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“Thanks. You have, too. It’s nice, comforting even, to see your photos in magazines and all over town. It hurt at first, but now I’m always pleasantly surprised at the sight of them,” she replied.
“Me too,” I admitted with a laugh. “You know me, I’m the guy who is always so unsure of himself, fumbling around with a camera trying to get a picture of something decent. Hell, tomorrow we’ll be lucky if you don’t end up headless in your spread.”
She was laughing loudly now, and it was a beautiful sound. “Great! I’m sure my investors will love it. Just make sure you get the shoes in the shot; those are the important pieces, not me. Okay?”
“Will you be wearing your shoes?” I asked.
“Of course! Who else’s would I be wearing, silly boy?” Her tone was still playful and light. This was how our first conversation should have gone.
“I should have guessed.” I drained my drink quickly.
“Getting drunk on me over there?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. It helps me ignore the mess we’ve made so I can just talk to you and pretend everything is as simple as I wish it were.”
“Okay, you want things to be that simple? How about you and I make a deal: we don’t bring up the past, and we leave all those painful questions behind us for now,” Mia said.
“I thought you wanted to know what happened to me. I thought you wanted answers.”
“Maybe I like it better being kept in the dark.”
“But you’re afraid of the dark.”
“Not this kind of dark, because at least I have you here to keep me company. We’ll deny all of it together. What do you say, cowboy? Want to pretend it isn’t real?” Her voice took on a playful tone yet again.
“Sure. I’ll keep you company in the dark if that’s what you want.” I almost whispered the last part.
“Yes, I do. At least, this way, I get to have you.”
I smiled at her admission. No one spoke after that—the first long silence since the call began. I couldn’t speak, too afraid to ruin our perfection. Apparently, neither could she. So instead, she ended the call.
“Night, Terry.”
“Night, Mia.”
Click.I lowered my phone slowly and poured myself another drink. I took a long sip before turning the lights out and heading to bed. My mind was full of thoughts of her. The only way to deal with them was to embrace them and meet her in my dreams.
* * *
Mia
I stared at the phone in my hand, trying to make sense of the conversation we’d just had. It was honest. He meant what he said. The whole time we talked, I could see his face in my mind as if he were sitting across from me.
He was probably sitting in his apartment or hotel, occasionally running his hands through his hair. The strands would just fall right back into his eyes, causing him to take his hands through it again. I smiled at the thought—what it would feel like to touch his hair.
I still made him nervous, he’d openly admitted that. He couldn’t deny it because he was drinking. Terry wasn’t a big drinker; he only ever had one or two to calm his nerves. The clinking of the glass had given him away. If I knew him like I thought I did, he was sipping on Jack Daniel’s.
I sat in my apartment—our old apartment—thinking over the deal I had just made with him. It was an odd place to find myself, given the last twenty-four hours. Granted, it was all based on a lie, but this wasn’t something I hadn’t had with Terry before.
I believed that my relationship with Terry had become a lie before he left for London. How could it not have? After all we had together, he’d walked away. Wrote his goodbye on a postcard. At some point, the life I had been leading—the life I thought I had—had become a lie. I just had no idea when it started.
This was a realization I came to a few weeks after our relationship ended. It made the moving on process more difficult because the demise of our relationship made me question everything I thought I knew about it. I thought we were in love and happy. A simple phone call and postcard changed all of that. It was a long, painful process that left me beaten down, confused, and easy prey for a man.
I pulled myself up off the sofa. It had been a long day, and now it was time to get some rest. Glancing around the apartment we once shared, I sighed. The place hadn’t changed much. It’s just missing one of its tenants, I thought as I made my way to bed.
