Page 12 of Change of Course
It’s my heart that needs her. It’s been a long damn lonely time without her, and I’m not willing to let her slip away again.
I get up and retrieve her dress from the floor, hanging it over the back of a chair so it won’t get wrinkled. I toss my suit and dress shirt over the back of the other chair, and then survey the wreck we’ve made of the bed, with tremendous satisfaction.
Cherry and me, we were always good.
When she comes back, she’s still gloriously naked, her face still flushed and her body still glowing damply. “Wow,” she says.
“Wow, what? I mean, what specifically?” I get back on the bed and pat the spot next to me.
I love that smile of hers. “Everything, I guess,” she says. “I’m a mess. You’re a mess. The bed is a mess, our clothes are a mess, we’re missing the last part of the reunion, Courtney is probably panicking looking for me…and I don’t care. I don’t care, Jax.”
I pat the bed again. “Everything you say is true. We are a mess and I don’t care either.”
She cuddles next to me, and I stroke her from shoulder to hip, just to be touching her. She cups my cheek with her hand. “It occurs to me just now that we never actually had that talk.”
I laugh. “Oh, we talked. Just not with words.” She pokes my gut with the hand not touching my cheek. “All right, all right! Yes. We need to talk about our lives. About where we go from here.” I kiss her forehead. “You start.”
So she tells me about her life. Some of it I did know—like she’s a Realtor, like she’s divorced—and some of it I didn’t. Like she spent a couple of wild years at college, drinking and partying and sleeping around.
I stop her. “Don’t call it sleeping around. As long as you weren’t hurting anybody by promising them forever,” and I certainly fucking hope not because I know how painful it is to expect forever and not get it, “you weren’t being irresponsible, you were exploring your sexuality.”
Her expression lightens as she explains that she was always clear she was just having fun. Then she tells me about her dad dying while she was in college, and how she thinks that his death and her misplaced desire to please him led to her marrying somebody older with an already-successful career. How she focused on her career and pleasing her husband, and neglected to nourish her soul.
I want to nourish her soul. I want her to have everything she wants out of life.
“I just wanted to make him happy,” she says in a small voice. “And I forgot to make me happy too.” She says that she’s glad to be living in Rivertown again, and she’s looking forward to reestablishing her old friendships.
It gives me a small pang. Those popular girls never spared a thought for me back then. But I let her keep talking, and she tells me about her plans for the future. She’s joined one of the larger real estate companies in the city, just as an associate for now but she’d like to buy in as a partner once business picks up. And, she confesses, her voice getting slower and dreamier, she wants a house of her own. Not a showpiece for entertaining, but a real family place.
“Picket fence?” I suggest, stroking her hair as she talks. “Swing set in the back yard?”
“Yes. You can’t see me as a mother?” she asks, and it almost breaks my heart to hear the uncertainty in her voice.
“I can,” I assure her. “Depends on what you want. I mean, I’d like to have kids, but not if my partner wasn’t enthusiastic.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “But…” She trails off. Trails her hand from my cheek down to my chest, lets it rest there.
“But what, Cherry?”
She sighs. “We haven’t talked about you.”
“What about me?”
She pokes my side. “I told you what I was doing while we were apart. I don’t know anything about you. I mean, you just gave me four orgasms but I don’t know what your life is like, Jackson. Talk to me!”
It’s not easy for me to talk about myself. But she’s right. We can’t just fuck ourselves insane…well, not all the time…and not be really open. I have to trust her.
So I suck in a good breath, and I start talking.
How I knew I couldn’t give her what she wanted back then. I wasn’t good enough. She starts to interrupt me, and I put my finger over her lips. “I know. We were both wrong, okay? But that’s where I started.” So I tell her about calling up our school guidance counselor and asking if he could help me with a career advice even if I’d already graduated, and he’d said yes. After he’d asked me a bunch of questions about what I wanted, he’d pointed me in the direction of the big oil companies looking for workers on the big rigs.
And that was that, I tell her. I jumped at the first opening on an offshore rig, and it was hard work, and it was lonely. Sleep schedule was crazy, weather was awful, drank so much coffee that even now my veins run with about 80% caffeine. But I made friends, I gained skills, and I socked away the cash, so that when I got hurt—and on the rig, it’s when you get hurt, not if—I was able to pick up an education and do something real, something that really helps people.
I tell her about working for the city of Pittsburgh. How what I do there impacts people’s everyday lives, and I love that. “That wasn’t something I thought of back in school,” I say, remembering how I couldn’t wait to be independent. “I didn’t know I’d want to do something like that. I can’t wait to get back to it.”
Cheri is quiet. I look at her in the lamplight. “What are you thinking?”
“So,” she says, “you’re…you’re going back to Pittsburgh.”