“Firefighting? Really, Rem? That is seriously what you want to do with your life?!” Cora shrieked, her face reddening with anger that was unfair and misplaced. “I thought this was a stupid, childish phase, and I was letting you live out your little GI Joe, macho fantasy while we were in college.”
“What did you just say to me? ThisISmy life, Cora. I am a dedicated, highly trained, highly qualified firefighter. I am going to serve my community, save lives. There’s nothing fuckingchildishabout it. There is no fantasy or romanticizing the danger or the sacrifice of this commitment.How fucking dare you.” I looked at her, and it was like I was seeing her for the first time. And I hated it.
Being with Cora was easy until it wasn’t. I should have ended things with her a long time ago, but our lives were so tangled and twisted together. Breaking up with her was not like ending things with a typical college girlfriend. Cora had been my girlfriend since high school. She was ingrained in every part of my life. Our little town looked at us like we were the prize couple and put pressure on our relationship—I despised that, but Cora loved it.
Standing there with her arms crossed, Cora said indignantly, “So you’re not going to do this with me? What’s going to happen?” Her phone beeped with an incoming call on thebed before she could fire off more stupid questions. I picked up the phone and looked at the screen, blinking at a familiar, unwelcome name.
“Why is Jared calling you?” I asked in a hushed voice, knowing I was not going to like her answer. There was no reason this dick should be contactingmy girlfriend. He was a TA for one of her previous classes, and they had an inappropriate relationship. She promised it didn’t go past the extremely flirty banter and him asking her out a few times. She chalked it up to her being inexperienced and unable to see it for what it was since we started dating so young. That was a year earlier. I told her I would forgive her and forget about the whole thing as long as she never spoke to him again. So his name flashing on her phone signaled nothing but doom for our relationship.
Cora’s entire haughty, angry demeanor shifted on a dime. Tears welling in her brown eyes, she said, “Please, Rem, I-I-I can, let me explain. It, you, I mean, you were always so busy, and so many classes, and working ...” She was stammering, scrambling to put a coherent sentence together, but I cut her off.
“So all this time I have been killing myself to finish my degree on time, so we can graduate, move home.Home. Where I thought we could finally have some more time, hopefully get our relationship back on track, and have time to work things out. Because you and I both know it hasn’t been great. I was willing to at least try ... But you have been fucking around behind my back? How long, Cora?” Not one of her pretend tears had fallen onto her cheeks yet. I just stared at her, waiting for an answer.
“The whole time,” she whispered.
I ripped my hands across my hair. Rage ran through my veins. I was furious, more with myself for not seeing what a selfish, manipulative, opportunist Cora was—had apparently always been. The red flags hadbeen waving right in my face, and I decided they didn’t matter because I prided myself on being a man that could be relied on and stuck to his commitments. And look what that got me? A cheating girlfriend that shit on my dreams.
“Get the fuck out.” I shoved the ringing phone into her hands and pointed to the door.
“What about the things I have here?” Cora had the nerve to pout at me.
“I’ll fucking burn them,” I roared at her and she scrambled out the door, seeing that I was not going to listen to her bullshit for one more second.
Snapping out of that long-buried memory, I am actually smirking thinking of that last thing I told Cora. That I would burn all her shit.
I didn’t, but I really wanted to.
Never in a million years did I think I could ever remember that night and not be stabbed with the deep shame I experienced, pain twisting my heart where I thought love for a girl I knew my whole life was housed. But today, I feel grateful that my life with Cora ended the way it did—forcing me to let go of something I had been holding on to for too long, assuming it was love because everyone around us expected it to be.
We have a lot more in common than Lainey realizes. I guess she was the only one that got to live out the “burning your ex’s shit fantasy” between the two of us, and honestly thank fuck for it because that night brought me to my dream girl. Spending time with Lainey is proving just how much of my life I wasted with Cora, because that wasn’t living, and it certainly wasn’t love.
14
Remington
Lainey’s journal is like diving into her brain, seeing little glimpses of who she was, and how she felt throughout the year. She mostly put down song lyrics, book quotes from things she was reading, or random stories. But every once in a while she would write about her day or thoughts she needed to get out. Those are the pieces that really get to me. Sometimes the things she said made me laugh at her surprisingly sarcastic humor. Other times my heart ached when I could feel her anxieties seeping into each word. I wanted to reach into the pages and pull those worries away. It was hard for me to sit here and rewrite all her doubts and insecurities, but it would be wrong to not give her what I promised. I told Lainey I would copy what she wrote and give it back to her.
Feeling the rain soak my clothes when I ran today was just what I needed. These past few weeks have been a mix of emotions and overwhelming anxietyattacks that I don’t feel like looking at too closely. I’d rather let the water today sweep them away.
Raindrops on my skin ... the only kind of water I love, or brings me some sort of comfort, well, bedsides a soak in a deep claw-foot tub of course.
I am also going to add my own improvements to her pages and hope she doesn’t kill me for it. With every transfer from the old journal, I add to the page, filling the blank space with my own drawings ... of flowers.
Every single kind I can think of from memory, and when I run out of those I Google more images and work from there. I told Lainey I would find a way to give herallof the flowers, and this is a great way to help accomplish just that. Each one I draw, I add the name and a little description at the bottom of the page. I want her to be able to name them and understand why I chose each one for that particular page or matched it with what memory she wrote. I knew as soon as Lainey told me about her flower situation through our texting that I was going to not only fill her apartment with flowers but also figure out a way to give her something more permanent.
Not many people know that I love to draw. It’s not something I intended to keep a close secret necessarily, but it definitely isn’t a talent that I openly like to broadcast. Cora had lots of nasty little quips about me “doodling” and after that, I kept to myself when I pulled out my artistic side. When someone takes something that is so personal, so woven into who you are, which all forms of art seem to be, it’s impossible to disconnect yourself from a partner’s dismissive and demeaning attitude toward it, even years later. Protectingmyself from prying eyes and any kind of further persecution has just been easier than opening myself up again.
Normally I draw at home on my back deck or in my art space in my office to decompress. So me sitting here at the fire station drawing flowers of all things has caught the attention of my friends. Eli, of course, knows that I draw. More than half of my tattoos are based on the concepts I sketched, and my friend Keller Shore, in Norfolk who is part owner of a shop there and an amazing artist, inked them all for me.
“Hey, Rem, what are you doing?” Adrian Garcia asks me, as he sets down a huge pan of his mom’s famous enchiladas. We all love it when it’s his night to cook because his mom passed on her chef genes to him, and he spoils us. My mouth starts to water, and I close up the journal as the rest of the crew come to the table, drawn in by the aroma and the rumbles of impatient bellies.
“Oh, uh, I am just working on a project. Lainey needed help with an old journal, and I am transferring what she wrote into this new one,” I say quickly, rubbing my neck, hoping he doesn’t press, but of course he does.
“Why do you need to redo what she already wrote down?” Adrian asks.
All eight of us that are on shift, including Eli, have settled into the table and are grabbing plates, eyes on me, obviously ready for a story. Most of them met Lainey, and they all are invested. I look to Eli, and he gives me a nod, confirming that it’s a safe space to share this hidden part of myself with the guys.
Blowing out a deep lungful of air, I relent. “Lainey has this tradition where she gets a journal on her birthday every year and writes things down that are important to her. Her asshole ex gave her this hideous one.” I hold up the old journal, watch the table full of grown men visibly flinch away from it, and laugh. “Yeah, it’s awful. So, anyway, the night of the fire at herapartment? She was burning a bunch of shit from him and their relationship, like a cleanse of her life from him, which would include this journal. The problem is that it was more important to her than just a picture or some dumb shirt. I could tell she didn’t really want to burn what was in the journal, just the actual journal.”
