Loved - A Novel Read online

  Apartment Twelve.

  I loved it more than any fancy new condo.

  It had three spacious rooms. The kitchen was large enough for a little cafe table and chairs, and I had shining granite countertops and warm blush-colored tile. The huge living room and bedroom floors were hardwood and each room had an old painted radiator. Crown molding ran throughout the place and there were windows on every wall. Never before had I let so much light into my life. I used to cover my windows with heavy curtains—never drawn. Now I danced in the sunlight on my hardwood floors.

  I put the farmhouse dining table with four of its six curved cream-colored Belini chairs at the end of the living room close to the kitchen. I painted a yard sale table light pink and put it with the other two chairs in the corner of the kitchen under the big pink and green painting that read, “I gave her roses and she blames me for the thorns.”

  Then, there was the bedroom. Oh, the bedroom! I found a wooden nightstand at an antique mall and replaced the knob on the drawer with a heavy round black and white striped treasure. The bottom of it held three years worth of Vogue Magazines. It sat atop a cream shag rug that my bare feet would hit first thing every morning. When I could afford it, I bought the dreamiest bedding. Gray and tufted with pillow shams to match.

  This is my bed, I thought. No one else belongs. There’s no room here to miss anyone. I stopped sleeping on the right side and slept smack dab in the middle, and I slept like a baby.

  I turned twenty-five the week after I moved in. I always knew that I would not be the girl having the quarter life crisis. That had come to pass, and even the romantic crises were at bay for now.

  And it wasn’t just the apartment. I opened the windows to my life and let the sun shine in. My career, my social life, my spiritual life and my physical health all flourished despite the lack of activity in my love life, which used to be the center of all things. I was loving myself and, after all, that really should be enough.

  My career grew slowly and steadily. I took an administrative job in marketing, which helped me to develop a steady daily routine and gave me more funds to build my styling business. I was booking more gigs and styling artists on music video shoots and models on fashion photo shoots and I worked backstage at the CMT Awards. I began to build a solid multi-media portfolio for myself.

  I had still been attending the wonderful, young and active church that I found with Lacey when I moved back from L.A., but aside from sitting on a folding chair in the downtown music venue where we met each Sunday morning, I had hardly been a member of the church community. Now, I began to make friends at church and grow in my own faith. I used to compartmentalize God. Although I still struggled with this, knowing that I needed to let God into the darkest and scariest corners of my heart, but I was getting better and better at it and I was led by the example of my church family.

  I lived by that old Girl Scout song, “make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.” Since our days at Longshots, Kellie, Sophie and I had developed a close, intimate friendship. Three’s company and we were a perfect support system for each other through what was happening in each of our lives. I was more different from each of them than any other close friend that I’d had, and sometimes it felt like it was hard for them to understand me; regardless, they unfailingly supported everything that I did.

  Kellie and her boyfriend who had been the drummer for the Longshot’s band broke up after five years of dating. He had been Kellie’s first and only boyfriend, and she was experimenting now with dating casually and being on her own. As an assistant to a booking agent at a major talent company, she began to discover that she had the mind of an agent. She started working with new artists and producers, helping them to develop their talents and ideas in the hopes that they would soon be her own clients.

  Sophie and one of the guitarists for the band began dating much in the same way that you notice a house being built on your drive to work—slowly, then suddenly. They fell into a beautiful, respectful and mad love and began to plan a wedding.

  New friends were coming into my life from many different places. Aside from my church friends, there was a guy from my partying and dancing days. We both had cut back on the partying and found that we had much else in common too, particularly our taste in men. A new girlfriend worked for the salon where I had been getting my hair done. She turned me back to my favorite shade of blonde. She was younger and livelier than me, always so enthusiastic about what I had to tell her or what was new in her own life. She was completely unafraid of what anyone thought of her, and that’s probably because one would have had to search very, very hard to find anything bad to say about her.

  There were others too. I remembered learning from my favorite professor at Belmont to “surround yourself with people who are better than you,” and I was now living that mantra. I found myself amongst strong and admirable people who built me up and I wanted to build them up too.

  For Christmas, Mom asked my brother and me to search for some way to volunteer or to do something positive in the community as her gift. I wanted to find a cause that I was passionate about and to utilize my talent and resources in whatever it was that I decided to do. After seeing a girl that I had worked with battle cancer and now that Zane had cancer too, I had become more aware of the existence of cancer in young adults as a real and too common occurrence. I began to learn more about the statistics and challenges that affected this particular group, and this became my cause of choice. My friends jumped in to help and we planned a concert/fashion show event for an organization that was called Stupid Cancer, which helped young adults with cancer to network with one another, both online and via social gatherings, and provided them with resources and other support.

  The organization’s founder came to Nashville from New York to attend our event and to give a little speech. My friends and I were thrilled with the turnout; there were about three hundred people in the small music venue, all people who were there to see the bands, to support their survivor friends or to take in the fashion show. The event sparked a relationship between the Stupid Cancer organization and the young adult cancer community in Nashville, and it was from that moment that our team decided to make the concert/fashion show an annual event.

  I was much thinner than I had been in LA., and I was more filled out than I had been when I was sick. Although I was happy with my size, I still wasn’t using my gym membership one bit so I hired a personal trainer for a month to kick start a more active lifestyle. I realized that not only did I begin to shape my body, but I also learned that I really liked exercising. Kellie and I started indoor rock climbing, and I became convinced that I was born to climb. I loved the rush, the challenge and the pain that came the next day. I picked up yoga again too, and I ran and weight trained, and I loved every minute of it. Ok, everything but the walking lunges.

  I made an effort to keep all of my newfound strengths as lifelong habits. I didn’t want to work out for a few weeks and then let it go. I didn’t want to raise awareness for cancer at one event and then move on. This was the life that I was building for myself. These were solid bricks in my foundation.

  As I’d hoped, one day I realized that I missed having Ben as my friend—just my friend. Since our break up, he had been calling every now and then and leaving me voicemails: Hello, I hope all is well, call me when you’re ready. I was ready to be his friend but I was hesitant to move back into even that relationship with him. I was afraid that if I let him back into my life that the feelings would come back too. As a result, I decided to take things easy. We had dinner one night, and then a phone conversation a few weeks later. Little by little I found a comfort with our friendship being just that and nothing more, and that our friendship would never be more was no longer a sad thing.

  So what about dating? I wasn’t ignoring the male gender by any means, and I wasn’t deliberately fasting from dating, but I was so focused on caring for myself that there wasn’t as much of me available to give to
each of the Joe Nobodies who came along. I liked many of the guys that I went out with, a few of them could have been “The One,” however, nothing clicked and none of them held my attention for long or I didn’t hold theirs for whatever reason. At least now, I was looking forward again.

  I knew that I’d come a long way, but I didn’t realize how far until one blazing August day when I met Blake.

  August, 2008.

  Most days at the marketing office I wore jeans and flats, cotton tank tops and cardigans, but on that day I had a big meeting so I wore the fancy camel pencil skirt suit. I had missed wearing my beautiful adult clothes, anyway. After work, I was meeting Sophie and Kellie for dinner at our favorite restaurant, where we’d been going a couple of nights a week since the beginning of summer. They had cheap sushi, good cocktails and cute bartenders, one in particular I had been watching. I loved his curly brown hair, his bright smile and his jeans rolled up at the ankles.

  He never seemed to recognize me from one night to the next, but we kept going back and I kept hoping that on one of these days he might speak to me. That night, he was standing at the hostess stand when I walked in, before Sophie or Kellie had gotten there.

  “Three please, outside if you have a table open,” I said to the hostess. The bartender was watching me and smiling. He was deliciously tall. I smiled back at him but then looked right back at the hostess. I had no reason to expect him to speak to me.

  “You look familiar,” he said. His voice was like lying in a hammock on a spring day—warm sun, cool breeze.

  “I come here a lot,” I replied, trying to hide what I was actually thinking: I cannot believe you don’t recognize me from sitting on that bar stool right there four nights a week, you idiot.

  “I’m Blake,” he said, holding out his hand and shaking mine solidly. I was impressed by his confidence.

  “Kimberly,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you,” he replied.

  I followed the hostess to a table outside, and Kellie and Sophie arrived shortly thereafter. We filled each other in on the happenings of our workday and I told them both about how the hot bartender finally spoke to me and that I wondered if there might have been more he wanted to say.

  “Well, that’s progress, for sure!” Sophie said.

  “I wish I’d been here to see it,” Kellie added.

  I loved these girls with all my heart.

  A few nights later, Kellie and I were leaving Hamilton’s after hanging out with a group of her work friends when I suggested that we stop to see if the cute bartender was working. It was on the way home, it wasn’t that late and I really thought he might ask for my number when given the chance. Kellie was tired but she agreed.

  I walked tall in my cream t-strap heels, pink satin top and cream belt, and dark skinny jeans. We sat at the bar and ordered a blackberry mojito and a glass of wine. Blake recognized me right away, for the first time, and kept coming over to chat. He wanted to hear all about the photo shoot that I’d worked on that day.

  Unfortunately, he still hadn’t asked for my number or a date or my hand in marriage, and my drink was getting low.

  “Sorry,” Kellie said quietly when he was off checking on the one table he still had. “Time to go to bed. If he’s gonna ask, he will. We gotta go.”

  I nodded and took one last sip of my sweet fruity mojito, leaving the dewy glass on the wood bar. We pushed back from our stools and slung our purses over our shoulders. Blake got it that we were leaving and he came back over to us.

  “Hey, I’m moving into a new house next week. My old roommate...” and he went into a story that was longer than it needed to be, and I wasn’t sure where he was going with it. He could see the lost, “wrap it up, buddy” look in my eye, and then he cut to the chase. “Well, we’re having a housewarming party and I’d love it if you would come.”

  He glanced in Kellie’s direction, politely including her.

  “Can I get your number? I’ll text you the info.”

  “Sure!” I was thrilled.

  I told him my number and we were gone.

  I wondered if he’d call. I wondered if there really was a party.

  Blake did text me. He wrote, “Hey! I’m getting off work and sitting here with some friends. You should come.” I didn’t have his number in my phone yet so I found it charmingly appropriate to write back, “Who’s this?”

  Yeah, I was playing the game.

  “Oh, sorry, this is Blake,” he replied.

  “Oh, hey!” I said. “Yeah, I think I can come by. Thirty minutes?”

  I picked out an outfit that was cute but didn’t scream trying-too-hard, shorts and a black sleeveless blouse with lilac swirls, and added a touch of makeup. Then, I rode the scooter that I had bought at the beginning of summer down Belmont Boulevard toward the restaurant, the cool breeze calming my nerves. I parked across the street from the patio and shook my hair out of the helmet before storing the helmet in the seat. I liked to imagine that I was in slow motion when I did this, but I probably looked dumb.

  I crossed the street and saw Blake sitting on the patio with three friends, staring with eyes wide.

  “No way, that’s yours?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I laughed.

  “That is so hot.”

  I found out that Blake was in Green Peace and rode only a bicycle so he was more impressed with my nod to the environment than my sexy hair shaking moves.

  He stayed across the big round table from me and I sat near some of his friends. I shook hands with his friends and asked getting-to-know-you type questions. I didn’t want to act like that I was there just for him. I was out to make some new friends. No big deal.

  After a drink or two, we decided to move on to another bar where we could play darts. Blake rode his bike and I rode the scooter. Somewhere in the half mile stretch between bars, I decided that I liked Blake. To start, he was better looking than any guy that I’d dated and so far. Also I’d learned that he went to college at the Art Institute in L.A., he was an artist who painted and sketched, and his degree was in culinary arts, meaning that he could cook. All of it thrilled me.

  We played darts at the bar, girls against guys, drinking and laughing. The girls won in part because, for no good reason at all, I was and always have been excellent at darts. I don’t even know how to keep score. I just aim and throw really well.

  Blake went to get another drink and I sat on a stool smiling and sipping my rum and Diet Coke as his friend cleaned the scoreboard. When Blake returned, he announced that he’d made a few jukebox selections for us. First up was a Counting Crows song. He was throwing darts straight at my heart.

  We started playing again, this time with Blake and me on the same team. I threw my three red-winged darts, good but not my best, and then I stepped back and smiled.

  “Wow, okay,” he said. “You can be on my team anytime.”

  His next song selection came on. It was Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a song that is absolutely one-hundred-percent impossible not to sing along to. Our game halted for seven minutes of Blake leading the entire bar in a rowdy, laughter-filled sing-along. This was serious.

  We moved from the bar to Blake’s house, just down the street. Then the drinking really began. We did vodka-and-orange-juice shots in a kitchen decorated with some of his art and I taught some yoga moves to his friends in the living room. Looking back, this is proof that I was drunk. Living room yoga is not really great first date behavior, but then again, I was making a good effort to display to him some of my best qualities: I always win at darts and my plow pose is fantastic.

  Later, somewhere in the vodka-and-orange-juice haze, I found myself in the kitchen with Blake. It had to be four in the morning. Easily, he reached out and put his arms around my waist and pulled me to him. He smiled that brilliant and invigorating smile and he kissed me. It was long and it was soft, but it was passionate. It was perfect.

  When we stopped, I leaned back and looked at him. It was in these moments that I gave t
oo much away. I was suddenly unafraid to show that I was happy, smiling with my mouth and with my eyes. I looked at him without really seeing as I searched for his soul behind his eyes. Then I saw that his face didn’t mirror mine. He was smiling, but it was a funny smile, his eyes squinty. He looked...terrified!

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, pulling back from his hold a bit. It was still a smile. “Why do you look so scared?”

  “I am. I am scared,” he said.

  “Well, don’t be, you’re freaking me out. Just kiss me again.”

  He gladly did.

  Was there really a crack in his confident facade? Didn’t he know how amazing he was? Why would he be so nervous kissing a girl? I decided that I liked that his confident act wasn’t seamless. It was a good thing that he wasn’t full of himself.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said suddenly, shaking me out of my analysis of his personality.

  “Okay.” He still held me while he leaned against the kitchen counter.

  “I knew who you were when I asked your name. I’ve been watching you all summer. And I never thought in a million years that you would speak to me, let alone be here, now. With me.”

  “Oh!” I looked away while absorbing this new and fascinating information, deciding whether to make a confession of my own. Go for it, my heart said, my heart always said.

  “I watched you all summer too. I thought you never noticed me. You never looked at me, you never spoke to me.”

  “I know. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how...”