2. Plus-One, Minus Emotional Availability
PLUS-ONE, MINUS EMOTIONAL AVAILABILITY
Dawson
Ifucking hated weddings. That wasn’t a casual “I hate waiting in line” kind of hate, or even the more understandable “I hate people who chew with their mouth open” brand of mild irritation.
My dislike was dense, fossilized, bone-deep.
I could feel the weight of resentment, as solid and cold as a tombstone, pressing against my chest.
Weddings were a symbol, a reminder of the only life I wanted and one I only had myself to blame for fucking up.
Which was why, on the morning of my brother’s wedding, I was standing in my bedroom, staring at my closet like it was the mouth of a hungry lion.
The house was silent except for the sound of my own teeth grinding.
I was stuck somewhere between the urge to punch a wall and the impulse to just crawl back under my faded comforter and stay there for the rest of my natural life.
Instead, I forced myself to grab a crisp white dress shirt and put it on.
As I buttoned it, I walked to my dresser and grabbed socks from the top drawer.
When I did, I noticed the faded paper edge peeking out from my wallet.
I did my best to ignore it. On this day, of all days, I didn’t need to pull it out and look at it.
It had been years since I’d looked at the photo strip we’d taken on the boardwalk when we were thirteen.
The four tiny rectangular images were seared into my memory but holding them in my hand and looking at them would cause my heart to break all over again.
That didn’t stop me from grabbing the leather billfold and retrieving the nostalgic keepsake.
I stared down, studying the images as if it were the first time I’d ever seen them.
In the first photo, Sadie’s mouth was wide open in a fake scream as I pretended to bite her earlobe.
The second one, she stuck her tongue out at me, her bright blue eyes sparkling, and I had a huge smile on my face.
In the third, she’d pressed her lips to my cheek with a cartoonish, exaggerated pucker.
And the last one, my favorite, was almost serious.
We were looking at each other, only our profiles were visible, but you could feel the energy between us, the connection, the sparks.
Part of me wanted to close my fist around the photo strip and crumple it, or grab scissors and cut it into tiny pieces, or strike a match and burn it.
Instead, I just stared down at the strip in my palm, feeling an ache at the spot right above my heart.
Weddings, fucking weddings. It didn’t matter whose it was—friends, a second cousin, a co-worker’s best friend, hell, even strangers who booked my family’s ranch—being anywhere near a wedding yanked the memory of Sadie out of whatever dark hole I tried to bury her in.
I’d told myself that meant I was a hopeless romantic.
But the older I got, the more I realized that wasn’t it at all.
I was just a man who’d ruined the best thing in his life and couldn’t let the wound scab over, no matter how hard I tried.
I slid the photo strip back into the wallet and shoved it into my back pocket.
If there was a world record for fastest time getting dressed for a formal event, I broke it that morning.
I knotted the tie, shrugged into the jacket, and forced myself to the mirror.
Most people said I looked like my brothers.
I supposed it was true; we all had the Lockhart hair—dark brown, thick with a slight wave—and the same jawline that made us look permanently pissed off, even when we weren’t.
But lately, I’d started to see something else in my face, a kind of weariness that didn’t belong to a man who was thirty.
My old man’s eyes stared out at me from the mirror, full of secrets and disappointments.
I left the tie crooked, grabbed my keys, and walked out the door.
As I stepped onto my front porch, I wondered, as I did every time I forced myself to go to one of these events, if I should have tried harder to forget her.
There probably wasn’t a therapist in the greater Valentine Bay area who wouldn’t have said, “Yes, definitely, move on, get closure, do trust falls, whatever.” My own version of self-care was patching up the walls around the memories and pretending I couldn’t hear them clawing at the plaster from the inside.
In fairness, I’d tried to move on. I’d dated other people.
A lot of other people. In fact, I was sort of notorious for it at this point.
My brothers and I had always been referred to as “heartbreakers,” either as a play on words from our last name Lockhart, or because every time my mom gave birth to one of us, the first thing the nurse said was, ‘You got yourself a heartbreaker” or “He’s going to be a little heartbreaker” or something to that effect for all four of my brothers.
My mom stands by her story, friends say it’s a play on our last name.
Either way, for the past decade or so, I’d been living up to the title.
Case in point, I was on my way to pick up a date for the wedding, but my head and heart had a mind of their own.
The thing about obsessive thoughts is that they don’t take orders.
It’s not a democracy in your brain, it’s a goddamn coup every time the right trigger hits.
Like waking up hungover and alone with a stranger.
Or seeing the spot on the beach where you guys watched shooting stars and told each other you loved one another.
Or witnessing two people promise to love each other for the rest of their lives.
Or buying the house that we’d always talked about owning and living in.
That one was my bad. I took full responsibility for those actions, but I couldn’t help myself.
Starting as early as twelve years old, we used to ride our bikes out to the north side of town, up to Cupid’s Cove, and there was a storybook cottage on our way that had a wraparound porch that sat on a bluff overlooking the ocean.
Sadie mentioned once that she’d always loved the house, and I promised her I’d buy it for her. I always kept my word.
I sat in my truck, hands locked on the steering wheel, and forced myself to focus on the road.
The only silver lining was that the wedding wasn’t at the church, which was where Sadie had always planned our wedding.
Today’s nuptials were going down on the south lawn at the ranch, with the vineyard and the ocean in the background for the kind of rustic-chic photo ops that made the ranch’s Instagram followers foam at the mouth.
All I had to do was show up and do my part to look like a functioning Lockhart.
First, I had to pick up Dr. Angela Chang.
Within two minutes, the first time we hung out, Angie and I agreed that neither of us had the bandwidth for anything that required real emotional investment.
Like everyone else I dated, I made it clear this wasn’t serious and it would never be serious.
It wasn’t exclusive. Zero pressure. Zero promises.
She’d just moved to town to take on the role of attending physician in ER which meant long hours and not a ton of time to spare for her personal life.
And I was…well, I was me. Whatever that meant these days.
I checked the time as I pulled up, ten minutes to spare if she was ready on time, which she always was.
I liked that about her. She was never late, never flaky, never cared if we went days without texting.
She had her own life, one that didn’t have anything to do with me.
If I were a different man, maybe that would’ve bothered me.
But I found comfort in the low-maintenance rhythm of our routine: occasional dinners, occasional sex, and a mutual understanding that neither of us was anybody’s forever.
Her apartment was one of those new, boxy complexes that tried to pass itself off as “urban chic” despite being surrounded by a quarter mile of cow pastures.
She answered the door in a burnt orange wrap dress, hair pulled up in a slicked-back ponytail highlighting her model-like features: almond shaped eyes, high cheekbones, perfectly asymmetrical face and full lips.
The first time I saw her in scrubs, I thought she looked young and didn’t give her a second thought.
But then I spoke to her and realized she was smart, classy, sarcastic, and age appropriate.
Angie carried herself with a kind of graceful, don’t-fuck-with-me composure that I respected.
“You look gorgeous,” I told her as I we walked down the path from her condo to my truck.
“You scrub up quite nicely yourself,” she returned the compliment as I helped her into the passenger seat.
After heading to the driver’s side, we were on our way to the ranch, a five minute drive away.
I thought I was doing a good job of disguising my anxiety when she eyed my knuckles with a frown. “Rough morning?” she asked, voice dry as a salt flat.
“Just didn’t sleep that well,” I explained away my behavior.
She shifted in her seat. “I’m excited to finally meet the last two Heartbreakers.”
Since Angie had only been in town for a few months, she’d yet to meet all my brothers. We ran into Damon, my middle brother, at sushi one night. I went to the bathroom and when I walked out he was hitting on her. He had no clue she was there with me. It was actually pretty funny.
“What are their names again?”
“Dean and Dylan.”
“One of the nurses, Carly, was telling me that your mom named you all after TV show characters or something. Is that true?”
I nodded. “My mom came to the country, and she didn’t know the language. She watched TV to learn English, and she named us all after characters from her favorite shows.”
Angie’s eyes lit up, which is usually what happened when I told people that story.
“That’s amazing! Wait, so you are clearly named after Dawson’s Creek.”
“Yep.”