You Don’t See Me - 9. Chapter 9

“The gentleman at the table in the middle has already paid for your lunch.

He sends his regards.”

Patrick

There is a story about a young woman who snuck out of her parents’ house with her handsome lover. Hand in hand, they made their way past the soggy marsh and into the backwoods where they consummated their love under the watchful gaze of the full moon. Hungrily, they scratched and clawed at each other’s pale and flustered bodies on the cold black earth. At some point, the man bit the woman’s lower lip and drew blood. She shrieked in pain that fused with pleasure. But the noise, the blood, and maybe even the full moon, drew in a pack of wild wolves. The man saw them first, and with a running start, he made it out of the backwoods and away from the soggy marsh and the house of the parents of the girl he left behind. There are stories of her sightings still to this day. Pale and shrieking—now in pain only—she haunts the woods in search for secret lovers. What she does to them when she finds them, is a whole new tale of horror.

The moral of the story—which Eloise used to quietly whisper into Patrick’s ear at bedtime, presumably so that he wouldn’t ever bring home a girl he accidentally got pregnant—is that you can’t trust men. Or at least that’s what Patrick took away from it. That probably wasn’t Eloise’s intended lesson, but it didn’t matter now. There would be no unwanted mistakes where Patrick was concerned. She should have saved that story for Callie, he thought.

A bartender and an aspiring actor. How original. He scrolled through the pictures of the Black Haired Guy—who now had a name: Michael—for the fifth time that morning. If Patrick was being honest with himself, there was something deeply alluring about the bartender. The other two—Jude and Gabriel—were nice to look at, but that’s where all the fun ended. There was a world of mystery bustling behind Michael’s deep eyes, which looked so familiar to Patrick, with their somewhat sleepy downward slant at the corners. He looked closer, but the pictures were taken at a distance. The eyes would remain a mystery for now.

He closed his laptop and made his way upstairs for a quick shower. He had lunch plans with Eloise and his sister, and he knew better than to try to get out of them. His mother was already concerned enough. Maybe if he put on a good face, she’d leave him alone. It was a long shot, but he had to try.

“They have the most delicious salads in this place,” Eloise exclaimed, about two minutes after he sat down, with the most obvious *wink wink* look on her face.

“You don’t say,” Patrick responded, as Callie rolled her eyes at her mother.

“Nobody is excited about eating salads, mom,” she snapped.

“I swear both of you eat as if daddy and I adopted you from impoverished countries marred by famine,” Eloise stated, displeased by her children’s large appetites.

“Can I get you anything to drink,” the waiter suddenly asked before Patrick could respond to his mother.

“I’ll have a vodka martini,” Eloise requested.

“Make that two, please,” Patrick added. He needed alcohol to get through an hour with his mother. Callie ordered an unsweetened iced tea.

When it came to food, Eloise tried to set a good example. “I’ll have the Garden of Eden salad. Dressing on the side,” she ordered.

“Can I have the Pan Roasted Scallops and Butter Poached Lobster?” Patrick asked the waiter, and Eloise had to take a sip of her drink to calm down.

“Do you really need the butter, honey?” she asked, and Patrick ignored her.

The rest of the lunch dragged on, and then, after two more vodka martinis for Eloise and three for Patrick, it was time to pay.

“The gentleman at the table in the middle has already paid for your lunch. He sends his regards,” the waiter told a confused Patrick. Both he and Eloise followed the waiter’s glance to the prime area in the middle of the restaurant, where Ford, seated amongst a group of smartly dressed businessmen, gave them a wink and a smile. Patrick couldn't help but smile back. He mouthed a ‘thank you’ and Ford replied with a nod. When he turned his head back, Eloise was positively beaming.

“That man,” she cooed—the liquor in her system allowing her to express her emotions freely—as if she was looking at John F. Kennedy himself. “That man really loves you.”

There is a story about a young woman who married a handsome man. Unable to wait for the honeymoon, he snuck in to see her right before she was set to walk down the aisle. Always willing to please him, the woman said nothing of the bad luck that seeing her in the wedding dress before the actual wedding would bring. He made her hike up the white chiffon and she gave herself over to his pushing. Later, she said her vows with a trickle of blood and other fluids trailing down her leg. Later later, she died while giving birth. Nobody could prove a connection of course. In those days, women died giving birth all the time. The moral of the story—which Patrick did not hear from Eloise, but during a sleepover—was that marriage would kill you.

Ford doesn’t come home after lunch, and Patrick doesn’t see him until later on that night, when he quietly crawls into their marital bed after taking a quick shower. But the hot water and soap do not mask the scent of betrayal that clings to his skin like a stale cologne for hours to come. The smell suffocates Patrick, but he keeps his eyes closed, and his body still.

In the morning, after his husband leaves for work, he flips through the pictures one more time. Michael is the only one Patrick has not seen in person. He needs to see those eyes, something tells him. He knows what he needs to do, and so he books a plane ticket to Miami.