Loved - A Novel (7 page)

He wasn’t allowed to stay overnight in the dorm with me because Belmont is a Christian school and they had strict rules about visitation in the dorms. My roommate and her new boyfriend agreed to rent a hotel room with us so we could all get off campus for the weekend. It felt very grown up. I wished we could have had our own hotel room but that seemed unfathomable, far off from where we were in our lives and in our relationship.

              Chase and I had talked before about when or if we would have sex. I wanted to wait and though he made it clear that that was one of the many ways he wanted to show me he loved me, he supported my decision and didn’t ever complain. This was the first time since prom night we had spent the night together. If it hadn’t been for my roommate and her boyfriend in the room near us or my fear, I may not have been able to keep my promise to myself. But I did.

              On Saturday we went to the mall. I hadn’t been in Nashville long enough to know how to show someone the town and though neither of us really cared to be in the mall, it was something to do. After we were bored of wandering around the stores, we walked across the parking lot to where the riverboat docks and sat on the ground under a wooden gazebo. The sky was overcast and Chase was smoking a cigarette, which I held for him between drags. I loved holding his cigarettes.

              “You seem really happy, Kit.”

              “Yeah, I guess. This is kind of where I belong, I think.”

              “Right, I can see it.”

              “You would like it here too,” I told him.  “There’s so much music and not just country. There is a lot of rock too.  So many of the kids at Belmont, I’ve been to their shows and you would love this stuff.”

              “I can’t afford to come here. I am going to have to stay close to home for school, Kit, or move somewhere and not go to school just, like, get a job.”

              “We can make it work,” I assured him.

              “I want to but I don’t see how,” he said, defeated.

              He stubbed out his cigarette butt.  My hands felt empty when he didn’t hand it back to me. I reached out and held his hand. We were quiet for a few minutes.

              “I’m not saying no or anything,” he said finally. “I just don’t know yet what I want. I do love you.  That’s all I can say right now.”

              “I understand,” I said.

              “You’re cold.  Let’s get back.”

              I tucked the Camel coupon from his cigarette pack into my pocket, a souvenir of the moment where he said
maybe
. I would hold on to his maybe for as long as it would take, even forever.

             
November, 2000.

              I went home for a long weekend to take care of some things regarding
my pending graduation and to see my friends. It was weird walking down the high school’s hallways again. I remembered emptying out my locker just a few months before with Chase standing next to me, watching me prepare to leave him. Even though I always came back, he said he was always watching me leave.

              On the video we made documenting my last day of school, Chase was holding the camera while I put notebooks and scraps of paper into my backpack.

              “I’m picking your nose,” he said, his finger positioned to create that illusion on the video. 

              “Okay,” I laughed, un-sticking pictures from the inside of my locker door and putting them into my backpack: a new one of Chase and me, one of the Dixie Chicks, one of me with Meredith and the girls.

              “Now I’m staring at your ass,” he said, positioning the camera on my white shorts.

              “Umm, Ok,” I said, smiling at him, a glimmer in my eyes.

Chase appeared in front of me then. It was between classes and the halls were filled with students talking noisily and slamming lockers. He was holding a white carnation in his hand. He handed me the flower and bowed a little and he kissed me. I could feel the other students’ eyes on us. Did they know what a special moment this was? That I wasn’t just another student kissing her boyfriend in the hall? Looking closer, I realized he had written, “I love you” on every petal on the flower. He also handed me a letter, which I read in the car before I left the school parking lot.

Kitten,

Welcome hom
e,
baby.  I don’t really know what to say.  I’ve missed you so fuckin’ much.  It’s not even something I can describe with a pen and paper.  I love you.  I guess I always have, and I know I always will.  I’m sorry for what we’ve been through in the past few months, but this is new for both of us, right?  We’re an army.  We’re a tank.  We can’t be stopped, and I won’t take that chance.

              I didn’t know how we could be together or if we could make it work. But there was one thing I was sure of—there was no one like Chase in all the world.

              We saw each other again when I came home for Christmas. He gave me a gray garden statue of an angel with the word “Faith” engraved at her feet. He said he walked by her and thought, “Kit has to have that!” I loved her. She was sad and romantic and hopeful just like me. There were a lot of things I cared about that Chase didn’t—Jesus, country music, clothes—but he loved me for exactly who I was.
He still saw me even as I changed. He still chose me. He also gave me the infinity ring he always wore on his pinky finger, the ring he hardly ever took off.  I wore it on my left hand.

              I knew what he wanted from me. I told him I was ready and we set a date for a couple of nights before I was set to leave for Nashville again. At home and getting ready, I was so scared I thought I might be sick. We had fooled around plenty over the last year but I was nervous anyway. I wanted everything to be perfect. I put on a black shirt, a tan suede skirt and black heels and set off for his house.

              When I got there, he had a hundred candles lit in his room and he was at least as nervous as I was, if not more. I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed. He followed, wrapped his arms around me and brought his face near to mine.

              “I love you, Kit. I always have and I always will.”

              “I love you, too,” I whispered.

              My heart was beating so fast I thought it would explode. He kissed me and began to take my clothes off. I wondered how this moment compared to all of the times I’d imagined it in the past.

              I still had no idea how we were going to make it work but I was certain that somehow we would be together. I felt sure and secure and was suddenly devoid of all my anxieties.  I had found the peace I’d been grappling for. 

Or so I thought.

             
January, 2001.

              I had cut my knee a few times that first semester before Chase and I had things moderately settled, which had in turn settled me; however, upon returning to school from the holidays, I found the unease crawling back into me and I searched for another way to feel relief from the stress of feeling out of control of my life.

              Megan and I made friends with a girl who was in her sorority and who was in my recording technology class. Brittany was a year older than us and seemed to me to be extremely self-assured. She was always laughing at someone or something. She wore giant fake blonde ponytails and tons of mascara. She was taller than us and wore tight jeans and preppy sweaters over her curves. One night she invited us over to her Belmont apartment to hang out with her roommate and some guys.

              It was much harder for Belmont to enforce their rules at the apartments. There were no cameras or a
front desk.  When we got there they had all been drinking and were talking very loudly. Once they caught on that Megan and I had never had a drink before, they decided it was their calling to show us how it was done. Brittany’s boyfriend poured me a shot of Jack Daniels and popped open a can of Diet Coke.

              “Okay, the Diet Coke is your chaser,” he explained.  “Have a little sip first then down the shot as fast as you can.  Don’t even let it hit your mouth, just straight down your throat.  Then drink more Coke to get the taste out.”

             
Oh my gosh. This is going to be awful. But...well, why not? 

              I couldn’t think of one good reason not to do it so I braced myself and then drank
the shot, finding it hard not to taste the strong liquor. The flavor lingered and my throat burned. I coughed a little but
quickly drank from the Coke can again. 

              Not bad at all
, I thought.

              Everything changed.

             
March, 2001.

              My college friends
and I were
still too young to take a worthwhile spring break trip so most of us went home. My parents were out of town, which suited me perfectly. One night Chase stayed over but the next night he had plans and I wanted to see the girls. Meredith brought some girlfriends with her from high school who came along with liquor and jello shots. Then the guys showed up with beer. We all got tanked and someone threw up in my parents’ bathtub. A lot had changed in the seven or eight months I’d been gone.

              I cleaned the house as best I could the next day. My parents still trusted me and I was letting them down; at least they didn’t have to know about it.

              Aside from our less-than-upstanding extracurricular activities, Megan and I joined a group for Music Business majors called Service Corps, where members got to volunteer at various entertainment industry events. In February, we worked the Country Radio Seminar at the Convention Center.  Radio DJs and programmers came in from all over the country to keep up on happenings in the radio industry and interview the stars. I personally escorted a gravelly-voiced country star at a press event, guiding him between radio station tables for his interviews and letting the DJs know when his time with them was up. It felt like a dream. Even if it was just for the day, I was handling the media opportunities for someone who used to seem larger than life. It suddenly felt like ages ago rather than just a few months ago that I would call the local Westville radio station and chat up the DJs about the latest music they were playing or what their jobs were like. My world was upside-down.

              At the Disco Party at the end of the weeklong seminar, I met several of the singers whose CDs were in my collection. I surprised myself by working up the nerve to ask Kenny Chesney to dance. “Maybe later!” he said, a gracious way of saying no. I didn’t care; just being able to ask was all I wanted.

              Service Corps felt like the continued education to the studying and networking I’d begun at home, when I would memorize liner notes and find a way backstage at concerts.  Classes were important but in this industry, the connections and inside view of these events were the most beneficial.

              A small edge I had over the other students was that I already had friends in the music industry: Paul, the band of brothers and a guy I’d met at a Dixie Chicks concert in Buffalo who had since become a country music television host. Of these, I saw Paul the most. He would pick me up at the dorm and take me to dinner or to shows. Then, we’d sit at Café Coco and talk about what I was learning and what he’d been working on lately. Even though I had once imagined that when I moved to Nashville we would be together, we were just good friends and that’s all I wanted from him. We were in different phases of our lives but also my heart had changed since I’d met Chase.

              As I neared the end of my freshman year, I felt that I had begun to accomplish what I’d set out to do. I was growing up, preparing for a career that excited me and I’d made friends. Chase and I, though we hadn’t made any kind of exclusive commitment to each other, had survived a year apart.

              One day that spring, Megan and I were hanging out, talking about life, boys and dreams. It was raining and there was nowhere to go, anyway. She told me she remembered meeting Chase when he had come to visit. 

“You were lying on the top bunk in your room,” she said. “I remember he was playing with your hair, holding on to you like you were so fragile, like you were about to break.”

“I don’t remember that at all,” I replied, thinking back to that last fall.

I liked the picture she painted. In that memory, Megan had captured a truth about us—I would break without him.

May, 2001.

              Even with Chase at home, I couldn’t stand the thought of being in Westville all summer so I decided that taking some extra classes would be a more productive use of my time. I did have a month off and that was long enough for me.  I was home just in time for prom and graduation. Megan went to spend the summer at home in North Carolina. Anna, my perky resident assistant, went home to Los Angeles. My roommate who had surprised us all by getting pregnant over Spring Break moved back to Kentucky. Megan and I would be rooming together in the apartments. I would move in when I got back to school in July and she would join me that fall.