Between Me and You

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Text copyright © 2018 by Allison Winn Scotch

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941229

  ISBN-10: 1503941221

  Cover design by Ginger Design

  For anyone brave enough to fall in love.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  1 BEN NOVEMBER 2016 (NOW)

  2 TATUM OCTOBER 1999

  3 BEN JULY 2015

  4 TATUM DECEMBER 2000

  5 BEN AUGUST 2014

  6 TATUM JULY 2001

  7 BEN APRIL 2013

  8 TATUM FEBRUARY 2002

  9 BEN MAY 2012

  10 TATUM MARCH 2003

  11 BEN FEBRUARY 2011

  12 TATUM JULY 2004

  13 BEN MAY 2010

  14 TATUM MARCH 2005

  15 BEN JUNE 2009

  16 TATUM OCTOBER 2006

  17 BEN JUNE 2008

  18 TATUM MAY 2007

  19 BEN DECEMBER 2007

  20 TATUM FEBRUARY 2008

  21 BEN SEPTEMBER 2006

  22 TATUM AUGUST 2009

  23 BEN JULY 2005

  24 TATUM OCTOBER 2010

  25 BEN AUGUST 2004

  26 TATUM MARCH 2011

  27 BEN SEPTEMBER 2003

  28 TATUM SEPTEMBER 2012

  29 BEN JUNE 2002

  30 TATUM JULY 2013

  31 BEN SEPTEMBER 2001

  32 TATUM NOVEMBER 2014

  33 BEN DECEMBER 2000

  34 TATUM DECEMBER 2015

  35 BEN OCTOBER 1999

  2016 (NOW)

  36 TATUM NOVEMBER

  37 BEN NOVEMBER

  38 TATUM DECEMBER

  39 BEN DECEMBER

  40 TATUM DECEMBER

  41 BEN DECEMBER

  42 TATUM DECEMBER

  43 BEN DECEMBER

  44 TATUM DECEMBER

  45 BEN DECEMBER

  46 TATUM CHRISTMAS

  47 BEN CHRISTMAS

  48 TATUM NEW YEAR’S EVE DAY

  49 BETWEEN ME AND YOU BY BEN LIVINGSTON (FINAL DRAFT)

  50 TATUM NEW YEAR’S EVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

  —Zelda Fitzgerald

  1

  BEN

  NOVEMBER 2016 (NOW)

  I told myself that if she showed, that would be the sign I needed.

  If she showed, maybe we could find a way to rewind, rewrite, do it all over. Do it all better. Do it all again, only differently.

  It’s silly; it’s something out of a Hollywood ending, and I’d know that better than most. It’s not how I’d write it, but it’s how the studio would want it, what would appeal to the demographic they were courting: Men will want to go home and screw their wives, call their girlfriends; women will weep and know that love conquers all.

  I snort to myself, though it’s lost in the bluster of the wind, the squeal of a motorcycle racing too quickly down Ocean Avenue, empty on this overcast Sunday morning.

  Did I ever believe that? Did I ever pin my hopes that love could conquer all? It feels like so long ago: when we met each other, when we loved each other without conditions.

  A familiar tornado of grief spins inside me. Though it’s not just grief for her. It’s for both of us. For me too. How naive we were, how we lost ourselves to so many things—her career, mine for a while, Joey, our mourning, everything that piled up to be the weight of too much. Me more than her, I suppose, though I never admitted this aloud. It was easier to point fingers, make her feel responsible, even though I know, if I peel back enough layers to my core, that I was equally so. More than equal. She was always sturdier than I was, elusive in the way that an actress needs to be: permeable, which also made her more adaptable to all the shit that came our way. I was who I was, always had been, and hadn’t been able to adapt, to duck right when a left punch was thrown, to duck left when the right one came at me too.

  But still, maybe today we can right ourselves.

  We can. We have to.

  I say this aloud, against the wind, as if putting it out into the universe, here where the earth dives into the sea, makes it true. We can right ourselves.

  It’s so romantic, so unlike who I’ve become, that I’m surprised to discover how much I believe it, how much I mean it. How much I need it. I need her. I want her; my stomach turns at the notion of just how badly I do. I’ve staked our future on her showing. Which is presumptuous and also dumb, since I have conveyed none of this to her.

  But she knows where to find me, knows exactly where I’ll be.

  I check the time on my phone. Not that I’ve told her I’d be here. Like a stupid script, some dumb chick flick, I’m throwing it to fate: If she shows, we’ll give it another go. Call off the lawyers, which she said she didn’t really want anyway. Did I want them? A year ago I was certain, but bruises fade until you can’t detect them across your healed skin, and now, even when I search for those welts, I find I’m unable to see them. Feel them, yes, sometimes if I press myself in the right places I can still feel them, but that’s probably the point. That you can still detect the pain but don’t have a constant reminder. That’s the only way to fix us: This is where you hurt me; please don’t do it again.

  So here I am, casting about, looking for the familiar bounce of her step, the way her hair fans back and forth as she walks, the way her spine points exactly north with perfect posture thanks to endless years of Pilates and yoga and whatever else the studio pays for and implores her to do.

  I lean over the white picket fence that lines the park’s running path, tilt toward the ledge below, the drop-off that crescents into the beach, then the vast expanse of ocean. When we first moved here, we lived just around the corner in a one-bedroom bungalow that felt made for us. We’d stumble down this same path on the weekend mornings, hands linked, toward the farmers market or for a beckoning cup of coffee. She’d be exhausted from her late shift at the bar; I’d be wired from a night of writing too late.

  I press my palms against the fence, straighten out, then head down the sun-bleached steps toward the water, the air swirling and smelling of salt and nostalgia.

  She’ll know to find me down here, where I always am on his birthday, where something beckons me year after year, as if this ritual brings me peace. She’ll come, I tell myself. She has to. I need her to.

  The beach is mostly deserted. It’s too cold to swim, and the sun is battling a swath of thick clouds that won’t dissipate until late afternoon, just before sunset, when it’s too late to enjoy the beach anyway. There are a few lone surfers, bundled in their rubber wetsuits, a determined jogger every now and then. I kick off my flip-flops by the concrete path’s edge, then step onto the sand, my arches and heels leaving imprints, tracks, as I go. We also used to do this, take morning beach walks in those heady early days of our marriage. We never had a destination or an end point in mind. We simply walked to keep each other company, talking for hours. Sometimes my calves would be sore the next day. I shake my head: I haven’t thought about all of this for ages, years.

  Jesus.

  Somehow between those days when the sunrises melted into the sunsets and now, we got here. Here. I blow out my breath, remembering New Year’s, remembering Sundance, remembering Joey’s birth, remembering the lot of it. We weren’t always split in two; we weren’t always beyond repair.

  My feet are in the chilly seawater now, sending a jolt up through my ankles, to my calves, my thighs, nearly to my heart. I stretch my arms upward, like I’m offering m
yself to the gods of the ocean. It’s not the first time I’ve considered it: swimming as far out as possible, seeing what happens from there. But I’m not brave like Leo. I reconsider: I’m not reckless like Leo either.

  I find a pack of old cigarettes in my pocket. I’ve never enjoyed smoking, how it makes me light-headed, its disgusting aftertaste. That it will slowly kill me. For a while there, I didn’t care, though. Now, I’m wiser. Now, maybe I’m more hopeful. So I raise an unlit cigarette to my mouth, let it linger because I like its heft, but not its consequences. Like so many things in my life, I’ve learned to straddle the middle and just try to get out alive.

  A lithe, blond surfer swims in, just a hiccup down from me, shaking the water off, then offering a little wave. I drop the cigarette back into the pack, then smile back, wondering if she means to wave at me, if this lithe, blond surfer has mistaken me for someone else. Not that I’m so bad, not for forty-two, which is midlife in theory but here in Los Angeles could really be an extension of prolonged adolescence. Hell, some of my friends still haven’t married; a few still run around with starlets in their lower twenties, especially those who have done well for themselves: drive the Porsche, have a spread with a view in the Hills. Sometimes they’ll ping me and say, “Come out dude, let’s roll, let’s score.” But none of that feels important like it used to: the Porsche, the house made of glass in the Hills. Initially, in those first few early months of being single, sure, well, who wouldn’t find that liberating? Now I just want her. Our old life.

  “Hey,” I say to the surfer. “Nice morning for the waves?” I self-consciously run my fingers over my dark stubble that is peppered with a tiny bit of gray.

  “Killer,” she says. “The best.” And then lofts her board under her arm and glides away toward the parking lot. “See ya.”

  I peer around. The beach is deserted again.

  She’s not coming.

  I lose my breath for a beat, punched in the gut with the realization. I actually believed that she was as hopeful as I was, that she was willing to forget how broken we’d become.

  “Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb,” I mutter aloud.

  It was a stupid bet I made with myself, a stupid way out from the corner we’ve backed ourselves into. The Hollywood ending. But Hollywood endings aren’t really life, aren’t anything more than what I’d type into a draft before hitting “The End.”

  My dad always told me that I was too romantic. Being a writer? he’d scoff. Not exactly what we had planned for you. He’d pour himself a scotch, adjust his tie, and gaze at me in the way that I could read only as disappointment.

  As if anyone’s plans for anyone else can set their path. The same lesson I learned with Leo, and the irony isn’t lost on me. I should have said that to him then; I should have known better. Do what you want, do what you love. Be happy.

  Instead, I lived to whittle down my young romanticism to prove my dad wrong. To show him that I had mettle, that grit wasn’t lost on me, even if I wanted to spend my days concocting fictional characters who allowed me to lose myself in other places, other worlds.

  The wind kicks up, blowing the salty air over me, and I inhale deeply enough that my chest puffs up, and then I squeeze my eyes shut and remember why I came here this morning. I came here not just in hopes of seeing her, but to remember him too. How much he loved the ocean. How he wanted to retire here and surf. I should have told him to, but how was I to know? How was any of us to know?

  “I’d have done it differently, you know,” I say aloud. To him, to her, to myself too. No one answers, of course. Just the continuous beat of the waves breaking in front of me, the ever-present swirl of the wind. “If I could go back and do it all differently, I would.”

  I turn and head back to the concrete path where I abandoned my flip-flops.

  A figure is running down the path in the distance. My gut spins—an honest mix of elation and nerves. But then I see the red hair in a ponytail flopping back and forth. I squint because I wonder if my brain is playing a trick on me, that I’m seeing something, a mirage, that isn’t really there.

  But then she’s in front of me, startled a bit herself, out of breath, sweat running behind her ears.

  “Ben,” she says. “Oh my gosh, hey.”

  “Hey.” I lean forward and kiss her damp cheek. “I didn’t . . .”

  My heart races, my brain goes to static. Amanda. Not at all whom I was expecting, not at all whom I’m ready for. I have to apologize for a million things, I’m sure. I stutter again. I was prepared to make a speech, to get down and beg for absolution, and yet, she isn’t here and Amanda is, smiling and seemingly open, and my pulse is hammering so quickly that I don’t know how I’m still standing.

  Maybe this is the sign, that romantic one in the movies that the audience is clutching their seats and waiting for with their hearts in their throats. Even as I hear myself think it, I’m not sure I believe it, but what the hell?

  My mind refocuses: on how good she looks, on how lovely she smells, on how something lights inside of me that feels a little feral, a little wild, like it used to whenever I saw her, even when we shouldn’t have been seeing each other at all.

  “God, Amanda, it’s been forever,” I say.

  She laughs. “Not forever. What, a year or two?” She smiles. “OK, I know exactly how long it’s been. Since May last year. Eighteen months.”

  “That seems right.” I hesitate. “You don’t hate me?”

  She smiles again, easily. “It was all a mess. So no, I don’t hate you.”

  I nod, unsure of what to say next. I know what I came here for, but like so many things recently, I find that I’m willing to abandon my principles because they’re inconvenient. Write a shitty script? Sure! Leave with a different woman? Why not! I unexpectedly think of my dad again—Fuck you! I want to tell him—and how disappointed he’d be with this sliding scale.

  “I just . . . I remembered what today was.” Amanda’s already pink cheeks turn redder, nearly matching her hair, and I push my dad out of my thoughts. “I . . . I thought you might be here. Remembered how you told me you’d do this.” She shrugs. “God, that sounds like a stalker thing to do. Really, I run down here most mornings. I just . . . I thought you might be here today.”

  My brain is playing catch-up, assessing this unforeseen turn. Amanda showed. Tatum did not. I determine that this has to mean something, even if it’s not what I wanted it to mean when I woke this morning and resolved to win back my wife.

  Finally I say: “Amazing how you knew. Of course I’d be here . . . I’m glad you found me.”

  2

  TATUM

  OCTOBER 1999

  I made a bet with Daisy that I could get at least three numbers by midnight.

  It’s not something I’d do normally, this bet, these numbers, but she is pushing me outside of my comfort zone, part of an acting exercise assigned to us by Professor Sherman—Move past your comfort zone into that sticky territory of inhabiting someone else—and so I agree. Besides, it’s better than deflecting the cheesy pickup lines that come with being a bartender, the lecherous looks of patrons who somehow think you’re up for grabs, the self-criticism that would otherwise clang around my easily infected brain. By playing the part, slipping into a role, it’s easier to step outside myself. That’s half the reason I want to be an actor in the first place. I can be anyone I want to be.

  So of course I said yes to the bet.

  “They can’t be trolls, guys you’d never go out with to begin with,” Daisy said, pouring a shot of whiskey down her throat, untying her black apron and passing it to me when we swapped shifts. I knotted it around my own waist as we traded places: me behind the bar, her on a rickety stool in front of it.

  “Got it,” I said, nodding. “No trolls.”

  “And no drunks.” She held up a finger, then another. “So no trolls and no drunks. Because then it’s too easy. Because then you’d get, like, three numbers in three minutes.”

  I laughed. “
You’re overestimating my appeal.”

  “Shut up,” she said, and wrapped her blond hair into a bun at the nape of her neck. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “That thing you do: act like you’re not worth it, act like you don’t deserve it.” She leaned over the bar and poured herself another shot. “Besides, this is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be about making them believe you are whoever you want to be.”

  “So it’s about the chase,” I said. “Well, and about the assignment.”

  “Here’s to the chase,” she replied, and flipped her empty shot glass over against the wooden bar. “And maybe some sexy-ass men.”

  “Here’s to that.” I laughed because why not.

  So now it’s 11:47, and I have one more number to go when I see him at the end of the bar. Nursing a beer, which I hadn’t poured for him, which tells me that he ordered it before I came on my eleven p.m. shift. One beer over the course of an hour. A lightweight. A sipper. Probably a bit of a geek, not unlike me when I’m not donning whichever mask I’m assigned for the day or the evening. Nonthreatening. I like making these assumptions; it helps me compartmentalize who he is, who I might have to be in reaction to that. Like a casting call: We are seeking a nonthreatening kind of geek (who is also cute!) to play off the role of man-eater bartender (who is also pretty in a generic way).

  I grab the dirty rag and wipe down the countertop, making my way toward the corner. Three undergrads, definitely not legal, push their way toward me and snap their fingers to get my attention. My cheeks blaze with something like lower-middle-class embarrassment, but it’s dark, and I’m not me right now, so I flush that inbred shame away. These girls. They’re all the same: NYU rich kids who come to Dive Inn with their parents’ credit cards or their hundred-dollar bills and act like the world is imploding when they’re not immediately served their vodka twists. Outside of the bar, outside of this role that I slip into, these types of girls make me duck my head, dart around them on the street. They are better than me in ways that seem inexplicable, unattainable. But here, in this bar, on my turf, with my apron as a sort of shield, they are my adversary.