It had a different effect on the college kids. They listened to what he had to say like men being read their last rites, clinging to any hope he could give them, desperate for salvation.
He gave it to them. Not much, but a shred of something to hold on to because as one they practically genuflected before sprint-walking back to their fancy silver car parked on the street.
Blond king and henchman remained frozen in position until the car was out of sight before they clicked back into movement. Simultaneously, they turned, staring at each other for a few long seconds before the laughter started.
He laughed and the sound carried perfectly to my ear. It was a clear, bright noise. Not a chuckle, a guffaw or a mumbled hahah. Each vibration erupted from his throat like a pure note, round and loud and defined by unblemished joy.
It was the best thing I had ever heard.
I gasped lightly as his joy burned through me and, as if he heard it, his head turned my way. We were too far away to truly lock eyes but it felt like we did. His friend said something to him but the blond object of my instant obsession ignored him. For the first time since I noticed him, his face fell into somberness and his jaw tightened.
I may have loved him from the moment I saw him but he clearly did not feel the same.
In fact, if the way he abruptly cut away from me was any indication, throwing one long leg over the seat of a huge chrome bike and revving the engine before I could even think to tear my eyes away, he may have even hated me on first sight.
Paralyzed, I watched him peel out of the lot with his buddy. It hurt. Which was insane because I didn’t even know the man and more importantly, I refused to be taken in by a pretty face.
The last time that had happened, someone had died.
I pulled myself together, collecting the grocery detritus that spilled out of some of the melted bags and moved to my car. It was hot as hell in the compact sedan, the leather seats nearly burned the skin off my bottom when I sat down. I got back out of the car and manually cranked open all of the windows before I started the drive home.
Home was a sweet white-shingled house in the quiet residential area of Dunbar in Vancouver where real estate prices were crazy and desperate housewives were a real thing. My husband had grown up in the ritzy grove about eighteen years before I’d been born and grown up in the house next to his. Everyone ohed and ahed over our little love story, the older neighbor falling for the quiet girl next door.
Once, I’d done the same.
Now, as I rolled up the asphalt drive and saw William’s car parked in the garage, I felt only dread.
“I’m home,” I called when I opened the door.
I didn’t want to say the words, but William liked the ritual. He liked it more when he came home to me already in the house, dinner on the stove and a smile on my face, but I’d gone back to work this year after three years of staying at home waiting for kids to come when none ever did. I loved working at Entrance Bay Academy, one of the most prestigious schools in the province, but William thought it was unnecessary. We had enough money, he said, and things around the house grew neglected in my absence, especially when you added on my hour-long commute there and back to the small town north of Vancouver that harbored the school. We had no children and no pets, a housekeeper with a more than mild form of OCD who came to the house once a week. I didn’t notice much of a difference but I didn’t say anything. This was because William wasn’t a fighter in the traditional sense. He didn’t yell or accuse, bruise with his actions or words. Instead, he disappeared.
His office became a black hole, a great devourer of not only my husband but our potential conflict and our possible resolution. Every fight we could have had lingered in the spaces between his leather-bound law books, under the edges of the Persian carpet. Sometimes, when he was late returning home, I would sit in his big wingback leather chair deep in the heart of his office and I would close my eyes. Only then could I find relief in my imaginations, yell at him the way I wanted to so many days and so many nights across so many years.
We’d married when I was eighteen and he was thirty-six. I was head over heels in love with the curl in his mostly black, slightly graying hair, his incredible manliness next to the boys that hung around me in school. I was infatuated with him, with how I looked beside him in pictures, so young and pretty under his distinguished arm. I’d known him my whole life so he was safe but also, I thought, not safe, older and worldlier and, I hoped, dirtier than me. There were so many things an older man could teach a naive girl. I used to touch myself at night imagining the things he would do to me, the ways he could make me pleasure him.