Page 30 of Ebbing Tides
“Okay, a lot older,” she begrudgingly corrected with a playful eye roll. “And you've seen more and felt more, and you're a little more … weathered, I think, but … no, you're the same.”
Through hooded eyes, I looked at her, not nodding or shaking my head. “How can you tell?”
“Because I feel the same way now as I did then,” she replied without hesitation. “Like I can trust you and it'll be okay.”
Then, before I could react to that brazen, loaded statement, she began to talk about how she had moved to a small town in Connecticut when she was in middle school. Her father opened his auto repair shop while she watched a rebellious boy named Luke from afar, developing a crush on him that wouldn't shape itself into more until she was sixteen and they started dating. She told me about how Luke and Chuck …Charlie’sparents had died when they were just teenagers, how Luke took it upon himself to care for Charlie, and how Melanie took it upon herself to take care of them both.
“You were just a kid too,” I commented, not meaning to interrupt.
“I was,” she agreed, watching as the waitress placed our drinks and bowls of stew on the table. “But I also knew I was more capable than they were. If nothing else, my parents were both still alive and could help me figure it out. Those two though … they had nobody.”
Some people have nobody, even when their parents are alive, I caught myself thinking, as if my situation were at all similar to Charlie’s.
God, poor Charlie …
I’d had no idea he'd suffered so greatly in his life, but as adults, did we ever? So infrequently did any of us voice our troubles, especially outside the anonymous void of social media. There was no telling what trauma we were struggling with internally, even if we were wearing a smile. I was more than aware.
Melanie spooned some stew into her mouth, then pursed her lips, nodding affirmatively. “Mmm, yeah, definitely decent.”
I snorted before taking a bite. “Solid five out of ten,” I agreed with my mouth full.
“Oh, come on now, Max. Let's be kind. It's easily a six-point-five.”
In between bites, she continued her story.
She had lived with her boyfriend and his little brother all through her boyfriend's struggles with alcoholism. But even throughout it all, she stuck by his side, hoping something would change … and it did. He got himself into Alcoholics Anonymous, backslid a couple of times, but held strong. She’d thought they were as good as gold, but then, when they were twenty-five, he had kissed another woman at a bar he hadn't been drinking at.
I eyed her with unintentional skepticism because that sounded like a load of bullshit to me.
She shook her head. “No, it wasn't like that. He had gone in to test himself, to see if he could do it, and I believed him. I wasn't even mad about it. But he'd been unfaithful to me. She had kissed him first, and he said he'd pushed her away, but the fact that he hadn't told me about it until he was forced to …” A bitterness, deep and faded with time, flashed over her gaze as she stared into the past. “I left at that point.”
“How long after we met was that?”
“Oh, um …” She calculated the time in her mind before shrugging. “A few years maybe? Two, three?”
“I almost kissed you that night,” I blurted out.
Her throat shifted with a swallow. “I know.”
“And if I had …” I hung my head, thinking about how differently things might've been for her at that point in time. She would've been the one to be unfaithful to him, and that would've been my fault.
“No,” she replied with a forlorn sigh. “It wouldn't have been the same.”
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“Because I believe that he didn't kiss her back,” she said. “I wouldn't have been able to tell him the same thing had it been the other way around.”
I was silent, staring at her as she pushed her empty bowl of decent stew away. She laid her hands in her lap and stared at the table, shame and regret blanketing her face.
“That's why I had to leave that night,” she admitted, lifting one side of her mouth into a sad smile. “I knew that if you kissed me, I would kiss you back.” She laughed, so sad and quiet, then looked up to meet my eye. “Which I completely blamed you for, by the way.”
I couldn’t find it in me to laugh with her as I leaned one elbow against the table, propping my cheek against my fist, and asked, “Why is that?”
She looked down at her hands, swallowing again. “Because you had been so nice to me, and … I guess … that was somethingI wasn’t used to. You listened to me, you cared about the things I had to say, and you had only just met me. I kept thinking,Why the hell am I wasting my time with my loser of a boyfriend when someone likethiswants to give me the time of day?”
A tear fell from her eye, and she swatted at it hastily, as if hoping I hadn't seen, but I couldn't miss it. “God, I feel like such an asshole, saying that out loud.”
“You're not an asshole,” I answered quietly.
