Eavesdropping

Chapter 1 - Lady in Red

"No, please don't... " The call ended before she wanted. She slammed her phone on the desk next to the television and walked away from it. After a brief pause, ten seconds at best, she jogged back across the room and picked it up. A text message might be more appropriate?

BRANDI: I love you, Rick. Please call me back. I don't understand why you are doing this? WTF? Call me back. Please!!!

She started to hit the send button then paused. Her mind raced with a million fleeting thoughts that accumulated in her mind whenever it was decision-making time, like a pitcher in the bottom of the ninth inning deciding on the next pitch. In moments of total indecision, like this one, she asked herself the question scrawled on a nearby notepad on her mirror: WWDJD - "what would Dr. Jennings do?"

She watched the letters fade one by one as she pressed and held down the backspace key on her phone. On instinct, she deleted his contact information. It was a disposable phone, a burner as the kids called it, with no way of anyone finding out about their phone conversation or texts. She deleted his information, just the same, taking the same precautions she had always been advised to take. Deleting their communication trail was how he wanted it. Private. Confidential. "CIA style," he always told her, followed by a musk scented kiss.

She ran her fingers through her long blonde hair as a forced breath of air blew past her lips. She had kept his identity confidential. To her friends it was sexy, they told her, but still advised her that this kind of situation would not end well. Deep down inside she knew it would end as they predicted, but she wanted to prove them wrong. Maybe that was why it still hurt. She hadn't prepared for this moment; that's why it hurt so quickly. The pain was deepened with each second inside her gut, pushing away all other thoughts like a snow plow in a blizzard.

She walked across the dorm room and looked into her mirror. Had it come to this? Really? Why wasn't she good enough? Why did those you love the most leave you? Why didn't he show any indication he was going to break up with her? How come he continued to have sex with me? The questions hit her all at once while any answers fled the scene like a scared flock of gazelles. Staring at her reflection always provoked the same questions, those same self-analytical thoughts that had most searching for answers by logging into Amazon for the latest self-help book. She took another deep breath and blew it out. Her lips made a perfect O. The same lips that had kissed his lips a dozen times.

"OK, Brandi, you can do this," she said to herself. Her therapist said it was healthy to talk to herself. After the many times she had struggled, a tool Dr. Jennings recommended was called "private speech." At least that was the conventional term for it. As a child she thought it was surely a sign of insanity, talking to herself, but she found herself a regular practitioner as of late. And right now a form of that, outer dialog, was coming out past her mouth and into the empty room. The more she conveyed outward what was happening on the inside, the good doctor told her, the more it was supposed to help.

Supposed to. But she was struggling on this occasion and for good reason. She got dumped. But not just dumped. There was more to it than that.

"He's so handsome," she said aloud to the mirror as tears welled up in her eyes. "Remember the way he looked that night? He looked at me. At me." she closed her eyes. "I looked good that night too. I felt grown up for the first time. Sophisticated. Like he liked."

She laid down on her bed and re-imagined that night again. The night she met him.

It was a night of impersonations, a night of fun and a night of facades. She had been dating another then. His name was Craig, and they were an item for the previous four months. When Craig asked her to the symphony, she could hardly believe it. The symphony wasn't her scene, and not his either by his admission. But it was a playful time, they agreed, a time for both of them to act older than they were. They wanted to pretend a little and best of all, to get away from others their age.