Without You

After a few days, Cadey finally stops putting it off, and asks her boss for a few days off. Her boss says yes, as she knew he would.
She had had second thoughts since first offering the trip to Zach, and she’d been hoping her boss would work as an inadvertent decider – his answer of no telling her that it was immoral to take the trip, and his answer of yes meaning that it was the right thing to do.
Since she had gotten a yes, it made her final decision accordingly.
“So, a Friday off to have a long weekend, huh?” Tara asks from her desk as Cadey returns. “What have you got planned?”
“I’m….um….I’m going away for a few days,” Cadey replies, swivelling the mouse on her computer, trying to watch the screen and appear busy, without her face giving anything away.
“Going away where? With Jackson? Have you gotta little trip of lovin’ planned? Cause you know I’ll look after Cam.”
Cadey fidgets with a button on her blazer to hide her face.
Over the past few years, since they first began working together, Cadey had appreciated Tara’s friendship. She was Cadey’s closest friend, Cam’s part time baby sitter and she was reliable. She never failed to put a smile on Cadey’s face, and she her strong opinionated streak helped Cadey see different sides of things. But, sometime, she couldn’t help but get the feeling that Tara was a bit too invested in her life’s events. It was as if Cadey lived in a glass house, her dirty laundry on the washing line and her baggage visible, Tara the main observer. She had a tendency to turn light mentions of things in passing into a Jerry Springer episode.
Cadey knows that Tara will have strong thoughts about her planned trip to New Jersey, so she tries to play indifferent.
“It’s not a big deal,” she shrugs. “But speaking of Jackson, I need to go meet him.”
“Hey! You promised to have lunch with me remember? I told you about that new place down on-”
Cadey quickly swipes her coat, wallet and cell phone from the desk and backs out to the door, rushing an apology. “Sorry, he said he wanted to have lunch and talk. It sounded important.”
A Lie. And then not a lie.

She meets Jackson at his house, still relieved and hyped from the close call with Tara.
“Hey baby,” he greets, his face instantly getting happier. “I’m glad you remembered.”
“Of course,” she replies, trying to uphold his tone.
He invites her in and they take a seat at his kitchen table, sandwiches and drinks set out on the table. She edges off her coat and sets down her belongings on the bench.
“You know, when you said you had the day off and wanted to meet me for lunch, I kind of had a different scenario in mind.”
Jackson laughs at her confession and pulls a chair out for her. As she sits he ducks his head to her ear. “Well, there’s plenty of time for that later,” he promises, “But I actually do want to have lunch.”
She tilts her head to him and he kisses her.
They start to eat their delicious sandwiches and keep conversation, but Cadey is only half paying attention. The other half is fighting an internal argument with herself, asking whether she truly knows what she is doing.
Playing families with Zach is a dangerous game, for all involved. Dangerous for her relationship with Jackson, and with Zach. If she gets too attached to it, she could get hurt, or worse, ruin the friendship between them and make things hard for Cam.
She tries to remind herself that it will only be for a few days, probably like two tops if they fly out on a Friday afternoon and fly back on Sunday afternoon. It will be harmless. But what if it’s not?
“Cade? Cadey are you even listening?”
“I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
Jackson sets down his glass. “I’d repeat it if I thought you were actually going to listen to it.”
Feeling herself well and truly caught, Cadey offers herself for reprimanding. “Sorry Jackson.”
An annoyed look works over his face but he controls it. He lets out a small sigh and touches his hand over Cadey’s on top of the table. “Cade, what’s going on? I can tell that your mind is somewhere else. You’ve barely heard a word I’ve said since you got here.”
“I’ve heard….some of it.”
He cocks his head and shoots her a look. “What was I talking about then?”
Her mouth opens, but it closes again, and she realises just how rude she has been.
“You know what, its okay. Just tell me what’s on your mind.”
Cadey feels the sandwich she has been nibbling on drop like a brick into her stomach. It’s so rude of her to be arranging these things with Zach when Jackson is trying so hard to work with her for this. He is always so understanding, so good at compromising.
“I’m taking a few days off work to take Cameron to New Jersey to see Zach’s life,” she blurts out.
She keeps her eyes trained on her plate, too cowardly to look at his face and see the hurt. She worries that this will be the last straw; this will be Jackson’s end point.
But he is a far more determined man then she gives him credit for.
He’s never had a child, never thought that that was what he wanted from life. Being a soccer coach is fun, teaching them skills, encouraging them and helping them succeed. But it’s far different from being a father, from being someone a child depends on –a life long commitment, and he has never confused the two. But things with him and Cadey and Cam, he loves it. He loves being someone Cam can come to, having a really close relationship with him. He had been worried at first when he fell for Cadey, that he wouldn’t be able to handle Cam, or to make a commitment to a woman with a child. But it was as if he hadn’t had a choice and that was never a problem.
Cam loves him and Cadey loves him. And he loves them. Fiercely.
Though he knows it’s not his place to judge, he has always thought Zach a fool for leaving them, even for a dream as big as the NHL.
He doesn’t understand how Zach could give up so much for it. Nothing made Jackson’s day like the look on Cam’s face after a soccer win or how beautiful Cadey looked in the morning when she wakes and her hair is a little messy, and watching them play and laugh together is amazing.
He pitied Zach for missing that, but felt it was of his own accord.
Jackson knows he won’t ever give them up, for anything. They have come to be integral parts of his life and he thoroughly enjoys it that way.
That’s why he does what he does next. He squeezes Cadey’s hand and pastes the best smile he can onto his disappointed face.
He knows Cam needs time with his father, and he doesn’t want to come between that. He could make Cadey feel guilty about her involvement, but he doesn’t want to. He cares about her too much to do that to her. Besides, he knows that Zach will leave at the end of the summer. Back to his life, back to whatever it is that bars him from this family.
But he will be here, able to enjoy what Zach so rudely discards.
“Cadey you’ve got to stop feeling so guilty about all of this. You’re his Mom, Zach is his Dad. This is good right? Look, I know I’m not his father, and I might not be his step-dad or whatever either, but I do care about Cam and what is best for him. My parents are divorced and they hate each others guts. It would have been great for me to be able to spend time with the two of them at once; I would have given anything for that. So I understand okay, I understand. You don’t have to keep apologising.”
Cadey rise’s from the table and rounds it, sitting herself in Jackson’s lap.
She sometimes wonders what she did so right to deserve all of this. To have had the fierce love that she got to experience with Zach, the wonderful little boy she has and to have Jackson.
It makes her feel greedy.
She is instantly disgusted with her behaviour so far today. Who does she think she is to dream of and plan days playing families with Zach while he is here, when Jackson, perfect Jackson is before her now, beside her always, wanting to play families?
“If you want to break up with me, I think I’d understand.”
Jackson laughs. “No, Cadey.” His hand fits around her back and kisses her shoulder. “I don’t ever want to break up with you. I love you.”
“I love you too Jackson.”
He grins handsomely. “How is that I never get tired of hearing you say that?”
She giggles and leans in, her lips a breath away from his. “I love you. I love you. I love you. I lo-”
The last of her words are stolen by Jackson’s hungry mouth. For as much as he loves hearing those words, he loves kissing her more. And it’s a feeling Cadey shares.

-

“Hey, what’s all this?”
Cadey looks up from where she sits on the floor, her back against the couch behind her. Photo’s scatter the floor around her, covering the carpet.
Zach immediately recognises certain people in some of them, and the events they were captured at.
“Cam’s teacher wants the children to do an assignment on this ‘fate’ topic and present to the class. He asked me this morning if I had a photo of the two of us that I could lend him, since our first meeting is his chosen example.”
Zach sets his keys down on the coffee table and clears a small space to sit on the floor adjacent to her. As she flicks through some more from a box down beside her, he scoops up a handful from the floor and glances through. Different expressions roll over his face with each different photo.
As far as he can tell, these are every photo Cadey owns, collected over her years so far.
There’s ones of her, about no older than five, playing in the snow with Noah. At her high school graduation. Her family Christmas when she was ten. With Tara at a work event where they are dressed as Hula Girls. Holding a very young baby Cameron. Her and Zach at a party of their friends, in his lap on a couch, red solo cup in one of his hands and Cadey’s in the other.
And one of him sleeping, that he remembers very clearly. It was the morning after she had stayed that night they first slept together. He had woken with her in his arms and wanted to freeze all of time. Apparently Cadey had shared his wavelength, as she had grabbed his camera from his top dresser draw and tried to snap a picture.
“Cade, it’s the morning. I’m sure I look horrible. We will take one later, I promise. Come back to bed.”
But she hadn’t been deterred, flashing him a delectable smile. “Zach, you look absolutely handsome. You always look absolutely handsome.”
She crept back to the bed, sitting up on her knees. He stretched his hands out to grab her to him, get her back in her rightful spot of his arms, but she dodged him.
“Come on baby, smile,” she’d giggled cutely, “This picture will be documentation. Every time I look at it, I’ll be reminded of what happened last night.”
She quickly clicked the button on the camera, taking the picture just before Zach leapt at her, pinning her down on the bed with his frame. “What makes you think I’m ever going to let you forget last night? You don’t need a reminder.”
She had then kissed his nose, then his cheek, and finally his mouth. “You promise a lot, Parise.” The camera dropped down on to the soft bed and she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Why don’t you take some action?”
Now, in the present, in her living room, he smiles to himself before he flicks it around to her. “You kept this?”
She studies it for a moment, again sharing his wavelength, at least when it comes to the memory that the photo holds.
“Sure,” she shrugs, “I’ve kept almost every photo I’ve ever taken. That’s why I’m sitting her drowning in an ocean of them, trying to find the right one.”
“Is there a special one you have in mind?”
Cadey chooses to lie. “No, I figured I’d just flick through all of them and one would come up.”
She goes back to the pile in her hands, and thinks of the exact photo she wants to find. One of her and Zach back in their summer, when they had been at a bonfire with their friends –Zach kissing her cheek as he wrapped his big arms around her from behind, her face half turned to him, a huge grin on her face. For her it represented so much of the relationship they had had back then. Simple. Loving. Free. Youthful. Easy.
Everything it wasn’t anymore.
She keeps flicking, and comes across one of her and Noah, throwing their hands up in the air in joy in the background, as a young Cameron takes his first steps in the forefront. She shows it to Zach, and the few that follow afterwards, ones with his parents and hers too.
She remembered the day clearly, making a hurried phone call to both sets of Grandparents who had sped over to partake in the joy of watching his biggest step of growth.
She explains it to Zach, who feels dread wash through him seeing another moment of Cam’s life that he has missed.
Just like his first word. His first day of school. His first soccer game. Every mile stone that’s important for a parent to share in.
He quickly busies himself in more photos from the floor, trying to avoid everything else.
“Hey,” he says suddenly. “Why don’t we give him this one?”
Cadey looks up to see the one photo she didn’t want him to suggest.
It was taken when Cam was still so little, a baby. Zach was in his Devils shirt, Cam in his Devils onesie and Cadey in a number 9 Devils jersey also, which Zach had insisted on giving her. They are sitting at the dinning room table, Cameron in Cadey’s arms and Zach’s around her.
They all look so happy and perfect, like the type of cheesy photo that fills a frame on a shelf before it’s purchased. The perfect family.
“No,” she replies sternly, getting up slowly and starting to place photos back in the box. “He isn’t using that one.”
“Why not?” Zach asks in disagreement. If anything, the photo, in his opinion, shows Cam everything he wants it to. That he was there, present for at least some things, and that there were moments where they really were all like a family.
Which is exactly why Cadey despises the thought of it being used to illustrate them.
“It’s you and I and him, all looking so together. It’s perfect.”
“Yeah Zach, it’s a perfect lie.”
“Excuse me?”
When she looks at him, her face shows complete discomfort. “That photo doesn’t represent anything about the two of us, or even about the three of us. That’s not what Cameron’s life has been like. The assignment is about a photo that illustrates us and how we met.”
Zach thought that them having Cameron was pretty fateful, given that it had kept them in each others lives for so long, or who knows what separate ways they would have gone after that summer, once he went to Jersey.
But knowing where the line was, and unwilling to cross it, he kept it to himself.
“Fine then, how about this one?”
Cadey reaches out and relenting takes the photo he offers, one of her and Cameron at a birthday celebration of Noah’s a while ago. Cadey sits on the swing at he parents house with Cam in her lap, the two of them laughing and smiling.
“That’s what you want right Cadey? One that shows my down falls. One that shows Cam’s life properly.”
“Zach,” she sighs remorsefully, “That’s not what I meant.”
He stands and leaves the photos on the floor. “Sure it is.”
Cadey closes in her eyes in complete dismay of the turn the conversation took.
Zach grabs his keys and readies himself to leave, “I just came over to tell you that I want to pick Cam up after school today. I’ll go now.”
He gets to the door before she says anything more. “Wait Zach,” she calls.
He slowly comes to a stop, turning just before his hand twists the knob of the front door.
“I don’t want to fight with you okay. Not ever. I just…I don’t hold anything against you, you know that. But I can’t let Cam use that photo.” Her voice is sad and low, her hands fidgeting at her sides. Zach takes notice.
“For me, it doesn’t represent fate or the three of us. It represents the life that we couldn’t give him and I can’t…..”
Tears spill from her eyes and Zach wipes them away gently with the pad of his thumb. “When is the project due?”
“Huh?”
“When is the project due?” Zach repeats gently, “because I have a photo of us at one of the bonfires we went to in the summer, you know so long ago now, but it’s at my house in Jersey. So we’d have to wait until we go.”
“Well I got Friday off of work yesterday, so I will book our tickets soon if this weekend is okay for you.”
“It’s great. And Cade?”
“Yeah?”
Zach smiles, all forgiven. “I will book the tickets, and no, it’s not up for debate.”

She tells Zach to hang out with Cam after school, take him somewhere and do something and his face lights up. “Really?”
“Yeah, I’ve been working from home today and I’ve still got stuff to do, and if I’ve learnt anything it’s that though our son is a lovely boy, getting work done while he is in the house is impossible.”
He laughs and promises to have Cam home for dinner, then leaves to collect him.
Cadey picks up her messy box of photo’s overflowing with them all crammed in, instead of nicely stacked.
As she walks back to her room a few photo’s topple over the edge and flutter to the floor. She sighs and drops to her knees to retrieve them, but is stopped when she sees which ones have fallen.
The one of Zach lying on the bed, the one of them at a party on the couch and the one of them in their Devils gear.
She stares at them for a while, soaking in the small movie like memories attached to each one. Like the small protest Zach made at having his photo taken in the morning and the wrestling move he put on her afterwards. How Cam looked so snuggled in his Devils outfit, and the look of pride in Zach’s eyes when he saw him.
And how their mutual friend Grace took the photo of them at the party, drunkenly telling them she wanted to ‘capture the way they looked at each other’.
Their friends over the course of ‘their summer’ had become friends too, finding it easier to just all hang out together if they ever wanted to see Zach or Cadey, with the amount of time that they had spent stuck together back then. It had become quite a large group, four of Zach’s guy friends and five of Cadey’s girl friends. The thought of everyone pairing up and the drama that came with young relationships seemed inevitable, but never eventuated. Cadey and Zach were the only couple, and every one got along well with everyone.
At the particular party the photo, it was Grace’s birthday, and as usual, almost trademark for the group; they had a back yard bonfire party to celebrate. Grace had broken up with her boyfriend, Daniel, a couple of days before, giving up on the long distance relationship after a hard year of trying to make it work.
Cadey remembered it had scared her a little, the thought that if Grace spent a whole year working on it and couldn’t pull it off that the ending for her and Zach could be just as sad.
She had been fighting off thoughts of where the end of the summer would leave them, remembering her promising words to her brother.
But being around Zach, or even near him, made it hard to prep herself for ever not being with him. Somehow, he was always able to tell what she was thinking and shut it down, tracing his hands over her or hugging her to him, murmuring in her ear that thinking about how things would end was a waste of time. The future was unpredictable, and he wanted to enjoy his here and now, with her.
That night had followed suit, and Zach had promised her that they weren’t Grace and Daniel, and that things would be fine. It broke the last gate Cadey had up, and they had spent the rest of the night even more entwined than normal, cuddled up on the couch soaking up each other.
Grace had had a lot to drink, with reason to both celebrate and commiserate, and had approached them with the camera, whining about how beautiful the two of them were together.
“Cadey & Zach, Zach & Cadey,” she had sung, teetering on her heels, “sitting in a tree K.I.S.S.I.N.G. First comes love, and then comes a baby. Then marriage and more in a carriage. No wait -that’s not right.”
It was a simple childish song, one sung plenty of times by people all over the world, and Grace’s rendition had been an intoxicated mistaken edit, but so far, at least for Zach and Cadey, it had been accurate.
A tear rolls down Cadey’s cheek now at the same time that a small smile forms on her lips. She looks at the concession of the three photos, but doesn’t just see the turns their lives have taken.
She sees the happiness on their faces, the complete joy they shared from the love they had. She sees the beautiful baby boy they were blessed with, whether they expected him or not.
She has a lot to be grateful for in her life, a lot of reasons to be happy. And she is.
But she also has reason to cry.
So once she has picked up the photos, she heads to the bathroom and runs a hot bubble bath, gets her self a glass of wine and sinks in to the tub, flicking through every photo and allowing herself the private luxury of doing both. Crying and smiling at both the happiness she had, and the sad way things have differed from her prior visions.