July 2012 | Two Years after the Accident

We crossed paths one summer afternoon on a busy state route, just miles from my apartment, almost two years to the day of a different kind of crossing.

It was only a quick glance, a brief moment of recognition, but it was enough.

Jackson Ross.

We had been Facebook friends for eight months, acquaintances for almost twenty years. He had been a new student at LHS when I was a new teacher, and now we were both middle-aged and divorced.

“I think I passed you,” he had messaged me the night after our cars had passed in opposite directions, sunshine providing a glimpse of each other behind windshields. “That smile!”

“It was me—I saw you!” I answered, intrigued.

Within the week, we had exchanged phone numbers, began a texting conversation, and agreed to meet for a drink sometime. The friendly banter—sweet, easy, and sometimes flirtatious—continued, and soon I realized he had potential, the timing was right, and this was not an opportunity I wanted to miss.

One night a couple of weeks later, during my master’s residency, I asked him to join my new friends and me for a drink at a local pub. I was a summertime, sloppy T-shirt, sweat-stretched navy shorts, hair-wilted and make-up-melted mess, so I figured it was a good time to put our texting interest to test. If I could look like that and he showed up and stayed, then hey, maybe there was something between us!

“What’s up?” Jackson greeted me, strangely raising his hand in a high-five, like we were old pals.

Uh-oh, I thought. Who high-fives someone at the start of a possible date?

And then I noticed his pale color-of-the-sky eyes and the way he looked at me when I talked. Our attraction was instant, the chemistry immediate, and the high-five became adorable.

When Jackson offered to drive me back to my parked car, I followed him and my heart, ditching my grad school friends for the rest of the evening. Once alone, it was only a matter of seconds until I felt his fingers on my cheek and his lips against mine.

Sigh.

We made out like teenagers, pausing only to move closer to each other, even giggling when I climbed the center console to sit on his lap.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

• • •

“Mom,” I said into my BlackBerry, “I think I’m in love.”

I was on a quick break from class, headed out in my nearly two-year-old Honda CRV to do some summer shopping.

“Aimee, you know it’s never gonna happen with Ricky Martin, right?”

“Ha, ha, ha, very funny, Mom. I’m serious.”

“Oh, really?” she replied, her words curling into an unseen but unmistakable grin.

“Yes! I’ve only known him for a few days—well, sorta, I’ll explain—but he’s wonderful!”

“Wow,” she said. “What’s his name?”

“Jackson. Isn’t it perfect?” I sighed loudly in exaggeration. “I mean, Mom, could I have dreamed up a better one?”

She laughed, and I began to share our brief background.

I had known Jackson for years, and in fact, I could vaguely remember him as a student. This made my mom chuckle.

“How ironic,” she said, referring to her own story of meeting Dad.

“But we’re only eight and a half years apart.”

And anyway, it didn’t matter. Jackson had assured me that age was just a number, and that since it wasn’t a ten-year age difference, I “technically” couldn’t even be considered a cougar (confirmed by my own frantic research on the Internet). And I figured that since women live an average of ten years longer than men, I could be securing a partnership ’til death.

“Mom, he is soooooooo gorgeous. Wait until you meet him—blue eyes, tall, handsome, and he smells good all the time!”

She laughed again.

“So, you’ll see him again soon?” Mom asked.

“Ooooh, I hope so—I really like him. This could be the real deal.”

She laughed again.

“Now, Aimee, I know you are forty-three years old and a grown woman, but I’m still your mother,” she lectured. “You need to go slow. There’s no rush.”

“I know, Ma, will do,” I said. “Talk soon!”

• • •

Written in my notebook during the next week’s residency:

Only two weeks and two days. How can it feel like this so soon?

Well, Aimee, you tell us. What does it feel like?

It feels like I’m falling in love. Not in like, or like a lot. In love. Hopelessly, madly, and passionately in love. A grown-up, mature “in love.” With an awareness that YES, YES, this is the one. Mine to love. Mine to want to love.

It feels like those darn clichés about love—my heart skipping beats, finally finding the one, or when you know, you know—are actually happening to me, the cynical divorcée who no longer believed in fairy tales.

It feels like I’ve always imagined—unexplainable.

It feels like I could kiss him forever.

It only takes one, Aimee.

• • •

When your very own Prince Charming sent you text messages like these—

Everything’s so easy for us.

I keep thinking about looking in your eyes and smiling, and then I think, ‘Damn, she is so beautiful, in all ways.’

Love when you wrinkle your nose.

It’s your smile.

I’m probably the happiest man alive right now.

—you knew you better hang on to him. Like ever-after hang on.

Jackson. The One. I could feel it. He did exist!

I was under his spell, enchanted over and over and over again on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis. My smile, with its brand-new teeth, returned along with my laugh—the one that wrinkled my nose—because of him.

He was real, and he was mine.

Jackson. Handsome, energetic, and charismatic. A self-titled “simple man,” he worked hard and loved his two children even harder. Jackson’s hobbies included cooking and watching gory old horror movies (thankfully, not at the same time), and he randomly sang bits and pieces to any song, from the ’80s until now, like a human jukebox.

We shared a love of George Michael (“Don’t tell anyone,” he once whispered in my ear, swearing me to secrecy), and if I corrected his grammar, Jackson corrected me with raised eyebrows and a smile and said: “This is who I am—take it or leave it!”

He was comfortable, genuine, and silly—quite an inviting combination—and he made me laugh every day.

Jackson also made me feel attractive, sexy even, in spite of those ugly scars—the ones he brushed his fingertips against with empathy, the ones he wished had never happened. But Jackson also understood. Those scars had kept me from dying, giving me the chance to find him.

“Look, it’s just something that happened to you,” he told me. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

And I knew he meant it.

Jackson never treated me differently because of what I had been through, nor did he ask me to talk about it. He just accepted me.

Every time Jackson looked at me, he would say, “You’re so beautiful.”

And I knew he meant that, too.

• • •

Jackson has eight tattoos.

“Eight is enough,” he says with a grin, but they are not an issue for me, neither turn-off nor turn-on. They’re just a part of him.

He readily admitted that a few were crazy teenage/early twenties mistakes—the alien in a human uterus, the Buddha with back-to-back aliens behind it, and the creepy spider-looking tribal face—but his favorites were his children’s names, one on each upper arm. Jackson knew I had a tattoo, too, a sunflower, about the size of a 50-cent piece, near my right hipbone.

It was a badge of bravery from a years-ago, fun venture with my sister, an almost-dare. It sounded so exciting—and unlike me—to get a tattoo, so I did it.

A sunflower, symbol of warmth and happiness.

“Do you think you’d ever get another one?” Jackson asked. I just didn’t know. I had enough permanent markings to last three lifetimes at least.

And then, after only weeks of dating, Jackson made an intriguing promise—another pinky swear, actually—to me.

“I’ll tell you what,” he started one night as we sat outside on his back deck.

“I’m so proud to know you, Aimee. You have a goal, and I believe in you. This book you’re writing?” he went on. “I know you’ll do it. That’s something,” he said, looking directly into my eyes.

That look. Like he could see right inside of me. It always made me blush and giggle.

“I’m so sure you’ll write it, that I will have your name tattooed across my ass cheek when you get it published. I promise.”

I erupted into loud laughter.

“Realllly?”

How I loved him already. He made me believe in me.

“Yes, really. It would be an autograph of sorts, right?” he asked, also chuckling, his blue eyes sparkling with equal parts mischief and admiration.

So I said yes and stuck out my pinky finger for him to grasp, and he did.

Tattoo number nine: all mine.

I liked that. I really liked that.

During the next two years, any time I complained about my grad degree and what was then an elusive “book,” or whenever I struggled, sometimes threatening to give up and quit, frustrated and bummed by how difficult the task, Jackson would remind me of the promise. Our promise. The tattooed-ass-cheek pinky promise.

Which everyone knows you can’t back out of.