Where I Laid Me Down To Sleep

Chapter seven ~ Partiers (temp title)

* * *

I didn’t even know what to say when I got off the phone with Natasha that night.  I mean, she always treated me like I was her older brother and nothing more.  But I was in love with her from the moment I saw her in High School.  To her I was nobody but Tim.  Good old Tim, the poet from English class.  Oh sure, she didn’t know half of the poems I’d written were about her, did she?  I’d never shown them to her.  I was way too shy in those days.  So what if I was only twenty five.   I didn’t love her like a sister, that was for sure.  She wasn’t anything like my sisters, and besides she was younger than me.  *Good old Tim,* that’s all I was ever going to be to her, wasn’t it?

I don’t think I ever heard a girl cry like that.  All I wanted to do was put my arms around her and hold her as the story came tumbling out of her over the phone.  I wanted to ask her how school was going.  By the time we were through talking, I wanted to punch that guy.

“I think I love him, Tim.”

That’s the last thing she said before we hung up.  After that call I called Jeff and we went to a party.  Both of us got laid that night.  Some chicks are just one-nighters you know?  But girls like Nastasha weren’t.  I was so hungover the next morning I couldn’t even see.  So was Jeff. 

“Let’s go surfing, Dude.”

He was groaning as he woke up.  I could hear his headache over the phone, as if it were hammering just like mine.  “Dude, let’s just go.  Now.”

“Meet you at Hammonds,” he said.  “In half an hour.”

* * *

What had happened at the motel had made Natasha cry.  But that isn’t what happened for John Sandman.  He felt fantastic.  While she lay there crying in a little heap he had a party to go to, with his wife Cathleen that night.  He had forgotten all about it though, and in fact he was late coming home.  Cathleen was pretty angry at him, when she heard him bang the front door  and not only that he had forgotten to stop by the store and pick up what she needed.  Her terseness meant nothing in that moment, because he had the scent of Natasha Evergreen all over him.  He could still smell her, even as he brushed past Cathleen in the kitchen where she was chopping vegetables up for the dinner party.  He brought his hand to his nose, still redolent with the scent of her while he watched his wife smash her knife over and over against the mountainous pile of colored vegetables before her.

“You were supposed to bring back the dressing, and some broccoli for this,” she said sharply.

“I forgot,  it was a long hot day.”

“I don’t ask you for much John, do I?”

“No.”

“Well what am I supposed to do now?”

“We can think something up.”

“Like what?”

“You will Cathleen, you always do.”

“Listen just, can you go to the store for me?”

“No, I need a shower.”

“John?”

“I said I’m taking a shower.”

He hated to wash Natasha off of him.  She seemed so much sweeter than Cathleen had ever been.  Slowly the water ran down the drain, washing away their afternoon completely.  He emerged wrapped in a towel, and wandered back to the kitchen.  Even their towels were as worn thin as their marriage.  As if all the emotion had been bleached out of them.

“Trying to feed an army?”

“John, can you please just get me the broccoli and the dressing?”