and tried to reshuffle my brain into some semblance of orderliness and rationality. Not that I had much to go on here. Mostly still just questions.

  “When—?” I realized I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask.

  When had Neil moved out?

  When had Jack moved in?

  When had this decision taken place?

  “I moved in about a week ago,” Jack offered. “Haven’t really gotten all settled in yet, but I’m getting there.” I looked behind him to see stacks of boxes scattered around the small living room, only a few minor changes evident in my direct line of vision.

  “Luckily for me, the place came fully furnished. Not going to keep everything, but it’s still nice to decide what I want and what I need to replace, you know?”

  I felt an overwhelming urge to cry, a sense of unexplainable loss. I hadn’t been told, hadn’t been consulted, hadn’t been given the chance to tell Neil good-bye. And even though the real man was not the one I’d grown to depend on, I had gotten used to the idea of being able to reconcile the differences between the two. To make the man in my head match the one that was real.

  I’d hung my hopes on a fantasy, and now the fantasy was lost.

  “Are you okay?” Jack asked, looking mildly concerned.

  I nodded silently, not trusting my voice enough to answer with actual words. I could feel the burn of tears in my nose and at the back of my throat, but I was determined not to make a fool of myself in front of this guy by bursting into tears on his front stoop.

  He eyed me suspiciously, obviously far from convinced. “Okay, well. I’d ask you if you wanted to come in for a minute, but I’m actually getting ready to go out,” he said, grasping the door lightly.

  “Oh, no. Please,” I stammered, waving at the air in dismissal, “don’t let me keep you. I’m sorry I kept you this long.”

  I started to turn away, but he caught my arm.

  “Zoë, wait,” Jack said, releasing me once he saw that I wasn’t going to run away. “Let me get your number. You know, in case I need some advice on where to get a good meal around here. Or if I find anything that might be yours.”

  The thought hadn’t really occurred to me, that I might have left something behind in my haste to move out. Surely Neil would have mentioned if he’d found any trace of my presence in the house? I wondered fleetingly if he’d found something and mentioned it to Ray, who would’ve undoubtedly kept it to himself. Ray seemed most keen on minimizing my questions about his plans to tell Neil of my brief stint as his houseguest.

  “Yeah, sure. Phone number…” I replied absently, my mind occupied by thoughts other than the man who stood in front of me.

  I reached into the purse hanging heavily from my shoulder, fishing around for a scrap of paper and a pen. Once I found them, I quickly scrawled my name and cell phone number, feeling suddenly very anxious to leave.

  “Thanks,” Jack said, taking the small piece of paper I held out to him and tucking it into his pocket with a quick glance at the writing. “It’s a real number, right?” he asked, a playful little gleam flashing in his green eyes and a smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

  I returned the volley, giving him a cocked eyebrow and a little half-smile-half-smirk thing. “Yes, it’s a real number. And it’s my number. You won’t call it and get Mr. Wong’s House of Wontons or anything like that, I promise.”

  “Okay. If you promise, I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it. Although I do love me a good egg roll.” The man really did have a nice smile, I had to give him that. And a quick sense of humor.

  I returned his full grin and held my hand out to him again, a parting handshake.

  “It was good to meet you, Jack,” I said sincerely.

  And I really did mean it. Sure, I was disappointed that Neil hadn’t been the one to open the door. That he hadn’t even felt the need to tell me he was leaving. That the trivial part I played in Neil’s thoughts was now an irrefutable fact. But sometimes being smacked with harsh reality is also oddly liberating.

  “Great to meet you, too,” Jack agreed. “And I’ll make sure to call you the minute I find something I think might belong to you—unless you’d rather I just throw away the odd hair scrunchie I might discover floating around under the bed.”

  “If you find a scrunchie under the bed, you can lay odds on the fact that it didn’t come from me,” I said, wrinkling my nose in distaste. I paused and shot him a look of suspicion. “Why—did you find a scrunchie under the bed?”

  Visions of other women gracing Neil’s bed set off whispers of jealousy somewhere in the recesses of my brain. Not that I really had any reason to be jealous, but still.

  “No,” Jack replied with a little chuckle. “Not yet. But do I detect animosity toward the unsuspecting scrunchie?”

  “Well, I think you and I are both a little pressed for time to be getting into my litany of grievances against scrunchies. That could take all day,” I said.

  There was an easy rapport, an effortless play of words that I hadn’t felt in ages. It was refreshing and strangely reassuring. When you’ve operated so long under a rotating cycle of grief-driven melancholy, happiness, depression, and enough other self-destructive emotions to keep a shrink busy for the next century, even the smallest reminder that you’re still there, in all that mess, feels like an unexpected gift.

  “Another time, then,” Jack said pleasantly.

  “Another time.”

  So Neil was gone, and Jack was now living in his house. Ray must have known this was coming. There was simply no way Ray had not been included in this knowledge, not when the two of them were so close. The question now was this: why hadn’t Ray told me about any of this? Or at least shown me the simple courtesy of telling me during some point of the process. His omission was not something merely excused by being overwhelmed with wedding plans. Not at this point, not with his track record. I was guessing that Ray’s “oversight” had more to do with his desire to let the whole charade evaporate without ever having to give Neil a hint of what had transpired during his ten months of deployment. Ray knew me well enough to know that I would have pressed the issue even more if I was aware of the upcoming move, so not telling me was, in essence, a form of damage control.

  Pulling into my parking space, I spied Ray’s beat-up little Honda Civic a few spa
ces down. Obviously, the man was waiting for me, which meant I could nail his butt to the wall without too much effort on my part. It would eliminate the need for me to hunt him down, at least.

  I climbed the stairs two at a time, anxious to get up to my apartment and have some of my questions addressed.

  “There she is,” Ray greeted me with a smile when I reached the landing. He leapt up from his place on the floor, where he’d been sitting cross-legged, propped up against my front door. Strangely enough, he didn’t look like a man on a mission to impart a confession. He looked guilt-free and excited. I noticed a box on the floor next to him, which he leaned down to pick up.

  “Your dress came today,” Ray said, holding out the surprisingly compact box.

  “Great! I was wondering when it was going to get here,” I replied, relieving him of the package, my mission momentarily forgotten in my own excitement. I stepped around him to unlock the front door and shove it open. “Come on,” I said, beckoning him into the apartment.

  We walked in, and I flipped on a few lights, dropping my keys on the entryway table and striding toward the kitchen.

  “I can’t wait to see what this looks like,” I murmured, more to myself than to Ray. Kate had found a website that sold jersey-knit bridesmaid dresses that could be worn multiple ways, one genius dress in one size for all of its wearers.

  “So, Ray,” I called to him from the kitchen, where I stood slicing the tape on the box with a pair of scissors. “When were you planning to tell me that Neil was moving?” As offhanded as I was trying to sound, I knew he could detect the edge in my voice.

  Ray took his time coming into the room, looking as though he was afraid of walking into a minefield. He shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned against the countertop, his eyes searching my face for some hint that I might be willing to show him mercy.

  “I know I should have told you, but honestly—I was a little afraid to.” He ducked his head sheepishly.

  “You thought you could get out of telling him what you did, didn’t you? And you thought if you told me, I would either make you go do it or take matters into my own hands and tell him myself, right?” I skewered him with my gaze and waggled the scissors accusingly to punctuate my hypothesis.

  “Are you going to use those scissors on me if I say yes?” Ray teased.

  “No. I guess I can understand a little bit. I don’t agree, I don’t think it was right—but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand. But I need you to do something for me. And for yourself.” I put the scissors back in the junk drawer where they belonged and then turned back to face him, my arms crossed over my chest to convey my seriousness. “You need to come clean with Neil so that you can have that off your conscience. So that you can rest on the knowledge that you aren’t keeping secrets from your best friend. Secrets like that are a poison, Ray. You know that. Don’t damage what you and Neil fought so hard to get back.” I saw the look of doubt in his eyes as I spoke. “He may be angry with you for a little while, but he’ll appreciate your honesty. He’s your best friend, Ray. Trust him enough to tell him the truth.”

  Ray nodded silently, chewing his lower lip in thought. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. And I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to tell Neil everything. But you’re right. I owe him—and myself—the truth.” He paused and scratched absently at his beard. “If it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t even aware that he was going to move until about a week before it happened. It was pretty sudden, actually. I knew he was changing bases soon, but I didn’t know it was this soon. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.” He shook his head in mild frustration. “You know how guys are with details,” he said with the tiniest hint of a smile. “Anyway. He’s got all this leave saved up, and he decided to just use it all to get settled in over at his new base. So he sold the house to one of the guys just moving here into his old squadron, quick as you please, and even threw in the furniture. He didn’t want to deal with any of it.” Ray shrugged deeply and slumped harder against the counter.

  He looked deflated, not that I could blame him. His best friend had picked up and moved in what basically amounted to a whirlwind, just when he was going through one of the biggest events of his life—marriage—and he was feeling abandoned.

  Or maybe I was just projecting. That was how I would have been feeling at this point.

  “Well, then that definitely explains Jack,” I said.

  I caught the questioning look in Ray’s eyes and smiled, turning back to the box I’d been opening.

  “Get yourself some cookies from the fridge and sit down, Ray. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Chapter 29

  When my phone rang two weeks later with an unknown number registering on the caller ID, Jack was the last person I expected to hear on the other end. It had, after all, been two weeks without a word. Any glimmer of interest I thought I’d seen from him had long since faded from my mind, effectively replaced by an annoying little voice that berated me for my absolute inability to read men.

  The magazine I’d been flipping through nearly slipped from my fingers in my surprise.

  “I haven’t run across any scrunchies,” he said once we’d gotten past the pleasantries.

  “So to what do I owe the pleasure of this phone call, if not to the unexpected discovery of a misplaced scrunchie? Which, I remind you, will not have ever belonged to me,” I said, feeling the unexpected warmth of pleasure creep in at the edges of my curiosity.

  Truth be told, I was glad to hear from him, whether he had a legitimate reason or not. Maybe the idea that he was interested wasn’t so absurd after all.

  “I think you’re putting up too much of a fight. Are you a closet scrunchie-wearer, Miss Z?” he asked, the smile audible in his voice.

  The familiarity assumed by his coinage of a nickname was a little bit startling, but instead of being offended, I was oddly charmed. I felt myself smiling shyly.

  “I’m not even going to qualify that accusation with an argument,” I replied with the smallest tinkle of a laugh.

  Or I hoped it was the smallest tinkle. Maybe it was more of a snort. A dorky snort. Crap, I was blowing this. It had been way too long since I’d been put in this position, and this flirty little feminine dance I was trying to do felt more like the spastic flailing of an uncoordinated nerd. A very drunk, very uncoordinated nerd.

  “Well. I would make a spot inspection of your apartment, but I don’t know where you live, so I guess you’re safe. For now, at least.” Jack’s voice was dripping with mock seriousness. “Actually,” he said, clearing his throat, “the reason I called was to see if you’d like to get together for drinks. Or coffee. Or whatever,” he murmured.

  My eyes narrowed as I stared unseeingly at the cover of the magazine that now rested, closed, on the bed in front of me. Was this a date? Was he asking me out on an actual date, or did this qualify simply as “hanging out”? Should I ask, or should I just go and hope that I would be able to figure it out at some point along the way? I’d done that many times during my pre-Paul dating career, and it had always driven me to near-madness. How was anyone ever supposed to figure anything out when everyone always seemed to be so intent on playing stupid little games with each other?

  I knew he could sense my hesitation, but I felt so very unsure of what my answer should be. If his offer was being made under the guise of it being a date, it lent more weight to the situation, which would make it that much more anxiety-inducing. So what did I want it to be—a date, or merely hanging out?

  I chewed my upper lip for a minute and looked back at the magazine cover on the off-chance that it might offer me some guidance in the form of one of its many screaming subtitles. Aside from listing tips on how to please a man in eight moves or less, how to reshape my butt in two minutes a day, and how to build the ultimate wardrobe without breaking the bank, I was on my own for this one.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not a date,” Jack said with a laugh. “Just a drink, you know?”

&
nbsp; I realized when he said it that I was mildly disappointed. Sure, the idea of a date with Jack scared me to death, but at least it would have meant that a guy—a really nice, good-looking guy—found me attractive. It had been so long since I’d been made to feel like a real woman, like someone desirable to a man, that it felt nice. Even if it really was only for a moment, and even if it really did turn out to be something concocted in my own head. The delusion had been sweet.

  Granted, I’d been out on that date with Ursula’s cousin Gregory, but the man had been an absolute boor. It had been a disaster, one I would’ve loved to have expunged from my dating record. And he had an uncanny way of letting you know he found himself more desirable than he did you. Or, at least, that’s what he had done with me. Maybe if I’d been a perky little blonde with big boobs, a low IQ, and an overactive sex drive, I might have held his attention for more than five minutes.

  Not that he was the kind of guy I wanted to be attracting, anyway. But still. It was the principle of the thing.

  Anyway, back to Jack. I had to wonder, what had I done to turn him off? He had seemed interested before…or maybe that was me, just misreading the situation. Again.

  “Well,” I said finally, “I guess that would be okay. Drinks. Got any place in particular you wanted to go?” I asked, hoping I was effectively masking my disappointment.

  “You could always come over here—there’s no cover charge, and I’ve heard the bartender is fantastic,” Jack drawled.

  Interesting. He wasn’t insisting on meeting at a public place, but that could be interpreted in so many ways. I could feel the overworked gears of my brain grinding as possible scenarios formed: 1) He was cheap; 2) He didn’t want to be seen in public with me; 3) He was pervy and thought he might be able to pull something if we were holed up at the house. Or, on the optimistic end of the spectrum, he might have just wanted the opportunity to relax and talk freely without worry of prying ears. Whatever the case, I didn’t know him, and I didn’t feel comfortable putting myself in such a strange position. The house may have been the same, but the man inside it was not.