One True Loves (13 page)

I have to let you go and I have to ask you to let me go.

I truly believe that if I work hard, I can have the sort of life for myself that you always wanted for me. A happy life. A satisfied life. Where I am loved and I love in return.

I need your permission to find room to love someone else.

I'm so sorry that we never got the future we talked about. Our life together would have been grand.

But I'm going out into the world with an open heart now. And I'm going to go wherever life takes me.

I hope you know how beautiful and freeing it was to love you when you were here.

You were the love of my life.

Maybe it's selfish to want more; maybe it's greedy to want another love like that.

But I can't help it.

I do.

So I said yes to a date with Sam Kemper. I like to think you would like him for me, that you'd approve. But I also want you to know, in case it doesn't go without saying, that no one could ever replace you. It's just that I want more love in my life, Jesse.

And I'm asking for your blessing to go find it.

Love,

Emma

I read it over and over and over. And then I folded it, put it in an envelope, wrote his name on it, and tucked it away.

I got in bed and I fell asleep.

I slept soundly and woke as the sunlight started beaming in from my window. I felt rested and renewed, as if the earth and I were in perfect agreement about when the sun should rise.

W
hen I showed up at the bar, Sam was wearing a dark denim button-down shirt and flat-front gray chinos. He looked like he might have put pomade in his hair, and when I leaned in to hug him hello, I noticed that he was wearing cologne.

I'd known it was a date. I'd wanted it to be a date.

But the cologne, the smell of wood and citrus, made it all crystal clear.

Sam liked me.

And I liked him.

And maybe it was that simple.

I knew it wasn't. But maybe it could be.

“You look great,” Sam said.

When I got ready that evening, I'd put on a tight black skirt and a long-sleeved black-and-white-striped T-shirt that clung to the better parts of me. I took more care applying my mascara than I had in years. When it clumped, I used a safety pin to straighten my lashes, the way I'd seen my mom do when I was a child.

And then I put on pale pink ballet flats and headed toward the door.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror just as I was leaving the house.

Something wasn't right. This wouldn't do. I turned around
and exchanged my flats for black heels. Suddenly, my legs looked longer than they had any right to be.

Feeling confident, I went back into the bathroom and outlined the edges of my lips in a perfect crimson line, filling it in with a lipstick that was called Russian Red. I'd only worn it once a few months ago when I took Marie out for a fancy dinner in Back Bay. But I'd liked it then. And I liked it now.

When I made my way back to the front door and once again caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I felt borderline indestructible.

I looked good.

I knew I looked good.

This was my good look.

“Thank you,” I said to Sam there at the bar. I pressed my lips together and I sat down on the stool next to his. “You're no slouch yourself.”

The bartender, a tall, formidable woman with long, dark hair, came over and asked me what I wanted to drink. I quickly perused their signature cocktails list and nothing struck a chord. It all just looked like various ways to mix fruit juice and vodka.

“Gimlet?” I said.

She nodded and turned away, starting to mix.

“What are you having?” I asked him. He was sitting in front of a pale draft beer. “I hope you haven't paid for that yet. It's supposed to be on me.”

Sam looked over at me and smiled a sorrowful smile. “They made me pay when they handed over the beer,” he said. “But that just means you'll have to buy my second.”

“Fair enough.”

The bartender put my drink in front of me and I handed her my credit card. She disappeared.

“I mean, you say that, but for my second beer, I plan on ordering the most expensive one on the menu.”

We were both sitting facing forward, looking at each other with glances and side eyes.

“That's OK,” I said. “It's the least I can do since you took the time to teach me this.”

I started playing “Chopsticks” on the bar with my right hand as if the keys were underneath it. Sam angled his body toward me to watch.

“Very good!” he said when I was done.

“A plus?” I asked.

He thought about it while sipping his beer. “A-minus,” he said as he put his beer down. “You just missed it by a hair.”

“What?” I said. “Where did I go wrong?”

“You missed a note.”

“No, I didn't!” I said.

“Yes, you did. You did this,” he said, hitting the bar with the same fingers I'd hit it with just a few moments ago. “And it's this.” He hit the bar again. It looked exactly like the first one.

“That's the same thing.”

Sam laughed and shook his head. “Nope. It's not.”

“Do it again.”

“Which one?”

“Do what I did and then do what the real thing is.”

He started to repeat mine.

“No, no,” I said. “Slower. So I can spot the difference.”

He started over and slowed it down.

He did mine.

And then he did his.

And there it was. Right toward the end. I'd skipped a key.

I smiled, knowing I was wrong. “Aw, man!” I said. “I did mess it up.”

“That's OK. You're still very good for a beginner.”

I gave him a skeptical look.

“I mean,” he said, his whole body shifting away from the bar and toward me. “You play the bar beautifully.”

I rolled my eyes at him.

“I'm serious, actually. If you got into it, I bet you could be really good.”

“You probably say that to all the girls,” I said, waving my hand at him, dismissing the compliment. I gracefully picked up my gimlet and slowly brought the filled-to-the-brim glass to my lips. It was sweet and clean. Just the littlest bit dizzying.

“Just my students,” he said.

I looked at him, confused.

“Now seems like a good time to tell you I'm a music teacher,” he said.

I smiled at him. “Ah, that's awesome. What a perfect job for you.”

“Thanks,” he said. “And what about you? Are you some big travel writer now? My mom said she saw your name in
Travel + Leisure.
”

I laughed. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I was. I did that for a while. But, uh . . . no, now I'm actually running the store.”

“No way,” Sam said, disbelieving.

“Shocking, I know,” I said. “But it's true.”

“Wow,” he said. “Colin Blair's greatest wish. There's a Blair running Blair Books.”

I laugh. “I guess dreams do come true,” I said. “For my dad at least.”

“But not for you?” Sam said.

“Not the dream I originally dreamt, as you know,” I said. “But I'm starting to think you don't always know what your dreams are. Some of us have to run smack into one before we see it.”

“Ah,” Sam said. “Cheers to that.” He tilted his glass toward me and I clinked mine against his. “May I change the subject ever so briefly?” he said.

“Be my guest,” I said.

“You seem to get even more beautiful with time,” he said.

“Oh, stop it,” I said, pushing his shoulder away with my hand.

I was flirting. Me. Flirting.

It feels so good to flirt. No one ever talks about that. But in that moment, I felt like flirting was the very thing that made the world go around.

The excitement of wondering what the other person will say next. The thrill of knowing someone is looking at you, liking what they see. The rush of looking at someone and liking what you see in them. Flirting is probably just as much about falling in love with yourself as it is with someone else.

It's about seeing yourself through someone's eyes and realizing there is plenty to like about yourself, plenty of reasons someone might hang on your every word.

“So you're a music teacher,” I told him. “Where do you teach?”

“Actually, not far from Blair Books. I'm just over in Concord,” he said.

“Are you serious?” I said. “You've been that close by and you never stopped in to say hello?”

Sam looked at me and said, very sincerely, “If I had known you'd be there, I assure you, I'd have rushed over.”

I could not stop the smile from spreading across my face. I grabbed my gimlet and took a sip. Sam's beer was almost finished.

“Why don't I get you another?” I said.

He nodded and I waved the bartender over.

“Your most expensive beer on the menu,” I said to her gallantly. Sam laughed.

“That's a pretty rich stout, are you sure you want that?” the bartender asked.

I looked at Sam. He put his hands in the air as if to say, “You're in charge.”

“That'll be fine,” I said to her.

She left and I turned back to him. We were both quiet for a minute, unsure what to say next.

“What's your favorite song to play?” I asked him. It was a stupid question. I knew it when I asked it.

“On the piano?”

“Sure.”

“What do you want to hear?” he asked.

I laughed. “I didn't mean now. There's no piano now.”

“What are you talking about? We played ‘Chopsticks' right here on this bar.”

I laughed at him, game to play, but suddenly having a hard time remembering what songs are played on a piano. “How about ‘Piano Man'?”

Sam made a face. “A little on the nose, don't you think?”

“It's all I could think of!”

“All right, all right,” he said. “It's actually a good choice anyway because it has a nice bit of show-off flair at the beginning.”

He straightened his posture and rolled up his sleeves, as if he were playing an actual instrument. He moved a napkin out of
the way and then picked up my drink. “If you could please get this out of my way, miss,” he said.

“Certainly, sir,” I said.

He interlaced his fingers and stretched them out away from his chest.

“Are you ready?” he asked me.

“I was born ready.”

He nodded his head dramatically and began to run his hands over the bar, as if there were a full piano right there in front of him. I watched as his fingers glided over the nonexistent keys. He was so confident as he pretended to play that I almost believed it.

“Excuse me,” he said as he was playing, “but I believe the harmonica would have come in by now.”

“What? I can't play the harmonica.”

“Sure you can.”

“I don't know the first thing.”

“You must know how musicians hold harmonicas. I assume you've seen at least one blues band in your life.”

“I mean, sure.”

He kept his head down, looking at the bar, playing. People were starting to look at us. He didn't care. Neither did I.

“Let's hear it.”

I surprised myself and I did it. I put my hands up to my mouth as if there were a harmonica between them and I ran my mouth over the space it would have occupied.

“Slower,” Sam said. “You're not Neil Young.”

I laughed and stopped for a minute. “I don't even know what I'm doing!”

“You're doing great! Don't stop.”

So I played along.

“All right, wait for a minute; there's no harmonica in this part.”

I put my fake harmonica down as he kept playing. I could tell he was going through the full song, each note. I watched how effortless it was for him, how his fingers seemed to move with the expectation they'd make a beautiful sound. And yet they were making no sound at all.

“Now!” he said. “Get that harmonica going. This is your moment.”

“It is? I didn't know!” I said, desperately pulling my hands up to my face and really committing to it.

And then Sam slowed and I could tell the song was ending. I took my hands down and I watched him as he hit the last few notes. And then he was done. And he looked at me.

“Next request?” he asked.

“Have dinner with me?” I asked him.

It just popped out of my mouth. I wanted to talk more, to spend more time with him, to hear more about him. I wanted more. “We can eat here or anywhere nearby if you're in the mood for something in particular.”

“Emma . . .” he said seriously.

“Yeah?”

“Can we get burritos?”

Dos Tacos was brightly lit with orange and yellow undertones instead of the flattering blue light of the bar. But he still looked handsome. And I still felt beautiful.