by Kaci Hart
***
Emily had just finished getting ready when she heard the doorbell ring. She knew it was him immediately. She was surprised at how excited she felt. It had been years since she felt excited about being around a guy but then again it was the same Aaron that she was as completely head over heels for as a teenager. When she had told her parents that she was going to be out with him that night, her mother just told her to have a good time. She opened the door to his handsome face, littered with a light stubble that she thought made him look older, in a nice way. His face was framed by his well-kept, rustic blond hair.
“You couldn’t meet me at the restaurant?”
“Nope. You know my dad always taught me to pick up a lady at the door and drop her back there at a decent hour of the night. And chivalry aside, you are a flight risk. I am not giving you a chance to not be there tonight.”
“Geez, stalk much?”
Aaron saw the little girl run up from behind and hug onto Emily’s leg. He could clearly see the resemblance then. Ashleigh was definitely hers. She had the same button nose, curly blond hair and dark brown eyes. He thought to himself that she was going to grow up one day to be beautiful, just like her mother. He bent down to talk to the little girl.
“Hi Ashleigh. I didn’t get to meet you properly last time. My name is Aaron and I’m a friend of your mommy. Do you mind if I hang out with her tonight?”
“Ok but not too long. Mommy is tired.”
Emily laughed as she stooped to talk to her daughter.
“Oh, so you do hear when I tell you I’m tired don’t you, you just don’t apply those rules to yourself, now do you. Come here and give mommy a kiss sweetheart.”
Aaron stood up directing his attention to Emily’s parents.
“Mr. and Mrs. Fowler, great to see you again.”
“You too Aaron. Now you heard the young lady. Don’t keep her out too long.”
“I won’t, I promise she will be home before my car turns back into a pumpkin. Now then Emily, shall we be off?”
He held his hand out to steady her down the steps toward his car.
Chapter 5
Aaron pulled her chair out for her, and Emily sat down. It felt nice to be treated like a lady for once rather than just being the baby’s mother. That wasn’t bad but there was nothing like feeling like a man really cared for her. When the server came and took their orders, she smiled and shook her head.
“Really? You come on a date to a nice restaurant with me and order a cheeseburger and fries? I can see that you have matured by your looks, but it seems you forgot to tell your taste buds.”
“Hey, I like what I like. By the way, I never said it was a date. I just said I wanted to talk. In fact, if it is a date, then you are the one that asked me out!”
She had to admit that he was right. He had just asked to talk. She assumed that he’d enjoy a meal with her more than just a few minutes in the office.
“Good try Aaron but you and I both know that you would have turned that few minutes into hounding me for more time. Don’t forget, I used to date you. I just cut out all the red tape.”
“Correct, Miss Fowler. I never could beat you in a good debate.”
“See, now you are a smart man. I knew that there was something I liked about you in the past.”
“Em, it really is good to see you. I missed you. I missed you a lot and I don’t have a problem telling you that. I know you saw my expression the other night and I wanted to talk to you about that.”
He saw her fidget a little in her seat and could tell that she was still a bit bothered by it.
“Yeah, it’s kind of hard when someone you have known as closely as I have known you gives you that ….look.”
“But Em, you have to know that I didn’t mean anything by that. That was an unexpected thing for you to say. Imagine how much of a loop it threw me for when the only woman that I have loved as long as I understood what love was says to me ‘Hi, oh by the way, this is my lovely daughter.’ That was just me trying to wrap my head around what I had heard. It was not me saying that you were or are a bad person. I had always imagined you with children, only I expected that they would be mine.”
Emily was embarrassed by how blunt he was, as her cheeks turned a slight pink in color.
“Wow. I forgot just how much you speak your mind. In the interest of full disclosure, I always felt the same way before she was born.”
Now it was his turn to blush. She smiled when she realized that she still had that effect on him.
“Why does it surprise you? Do you remember that time in the back of the church when I told you that I wanted you to be my wife and that we were going to have a lot of kids?”
“No, you didn’t say a lot of kids. You said exactly nine kids. A statement that my body now cringes at. Having the first one was painful enough; eight more times would be crazy. With that in mind, that proposal kind of lost all credibility with me.”
“I was completely serious. Even as a fourteen year old I knew what I wanted in life.”
“Well, that was so long ago. You can’t possibly hold yourself to that statement, and even if you did, I don’t think I deserve that kind of ...unconditional love. And I have a baby on top of that.”
“Of course you deserve that kind of love. We all do.”
Apparently her years in college had affected her self-esteem. He would take his time working on that. He was just happy that she was even talking to him again.
“So tell me more about Ashleigh. I mean you have a beautiful baby. I can’t imagine that it was easy for you to get her father to let you just leave with her and move back home. Do you guys have something worked out?”
“In fact we do. It’s called he’s a deadbeat that has never even met his daughter before.”
“How is that possible? Does he know about her at all?”
Emily’s answer was short and very to the point. She really didn’t like talking about him at all.
“Of course he does. He’s a lowlife jerk.”
Thinking of how sweet that little girl was the last time he saw her, Aaron felt his anger starting to rise. He couldn’t imagine not being there for his child.
“No offense to you but that really bothers me. What kind of man doesn’t even want to hold his own daughter?”
“Like I said. He’s a jerk. He even wanted me to abort her when I told him. When I said no, he told me that he didn’t even think she was his and that he didn’t want anything else to do with me or her. I guaranteed him she was his baby because I had never been with anyone else before. I figured we were better off without him so I decided to go ahead and raise Ashleigh on my own. That was all before I came back here. It’s a lot better with my family supporting me. It’s nice to have people around her that really care for her wellbeing.”
He found it strange to be talking to her about a guy she had been intimate with but they had always had a relationship built on being able to talk to each other.
“Not just your family Em. You’ve got me. You always have and I know that you have always known that.”
Emily felt her eyes begin to well with tears.
“I’m sorry for being so emotional. It’s just that everything my family has done and the things you just said. I don’t see how you all can feel this way about me. It’s so ironic. This whole thing is ironic. The man I had my child with wants nothing to do with me and here you are begging me to take your heart. It should be the other way around.”
She gazed into Aaron’s kind blue eyes and felt supported and cared for like she hadn’t in years.
“I owe you an apology Aaron. I never told you why I stopped talking to you all those years ago.”
“I did always wonder but when you got back that was the last thing on my mind. Now that you mention it, I am curious to know what happened.”
“Well I remember it just like it was yesterday. I had gotten to school and didn’t know anybody out there. It was so different from here where the neighbors are frie
nds and the principal of the school was your mother’s high school teacher. It’s a different world out there.”
“You’re telling me. Try four years in the middle east.”
“Ouch! That makes my story seem like a walk in the park. But still it was hard for me. You’d think that college was meant to educate people and get them prepared for the real world as adults. It did a little of that but half of the time it was about relationships, drinking, and parties. There definitely wasn’t much Christian influence on campus and the influence that was there had to compete with every other religious viewpoint that was sprayed all over campus too. I’d call it the anti-Stanton Falls. Now, my roommate was in a sorority and was always trying to get me to join up. The first year I was able to stand my ground but like they say, peer pressure is no joke. The more alone I got there, the more I just wanted to fit in.”
Her words trailed off as she stared into the distance, nervously biting the corner of the bottom lip. Aaron placed his hand gently on hers in a show of support for. She looked up at him and he nodded for her to continue.
“No judgement, I promise.”
Looking at him, her features softened slightly and she released a long breath.
“Thank you. Well in my junior year, I did join a sorority and it was fun at first, and clean. Then just like with everything else, the pressure to drink was too much. Every night it seemed like there was party or a keg at someone’s house. Funny, I never even liked the taste of beer. Still don’t but I drank it anyway. The things that we will subject ourselves to in order to fit in amaze me. Eventually I did stop drinking but …”
She looked into his eyes and continued as he gently squeezed her hand in encouragement.
“Let’s just say I didn’t stop drinking because of any self-realization or an epiphany. I don’t know if you remember this or not but around the beginning of my junior year was when I stopped talking to you. I had gone to a beginning of semester blowout party that one of the fraternities on campus was throwing. I got drunk and had unprotected sex with a guy that had been trying to … get to know me better, if you know what I mean. Literally one time and...boom. I wasn’t textbook promiscuous but it was enough to get me pregnant.”
Aaron knew all too well the kind of guy she was talking about. Men that took women for nothing more than sexual objects. He’d met a few guys like that when he was in the marines. They didn’t give value to the woman, only quenching their desire. It was kind of hard for him at times to watch the back of a guy he thought was pretty low as a person, but they were on a team. He listened as she continued on.
“That was when I had decided to break it off with you. You had always treated me like this clean, perfect woman. I betrayed that image you had of me and just couldn’t take it. Every time we would talk you would go on about how much you loved me and how you wanted to marry me when you got back. I knew before then that I wasn’t the same person you loved, but after that weekend, I felt like I was someone that you would not even recognize. I didn’t even recognize the person that I had become. Considering that, I didn’t think I deserved someone like you. That was when I broke the relationship off with you. Two Months later I found out I was pregnant and now there is my little Ashleigh. So you don’t have to pretend that I am the same person that you used to love. You probably see me in a completely new, negative light now. Maybe we should just call it a night.”
Emily turned to grab her purse but Aaron hadn’t released her hand yet. He was still looking in her eyes. Loving. Gentle. Confident.
“Is that why you stole almost four years of my time with you from me? Not one word said could change anything I feel about you. In fact, I think I am more proud of you now than I have ever been before.”
“How can you say that? Were you listening to what I just told you about me?”
“You know I was. I heard a lot of wallowing in self-pity, which is understandable when you think that your life as you know it is over. I also heard a person who realizes that they had made a few mistakes, certainly more than you would care to have made. But it sounds to me like you don’t give yourself credit for making the really hard decisions. It would have been the easy way out to just abort your baby. No one would have been the wiser. You made a hard decision and have done nothing short of being amazing. You finished school and still became a nurse, all while caring for a new born baby.”
She had never considered it from that vantage point.
“But you are the very same Emily that I knew when I was a scrawny teenager trying to act cool for you at school, and the same one that prayed God’s protection over me the night I shipped out for my time in the marines. I have a million character stories that far outweigh what you did at school. No you aren’t the same person you were when you left, but none of us are. Right now, what I am truly happy about is that all of the decisions that we both have made have brought us together at this point in time. Right here. Right now. And believe me when I tell you that we have all made some bad decisions and done some things that we wish we could take back.”
Aaron watched as Emily started to giggle and then full out laugh at him.
“I was just giving a serious, Nobel prize worthy speech. What did I say that was possibly this funny?”
Emily wiped the tears from her eyes as she tried to respond, still laughing.
“I just realized as you talk about us all making bad decisions that I am getting advice from someone that works for Nick Dellinger, of all people!”
He joined in with the laughter. Whenever she laughed like that, it was contagious for him. He tried to stop himself but something about seeing the joy on her face just brought it out in him too. It had been a long time since they laughed like that together. Too long for his liking.
“Well, when you put it like that, I guess maybe you should be the one counseling me on decision making.”
He let out a husky, full chuckle.
“How did you go from the marines to working for him anyway? That’s like night and day.”
Aaron took on a more serious look.
“Well, we’ve all got our stories but let’s just say that it wasn’t what I was expecting out there at all. I was having to choose daily to possibly end someone’s life so that people that I knew and cared about could keep living the life that they do. It didn’t sound so bad in theory. When I used to look at the pictures of my father and his father in their military uniforms having served, I felt like it was something I had to do. My father tried to tell me that it wasn’t something that I wanted but I was stubborn. And nothing against the troops out there fighting. We live in a blessed country and it’s because of the sacrifices that they make for us daily.”
In his eyes, she saw anguish and despair. She felt so bad when she thought about the Aaron she knew. He had obviously seen a lot of things that he wished he could erase from memory. He was the kind of person that would remember the face of every person he had gone into battle with. Every shout, every friend that was sacrificed so that he could keep fighting, and every enemy whose life he ended. They would be with him forever. It was her turn to be a comforter to him. She gently rubbed his hand.
“Oh my. I am so sorry Aaron. I can imagine how hard that was. I feel horrible now. You needed me and I left you because of my foolishness and my insecurities. How could you possibly still love me?”
“Because when I fell in love with you, it was forever Em. You know me. All or nothing. Anyway, after my tour in the marines, I came back home but I didn’t really have any idea what I wanted to do. With you being gone, I kinda just fell into a little bit of a sad moment. Nick was there to help me. To this day, I still think he started his business as a way to help me find something else to focus on. After a few months, I was starting to feel a bit better. I even started going back to church, something I was almost certain I would never do again after what I had seen out there.”
“I can only imagine what that must have been like for you. Nick is a real friend.”
“Yeah. Now en
ough of the sad stuff. Em, what about us?”
“You’re really serious, about this, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I know it’s a lot for you coming from what has gone on in your life. I don’t want to rush you into any decisions at all. Just know that I plan on asking you to be my wife one day and I do hope that the answer will be yes. For now, I would settle for a few dates here and there.”
“Well if you are sure that this is what you want.”
“I’m positive about what I want Emily.”
“And Ashleigh? She kind of changes things doesn’t she?”
“Not at all. As I see it, she didn’t have a father before. She will now. ”
That kind of promise felt good to Emily. She was sure that if he had asked her to marry him right then, she wouldn’t have hesitated to say yes. He was the kind of man that she could see raising a family with. If she was honest with herself, he was the only man in her life that she ever saw that future with.
