“Thank you for tonight, Beckham. Seriously. I… I don’t know what happened…” He looked out to the river. “Well, I do know what happened. I just… Thank you.”
If only he knew I should be the one thanking him. He’d turned my night completely around.
“How much longer are you in London for?”
“I leave tomorrow.”
The words settled in my chest like radioactive dust from a nuclear fallout. I wanted him to say a couple more days, I wanted him to say he was leaving on the same day I was. Then I’d have someone here, someone to make this trip one to remember, not one to try and forget.
That was wishful thinking. Verged on crazy as well. I was beginning to feel like I was twenty-two again, falling hard for the first guy who paid me attention. And back then, there hadn’t been any apps to help forget about the one who got away. There had been some not-so-pleasant cruising spots, but it hadn’t been my scene. I would talk to someone who I had an idea was gay and then end up getting incredibly attached with no remedy when things went south.
I thought I’d grown out of that. Once I hit my midthirties, I let go of any dreams having to do with eternal love. Plus, I downloaded Grindr and found it much easier to forget about the ones that didn’t work. It sucked, of course, but I wasn’t letting myself fall too deeply, too quickly.
Tonight, though, was interesting. Very interesting. Olly, a name that suited him much more than Jamison, had kept me engaged all night. It was a night that, on paper, was set to be a blur of nothing but me in my bed going to sleep to trashy TV. And then Olly stopped me in my tracks and turned the night completely around.
“Maybe we can meet up over there. In Florida.”
Olly said the words I hadn’t realized I wanted to hear so bad.
“Let’s do that.” We traded numbers, and suddenly oceans didn’t seem to separate us. Still, I wasn’t letting myself drift too far from shore.
We talked for what felt like a lifetime but ended up being only another hour. Both of our yawns gave away the time.
“I should get a cab back to my hotel.”
I wasn’t going to ask if he wanted to sleep over. I felt like that would be way too much pressure, and after the great time we’d had together, I didn’t want to do anything to remotely ruin it. Instead, I stood with him and walked back into the living room, putting on our shirts and walking him to the door of my flat.
“Thank you for tonight,” I told him. He stood in the hallway, those captivating eyes tilted up to mine. His smile stretched from cheek to cheek.
“Please, I should be thanking you, Beckham. I totally freaked out on the hottest hookup of my life. I completely ruined the night.”
“Ruined it? You’re kidding? Olly, you saved the night. I needed this.”
More than you’d ever know.
“Well, hopefully we can meet up back in America.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Olly’s phone buzzed, meaning his cab must have arrived. Before he could turn and leave, before he could walk away into the unknown, I grabbed his head in my hands and held him for a kiss to seal the night.
It did so much more than that. This kiss unraveled me. The tiny moan he gave me, the tickle of his tongue against mine, the taste of his lips.
And then we parted, and my lips tasted nothing but air, my tongue no longer dancing with his.
“Have a good trip back,” said Olly. He put a thumb to his lips, the smile on his face looking like he’d been hit by Cupid’s arrow ten times over.
“Same to you.”
Another buzz from his phone. He took a few steps backward, still smiling, still looking at me. Then he turned and left down the stairwell, leaving me thinking I’d also been hit by the same arrows.
Back inside the flat, I locked the door (double-checked this time) and walked to the table where the envelope from earlier tonight was lying. The edges were a tad crinkled, and the middle section was bent, but the letter was still intact and readable, still not bursting into flames as I had expected it would.
Why? What could he possibly have to tell me? After everything that man did to me, what in the bloody hell would he have written to me?
My fingers traced the envelope. The handwriting was clearly his, my name written in the same bold way he’d always written since I was a kid. There was a shake to it, most likely from his old age, but it was him, I was sure of it.
And then who was that woman? His new wife? Secret lover?