Page 48 of Dreaming of Dawson

“Except that’s not what I meant. Not really. Let’s face it, you witness my drunkenness all the time. So, I guess what I wanted to say – what I should have said – was, I’m sorry you saw me being so weak… so pathetic.”

She puts down her cup, without having taken a drink, and leans a little closer. “You’re not weak, or pathetic.”

“I felt pretty weak last night,” I say, and she smiles. “And I’m sorry you had to help me.”

“I know you are.” I open my mouth to add to my apology, or to explain it better, but before I can, she twists around a little further, so her knees are touching my leg. She doesn’t seem to notice, although my cock does, and while I try my best to ignore it, and focus on her, it’s a struggle… especially when she’s this close. “Why do you do it?” she says, surprising me. “Is it about your wife?”

My dick seems less keen on that thought and responds accordingly. That ought to make things easier, but it doesn’t… because I know I have to reply.

I owe her that much, even if I’d prefer to talk about what happened last night, and this morning, and maybe explain my reaction to her outside the bathroom… if I can. She needs answers, though. Honest ones.

“She’s my ex-wife, not my wife,” I say, just to get that straight. It feels important.

“And you drink because you miss her?” she says, nodding her head, like she’s answering her own questions now, rather than waiting for me. “It must have been hard, having built this place up together.”

“Must it?”

“Of course. When she left, it wasn’t just the end of your marriage, it was the end of something you’d created… the two of you.”

“In a way. But the bar was always mine.”

Her eyes widen, and I can see she’s surprised by that. “I thought you said you worked on it together.”

“We did. But this place is called Dawson’s for a reason.”

“Because it’s yours?”

“Yes. Right from the start.”

“So she didn’t want a share in it?”

“No. I offered, but she said she wanted it to be mine.”

“Was that because it was your parents’ money?” she asks.

“It might have been, or it might have been because she thought she owed me for supporting her through college, working two jobs, so she didn’t have to.”

“Did you feel like she owed you?”

“Never.”

“And you didn’t ask about her motives?”

“No. She just said it was something she wanted to do.” I can remember the look in Stevie’s eyes when we had that conversation. There was so much love there, I didn’t feel I had the right to question her motives. That would have been like questioning her love for me… and I’d never have done that. Not until the day she left me.

“So what was Stevie’s plan?” Macy asks. “To get this place up and running and then find a job elsewhere? Was she thinking of going into accountancy once the bar was all set?”

I shrug my shoulders, finishing my coffee, even though Macy’s hardly touched hers. “That may have been her plan at the beginning, I don’t know. It all happened so fast, we didn’t get to talk about the future. We were too busy dealing with the present. Neither of us had expected to find ourselves in the position of having that much money when we were so young,and while we weren’t short of people advising us what we should do, it seemed insane to invest it in something we knew nothing about. I’d worked in bars all through college, and enjoyed it, so it made sense to throw our time and effort into something at least one of us understood.”

“You didn’t consider putting the money in the bank?”

I shake my head. “No. We were foolish enough to think that would have been just plain boring. When this place went up for sale, it seemed like fate.” I stop talking and run my finger around the rim of my cup. “We got kinda swept along on a tide of youthful enthusiasm, but I remember stopping for long enough to ask Stevie if this was what she really wanted. She’d worked real hard to get her degree, and I knew how much she wanted to become an accountant. The problem was, we knew she’d have had to go to Concord to do that.”

“Was there no-one here who she might have worked for?”

“There’s a firm of accountants with offices above the drugstore, but they’re quite small, and I think Stevie had bigger ambitions than that.”

“Concord isn’t that far away, though. She could have commuted.”

---