A Lesson Learned

A Lesson Learned

That night, the night of the first meeting, I made a discovery.

My Discovery:
There was something about habits. I could form a different habit. Maybe it wasn’t healthy, and maybe it wasn’t right, but it was the only thing that I could think to do. Other than that, I thought that this situation, this rule of no-contact might kill me. And maybe that was a bit melodramatic. But that was how I felt, anyway.

And shortly after that, I learned a lesson, learned it of my own accord.

My Lesson:
Just because I was separated from Ian didn’t mean I had to give up everything that had happened in my life before. I was not, for example, ready to abandon all the friends I’d had before. Things didn’t necessarily have to change completely.

There wasn’t too much I could do to act on my discovery. Any meetings I had with Ian would be absolutely accidental. He certainly wasn’t going to respond well to any attempt I made to make plans. But for my lesson—there, I was completely in charge. And so I decided to make plans with Kay.

It had been a solid three weeks that I hadn’t been with Ian—three weeks and one meeting—before I called her. I wondered if she would even bother to pick up when she didn’t recognize the number. I still hadn’t been to reclaim my stuff from the guys. I really needed to make plans to do that.

But she did pick up. “Hello?” It was a polite inquiry—by God, I had been surrounded by so much politeness recently that I wanted to explode. I would have killed for some honest brutality; maybe that was my real reason for calling Kay; she wouldn’t be polite unless I deserved it, which I most certainly did not.

“Hey, Kay,” I mumbled shyly. I was putting on no act. I just wasn’t sure how she would respond to my contacting her. “It’s me.”

Instantly she was on her guard. “Hello there, Sloan.”

A few moments of silence overtook us. It wasn’t uncomfortable silence for me, but I suspected that it was for her. I suspected this because she asked, all too soon, “What do you want, Sloan?” She kept using my name.

I shrugged even though she couldn’t hear me over the phone. I inserted another quarter into the slot—I hadn’t really thought that Kyle or Keeley or even Craig would want to lend me their cell phones to call Kay, of all people. So I had cheaped out and found a cell phone.

“I was wondering if you wanted to do something sometime this week.” I tried my best to sound confident. If I was certain that she wanted to spend some time with me, she would be certain that she wanted to spend some time with me. Projection.

She seemed suspicious now. From cautious to downright suspicious. “Why?” she demanded.
Oh, how she wounded me with her suspicion and suspicious questions. “You’re my best friend, Kay,” I informed her, in case she had forgotten in the past three weeks. That seemed entirely possible, given the circumstances. “I miss you. We haven’t really hung out in a while.”

“And why is that?” she asked sarcastically. “Could it perhaps be because you cheated on my boyfriend’s best friend and made things really uncomfortable for everyone? Could be perhaps be because of that, Sloan?”

She did have a point there. Luckily, I had a counter point. “I’m not asking you to take sides,” I told her, even though I sort of was. “I just want to spend some time with you.”

She seemed no more than a little swayed by this logic. “So I’m still allowed to hate you if I want to?” she asked. “Because I sort of do hate you. Because you totally fucked up a good thing, you know. We had a really good thing going.”

I chose to ignore the second part of her snappy comeback. “You’re still allowed to hate me if you want to,” I assured her.

I could practically hear her nod over the phone—could she, then, have heard my shrug? It’s possible. It’s possible. “I guess, maybe, we could, if I’m still allowed to hate your guts.”

My grin was huge. I could feel it practically splitting my face. This was the complete opposite of how I had felt talking to Ian. This was a good thing, a good thing. “What do you want to do?” I asked. I was willing to do whatever Kay was into doing as long as she was willing to see me. It didn’t matter what, didn’t matter at all.

“Eh,” she said, “ something away from this goddamned circus, yeah?”

“Fine with me,” I said. “When is good for you? I don’t have anything going on.”

“Friday—oh, shit. I’ll call you back, or I’ll come find you or something, okay?” All of a sudden, her words were rushed. She didn’t even wait for my response. But as she hung up the phone, I heard her say, “Oh, hey, Ian.”

So that was how things were going to be from now on, was it? Well that just sucked. “Bye, Kay,” I said into the dead phone.

That was Monday. On Wednesday, I ran into Ian. Or perhaps more accurately—I saw Ian, saw him from across a field, setting up for a show. I was alone this time. And I knew that I had made a promise to myself that I would go and talk to him the next time I saw him, but he looked happy. He looked happy there, smiling, and laughing at something Mark had said. Hell, I even missed Mark.

So I just stood there and watched him for a while. He looked good, laughing and singing. I stood there long enough that Kay—being the good girlfriend she was, she was helping them set up; I should have done that more often—to notice me. She got a very pinched look on her face and kept looking over at me until she could slip away to cross the field and talk to me.

“He might see you, you know,” she called to me when she was just close enough. “And that would certainly be uncomfortable for all of us, you know.”

“I know,” I called back. She stopped with just enough distance between us that we were still calling and not just talking. Baby steps, Sloan McLellan. Baby steps, Sloan Kettering.
She stuck out her bottom lip and digested this. “Okay, well, how about you go someplace else then, eh, Sloan? I’ll see you Friday, yeah?”

“I’ll see you Friday,” I confirmed. “But I don’t really have anywhere else to go, at the moment.” Kyle and everyone else were on stage. I could, I supposed, have hung out with Molly—but I still sort of thought she was a snitch.

Kay sighed. “Are you trying to get me to come with you?” she asked sassily. “Because you don’t have to freaking use extortion. I’ll just come, particularly if you’re getting some food.”
I hadn’t been trying to extort her. I had been trying to get a few moments more watching Ian. When I had become one of those sick, voyeuristic people who admired from afar I didn’t know. But here I was, watching Ian like some lovesick puppy.

But Kay was waiting for an answer, and I wanted to mend my bridges with her. Also, this would be a good time to get my stuff back. This was the first time in three weeks that I could be absolutely certain that nobody in the band would be in the trailer. Call me superficial in the face of whatever emotional turmoil I had going on, but I really would have appreciated getting my stuff back. I was really very tired of dragging my sorry ass down to the Laundromat every other day because I only had freaking two pairs of clothes, and one of them wasn’t even mine, and so didn’t fit very well. It seemed like it would be a little callous to bring this up the very first time I hung out with Kay, though.

And I didn’t want to alienate her. I understood that I was still on very thin ice.

“Let’s go get some sausage and peppers,” I suggested after a moment or two, tearing my eyes away from Ian with some great difficulty. “I know a good place.” I had ten dollars in my pocket. It was the same ten dollars that had been there for some time. Actually, they had been there long enough that I wasn’t sure that the ten dollars didn’t belong to Keeley. Well, it wasn’t as if she was going to miss them now, if she hadn’t already.

Kay punched me in the arm emphatically. “That is a goddamned good idea, kid. Let’s go.” I just sort of hoped that dear old Jim wasn’t going to say anything about Kyle when we went to see him.