I’d been alone in LA for 16 days… I’d given myself a crash course in driving around – I knew all of the highways and major areas like Beverly Hills, Malibu, Hollywood, West Hollywood, etc., the best places to shop and where to find the hottest surfers. I was settling in nicely, I was just in desperate need of some socialization. But I could work on that later… right now, I just wanted to sleep, snuggled up in this fantastic marshmallow of a bed.
~~
I sat straight up when the phone rang, trying to remember where the hell I’d left it. I jumped up to turn on the light and nearly tripped over the phone, conveniently lying on the floor next to my slippers. I picked it up, “hello, Nick…”
“Hey… how’d you know it was me?” he asked.
I chuckled. I knew him well enough to know when the restlessness would set in… when the night would get too long for him. “C’mon…who else would it be? I expected you’d have to start making calls pretty soon… I just figured it would be Macy you’d be dialing.”
“I do call her… I just can’t call her now… she’s got to go to work and I don’t want to keep her up all night talking… but that’s always the last thing I do every night after I get into bed… call her.” He explained.
“That’s cute…” I said, thinking of when he used to call me at night from the road.
He waited in my silence and said, “That’s what I should have done with you.”
“Should have done… what?” I asked, hesitantly, wondering what I was about to find out.
“Called you last thing… I mean, I know you.. know… some of the stuff that happened, but… I guess… just being out on the road has given me so much time to think about everything and I’ve been thinking a lot about Macy…and a lot about you and everything I did wrong with you and … don’t want to do again. I called you when the show was over or when I’d come back to the room… but I always went back out. I’d checked in, I was done. But… with Mace… I wait to talk to her… I get in bed and then I call her…”
I followed where he was going with that, “And you can’t call her if there’s another girl with you…”
“Yeah…”
I sighed. I kind of knew he cheated on me... I’d only caught him once, but I figured there’d been others… I just hadn’t been ready to deal with it at the time. That had all come later… and I’d basically gotten over it. But that didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt me to bring it up again, now.
“I’m sorry, Summer, I really am… I really fucked up with you.”
“Nick, we can’t go back and change it. I loved you, I love you… and I’m glad that you figured out how things should be. Do I wish you’d known sooner? Hell yeah… but we still had a good thing.” I told him, and then added, laughing, “Most of the time.”
“It was good all the time… I just… couldn’t handle how I missed you… and I went looking for distractions.”
I was silent again, where else was I supposed to go with this conversation? It was weird we’d never really talked about this before… so I guess I did have a few things to add. “It was hard on me, too… that’s sort of been on my mind, too, because, I mean… it’s the same for me now… I’m lying in your bed… alone. Nights sucked when you were gone… I worried you were with someone else… you’d come back and we’d have sex and I’d worry about it more…”
He interrupted me, “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“I did say something… indirectly… you know… the only reason I’d kick you out of bed…”
He cut me off again, “was to fuck me on the floor.” He laughed, and then asked, “What did that have to do with anything?”
“We had awesome, awesome sex, Nick. Like porn star sex. I loved that… and I just wanted to be close to you… I’d deal with the doubt and worry or whatever… to be with you like that.” I told him.
“But why didn’t you tell me, like, that you … knew or though you knew or suspected…” he asked, pressing the issue. He never did know when to let up.
“What was I going to say? I didn’t really want to know! Just worrying about it seemed easier than knowing it… and if I’d have known… it would have been hard to stay with you… and I wasn’t ready to give you up before I had to.”
“You’ve never given me up… and I’m thankful for that every day.”
“No, I’ve never given up ON you… I had to give you up and let you go. Those are two totally different things.” He was killing me with this conversation. I wanted to throw the phone across the room and pull the pillow over my head until I was asleep again. But I knew he wanted to talk, he needed to get this out. “If we’re going to continue to reminisce like this, can we at least talk about some of the good stuff?”
He gave a soft chuckle, and I could picture the expression on his face from the sound. “Yeah, sorry for the depressing shit… what would you like to talk about?”
“I don’t care what we talk about, just stop reminding me that I’m here alone and making me remember what we had… even if it was nothing like I thought it was.” I punched one of his pillows a few times, just for good measure.
“It wasn’t that bad, Summer. We had a good thing.” He said, using that tone of voice that he only brought out when he needed to placate me.
I sighed. “I know… then it was all over and everything went to hell.”
“Why?”
His question hung between us, suspended on the phone line. Why? Why had everything gone to hell? We’d broken up and suddenly, my whole life was over. He moved to LA, I didn’t have “our” friends anymore, and I’d just sort of fallen apart. I got involved with Zack – trying to find the stability in him that I’d apparently been lacking in Nick, got sucked into a new social circle and group of highly debatable “friends”, and just kind of… stopped caring.
“Summer? You okay?”
“Right now? Sort of… I guess. I don’t know. I was just thinking… when it was over… I was… WRECKED. Fucking wrecked, Nick. And we keep saying “it was good, it was good”, but it wasn’t always good. A lot of the time we fucking SUCKED together… but it worked because when we were together, when you were home, it was AMAZING. You left, I held on, you fucked around, but you came home and everything was “okay” even though it wasn’t because you were THERE and I was with YOU and it was un-fucking-believable. Then we were over, I wanted someone, anyone to fill the void you left. So I ended up with a dumbass motherfucker and his stupid fucking friends… and I just put up with it because I didn’t know what else to do with myself without you. Fuck LA… my dreams lived and died in Tampa.” I actually clamped my hand over my mouth, shocked I’d just said all that. Apparently I was more than willing to hold Nick responsible for the untimely demise of whatever was good in my life. I don’t even know that I realized I really felt that way until I started saying – and it was true.
There was silence from his end… I’m sure he was just as surprised as I was. We made mention of “the end” sometimes, but we’d never talked about it in detail and he had no way of knowing how things had been for me. He’d left, gotten involved with Paris… and those of months of our lives that had been apart had just… disappeared between the two of us. I don’t know that he was that upset when we broke up or how he felt, but now he… and I… both knew that I’d obviously never quite recovered.
“Nick, I… shit… I’m sorry… I wasn’t even… thinking…. I…”
He cut me off, “Don’t apologize, Summer. I had that coming.”
“You might have had that coming a few years ago, I should have figured it out and dealt with it by now. I’m sorry. I am. It’s over… I just.. need to move on, obviously. It’s not all your fault. I was there, too.” Right then, I wanted nothing more than to hang up the phone and scream and cry. I didn’t want to be talking to him just then. Maybe in the morning, maybe later, just not now. It was too much like those nights before, when we’d hang up and I’d wonder what was next.
“Summer, stop it. Don’t go and get all upset over this. It’s over. I fucked up and I know that. You were good… too good, maybe. I know you loved… love me… just like I do… I love you… maybe in a little bit different way… but I do,” he told me.
“I know…” I had nothing else to say.
“Get some sleep, okay? I’ve got to go to bed… I know you don’t need anymore of this tonight… We can talk more later… if you want to. Aight?”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Yeah.”
“Sleep sweet, Winter.” He said, saying our traditional goodnight and goodbye.
“Wet dreams, Dick.” I replied, and hung up the phone, pulling a pillow over my head and just wanting to forget almost everything that had just happened.
-------
I woke up, tangled in the sheets like something much more interesting should have happened during the night. I was hoping that I’d just dreamed that phone call with Nick, but judging from the puffiness of my eyes, I knew that wasn’t the case. Damn. I’d fallen asleep crying, more for myself and ridiculousness of my own life than anything Nick had said or done.
~~
I was dancing around the kitchen making dinner when the doorbell rang, nearly giving me heart failure. Who the hell was going to drop by? I went to the door and opened it up, surprised and not to see Elias standing there. He was freakin’ hot, I’d give him that… but his general personality had impressed me less and less the night I’d seen him at the bar. “Hello…”
He gave me a big ass smile, “Hey there, beautiful. I thought you might be lonely… so I thought I’d drop by…”
“And keep me company?” I asked, turning my back on him and walking away from the door. I knew he was following me, I could practically feel his eyes fixed on my ass.
“No need for a gorgeous girl like you to be alone.” He said.
“What makes you think I’m alone? I could have someone here every day… I’ve done this Nick-is-gone-on-tour thing before, you know.” I told him.
He slid up beside me as I went back to the stove to stir, “Yeah, and if I heard correctly… you were workin’ on a few of his boys, too. Since you don’t know anyone out here, I just thought I’d… y’know… volunteer myself, in case you needed some attention.”
Wow. Did he seriously just say that? I turned to him, “Are you for real? Did you actually just ‘volunteer’ to fuck me if I got lonely? Do you really think that I couldn’t do better than you? I could walk down the Strip at 3 AM and probably find 15 drunk homeless guys I’d rather have sex with.”
He appeared sort of perplexed, like he didn’t quite understand either what I was saying, or how I could possibility not want to have sex with him. “What? Are you and Nick still fuckin’ around?”
I glared at him, “No, we are not still ‘fucking around’. I have too much respect for other people’s relationships than that.”
“But not your own, huh?”
This guy was incredible...and not in the good way. Nick had definitely been right to steer my attention away from him. “My relationships are none of your concern. Why did you come by? Just to offer up a mercy fuck … aww, poor baby is all alone, and needs a man? Fuck that shit.”
“It’s not just mercy… I think you’re hot,” he said with a smile.
“Oddly enough, you are totally unattractive to me. I’d love it if you left.” I returned his grin and bat my eyelashes at him.
“I could give you some time to think about it…” he said, making no move toward the door.
I picked up the knife I’d been using to chop things with and pointed to the door. “Out. This requires no thought.”
“Right. Going now.” He started backing away from me and mumbled something about Nick not having mentioned that I was a crazy bitch.
I slammed the door shut once he was out of it and locked it. A thought occurred to me as I went back to the kitchen – this was Nick’s life now. How had he ended up with a friend like that again? He’d done so much to get rid of the people in his life who would drag him down – he’d managed to get a tight, close group of guys who were good people around him. And they were back in Florida. I hadn’t considered before what Nick’s life may have been post-me. Maybe things hadn’t been easy on him, either. Maybe there were times he looked back at what we had, what we were… and wondered what the fuck had happened… just like I had.
When I finished cleaning up the mess I’d made in the kitchen, I dialed his cell phone, knowing I wasn't going to catch him, but I had to ask... if he'd gotten so much out of me... I thought it was only fair if I could get a little something from him.
I left him a voicemail, telling him to call...whenever.
~~
I was less startled when the phone rang in the middle of the night, since I was expecting it. I'd dozed off, though, so it still woke me and I jumped a little. I grabbed the phone - actually where it was supposed to be this time - and said 'hello, Nick'.
"Hey... everything okay?"
"Yeah, it's fine... I just wanted to ask you something."
"Alright..."
"How was your day?"
"That's what you called to ask me?" he said, laughing.
"No, I just thought I'd see how things were before I began my interrogation."
"Interrogation?" There was a definite hint of wariness in his voice now.
"Chill out, this isn't the Summer Inquisition... I was just trying to make a joke." I told him.
"Just ask me, this is kind of freaking me out."
Okay, fine. "Why'd you move?"
The question hung in air for a few minutes, like he was trying to figure out how to answer it.
"It made more sense for me with working.... but I guess... I needed to get away. I couldn't be around so many things that reminded me what a fucking failure I was."
"Failure? What the hell. You've never failed at anything." I said. There may have been a few things here and there that he HAD kind of sucked at, but I didn’t think it was really necessary to point them out right now.
"I failed with you. I was part of something awesome and I fucked it up. I didn't need the constant reminders of that,” he said, and just the tone of his voice made me sad.
He’d run away, too. Somehow, hearing him say that made me feel better. I started to say something else, but he started talking again. “Summer, we did the same thing. You got Zack, I got Paris. He fucked up your life, the whole damn world knows what she did to me. I don’t think either one of us knew what to do… we had a… a life.. a world… together…and when there wasn’t the two of us, none of that existed. So, we both got lost.”
“Did we find ourselves again?” I asked… I wasn’t really sure.
He paused to consider. “I think we’re working on it.”
For now, that was a good enough answer for me.