Page 3 of Chasing After You
Silence fills the space between us for several seconds before he finally answers, “Never mind. It’s nothing we can’t say later in person. I love you.”
“Love you, too.” And another call ends fueling the distance between us.
Hours later, I’m back in my car. This time, parked outside Louie's Diner, the only all-night diner in town. It’s almost three in the morning with no sign of Matti.
If he’s tried to call me, I don’t know. I was so distracted all day, thinking about tonight, about seeing him, I forgot my phone at the retreat.
When three-thirty rolls around and he’s still not here, I decide I gave it my best shot and leave.
I’m maybe five minutes down the road, when I notice a semi behind me, flashing me with its lights. “What the?!”
Wait. Not a semi. The tour bus. “Matti.”
I pull over into the first abandoned parking lot I can find, a strip mall with zero overnight businesses.
“This, this is the worst date we’ve ever had,” I mutter under my breath as I get out to meet my husband under a dimmed streetlight, less than thirty feet from a tobacco shop and nail salon.
“Why aren’t you answering your phone?” he demands the second he’s within earshot. “I’ve been freaking out trying to reach you.”
“I forgot it at work.” Though even as I say it, some small voice inside my head denies it was an accident. “I’m sorry.” I look past him at the bus and the insanity of this moment. “I can’t believe you found me out on the road.”
“Yeah.” He nods, slowing to a stop a few feet in front of me. “I can’t believe a lot of things right now.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs, shaking his head. “What’s happening here, Ness? First, you tell me not to come visit you on my days off. Then you become harder and harder to reach – and I get it, you’re working, this is a new thing and you’re putting it first, I want that for you, believe me, but now, we finally have plans to meet up and see each other in person after weeks of being apart, and you just happened to leave your phone somewhere? When you know damn well I’ll be calling you to update you on my arrival? It’s almost like you were hoping to get out of seeing me.”
“I wasn’t hoping that.” I should take a step toward him. Get closer. Touch him. Remind myself of what’s real and what isn’t. Matti is real.
But my feet don’t move.
“Just be honest with me.” He swallows like he’s trying to gulp down a rock the size of his fist. “Do you want out? Is that what this is?”
Is it? That’s not where it started, my desire to get out and do my own thing was never about getting away from him. From us. But is that what it’s become? “You really want to have this conversation here? In a parking lot?”
“No.” His amber eyes look black, darkened by night and sadness. “But I don’t want to go on pretending nothing is wrong either. Tell me the truth, Ness. What’s really going on?”
The truth. The only truth I’ve known for months is this feeling in the pit of my stomach, this dull, unrelenting ache, that I don’t matter. That my purpose has been served. My dream has run its course. And the fears born of this ache, fears of being left behind by the one person I never imagined myself apart from, now surge through me, giving voice to words I don’t even know until I hear them spoken out loud, “I don’t think we work anymore.”
Matti sucks in air like he’s taken a punch to the gut. “You don’t.”
“I think you know we don’t, too.”
“I knowthisisn’t working.” His jaw tightens and his lips press into a line so firm and so thin, they nearly disappear.
“I don’t want to fight.” I feel like I’ve been trapped in a car with no brakes going a hundred miles an hour. It’s all I can do to keep spinning the wheel and avoid a crash.
“I won’t fight you.” Surrender softens his expression. “If you want freedom, I’ll give you freedom.”
“It’s what we do, right.” I used to think it was a beautiful thing we did for one another. Now, the feel of it leaves a bitterness in its wake strong enough to turn even the softest parts of my heart brittle.
He nods, kicking at pebbles of concrete on the ground. “So, this is it.”
“This is it.” It can’t be though. Because it’s all too surreal to be true.
Matti looks up, meeting my gaze one last time. “I’ll make sure my stuff is out of the house before you get home.” He starts to turn. “We can figure out how to tell the kids together once we’re all in the same place at the same time again.”
“Okay.” The word comes out of my mouth on autopilot. Nothing about this is okay.
