2. Robert
two
Robert
I sipped on my beer, lost in thought. I hardly heard Jeremy as he snapped me back into the present by saying, “So, how was class today?”
“Huh?”
“Self-defense class? I assume that’s why you’re so sweaty, anyway, unless you have a thyroid problem I don’t know about.”
“Oh, right.” I looked down at the mozzarella stick in my hand and dropped it, wiping my greasy fingertips off on a napkin.
This was not the kind of food I usually ate, but most of the times I ended up at a dive bar with Jeremy.
I always offered to go somewhere more upscale, and I would pay, of course, but the propositions seemed to offend him, so I had stopped. That meant a lot of greasy food and beer.
“Um, it was good. I saw your ex.” I looked at him to gauge his reaction.
“Which one?” he asked, a small smirk across his pale face.
I look at him with a mockingly sad face. “Oh, don’t do that. You know you only have one ex.”
“That isn’t true,” he said defensively. “I’ve got plenty of women wanting a piece of this.”
I took a long sip of my beer, giving him a moment to sit with his lie. “Fine, if you need this charade to keep going, it was Delia. She looked good.”
“I know she looks good,” Jeremy said, a little too quickly, a small blush creeping up into his cheeks. “I see her all the time, you know.”
“Right, sorry. Well, she looks good,” I said offhandedly.
“Okay, I get it.” He sounded annoyed at me, as though by pointing out she looked good, I was basically fucking her in front of him.
We sat in silence for a moment, and Jeremy bit off a piece of a mozzarella stick, clearly thinking about Delia.
For just a second, I felt a pang of guilt for breaking them up. It was clear when I spoke to her today that it still hurt her to think about it. She missed him, and why shouldn’t she? Jeremy was a nice guy, attractive enough, and reasonable.
But it had been inappropriate, their relationship. I couldn’t hang out with a guy who would sleep with his students, even if she was an adult. It just wasn’t right.
After a moment, Jeremy continued, “I wonder why she was at your class. Do you think everything’s okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean, what if she feels unsafe? What if she’s worried about someone?” He looked intensely at me, prying without asking if I knew anything, hoping that I would tell him what I knew.
I shrugged his questions off. “Women take that course all the time because they just want to be prepared. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“Maybe I should take one, prepare myself. I’m a small guy. Are small guys allowed?” His tone was joking, but in a way that told me he did want to take the class. I could guess why.
There was something appealing to him, I’m sure, about seeing Delia sweaty in workout clothes. I’d seen it myself, and it wasn’t a bad view.
Chuckling, I responded, “How about I do you one better? Why don’t you come to the next one and I’ll let you be my co-instructor for the day? We can get you trained, and you can teach a couple lessons. It’s rewarding work.”
Jeremy stuck out his bottom lip, considering, and looked out the window of the dimly lit bar. The light was nearly blinding in comparison.
He looked back at me, squinting, and his pupils were tiny against the sunlight. “Yeah, that sounds fun. Thanks.”
“It starts pretty early, though. 6 a.m. Think you can hack it?”
“I’ll manage.”
“As long as it’s not just a scheme to get close to Delia again. It took you so long to get over her, man.”
“Like I said, I see her all the time. I haven’t gone back yet. I’m not going to go back now.”
“Okay, good, because I worry about you.” I watched him over the glass with stern eyes as he ate, his mind somewhere else.
Despite being a successful therapist for veterans and managing a successful partnership with the local colleges in which they sent over master’s students to study underneath him and get their hours, he managed to have the worst self-esteem of any man I knew.
He always seemed to be striking out with women, and he took it hard.
“I know Delia was a lapse in judgment, dating a student like that, but you’ve got a career to think about. You can’t blow it all on some twenty-something.”
“She’s more mature than half the women in their thirties I’ve dated in Seattle,” Jeremy griped, annoyed with me for dragging the conversation on.
“Maybe that’s more about your taste in women,” I pointed out, waving a half-eaten mozzarella stick at him.
“No, it’s about Delia. Delia’s special. You’ll see if she keeps coming to your classes.”
“I think that ship has sailed. She stormed out of there. She didn’t seem too mature to me.”
That answer seemed to satisfy Jeremy for some reason. It pleased him that Delia didn’t like me. “Well, you do have a way of getting under people’s skin. I mean, I love you, but you’re an asshole.”
I ignored him, wiping some crumbs off the table and into a napkin. “Listen, if she’s so special, why’d you let me talk you out of it?”
He looked up at me with a contemplative face. “I guess I just thought…you had a point at the time. I didn’t want to lose my job, and I didn’t want to go through the trouble of transferring or making her transfer.”
“If it were true love, don’t you think you would have?”
He shrugged. “Don’t do that to me, man.”
I could have let it go, but I pushed it, being the asshole that I apparently was. “No, I mean it. Don’t you think if it were really more than something that stroked your ego, you would have ignored my thoughts on you dating an underling and made it work?”
“Maybe. I regret it sometimes, but I ultimately think it was the right call, even if it was hard at the time.” He looked at me and frowned. “I’m glad you talked some sense into me. I could have gotten into a lot of trouble.”
“Hey, I had to eventually return the favor. You talked sense into me so many times. You kept me alive for a while there. I could have ruined my daughter’s life by ending it all so many times, and you always talked me off the edge. I owed you.” I smiled at him and saw the twinkling in his eyes.
Jeremy may have made a mistake a year ago with Delia, but he’d been my best friend for so long, a man who I could truly rely on. When I entered his office ten years ago, broken and single with a baby to take care of, I had no idea what therapy would be like. I just knew I needed help.
Jeremy had been a guiding light out of a fog, and through my work with him, I learned to enjoy things again, slowly but surely.
Eventually, he became a friend, my first friend in adulthood not in the Navy. I owed Jeremy everything. I owed Jeremy my life.
But then there was the nagging thought in the back of my mind, the way Delia had looked in her outfit, the way her brown eyes got so stormy and angry when she realized who I was, the casual smile on her perfect and peachy lips. I tried hard not to acknowledge that thought.
I especially tried not to think about her touch on my shoulders and the way my skin tingled when her fingers made contact. I tried to get her out of my head because Jeremy had really liked her, and I had ruined it for him.
Nothing could be a bigger betrayal than to like her myself. I would have to push any such feelings away.