Loving Hart (18 page)

We gathered around the
family table to eat Christmas breakfast, and when we were finished we headed to the tree to start opening gifts while
Aunt Sandra took pictures like a paparazzo
.  After spending the beginning part of our lives never getting Christmas or birthday gifts, we tend to go all out.

Aunt Sandra always buys us
all an obscene amount of
clothes and socks and underwear.  "This is what normal parents would have done," she always says, "and now that I'm around, you get normal."
  We all had a blast going through the candy and toiletry filled Christmas stockings that she'd put together for us
,
too.

Dante gave us all an itinerary for a family trip to Hawaii in the spring, which made the girls go wild with joy.
  Dominique
bought Dante, Damien and me
an
XBOX 360
each,
with a
bunch of
games
,
along with gold memberships to play with each other online
, while she gave Aunt Sandra and Delilah each
the newest iPhone
,
as well as a diamond bracelet for each of them.

Damien had gotten us all fun presents
, just like he always does.
  His first gift was for the group
;
a weekend in New York City this coming February
,
which included tickets to see a Broadway show and Dane Cook at Madison Square Garden
.
He'd also gotten us all our own individual funny gifts.
  For me, the entire Looney Toons collection on DVD, for Delilah a light bright and a collection of Rom Com DVDs, for Dominique rock em' sock em' robots and a karaoke machine, for Aunt Sandra
an entire collection of Saturday Night Live DVDs and for Dante a bunch of comedy CDs. 

I enjoyed handing out my gifts.  I'd gotten Dante and Damien season tickets for the Lakers, a
necklace for Aunt Sandra that had
a family tree
made of diamonds with leaves that were
all of our birthstones on it,
a floating diamond necklace and matching earrings for Dominique.  Delilah loved her ring, and I puffed up with pride when she put it on.

She handed out her gifts last.  She'd gotten Aunt Sandra a new SLR camera and a beautiful key fob that she'd had engraved with the words 'Mama San.'  For Dante she'd gotten a beautiful pair of
diamond
cufflinks and tickets to the coming Green Day concert, for Damien a custom boogie board and
a leather jacket
.  For Dominique she'd gone all out with a matching necklace, bracelet and earring set from Tiffany's
,
and two pairs of UGG boots
.  She gave me my gift last.  It was a beautiful silver watch, and I loved that it was something I could wear every day.

I pulled her aside when I had a chance
,
and showed here the inscription in her ring.  She started laughing even as she got choked up.  "Take your watch off and read the back."

She'd had my watch engraved as well, and it said the
exact
same thing
I'd had put inside her ring
. No gift that I'd ever gotten in my entire life had ever touched me so deeply.

We spent the rest of the day with the family watching 'White Christmas' and 'It's a Wonderful Life', capping off the day with a huge ham dinner. 
It was a perfect family day, and we all laughed and talked and laughed some more, enjoyin
g the time we spent together
.

When it was over, I got to take Delilah home with me for another night, and that was the best gift of all.

***

It was tough separating from her again after Christmas.  I missed her terribly, and I wished that time would pass quicker.
  I hated being away from her, hated the way time seemed to stand still.  Hated more that
I continued to fuck other girls from time to time
, all the while praying she wasn’t doing the same.  Nothing quite as pathetic as a double standard,
I know.

Eventually I got as used to it as I could, and things started to improve.
The
thing that made any of it bearable wa
s that I still go
t to see her every Sunday, and that we talk
ed, texted and emailed constantly.  We didn
’t
often
talk about “us” or what happened
,
(we both agreed
that
it was too painful
to talk about all of the time
), but we talked
about almost everything else.
We
,
(she)
,
decided that coming together
at Christmas
had made the ache worse, and we decided to ride it out until she graduated.

"I thought I had control of it Spence… but leaving again damn near killed me all over again.  I don't know that I could do it again."

I agreed with her, even though it hurt.  We were really chancing getting caught anyway.

She’s still the brightest spot in my life.  Always has been, always will be.

Things kept changing, and life was totally different
than it used to be
.  There we
re new additions to the family, and they came in the form of the Tyler sisters. 

The eldest Tyler girl, Sabrina, broke Dante like a bad habit.  He’s bowed out of the player’s game, and that left Damien and I.  Dante was always the most responsible, the one who felt the most, (even if he never admitted it) so once I got used to seeing him with Sabrina, I wasn’t surprised that he went all in and asked her to marry him.

It’s great to see Dante so happy.  My man Damien, on the other hand… He’s thrown a real fucking
wrench into shit
.  Aside from my love for Delilah, the worst kept secret in the family is that Damien
has
totally gone for the youngest Tyler girl, Brooke.  Not sure what’s going on, and he’s not saying a word.  Delilah and Dominique have become best friends with Brooke, but the girls say that she isn’t saying a word about what’s going on with Damien
either
, even though it’s
very
clear that something is happening.  I’ve actually been brainstorming with the girls on ways that we can get the two of them to admit that they are crazy fucking in love with each other, but so far, we haven’t had any good ideas.

I was so excited
that we were in the home stretch.  There were less than
six weeks
until Delilah’s graduation,
and I was counting down the days. 

I couldn’t fucking believe it
when Dante mentioned to me that he’d run into Delilah and someone she was dating at a
restaurant.  He told me he'd seen
the two of
them holding hands, and it da
mn near killed me.
I’m not sure how I sat through that conversation with him, because in my head I was screaming in agony.

How the hell could that be happening?  I’m out with Delilah at least two nights a week!  She never once said a word about a boyfriend. 
Like the pathetic fool that I am, I went
and
asked her who she was seeing.  Delilah would never lie, and she
told me the truth.  His name is Eric, and they’ve
been seeing each other casually for
a
few weeks
.
  When I asked her if she fucked him, she
shook her head
and sai
d no,
not yet
.
When she started to cry,
I knew that meant that she
really
wanted to, and I died inside.
I
kept my shit together and told her it was okay, held her while she bawled.  I knew without her saying another word that she’d moved on, that she wasn’t waiting for me anymore.
  Once her tears were under control, I all but ran from her apartment.

When I got home that night, I sat on my co
uch with a bottle of scotch and, for the first time I could ever remember doing so, I
cried my fucking eyes out as my
heart broke.
  After I passed
out
in a drunken stupor,
I dream
ed
about her underneath every nameless faceless little punk on the UCLA campus, and it made me fucking sick.

After that, a depression set over me that was damn near impossible to shake off.  I’d lost her, and I didn’t know how to move on.  Most days, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. 
How had we gotten this close to the finish line only to lose it?

***

The night that all my bullshit caught up with me, I was with Damien at a club in Hollywood.
  The two of us were totally miserable, but I was really taking the cake.
  I’d
been struggling
to put one foot in front of the other
ever since I realized that Delilah was
with someone else
, and I hadn’t gotten my shit back together yet. 

I’d hoped he hadn’t noticed, but that was a dumb thing to hope.  Aside from Delilah, Damien knows me better than anyone on
Earth
.

There were beautiful girls everywhere, and many of them seemed to think there was a homing beacon on my cock.  My cock and I weren’t feeling it, and I sat sullenly at the bar. 
It’s impossible to keep up the charade when you know you’re alone, that you’re never going to have a shot at happiness.

Thoughts like that weren’t making me feel so hot, and that made it easy for Damien to pick out that there was a problem.  He threw in the towel at the club after an hour, telling me that it wasn’t worth even being there if I was going to act like it was the fucking morgue.
  I think that’s true, but the other reason was because he wasn’t into the game himself.

I figured we’d head our separate ways, but when we got into the lot he told me he was going to follow me home for a chat.  I assumed he was going to bitch me out for being such a downer, then tell me that he was worried.  I spent my drive home getting my game face on.

The second we walked through my front door, my game plan went to shit.  He threw it out there right away.

“Clearly something is seriously fucking bringing you down.  I’ve seen nothing happen so I had no fuckin
g
clue
as to
why you’re like a ghost of your former self.
  You’ve never been this down Spence, not ever.  You’re scaring the shit out of me. 
I went to Dante and asked if he knew what the fuc
k was going on.  He didn’t
say anything, at least
not a
t first.  But
after I badgered him,
he admitted
that he’d told you he saw Delilah out w
ith some guy and
that you looked like someone had shot you in the stomach.  It didn’t take a genius to figure it out from there. 
I've suspected for a long time, but now I'm sure. 
You
’re in love with Delilah.
”

I thought I’d die right then and there.  The feeling of dread that overcame me was overwhelming.  All I could think was that Damien was going to tell me that I wasn’t good enough for his sister.  Damien, better than anyone, knows what a perverted fucking asshole I’ve been in the decade since we both lost our virginity to Marnie George on the sixteenth hole of our country club golf course.  She was a senior, we were freshman, and she fucked us both for the first time on the same night.  Our sex lives only got crazier from there.

Swallowing the knot in my throat, I nodded.  “Yes.”

Crossing his arms over his chest, he nodded back at me.  “What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” I said.  “She’s
got a boyfriend.  It’s serious
enough that she's going to have… it’s serious
.”

He nodded at me again.  “
Fuck Spence that's not…  Damn. 
Then I guess we don’t need to have this conversation.
For what it’s worth,
I’m sorry
.”

I could have been a coward and let it go at that, but I didn’t.  “No, we don’t need to
have the conversation
. 
I’d hoped that when she graduated from college that we would have the conversation, but all of that’s different now. For the record, I’
m in love with her and I would never
have
hurt her.  All this,” I said as I gestured around me, “all the bullshit we’ve done,
it wouldn’t have
touch
ed
her, not ever.  I would never
have
behave
d
like this with her.  I know you probably hate me for this, and you don’t think I’m good enough for her. 
It doesn’t even matter now anyway, but I’ve always
love
d
her.
  I’ll be a good friend, and I’ll do all the right things when she brings this guy home.  It’ll fucking destroy me, but I’ll do it for her
.”