Chapter Forty-Four

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Chapter Forty-Four

TPOV

Allison’s birthday was only a few days away.

It was her 21st, her first birthday that she’d celebrate with me, and I wanted to make it special.  Like most things in her life, birthdays hadn’t been something special, or really something to celebrate at all.  So my current mission was to make that happen.  

Things on my side: she was ridiculously easy to please, had relatively little in the way of gifts, so just about everything was open for ideas, and I wasn’t competing against anything.  Of course, alternately, I would have no fucking clue how to top it for next year, but I’d worry about that when the time came.  

In all honesty, she would have been happy with very little, but that’s why I wanted it to be more than something little.  

I wasn’t sure what I planned was going to work, or be well-received.  I was sort of just flying by here.  It was nice; I knew it was nice.  I just didn’t know if it was…appropriate.  I think I’d just have to come right out and ask her about it.  That killed the element of surprise, but I didn’t want to blindside her with something potentially undesirable, either.  

“Hey, do you remember Doug and Lois?  The ones that sent me the postcard?”

“Yeah, I remember you telling me about them.”  

“They’re coming to visit.”

“They are?”  The idea of meeting anyone that knew her was so fucking exciting, I’m sure I couldn’t contain it spilling out in my voice.  

“Yeah, they’ll be in town for a few days and wanted to go to breakfast on my birthday.”

Hmm, birthday breakfast threw a slight wrench in my plans.  “Wait, am I going along?”

She chuckled, snuggling into me.  “Of course you’re coming along.  I want you to meet them.  And I want them to meet you, too.”

“I’d love to meet them.”  

She chewed on her lip for a second, like she was debating something, and then smiled shyly.  “I…kinda called Doug a while ago.”

I just let my eyebrows go up in response, waiting for what she was going to say.

“I talk to you about everything, and I didn’t really know who else to ask, because I didn’t really think Jordan would be a good choice… I dunno, I just needed to talk to someone that had experience with it.”

“Experience with what?”

“I kinda called him to ask how you know you’re in love with someone.”

I smiled, squeezing her.  “Really?”

“Yeah.”  She nodded.  “I mean, I would have asked you, but it seemed wrong to ask you about how I could tell or not if I loved you.”  She chuckled.

“You could have.  I would have helped you sort it out.”

She smiled back at me warmly.  “I know you would have, but I didn’t think that was really fair.  Anyway, we talked for a while, and he talked about coming out to meet you and everything, and they’ll be here in a few days.”  

“That’s great.  I’m looking forward to meeting them.”  I stopped, not sure I should ask, but my curiosity won out.  “Can I ask what he told you?  Did it help you decide?”

She shook her head.  “I really didn’t need to decide anything.  It wasn’t like that.  I didn’t call him really to have him help me decide.  I just wanted to know if what I felt was what it was supposed to feel like.  He was very Doug-like.  He basically told me that if I was calling to ask at all, I already had my answer.  And he was right.  I just needed someone to bounce it off of, or, like, I dunno, not reassurance, but just… I’ve never been in love before.  I needed someone to just talk it out with.”

“I’m glad he helped.”

I remembered her telling me that Doug and Lois had sort of faux-adopted her, and they sort of helped each other—they had someone to focus on after losing their daughter, and came to some sort of peace with that, and they tried to offer her an out for a lifelong series of bad situations.  Neither really solved all of their problems, but they pushed each other in the right direction.  If nothing else, they’d been the first ones that seemed to actually care about Allison, and that made them more than decent in my book.  

I thought about her calling Doug; what that must have been like.  Too bad I couldn’t have heard that conversation.  I was glad she had someone else to rely on, to trust with heavy shit.  

That first morning after she told me—waking with her, her tiny body enveloped in mine, her back pressing into my chest, my arm around her keeping her as snug to my body as possible—I can’t describe the happiness and innate rightness, and sense of completeness I felt.  So small.  So delicate.  Yet the opposite of both—her personality and her strength make her incredibly large in scope—large in personality.  The same strength and brashness made her incredibly indelicate sometimes, but I meant that in the most thankful way.  She’s not breakable, and yet, she’s vulnerable in ways that I never dealt with before.  It’s hard to have warring feelings about wanting to let her fly on her own and soar, but want to keep her tucked away where I know she’s safe and protected and no one can clip her wings.  

She’s so beautiful.  So amazing.  And she loves me.  The sanctity of my room is like the epitome of safety for both of us.  It’s completely true—if it were possible to never leave this bed, and still afford to live, there wouldn’t be any way I’d let her leave.  It’s truly despicable that leaving the apartment and the bed in particular, is necessary at all.  And the longer we’re together, the harder it is to be apart from her.  You’d think just the opposite really—that once you know someone intimately and spend a lot of time with them, that you’d crave independence, but I don’t find it to be that way at all.  I want to be with her.  It’s hard not to be.  And sometimes it hurts not to be.  

That’s something I’ve never had.  

I don’t think I realized how much her saying I love you back would actually mean to me.  Logically, I knew it was a huge thing for her to even consider or understand, but to mean it—it’s almost unfathomable.  She’s come so far from when I first met her.  I don’t think she was even capable of love then.  She didn’t understand the concept.  I think that’s something that only comes with experience, and maybe only something that comes with receiving it first.   

How incredibly confusing and scary that must have been for her; to have these emotions that she didn’t know what to do with.  I would have gladly talked it out with her, too.  That was complete truth—even if the answer she arrived at wasn’t the one I wanted, I would have helped her come to it.  

Love is hard.  It’s frequently messy.  People you love frustrate you, piss you off, disappoint you.  I never thought she was perfect, and I never believed that we wouldn’t have our share of disagreements and problems, but it still stung knowing that I needed her, and she let her job get in the way of that.  I was far from perfect—I made mistakes all the time.  I’m sure if I hadn’t disappointed her already, I would at some point.  But throwing Caroline in the mix, and having it be something that affected her as well just made it that much worse.  I tried my hardest to make sure that she never got hurt.  It was one of my goals in life, and thus far, I’d probably done a pretty shitty job, but I never stopped trying.  I showed up for her.  I did what I could.  And I tried to keep her away from all hurt if I could.  It wasn’t like I thought Allison did it on purpose, but it still happened, and I was still left in the fallout from it.  

It’s hard then when the one person you want to turn to because something happened was part of the problem in the first place.  

It says so much about her that she wanted to make it up to Caroline—to spend time with her and apologize for missing the show, and for wanting to make it right with me.  

It was interesting then, too, how much I basically let all of that go when it came to planning shit for her birthday.  

“Hey, would you mind if we did, like, a brunch kind of thing with Doug and Lois the day after your birthday instead?”

“I guess.”  She shrugged.  “Why?”

“Well, it’s just that I kind of had this plan…for the day.  I was gonna run it by you.”

She smiled.  “For the day?”

“Yeah.” I lifted a shoulder.  “The first part I want to keep a surprise.  But the other part I wanted to talk to you about first.”

“Ok.  What is it?”

“Well, it’s the first birthday you’ve had with me.  And I want it to be special, besides the fact that you’re turning 21, which is a milestone itself.  So I was trying to think of how I could make it really special, and wavered back and forth about a million times trying to decide if it was stupid or offensive or something, and then I just basically decided to throw all the chips in and let you decide.  So you’re free to say no.  And I won’t be mad, or offended myself, or anything.  I just want you to be honest.”

She was already smiling at me.  Probably because I was talking about a mile a minute and sort of freaking out and panicking all over again, pretty much exactly like I had been doing for the last few days after I’d decided to go ahead with this.  

“So what is it?”

I chewed my lip for a second.  “I kinda sorta booked us a hotel room.”

“Oh.” Her smile didn’t go away though.  

“And a dinner reservation.”

“That’s nice.”

“At the Ritz-Carlton.”

Her eyebrows pulled down at that.  “At the where?”

“Yeah.”  I nodded.

“Tyler.”

“I wanted it to be special.”

“That’s…”  She shook her head.  “Tyler, that’s way too much.”

“I want to.”

“It’s the fucking Ritz.”

“I know what it is.”

“That’s way too expensive.”

“I already paid for it.  So it doesn’t matter.  If you don’t want to, or that’d be weird, we don’t have to go.  Or we can just go to dinner and come home.  I just thought it’d be nice to get away for a night, and to go somewhere nice for your birthday.  It’s not about the money.  That’s not why I did this.”

She was still shaking her head, but she was considering, I could tell.

“We can go and have dinner and the rooms are really nice.  And they have a shower and a tub, and robes, and seven different kinds of pillows, and slippers, and a mini-bar, and 24-hour room service.”  

“You sound like a fucking brochure.”

“Well, there’s that, or we can just hang out here after dinner and Aidan can be our slave for the weekend.  He doesn’t know that yet, so I’ll need at least 24-hours-notice to tell him.”  

“You know the word special does not mean the Ritz-Carlton.”

I shrugged.  “I wanted to take you someplace nice.  Someplace you hadn’t been before.  Do you wanna go?  Or would that be weird?  I don’t want it to be…”  I waved a hand.  “Whatever.”  

She kissed me gently.  “Just spending my birthday with you is special enough.”

“What does that mean?  Is that a ‘No, we’re not going and alert Aidan,’ or is that a ‘Fuck, yeah, 24-hour room service?’”

She put her arms around my neck and kissed me again, much less gently, and much more deeply.  When she was done, she rested her forehead against mine, and her arms stayed right where they were.  “You’re too good to me.”  

“That’s not possible.”

“I think it’s too much.”

“But we’re going, right?”

She smiled widely.  “Yeah, ok.  Let’s go.”

“Happy Birthday.”

“Thank you, Tyler.”  

~ooOoo~

So basically I was happy that a) if she had any objections, it was the monetary aspect only, not anything to do with self-confidence or self-worth; and b) she said yes.  Just the saying yes was huge, at least to me.  She made so many decisions lately that showed how incredibly far she’d come.  The girl I met that night in the bar was concerned with such base things: food, water, sleep, place to stay, safety, job (although those ideas were sometimes completely contradictory).  She had one close friend in the entire world that she was truly close to.  Since that time, she had gained friends, family, intimacy both emotionally and sexually, love, self-esteem, confidence, and respect.  She removed herself from negative situations, and actually recognized they were negative and the impact that could have.  And she moved into this completely other realm of complete self-actualization.  She could be spontaneous; she knew that she had things she liked and favored; she accepted change and an altered-world view.  In a lot of ways, she was an entirely different person, but still the same girl I fell in love with.  

And all of these things were her own ideas, her own decisions.  I was so fucking proud of her.  For everything.  For who she was.  For this person she’d become.  This person that I loved beyond anything else, more than myself.  

Those were all things that the Allison that Doug knew wouldn’t have done, I don’t think.  And I think he was in for a surprise.  

I wanted to tell her all of those things.  But I’d wait until her birthday.  

~ooOoo~

When the day arrived, I felt pretty confident with my whole plan.  I got up early, and snuck out of bed to make her breakfast.  I actually looked up how to make an omelet; watched a youtube video and everything.  Somewhere around folding it in half, something went terribly wrong, and I think I was lucky that it didn’t burn up.  I managed to get everything back to the bedroom before she woke up, too.  

I sat down on the bed next to her, watching her breathing change, and dipped to kiss her gently.  Her arms moved immediately, circling my neck.  I moved the kisses closer to her ear before whispering, “Happy Birthday, baby.”

She squeezed me tighter.  “Thank you, Tyler.”  

I pulled back gently.  “I have something for you.”  

“Well you’re half-dressed, so I know what it’s not,” she teased me, grinning.  

I chuckled.  “Not right now, no.  Later.  I made you breakfast.”

She started sitting up.  “Really?  You did?”  She smiled.  “I mean, that’s so nice.”

I laughed.  “Yeah, well, it was an omelet.  Now it’s scrambled eggs with vegetables in it.  And there’s toast.”  

She touched my cheek.  “Aww, thank you.  You didn’t have to make me breakfast.”

“Yeah, I did.  It’s a full-service birthday.  Hurry up and eat so you can open your presents.”

She giggled at me.  “Shouldn’t I be the one excited about the presents?”

“I’m excited for you to open them.”

“Well then you’re much better at it than I was.  I was a nervous wreck.”  

I didn’t tell her this, but I wasn’t.  At all.  Because really, she was about the easiest person to buy things for.  Maybe because she didn’t have a lot in the way of gifts, so everything was meaningful, but I had a hard time reigning myself in on what to buy because everything seemed appropriate.  

And I was excited.  I loved watching her react to things.  

She pretty much wolfed down the eggs, so they must have been edible.  Maybe I’d get the hang of the whole cooking thing sooner, probably later.  

I pulled out the box the second she was done, and she was smirking at me.  Inside the box were really three smaller boxes, because who doesn’t like opening more shit?  Her eyebrow quirked at me.  “Is there an order?”

“Um, do this one first.”  

She smiled and took out the first box.  She was cute when she opened shit.  Kind of like that first day I’d given her the wallet and she insisted on keeping the wrapping paper; this wasn’t much different.  She was very careful and precise like opening it without ripping any of the paper was a goal.  

“A key?”

“Yup.”

“What’s it for?”

“The apartment.”

“You don’t have a lock,” she said, shaking her head at me.

“We do now.”  I smiled proudly.  More because I just liked the idea of her having a key than the fact that it took me years to actually get the lock replaced.  

She laughed.  “So is this more for my safety?”

“Well, I mean it wasn’t safe not to have a lock, but I wanted you to have a key.”

She moved forward to kiss me.  “Thank you.  That makes it, like, official that I pretty much live here.”

“Of course you live here.”  

She smiled.

“No pretty much.”  I shook my head, buttoning that shit up fast.  “Open another one.”

“Which one next?”

“Open this one.”  

Same kind of careful removal of the paper.  Seriously she should win an award.  This one had just kind of leapt out at me.  I’d gone to the store with the intention of finding an equally cool, super-meaningful ring for her.  Because according to my little sister I should have given one to her months ago, and it seemed like the thing to get.  But then I saw this.  

She opened the jewelry box, and to anyone else her face was probably unreadable.  But I knew better.  Her hands just stayed on the box for a second, like if she moved them the whole box might just crumble or something, and her eyes were welling, and if this was making them start to tear, the next one would probably be outright sobbing.  I mean, it was just a necklace really.  But like most things, it was so much more.  

“Tyler,” she said, but it came out in a whisper.  It occurred to me that I’d never bought her jewelry before, so this was actually quite momentous.  

“Do you like it?” I asked back, same low whisper.  

“It’s beautiful.”  Her eyes tore up to mine for a second.  “Will you help me put it on?”

“Of course.”  

I didn’t think she was going to let me take the box for a second, but she let it go, watching my fingers and the chain the entire time, like it was going to disappear.  

The second it was on her neck, her fingers went to trace the chain, and the little ring on it.  “It’s like your ring,” she said, looking down at it.  

“Yeah, but on a necklace.  I thought it was…I dunno, similar but still different enough.”  

She smiled, launching herself at me, knocking us both to the bed.  “It’s perfect.”  

I loved it when she hugged me.  It was so simple and stupid, and small, but I loved the feeling of her body against mine, and the way she just fit; the way we fit.  

I turned my head to press a kiss into her cheek.  “You have one more present to open.”

“I think you went overboard.”

“Well, you’re the only girlfriend I’ve got, and I love you, so I don’t think it’s overboard.”

She pulled back.  “You mean…you don’t have other girlfriends?  Because I’ve got, like, three other guys I’m seeing right now.”  

“Oh, yeah?  What are they doing for your birthday?”

“They haven’t told me yet.”

“What are their names?”

“Um.  Julio.”

I burst out laughing.  “Julio?”

She shrugged.  “Yeah, Julio.”

“Ok.  And the other two?  Emilio and Juan?”

“Juan is the pool boy at some rich asshole’s house, yes.”

“A pool boy, huh?”

“Yes, well.  I mean, he goes away for the winter.  He’s in the Bahamas or something right now.”

“Must be an awesome salary for cleaning pools.  I’m obviously in the wrong line of work.”

“Well pools take lots of care, you know.  Lots and lots and lots of care.  All night long sometimes.”

“Right, right.  And the third?”

“Oliver.”

I laughed again.  “And what does Oliver do?”

“He’s, like, a business man.  Always very proper.  He’s kind of boring, actually.”

“Then why do you keep him around?”

“Well, sometimes you’re busy on Tuesdays.”

“Well, I’m glad you seem to be so well taken care of.”

“Yeah, but I love you.  And truthfully, Julio’s kind of a snob.  Juan’s gone a lot, and like I said, Oliver’s kinda boring.  You’re very well-rounded.”  

“I don’t like sharing, you know.  I might need their addresses.”

“Well I hear you kinda suck at fighting, so you might want to take Aidan with you.”

I started tickling her.  “Open your other present before I decide not to give it to you.”  

She sat up quickly and grabbed the other box.  

I was right with this one, the waterworks started almost immediately.  

“Jordan let me in so I could grab the pictures.  I’m fairly certain she didn’t think I was stealing anything.”  

“Tyler.”

“Bet Julio and Juan and Oliver didn’t do that.”  I smirked.  

“Shut up,” she said quickly.  “I can’t believe… I mean, of course I can believe, but to remember that I even had them.  I don’t… You’re so fucking thoughtful.”  She sort of dissolved after that, landing against me again, the picture trapped between us.   

I wasn’t that thoughtful.  I just had a good memory.  And I was awesome at knowing what was important to her.  The pictures she’d shown me so long ago of her mother when she was a little girl were two of the only vestiges of a life that she hadn’t got to live—of a happier time that she couldn’t even accurately remember.  That made the infinitely more important to hang onto.  And what was important to her was important to me.  

She moved back after letting me hold her for a while.  The tears were gone, and she seemed just genuinely happy.  “You can put it anywhere you want.”

She turned and put it on the nightstand.  “I want it here, so I can see it all the time and it can remind me of her and how great my boyfriend is.”

“Way better than Julio, Juan and Oliver.”

She touched my cheek.  “Way better.”  

I kissed her quickly.  “K, come on, get dressed.  Your birthday is just beginning.  We got somewhere to be.”  

“Where do we have to be?”

“Surprise.  Get dressed.”

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