Old Flames (2 page)

“Why’s that?” I asked while following him.

“Because as much fun as I’m having, there’s been something missing.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s that?” I asked as I took a sip of my hot chocolate. Brad stopped suddenly, causing me to walk a few more steps before stopping and looking over to him with a raised eyebrow. Had I upset him somehow? Or hit a nerve? Or was he about to give me the answer that I secretly hoped for even though I felt like I should still be bitter?

“You.”

My heart literally flipped in my chest as I let the answer sink in. I felt a smile creep its way onto my mouth, even though I didn’t want it to. As evil as it sounds, part of me wanted to try and play bitter for a few minutes so Brad knew just how much he had hurt me. That was probably for the better, though, because the more I thought about it, the more dickish that was.

Looking at Brad, I felt the smile widen when I saw his blush and, before I knew it, I was reaching up to gently stroke his cheek. He smiled as he reached his hand up and covered mine, then leaned in and pressed his lips to mine. Closing my eyes, I smiled lightly as I returned the kiss, time seeming to slow down a bit as I soaked in the emotions I had longed to feel after Brad left.

“I missed you,” I whispered as I reluctantly broke the kiss after holding it as long as I could without drawing attention to us. Despite all of the stereotypes that New Yorkers are nothing but a bunch of jaded, attitude-laced robots, it is entirely possible to show too much affection in public. While the scorn isn’t quite the same as I’ve seen it in places like Washington, DC or on Long Island, you can definitely feel when here are multiple sets of eyes staring you down.

“I missed you, too,” Brad whispered as he looked down and fidgeted with his hot chocolate and the chestnuts. Smiling warmly, I gently lifted Brad’s chin so I could look into his eyes, only to give him another, softer kiss. This one didn’t last nearly as long as the first and, unlike the first, which was followed with a feeling of completeness, ended with more of a fluffy romantic feeling.

“Then why did you leave?” I asked quietly, the question having bugged me for the past few months. “Honestly.”

“I… I guess I don’t know,” Brad replied quietly as he hitched his shoulders. I frowned a bit in confusion at the thought of dumping somebody without even knowing why. Tilting my head a bit, I offered Brad an expectant look, hoping it could coax him into continuing. “I honestly did think I needed to be on my own to reach my full potential. I believed that I’d be so busy practicing and rehearsing that I wouldn’t have time for a relationship and I didn’t want to put either of us through that….”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

“But I was wrong. I regretted the decision within the first few nights,” Brad confessed, irritating me a bit. He had regretted it so soon and yet I didn’t see or hear from him until now? Five months after the fact?

The hell?

“Brad, it’s been five months,” I protested as I reached over and liberated a chestnut from the bag in his hand, only to toss it into my mouth. Biting down, I savored the sweet flavor as the chestnut fell apart and seemed to dissolve in my mouth.

“Maybe I was ashamed!” Brad called out while shaking his head. I was sure he would have rubbed his forehead or tried covering his face if his hands weren’t full, but given that wasn’t the case, he chose to look away instead. “Maybe I was scared that you wouldn’t take me back. That you were mad at me.”

I bit my lip. Should I be honest with him or tell him what he probably wanted to hear? Back when we were together, we had this thing. It was more like an agreement than a pact or a promise or anything of that sort. As many couples try when they start dating, we mutually agreed that if we became serious, we’d never lie to each other. Who knows what happened in the time before we were serious, but one thing was certain: I never lied to him. Not once. Now was not the time to start.

“Well, yeah, I was mad,” I said as I took a sip of my hot chocolate while I tried to think of how to continue. “I was mad and upset and I felt betrayed and… you walked out on me after four years. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers, as if proving a point. “Leaving me a confused mess, trying to figure out what your flimsy excuse really meant.”

“AJ, I—”

I didn’t bother to let him apologize. I wasn’t finished with what I was saying and I had the feeling that after he heard the rest of what I had to say, his apology would be less of a reaction to me telling him about how much he upset me and more about… well, whatever he wanted it to be about. I just didn’t want him to feel like he had to apologize out of guilt.

“But it was only for a little while,” I continued, my eyes
watering slightly. I had no idea why I was getting so emotional
over this when I hardly ever cried or showed sadness. Maybe it was because this whole thing called “love” is so inherently personal. “I was bitter after that, but the moment I saw you again…. God, Brad, I couldn’t stay mad at you if I tried. I just want you back. I don’t care about what you did five months ago anymore. That snowball fight? That kiss? God, I miss you. I just want you back.”

 “I missed you, too,” Brad whispered quietly before giving me a gentle peck on the lips. I grinned before putting my hot chocolate cup to my mouth and taking a long drag of the now lukewarm drink. “So… did you decorate the apartment?”

I chuckled a bit and shook my head in response to the question. Christmas decorations had always been Brad’s gig, not mine. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a complete Scrooge by any means. I just found a small fake tree with a bauble or
two to be a sufficient decoration. Brad had always
complained I was too low key, though. So, being the Christmas sprite he is, he took it upon himself to go out one day and buy us enough Christmas decorations and ornaments to last us until the zombie apocalypse.

“No,” I said simply before offering a light shrug as I started to aimlessly walk deeper into the park, Brad quickly following. “Well, not as much as you did.”

“What do you mean?”

“I put up a miniature tree on the side table next to the sofa.”

“Miniature tree? Does it have any room for lights?”

“It has a few.”

“What about decorations?”

“A bauble. Blue with white snowflakes.”

“
A
bauble,” Brad said skeptically, crossing his arms and looking at me with a degree of disappointment one would expect a mother to have when she caught her child stealing from the cookie jar.

“Yes, a bauble,” I repeated with a chuckle as I finished up my hot chocolate and took a few more chestnuts from the bag.

“Oh, no. You’re not getting away with just a bauble. You still got your Frank Sinatra CDs?”

“Perhaps,” I said with a smirk, knowing exactly where this was going. I guess it was a good thing I couldn’t bring myself to toss the Christmas decorations when he left—even better that I forgot about them until winter came. A month earlier and I might have tossed them, but I didn’t see them again until last week when it first snowed. “Why?”

“Because it is a week before Christmas and all you have is a tiny-ass tree with a bauble,” Brad replied as he thrust the bag of chestnuts into my hand and grabbed my upper arm before starting off towards the exit to Central Park South. I stumbled a bit before quickly falling into step with him, almost dropping the chestnuts in the process. “And we’re going to fix that.”

I chuckled lightly and shook my head as Brad stepped to the curb and hailed a cab. Only him.

“How about a real tree?” he asked with a huge grin.

Oh God….

A
N
HOUR
and a half later, the two of us finally found ourselves in my apartment. Brad was searching for my Frank Sinatra CDs while I tipped the Christmas tree delivery men, giving them an extra ten for dealing with us on the ride. I was sure they’d heard enough about Christmas after Brad talked my ear off about how much fun it was going to be decorating the tree and putting up the garland and setting the candles in the window. The funny thing was, as annoying as it was to listen to him go on and on about how he wasn’t sure if the garland needed any lights to be replaced, I enjoyed it. Maybe because I was so happy to have Brad back, I don’t know. But for once in my life, I didn’t tell him that he was talking about Christmas too much.

“Thanks, guys. Take care,” I said as I opened the front door for the two men and allowed them to leave while Brad continued to fumble around my hall closet. We all wished each other a Merry Christmas, regardless of whether any of us were Christian. Closing the door behind them, I turned around and let out a relieved sigh, the sunset starting to shine through the living room window.

“I found Sinatra!” Brad called out triumphantly from the closet a few feet away. I chuckled and rolled my eyes, not bothering to tell him he could have just used my iPod in the sound dock. There was something he liked about the CD player, no matter how old school it was.

“I’m gonna make some coffee. You want something to eat?” I asked as I made my way into the kitchen and washed my hands before opening a cabinet and pulling out a bag of ground coffee beans.

“Do you have Christmas cookies?”

I couldn’t help but facepalm as Brad made the request. Whether or not I actually had the dough for Christmas cookies in my cupboard seemed to be beside the point. I don’t know if it was possible to overdose on Christmas, but I felt like I was about to find out. Most of me thought that this was Brad’s way of overcompensating for lost time. He’d never been quite
this
into decorating for Christmas.  I mean, yeah, the Sinatra and the garland and tree were normal, but he’d never asked for Christmas cookies and window candles before.

Should I have been scared? I wasn’t a huge holiday person.

“Nope. I’ve got cereal and milk, though,” I suggested with a shrug as Frank Sinatra’s voice began to fill the apartment while I turned around and replaced the filter paper in the coffee machine against the wall on the small kitchen island opposite the sink.

“Milk and cereal?” Brad’s somewhat disgusted voice replied from the living room as I pulled the coffee pot out of its housing. “No cookies?”

“Brad.”

“Yeah?”

“We have
plenty
of Christmas decorations. We don’t need cookies or candles in the window, or—”

“But I already bought some candles!” Brad pouted as he made his way around the corner and into the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator in order to watch me fill the coffee pot with water.

“For your place?” I asked as I shut off the faucet, turned around, and poured the water into the machine’s special water compartment.

“For here.”

I frowned in confusion before looking up at Brad, only to be regarded with a shit-eating grin. Something told me that he knew I couldn’t stay mad at him. Probably because, while I wasn’t a pushover, I happily indulged him with gifts and expensive dinners. Or at least as expensive as I could afford on a public servant’s pay scale. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to assume that I’d also forgive him for almost anything. Choosing to dodge the question, I just shook my head lightly and grinned.

“You’re one of a kind, Brad,” I whispered as I leaned over and gave him a soft kiss as I slid the coffee pot back into its housing.

“You bet,” Brad replied adorably before sauntering out of the kitchen and into the living room where he promptly busied himself with opening a box of tree lights and untangling them. I shook my head, chuckled, and smiled as I pressed the button to start the brewing process. Looking up, I rested my forearms on the counter and leaned against them, grinning as I watched Brad rock back and forth to Sinatra singing “Auld Lang Syne” while he worked.

Once all of the lights were untangled, had been tested, and lit up enough to satisfy the Christmas Sprite, the two of us set to decorating the tree just as we had each year for the past four-and-a-half years—I added half a year because our first year together we had to do one tree for each of our apartments. While Brad stood on the side of the tree closest to the power outlet, I waited on the other side. Soon, we began wrapping the lights around the tree, taking turns as the string came around to our half of the tree.

“So I take it you’ve decorated your place already?” I asked, breaking the silence as I reached over and took the length of lights that Brad was holding out to me, wrapping them around the tree before passing them over to him so that he could finish.

“Bitch, please,” he replied as he peered around the side of the tree and gave me a somewhat sassy expression, taking the small amount of string left and tying it off at the top of the tree. I crossed my arms and grinned in amusement while Brad leaned over and plugged the bottom of the long string of lights into a socket on the wall. The tree lit up almost immediately, the lights a combination of various reds, blues, greens, oranges, and purples.

“It’s beautiful,” I said quietly, just like I had had every year.

“It’s not done yet, AJ,” Brad replied with a smirk, the same as he had every year.

The smile I gave after that felt much bigger than it was last year. I think it was finally sinking in that I had just barely avoided losing moments like this. Moments where everything fell into place like a puzzle, each piece perfectly connecting to the other.

Obviously, the ornaments were the next order of business. To be perfectly honest, they were nothing special, just a small multicolored collection of glass baubles with a box of assorted shatterproof gold and yellow ornaments that I got for ten bucks at Duane Reade and one or two NYPD ornaments. Carefully opening the boxes, I sat on the sofa and pulled out each glass ornament one by one. I had learned early on that there was a way to go about pulling the ornaments out of the box so that they didn’t scratch or get damaged. Had Brad been this particular about anything else, I might have told him to go get checked out for OCD.

“So… I have next Friday off. Director’s gonna be out the weekend because of his daughter’s surgery,” Brad commented as he hung a gold pinecone-shaped ornament on the tree.