Page 36 of Unmasking Love
“Bye, Aiden.”
Watching him go is the cherry on top of this whole interaction. He walks his bike to the road, clips on a helmet, and swings his leg over like a damn cowboy mounting a horse.
That ping of arousal radiates and I feel weak in my knees.
And elbows.
Aiden can make my freaking elbows quiver.
When he disappears from sight I take a deep cleansing breath, fold up my empty wrapper, and walk back down the block to the office. The family I’m seeing this afternoon called me last week and asked for homes in a specific school district. Their daughter is a sophomore in high school so maybe she’s an athlete and they’re trying to get her more playing time? Or one of them is running for school board and needs to live within a certain boundary?
Either way it narrows down my search radius but a new listing hit yesterday and they said they’d pick up their daughter and meet me at the house this afternoon. There are some emails I need to get back to which I would have done last night but I was, well, otherwise engaged; getting drunk over catching my boyfriend cheating on me.
Aiden kept looking at me like he expected me to cry. Or crumble. But, I never have. I bottle it up, bury my weakness, and move on. I’ve been doing it for years, it’s second nature now.
With a long exhale I square my shoulders towards my computer and focus all my attention on work. Work has never let me down. Work is always there. There is always more of it for me to find. More to do to keep me busy. Occupied. Distracted from my loneliness.
And for the longest time that “work” has been about homes.
It doesn’t take a world renowned psychologist to relate the fact I have been obsessed with homes since I was little to the way my mom bounced us between them when I was growing up.
All the TV shows and movies I watched as a kid had the nuclear family and white picket fence. Then the magazines I devoured as a teen had beautifully designed spaces with recipes for cozy home cooked meals and party hosting.
I never got around to the party hosting part. I’d need to build a friend group first. But I’ve got boxes of old magazines and notebooks filled with recipe clippings stored in the basement of my house waiting for me to use them.
Maybe someday when I remodel I’ll have an office I can keep those clippings in. A space to put some up on the wall. Currently I’m in the second floor apartment of a Victorian that was converted into apartments back in the sixties. The building came up for sale a year after I started with the Rothchild Reality Group and I used my commission check from Felix’s house sale for the down payment.
Momthought I was crazy but I loved the building as soon as I saw it.
There was history and amazing vintage details. Someday I’d like to remodel it into a single family home again.
One, it would increase my resale value.
But, secretly, I want to fill it with a family.
Over the years, my imagination has taken each of my boyfriends for a test run as the husband in my home. None of them really showed any interest in helping with the renovation itself but I was able to picture some of them in the dream version of the completed home.
Sitting with me on one of the twin facing sofas in the front room by the fireplace. We’d be sipping wine. My feet on his lap as I read a novel and he watched a sporting event on TV.
Or cooking together in a kitchen that takes up the entire back third of the first floor. Playfully bopping flour on my nose as we baked cookies for the Christmas party. Or smiling as he hauled a tray of hamburgers out to the grill on the deck. The ambient chatter of a house party of adults filling the emptiness.
But.
The images vanish from my mind with a poof and I shake my head to clear the debris. I have to stay in a relationship for those dreams to come true. I have to figure out how to keep a man interested in me.
I’ve tried it all. Helping with his work, cooking for him, cleaning. Running errands. There was one who didn’t want to be seen getting pedicures so I learned how to do it. Another who didn’t like that I was the same height so I wore flats for four months. One who brought his parents to our first date and I ended up talking more with them over the course of our relationship than I did to him.
I still talk to Joe and Kathleen every so often.
Unfortunately Crispin is just the latest in a string of relationships that start off fine but end around the sixteen week mark.
But, like the others before, I’ll bury myself in work for a bit and then one night I’ll feel particularly lonely and decide it’s time to get back out there. I’m good at the meeting men part. Probably because I meet new clients all the time and have to charm and build trust immediately.
It’s the keeping them around part that I need to figure out.
***
“Nanners,” Cheryl, the mother, calls after her daughter, Hannah, who just stomped off when I mentioned the high school, “please, don’t storm off, talk to us!”
