Eavesdropping

Chapter 2.1 - Life Decisions

Ethan rolled over and pushed the home button on his iPhone.

Shit. 2:19 in the morning.

He lay in bed for a few minutes more as he adjusted positions a few times. He tried rolling over onto his stomach, then shifted to his left as he flipped his pillow over to the cool side, as ESPN's Stuart Scott used to say. He scrunched it in his hands, felt a twinge in his stomach and sighed. He rolled onto his back, looked up and accepted the defeat of yet another sleepless night.

Kicking the sheets off, Ethan brought his legs to the floor, his head falling forward with his hands on either side. He felt like crying. It had been two months. She was gone.

He lifted his tall frame out of bed and walked from the bedroom into the living room, grabbing his phone on the way. His apartment, roughly 1,200 square feet, was spacious enough with a high ceiling to boot. He turned on the television to help distract his thoughts. The sudden sound level from earlier that night came through the speakers, scaring him. He quickly turned it down so he wouldn't wake his neighbors nor their cute three-year-old would suffer.

He grabbed a blanket and threw himself on the couch, flipping through the channels. The local stations had all signed off, making space for paid programming. And that's why you're going to college, he told himself, so you can work 9-5 and avoid late night infomercials. No one informed you insomnia or heartbreak made you desperate enough to watch that junk, it just happened.

Two ladies were in the midst of an excited conversation, at least for them, about a revolutionary new broom. He smiled as they transitioned to the sell portion of the program where the obligatory "buy one, get one free" message scrolled across the screen along with a counter to show how many were buying the message along with the broom. If the product was so great with attractive pricing, why did they cheapen the impact by selling you two? To Ethan that inferred the product would likely give out, meaning you needed an instant replacement for when it did. Like his personal life, nothing was as good as it seemed.

He closed his eyes, bored with the TV. It wasn't working anyway. She was still there. He couldn't yet let her go in his heart. But in his mind, she was slipping away. By her standards, she was already gone. In Ethan's world, the one of soft heartedness and disenchanted optimism, it took a bit longer to come to the realization.

A few weeks ago he had felt the first shifts toward recovery.

He had been studying at his usual haunt, The Bump & Grind, which was in reality an odd combination of a night club, wine bar, and internet cafe. The name always made everyone smirk the first time they heard it. In a college town, double entendres were accepted, hell even encouraged. And, in this case, it applied. For as many years as the locals could recall, a bar called "The Bump" had been a business founded on the ritual of ordering a shot of hard liquor and receiving beer with it. The name stuck for decades until new ownership took over and realized the bar's potential for earning revenue around the clock, not just at night. They took the empty bar space during the daytime hours, divided it, kept the bar on one-half and set up a coffee shop on the other side. They added WiFi, calling the cafe side "The Grind." But the college students re-named it through a social-media contest and thus, The Bump and Grind came to be. It was a genius idea, and the owners could not have been more pleased. Their t-shirts gained local favor, with the front saying "Do You Want To Bump?" and the back continuing, "...Or Do You Want To Grind?" To further accommodate the patrons and popularity, they expanded the business and placed a wine bar in the middle. There was ample seating, separated by rooms based on what you were drinking that day/night.

Just last week in The Grind side Ethan spied a cute redhead. She looked his way while studying. His mind entertained a few old thoughts, and it was then that he knew he was making a shift towards recovery. He even walked over to her table and they had a fun conversation until he found out she was a sophomore. Subtly, he backed off the conversation. He was temporarily suspending all relations with women younger than him. They didn't have a firm foundation on what they were going to do, at least that was the lesson he learned from dating Jamie. And one train wreck at this point in his life was enough.

Ethan met Jamie online. That went without saying since social media marketing was her major. Ethan, trusting his hunches to profile people from afar, left little to chance when it came to his personal life. His studies and job left him little free time so going online to find the love of his life seemed easier. And for Jamie, she had been dabbling in the making match area for many months prior.

It was quite by accident they even came across each other since Ethan had neglected to check Caucasian as one of his racial preferences to date. At first he had been intrigued by the exotic choices the matchmaking site provided him — those he would never have chosen for himself. Not that he was racist, far from it, but it never occurred to him living in the Midwest that someone of color or different nationality would have an interest in him. Ethan's mom gave him a hard time, asking him if he was considering a position with the United Nations. It made no different at the end of the day to him — they were all lovely women, but a match had not yet occurred until he received a date request from Jamie. Luckily she checked the right boxes and within a few weeks, Ethan's profile landed on her radar screen. She reached out to him for a chance at romance.

On their second date, they discussed their "matches" and on a hunch Jamie checked Ethan's profile set up and found his inadvertent omission. That was the first time he saw her laugh. Her brown eyes had glistened, and it was at that moment that he had looked past their differences in color. He found his match. He was two years older than Jamie, but still felt drawn to her. She talked a good talk and was pretty versed in politics when she wanted to be.

Besides her brown eyes, she had long hair. She teased about cutting it often. She told Ethan that in the event of a zombie apocalypse it wouldn't get in her way if she needed to axe down the masses. Spending as much time on the computer as she did, Jamie steered clear from the athletic build category, but she maintained a physique that kept glances coming her way. On any given day you'd find her at home in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt promoting various bands or social media campaigns.

With Jamie a senior, and Ethan a grad student, both attended the University of Missouri. Ethan completed his political science degree and was now in law school. They pushed aside the future and lived in the present. The potential of them going in separate directions was always the risk, but pushed that gray cloud away any time it hovered nearby. Having come from different worlds and influences, he saw all the good in her life. But the bad if his life was equally apparent to her as well.

Jamie got along really well with Ethan's friends. They found her funny, albeit a bit quirky. With his circle of pre-law buddies, they found it odd that someone could make a living out of social media. It was through her arguments and defensive tactics that earned her respect with them. Ethan, however, found most of her friends nice but immature. They were more into the party scene, just as he had been at that point in his life. And because many of her friends shared her major and were on social media as much as Jamie if not more, they constantly "violated" Ethan's pet peeve - the consistent head crook at their iPhones. Ethan loved his phone, but the interruptions and need for others to record their every move irked Ethan. Jamie caught on to that peculiarity about Ethan. The over sharing of people's lives, the invading of privacies was a common debate between them. From his vantage point, you never saw anyone on TV get arrested because they didn't post enough updates on Twitter or Facebook. She always argued back with Ethan, but she secretly conceded he had a point.

Those familiar with the University of Missouri, affectionately called it Mizzou, making both of them proud Mizzou Tigers. At all of the athletic events and parties, one side of the crowd would yell "M-I-Z!" and the other side would shout back "Z-O-U!" Jamie joked with him that it was a good thing they didn't go to school in Mississippi which provoked a litany of goofy chants. It was one of many things they had in common despite their differences — the ability to laugh with each other.

Although the University had satellite locations in many parts of the state, the main campus was in Columbia, sandwiched in the middle of the state, smack dab between Kansas City and St. Louis. Besides the many activities to do on campus or in Columbia, they went home on the weekends when there wasn't much to do. With Ethan's family living in Kansas City, and hers from St. Louis they never lacked for excitement. But it never made up for the uncomfortableness found at Ethan's home.

Ethan's family lived in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. With the metropolitan area of Kansas City situated on the border of Kansas and Missouri, Overland Park was on the Kansas side. The storied interstate rivalry between Missouri and Kansas which began in the 1800s played out for many years between the two state universities, the Jayhawks, and the Tigers. It was a frequent apology Ethan was forced to make with his friends and fellow students that although he attended Mizzou, his roots were from Kansas. That rivalry mirrored the direction Ethan and Jamie would eventually take.