“Thss’cuse me, can I get by, pleassthe?” a young girl relying on the wall for balance asked with an annoyed huff and prominent lisp through her missing top front teeth.
Gabe and I snapped back into the reality of sitting on the floor in the middle of a speedway. “Sorry,” we mumbled and pulled ourselves fully up to a standing position.
“Let’s get these things off before we really hurt ourselves . . . or somebody else,” Gabe joked, already leaning down to untie his skates midstride.
“Agreed. I don’t have collision insurance at Mimi’s,” I jested back. “Or any insurance for that matter!”
We exited the rink, changed back into our own shoes, and headed to the snack bar for a drink.
Gabe glanced down at our passes. “Our choice of beer, soda, or hot chocolate? What’ll it be?”
“Hmm . . . a hot chocolate sounds good.”
He nodded. “Be right back.”
I found us a small table overlooking the rink underneath a few propane heaters, pulled a couple of chairs close to one another, and settled in to wait for him. A few minutes later, he approached with two steaming cups piled high with whipped cream and set them down on napkins before taking the seat beside me.
“I had a really great time tonight,” I said, wrapping my hands around the warm Styrofoam. “You said you changed and I wasn’t sure, but you do seem different somehow. Or maybe we’re both not the same people we used to be. Either way, this feels nice—to be here with you.” And it did feel nice. Surprisingly normal, as if no time had passed, let alone seven years. For the first time in weeks, it didn’t feel like an Adam-size elephant was sitting beside me. I was realizing I could actually have a life post-Adam, and that maybe I hadn’t lost everything after all.
Gabe nodded, eyeing me over the hot chocolate he’d been blowing on. “It feels more than nice. It feels . . . right. You know, Mom would’ve gotten such a kick out of seeing us here together like this. She never stopped talking about you. Asking about you,” he said, his voice dropping off at the end of the sentence. He cleared his throat and continued, “Anyway, how are your parents doing? Still selling antiques in Woodbury? Other than the fact they’re such diehard Red Sox fans, I always really liked them.”
I had heard Gabe’s question about my parents, but couldn’t answer, too distracted by what he’d said. “Mom would’ve gotten such a kick out of seeing us here together.” The fact Gabe was speaking in the past tense and trying to change the subject made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end—no—“Wait, Gabe, your mom . . . ?”
His face turned more serious. “She passed away two years ago.”
All the air whooshed from my lungs, and black spots speckled my vision. I hadn’t even imagined Elise could be gone. She was such a force of life. I could still smell the floral notes of her overwhelming perfume, hear the echoes of her contagious laughter, and taste her unparalleled paella. I reached out and covered Gabe’s hand with my own.
I was surprised to feel my eyes wet with tears and quickly lifted my hand to conceal them. “I’m so sorry, I had no idea.”
“Even in those final days, she begged and pleaded with me to call you. She never gave up hope we’d end up back together. But the problem, you see, was that I never told her I was the reason things ended, that I put my career and goals ahead of my heart. Ahead of you. And that I chose wrong.”
“Seems we both did,” I offered.
Gabe smiled, took another sip of his hot chocolate, and said, “It was amazing seeing you perform at Mimi’s. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to check you out onstage, and it was like nothing changed, still as talented as I remember. So, have you been in anything I’d know? Working on anything new now?”
I shifted uncomfortably, suddenly unsure of how to answer the question. It was hard enough to consider the fact I’d ended things with Gabe because he didn’t support me enough in my career, only to have willingly sacrificed it once I got pulled into the impossible draw of Adam’s magnetic force. “After we broke up, I kept at it for a while, but I wasn’t booking any jobs. I started seeing Adam, and the opportunities became fewer and far between, and then one day, I just gave it up altogether and never looked back. Sometimes I look around Mimi’s and wonder what I’m even doing there, but this is all I know how to do.” I took a deep breath, unsure if the admission made me sad or proud. But either way, Gabe was still listening, attentively for that matter, finally interested in my career. Maybe things really had changed?
I continued, my mouth a bit dry, “I’ve even started auditioning again.”
“And?”
“And I still have some work to do on my belt and my confidence.”
“Not sure I can help much with the belt, but as for the confidence,” he said, pushing a hair out of my face and tucking it behind my ear, “I’ve never known a woman who has such a bright light within them. It could light up all of Manhattan if you’d just let it.”
A flush of warmth worked its way under my faux fur, competing with the orangey heat lamps above us. The rest of the rink faded away behind us, and we may as well have been on the moon.
The poet Robert Frost wrote about a man encountering two roads diverging in the woods. My watershed moment wasn’t so different, only it happened in the concrete jungle of New York City, between city blocks in a bustling metropolis. Happy as I thought I was with Adam, I never could shake the feeling there was a whole other life I could have been living. But now I had the chance that so few, if any, ever got—somehow finding myself back at the crossroads and able to explore the path of the choice I didn’t make.
Without another word, Gabe seized my waist, pulled me against him, and kissed me hard. My hands gripped the lapels of his white leisure suit like I would never let them go. I melted into his arms as fireworks erupted in my brain, and a disco ball of bright lights and colors flashed before me. I could hear the faint sound of “Upside Down” by Diana Ross echoing in the background, and I too felt like Gabe had spun my world off its axis with that one kiss.
Back in the arms of the man I once loved and once knew so well, it was almost like meeting him for the first time, but also not at all. Like when you meet a stranger you feel like you maybe knew in a past life. We had this whole rich and complicated history, which should’ve felt like an anchor weighing us both down, but it didn’t. Instead, that anchor was the thing rooting us in place, forcing us to re-examine one another using fresh eyes and gained perspectives. With the past crashing into the present, just like that, we had the chance to start again.
Chapter Nineteen
In spite of the fact that it was almost 1:00 a.m., I swung my front door open with the abandon of a silly schoolgirl with a wild crush who had just been on her very best date. Then, remembering I no longer lived alone on the Upper East Side, I quietly closed the door behind me, securing the dead bolt in place, and tiptoed in the direction of my bed, eager for my dreams to pick up where my date with Gabe ended. But laughter and commotion wafting down the corridor from the living room stopped me in my tracks. I followed the sound and was surprised to see all my roommates were not only still wide awake, but were elbow deep and eyeball high in containers of Chinese takeout.