I expected home to look different. At least a little bit. When the cab
reached my street, I looked out the window searching for signs of change. Not
something dramatic like the solid brick buildings of the neighborhood morphing
into fanciful castles, or the trees suddenly appearing as lollipops. Just a
fresh patina of some kind, a sharpening of details or a joyful Gene Kelly doppelganger
rounding the corner, swinging his umbrella and singing in the rain.
At first, I thought the hotel was on fire. I was roused from a deep sleep in my big, comfy hotel bed by an acrid aroma that put me in mind of The Towering Inferno and being rescued by O.J. Simpson playing the security guard. It turned out just to be Starbucks, and that presented the second conundrum of the day. How had the small coffee pot on the Formica desk filled itself with water, inserted its own pre-packaged coffee disk and turned itself on? Blinking fully awake, everything became clear. Seth, who at that moment was singing "Roxanne" in the shower, had made it for me. Waking to brewed coffee was an unheard of luxury and was another reason waking up with Seth was superior to waking up with Zelda. In all the years we had lived together, my cat had never done that for me. Not even once.
"Oh, look, Lisa. It's a sign that you should call Seth," Michael tossed a Rubik's Cube at me from a jumbled bin marked "miscellaneous nostalgia" in a shop that called itself an antique store. The shelves were stuffed with items from our childhood, which was making me crotchety. I didn't like to think of myself as an antique ...
As advertised,
Seth was in the background while his friend Jeremy stood front and center,
fully lit. He had that familiar, slightly blissed-out look on his face, just as
he always had in the Joe's Got a Problem days. But watching him sing someone
else's songs from the back of the stage gave him the air of an impostor, a
Clark Kent who was trying valiantly to cover up the superhero costume under his
trendy T-shirt. Even seated in the
shadows, he drew attention. Well, my
attention...
Chapter Three: Friends are Friends, Pals are Pals...
I was always a
light sleeper. The whir of car tires uselessly spinning after an eight-inch
snowfall, the sound of freshly made ice cubes falling into the bin, too many
work calls to count. All these sounds had roused me from my sleep at one point
or another. But it had been a very long time since I was woken by
someone's snoring. Particularly someone in my bed...
"Please let there
be a special place in heaven for the person who invented frequent flier miles,"
I whispered under my breath to no one as I drank in the most beautiful sight in
the world: a single-digit seat number on an airplane boarding pass. I had just
traded a chunk of my reward miles for this work of art, not that it made a dent
in my stockpile. My trip home was going to be far cushier than the one that
brought me to L.A. I earned it. I had spent all my waking hours of the last
week making plans to shut down one of Hemisphere's biggest manufacturing
plants...
His head was dropped, one hand held the bridge of his nose and I could see his shoulders shaking even from where I stood at the opposite end of the sparkly underpass at Bryn Mawr. We met there, at the lakefront running paths on the far north end of Lincoln Park, every morning. It was close to my house and Michael loved it because of the underpass's mural with its mirrored and iridescent tiles. It was as close to a disco ball as you can get on a public street and in Michael's mind, disco balls were one of life's great inventions. This was just one of the many reasons people who knew us both would eventually ask "which one of you is adopted?" That his hair was platinum blonde at the moment compared to my life-long medium brown was another. I picked up my pace to reach him, my mind whirling with possible disasters and bracing myself for bad news...
There are things that you can and should say when a man tells you that he loves you for the very first time. There are other things that might occur to you in that instant -- surprising things that billow into your consciousness unbidden.
Be careful. Things in this second category are far, far better left as puzzling little asides for your amusement only. Things in this second category should never, ever be spoken aloud. Not to him, not to your closest friends and not even to yourself, even if you know for certain that you are the only one in the room. Regardless of how honest they might be. Especially because of how honest they might be.
Believe me. When a man tells you that he loves you for the very first time, it's just not good to look straight in the eye and say back, "I'm stunned."
