Personal Possessions (4 page)

I let it go when Greg
walked into my office.

“
Dude! Hold the fuck on,
cuz you aint gonna guess where I just came from!”

I didn’t even attempt to
guess, I just shrugged. He waved a piece a paper in the air as he
spoke, getting a better look I could see it was a check.

“First National Bank, son…
The check from Eastern Equipment hit. We are officially
hundred-thousandaires!”

He started dancing around
my office, some fucked up dance that looked more like a seizure
then dancing. What the hell, I decided to join in. We didn’t give a
shit, we had just been given a check for over six hundred thousand
dollars.

“Now, when I say hike, you
block me with everything you have in you, ya got me, brutha,” Bear
said as he wiped the sweat from his brow, it was humid and the sun
was shining so bright, you had to squint just to see what was in
front of you. I got down in position and heard Bear grunt, “Hike”.
I pushed my body, all 250 pounds straight into him.

“Fuckin’ nice…real nice.”
Bear returned after the play was over with a pat to my ass. I
chuckled.

“Liked that huh, I got
more where that came from.” Making him look at me funny, “I meant
the play, fucknut!” I yelled at him.

We ran several other plays
until we noticed the sun wasn’t as bright. I looked down at my
watch, “Shit Bear, it’s five thirty, we gotta go.” We packed up our
shit and headed for the trucks.

“Heard Lauren’s been after
ya,” Bear blurted out while continuing the trek to the
truck.

Lauren Abbott had been
after me since freshman year of high school. Now that we both were
graduating, and heading off in total opposite directions, she was
practically licking my sac to get me to fuck her. I looked at Bear
who was trying to hide his smile.

“Not fuckin happenin’,
Bear.”

“Well, since it’s not
happenin’, I can tell you that, that chick knows how to suck one
back.”

“For Christ sake, Bear!
Please tell me you did’n-“

“Way before Rach and I,
let me tell you…” he let out a long whistle as he looked up at the
sky, “if she’s offering…” He turned his head towards me and raised
his eyebrows but didn’t say a word.

I stopped right where I
was. “Don’t go there, Brother,” I said in a low stern
tone.

Bear raised his hands that
were full of gear in defeat “Ok… ok, I’m just sayin’.”

I started walking again
towards the trucks. “What you’re sayin’ is that you think that I
should do Lauren?”

He chuckled, “I think you
should…” He stopped talking and walking at the same time. He was
thinking of how to soften a hard blow, “…consider other options
that have become available to you, because truthfully Trev, she
ain’t gonna do it. She ain’t gonna say yes.”

I held my breath, he knew
something. This conversation was going to be like a car accident, I
didn’t want to know, but yet I couldn’t help but ask.

“You hearin’ talk?” I
didn’t want to say the words, but I had to know.

Bear shook his head,
“Dude, I can’t be the one that says shit… you need to have a chat
with your ole lady.”

My head became fuzzy, I
couldn’t find my breath. I needed to find out what the fuck was
going on and I needed to find out now.

“I swear to God, Bear…you
don’t tell me what you know right now, I will take you to the
ground before you know what hit’cha!”

“
Really… it’s not my
place, Rachel just told me some shit that Ellie said to her.” In an
instant, I had dropped the gear that I was holding in my hands and
had Bear held up by the throat.

“Start. Fuckin. Talking,”
I grinded out at him.

“She’s droppin ya,
Buddy.”

I woke up to screaming and
sat up in bed. I had some chick next to me, I think her name was
Ginger, Gwen, regardless, I had her around the throat.

“Oh shit, oh fuck… I’m
sorry,” I regretfully apologized to her.

Damn, I didn’t even know
her name and this was how I woke her up, by choking the shit outta
her.

“Are… you… fucking… nuts?”
She yelled as best she could, attempting to grasp onto every breath
that she could.

She quickly jumped out of
the bed, and began stumbling to put her clothes back on.

Just then, Greg busted in
the door wearing nothing but a pair of boxers that said on the
front next to a large monster dick “different strokes” and on the
back it said “for different folks”.

What. The.
Shit.

He was holding a bat up as
though he was going to bash her in the head, which ended up scaring
her worse, in turn making her begin screaming again. Shit, she
sounded like a fuckin’ fire truck with the screaming.

“Jesus Christ, Greg…what
the fuck!” I yelled over her.

I wasn’t sure if I was
talking about the boxers, or him busting in like that.

“I… I thought someone was
breaking in...”

He set the bat down but
yet, his eyes never left the chick’s breasts, which by the way,
were fuckin sweet! I don’t remember having had my lips or hands
wrapped around them, but they looked amazing.

“Hi, I’m Greg.”

He said as he held out his
hand for her to shake. She didn’t even seem bothered that she was
standing there with no top on while a strange man ogled at her
large, fake breasts.

“Genevieve,” she answered
back as she fluttered her eyelashes at him.

Genevieve, yeah, that was
it. I was close, I knew it started with a “G” and possibly
contained a vowel.

I looked at him, “Dude,” I
said as I rolled my eyes, “I think I just got done bagging
her.”

He looked at her, before
turning to look at me “So?”

She turned, and looked at
me too “Yeah, so?” she chimed in as they walked out of my bedroom
together.

I just laid back down, and
concluded the conversation to myself with a, “Have at
it.”

This was becoming a
nightly ritual for me, hanging out at the bar. I liked the
anonymity of one night stands, no feelings, no harm and no foul.
The sting of everything that happened haunted me daily. Anger
continually raging inside from the betrayal I constantly felt, to
this day, as though it had occurred yesterday. I swore to myself
that I would never end up there again.

It was better to be alone,
than to go through the agony I went through. I sensed daily a
heaviness inside me. A burden with how I had handled the last night
I had seen him and her together. I just let him take her, just gave
her up, and let him win. It was difficult to face, so I dealt with
it by drinking until I couldn’t feel shit anymore.

Chapter 3

2006

I really needed some time
away from work. From the bullshit, that became my everyday life. I
just wanted to let it all go for a time, so I blacked out my
schedule, and picked a place that was far enough away from the rush
of life, I could actually breathe.

California.

I ended up using this time
away to repair the physical part of me that had been broken. I was
sick to fucking death of looking in the mirror, and seeing my face.
My crooked nose that Bear broke, the night he killed me inside. It
was all I could do not to get sick from envisioning him and her
together.

Physically, I would have a
brand new me, internally, I would still be dead. No hope, no
emotion. Just lifeless. I begged and pleaded with all that was holy
that if I did this, maybe, just maybe the memories would stop
coming back.

I ended up finding the top
plastic surgeon I could afford, and endeavored to surgically remove
my past.

I found out not long after
that it didn’t help.

I had been out here for
close to two weeks now, and was just about healed. Laying out on
the private deck of my hotel suite, my recovery seem so much easier
to deal with. I had two more days here at this resort, and then I
was headed back to Boston, where it was cold and snowing. I began
seriously contemplating networking out here, and making this my
permanent home.

Lying back in the lounge
chair, the sun’s rays were beating down on my skin. The refreshing
warm breeze blowing against my body, dissipating the small beads of
sweat that were attempting to build. I
closed my eyes and let myself relax. God, I hadn’t felt this
calm since…”I don’t remember when the last time I felt this
relaxed” I answered myself aloud. Slowly, I began to drift
off.

“Trevor. Trevor, honey is
that you?” I heard my mom speak quietly from the kitchen as I
stepped down on the last stair.

“Mornin’, mom!” I said as
I kissed her cheek quickly while I walked by.

“Kinda in a hurry,
What’cha need?” I could tell by the way she had said my name that
she wasn’t just seeing if I was awake.

“Honey, I need you to talk
to Rachel.”

Shit,
seriously?

“
Sweetie, Johnny doesn’t
like that Jackson boy.” She was talking about Bear. My mom’s older
brother, Rachel’s daddy was not someone to fuck around with. He
would put a bullet in you quicker than you could say “put that gun
do-“. My uncle didn’t care what he said or who he hurt, he was
going to get his point across or else.

He did not like Bear
because in his eyes, Bear was white trash. No good momma and daddy,
no well-known lineage, and no goddamn money. He detested the idea
of Rach hanging around a guy like that, much less her dating
him.

“It don’t look good on the
family, darling,” she stated as she lifted her coffee cup up to her
mouth to blow on it.

I rolled my eyes in
response. I was not getting in the middle of this shitstorm that
always seemed to include Rachel and Bear. I mean, I really didn’t
give a shit who she dated or even fucked for that matter, none of
it concerned me. “Mom, what she does is none of my business.” I
could tell immediately by her expression, those were the wrong
fucking words.

She set her cup down with
a clunk on the wood table, which told me I was going to be here a
minute.

“Trevor Jordan, she is
family! It is our concern when family is involved, besides, we
have…” she paused for a moment to find the right words not to
offend because truthfully, she liked Bear, just as long as he
wasn’t dating her niece, “expectations that we have to live up to
and that right there, is not doing my daddy’s name justice. Now,
will you talk to her or do I need to tell Johnny to have a talk
with Bear, because I don’t think you’ll like the outcome of that
little conversation.”

What she was telling me
was that the ball was in my court, and I was going to have to take
care of this.

“I’ll handle it,” I
grunted in response. Seeing as how I didn’t want to implicate
myself into something I was not going to follow through with. And
truthfully, I didn’t need a twenty minute lecture on why our family
was above everyone else’s and that they should feel privileged to
even dwell in the same vicinity as us, because my great-great
grandfather Jeb Broderick was one of the founding fathers of this
town.

My mind skipped ahead to
the middle part of the day where Bear and I were out at the lake
setting up tents. Bear had started a conversation that now makes
sense but back then, I didn’t know what to think about
it.

“Dude, four years! I can’t
believe you’re set up for four… fuckin’… years!” Bear said as he
started hammering in the stake where the tent tied into, and I
began on the one opposite him.

“Yeah, four years. I was
kinda shocked when they gave me the official offer, but now I’m
really fuckin’ psyched!”

Bear laughed. Never
looking up from the stake, he went on, “You know you wouldn’t have
gotten that ride without me.”

I stopped hammering for a
moment, looking over at him continuing to hammer. The sun was
almost to him so I had to squint to be able to envision
him.

“What the fuck does that
mean, Bear?” I said, still looking in his direction.

“Oh, nothing. Ya’ll gonna
take the plunge before ya leave?” Bear asked, reaching down and
tying one end of the tent to the stake.

“Ummm, don’t think so.” I
said as I hesitantly grabbed the other rope and tied my side of the
tent down.

“Is that her choice, or
yours?” he still wouldn’t look at me as he was talking, so I didn’t
know if he was serious or not. He knew how much I loved her, what
the fuck caused the mood change.

“What’cha getting at,
Bear?” I stopped working so that I could put my attention to his
answer. For some reason I felt like I was in defensive
mode.

“Nothin’, just thinkin’-
if you don’t marry that woman ‘fore she leaves, shit’s gonna be
perty ugly when you get back.”

Moving on to the back of
the tent as he was talking, he began powerfully laying blows to the
stake that looked pretty permanent where it was.

“You gonna nail that stake
to China there, brother?” I asked as I made my way to the other
side of him. “Somethin on your mind, Bear?” I asked as calmly as I
could, I had to remember this was my friend. He was only looking
out for my well-being.