Chapter 15
Maryellen
Shit! That was the buzzer going off like crazy.
I didn’t expect him to be back that quick.
On Saturdays, the bakery was always packed with the line usually out the door.
I thought he would be at least another fifteen minutes.
I jumped out of the shower and ran to the intercom, hoping I made it in time.
“Chase!” I screamed into the speaker. “Is that you?”
“Yeah,” he said, almost sarcastically. “Expecting someone else?”
I buzzed him in and went back in the shower to rinse the soap off my legs. By the time he got into the apartment, I was dry and in my robe.
“Do you always leave your door propped open when you buzz people in? That’s really unsafe, Mare. You shouldn’t do that.”
He walked through my tiny hall with his arms full of bags, more bags than I anticipated. Plus, he had coffee. I followed him closely and grabbed what had to be mine from the carrier as soon as he put it down.
“Ahhh.” The first sip was always the best.
“Did I get it right?” He pulled pastry after pastry out of the bags, plus bagels and cream cheese.
“It’s perfect. What did you do, buy out the entire place? We’ll never be able to eat all of this.”
Taking a shower had helped clear my mind, and I felt ready to at least listen to him more. But he had some explaining to do about a couple things.
Well, more than a couple things.
I pulled a platter from a cabinet, and we arranged the food. We grabbed our drinks and brought plates with us to the tiny table I had by my window. It felt nice. I hated to admit how nice it felt, to be doing such a normal, mundane thing like eating breakfast with him.
He sat across from me, gaping at the mountain of food, and laughed.
“I guess I did go overboard. But it’s OK, you’ll have leftovers for a couple days.”
Muffins, croissants, cookies, bagels. He got it all. I grabbed a bagel and swiped some cream cheese on it before taking another gulp of coffee.
“I got nervous down there when you didn’t answer right away.” His mouth was full of chocolate chip muffin, a bit of it covering his lips, and he had crumbs all over his fingers.
“Yeah, sorry about that. I thought you’d be longer than you were.”
My clear head didn’t last long. The muddled thoughts about how I should feel contrasted with how I did feel and made me confused when I looked at him. My brain took over and wouldn’t allow me to continue enjoying this moment. I picked up my coffee, no longer hungry, and stepped away from the table.
“How did you know I had a date, Chase?”
Turning to the table, guilt covered his face. He pushed his plate away, losing his appetite as well, apparently.
“I, um, saw the text from him the other day on your phone,” he said.
It should have bothered me more than it did. I think I was happy it wasn’t something more…stalkier. That wasn’t Chase’s MO, anyway.
“I didn’t steal your phone, or anything like that. We were working. When you got up, it fell. I picked it up and happened to see it. I’m sorry.”
I nodded, remembering the moment.
“It’s just, once I knew, I struggled with it all week. Then the night came, and I made poor choices. I made Chase choices.”
Chase choices.
We both chuckled at his self-deprecating statement.
“Well…I guess I’m glad to hear you didn’t steal my phone,” I said.
A nervous laugh escaped him. I was still angry, yet neither of us knew how to proceed.
Chase was younger than me. Significantly younger. It wasn’t a May-December thing. Even though he was almost twenty-five, there were still almost five years between us. Immature would not be a word I’d use to describe him, but he did have some growing up to do in some areas of his life.
His choices, at times, were not always thought through. How could I continue to be mad at him for poor choices when I was withholding something from him? That was a choice I’d made that could affect us. Whether he found out my truth or not, it would always be there, lurking in the shadows.
It would continue to affect us.
Who in their right mind would be comfortable dating the co-CEO of the company they worked for? He was my boss.
But we had a past. We gave this a shot once before.
After the party at The Plaza last summer, he’d convinced me to go home with him.
It didn’t take much. I’d had my eye on him for months, and our constant flirting at work was one of the better parts of my day.
But then, when he showed up to the party with Amanda, I was hurt.
I knew we couldn’t go to the event together, but I also didn’t know he was still seeing her.
I’ll call it what it was. I was jealous.
And it was intense. That was when I knew it was more for me. More than just our casual flirtations across my desk each morning. We were getting to know each other during those moments. They weren’t the deepest of conversations, but they meant something to me.
Turned out they did to him as well. Because we connected that night. In more ways than one.
We were different in so many ways. In our upbringing. In the way we lived our current lives. And that created its own set of problems, at least for me.
“My place is nothing like yours, is it?” I scanned my tiny space.
His apartment, rather his penthouse, was on Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side, looking over Central Park. Slightly different from my living quarters.
“So?” he asked. “What does that matter?”
As I peered out the window onto the street of my neighborhood, I wondered if he was right. I loved my apartment, my neighborhood.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Chase. I wasn’t brought up like you. I don’t come from much.”
As he came up behind me, I could tell he wanted to hold me. His finger drifted along my arm. When I didn’t shrug him off, his finger hooked mine, giving it a gentle tug.
That always melted my heart.
He wrapped his body around me. It always felt good to be in his arms as he held me tight. I felt safe, protected. That was always something I craved growing up. Still did.
“Well, why don’t you fill me in. Tell me something about your childhood,” he said.
Oh man, where did I start? I wasn’t sure how much I truly wanted to tell him or if he really wanted to know the whole truth. Guiding him back to the couch, I sat us down. I knew I’d need to be sitting for this.
“I grew up in a shithole town in rural Ohio. We really didn’t have much money, so I had to work from the time I was thirteen or fourteen to help out, babysat mostly. But my money went to help pay the bills, rent, and food, not for me to go to the movies or the mall with friends.”
Chase held my hand, rubbing the back of it like he usually did. I refused to look his way, though, not wanting to see the potential look of pity he might give me.
“We have one thing in common,” I told him.
The irony was evident in my voice. “We both have a parent who deserted us. My dad left us when I was three, I think. He, uh, was an addict and took off one day. We never knew what happened. My mom didn’t care enough to try and figure it out.
At least that’s what she told me when I got older. ”
I pulled my hand from his and reached for my coffee on the table, taking a long drink. The sticker on the cup was a great distraction. Chase was patient as he waited for me to continue, though I wasn’t sure what else I wanted to tell him.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he eventually said.
“It happened to you, too.”
He tried to pull me into his arms, but I didn’t let him. This time I needed space.
“Yeah,” he said. “But you were basically a baby, Mare. That’s hard. Hard for your mom, too.”
I leapt from the couch, antsy with this conversation now. He had no idea.
“My mom was never around, Chase. If she wasn’t working, she was on dates with guys or hanging with her friends. I was an inconvenience for her. The second I could, I got out of there.”
This was a mistake—I knew we shouldn’t have brought up our pasts.
I noticed my bed and made my way to it, the anxiety of the messiness setting in. It was unusual for me to have left it unmade for as long as I did.
I needed order.
I needed organization.
There were no surprises with me. Secrets maybe, but no surprises. If I had order and organization in my life, I knew what to expect.
“Let me help you,” Chase said. He sensed my discomfort, I could tell.
He folded the throw blanket and helped drape it on the end of the bed. He did a pretty nice job, almost as if he might have one on his own bed. I couldn’t remember from the time I was there.
My mind wandered to last night and who he might have been with.
And where.
Did he see Amanda again? Was that who he spent last night with, trying to forget about me?
Or did he hook up with a stranger?
I wasn’t sure which one bothered me more. Or if I truly wanted to know. I had no say. We weren’t together. Yet that green monster always seemed to find its way in, no matter what.
Once the bed was made, he came around to where I was and stood in front of me, waiting. Waiting for me to, I don’t know, look at him or tell him I was OK.
But I wasn’t. My past was not what I wanted to be talking about, and I think he finally figured that out.
“It’s hard growing up with one parent sometimes, isn’t it?” he asked.
The couch almost groaned as he fell against it. Small dust clouds flew into the sunrays coming through the window. The tiny particles distracted me from his question, but then I saw him staring at the ceiling. Lost in his own thoughts.
Once I joined him on the couch, he chuckled to himself. My eyes drifted to see him running a hand through his hair as he did.
“I don’t know about your mom, but my dad kinda sucked at the single-parent thing.”
The mention of his dad made my heart stop, but I realized this was reminiscing. This would not be centered around me.
“He thought since we weren’t toddlers, ya know, eight and ten, we could take care of ourselves.
” The pause Chase took accentuated the sarcasm of his father’s actions.
“He was more concerned about his company. He would later tell us it was our legacy and he was thinking of us by going to work all the time.”
The years I worked for Robert Parker, I knew him to be fair. Tough, but fair. He wasn’t an easy boss to have, that was for sure. I had to be on my game at all times. But he taught me a lot and did so much more for me even before I stepped foot into the offices of PFA.
Hearing about this side of him was eye-opening.
Chase turned toward me on the couch. His look softened.
“Did I ever tell you about my mom and her singing?” he asked.
The tone of his voice had morphed into one of admiration…and love. It was obvious he cared deeply for his mother, even though she’d left them. That was heartbreaking.
“No,” I said. “Tell me.”
He launched into various stories about how she used to include music and song in almost everything she did with him and Gage.
It wasn’t just lullabies. While she cooked, she sang.
While she did the laundry, she sang. When they walked to school, she sang.
He was immersed in the world of music with her.
She bought him his first guitar and taught him to play.
They would sit on their front porch and practice until the fireflies came out.
As I listened to Chase talk about his mom, I realized there was a gap that had been widening between us, and I didn’t want that. Even with the rough night we had, I didn’t want that. This was helping.
It was helping both of us.
“What is your mother’s name?” I asked.
A smile consumed him with my question.
“Susanna.” His eyes drifted back to the ceiling. It was as if he needed to look away to take himself back to a time that was better. “Isn’t that a beautiful name?”
“It is,” I said.
The question was on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment.
Why haven’t you reached out to her if you miss her so much?
“I guess your interest in music makes sense.” My body turned in his direction, and he did the same. “I’m the least musically inclined person you’ll ever meet, but I love to listen to music. I usually have it on in my apartment all the time when I’m alone.”
“Oh yeah?” he asked. “What do you like to listen to?”
Our conversations went on for hours. We stopped and had some of the pastries. I made coffee. But we never stopped talking. The words flowed like wine between us, and it made me realize we’d never done this before.
There had never been a time we sat and really shared anything about ourselves with one another. Casual conversation about superficial things at work, but nothing substantial.
Chase was going through his Spotify list and playing random songs through my speaker to see if I knew them. It was a game we’d been playing, taking turns for a while to pass the time, and it was fun. As the day came to a close and the sun began to set, I wondered where this left us.
The barriers we broke through with our sharing seemed to help with some issues I had with him earlier.
But not all of them. One still chipped away at my brain, and I couldn’t let it go.
“Chase.”
He paused the song at the sound of his name. The seriousness of the way I said his name caused our eyes to connect. A look of defeat fell across his face.
He sat on the floor, holding his phone, simply staring at me. Waiting.
“I need to know. Who were you with last night?” My manicured nails were safe from my teeth, but my cuticles weren’t. I found a loose piece of skin and gnawed on it while waiting for him to say something.
Anything.
“Mare.” There was a hint of frustration in his voice as my name got drawn out. As our day progressed, he probably thought the topic was closed. “Why does it matter?”
It was hard knowing he was with someone else. All this back and forth, it was killing us both.
“I don’t need details, Chase. All I want to know is, was it her?”
His eyes pinched together. My god, why were men so clueless? It was my turn to be exasperated.
“Was it Amanda!” It came out loud and strong, as I slammed my hands on the table in front of me.
His movements were slow as he got up from the floor and approached me. The table was between us.
“No, it wasn’t Amanda.”
Suddenly, I could breathe. He had been with someone, I knew that. But so was I. As long as it wasn’t her, I felt like we could get beyond this.
At least I was going to try.