“Tripp.”
“Just promise.”
“There’s nothing to promise.”
He sat up. I was parked in the chair. He grabbed my face sloppily. “Fucking promise.”
I wanted to get away from him. Desperately. I let him win that battle. “Whatever. Yes. If it gets you to go to sleep.”
He smiled. “I’ll sleep like a baby.”
He curled to his side.
We never spoke of that night again.
21LEO
Present Day
Running doesn’t work.
Gorging on South American history doesn’t work.
Furniture stripping doesn’t work.
My mind is a depot, and two trains keep slamming into each other.
One is the kiss.
The other is a conversation with my dead best friend.
The two can’t coexist.
And I can’t talk to him again. I can’t ask him for permission. I can’t honor a promise I made late one night at my apartment a few months before he died, a promise I veiled as a simple excuse to get him to shut up. I can’t honor it because he took that away from me too, the night he got behind the wheel after too much to drink, drove too fast, and crashed his car into a tree.
Fucking tree.
Fucking Tripp.
That was five days after we’d gone to dinner at a hot new restaurant he’d been raving about. The Red Door. He’d gotten us into The Red Door, and the fucker hadn’t even been drinking that night. He had iced tea, and he gave me hope.
Hope that he was finally turning the corner.
Five days later, he was gone.
Tonight, I pace through my apartment, wishing I could get in a cab uptown, bang my fist on the door of his pad, and tell him I’m taking her out, and that’s that, then go to the batting cage the next day with him and laugh about whatever had cracked us up that week at work.
Like we used to.
There’s so much we used to do that we’ll never do again.
And I’ve dealt with all of it. I’ve mourned him, missed him, and moved on.
But that promise—that stupid promise—hangs over me.
He can’t grant me a thing anymore, and I don’t know that Lulu can either, but at least I can see her, talk to her.
That’s a choice I do have.
I head downtown, straight for Lulu’s home, texting her that I’m on the way.
She buzzes me in. Tension coils in me as I walk up the steps slowly, as if each successive footfall will sort out the mayhem in my mind.
It’s a mess in there.
More than ten years after I met her, I finally kissed the woman I’ve loved.
The woman I can’t get out of my head.
She’s back in full force, the deed to my heart in her hand, and I need to know what she’s going to do with it.
I reach her floor, scanning for 3B. I locate it instantly when I spot a neon-pink Christmas stocking hanging from a door. In felt-tip pen on the cuff are the words “Feel free to drop any assorted packages, bills, or winning lottery tickets here.”
I let myself imagine her apartment. What does a Lulu-only place look like? Colorful, vibrant, teeming with all the things?
I knock, and she opens the door right away, dropping into her best Mae West impression. “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” She takes a beat. “Oh, you’re already here. Come in.”
“Why, thank you very much,” I say, Cary Granting it back to her.
