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  I found what I was looking for and grabbed the box off the shelf, feeling sophomoric as I hurried over to the self-checkout lanes. Really, the act of me buying condoms wasn’t meant as an omen - it was strictly a precaution. I remembered the wisdom I’d spouted off to Blake and Chris about how sometimes a little conversation and a good screw could make everything right in the world. I wondered if it would help in this circumstance, too. Besides, it wasn’t like I was going to proposition him or anything - if I didn’t end up needing them, I’d pretend I’d never bought them. Or I could leave them as a parting gift. Whichever.

  As I exited the store, I paused in the vestibule to stash the plastic bag containing my contraband into my purse. I knew I carried a huge handbag for a reason. He wouldn’t be the wiser.

  Smiling to myself, I strode across the parking lot to where he waited for me, leaning against the driver’s side of his Jeep Wrangler. I hadn’t pictured him to be a Jeep kind of guy, but now that I saw him with it I supposed it kind of fit him.

  “Everything come out okay?” he quipped.

  “Yep. So, lead the way.”

  We both got in our respective vehicles, him pulling out of the parking lot first of course. We stayed on the main drag through town and for a portion of the drive I knew exactly where I was. We passed Lauren’s work, the Italian restaurant that I’d been to a handful of times, one of the shopping centers that I’d gone to. No sweat so far. When my familiarity with the landmarks dissipated, I paid close attention to my surroundings. Even though we were still on the same street, the last thing I needed was to get lost on my way back home. GPS was handy, but it was no substitute for knowing where the hell you were going, especially in the middle of the night after having more than a few drinks.

  We turned off right before we entered downtown Fort Wayne and its maze of one way streets. I wasn’t entirely out of sorts yet; I’d come this far a couple times, namely for Matthew and Lauren’s wedding. But the road he led me down I hadn’t traveled before. A couple family owned shops and storefronts littered both sides of the street, then gave way to a more residential setting.

  The Jeep signaled again and I followed, going a short distance before he slowed to a crawl by a duplex with a cop car parked in front. I was concerned for a split second that perhaps he didn’t live in the best of neighborhoods until I realized that said police cruiser was likely his. Then I just felt stupid.

  Immediately past the duplex was an alley; we took that and parked behind the structure in a makeshift parking area. The graveled over backyard provided room for about three vehicles, but it was a tight squeeze. A chain link fence bordered the property, making it feel even more claustrophobic.

  “Home sweet home,” Will announced quietly as he stepped out of his Jeep. He reached across the front seat and grabbed the Coke and the chips, handing the bag over to me and carrying the twelve pack himself.

  There apparently wasn’t a back door to his place, for he led me up the sidewalk that wrapped right back around to the front of the building. His place was on the left. Judging from the fact that there were no other cars parked around the duplex, the other side was either vacant or its occupants weren’t home. He hadn’t mentioned me taking someone’s parking place and I didn’t ask.

  He unlocked the front door and led me inside, flipping on the light as we entered.

  “It’s not much, I know,” he said almost apologetically, “but it’s only temporary.”

  I snorted, then instantly felt bad. It hadn’t been meant as an insult, but rather as an admission that I knew exactly where he was coming from. I didn’t live in the lap of luxury, either. I wondered if he knew that already. In case he didn’t, I qualified my reaction.

  “It’s a veritable palace compared to my shoebox in Indy.”

  He relaxed at that, the tension noticeably removed from his shoulders as he led me into the kitchen. We set down our things and he moved about the room, trying to play host as I stood out of his way. In the tiny square footage, that wasn’t an easy task.

  “I swear I’m not a raging alcoholic,” he informed me as he ran through his collection. He had quite a selection, though in various states of emptiness. Between everything on hand, the two of us could get sufficiently trashed.

  And getting liquored up was exactly what we set out to do. I wasn’t going to pry into his personal life. I figured if he wanted to tell me about it, eventually he would. A little liquid courage might help the words come out more easily. I stayed one drink behind him, prepared to stop and listen as soon as he began to come clean.

  It wasn’t like he had clammed up completely. We talked about stupid things: the weather, our jobs, the people we knew in common. He was pretty well-versed at the art of small talk. Coming from a bank teller, this was a huge compliment, since I could bullshit with the best of them. In my line of work, it was common to have entire conversations that lasted for several minutes about nothing - where I couldn’t care less about what the person was telling me, but I still was able to make them feel as if they were the most intriguing person to ever walk the face of the earth.

  But for Will, I really was listening. Beneath all his talkativeness, there was evident loneliness. He was hashing out things with me because I was there lending him my ear. He likely hadn’t had someone to come home to and vent about his day to since things had gone sour with his ex-wife.

  As I paid attention to his blabbering, a portion of my brain wondered what exactly their relationship had been like. If she was still in the picture, would he have been telling her the things he was now telling me? Or had she shut him out long ago and not shown interest in the mundane day to day activities of his normal life?

  He seemed like such a nice guy that I couldn’t imagine anyone ever drifting apart from him. I began to create my own synopsis of what had disintegrated their marriage. Number one, she was obviously a bitch. Number two, she probably never sat with him at the kitchen table, drinking and shooting the shit like two people who were actually friends. Number three -

  “Gracie,” he said, snapping me back to reality.

  “Hmmm?”

  It was probably a bad sign that even my sound effects were beginning to slur, but I was still in a better state than my companion. He grinned crookedly at me, his face turning red as he stared.

  “Will?” I pushed again for a response, but he simply lowered his eyes to the table top. His head bobbed slightly, as if his neck were no longer strong enough to support it. I giggled despite my best efforts to play it straight. He joined me in laughter until we had both laughed for so long we’d forgotten what was funny.

  Then, just as quickly, the mood turned serious. He turned to me, his green eyes deceptively sober looking and asked: “Why couldn’t I have ended up with someone like you?”

  I was taking a swig of beer as he questioned this; his words caught me off guard and the bottle fell from my grip. It landed on the kitchen table nearly right side up, but when I moved to stabilize it, I ended up knocking it down. It rolled off the edge and clattered to the linoleum floor. Fortunately, it didn’t break, but it did leave a trail of cheap beer in its wake.

  “Fuck,” I said, rising from my chair to take care of the mess.

  Will had the same idea, only he was more practical about things and actually grabbed a towel before joining me at the scene of the spill. He handed it over to me, perhaps because I was already on my hands and knees. I accepted it and began to soak up the liquid, apologizing the whole time for my clumsiness. By the time order had been restored, inertia had taken over and I found myself having difficulty rising to my feet. The fact that I was smashed and wearing stilettos probably didn’t help either.

  Will reached down and grabbed my wrist, pulling me upward in what could have been a graceful motion had he not staggered backwards into the wall. In doing so, he brought me with him. I ended up pressed against him. We stood frozen in place, eye to eye, chest to chest. If I wasn’t drunk enough already, I could have gotten intoxicated off of his b
reath.

  “You’re really pretty,” he whispered.

  Heat flooded my cheeks at his sincerity. I’d so often been the object of stares and attention from the opposite sex, but most guys went way over the top in their description. I’d heard them all: hot, sexy, beautiful, goddess-like, ethereal. But never pretty. Never anything so sweet and innocent.

  He reached up to smooth my hair back from my face. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t keep the stupid smile off of my lips. I wanted to tell him “thank you” or that I thought he was so cute I just wanted to squeeze him until his head popped off, but I was rendered speechless. The boy had serious skills if he could do that to me - I had a comment for everything. Except for this.

  His face inched ever closer to mine, as though he was testing out the waters. As if I would reject him and push him away. Yet I remained as still as possible, my body beginning to shiver with anticipation. My lips parted as my eyes closed and I waited. When it came, the kiss was lingering, the kind that’s filmed in slow motion. It might have happened at an even more leisurely pace than that, for my world stood still.

  We sunk back down to the floor, unable to trust our own legs to support us.

  Yep, those condoms had been a wise purchase.

  Chapter Two

  “Well, that was fun,” I summed up, pulling Will’s comforter tightly against my exposed breasts, “but it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Agreed.”

  Will exited the bed while I averted my eyes from his naked body. Mostly. He quickly pulled on a pair of boxer shorts, then reached for the jeans that lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. Once dressed from the waist down, he consulted the box of condoms perched on his nightstand. He stared inside the open package for a moment.

  “Looks like it was a good run,” he mused. “There’s three missing.”

  I vividly remembered two times. The third was a bit hazy, but I didn’t doubt his appraisal. I swallowed the lump in my throat and digested just what it was that we’d done.

  I needed a cigarette and I didn’t even smoke.

  “Here,” he said, tossing the box onto the mattress. “These are yours. You bought them.”

  I shook my head. “No, you keep them. Consider it a memento of our hookup.”

  He snorted. “How about if I consider it a promise?”

  I raised my eyebrow at him in a silent question.

  “That we’ll do this at least nine more times,” he clarified. Again, he’d rendered me speechless. In order to fill the awkward silence, he added a qualifier. “Just kidding.”

  He snatched the condoms back up and shoved them in the top drawer of his dresser. They way he handled them, they could have been on fire. It was humorous how two consenting adults could be so juvenile when it came to having sex. Even after the evidence had been tucked away and the drawer slammed shut, he still remained with his back to me, his head bent in reflection. And I still clutched his blanket as though it was a life preserver.

  “So,” I said, eager to change the subject, “that’s wild about Blake and Chris, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. I watched his shoulder blades as they moved under his skin, remembering how it had felt to grab onto him, to feel his naked body on top of mine. I felt guilty when I realized that I could still see the red marks that my fingernails had left behind on his flesh.

  “Huh?” I said when he turned back to me, his eyes prompting me for my response. I’d missed every single word.

  “I said,” he repeated with dramatic emphasis, “that it was bound to happen eventually. Some people can’t stay away from each other, no matter what the circumstances are. Don’t you think?”

  I could come up with a few. Blake and Chris. Matthew and Lauren. After that, my well dried up. “I don’t know. It’s not a phenomenon that happens for everyone.”

  Will picked up on the not so hidden irony of his own remark. “Don’t I know that?”

  I smiled sadly at him. “I know one thing that I owe you: we never quite got around to hashing out your problems. What with the beer spilling and the sex and all. Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not very exciting anyway.”

  “I beg to differ.” I stared at him pointedly until his face turned red with embarrassment.

  “You’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?”

  I shook my head. “Cross my heart. I was never here. We haven’t seen each other since the wedding.”

  He nodded. “It’s for the best, really.”

  “I’ll pretend that I drove home last night and back up here this morning. Which will take some work on my part, since I can’t wear the same thing that I had on yesterday to the courthouse. Matthew and Lauren will notice that right away. Looks like I’m going shopping.”

  “I’ll buy you something to wear,” Will volunteered. “It’s my fault.”

  “No,” I refused, “I won’t have you buying me things like you’re paying me to have sex with you. That just makes it dirty.”

  “Look, I know that money’s tight for you.”

  I rolled my eyes at him, wishing my reputation as being stuck firmly in the lower tax bracket didn’t precede me everywhere I went. “And you’re going through a divorce. Can we say legal bills?”

  “Touché.”

  “It’ll be fine. I’ll swing by the mall and hit some clearance racks. I have an eye for clothes; plus, it can’t be too hard to find something appropriate to wear to this kind of an event. A nice pair of jeans maybe?”

  “You can, um, take a shower here,” he offered. “So you don’t smell like booze and sweat.”

  “Because smelling like a clean guy is better than smelling like a drunken, sweaty one?”

  “I have girly things.” We both winced. “Wait, that didn’t come out right. I mean, I have a daughter. You can use her stuff.”

  I was just about to fire back that I was slightly past the stage of bubble bath and non-tear shampoo, but I felt enough pity towards him for his previous remark that I decided to bite my tongue. He looked sufficiently mortified already.

  Will had a daughter. The announcement shocked me, though it shouldn’t have. Isn’t that what married people did? They had kids. Kids didn’t disappear when the relationship unraveled at the seams.

  “Okay.” I decided it would be best to graciously accept.

  “Okay,” he repeated.

  Then we stared at each other while contemplating the logistics of just how I was going to discreetly find my way down the hall. With the amount of alcohol that I’d consumed last night, I was already intimately familiar with the location of his bathroom. However, my clothes were strewn all over the bedroom floor. I’d have to pick them up while wrapped like a mummy in his comforter. Being the guy I imagined he was, I figured that he’d offer to help me out. But I knew for a fact that I didn’t want him touching my bra and underwear in the light of day. They didn’t match, because I’d put off doing my laundry for way too long.

  “So I’m just going to go in the living room and watch some television while you do that.”

  I wanted to hug him for the way he took control of the situation and solved both of our problems. He would just go to the other side of his place and pretend that I wasn’t there, getting naked in his shower. I nodded eagerly, dismissing him.

  I waited for a few seconds after he’d left the room before I dropped the bedspread, in case he came back for some reason. Once I heard the television turn on, the volume increased for my benefit, I scurried around the room on a scavenger hunt for my stuff. With my clothing wadded into a ball in my arms, I ran the few steps down the hall like I was on fire, slamming and locking the bathroom door behind me.

  Fortunately, a towel rack stood in the corner of the room holding several neatly folded clean towels. That eliminated me having to investigate to find what I needed. I didn’t want to be the type to open closet doors and medicine cabinets. Everyone should have some privacy, especially when you first met, whether you were having
sex or not. But the shower - that was a different story. He’d given me permission to use his daughter’s things, so that made everything fair game in there.

  I turned on the water and watched as it spilled out of the faucet into the tub below. Transfixed, I stared for a moment before switching the output to the shower head and stepping in. The set up was marginally better than what I had in my apartment, but I wasn’t complaining. We both had the old style tub and shower combo like most renters. His just looked a bit newer and cleaner than mine.

  Hot water coursed down my body, dampening my hair and making it stick to my back. I stood in the steady stream for a second, my eyes closed, as I tried to compose myself. Yet his comment about hooking up again played repeatedly in my head. Was he serious? Would I be disappointed if he wasn’t?

  My eyes snapped open and I searched the small space for what I was assuming was his daughter’s stuff. His was hanging from the shower head on one of those caddies. The only other containers in the bath were tucked in the corner of the shower, standing on the edge of the tub. But they weren’t brightly colored bottles with pictures of teddy bears or smiling fruits.

  Will’s daughter apparently was a spoiled brat. She used professional hair care products and fancy body wash from the store in the mall that allowed you to create your own fragrances. Her stuff was superior to mine. If I knew him better, I’d berate him for trying to overcompensate for divorcing the kid’s mother by buying her expensive toiletries. I totally understood that, but it didn’t work. Maybe if we ever did end up having a serious conversation about life, I’d slip that in there somehow.

  Unless he just didn’t know any better and he bought her what her mom used.

  I grimaced as I contemplated that. I wasn’t quite sure which was worse: walking out of his shower smelling like his daughter or his ex-wife. Both were creepy in their own special way. But I was enjoying the aromas wafting through the tub way too much to consider using the man soap perched behind me.