Every Single Secret(2)
My know-it-all brain helpfully told me why.
He’s hiding from you.
I stood just inside the door, my legs gone wobbly beneath me. From dinnertime to just past midnight, I’d been driving around the city, checking out his favorite haunts, fueled by surging adrenaline. Now that I’d found him, the chemical was receding, leaving my limbs trembling and weak.
The bar was called Divine. Major branding irony, as the place was a discordant hell of shouted conversation, clinking glasses, and migraine-inducing techno-pop. The clientele—youngish, hollow-eyed metro-Atlanta professionals—milled around, sizing each other up for future business deals or a late-Saturday-night hit-and-run.
Heath hated this place. At least, that’s what he’d always said.
I pressed back against the wall and eyed him. Like always, twin bolts of disbelief and desire shot through me. Desire for his jaw-dropping handsomeness. Disbelief that he was truly mine. It always hurt, just a little bit, to look at Heath. There was a woman on the stool next to him. Young, with dreadlocked hair gathered into a tangled bun. She was wearing a transparent peasant blouse with no bra, but Heath didn’t seem to be the least bit aware of her. No surprise there. He wasn’t a cheater, not even a flirt. He’d never given me a reason to worry, not in that respect.
Dreadlocks grabbed her purse, slid off the stool, and walked toward the bathroom at the back of the bar, giving me my opening. I wanted to rush up to him, hug him, and smother him with kisses, but resisted the urge. This wasn’t a happy reunion; it was a confrontation. I needed to know what the hell was going on.
The nightmares had started a couple of months ago. They’d wrecked the bliss of our engagement, exhausted us and made us tiptoe around each other. And then came that first night when Heath didn’t return home from work. It hurt, of course. But more than that, it scared me. What did he need that I couldn’t give him? What was he doing that he couldn’t share? As it turned out, it was the first night of many. A new normal for us.
I could hear Lenny now, drawling in her posh, old-money Buckhead accent. This is why you give a man at least five years before you let him put a ring on it. She was my best friend, my partner in our corporate design business, and she was always looking out for my interests, but when it came to Heath, I took her advice with a whole saltshaker. She didn’t have the full story. She assumed I’d fallen fast and hard for Heath because he looked like he’d taken a wrong turn out of a Greek myth. She had no clue, but it wasn’t her fault. It was because I’d never told her. I’d never uttered the two words that would’ve explained everything: soul mate.
I couldn’t have said those words and expected her to keep a straight face. Nobody said old-fashioned stuff like that anymore. It made people gag and roll their eyes and pity your na?veté. The idea of a soul mate was a cliché. An invitation for mockery—even if it happened to be true. Even if it was the only term that came close to describing the connection you felt.
Somehow Heath and I had short-circuited the customary “Show me yours, I’ll show you mine” dating process and arrived at a perfect understanding of each other. “I have a story,” he’d said on our second date at a cramped Italian restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of the Westside. “A long, sad story that I don’t particularly enjoy talking about.”
I nodded. You and me both.
He sighed. Took my hand. “It stars a single mom, some of her particularly unfriendly boyfriends. She passes away. There are a lot of nights sleeping on friends’ couches.” He looked down at our interwoven fingers. “The thing is, I don’t believe therapy is the answer. I don’t believe you find strength in talking about your past. I think you find it in a person. The right person.”
I was mesmerized by the elusive logic of it all. Crazy how, in one instant, everything you could never express can suddenly make perfect sense. I wondered if I was the right person, if he was mine. And then he jutted his chin at the speaker above us, which had been playing a steady stream of Sinatra all evening. Now “Why Can’t You Behave?” slithered through the patio.
“This guy,” he said. “He’s always made my skin crawl.”
I laughed. I hated Sinatra too.
With that, loving another person became the most effortless, beautiful thing I’d ever experienced. Our silences were more precious to me than all the conversations I’d ever had with other men. Even after nine months together and getting engaged, Heath knew very little about me. But he knew the things that mattered. He knew I loved him. That I would never leave him. Not even with the nightmares, or the distance, or this ghosting routine he was putting me through. Not ever. Maybe it sounded desperate, but I had been searching my whole life for something I didn’t know existed. Now that I had it, now that I had him, there was no way in hell I was going to let it go.
Dread, like warm bile, pushed up my throat as I threaded through the crushing tide of people in Divine. I slid onto the vinyl stool the dreadlocked woman had deserted, and Heath straightened, a look of surprise on his face.
“Daphne.” He’d been playing with a white business card, rotating it between his fingers, but now he held it still, poised like a flag.
I fought the urge to put my hand against his cheek. “Hi.”
On the other side of Heath, a knot of girls in tight club dresses and impossible shoes not-so-subtly checked him out. I wondered how long they’d been standing there. Posing. Baiting him.