Gage and Sadie

Chapter 10: Gage

Sitting across from Sadie at a table in a restaurant was becoming a habit. A habit I'd been enjoying more than I ever expected to. This woman was like new eyes in my head, and she made me see things I'd never noticed before. 

The homeless man in front of my hotel? Would have walked right past him before. Now, I stopped, exchanged a few words and gave him some money. And, after walking away from him, I carried with me the uncomfortable feeling that I hadn't done enough. That I needed to do more. So I put that problem simmering in the back of my mind to let a solution come to light.

If my friends could see me, they'd laugh. But the person who never laughed at me? The homeless man. He always gave me a big smile, minus a few teeth and said the same thing: thank you. He meant it, too. I both liked that thank you and hated it.

But those opposing feelings were becoming more and more common in my life.

My feelings for Sadie felt like a huge dichotomy in my life. While it felt completely unnatural to be so intrigued by and fascinated with and just plain attracted to a woman since I never had been before, it also felt completely natural with her. Never had I known a woman who was so kind, so outwardly focused, so giving. If you had asked me before I met Sadie, I would have said those character traits were not even on my radar as to what I admired and liked in a woman. It had been physical traits, sexual traits, selfish traits about how they made me feel.

But now, instead of thinking about what Sadie could do for me, I was thinking about Sadie and what I could do to tease a smile out of her, to fire her up, to watch her fight and care and just fucking live her life in a way that I had not once experienced.

I couldn't have stayed away from Sadie if I tried. I was drawn to her in all those cliché ways. So whether it was like a moth to a flame or like like a bee to honey, those clichés described the pull she had on me. I wanted to be around this woman and for once, it wasn't because of how she made me feel, but because I wanted to get to know her more, understand her better, watch her grab hold of life and not let go.

My wife was showing me a whole new way to live, and I wanted to share in that with her. Sadie countered my coldness with her warmth and my callousness with her caring. She was like no one I'd ever known before and the desire to keep her right next to my side all the time was overwhelming. I felt like a boy with his first crush -- all these emotions I didn't know exactly what to do with and struggling to try to capture the girl's attention and affection. Making a total mess of it along the way because even negative attention was better than no attention.

Knowing I was going to have to return home in a matter of hours was pushing at me hard. Never before had anything tempted me away from the business, but I found myself trying to think of excuses to stay other than my need to be near Sadie. I already knew I'd be flying out to see Sadie every weekend and could just imagine Galen laughing at me every Friday when I ran out of the office for yet another weekend away.

"Gage? Are you OK?" Sadie's voice from across the table called me back from all my roiling thoughts.

Then I decided to try something that was still new to me: I'd answer her question by telling her what I was thinking and feeling. I was turning into a motherfucking pansy.

"Honestly, I'm not looking forward to going back home tomorrow. I don't want to leave you because I feel like all the progress we've made is going to disappear."

"What progress?" she scoffed. "I still can't stand you."

"From my point of view, there's been a ton of progress," I told her, ticking off each point on my fingers as I went along. "You're not ignoring me, you're talking to me, you aren't causing a scene because you're so pissed at me you could scream, you aren't ordering one of everything off the menu to get back at me and, so far, you haven't offered the waitress a fifty percent tip. You also haven't attempted to set your new car on fire or take a baseball bat to it. So, in my mind, those are all positive indications of progress."