Thou Shalt Not (32 page)

I used the valet service, and we walked into the lavishly decorated entryway. Her eyes were big and bright, and it was obvious she hadn’t been anywhere quite that unique. Reds and golds surrounded us, as well as photos of people that could have been displayed at Disney’s Haunted Mansion. I always felt like I was walking through a more ornate version of Gosford Park, right down to the staff that was hustling and bustling about. They always stayed out of the way though, in the shadows, letting the diner take in their surroundings.

“This is wild,” she said as we were led to our table.

April was wearing a sexy and simple red dress. The eyes of men all over the restaurant, and a few women, were following her as we reached the table.

“You really do look lovely tonight,” I said as we sat down. I had told her this when I picked her up, but she needed to hear it at least five more times. “And judging from the looks of things, I am not the only one who thinks so.”

“Oh stop,” she said, placing her napkin in her lap.

“Well, it’s true. Everyone was looking, even the women.”

“You are the one I want with their eyes on me,” she said, smiling. “And a few other things.”

“We could skip all of this,” I said, bending down to speak into her ear. “I’d rather have you in my mouth than anything on this menu.”

To my enjoyment, her face turned red and her top teeth clutched at her lower lip.

“After,” she said. “We will play after dinner.”

I could live with that.

Martin was our server’s name, and I didn’t like him. For starters, I could see his nose hair, which is the most off-putting thing in the world. You should never be able to see a man’s nose hair, but if there is nose hair to be seen, odds are I would always see it. It’s like my eyes zero right in on it. You might as well wear a t-shirt that says
I have no personal hygiene.
I wanted to hand him tweezers and tiny scissors and tell him to come back in ten minutes. And his French-ish accent didn’t sound genuine. I could imagine him going out back for a smoke and talking like one of the Goodfellas.

Maybe I was being too harsh.

I was going to pay good money for this; I could be critical.

Martin went off to bring our wine, and we placed an order for an appetizer. I had convinced April to try the steak tartare, although I had been worried she would turn her nose up at it.

“My family used to eat menudo, Luke,” she had said. “If I can handle cow stomach, I can handle raw meat.”

Martin’s wine suggestion for the tartare was a disappointment. Even April made a face when she took a drink from her glass. Maybe we weren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate it. The steak was delicious though.

Then it came time for more steak, this time of the cooked variety. April surprised me by ordering the Delmonico, and I got the Strip. Martin suggested we order the Okinawan sweet potato as one of our sides, and when I took my first bite, I wanted to hug him and adopt him as a brother. He could even keep his nose hair. Good food can do that to a person.

“Oh my god,” April said, putting her fork down. “I will never be able to make sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving after this. It’ll just be embarrassing to even bother.”

“I think the potato was more of a revelation than the steak, which is obviously delicious.”

“Listen to you, ‘more of a revelation’,” she said, laughing. “I swear you’re an eighty-four-year-old dork.”

I grinned at her. She was right.

As Martin removed our plates, we had to have the serious discussion about dessert.

“God,” she said, “I don’t know if I can come here and not get dessert. But, I’m so full I don’t think I would enjoy it.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Then I added, “What if we come back sometime this week, maybe Friday? Just for dessert.”

“If you’re going to ask me out on a date, you have to actually ask me.”

“Well, wasn’t this a date? Sort of?”

“No sir,” she said. “You told me this was a celebration dinner. Big difference.”

She smiled, and my heart melted like the butter on the sweet potato.

“You are right,” I said. “Fine. April, would you go out with me on Friday night? I know a great place we can go.”

“I’d love to,” she said.

I wanted to run around the restaurant and high five everyone. I might have even chest-bumped Martin.

I was worried that she would back off once we had sex. Get weird, or regret her decision. Agreeing to another date was a good sign.

God. I was dating a married woman.

I paid the bill, left Martin a tip I wouldn’t have envisioned giving him in the first few minutes, and we began the drive home.

We crossed the bridge, and it dawned on me that I had gone the entire dinner without once worrying what would happen if someone from the school saw us. I hadn’t been paranoid about getting caught. Maybe I was evolving. Maybe I was becoming reckless.

“Thank you for dinner, Luke,” she said, taking hold of my hand as I drove.

“It was my pleasure, April.”

“When I told Marco I had gotten the job, he flipped out. Wasn’t happy for me for a second. It’s weird to be around a man who wants to celebrate something like this.”

“You make me want to celebrate the ability to breathe.”

After I said it, I nearly facepalmed myself. Then, I nearly facepalmed myself for thinking the word “facepalm” in my head. But, the students always used it when they did something stupid. What can I say? They have rubbed off on me.

“You’re a good man,” she said.

I was waiting for a “but,” but it never came. We drove in silence for a little bit, until we neared the main road that led toward the beach, and toward both our homes.

“I need to stop by my house and get a few things,” she said. “I might even get my car, so that you won’t have to drop me off in the morning.”

“Okay,” was all I could say. But my mind was racing. She had no intention of going home, obviously. She wanted to spend the night again. And hadn’t even bothered asking. She was perfect. I didn’t even have to work at this.

I wasn’t ready to take her home yet, though.

There was a specific neighborhood about three minutes from mine that I had frequented as a kid. When you turned into the neighborhood, a massive oak tree in the middle greeted you, creating a natural median in the road. The road winded back through many more oak trees, none quite as big as the first one. But, it was a beautiful neighborhood. The houses were visually impressive, although not quite mansion caliber like you would see in April’s neighborhood.

“Where are we going?” she asked. She was looking up at the trees as we drove. Her question seemed more like an afterthought.

“You’ll see.”

“You really like your surprises.”

The sky was clear and the moon was full. Moonlight shone through the tree canopy, piercing the road with occasional light.

After you passed the first six houses, you turned left. If you were walking the neighborhood and were unfamiliar with it, it would have been easy to lose your bearings. And you most certainly wouldn’t know how close you were to the water. But after the turn, and down the road a little ways further, there was a break in the trees and houses and you would find a large fishing dock that stretched out over the Intercoastal.

Friends and I used to come fish here late at night, after the residents had gone to bed. Technically, the dock was private property. But, we were young and carefree.

The dock that I had fished on was wiped out during Hurricane Charlie a few years before, and a brand new one was in its place a year later. I hadn’t been on the new dock yet.

We were still dressed in our Bern’s attire as I parked along the street, and we walked through the grass to the dock.

“Full moon,” I said as we walked. “All the crazies come out tonight.”

“God, it’s so true,” she laughed. “It’s like clockwork with him. He’s always a little nuts, but when there is a full room, I do anything in my power to avoid him.”

“Well then, thank God for Cuba,” I said. “We should have him shipped there every full moon.”

“Let’s just ship him there permanently.”

She took my hand, and we walked onto the dock.

Since the dock was new it didn’t smell of fish, and there were no shrimp heads or squid guts or anything else littering the floor of the dock.

“It’s beautiful out here,” she said.

“We used to come out here to fish,” I said. “Never took much stock at the time of how nice it was.”

“This would have been such a great area to grow up.”

There was a bench along the railing and we sat down to look out over the water. I put my arm around her and she laid her head on my shoulder. I absently started playing with her hair.

“You know,” I said, “I have a friend I graduated high school with named Laura. We both went into teaching, but after she graduated college she moved to North Carolina, got married, and started working in a high school up there. At the end of last school year, she sent me a message on Facebook to tell me that one of their English teachers was leaving. Asked if I would be interested in applying.”

“Did you?”

“I thought hard about it. I mean, after Carrie died I kind of wondered what my place was here anymore. Yeah, I’m from here, but after going through all that I was tempted for a long time to just drop everything here and go somewhere new. Start fresh.”

“You rarely answer a question directly, you know,” she said. “It’s kind of frustrating.”

“Not the first time I’ve been told that,” I said.

“So what made you stay? Did you apply and they turned you down?”

“Laura sent me the paperwork. I filled it all out. I was on my way to send everything out, and Robin called me. Her tire had gone flat on the bridge to Tampa. It was during the day and her husband was at work. So she called me.”

“But, you still could have sent them afterwards, right? Or even the next day.”

“Yeah. But I’m kind of, I don’t know, maybe superstitious is the right word. I had told Robin I was going to apply. She thought it was a great opportunity and was excited for me. She said that she and Walt would be praying. And as I was driving, I remember even thinking how smoothly everything seemed to be going. How it seemed like nothing was going to stop it. I had even started looking at houses up there.”

“Slightly premature,” she said, rubbing my chest with her hand.

“Yeah, but you know how it is. I was mentally preparing myself for the idea. And then, bam, tire goes out. They had just put new tires on the car a month before. And so I drove out there and spent the afternoon fixing her car on the bridge. Finally, I got her back on the road. And Walt called me from work and was beyond grateful. I guess Robin hadn’t even told him until afterwards because she knew he couldn’t have left his job to help. So she didn’t want to worry him.”

“What does Walt do?”

“He’s an air traffic controller at the Clearwater airport.”

“Oh wow, Yeah, he wouldn’t have been leaving work then.”

“Exactly. So, he called and was so thankful. And I guess because they had always been so good to me, I felt like I was a little in debt to them. Not in a bad way, just that I wanted to repay them for how they had treated me, you know?”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“So, for whatever reason, I just took the tire popping and me losing the day as a sign that maybe I wasn’t supposed to get to the post office to send out the paperwork. Then Robin got sick. And then you walked into my life.”

I decided to just go for it. Fuck it.

“And I know that her tire popped for a reason.”

“You knew right away?”

“I knew you were something special. I knew I had never met anyone like you. You turned around that day and it was like a scene from a movie. The ones where the guy sees the girl and she is brightly lit, like the light is shining only on her. Everything else goes blurry and fades out. I swear I thought you’d notice that I froze and think I was a creep.”

“I think I was too nervous about working again to notice that. Obviously, I did notice you check out my ring.”

“Sorry for making that so obvious.”

“It was cute. And I remember thinking I never had a teacher who looked like you when I was in high school.”

I laughed.

“Yeah, you were probably thankful!”

“I probably would have flirted my ass off.”

“I’m not even sure how to respond to that,” I said, laughing again. “I can’t say I would have flirted back, or that would make me a pedophile creep.”

“True. Creep.”

I turned around on the bench to face her. Her skin was so pale I could see the veins in her neck. She looked like a ghost in a red dress.

“Look, I’m going to be honest here...not that I haven’t been honest up to this point, but you know what I mean,” I started.

She just smiled and nodded. Her dark hair shifted around her face and for a moment I lost track of my thoughts.

“I loved Carrie.”

April immediately perked up at the mention of my late wife’s name. These were things she wanted to know about me. These were things Holly wanted to know about me. But, I so rarely shared thoughts or feelings related to that period of my life. I felt like I needed to say this though.