A Privileged Stumbling Into Love

"How long have you been in town? I wish you had called me, we could have set something up. Jesus, you just disappeared. Did you have to travel for work right after the last time we got together?"

I took her in for a moment before replying. She's just such a beautiful angelic creation but now here in the flesh a couple months since the 'bomb' I didn't really know what I wanted to say.

"The company sent me here a couple weeks after the last time we talked. I've been staying up on the lake with my folks and driving down to the plant just north of here."

"On Lake Norman? That's where Mr. Nason lives.. Oh, you know that." I think she caught herself a bit too late and a tinge of guilt slipped from behind her mask.

"Denny, can we talk about that, about Mr. Nason? I explained to him when I came down here for our training that I couldn't be with him when he came to the office anymore because, well, because I told him I was in a relationship."

The thing is Marylyn is smart as hell, almost brilliant in intellect but when she said that it was as if an epiphany rose above the horizon and shed its light upon me. If everything was burning down around me, I'd be looking for a fast exit and I don't think I would have seen her sitting there.

"When were you in a relationship, Marylyn?"

Her fruit plate arrived before she could answer and with all the pleasantries done and a fresh berry grazing her lips, she looked at me as if I had grown a horn not realizing she might have placed it there herself.

"What do you mean, Denny? I was in a relationship with you; we were in a relationship."

"Yes, I suppose we were so if that was the case, how did you happen to be fucking George Nason, if we were in a relationship, you know? You don't have to answer that. I'm OK with that. Hell, those have been the kind of relationships I've always had. I'm still having them. A fuck here, a fuck there, there a fuck, here a fuck, everywhere a fuck fuck."

I was on a roll having been shed of the delusion of Prince Denny and Princess Marylyn and she was staring at me with the same doe look as back at that cafe in Asheville a couple months earlier.

"Marylyn, I could enjoy this relationship, a lot I'm guessing. You are so damn hot I'd like to fuck you right now and I wouldn't give a shit if George Nason was still running his toad dick up into you. Whatcha' say? A quickie over there across the street?" I pointed to the Hyatt.

I thought I caught a glimpse of unbridled lust trying to break free of her business decorum. She was certainly flustered.

"D-Denny, I have to get back to work. I mean, I can't. I'm sorry."

I thought she was about to cry and I laughed to myself watching her leave her fruit plate and walk briskly back up the street.

"Don't worry, I got it covered." I shouted out.

I don't know why I did that; maybe I'm still just a privileged asshole but I felt like a crushing burden had been lifted. I didn't need to be in love or fooled by some counterfeit version of it. Later that evening I called her and apologized for being so crass. Of course if she had been willing I would have fucked her and probably right under the same roof as Mother. That wasn't the case but curiously she didn't shut the door on a bit of recreational fun on a raincheck. That was interesting.

So once again, Denny Chadwick was an unencumbered free spirit beholden to none. Maybe Patricia Crenshaw was right; we should just sow oats and get the bones jumped until the big 4-O hits. I certainly tried to live like that. The company sent me back to the Asheville plant and after getting settled back in, I hit all the favorite old haunts on a regular basis. I even ran into Marylyn a few times, had dinner and we even spent the night together a couple times but we both knew there wasn't anything but good company and sex.

On the other hand, I found myself with my special friend August every week or so and we never failed to have a great time. We were from two different universes but somehow, in that little eclectic space of Asheville we found something we liked and it worked. She was a vegetarian, I was a BBQ kind of guy; it was like that with nearly everything. After a while I stopped chasing anything else and felt satisfied with that weekly friends with benefits thing. I didn't ask or push for anything else and I think she was pretty much in the same place. We each had our lives and interests and our thing together late nights on a weekend or maybe on one of her days off. It wasn't serious; it was a satisfying comfort.

Then life intervened again full force. The company was sending me to Germany to work out of their European headquarters in Wurzburg. I can't say it was unexpected; all the managers rotated to either Europe or China at some point, usually mid-career level. I was settled into a comfortable life in Asheville getting laid every week, living in the mountain paradise of western Carolina, earning good money. Nonetheless, I went for it regardless. August and I had a fond farewell weekend and I even had dinner with Patricia Crenshaw. By the end of October I was in Bavaria drinking Hoffbrau and eating brats; stereotypical I know.

My extant knowledge of German was mostly limited to ein bier bitte so the company enrolled me in a crash language course evenings after work for three months. That is where I met my destiny. That was her name, Destiny. To this day I can still see her face the first time I met her. She was a precocious six year old girl who would come into the class each evening and sit in the back with a coloring book or headphones and a game as her mother taught the class.

Melody Lofler was her mom and her dad and Melody's husband, Will, was an engineer working on one of the container ships sailing out of Bremerhaven. During breaks in the class I got to know both Melody and Destiny a bit and after a few weeks they talked me into accompanying them on a Saturday morning to help out in one of the homeless food shelters they volunteered at. Destiny took the lead and led me by the hand to work next to her. Melody put a packing crate on the floor behind the serving line and the little girl scooted right up on it putting her at almost face level with the people coming through the line.

Nearly everybody that came through knew the little girl by name, to my amazement. She put a breakfast sandwich on every tray that came our way and I put a juice bottle beside it. I don't think I saw a smile leave her face the whole time.

"Mr. Denny, these are some hungry people" she said in nearly perfect English. "Sometimes this is all they get to eat for the whole long day!"

One fellow in particular came through the line looking like Jethro Tull's AquaLung wearing a battered old fedora and a long overcoat that had seen many better days. That said, his clothes were clean and his shoes had fresh polish. There was something about him that was dignified in spite of his whereabouts.

"Mr. Denny, this is Mr. Toller. He's my good friend."

The gentleman merely smiled and nodded as Destiny placed two sandwiches on his tray and I followed suit with two drinks. The man named Toller proceeded to sit with a group of souls at one of the tables striking up a conversation with them.

"He's an interesting fellow." I said

"Yes, Mr. Toller takes care of everybody here. My mom says he pays for everything and he comes in everyday and always gets two sandwiches, one for him and one for Mrs. Toller who never comes because she can't."

I glanced back at the gentleman and saw him immersed in a boisterous conversation with his fellow diners; I saw a humble benefactor with everyday Homo sapiens enjoying the simplest pleasures of life. My constitution was never delicate but I was now certainly affected. It wasn't a generosity of his wealth although there was most definitely that; it was the generosity of witnessing him share his very soul. I turned back to my precocious little friend.

"Guten Morgen, mein liebes kleines Destiny" one of the elderly ladies in line greeted my little workmate.

She smiled and replied. "Und auch Ihnen einen guten Morgen, Frau Beatrice. Ich bin nicht mehr klein."

I had to laugh some at the notion of her not being little anymore and Frau Beatrice joined me with a chuckle of her own. The line was winding down at that point and I joined the other adults in tearing down the line and cleaning up. When we were finished, all of us grabbed a table and enjoyed breakfast as Mr. Toller joined us.

"Mr. Chadwick, my friend Melody told me you came here from the mountains of the eastern United States, Asheville it seems." Mr. Toller spoke very good English with only a slight accent.

"Yes, my company sent me over to expand my horizons, they claimed" I smiled.

"Good, good. We're glad to have you join us. There is a lot of suffering in the world and we think we can help a lot better than waiting for some bureaucrat in Bonn or Brussels to parse out a pittance here and there. Welcome aboard."

We shook hands. Destiny still had a giant smile on her innocent face. Melody was grinning as well.

"Mr. Toller helped my husband and I when we first arrived here. I don't know what would have happened if he hadn't. Destiny was just a baby at the time and ever since then we've donated as much time as we could to return the generosity. Paying it forward, he called it."

To this day I can't really explain the experience other than it being a revelation or an epiphany. I had found something that gave me a purpose beyond going to work or chasing some selfish desire. Maybe the closest thing to it in my life up to that point was the Melissa Moriarty experience. Whatever it was, I liked it. I liked helping these people. I appreciated the smiles and knew that Melody and my little friend, Destiny and the others were doing something worthwhile and meaningful. It was one of those life changing experiences for me.

I continued my German lessons through the Christmas season and into the new year meeting Melody's husband Will and becoming fast friends with him. The homeless kitchen became almost a second home for me and eventually Mr. Toller asked me to manage a new site he was funding on the other side of the city.

I lived in Wurzburg for almost three years growing in my job responsibilities and enjoying the pleasantries of Bavaria. Through the Lofler family I met an older neighbor of theirs who reminded me of that puckish Marjory Pillars. She was a divorcee with a couple grown children who had an almost insatiable appetite for hot sweaty sex, always in her home and only with me. She insisted that our relationship be exclusive in return for unbridled sex and good company. Her husband left her a few years earlier and she had no interest in remarriage; she just had an extraordinary appetite for being fucked that manifested itself after he left, supposedly.

Yet, as with all good things, they seem to have an expiration date. The company was sending me back to Asheville and after settling my affairs in the country and several goodbys, I boarded a flight back to the good old USA.

Asheville hadn't changed much in the intervening years other than a few new shops and a bit of gentrification here and there. Jacks was still hopping most nights and the gold diggers were still mining for treasure up at the Grove Park Inn. It was the same old story with new characters in place of the old; some things never change.

I did find that Marylyn Sutton had married while I was gone. Unfortunately for the groom, I caught a glimpse her back in Charlotte one afternoon with the old nemesis himself, that fucking old fat toad George Nason. It kind of pissed me off at first until I realized how fortunate I was not to have saddled myself with that problem, c'est la vie.

One of Asheville's notables once coined an old maxim 'you can never go home again' meaning the nostalgia we paint our memories with always loses some of its lustre with the passage of time, especially when we return. Maybe it's called maturity in another book. Whatever the case, I looked at life with a different lens than before.

My new role at the plant came with significantly more responsibilities, being the number two guy there and one of them was to be the public face in our relationship with the county government and public at large. That proved to be a segue into picking up where I left off in Wurzburg...

"Mr. Chadwick, I'd love to have you join us this Saturday. We've been a bit short handed and believe me, we can use all the help we can get." Mrs. Danforth was the director of the regional interfaith charity that operated homeless shelters and food kitchens throughout western North Carolina.

"It is my pleasure, believe me, I became intimately involved with a wonderful operation during my time in Germany and this is exactly what I've been trying to find here."

I had been looking around for a similar charity in the area to not only donate money to but to offer my time and services. I had that void in my life since coming back stateside and this is what I needed. Mrs. Danforth had me working food prep in one of the kitchens to start and I showed up early the next Saturday morning.

It was a nondescript storefront on lower Patton Avenue where a lot of the homeless and downtrodden folks would hang out. Several day laborers waited for pickups across the street.

"You can handle a knife and cutting board, right?" The little bespectacled lady was kidding but did so with a deadpan face.

"It's how I open up TV dinners"

We both got a cheap laugh out of it and I got down to chopping up veggies for whatever they were planning for the lunchtime menu. I was lost in thought and deed for a while until a feminine voice interrupted me.

"Denny, long time no see. How have you been? When did you get back?"

I looked up into a pair of sparkling blue eyes and a fresh smile, almost a deja vu of sorts.

"August... Oh my god, I didn't expect to see you. I'm doing fine, thank you. I've been back a while, three months or so I guess. How are you doing?"

We bantered back and forth a while with pleasantries and I discovered that August had been volunteering at the kitchen for the past year or so instead of working at Jacks on Saturdays. Her nights as a mixologist for the one percenters up at the Grove Park had turned into days managing conference bookings.

"I've led a workaholic's life, my dear August. " I replied when she asked if I had settled down into a domesticated existence. "I don't know if there's a woman out there who would put up with it."

I detected a fresh sparkle to the eyes and I made a move.

"How about Dinner tonight? You game or is there someone who has your card booked?" I asked not seeing a ring on her finger and hoping.

"I'd like that a lot, Denny. Can you pick me up outside my place at 7? Same place as before. There is a great place, well, an old one that has reopened recently that we can walk to."

So, we did and we walked arm in arm together over to the Laughing Seed, a vegetarian place; some things never change. We talked about so much that had gone on in our lives over the past three years or so.

"Now I know you, Denny, you weren't celibate over there. Did you find a special friend?" She had a mischievous smile.

"A gentleman never tells, August... but you know I'm not necessarily a gentleman." I replied, returning her mischievousness. "I was a boy toy for a mature divorcee. I'll leave it at that."

She broke out in her high pitched laughter. "Touche'. I had the same kind of thing here but in reverse until I found out he wasn't really divorced. That really pissd me off so I outed him to his wife. Now he is divorced, the bastard and his ex and I have lunch on occasion."

"So, nobody special now?"

"Nope"

"You?"

"Nope"

Fuck, we both knew where this conversation was heading and a couple hours later I had the fresh taste of August's pink resting on my tongue with the egg timer counting off the sands.

"Just testing." She giggled.

We fell asleep in each other's arms til morning and after getting cleaned up, I watched her fixing us a light breakfast, naked from the waist up. It felt almost like I had never left yet both us were different people, in a good way.

She had cut her hair and had a more mature outlook about her. Oh she was still living that bohemian lifestyle with a bowl of buds at the ready and still in the same loft apartment but now we seemed to have more in common; not just the kitchen volunteering but a more relaxed outlook on life. It's that maturity thing again.

As I watched her, I realized something. Mother wasn't right about the world burning down around me and seeing only the love of my life. Instead, I recognized that it was already there. It just took time for me to mature in order to recognize it. I had to grow out of Mother and Father's world to see it.

August glanced back at me and smiled, bare titted. "I'm glad you're home."

*************************

August and I didn't run out and storm the chapel overnight and prance about like a couple of love struck teenagers; we did that on our beds at night. What we realized is that the only person each of us wanted to be with was each other. She kept her loft and I kept a condo, again on the other side of I-240. Both of us needed to wean ourselves off our stubborn independence on our own timetable. Eclectic, I know but it worked wonderfully well for us.

Mother was mad at me for a while although she tried to hide her societal disappointment in my disinterest in chasing the gold ring. Father was more nonchalant. In his view, we all settle for the one we want to live with and chase the piece we want to play with. That's his world. He would just never realize it wasn't my world.

We did eventually get married, it was inevitable at some point. We spent our wedding night in August's loft on the same bed we giggled at ourselves silly stoned on pot seven years earlier when I told her I "could wait seven years". Mother sprung for the whole wedding thinking she was going to invite half the fucking city of Charlotte. We kept it to a small affair over her protestations.

I didn't invite Marylyn; I don't like cheaters. I did invite Patricia Crenshaw and she came with whoever was riding her bike at the time. She looked good, damn good and by all means, August knew my history with her; I made sure of that before inviting her. I danced with her at the reception and the bike rider danced with my bride.

"He'll be good, Denny. He's in love with me. I just haven't found a gold ring to put in his nose yet."

I almost peed myself laughing as August looked over at us.

"We'd have been quite a couple, wouldn't we, Denny?"

"The divorce lawyers would have loved us."

She smiled. "I can tell you love her. We had lust but you two have it all. I'm happy for you."

Her dad gave us a wonderful gift; a fully paid trip to Europe whenever we were ready to do it. It turned out to be the best gift we could have received. A month later, August and I flew to Frankfurt Am Main, toured all over the place and saved the best for last. We visited Will and Melody Lofler and of course my special little friend Destiny, who was no longer little at thirteen years of age. All three of them had visited me in the States a couple times. Old man Mr. Toller joined us for dinner on one occasion which was a bit difficult for him given his declining health.

Looking back on the circumstances of our lives, I think it's fair to say that true love comes with maturity and patience and not a thunderstruck happenstance. I fucked a lot of women over the years and could have married a few of them but there has only been one woman I truly loved and whether by fate or luck, I married her.

When Mother asked me if there were grandchildren on the way, I told I I didn't know for sure but if there is a boy, his name will NOT be Milton Jr.