It hadn’t been easy to set up the meeting.  She wouldn’t talk to me directly, so everything went through a very slow filter via Jerry.  We constantly met up with complications.

It took months just to get the ball rolling.

She wouldn’t even meet with me alone, as though I was some kind of dangerous criminal.

I tried not to dwell on that.

It messed with me, my sanity, my will to stay sober, but I had to focus on the positive.

I rounded up a few friends I’d met in rehab.

Trinity was a twenty-year-old heroin addict whose parents had already put her through rehab four times.  Her current clean run was the longest she’d been sober since she was fifteen years old.  She was a sweet, funny girl, and I had hopes that this time she’d pull through.

She was a compact girl, and wore a uniform black T-shirt and jeans.  Her short red hair was only long in the front, long enough to cover one eye, but she still managed make good eye contact.

Todd was a twenty-five-year-old tattoo artist and a pain killer addict.  We wound up in the same sober house after rehab.  He was a small guy, skinny, with bleach blond hair and enough tats to make me look like a blank canvas.

I’d made the fastest friends in rehab, but unfortunately, many of them weren’t lasting friends.  Nearly everyone I’d met had relapsed within the last eight months.  The ones that stayed sober with me, though, were like a lifeline, very necessary for my own recovery process.

Trinity and Todd were both still staying clean after rehab, still fighting the good fight, like me.  They were ideal company for me, going through the same things I was, and so they could understand how hard the coming meeting was for me.

They’d been in group therapy with me, so they knew all about my obsession with Danika, and all of the reasons she had to hate me.

We got there early, because I just couldn’t wait around any longer.  I was jittery with nerves.  Wound up so tight that I couldn’t sit still.

I’d been waiting, obsessed, tormented, consumed for this meeting since the last time I’d seen her.  It simply couldn’t end like this.  There had to be something more, something I could do to make amends.

Even if I couldn’t be her husband, I longed to have her in my life.  In any capacity.

I’d take literally anything.

I wouldn’t be happy with less than everything, but I’d take what I could get.

Crumbs, scraps, a taste of what she once felt for me, as a salve for what I still felt in abundance for her.

Even that I would take.

My hands were shaking so hard that I spilled coffee on my hands as I tried to take a sip of the decaf coffee I’d ordered just to have something to do with my hands.

As we sat there and waited for her, the future so uncertain, no, so likely to turn out in a way I couldn’t bear, I’d never wanted a drink more in my life.

I shared this piece of information.  It was part of the process, to reach out when you felt yourself slipping.  It still went against the grain for me, but I was trying my best to learn a new way.

Obviously, the old way hadn’t been working for me.  Not by any wild stretch of the imagination.

“Well, hell, man, let’s hit the bar then.  It’s five o’clock somewhere.”  Todd said it as a joke, and that levity was what I needed.

I burst out laughing and so did Trinity.

I was facing the door of the place, on lookout, and so I saw her first.

I froze.  Every part of my body just seized up as I set eyes on her.  At first it, was just at the shock, the sheer joy of seeing her beautiful face, even from several feet away, through a glass door.

Some man opened it for her, and I took her in for one heart stopping moment.

She wore a long black skirt that went down to her ankles, her pale pink blouse skin tight, showed off her perfect figure.  Her hair was loose and shiny, her makeup heavier than I remembered, and absolutely striking.

She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever set eyes on.  I knew she always would be.

“Holy shit,” Todd muttered.

“That chick is gorgeous,” Trinity said.

Danika began to walk through the door, and my fists clenched.

“Oh my God,” Trinity continued, in dawning horror.  “Is that her?”

I didn’t respond, couldn’t, caught up in my own personal hell as I saw her struggle to make it just a few feet to sit down at a table.

Have you ever felt like someone just reached into your chest and twisted a corkscrew into your heart?  No?  Well, that’s what I felt then.

It wasn’t fucking pretty.

I reeled for an endless moment, as I saw just what I’d done, and tried to cope with it, trying to breathe for even another moment, to live in a skin that I despised down to my soul.

I didn’t even realize I’d moved to her until I was at her table.  My body had moved with no tangible communication to my brain.

 She barely looked at my face, just one devastating, cursory glance before her eyes became glued to my chest.

Oh God.  She can’t even stand to look at me now.  I felt gutted by that.  This was going worse than my most dreadful fears.

I stared at her for the longest time, drinking her in, willing her to just look at me.

Finally, I shook myself out of it.  “Can I get you anything?  Coffee or tea?”

The finest tremor ran through her, but it stopped between one second and the next.  I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it or manufactured it, since I myself was shaking.

“Some hot tea, thank you,” she finally answered stiffly.

I went to the counter and ordered two teas, watching her all the while.

She didn’t look at me once.

I brought the tea back to the table, and she nodded her thanks, staring down into her cup.  She added a sugar packet and stirred it.

“Milk?” I asked.

She shook her head, adding more sugar.  She didn’t drink it, just focused on it.

I shoved my own neglected tea to the side.

I put my hands on the table, fingers threaded together.  I stared down at them as intently as she stared at her tea.  I took a very deep breath, gathering my courage.

“I have many regrets, many bad things I must take credit for, but believe me when I say that the negative impact that all of my actions have had on your life is my biggest one.”  I had rehearsed this speech.  I doubted I would have been able to say it without breaking down otherwise.

Finally, I felt her eyes on me, but now I didn’t have the strength to meet them.  I knew I’d find nothing I could bear in them.

I wished she’d say something, anything, but when it was clear that she wouldn’t, I continued.  “I do not deserve your forgiveness, after all that’s happened, but I am asking for it.”

Begging, I thought.

Groveling.

“Know that I would take it all back if I could, and know that I hold myself responsible for all of the bad things that happened.  I am so sorry that my hitting rock bottom the way I did impacted you.  Any recompense you can imagine, anything you would ask of me, I would be happy to provide.”  Please, I thought.  Ask me for something, anything.  Let me give and you take.  Let me have some role in your life again.  “I’m at your service.  Always, Danika.  And it is my most sincere wish that someday, perhaps over time, you might consider being my friend again.”

Her hand went to her throat, and she shuddered, as though in revulsion.

I shuddered in pain.

She was that disgusted with me now that even the idea of a friendship with me made her recoil?

“Tristan,” she said slowly, her voice hoarse.  “Consider yourself forgiven.  But please don’t think that I hold you responsible for everything that happened.”

I was filled, for the briefest moment, with the strongest feeling of elation.

“Things didn’t turn out how I could have hoped,” she continued.  “But no one person is to blame for any of it.  So yes, I forgive you for any and all of it.”