Fading (6 page)

“Hello?”

“Lex?” I grip the phone in my one hand and stir gravy with the other. “Lex? Please come and help me.”

“What do you mean ‘help you’? Isn’t tonight your date with Ethan?”

“Yes, which is what I need help with. Can you come over please?”

“No, I’m not coming over, just tell me what the problem is and I’ll try to help.”

“Okay,” I take a deep breath and a huge gulp of wine – my second glass, of wine. “So I’m cooking dinner. But I don’t know what I’m doing and I need some help here. Why can’t there be a step-by-step guide for this stuff?”

“Lil, seriously, you need to chill out, you can cook a simple meal for two. What are you making? Pasta? Steak?”

“No, Lex, instead of cooking a simply meal for two people, I’m making a fucking chicken roast. The whole things, I have a whole chicken. – which by the way is cooked to perfection, I have a both roasted and boiled potatoes, I’ve done carrots, peas, broccoli, stuffing, yorkshire puddings and gravy.”

When Lexi’s laugh comes clear through the phone, I roll my eyes and start taking the food out of the over. “It’s not that funny.”

“Okay, okay.” Everything goes quiet for a few seconds and I know it’s because she has muted me to hide the remaining chuckles. “Right, here’s what you need to do. Leave everything but the chicken, potatoes, peas, broccoli and gravy. Keep the rest of it in the oven and then when he goes home, wrap it up and we’ll figure that out tomorrow. Just put together the chicken potatoes and veg and serve that.”

“I can do that.” I start moving the food I’d already dished up back to the oven. “That’s good. See I totally needed you.”

“No, you just have no experience at this, if you had-”

“Lex! Shhh. I have to go.” The doorbell rings again. “He’s here.”

“He’s there now?”

“Yes!” I stop just before I reached the door. “I really have to go.”

“Wait! What are you wear-” I hang up, effectively cutting her off and open the door to Ethan.

“Hey,” I smile and open the door wider in an invitation to come in.

“Smells great.” He comments and walks through to the kitchen without direction.

Plastering on a smile and brushing away the stress of the last two hours, I straighten my dress and prepare to deal with dinner.

After dinner we move in to the front room and settle down on the sofa to watch a film. I’m not sure what film we’re watching, all I know it that it’s been on for an hour and a half and I think there’s still an hour left. It’s about two men in prison and I have no idea how we ended up watching this out of the hundreds of dvd’s I have.

Dinner went great though, Ethan was happy with the food and seemed to enjoy it and I dodged the whole embarrassment of cooking enough food for a family of six, which if I have anything to do with it, he’ll never know about it.

“You know, I kind of feel bad for these guys, those guards are arseholes.”

When a minute or two passes and there’s no reply from Ethan, - which is unusual because he’s been keeping up with my comments all night, I turn to look at him and have to do a double take.

He’s sleeping.

He’s sleeping?

What. The. Fuck.

“Ethan?” I call and when that doesn’t work, I poke him in the shoulder. “Ethan.”

Having no luck, I get my phone from the kitchen and call Lexi.

“Hello?”

“He fell asleep.”

“Huh?” She sounds groggy and on a check of the time – 11:20pm, I realise that I probably woke her.

“Ethan. We had dinner and then put on a movie and he fell asleep.”

“He fell asleep? So what did you do?”

“Nothing, he’s right there, just sleeping.”

Once again, she’s starts laughing uncontrollably.

“I’m so glad you find this amusing.” I aim for a dry tone but I can’t quite supress the laughter.

“I’m sorry, it’s just that well, he’s
sleeping
...”

“I know that, I’m looking right at him.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t realise how late it was and I already tried waking him but he’s out.”

“You tried waking him? How?”

“I said his name a couple of times and I poked him.”

“Wait, you
poked
him?!”

“Yeah, just in the shoulder. It didn’t work. Obviously.” I move back into the front room and watch him sleep. “What should I do? Do you think shaking him will work?”

“Lil. Lilith. Do not shake him. Do you hear me? Do not shake him.”

“Why? I need to wake him up, he can’t be comfortable, his back will hurt like a bitch tomorrow.”

“Call his name again. I don’t know, just wake him gently.”

“And what do I do then? Kick him out?”

“I don’t know. Unless you want to let him sleep in your bed, sure.”

“Okay, I’m going to do it.”

“Okay, call me when he leaves, I don’t care if it’s tonight or tomorrow, just call me.”

“Fine.”

I hang up the phone, drop it onto the coffee table and consider my options. My eyes drift back to the phone… maybe I can
accidentally
drop it on his head. Everybody drops phones, right? Or maybe, I can spill some water on him and tell him that I was just trying to get comfortable and didn’t even notice that he’d fallen asleep.

As luck would have it though, it’s as I’m leaving over him to reach the remote control when gravity screws with me and my plan and I end up falling on to top of him.

Of course this is how he wakes up.

“Uhnguh hu what?” He grumbles.

“I’m so, so sorry. I’m not trying to attack you while you sleep or anything, I fell. I actually did fall too. I was contemplating different ways to wake you which actually included shaking you, potentially killing you by dropping a phone on your head and throwing water on you. Falling on you wasn’t even an option. I swear.” I rant as I scramble to get off him.

“Hey, it’s okay.” He slowly gets to feet and rubs his whole face with a hand. “I fell asleep?”

“Apparently,” I shrug as if it’s a normal occurrence for people to fall asleep on my couch and I didn’t spend almost half an hour freaking out about it.

“I’m really sorry about that. It’s been a long week and I had a busy day and then that amazing dinner you cooked, I guess it all just caught up with me and I drifted.” He smiles sheepishly.

“It’s okay, I’m sorry I kept you here so late.” I offer as I walk him to the door. I really didn’t mean for this date to go on all night, not in my own home.

“It’s fine. I’ll call you tomorrow?” He steps closer and wraps his arms around me.

“Sure,” I return the hug. “Goodnight, Ethan.”

“Nigh, Lilith.”

I watch him walk away and when I close and lock the door behind him, I do with a smile.

“Okay, Lil, You have my complete attention so tell me what’s bothering you?”

“Nothing.”

“Really?” Cal cocks an eyebrow at me, clearly more amused than worried. “Then why haven’t you noticed that we’re the only two people left in here?”

With a frown I turn from the bar and realise that not only is the bar empty but it’s also been cleaned. “When did that happen?”

“Exactly.” He gets us both a fresh beer and comes around to my side of the bar, sliding on to the stool next to me. “We closed an hour ago, you didn’t even notice me wiping down the bar in front of you. Not even when I lifted your beer and wiped under that.”

“Oh.”

“So, are you going to tell me or do I have to sit here for another two hours while you stare off into space?”

“I don’t know,” I sigh and turn on my stool so that I’m facing him. “I’m not even sure why I came here, I don’t think it’s entirely appropriate but I have no one I can talk to about this stuff and it’s embarrassing because I’m twenty six for Christ sake, I’m supposed to know what I’m doing or at the very least how all of this works and I can’t talk to Nate because he’ll tell Lexi and then I’ll have to answer a million questions and I don’t want to think about so much that I start second guessing myself and then there’s Jason, he’s the last person on earth I want to talk to, I wouldn’t trust his opinion on which way around the toilet roll goes on the holder let alone anything personal. If Gavin were here and things were different between us, I could have talked to him about it, I could always talk to him, you know? So that leaves you, and I know that I can talk to you if I need to and I know you won’t judge me but it just feels weird.”

“Uh…” He blinks at me and for the first time all night I smile, not a small smile or a grin but a full out one hundred watt smile.

“You asked.”

“I did,” He nods and then shakes his head. “So, I’m guessing you need to talk to a guy about something and no, I won’t judge you and just to make it a little easier on you, I promise I won’t tell anyone that you even came here tonight, so technically this conversation never happened.”

“Thank you.”

“So, what’s on your mind?”

“You know I’ve been dating, right?”

“Yeah, Ian or something isn’t it?” He takes a long swallow of beer and I remember that he’s been working all night and now I’m dumping on him.

“Ethan. We’ve been on a couple of dates, three actually.”

“So it’s going well? You like him?”

“Yeah, I do. I mean it’s not like I’m falling for him or anything – it has only been a couple of dates but I like him.”

“That’s good, it takes time to fall for someone.”

“I guess,” I notice he’s halfway done with his beer so I drink some of my own to catch up. “But, you know I’ve never really dated before so I guess... well, there’s no guessing about it, I need to know if it’s too soon to take it to the next level like do I drag it out or should I just get it over with?”

“Get it over with?” He asks and I can tell from his expression that he’s confused.

“I don’t know?”

“What’s worrying you?”

“I don’t want to sleep with him just in case the only reason he’s dating me is to get me into bed, but then if that is the reason, I want find out sooner rather than later. What if I drag it out and make him wait like, two months? I could be halfway in love with him by then and if he’s leaves after we have sex and I never hear from him again, I don’t know how I’ll handle that. Whereas, if I slept with him tomorrow and then he ditched me after that, at least there won’t be any deep feelings involved.”

“Why would you think someone would disappear after sleeping with you?” He asks slowly.

I look into his eyes trying to find out how much he knows. I know that if I told him, he could talk to me about it, maybe give me the explanation that I’ve been waiting for since I was sixteen. “Well, that’s all some guys are interesting in, right? Sex.”

“Lilith, from what I can tell, the only person you’ve slept with has been Gavin, I don’t remember there being anyone else before him and I know there hasn’t been anyone since him, why would you assume to know that’s all some guys want?”

“I don’t know,” I shrug and turn to face the bottles that are staked behind the bar. “Just an assumption, I guess.”

“Look, clearly there’s more going on here than you’re telling me. Or more has gone on that I don’t know about but I know that no matter what I say to you, you won’t tell me. But I know this much, something happened that changed you, Lil and it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. You and Jason used to be best friends and freaking inseparable at one point, everyone suspected that there was more between you two than just friendship but hell, you were both only sixteen so when you both stopped talking to each other, we just assumed that you’d argued or outgrown each other. Now I’m thinking there was something more going on and I can tell you that whatever happened between those two teenagers, it has nothing to do with that men do, because you were still kids. Kids make mistakes, we all know that and you shouldn’t let that change how you see things as an adult.” Like, I did earlier, Cal sighs long and hard and I suspect is because I’m looking at anything and everything that isn’t him at the moment. “As I said earlier, this conversation didn’t happen, so I’m not going to say anything to anyone about this but, Lil, whatever happened ten years ago shouldn’t affect you now. If you want to move things forward with Ethan, there’s no right time for that. You not working to a deadline here, if it happens, it happens, but this will be your forth date, so yeah, it’s acceptable.”

“Okay.” I nod at the bar and turn to look at him again. “Thank you.”

“No problem. I just have one last thing to say and then I’ll never talk about this ever again; forgiveness isn’t just needed by the person who seeks it, Lil, very often, the person who was hurt needs to give it more than the one who receives it does. If you want to move on, you need to forgive.”