While You Were Teaching

Chapter 23- We Found Wonderland

"It's so beautiful here.  All the palm trees and the ocean." I sighed happily as the ocean's balmy breeze washed over me, twisting my hair into tiny knots.  "You know I almost came here.  This was my second choice. Santa Barbara, I mean."

I thought for a moment about how different my life would be if I had gone to school here instead of in LA.  In some ways, my life would almost eerily be the same.  I'd be taking the same classes, and probably wasting just as much of my life away on Netflix as I am now.  But when I think about Blake and Reina, I can't imagine that I would have been able to find someone else who compared to them.  Blake Peterson is one-of-a-kind, and if she isn't well everyone should be very, very afraid.

Not to mention Dominic.  Would I be dating someone else? Would I be just as happy as I am right now?

Had I picked a different school, made a different choice, would I feel any different?  Could I be as happy with someone else as I am with Dominic?  It's strange when you start to think about life in terms of missed chances and opportunities.  You start to question every little choice you've ever made.  You almost have to start believing in destiny at that point because the other option is just too terrible to think.

"Really?" He tilted his head to look down at me. "I actually got a job offer here two weeks after I accepted the one at UCLA.  Apparently the Southern California area was in desperate need of math teachers."

"And you were the best they could find?" I joked, nudging him playfully in the ribs.  Inside, my mind was running a million miles a second as my mind floated back to the concept destiny but then I reminded myself that destiny was only something that belonged in the movies. It wasn't something that actually happened in real life.

"Ha ha. It would've been weird though, right?  If I had taken that offer and you had decided to choose UCSB as your school.  We might have ended up exactly where we are right now."

"Yeah." I pondered the idea for a moment, letting the ocean waves be the only noise around us.  "Or maybe I would never have taken your class.  Maybe our paths would have crossed a few times while wandering through campus and that would have been it."

I laughed lightly as a situation popped into my head.  "What if one day I had dropped my books and you helped me pick them up? And we just walked away and went about our lives? Wouldn't that be weird?"

To think that I could have met Dominic in another way, in another life, and have just walked past him with no further thought to him whatsoever was a really strange concept. I would have never known what I had been missing.

"The weirdest." He confirmed, nodding his head. "But I don't think that would have happened."

"What the Santa Barbara thing or the walking away thing?"

"The walking away part.  Even if I had never seen you before, knew absolutely nothing about you, I don't think I could have walked away from you.  Something in me would have told me to stay, and I wouldn't have fought it."

He had parked the car in front of a little restaurant right off the ocean and we were standing right by the glass wall, watching the ocean.  There was only silence as  he stared at me with that daydreamy look in his eyes that never failed to take my breath away.

"Maybe..."  I took a breath staring into his eyes with the same openness and pureness in which he was looking at me.  With a whisper so soft I wasn't even sure he would hear it, I said, "Maybe I would have stayed too."

__________

"So we're actually going to do this.  We're just going to walk right in there and act like everything is normal." I think my brain still hadn't caught on to the fact that Dominic and I were actually going to be in public together and was slightly freaking out. I had been fine with the idea in the car, but now that it was actually time to walk into the restaurant, his fingers intertwined tight with mine, I was scared.