Next to Me

Chapter 12

Logan

She ends up going away for a week and a half for a voice-over gig in Montreal. I throw myself completely into finishing the house. My guys are on other jobs so I end up doing the entire bathroom by myself. Retiling, caulking, painting, and installing the hardware. 

And I miss her like crazy. I feel like a high school kid in puppy love. We text each other constantly. One night, I read her Italian poetry over the phone until she falls asleep. I find that she's more open to tell me things on the phone than in person.  She tells me about Thanksgiving and everything that went down with her family. During our night time talks, we tell each other about every heartbreak, every failed relationship, no matter how ugly. I find myself looking forward to hearing her voice, telling her about stuff that bothers me, hearing her take on it. We discuss things that I've never talked about with women or never felt comfortable enough to talk about in general. I don't have a lot of secrets, I've lived a pretty charmed life considering how Nicole has been treated, so there is not a lot of darkness in me. But I guess growing up in a male-dominated household, I never knew what girls talked about. 

We avoid the one topic, the elephant in the room, about us. The house is almost finished. She casually mentioned something about a dance studio but I'm reluctant to start on that if she's going to sell the house. I love that house now. I want us to live there, in our happily ever after, but I don't tell her that. It's the one thing I feel like I can't tell her.  I feel like she's allowing her fear of failure to guide her decisions. But the other part of me feels selfish; I've robbed her of a proper courtship. I mean how would we tell our story to other people in the future? The arrogant part of me thinks it won't matter but then I think 'What would I tell my kids?' Do I tell my future daughter that it's perfectly acceptable to marry a man you kind of like when you get blackout drunk in Vegas? Then that same man strikes a deal to get you to give him a chance because you think he's a womanizer? I would kill the man that took advantage of my daughter that way. 

These are the thoughts rattling around in my head all day as I go through the motions of my job. For the first time in my life, I don't feel like discussing this with my family. I would normally take my mom out to lunch and chew her ear off. I don't want my mother to know I started a relationship this way but since my parents rather rocky start she might be sympathetic. 

My mother married a man named Harrison Bonner when she was eighteen. Childhood sweethearts since primary school. Three weeks after their wedding, Harrison stops off at a local pub after work. He gets hammered and steps out for a smoke. He stumbles into traffic, gets hit by a car and killed instantly. A chauffeur driven car with none other than Gabriel Russell in the backseat. My father jumped out and gave Harrison CPR for twenty minutes waiting for the ambulance to show up. The day after the funeral, which my father paid for, he visits Harrison's poor young widow to pay his respects. My grief-stricken mother answers the door. As soon as she finds out how exactly my father fits into this awful scene, she spits and curses at him, slamming the door in his face. Despite this reception my father got it into his head that he had to make this right with her. He goes back every week trying to talk to her. My mother finally lets him in for tea, announcing she just found out she is pregnant and has no idea what she's going to do. Her husband is dead, his family abandoned her. She didn't want to move back home. My father suggested that he would take care of her, cover all her expenses since he felt it was partly his fault that her husband was dead. 

Love blooms in some strange places. By the time my mother has the baby, my older brother Brandon, my parents were quite smitten with each other. My father's family thought my mother was a golddigger and her family thought my father was an emotional vulture, taking advantage of a poor young widow. Neither of them cared. They married when Brandon was a few months old and proved them all wrong. By the time the twins were born, the strangeness of the beginning was long forgotten. I pray that would be the same for me and Nicole. Our crazy beginning would eventually be just a funny story to tell our grandkids.