Waiting for You (39 page)

It was remembering
every detail, everything that made him Dylan Wade and remembering nothing at
all.

My silence spoke
volumes and I could tell it made him angry. “Say something!”

“This can’t work.”

“You believe that?”
he hissed in my face jerking my chin up so I would meet his eyes.

“I don’t know what
to believe anymore, Dylan.”

“Please don’t do
this,” Dylan groaned running his hands down his face and letting go of me. “I
would wait forever for you but don’t tell me it’s over, please.”

“It’s over.” A
sharp sting of pain radiated throughout my body, my heart, my soul when I said
that.

“You know that it
breaks my fucking heart that I didn’t tell you what I knew.” His face contoured
into an unbearable amount of agony and he turned away, pulling his hands
through his hair. “Fuck,” he whispered painfully.

I grabbed the
collar of his shirt and cried into his chest like I’ve never cried before.

The absolute worst
part was when he let me go. Our eyes met and they stay locked for a moment,
remembering, loving, and never forgetting.

Dylan reached up
and twirled a lock of my hair between his fingers. He watched dark ginger dance
in his hand before letting it fall.

I hugged him
tighter and exhaled breathing out the breath I had been holding. I lifted my
head and rested my chin on his chest, looking up at him.

He didn’t smile.
“I’ll always remember this, with you,” he said attempting to smile but it
didn’t touch the pain in his eyes.

“I will too…but I
need to do this Dylan. I can’t give you my heart when I don’t know myself.”

It hurt to watch
but harder to look away as he took in what I was saying. I could tell my words
were hurting him, but he looked somewhat resolved when he responded. “Will you
promise me something?”

I nodded.

Dylan ran his hand
over my hair and kept his eyes on mine. “Keep our memories what they are,
ours.”

I buried my head in
his chest savoring the connection I knew would be gone once we broke apart. I
wasn’t trying to choke back the tears any longer and neither was Dylan.

“I’ll never be
sorry,” he said slowly, his breath on my ear. I squeezed my eyes shut, hot
tears poured as I swallowed his words. Then he let go and created distance
raising his hands to cup my face in his hands. “I love you, please remember
that,” he whispered tucking a lock of my hair behind my ear. “Half of me will
always be with you, barely breathing, watching your sunset.” Removing my hand
from around his neck, he kissed my knuckles and then let my hand fall.

Before I had a
chance to say anything, Dylan removed himself his eyes casted down hidden from
mine. He walked away. Hands in his pockets, face down, he walked away.

Some people never
consider the ramifications of a lie. After a while, a lie can become what you
believe as if it was never a lie. You’re floating in between reality and
fiction.

The problem is if
you keep that lie to yourself, eventually it will eat at you.

I also knew that
everything in lie was two sided. That’s why I waited for Dylan to explain. My
dad told me once, though he never believed his own words, that the world had
two sides.

Everything had two
sides. The world, relationships, lies, love, all two sided. Assuming you know
both sides, whether it
be
in a relationship or a lie,
you can easily make a complete ass out of yourself.

I had a desire
inside of me, something dark and unpredictable. The problem was that I forgot
about me that summer.

There was a reason
why I got in the car that day. And there was a reason why he asked me to come.

But there was a
reason why I left too.

When I looked back
at him, it was harder than I thought it would be.

Dylan once asked me
if I was the same person when others weren’t looking as I was when they were. I
didn’t know who I was when they were looking.

Every memory I had
that was about
me,
was tied to Dylan in some way. He
knew me and it was the only way he let me walk away from him that afternoon.

The thing was, you
experience life and you’re forced to deal with it. Like it or not, it happened
and you deal with it.

That’s the deal.

24.
  
Regrets – Dylan Wade

I had regrets. Fucking
crushing regrets but I had the chance to change it and didn’t. That’s my shit.
No one else’s.

But after nearly trying
to kill myself by drowning my sorrows, my brother let me in on a secret. Get
the fuck off my couch was his secret. So I did.

When Bailey left, Megan
took her to the airport and she went home for all I knew. It was none of my
business and probably better that I didn’t know. I lost her.
Simple
as that.
Another fucking regret.

Eddy lived in Seattle.
I went there when Drew told me to get on with my life. I would have stayed in
Birmingham but I missed my friends in Seattle. I went there instead.

Eddy got me into music
more, a welcomed distraction. I had a steady gig with him
at
a string local bars
.

Eddy was what I needed,
he didn’t put up with my shitty attitude and temper, and he kept me grounded in
music. The first time I ever heard him play, I was young. He played Hurricane
acoustic,
eyes closed and played the shit out of the song. I
had fucking goose bumps at eight-years-old and was hooked.

Eddy, my mom’s older
brother, taught Drew and I how to play the guitar and anything else we wanted
to know musically. He played in a band when he was younger, they made it big
and then he just walked away when they were on tour. It wasn’t long after my
mom died, that had something to do with it, but it wasn’t Eddy’s thing either.
He enjoyed the music, not the life.

After my mom died, I
spent a summer with Eddy and it changed my life a lot.

Eddy wasn’t married and
if you ever met him, you completely understood why. He was a dick.

His mom was a Russian
Jew and if you asked my dad, she was completely crazy.

Eddy played the guitar,
like me, and always had Bob Dylan playing. As a kid, I thought that was pretty
cool given my name. Apparently, my mom named me after him.

Eddy and I would play
Beatles and Stone songs all night long. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a
musician, to an extent.

That led me back to
Seattle to do it the right way. By October, I had a place to stay and a steady
gig. But I wasn’t over her. I wouldn’t say I straightened up after she left,
Drew would tell you differently, but I had distractions.

People do stupid shit
when they’re tossed. I did some stupid shit. Spent some time in jail, a few
nights, and Eddy had to tell me to stop fucking up.

So there I was becoming
a fucking stoner and well on my way to fucking up big time when I met Silas at
a gig we played in
Beltown
. Pretty much the worst
influence ever.

Drugs don’t kill
people. People kill themselves by becoming addicted to the shit. Using kills
people. Drew was proof of that. Though he didn’t die, he got pretty fucking
close more than once.

I was on my way there
after she left. Regrets, they could kill you and make you do stupid shit. I
believed that.

Drugs didn’t kill you.
They fucked you up.

That’s how I met Silas,
drugs. Silas, a bassist guitar player, was a crazy son of a bitch. Fucking
crazy but I dug it. He was unpredictable too. You never knew when he’d show up.
Our lists had to change nightly because we didn’t know if we’d have our bassist
player that night until five minutes before the show. I did two set lists each
night. One marked Silas and one marked Wade.

Silas had apparently
graduated from Berkley and majored in Botany. Strange dude and smoked too much
of his own shit.

It may sound like Silas
was a bastard. He was but when he wasn’t high or picking fights, he had a big
heart and would say things like, “Hey man, you need to get whatever girl that
ripped out that heart of yours and made you play this bullshit.

The thing was
,
he was right. It was shit music.

He’d ask me, “What’s
your deal?”

What was my deal?

It was about taking charge
of my career, playing the music I wanted to play, where I wanted to play, and
not seeing overpriced ticket sales.

Sometimes I woke up in
the morning and reached for her. She wasn’t there. It’s a strange moment when
you wake up in the morning and for a brief moment, nothing is what it was. And
then you realize that nothing will ever be the same and probably never will be.

Everyone knows if you
want to control someone completely, take what they love. You want power over
them, take what they love. You want revenge, take what they love. You want
anything, take what they love.

You want to hurt them,
simple, tell them a lie.

Believing that it could
be, in fact, be real, I ignored it. I let the lie go and saw what I wanted, a
love like no other.

You never want to make
a mistake, but, they fucking happen.

Sometimes, I think I’ll
never be normal again. I like to hope Bailey was the same but I’m not sure.

I’m just a guy. Deep
down, I’m still a boy. 
A boy with a broken fucking
heart who misses cold toes, freckles and tangled ginger locks.

That’s my deal.

25.
  
On
my own – Bailey Gray

I could tell you a
story about love but you’ll never fully understand what we felt that summer
because you weren’t there experiencing our moments and living it with us. Maybe
you see it now. Maybe you don’t. Maybe I lost you in the
middle,
I lost myself a few times.

But it was a story and
it wasn’t finished.

I believed that if
there was someone out there for me, my soul mate, I would find a way back to
them.

On my own now and I’m
constantly met with silence.
A lot of it.
It’s
something I’ve missed and something I hated.

Sometimes I think I’m
the strongest when I have something to prove. It’s like a fire gets lit and I
say, “I’ll show those fuckers.”

I became driven to show
everyone, myself included, that me, Bailey Gray, with the perfectly planned
disaster, could be on her own.

I wanted to know that I
could make it.

I had been wondering
for eighteen years on what my life would be. Now look at it. I’d like to say it
was what I imagined but it wasn’t.

After that day with
Dylan, Drew bought me a plane tick home. I went back to Washington but I didn’t
go home. Instead, I drove up to Seattle with my $750 that I had left.

I was sitting in a
small coffee shop ready to pick out a corner again, only this time to live on
when I met Avery Weber, a photographer of all people.

She gave me a place to
stay and helped me sell some photos. It seemed too good to be true but Avery
was what I needed to get over that summer. I never went to Dartmouth, I gave
that life up. I never talked to my parents but I did see Jeb.
I couldn’t not see him.
He didn’t blame me for leaving the
sweet
boy,
he tried to give me money. We kept in touch
now and then he snuck up here to see me with friends. My parents never knew. As
far as they were concerned, I was no longer their daughter. It’s a shame but
they made it that way.

I thought about that
summer all the time.

It was a summer of
tears, laughter, colors that bled lies, denying the
truth,
it was the kind of love that knew no bounds, tangled emotions that were strong.

I saw colors that
summer I had never seen before, ones that gave me hope where others were dark
enough to give me chills and frighten my soul with their storm.

I have a phone now but
I have very few contacts in it. One number appears frequently and I know how he
got it. Megan. We kept in touch. It was now December and he called twice, both
times I didn’t answer. He never left a message and I didn’t expect him to.
Dylan wasn’t the type of guy to leave a message.

Sitting in a local
Starbucks in downtown Seattle near the pier, I contemplated a few places to
take some shots this weekend. Avery and I traveled up the coast a few times
this month and got some really good sunsets, my specialty in photography, but
they never had the same effect on me anymore.

“Bailey? Is that you?”
I recognized the voice, my eyes shifted through the line to Kasey. Shocked I
stared at him for a moment before his smiled broke through and brought me back.

Removing himself from
the line, he came over to the table I was at near the window. “It’s really
great to see you, Bailey.”

“You
too Kasey.”
I stood and wrapped my arms around his broad shoulders. It
was the first time I’d hugged another guy since I left Dylan.

Kasey got back in line
to get some coffee and then came over to sit with me. We talked about that
summer and why I left. I told him about my dad and what he had done to Dylan’s
mom. He said he assumed something along those lines with how quickly the accident
had been covered up. We may have only been ten at the time but it was obvious
that something wasn’t quite right with it.