Meant For Me (13 page)

“She’s not a prize.” I rolled my eyes and I scooped up a whole shit ton of dirty clothes off of my bedroom floor. I needed to do laundry. I needed to do a lot of things. But for the first time in about a hundred years I actually felt some ambition to make it all happen. Turning all my pockets inside out on my dirty jeans I found quarters, a bar napkin (no clue what that was about), a condom, and a lighter. Apparently I had been drunk smoking one night.

“Well, well, look who found his ethics again? Because you’ve been racking up the prizes for awhile now, my friend.”

He had a point, but I didn’t want to hear it. “Can we just focus on the issue at hand? Her birth name is Anya Volkov.” I gave him their birthday and the general area Chloe thought she had been living in before being adopted.

“What is your girl’s name? That might help me.”

Your girl.

I liked the sound of that.

“Chloe Rush, born Ekaterina Volkov.”

“That’s a serious name change. It’s weird, like one day you’re one person and the next day they’re like and now you’re this, bitch. Deal.”

It was weird. I didn’t think that anyone had done Chloe any favors by changing her name. You couldn’t strip someone’s identity from them. “Agreed. But I think finding her sister will help.”

I still couldn’t imagine what it would have done if me if Aubrey had just been ripped out of my life when I was a kid. You didn’t just get over that.

“I’ll do what I can. And then you owe me.”

“Sure.”

Kyle asked me about law school and I evaded the question. I asked him about his girlfriend and he evaded the question. Then we were done and hung up.

Accumulating the rest of my laundry, including every towel I owned, I piled everything into a basket and shoved my feet in sandals. There was a washer and dryer in the basement of my apartment building so I headed down. While I was sitting there on the single chair, waiting for the wash to do its thing, so I could immediately transfer to the dryer, I opened another document Chloe sent me. I wished we could Skype, but there wouldn’t be much point. It would be me talking and her just listening.

I liked that she wanted to share her thoughts with me. It meant a lot.

This isn’t a story. This is just me telling you what is in my head. I know that you got frustrated with me and I don’t blame you. I wish that I could open my mouth and speak, but even when I want to nothing happens. My throat closes and the words are swallowed again.

But I like you, Ethan, and I don’t want you to think that I’m doing it on purpose or that I’m using you to help me find my sister or to lose my virginity. I don’t see being a virgin as something I need to get rid of, and me wanting to have sex the other night was impulsive, because you make me feel good. I feel sexy with you, not weird. I’m sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable. I’m sure you have a lot of girls in your life and I don’t want to make assumptions.

I know that being around me makes it impossible to talk and do things in a way that is normal. I’ve met guys who either want to fix me or who think I’m going to be some kind of intentional submissive, and it’s not that. I don’t want to be submissive and I don’t need to be fixed by someone else. I’m the only one who can find my voice and I guess, I just need to be accepted, the way my dad and my sister do. I feel like you accept me, but I frustrate you. That’s okay. Just let me know if you can’t and I will understand. Let me know if what you want is to just be friends, as much as you can be friends with a girl who doesn’t talk.

But this isn’t just about me. This is about you, Ethan. And how you don’t like yourself very much.

I stopped reading and swallowed hard. I glanced around my apartment. The blinds hadn’t been opened in weeks. I never cleaned. There was a layer of dust and stickiness on the coffee table and the carpet was dingy and in need of vacuuming. When you slept all day you never noticed those things. When you moved around in the night, the dark, everything looked okay. You could fool yourself the way you couldn’t in the harshness of the daylight.

Meeting Chloe was like being thrust into the daylight. It made me simultaneously want to tilt my head towards it and squeeze my eyes shut. I wanted to feel. But I couldn’t look.

For several long minutes I sat there, doing nothing. I thought about the last two years. I thought about the next two years.

Then suddenly, I dug my sorry hungover ass up off the chair and I twisted the cord so the blinds opened. Light flooded the room, and all the dirt and neglect were brightly illuminated in the sunshine.

I texted Chloe.

I don’t want to be just friends.

Chloe was right. I didn’t like myself very much and I didn’t want to live like this any more. My sister was right- at a certain point you had to jump off the fucking merry-go-round even if you landed in the dirt when you did.

My first instinct was to delete everything off my phone from every chick I’d fucked in the last two years. But that seemed pointless. I shouldn’t try to erase the past or what I’d done and it wasn’t even regret that I felt. Not exactly. We were all adults. We’d all done what we had wanted to do in that particular moment. Even if I was doing it to escape my own loneliness and fixation eighteen months ago on Caitlyn, last night on Chloe. I needed to learn to face my shit head on.

So no deleting. No erasing. It was what it was. I was what I was. The question was, who was I going to be today?

I was going to be the guy who helped Chloe find out who she was.

That simple.

That night when I went to work I was polite to customers and I didn’t drink.

And when I got home at three I lay in my bed and I watched Chloe on my phone and I fell asleep listening to her music.

I dreamed that she whispered in my ear, her hot breath tickling my flesh. I kept straining to hear what she was saying, but the words were music, not English. I kept turning to her to try and ask her what she meant, but she held my chin tightly in the grip of her delicate fingers. She had more strength than I could have ever imagined and I couldn’t move without a struggle. The music swelled and surrounded me, boring into my eardrum like a power drill.

I woke up just as my head exploded.

As humans we’re hardwired to survive and buried deep in our DNA is the relentless desire to possess that which we can’t have. It forces us to push through mental and physical limitations and survive, propagating the species. It’s science, not stubbornness.

But the way it manifested itself in me during those weeks when Kyle was looking into Chloe’s twin and I was staying sober, was to cause me to fixate on Chloe and how much I wanted her. I had gone from thinking she was cute but awkward that first day I’d met her to being unable to get her beautiful face, and her amazing body out of my mind. She ran through every one of my thoughts. From my coffee right after I crawled out of bed to my increasing need to hear her playing the piano before I fell asleep, she was there. In texts, in DMs, in pictures I insisted she send me. Chloe was no selfie-lover. Of the two pictures she consented to take and send she was self-conscious, shy, her hair falling in to her eyes.

Ironic, then that when I found myself finally ready to date, it was with a girl who lived on an island several hours away and who couldn’t talk. Freud, and my mother, would have a fucking field day with that shit.

And the more I couldn’t have access to her, the more I wanted her. I wanted to wrap myself in her hair and lose myself in her eyes. I wanted to drink her in, like vodka, and feel the burn of what she did to me all the way down my throat and through my limbs. I wanted to kiss her sweetly and I wanted to fuck her hard and most of all, I wanted to hear her say with her own voice, that she gave a shit about me and what I did.

I was falling for her and I wasn’t sure if it was real or if it was lust or if it was chasing the rainbow. I thought I wanted it because I couldn’t have it.

But when Kyle gave me the name and address of the twin, who was living in New York City, I knew it was my key to seeing Chloe. And I had to see her.

I had to know if what I felt was real, if reading her thoughts and hearing her music and ‘talking’ to her every day was the truth or a story I’d created.

My gut had me calling her via Facetime. I was kind of surprised she actually answered but my chest tightened when I saw her on the screen of my phone. She looked so… alive. So warm. The shirt she was wearing had slipped on her shoulder and I wanted to lick her skin.

Even as my dick swelled though I spoke softly, carefully. “Hey. I’m glad you answered. I have some news.”

Her eyebrows rose up in question.

“I found your sister. Her name is still Anya. But she legally changed her last name to Strange two years ago. She’s living in New York City.”

Chloe’s mouth dropped opened and formed an “O.”

“She sings in a band, works as a cashier at a newsstand, and has a baby. I saw the pictures. I’ll forward them to you.” I hadn’t intended to tell her all of that at once, but it came out in a rush. Like I wanted to impress her. Please her.

Or maybe I wasn’t that self-centered. Maybe it was because I wanted her to be happy, to have her sister, but to understand right away that her sister seemed like a bit of a hot mess.

Tears filled Chloe’s eyes. I thought they were happy tears but I wasn’t sure.

“She’s, uh, had a couple of arrests for theft and possession. Just so you know. It seems like she’s had a tough life.” I wasn’t one to judge. Anya had been given up at birth and then from what Kyle had gleaned from public records, Anya’s adoption had occurred six months after Chloe’s but somehow eighteen months later she had been put in foster care.

Chloe reached up and wiped her eye with a knuckle.

“I can take you to meet her if you want. You should probably try to contact her first though, see if she is receptive to a reunion.”

Anya looked like a bit of a hard ass. I’d seen a picture of her. Asymmetrical hair, lip ring, leather jacket, blood red lipstick. The resemblance to Chloe was small. I would never guess they were twins if I met Anya on the street.

Chloe bit her lip and nodded. She mouthed “thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” My throat closed at the way she looked at me. Like I was brilliant. Like I’d done something really amazing. “Let me know when you want to make plans and go to New York, if you do at all.”

She nodded. Then she looked away.

I waited. She still faced the wall, her hair covered her face so I couldn’t see her expression.

“Should I let you go?” I asked.

Nod.

“Okay. Sure. I’m glad we found her, Chloe.” For some reason, I kept feeling like I needed to warn her not to have high expectations. “Even if she might not want to meet you, at least you have proof she’s real. No one can take that away from you.”

She nodded.

Finally, she turned and looked at me out of one eye. I didn’t know how to read her face. There was something there I didn’t understand. But before I could ask, she waved and disconnected our call.

I tried not to be offended. There really wasn’t any other way for her to end a call with me. But still. I wanted more. I just wanted more.

My phone buzzed in my hand.

I want to go to NY as soon as you can. Tomorrow?

No hesitation there then. Chloe wanted to go track down her sister in person. She wanted me to take her.

“I’m off work Monday to Wednesday,” I said to her. “We can go then. Can you wait two days?”

She responded via text. Yes. Thanks. Can you pick me up in Rockland? I’ll take the ten o’clock ferry.

“Of course. I’ll be there.”

I had no idea how we were going to drive to New York City and back in three days or how either one of us could afford a freaking hotel in the city but I had to be there for Chloe. I wanted to be the one there for her. I wanted her to look at me with hero worship, I could admit that. I used to have people view me with respect, admiration. Guys had wanted to be more like me, mothers had wanted their daughters to date me. I had taken that for granted, then I had eschewed it. I had thumbed my fucking nose at it.

Now I wanted to be neither noteworthy nor rebellious. I just wanted to be a decent human being, who took care of his.

And I wanted Chloe to be mine.

The reason I did online dating was because it was an agreement between me and my dad. He never dates or goes out or does anything. It’s him and the dog all the time hanging out on the couch. When Sarah and I kept giving him a hard time, Sarah even making him a profile, just waiting for his permission to make it live, he said he would only do it if I did it too. I was kind of surprised. Dads don’t usually want their daughters dating, let alone online. But I realized that he worried about me the way I worried about him- he didn’t want to see me spend the rest of my life alone.

Dad never talks about the woman who pretended to be our mother- let’s call her by her first name. June. I don’t like to call her Mom any more. A Mom, with the capital M, would not leave her children just because they weren’t perfect, because I can say with utter certainty that no children are perfect. Just as no parents are perfect. That’s not the expectation, simply the goal. So while I can’t say I sit around and despise her, to me she is just June now. Not Mom. So when June left, Dad was depressed. Sarah and I felt guilty about that. I mean, if it wasn’t for us he would still be with her. He wouldn’t be sleeping alone.

But when Sarah said that out loud, because Sarah says everything out loud, Dad looked shocked. He told us he was sad because she’d left for our sake, not his. That truth be told, she probably would have left him years earlier if it wasn’t for us. That she had stuck it out, trying to do the right thing, but that he wasn’t enough for her. Never had been. She liked change, excitement. But he had loved her.

I think for me and Sarah, that conversation helped us let go, move on. But Dad was still alone and I had no prospects for guys anywhere in my future. All the guys I went to high school with either were terrified of me (like I was some kind of modern day Carrie who might ignite their junk on fire) or they saw me as the puppy they occasionally wanted to pet.