Waiting for You (40 page)

“Eric was pretty torn
up after you left,” Kasey said with a grin. “Punched through a glass window and
ended up with thirty some stitches in his throwing hand.”

“Are you shitting me?”
I nearly spit out my coffee.

“Nope.”
His grin got wider. Kasey couldn’t keep a straight face and started laughing.

“Damn you Kasey,” I
said wiping the corners of my lips with a napkin.

“I’m sorry,” he said
through giggles, “but your face was priceless.”

“What did he do?”
Tracing the coffee cup with the tips of my fingers, I tried to hide my
curiosity.

“What do you think he
did?”

“Honestly?” I
contemplated my response because, believe it or not, I had thought about this a
lot lately. I thought about Eric’s reaction when I left but I thought about
Dylan’s even more. Something told me their reactions were entirely different.
“Nothing.”

“You’re right. He did
nothing for about a week. We still went to Lake Washington that night, he got
drunk and that was about it. Then, after a while when he realized you weren’t
coming back, he got drunk every night.” Kasey gave me an expression that spoke
more about the past than I thought he knew. Deep down, Kasey knew. He was a
smart guy. “He showed up at my house, drunk and got in a fight with my
brother.”

“Did you know
about―?”

Kasey nodded before I
finished my question. “I more or less ignored it. I never thought
Mer
and I would last but I loved her. I did. She broke my
fucking heart bad but I knew. I wasn’t stupid.”

“I’m sorry Kasey, I
am.” And I was sorry. I knew exactly what he must have felt.

“I’m sorry too.”

We talked for probably
another half an hour about football and that he was dating a girl now, Payton,
and he was really enjoying having a two-sided relationship with someone who
didn’t just think about themselves.

“Keep in touch Bailey,
please,” Kasey said before he left.

“I will. Good luck on
Saturday.”

He smiled and tugged me
into a hug. “Thanks.”

I met up with Avery
after that. She wanted to see a concert at the
Showbox
SoDo
downtown. I tried to tell her music wasn’t my
thing but she knew I was lying. Avery wasn’t letting up and we eventually went.

Avery didn’t let me get
away with shit. She was a say-it-like-it-is type of girl with short sassy red
spiked hair, wore leggings with leg warmers everywhere and I was sure she
didn’t shave her legs.
Ever.
But I loved her.

She’d say things to me
like: “Girl, if you don’t like your life,
change
it.
Don’t cry to me when you’re the only one with the power to change it.”

I needed shit like
that. I did. She told me the truth whether I wanted to hear it or not.

And then, when I got
sad around his nineteenth birthday, she asked what my deal was.

What was my deal?

My deal?

My deal, as Avery would
put it, I was just a girl with a broken heart.

That’s my deal.

I loved Avery for the
simple fact that if she didn’t want to see you, she’d slam the door in your
face, and had a time or two. She was my kind of friend.

I was doing well. I was
making my own money, selling my photographs and living a life that was mine.

It
wasn’t
 like
I didn’t think about Dylan. I couldn’t look at the blue sky
and not think of him. Good thing Seattle was mostly grey or I might have gone
insane.

Being with him opened
my eyes to a lot of things. Not just my family but life in general. It opened
my eyes to a world I never knew. A world I could be myself in.

For the first time in
my life I knew who I was, but I knew that because of Dylan, what he showed me.
It took months to realize that, distance myself from that to know it.

Dylan and I weren’t
anything anyone else could ever see or hear, or know. For the longest time we
were a fraction of a touch in the halls, for just a second. We were unspoken words
to leave home. A head nod. We’re the only ones that know what that dent in his
door meant or the cracked windshield while making memories.

We weren’t anything we
could have been, should have
be
, or actually were.

We were a sunset of
rich colors that blend that knew no lines.

We were waiting

Who was I?

Well I was dark ginger
beauty with speckled cheeks from sun kissed rays. I had my dad’s eyes and my
mom’s nose. I shared a birthday with my little brother. I had chocolate brown
eyes that Dylan would say he wanted to swim in and bath himself in their
chocolate syrup and would tell me, as the moon lit the bedroom and all I heard
was the beating of our hearts, that the chocolate made my soul sweet and my
heart sing to him.

I could dance my ass
off to just about any song and Dylan would say I do it well.

I enjoyed beer now, but
it’s not my favorite and I’m not twenty-one so it’s few and far between.

My favorite color is
ice blue.

I have tattoos now, my
favorite is the guitar wrapped in a chain on my wrist. My sun tattoo on my hip
means a lot to me as it reminds me of a boy who holds my heart.

I could speak two words
in Spanish and three in Italian. I could make an apple pie that will put your
grandmother’s recipe to shame.

I was scared of the
dark and couldn’t watch scary movies. I owned every Kings of Leon song ever
made, including their questionable earlier years. I wear jean shorts even in
the winter. I collect flannel shirts, I have a bottle of whiskey I will never
open and a guitar I will never play.

But that’s just my
deal.

Maybe I’ll never have
my sunset.

Maybe I don’t need it.

Maybe perfectly planned
is okay for some people. Perfectly planned is not my deal.

I believe that people
come into your life and then some go. I also think there’s a purpose as to why
they were in your life at all. Each one takes a piece of you when they go. Some
leave pieces of themselves with you. Sometimes
it’s
wisdom, or maybe, it’s a lesson.

Dylan left a huge part
of himself with me

When I close my eyes, I
think about Dylan kissing me awake in the barely illuminated morning, and the
way his blues eyes look when he first opened them. I think about what it felt
like to kiss him in that lake and making out a summer bucket list. I think
about what it felt like to be in his arms, have them wrapped around me and feel
his weight on me. I think about the look on his face when I said on was leaving
and watching him walk away.

I lost a lot that
summer but I gained a lot more.

If you let Dylan, he
could be the shadow and the smoke in your eyes.

He gave me a piece of
forever that summer. I had a taste of what it was like. To love, to feel, to
live, I had it. Maybe it was short but I still had it.

Dylan blamed himself
for not telling me but it wasn’t his fault. I knew that. Dylan hadn’t done
anything wrong but
show
me how to be myself and how to
live for myself. So many times he’d tried to tell me. Now I understood that.

Even with that, Dylan
wasn’t the type of guy that you could fall in love with and then simply fade
out if things didn’t work out.

He was the type of guy
that you fell hard and like concrete, rooted, you stayed until that barrier
cracked and you could start to wiggle loose one wiggle at a time.

He was intense and you
couldn’t just forget him as if he had never been there.

Now, this was where the story of two
outlaw kids took on another twist. Some would have thought that day in
Birmingham would have been the last we saw of each other. Like I said, loving
someone like Dylan couldn’t be easily forgotten. Our souls couldn’t forget a
love like that. It may have been brief but was enough to last a lifetime.

Avery had convinced me
to go to a concert at The
Showbox
SoDo
.
I told you that already. That’s when two souls found each other again. Maybe it
was fate? Or maybe it was being in the right place at the right time.

I don’t think Dylan
knew I was there that night and I never knew it was his band that was playing.
I didn’t know he was still playing. I hoped that he was but I didn’t know.

Avery and I were
sitting at a table in the back, talking about what she ate for lunch when the
band took the stage. Still, I didn’t look up. Avery was also incredibly
animated when she spoke about anything, now wasn’t any different.

Then he spoke.

“You hear people say
they lost the girl of their dreams, and I did.”

My eyes shot to the
stage when I heard that familiar voice that could still send chills down my
spine.

It was him.

In
Seattle.

Right
in front of me.

“And I fucking regret
it every day. Here’s to you brown eyes. I hope you got your sunset.” His eyes,
ice blue, shifted from the audience to the guitar in his lap.

I spit out my drink,
literally spit out my drink all over Avery.

She sighed like a child
had just thrown up on her and said, “I’m guessing you are brown eyes?”

“No.” I wiped ice from
my lap.

Avery rolled her eyes,
long fake black lashes.
“Liar.”

When he started to
sing, I was completely entranced by him as he sang, it was captivating. When
Dylan played music, he had the air of a person in deep almost studious concentration
way his voice would lower still
did
things to me.

The song he played?
Tangled Up In You.

Dylan sang that song
with such an emotion people felt that song in their bones, the passion was evident
in every word. His eyes were closed, he wasn’t fidgeting. He was feeling.

“My god,” Avery said
blowing the breath she had apparently been holding in when he sang the very
last word.
“Who the fuck is that boy?”

I couldn’t speak, I
couldn’t move.

He must have known I
was there. Maybe he felt it too.

I knew it when he was
standing behind me. My blood felt it, my heart knew it, and my skin tingled. It
was him. Honest and alive, I smiled.

“How are you?” he asked
giving Avery a shy sideways smile. His flannel was rolled up to his elbows
revealing those same tattoos I studied over the summer. Ripped jeans met a pair
of worn Vans and I smiled that we were wearing the same type of shoes. All this
time and we still had the same quirks.

“Please tell me you fucked
him.” Avery shook her head biting her lip batting her eyes. “Goddamn.”

“Avery!” I gave her a
glare and offered an apologetic smile to Dylan. He smirked, sideways, boyish,
damn him

“What?” She stood and
shook his hand. “Anyone that smiles like that deserves a good fuck.”

I rolled my eyes.
“Dylan
meet
Avery.”

They spoke for all of
two seconds and she ran away. Avery knew we had some unresolved issues. “He’s
your deal,” she said with a wink.

My
deal.

Seeing him now, being
in the same room with him made me realize how incredibly stupid I had been.
Looking at those ice blue eyes now, that spark I had flamed brighter than ever
now. When he smiled, it became a volcano.

“You’re not the girl
you used to be,” he said eyeing the tattoos.

“And you’re not the boy
you used to be,” I said gesturing with a nod to the stage, with swarming girls
around him.

We spoke briefly about
his band. Now that I looked closely, Reece was with him as well as Eddy. They
were both sidetracked with women on their laps.

“Why did you come to
Seattle?”

“My uncle,” he said
sitting across from me where Avery had just been.

“Oh.”

He smiled, crooked and
just the same as he would over the summer. “It was you. And if there was one
thing that kept me going,” His smile faded slightly, one side higher than the
other. “It was waiting for you.”

“I need to tell you
something,” I murmured.

“Anything,” he said
tucking a stray lock of hair behind my ear.

“I still love you. I
never stopped.”

I felt like I couldn’t
breathe after the words were spoken, truth and desire turning on me.

“Brown eyes,” he sighed
as both of his hands came up to frame my face. I slowly opened my eyes.

I gasped when I
realized how close he was.

“Sometimes I thought I
imagined everything between us, like maybe it wasn’t real but then I watch a
sunset and I remembered the way your touch felt and the way your eyes mixed
with the lighting. It was real.”

“Every moment with you
was real, brown eyes. I mean that.”

I stared at him.

“I’ll be honest,” he continued.
“I told myself to forget you. Imagine it wasn’t real and that I let you walk
away, because I did. I was angry. I wanted to follow you, shake some sense into
you but you made it seem so easy to walk away, like it was never there to begin
with, like you didn’t take every piece of my soul that summer. But you did.” He
let out a dark chuckle.

I only nodded as he
poured his heart out to me, something Dylan never did.

“Now
what?”
He knew what I meant by that.

“I’m done pretending
you didn’t mean anything to me. That you still don’t. I loved you. I love you
now, here. The bone deep shit that you try to capture in a song or a movies or
a book, that kind of shit.
The type of love that words can’t
compare to.
I still love you. I never stopped. Time apart never changed
that for me.”

I gasped feeling the
blood rush to my heart with each word. I couldn’t deny that his words stung
something deep inside of me. A love I could never forget and never wanted to.
It was a love that put those sunsets to shame.