Page 54 of Bossy Mess

It didn’t matter, though. Not then. At that moment, I had to talk to Sloane because I knew that it didn’t matter. Whatever the situation was, I knew I wanted to be with her.

I grabbed my coat and jumped in my car, driving out to her apartment as quickly as I could, praying that there weren’t any police on the road to pull me over on the way. There weren’t. But there also wasn’t any parking at her apartment. So, I said fuck it and pulled in the red zone in front of a fire hydrant. If I got a ticket or someone towed my car, I’d deal with it in the morning. All I cared about at that instant was Sloane.

I raced up the stairwell and made it to her apartment door. I rang the bell and knocked several times.

“Sloane,” I said, “open up!”

It was late and, under normal circumstances, I shouldn’t have shouted in an apartment hallway, but these were far from normal circumstances. This was the rest of the both of our lives at stake.

It didn’t matter. Nobody answered the door or responded. After fifteen seconds or so, I tried the doorknob, and was surprised to find that it was unlocked, allowing the door to open just a crack.

I stared at that opening for a moment, debating whether or not I should push it all the way open and go inside. It took me all of half a second to convince myself that she could be hurt, and I just needed to check on her. I pushed the door open and went inside.

I instantly realized it didn’t matter whether or not I went inside. She wasn’t there. In fact, the whole place was completely empty. Sloane had cleared out of her apartment and taken everything with her, including the furniture. It was almost like witnessing a magic trick — I had no idea how she did it. How could she have moved out of her apartment so quickly? How did she find a place to move to? How did she move everything out of there on her own?

The answers to those questions didn’t matter. All that mattered was the reality of the situation I was in: Sloane wasn’t in her apartment, and she didn’t want to be found.

I walked through the bare, eerie space she used to inhabit, which only accentuated the idea in my head that she was gone. She was not coming back. She would not be changing her mind. And, what’s more, I had no way of knowing where she was. It was possible she was just on the other side of the wall, in a neighboring room. Or perhaps she’d made her way to the Burbank airport and taken the first flight to the other side of the world, hiding in some remote village, where I’d never find her.

Though neither option was especially likely, the fact remained that, unless she answered her phone or returned my email, I would never learn where she was. I contemplated hiring a private detective in that moment, but it hardly seemed worth the money. Sloane had made one thing clear in disappearing like this: she did not want me to find her.

I went back to my car — fortunately, I had not left it long enough to catch the eye of an overzealous parking enforcement officer — and drove back to my house in a fog. I don’t remember a single detail of that drive because I was so distracted in trying to decide what would happen next.

Everything I’d been counting on and hoping for had vanished in a matter of just a few moments. And I was left back where I was a few months ago: alone and marking time.

I pulled out my laptop to check for an email response, but of course there wasn’t one. While I had my computer out, I checked on my retirement fund. It was too early to pull anything out without a penalty, but I had some savings on top of that, which I had planned on using towards the cruise with Sloane. Now I was doing the calculations about how soon I could retire. Assuming the Dyer sale went as planned, it might be able to happen sooner than I thought. After all, I owned my house, so didn’t need to worry about a mortgage, and was fairly conservative with my finances. Perhaps I could just take Sloane’s lead and also disappear off the face of the planet.

I’d always wanted to go to Iceland, but maybe I was thinking too small. Maybe I should travel all around the world, calling nowhere in particular my new home and becoming a nomad. For a moment, the idea filled me with the smallest spark of excitement until I realized it felt almost meaningless to adopt such a lifestyle alone. But it felt equally meaningless to go into the office every day just to make money that I had no interest in spending and nobody to give it to when I passed on.

Mostly, I was upset with myself. I shouldn’t have allowed my hopes to get out of control. Deals that seem too good to be true — a young, beautiful woman who adored me and filled my life with endless joy — always are too good to be true. And, while I knew I should have been thankful for the time that we had together — repeating the mantra about loving and losing being better than never having loved at all — it only made the heartache worse. I was too busy enjoying myself with her to fully appreciate how good things were. And now I was kicking myself for not savoring every second that I got to spend with Sloane.

The sun would come up again tomorrow morning. I’d go to work just like I did every day in the past twenty years or so and then I’d repeat the process again and again until I eventually retired. There would be no happily ever after for me, just an eventual conclusion which would allow me to transition into an even less purposeful life.

I would never again meet another Sloane and I was too old to have dreams of what life would be in the future, like we did back when we were kids. Eventually, every kid turns into an adult who has to come to terms with the fact that he won’t be a firefighter or astronaut. And, while we might meet the girl of our dreams, we’ll wake up before we get to spend too much time with her.

That’s what life was for me and virtually everyone else on the planet. We’re all a bunch of nothing specials. I’d accepted that once before and it wasn’t so bad. Now I would just have to reteach myself and return to the mindset that I was just a tiny cog among eight billion others on this planet.

We were all insignificant, but we had to do what we could to try to make the most of that insignificance.

I dealt myself another hand of solitaire and then another after that until eventually I was too tired to even focus on the mindless task of sorting cards and went to sleep.

CHAPTER23

***SLOANE***

Imoved back in with my sister. Mila had a spare bedroom and being a good older sister, always made it available to me. This was where I’d ended up after the whole incident with Bradley and I was now lying on the couch watching daytime TV while she was at work. It was a case of deja vu. But it was the kind of deja vu I should have seen coming a mile away.

Because I knew I was making a mistake. I was falling for my boss again. And while Wesley was no doubt a higher caliber of man than Bradley was, he was still more than twenty years older than me and had a very different future than the one I had in mind.

Wesley did respond to my email. He responded almost immediately after I sent it, and he said the exact thing I expected him to say: that he would support me and our baby. But that was the problem with a nice guy like Wesley. He would do what he thought was the right thing whether or not it was actually what he wanted.

God, it was so tempting to respond back to that email and return to his arms, letting him be the responsible man that he was. But it somehow felt wrong to me. I thought back to Rebecca and Marty and how in love they must have been way back when they met, but it just turned into resentment after time.

I’m not stupid. I knew the relationship between Wesley and me couldn’t last. We were too different. Our personalities clashed with one another and, though it seemed like we complemented each other, that would wear off. Like when Wesley promised to take me on a cruise to Iceland. It was hard to imagine that was something that he wanted to do. He’d probably be happier staying in the office filing tax forms.

His job was providing happiness to other people. And not temporary short-term happiness, either. He provided people with the potential for lifetimes of happiness. That’s what a real estate agent promised: this is the perfect home for you to create your life in and allow your dreams to come true.

Wesley was doing the same thing for me. He was trying to be the man that made my dreams come true without considering what his dreams might have been. And, sooner or later, he’d realize that. It would catch up to him and he’d blame me for it.

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