Loved - A Novel (26 page)

              There were others too. I remembered learning from my favorite professor at Belmont to “surround yourself with people who are better than you,” and I was now living that mantra. I found myself amongst strong and admirable people who built me up and I wanted to build them up too.

              For Christmas, Mom asked my brother and me to search for some way to volunteer or to do something positive in the community as her gift. I wanted to find a cause that I was passionate about and to utilize my talent and resources in whatever it was that I decided to do. After seeing a girl that I had worked with battle cancer and now that Zane had cancer too, I had become more aware of the existence of cancer in young adults as a real and too common occurrence. I began to learn more about the statistics and challenges that affected this particular group, and this became my cause of choice. My friends jumped in to help and we planned a concert/fashion show event for an organization that was called
Stupid Cancer,
which helped young adults with cancer to network with one another, both online and via social gatherings, and provided them with resources and other support.

              The organization’s founder came to Nashville from New York to attend our event and to give a little speech. My friends and I were thrilled with the turnout; there were about three hundred people in the small music venue, all people who were there to see the bands, to support their survivor friends or to take in the fashion show. The event sparked a relationship between the
Stupid Cancer
organization and the young adult cancer community in Nashville, and it was from that moment that our team decided to make the concert/fashion show an annual event.

              I was much thinner than I had been in LA., and I was more filled out than I had been when I was sick. Although I was happy with my size, I still wasn’t using my gym membership one bit so I hired a personal trainer for a month to kick start a more active lifestyle. I realized that not only did I begin to shape my body, but I also learned that I really liked exercising. Kellie and I started indoor rock climbing, and I became convinced that I was born to climb. I loved the rush, the challenge and the pain that came the next day. I picked up yoga again too, and I ran and weight trained, and I loved every minute of it.  Ok, everything but the walking lunges.

              I made an effort to keep all of my newfound strengths as lifelong habits. I didn’t want to work out for a few weeks and then let it go. I didn’t want to raise awareness for cancer at one event and then move on. This was the life that I was building for myself. These were solid bricks in my foundation.

              As I’d hoped, one day I realized that I missed having Ben as my friend—just my friend.  Since our break up, he had been calling every now and then and leaving me voicemails: 
Hello, I hope all is well, call me when you’re ready
.  I was ready to be his friend but I was hesitant to move back into even that relationship with him. I was afraid that if I let him back into my life that the feelings would come back too. As a result, I decided to take things easy. We had dinner one night, and then a phone conversation a few weeks later. Little by little I found a comfort with our friendship being just that and nothing more, and that our friendship would never be more was no longer a sad thing.

              So what about dating? I wasn’t ignoring the male gender by any means, and I wasn’t deliberately fasting from dating, but I was so focused on caring for myself that there wasn’t as much of me available to give to each of the Joe Nobodies who came along. I liked many of the guys that I went out with, a few of them could have been “The One,” however, nothing clicked and none of them held my attention for long or I didn’t hold theirs for whatever reason. At least now, I was looking forward again.

              I knew that I’d come a long way, but I didn’t realize how far until one blazing August day when I met Blake.

August, 2008.

              Most days at the marketing office I wore jeans and flats, cotton tank tops and cardigans, but on that day I had a big meeting so I wore the fancy camel pencil skirt suit. I had missed wearing my beautiful adult clothes, anyway. After work, I was meeting Sophie and Kellie for dinner at our favorite restaurant, where we’d been going a couple of nights a week since the beginning of summer. They had cheap sushi, good cocktails and cute bartenders, one in particular I had been watching. I loved his curly brown hair, his bright smile and his jeans rolled up at the ankles.

              He never seemed to recognize me from one night to the next, but we kept going back and I kept hoping that on one of these days he might speak to me. That night, he was standing at the hostess stand when I walked in, before Sophie or Kellie had gotten there.

              “Three please, outside if you have a table open,” I said to the hostess. The bartender was watching me and smiling.  He was deliciously tall. I smiled back at him but then looked right back at the hostess. I had no reason to expect him to speak to me.

              “You look familiar,” he said. His voice was like lying in a hammock on a spring day—warm sun, cool breeze.

              “I come here a lot,” I replied, trying to hide what I was actually thinking:
I cannot believe you don’t recognize me from sitting on that bar stool right there four nights a week, you idiot.

              “I’m Blake,” he said, holding out his hand and shaking mine solidly. I was impressed by his confidence.

              “Kimberly,” I said.

              “Nice to meet you,” he replied.

              I followed the hostess to a table outside, and Kellie and Sophie arrived shortly thereafter. We filled each other in on the happenings of our workday and I told them both about how the hot bartender finally spoke to me and that I wondered if there might have been more he wanted to say.

              “Well, that’s progress, for sure!” Sophie said.

              “I wish I’d been here to see it,” Kellie added. 

              I loved these girls with all my heart.

              A few nights later, Kellie and I were leaving Hamilton’s after hanging out with a group of her work friends when I suggested that we stop to see if the cute bartender was working.  It was on the way home, it wasn’t that late and I really thought he might ask for my number when given the chance. Kellie was tired but she agreed.

              I walked tall in my cream t-strap heels, pink satin top and cream belt, and dark skinny jeans. We sat at the bar and ordered a blackberry mojito and a glass of wine. Blake recognized me right away, for the first time, and kept coming over to chat. He wanted to hear all about the photo shoot that I’d worked on that day.

Unfortunately, he still hadn’t asked for my number or a date or my hand in marriage, and my drink was getting low.

              “Sorry,” Kellie said quietly when he was off checking on the one table he still had. “Time to go to bed. If he’s gonna ask, he will. We gotta go.”

              I nodded and took one last sip of my sweet fruity mojito, leaving the dewy glass on the wood bar. We pushed back from our stools and slung our purses over our shoulders.  Blake got it that we were leaving and he came back over to us.

              “Hey, I’m moving into a new house next week. My old roommate...” and he went into a story that was longer than it needed to be, and I wasn’t sure where he was going with it.  He could see the lost, “wrap it up, buddy” look in my eye, and then he cut to the chase. “Well, we’re having a housewarming party and I’d love it if you would come.”

              He glanced in Kellie’s direction, politely including her.

              “Can I get your number? I’ll text you the info.”

              “Sure!” I was thrilled.

              I told him my number and we were gone.

I wondered if he’d call. I wondered if there really was a party.

Blake did text me. He wrote, “Hey! I’m getting off work and sitting here with some friends. You should come.” I didn’t have his number in my phone yet so I found it charmingly appropriate to write back, “Who’s this?”

              Yeah, I was playing the game.

              “Oh, sorry, this is Blake,” he replied. 

              “Oh, hey!” I said. “Yeah, I think I can come by. Thirty minutes?”

              I picked out an outfit that was cute but didn’t scream trying-too-hard, shorts and a black sleeveless blouse with lilac swirls, and added a touch of makeup. Then, I rode the scooter that I had bought at the beginning of summer down Belmont Boulevard toward the restaurant, the cool breeze calming my nerves. I parked across the street from the patio and shook my hair out of the helmet before storing the helmet in the seat. I liked to imagine that I was in slow motion when I did this, but I probably looked dumb.

              I crossed the street and saw Blake sitting on the patio with three friends, staring with eyes wide. 

              “No way, that’s yours?” he asked.

              “Yeah,” I laughed.

              “That is so hot.”

              I found out that Blake was in Green Peace and rode only a bicycle so he was more impressed with my nod to the environment than my sexy hair shaking moves.

              He stayed across the big round table from me and I sat near some of his friends. I shook hands with his friends and asked getting-to-know-you type questions. I didn’t want to act like that I was there just for him. I was out to make some new friends.  No big deal.

              After a drink or two, we decided to move on to another bar where we could play darts. Blake rode his bike and I rode the scooter. Somewhere in the half mile stretch
between bars, I decided that I liked Blake. To start, he was better looking than any guy that I’d dated and so far. Also I’d learned that he went to college at the Art Institute in L.A., he was an artist who painted and sketched, and his degree was in culinary arts, meaning that he could cook. All of it thrilled me.

              We played darts at the bar, girls against guys, drinking and laughing. The girls won in part because, for no good reason at all, I was and always have been excellent at darts. I don’t even know how to keep score. I just aim and throw really well.

              Blake went to get another drink and I sat on a stool smiling and sipping my rum and Diet Coke as his friend cleaned the scoreboard. When Blake returned, he announced that he’d made a few jukebox selections for us. First up was a
Counting Crows
song. He was throwing darts straight at my heart.

              We started playing again, this time with Blake and me on the same team. I threw my three red-winged darts, good but not my best, and then I stepped back and smiled.

              “Wow, okay,” he said. “You can be on my team anytime.”

              His next song selection came on. It was
Queen’s
“Bohemian Rhapsody,” a song that is absolutely one-hundred-percent impossible not to sing along to. Our game halted for seven minutes of Blake leading the entire bar in a rowdy, laughter-filled sing-along. This was serious.

              We moved from the bar to Blake’s house, just down the street. Then the drinking really began. We did vodka-and-orange-juice shots in a kitchen decorated with some of his art and I taught some yoga moves to his friends in the living room. Looking back, this is proof that I was drunk. Living room yoga is not really great first date behavior, but then again, I was making a good effort to display to him some of my best qualities: I always win at darts and my plow pose is fantastic.

              Later, somewhere in the vodka-and-orange-juice haze, I found myself in the kitchen with Blake. It had to be four in the morning. Easily, he reached out and put his arms around my waist and pulled me to him. He smiled that brilliant and invigorating smile and he kissed me. It was long and it was soft, but it was passionate. It was perfect. 

              When we stopped, I leaned back and looked at him. It was in these moments that I gave too much away. I was suddenly unafraid to show that I was happy, smiling with my mouth and with my eyes. I looked at him without really seeing as I searched for his soul behind his eyes. Then I saw that his face didn’t mirror mine. He was smiling, but it was a funny smile, his eyes squinty. He looked...terrified!

              “What’s wrong?” I asked, pulling back from his hold a bit. It
was
still a smile. “Why do you look so scared?”

              “I am.  I am scared,” he said.

              “Well, don’t be, you’re freaking me out. Just kiss me again.”

              He gladly did. 

              Was there really a crack in his confident facade? Didn’t he know how amazing he was? Why would he be so nervous kissing a girl? I decided that I liked that his confident act wasn’t seamless. It was a good thing that he wasn’t full of himself.