Five years later, Ryan found himself sitting outside of Michael and Chelsea’s house. It was a bitter winter that year. The snow may have melted because of the sunlight, but the wind felt like it was piercing your skin as when people walked through its blustery path. His mom called him a few days ago, asking for his assistance in getting his dad settled back into the house. He was recovering from a heart attack. Nikki was going to come with him, but David caught the chicken pox a few weeks back and Nikki took time off of work to stay at home with him. The three were planning on going on a fishing trip during David’s spring break, and if Nikki wanted to go, she needed to stay and work.
It took five minutes of sitting in the car for the heat to seep out through the poorly sealed car, which prompted Ryan to get out and walk towards the house. Jamming his hands deep into the leather coat pockets, his pace picked up with each gust of wind. Jogging up the steps of the pale yellow, Victorian style house with its wraparound porch, he took his hand out momentarily to ring the doorbell. As Ryan heard the chimes faintly singing, he knew there was no turning back now.
Seconds later, Chelsea opened the door. The two stared at each other in disbelief. Ryan assumed that Chelsea’s wide-eyed expression was because she was actually seeing him, in the flesh, standing on her porch. But for him, it was how different she looked. She wasn’t the stick-skinny girl anymore with her hair in a ponytail. She had makeup on her face, the ends of her long brown hair curled, and bangs that were long and swept to the side. Ryan remembered back in high school, how excited Chelsea was the day she realized that her bangs were long enough to go back into her ponytail with the rest of her hair. She even swore that day that she would never have bangs again.
“Ryan?” Chelsea asked. “Is that you?”
He laughed. “It’s me.” If his voice didn’t convey his apprehension, he was sure his stiff shoulders would do the trick. “I was, um, in the neighborhood…”
“Come in,” she said, moving away from the door. As he stepped inside, he looked around at the inside of her house. When she shut the door behind him, it startled him, but only for a moment.
“Mom said you and Michael bought the Hudson house once on the phone,” Ryan said to her, trying to make small talk. “I always wondered what it looked like on the inside.”
“Michael and I had the entire house gutted and remodeled five years after we bought it.”
“Oh.”
Before Ryan could say anything else, a whirlwind of a little girl appeared from around the corner, racing down the hall and sliding every few steps on the hard wood floors in her socks. Her brown curls tied in two pigtails bounced with every laugh, which soon turned to squeals as she looked behind her, seeing that her dad was still chasing her. As she latched onto Chelsea’s leg, Ryan looked at her face and smiled. She had Chelsea’s eyes and Michael’s smile.
“Mommy save me!” she said through her laughter.
Ruffling the two ponytails, Ryan watched Chelsea look to Michael before he turned to acknowledge. Watching them, he felt like he was intruding on a private conversation that didn’t require words. He and Chelsea used to communicate like that, once upon a time. A face he used to be able to read like a book was now foreign. Looking to Michael, he gave his old best friend a curt head nod.
“Ryan?” Michael asked.
“Hi,” Ryan said. “I uh…I was in the neighborhood.” He needed to come up with a better reason as to why he was here.
“Is Nikki with you?” Michael asked.
Ryan shook his head no. “She had to work. David had the chicken pox a few weeks back and she took off time then to take care of him. She was going to come down, but she just couldn’t get the time off.”
“Must have been going around,” Chelsea said, a small grin appearing on her face.
“What, the chicken pox?” Ryan asked.
“Shut up,” Michael said, looking at Chelsea. “Don’t even—”
“You were such a baby.”
“Seriously, Chelsea, are you ever going to let me live it down?”
“Um…no, I don’t think so.”
Ryan stared at the two, a blank look on his face. Watching the playful banter in front of him, he could feel twinges of jealously forming a pit in his stomach. “Um, what happened?”
Chelsea laughed. “Gracie got the chicken pox a few weeks ago too, and she gave them to Michael.”
“You never had the chicken pox?” Ryan asked.
“No,” Michael said. “I never got sick as a kid. Then I had kids, and my immune system went to shit.”
“Ummmmm!” Gracie said. “You said a bad word!”
Ryan watched, pursing his lips together to keep his laughter in as Michael dug his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Seconds later, he pulled out a quarter and handed it to Gracie.
“There,” he said. “Go put it in your jar.”
Gracie smiled. “Thank you.”
As Gracie scampered off, Chelsea switched the baby on her hip from one side to the other. “I had to tape oven mitts to his hands to keep him from scratching,” she said to Ryan. “He was worse than Gracie.”
Ryan laughed at the thought of Michael, roaming about with oven mitts permanently attached to his hands. “Well…at least you got better,” he said.
“Yeah,” Michael laughed. “I got better.”
The three of them stood in the entry way, staring at each other as an awkward silence had fallen over them. Ryan didn’t know what else to say to them, and by the looks on their faces, he felt safe in assuming that neither Chelsea nor Michael knew what to say to him, either.
“So what brings you back here?” Michael asked.
Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “Mom brought Dad home from the hospital yesterday and Mom asked if I could help out for a few days while Dad gets settled back home.” His father was recovering from a heart attack. Because his father was as stubborn as they came, his mother called Ryan for backup.
“How’s he doing?” Chelsea asked.
“Oh…he’ll be right,” Ryan said. He could see the concern in her eyes, which loosened the knot in his stomach. After all, it meant something if she cared, didn’t it?
Chelsea smiled. “Good. That’s good to hear.”
“How about we move this into the living room?” Michael asked. “Maybe sit down and visit or something.”
“Of course!” Chelsea said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking!”
Ryan nervously laughed. “It’s ok, Chels. I didn’t even think I was going to make it this far inside the house.” He was trying to make a joke, but by the looks on their faces, Ryan could see that the joke fell flat. Shrugging out of his coat, he looked for a place to put it before Michael took it from his hands. “Thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” Michael replied.
Chelsea led Ryan into the living room. As she took a seat on the chocolate brown sofa, Ryan sat down in the matching wing tipped chair at the end of the coffee table. The two of them were silent until Michael joined them, sitting right next to Chelsea on the couch. Ryan watched as he took the baby from Chelsea.
“You want to hold her?” Michael asked.
Ryan smiled, but held his hands up. “That’s ok. It’s been awhile since I’ve held a baby.”
“You can’t break her,” Chelsea said.
“Maybe later,” Ryan said. “What’s her name?”
“Emma,” Michael said, using a voice that Ryan had never heard come out of Michael’s mouth. It was borderline baby talk, but from his seat, Ryan could tell that Emma enjoyed the voice and the attention as she broke out into a huge smile while holding onto Michael’s fingers. “Her name is Emma Claire, and her sister is Chelsea Grace, but we call her Gracie.”
“How old is David now?” Chelsea asked. “Nine?”
“Ten,” Ryan said. “Turned ten in January.”
“She sent Mom and Dad pictures a few years back,” Chelsea said. “But last time I checked with Dad, he said that Nikki and Mom weren’t speaking still.”
Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know what’s going on with those two. All I know is that when my mother-in-law calls, I leave the room.”
Chelsea sighed. “How is my sister these days?”
“She’s good,” Ryan said. It was a half truth though. Nikki was only in a good mood when there wasn’t any mention of her family back home. “Nikki’s been working as a fashion merchandiser at Saks Fifth Avenue for awhile now, and she enjoys it a lot.”
“What about you?” Michael asked.
Ryan laughed. “Teaching eight grade math.”
“Really?” Chelsea asked.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “It’s weird though…I actually enjoy it.”
Michael laughed. “That is weird. You hated math.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes things change,” Ryan said.
“Well,” Chelsea said. “I’m going to go upstairs and get Gracie ready for her nap.” As she stood up from the couch, Ryan tried to look her in the eye, but Chelsea had turned away from him.
“Do you want me to take Emma?” she asked Michael.
“Sure,” he said. Kissing Emma on the cheek, he handed her back to Chelsea. Both Ryan and Michael watched as Chelsea walked out of the room with Emma. When Michael turned his attention back to Ryan, he shrugged his shoulders at him. “She’s not mad at you anymore.”
Ryan laughed. “I don’t know about that. She won’t even look at me.”
“She’s not mad,” Michael said. “Chelsea was furious about the wedding, but if she was still mad at you, she never would have let you in the house.”
“And you?” Ryan asked. “Are you mad at me?”
“I thought you might have come, but I didn’t expect it, to be honest,” Michael said. “I mean, look around at us, ten years later. Did you expect it to end up like this?”
Ryan shook his head no. He expected a lot of things to happen in his life. It just happened with the wrong person. “I thought Hell would have to freeze before you and Chelsea were able to be within five feet of each other.”
Michael laughed. “We ran into each other at some frat party sophomore year. She wanted to leave and her date was too busy bonging a beer in the kitchen to care. As I was walking into the house, she was walking out and nearly knocked me over.” Standing up from the couch, Michael motioned to Ryan with a hand. “You want a beer?”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. He was going to need something in his system if they were going to take these trips down memory lane. Following him into the kitchen, he sat down on one of the bar stools around the island. Taking the cold beer bottle from Michael, he gave him and nod.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” Michael said. Popping the cap off, Michael sat down on the stool opposite Ryan and took a drink. “Anyways,” he said. “She nearly knocks me over, and by the time she finishes apologizing, she realizes it’s me that she’s run into and says, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ and tries to walk away. She was going to walk almost ten blocks back to her house, alone, in the dark. When she told me how far away she lived, I didn’t feel good about her walking that far by herself, so I walked with her. She tried to fight me about it, but she gave up after four blocks or so.”
Ryan laughed a little. The knot in his stomach was turning into a heavy pit of rocks, despite his best efforts to wish it away. So he continued to smile, putting on a show to keep his envy at bay. “She always was stubborn,” he said.
“Still is,” Michael said. Taking a drink, he set the bottle back down on the counter, smiling as he started to speak again. “I was surprised she let me into her house that night,” he said. “But she offered, so I went in, and we spent the rest of the night sitting on her couch, talking.”
“Talking?”
“Yeah, talking.” Ryan couldn’t ignore the look on Michael’s face as he talked about that night. The way he looked away for a moment with a small smirk on his face made Ryan feel uncomfortable, because he remembered the look all too well, and the feeling that came with it.
“We talked about everything,” he heard Michael say.
“Everything?”
Michael nodded. “Everything. I apologized for being a jackass all those years, and she talked about how you and Nikki, and I think it helped her a lot, actually. I mean, talking about everything. She even said that she felt better afterwards.” He took another drink. “Of course, it took a whole year of me doing everything but getting on my knees and begging her to date me, but it was all worth it in the end, you know?”
“Yeah.” Michael had to force the word from his throat.
“So you two don’t fight anymore?” Ryan asked.
“Oh, we still fight,” Chelsea said, walking in on their conversation. With a smile on her face, she walked right up to Michael, resting her head on his chest as he wrapped an arm around her waist. “But it’s for sport now, isn’t it?”
“Most of the time,” Michael said. As he bent his head down to kiss her, Ryan quickly looked away, taking a drink of his beer to act use as his distraction. Stop it, he told himself. They’re married, I’m married, and it’s what married people do. As he rubbed his temples with his fingers, he let the conversation between the two bounce around his brain like an erratic pinball machine. “The girls asleep?” he asked.
Chelsea nodded. “Gracie tried telling me that she was getting too big for naps, but she fell asleep in the middle of her argument.” Ryan opened his eyes long enough to see Chelsea give Michael a quick kiss before he shut them again. “What were you two talking about?”
“How you begged me to date you,” Michael teased.
She smacked him in the chest and laughed. “I did not beg you!”
“You begged.”
“No, Romeo, you begged. You begged and pleaded and whined like a schoolgirl.”
“I didn’t whine!”
“Fine. You didn’t whine.” Chelsea looked over at Ryan as he opened his eyes again. “He cajoled me into dating him.”
Michael rolled his eyes. “Who uses the word ‘cajoled’?”
“I do.”
“Anyways,” Michael said with a smile on his face. “New subject.”
Ryan smiled weakly as Chelsea laughed. “Yes,” she agreed. “New subject. Did you know that they added the Assistant Principal title to his Athletic Director title this year?”
“Really?” Ryan asked.
Michael shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just a few extra responsibilities. They didn’t want to take the time and effort to hire someone into the position, and I was doing most of the work anyways. It’s kind of weird, though, taking Simpkin’s place. Especially after all the detentions of mine he signed his name to back in the day.”
Ryan nodded. “Whatever happened to you being a doctor?”
Michael laughed. “I decided that I wanted to have a life. What about you now? I know your mom said you did some night school for awhile.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I got my degree a few years back.”
“That’s right!” Chelsea exclaimed. “You teach math now, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do.”
She smiled. “I thought I remembered your mom saying something about that.” Chelsea reached over the island and grabbed Michael’s beer bottle. She stole a drink and handed it back, laughing at Michael’s faux look of irritation. Ryan remembered when Chelsea used to steal drinks of his beer back when they would spend their Friday nights with their friends, drinking in the middle of Clawson’s cornfield. “Is Nikki still doing the fashion merchandising?” she asked.
Still hung up on the beer sharing, it took Ryan a few seconds to respond. “Huh? Oh yeah, Nikki. Yeah, she works at Saks Fifth Avenue. I think she likes it.”
The small talk was turning awkward, and the tension was growing thick. The things that had been left unsaid between Ryan and Chelsea were causing the tension—things that were damning if said, damning if kept quiet.
“You know,” Michael said, interrupting the silence. “I have some paperwork to do, some referees to call for the basketball games next week.” Ryan took a drink of his beer, using the bottle as a distraction while Michael hugged Chelsea and gave her a kiss. “Talk to him,” he heard Michael whisper to Chelsea.
As Michael disappeared up the stairs, Ryan could feel Chelsea’s brown eyes staring at him. Looking down the beer bottle to keep himself from catching her gaze, he hoped that she would be the first one to speak. It’s how it always worked before. Mustering up the courage to look at her, she responded with a single eyebrow raise. With one expression, he knew that he’d be the one taking first.
“I never wanted things to get weird…between us, I mean.”
He watched her face, waiting to get a reaction, but got nothing. “It’s not weird,” she finally said. “It’s awkward.”
“You know what I mean, Chelsea.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess.”
“You guess?” he asked in disbelief. “That’s the response you’re giving me?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, it wasn’t my fault.”
Ryan cringed at her words. Even if her words weren’t meant to sting, they did. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We…you and I…I mean, it was supposed to be us.”
Chelsea shook her head back and forth as she held her arms tightly against her chest. “Fate had other plans, Ryan.”
“Fate had nothing to do with it.”
“Fine,” Chelsea scoffed. “Stupidity made you sleep with my sister while we were together. But none of it matters, Ryan, because Fate worked out for me in the end.”
Ryan stared at her. He didn’t know what else to do. “It was an accident.”
“An accident?” Chelsea laughed. Ryan grit his teeth as she laughed a little. “What did you do? Trip or something?”
He sighed. “Chelsea, please.”
“No,” she said. “You can’t accidentally sleep with someone. It doesn’t work like that.”
This wasn’t how the conversation was supposed to go. Not there was an actual plan that Ryan had while coming into this, but he did know that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Everything was spinning out of control, and Ryan didn’t know how to stop it. “You know, we were all drunk that night, including you and—”
“And nothing! You let her drag you away, Ryan. And you knew she was pissed at me, too. She wanted prom queen more than anything, especially after Michael won prom king, and you knew she was mad about me winning! I didn’t even want the damn thing! And I even told you, I told you later that evening that I thought she’d do something to get back at me, and she did!”
“But I don’t even remember sleeping with her!”
“You don’t have to! You had living proof nine months later!”
“We could’ve worked something—”
“No.” It was the second time she’d cut him in less than two minutes. “Don’t even suggest that my sister and I could’ve shared you. Don’t even do it.”
Ryan dragged a hand down his face. “I would’ve figured something out.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.” Chelsea walked around the island and stood next to him. Leaning her elbows on the light brown tiles, she looked straight ahead as Ryan stared at her. “You’re noble, Ryan. You’ve always been Mr. Do the Right Thing even if the situation was caused by a severe lapse in judgment. And that’s why I loved you to begin with.”
Her words hung in the air for a moment, suspended by the sincerity in her voice. She had a point though. Had Ryan not been as noble as Chelsea claimed him to be, he never would have married Nikki to begin with. And while their relationship had more rocky moments than most in the past ten years, the two did love each other. It might not have been as intimate or as loving as either hoped, but there was a fondness that grew between them over the course of a decade. Had their relationship been more than what it was, they might have had more children. More children weren’t out of the realm of possibility yet, but they would be soon. It took a long time for Ryan and Nikki to become comfortable in their financial situation, where they could provide not only for David, but for themselves as well. Having another child would have made it harder than it already was for them.
“But why Michael?” Ryan finally asked. “I mean, you could’ve married any guy you wanted, Chelsea.”
She threw her hands up in the air. “Why not Michael?” she asked back. “Michael loves me. It came out of nowhere—it’s not like I planned it as some kind of revenge to get you back.”
“But it’s Michael!” Ryan cried. “Don’t you remember—”
“If I held every stupid thing against everyone, you would not be in my kitchen.” Chelsea began to pace back and forth. For the first time, Ryan found something that both Chelsea and Nikki did that was exactly the same. With a hand on her hip and another other her mouth, it was as if her hand was keeping the words inside until her brain put them together for her to say. “You know,” she said, turning her eyes towards him. “I thought I was crazy at first, falling for Michael. And I tried so hard to ignore it, but I couldn’t. Michael grew up, Ryan, and so did I. We have an adult relationship. We communicate with each other about everything, God knows we fight, but never have I ever second guessed him. Ever.”
Her words knocked the wind out of him. “So what you’re saying is that our relationship was worthless.”
“No, what I’m saying is that we were teenagers who thought that we were invincible to the world.” She stared at him, and Ryan knew she wouldn’t continue until he looked at her. So he did. “We walked through life with the notion that we could stay eighteen forever. But reality hit us in the face.”
“Well,” Ryan said, standing up from his seat. He couldn’t take sitting down anymore. Her words tore at his insides, and hiding it was impossible. “I’m glad to see that we meant something together.”
Chelsea slammed her hand on the table. “Don’t you dare try and guilt me, Ryan Saunders! Don’t you dare!” She walked back over to him, standing toe to toe, jabbing her finger into his chest. “Don’t act like you were the only one devastated. You broke my heart. Do you know how many nights I spent crying because of you? Do you think it was easy to get over you? I’d spent every day since I was five with you!”
“And you think it was easy, knowing I hurt you like that?”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“Yes it does!”
“No it doesn’t!” Chelsea yelled. “You broke my heart, and Michael fixed it! And I knew you’d be pissed about it. I’m not delusional. But you know what—we had to live our lives and make do with the circumstances. And you cannot…I will not let you make me feel guilty about being happy!”
Ryan rolled his head around in a dramatic fashion. “But it’s Michael,” he said with a sigh. “Of all the people…”
“Of all the people!” Chelsea shouted, throwing his words back in his face. “Of all the people in the world that you could have cheated on me with, you cheated on me with Nikki! Of all the people you could have gotten drunk and have a one-night stand with, you chose her! The one person in this world that I truly hate.”
Ryan dragged a hand through his disheveled hair. “You don’t hate her, Chelsea. She’s your sister.”
“Yeah, well,” Chelsea sighed. “She might be my sister, and I love her, but it doesn’t mean I have to like her.”
Ryan squeezed his eyes shut. He needed to find a way, he had to find a way, to take control of this conversation. “I don’t want to fight with you,” he said in a softer voice.
Chelsea took two steps back and crossed her arms to her chest. “Then let it go.”
He stared at her, his eyes pleading with hers. “I’ve been trying for ten years…”
“I’m happy,” Chelsea said with a small smile. “I’m married to someone that adores me. I have a family that I couldn’t live without. Without Michael, I wouldn’t have my children, and my children are my life, Ryan. I have the life I wanted, the life I imagined.”
He forced the lump in his throught back down by swallowing as hard as he could. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he looked away. She wanted him to let it go. She wanted him to let everything wash away. But he’d been trying for ten years, and a big part of him couldn’t let it go. “I…um…I need to get going,” he forced his voice to say. “I…uh…didn’t plan on staying this long.”
“Well, wait,” Chelsea said. “Let me go get Michael…”
Ryan held a hand up to stop her. “Don’t,” he said. “I just…I can’t…just tell him I said bye, ok?”
“You say goodbye to him,” Chelsea told him. “Despite everything, he’s still your best friend.”
He gave her a wry smile, but shook his head no. “Goodbye, Chelsea.”
She tried to protest, but Ryan didn’t react. He walked stoically through the kitchen and down the hallway with his eyes fixated on the dark oak door with it’s blurred oval glass. With everything that Chelsea had said, bouncing around in his brain, he grabbed his coat and threw it on in one swift motion before walking out the door.
The wind was still cold and bitter, but he didn’t know if he was running towards the car because of the piercing feeling of the air as it hit his skin or if he was running from his past. It didn’t take him long to unlock his car. Climbing in, he quickly slammed his door shut, jamming the key into the ignition. Once the car was started, a cold blast of air hit his face. He turned the power knob back to low until the air warmed up enough to put back on high again.
While waiting for the air to warm up, he sat with his teeth chattering he felt a buzzing in his pocket. Pulling out his cell phone, he looked at the caller ID. It was Nikki.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, yourself,” Nikki replied. “I hadn’t heard from you today, so I thought I’d call.”
Ryan shivered. “Sorry. I was just busy and—”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Nikki said. “David’s at a birthday party, so I’m just sitting here by myself. It’s weird, not having you here.”
He laughed. “Weird?”
“Well, yeah,” Nikki said. “I miss you.”
Ryan held his hand up to the vent as he pinned the phone to his ear with his shoulder. It was
getting warmer. “You miss me?” he asked. “Is that possible?”
“Ryan,” Nikki said with a laugh. “I always miss you when you’re gone.”
“Really?”
He heard her laugh again. “I’m by myself in this house. Of course I miss you.”
“You’ve never said you’ve missed me before.”
“I haven’t?” he heard Nikki ask.
He shook his head no, even though Ryan knew she couldn’t see him. “No.”
“Oh.”
“You should tell me that more.”
“Why?” Nikki asked.
The car was warm enough now so that he could pull his other hand from his pocket without feeling like his fingers would fall off. “Because…it’s just nice to hear.”
“Ok,” Nikki said. “When are you coming home?”
“In a few days,” he said.
“You see Chelsea?”
“Yeah…”
“And…”
“We talked.” Pinning the phone in his ear, Ryan reached out and put his car into drive with his foot pressed firmly on the break. “But the roads are slick right now, and I don’t want to drive and talk, so can I call you later?’
“Sure,” Nikki said. “Be careful.”
“I will,” he promised. “And Nikki?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
He waited for her to say something. Instead, he heard a dialtone.
