"Sunny! Oh, my
god
I'm so glad you called.
"You taught me two lessons last week. The first one you know about because you told me how I need to get out of my head, to stop dwelling on the past, and to enjoy the present. The second one is that the pain I've been feeling since I left your campus last weekend forced me to get out of the present and think about the future.
"I can't begin to describe how I feel right now. I have a plan. Do you have some time to listen to me?"
Since Sunny was using a payphone, I asked her to give me the number for one of the phones in the commons on which I could call her so I could foot the bill. We spent almost an hour and a half talking. I expected the call to cost a chunk of change, but I didn't give a crap.
The last thing she'd said when I'd seen her was, "I wish I could hate you." The last thing she said on the phone was, "I think this is a bad idea, but I can't wait to see you. Thank you. I love you so much!"
It was going to be very, very difficult logistically, but I thought it could work. The bright spot helped me sail through the rest of my finals. I aced every single one of them. My final GPA was 3.811, which earned me the
Summa Cum Laude
gold leaf seal on my diploma.
Commencement was, thankfully, a very quick affair. It was a gorgeous day, which was a great thing, because the ceremony was held at the football stadium with thousands of people in attendance. Unfortunately, Sunny wasn't among them because she had her own things she needed to do before her semester ended.
Immediately after the ceremony, my parents helped load all of my stuff out of my dorm into their car and mine, and I departed the town I'd called home for four years. I had two days to box up those belongings and tag some hand-me-down furniture to get ready for the movers.
My mother traveled the fourteen hours from my former home to my new one to help me with the process of finding an apartment and getting it at least sparsely furnished. It required three days before I signed a lease. The rent was more than I'd budgeted, but it was very convenient to the office building in which I'd be based.
I'd arrived.
I knew it'd take me a while to consider the new place to be my home, but I was starting my new life and was so incredibly excited. There was, though, a huge vacuum because I had to wait almost two more weeks before I could communicate with Sunny again. She was on her summer break.
First, I had to wait for a telephone line to be installed in my apartment. The GTE agent I spoke with was at least able to assign the new number during the call. I mailed a letter to Sunny's home so she'd have my address and phone number, but it'd take a few days for the line to become active.
I waited with bated breath on a Friday evening at the appointed time. Since Sunny's family still didn't have a telephone in their house, she had to drive fifteen minutes into the nearest town to use a payphone. She'd call and let the phone ring twice, then hang up, getting her quarters back. I'd call the phone right back. Luckily that particular payphone was one which could accept incoming calls. Not all did.
We made plans. It was late June when they would come to fruition with me meeting her flight at the gate on a Saturday afternoon. She was mine for a week!
We had an absolute
blast
together. Since I'd only lived in my new surroundings for a few weeks, we went out almost every evening and explored. Most of the sights were as new to me as they were to her. We ate out a few times, but trying to stick within my budget, we prepared most of our meals ourselves. To be perfectly honest, Sunny prepared most of them. She was
fantastically
adept in the apartment's small kitchen.
Do
not
misinterpret me. I can cook a pretty darned-good scratch meal myself because my own parents began teaching me kitchen skills from a young age. I was making homemade pancakes when I was seven or eight years old. I'm only saying I was impressed that her skills were far better than mine.
Unfortunately, since I'd only been employed for less than a month, I had zero vacation time. I wouldn't earn my first week of vacation until the sixth month, so I had to work that week. I hated abandoning her alone in my apartment with no way to get around. Though she never said anything about it, I'm sure she didn't enjoy being cooped up, but she understood it was a necessary evil. I think that's where her interest in daytime TV dramas began.
Leaving the car with Sunny was an unworkable option. There were times I might be called to another campus with no notice, and a delay from a new employee wouldn't be easily tolerated if I had to wait for Sunny to transport me.
One thing I still remember vividly was at least being afforded the opportunity to rush back to my apartment during lunch. Many times, we didn't eat because we were too busy enjoying each other. I often "neglected" to wash my hands after a midday reunion so I could smell her intimate odor on them the rest of the day.
The week was incredible, and her stay ended way too soon. We both were pensive and quiet on the drive back to the airport. In those days, one didn't have to possess a ticket to go through security, and I was more than happy to sit with her as we waited for her flight to board. She was the last passenger aboard because we didn't want to let each other go, and we wanted one more kiss. Lots of last kisses were exchanged until the gate agent tapped Sunny on the shoulder and pointed to the door.
Before I left the airport, I went to the airline's counter and booked my flight to see her the following month.
I was sent on a facility audit with a more senior coworker so he could show me some new ropes. It was a four-day trip to one of our manufacturing plants about three hundred miles to the west.
The work was brisk. It was educational on-the-job training, but it was tedious and fatiguing. On our last night in town, with our work completed, my coworker and I enjoyed drinks at the hotel bar. We chatted amiably over beers for several hours as he gave me the rundown on corporate life. He was interested in the basics of my life story and my college experiences.
He'd graduated six years before, so his memories were still fresh. We commiserated in the pitfalls and hazards we'd experienced. Even the bartender joined us in the conversation when she mentioned she was a local university student about to begin her senior year, which allowed her to share some entertaining stories with us as well.
All three of us had a good time chit-chatting. Traffic at the bar was light, so our conversation was seldom interrupted. As the evening drew late, my coworker seemed itchy to depart. When he did, I followed him out.
When we boarded the elevator, Don said, "You weren't supposed to follow me, you moron. I sure as hell hope you're not as ignorant doing audits as you were with the bartender."
"What are you talking about?"
"That cute little thing was making eyes at you."
I laughed. "What makes you think that?"
"Are you kidding me? You didn't notice how she played with her hair and hung on your every word when you were the one talking? You didn't see her presenting her perfect little ass when she was bending over to get your beers out of the bottom of the back-bar fridges when they were right there, in the icy things beside her?"
I shrugged in ignorance.
"Crap, Gary! You and I were drinking the same thing! She pulled every single one of mine from the ice!"
"Wouldn't the ice baths be colder? Maybe she's after you."
He laughed hard.
"Don't I wish, but no. My beers didn't come with a free side of butt-show. Did you not notice how, when you were handing her cash, she'd 'inadvertently' brush your fingers with hers?" He air-quoted. "I saw it myself! For crying out loud, dude, are you
blind
? I'm not sure, but I think she even wrote your name on her palm."
I hadn't noticed any of it. It's completely crazy how true love and deep connection with a soulmate changes one's perspective. For one thing, it had made me blind again.
He continued, "You need to go back down there, right now, and give her your room number. I guarantee that hot little honey-buttered biscuit will be tapping on your door as soon as the bar closes."
He got off the elevator at his floor. The elevator then arrived at mine. I decided to test his theory and rode it back to the ground floor. I returned to the bar and removed the blinders.
The bartender was, indeed, a gorgeous woman. She had azure-blue eyes and long, wavy blonde hair anchored behind her head with a banana clip. Yes, she had a fantastic body tucked into snug khaki shorts and a blue golf shirt with the hotel's logo embroidered into it. She flashed a delightfully lovely and different sort of smile when she saw me.
"I'm glad you came back without your friend," she said, twirling a lock of her golden hair around her left forefinger.
"I'm not staying. I thought I might have left my sunglasses behind, but nope, I didn't. Must be in the car."
I returned her smile then turned back toward the elevators.
She looked decidedly dejected, but I frankly didn't care. She was very pretty and had a great personality, but she wasn't Sunny. She didn't even come close. My self-esteem was bolstered by her, but I knew where my heart was.
I flew to Kansas City on a Friday night in early August. Sunny met me at the curb at the arrivals area where I was more than looking forward to diving right into and ravishing her mouth with my own. I even hoped for the opportunity to touch her intimate places when we got into the car. She jumped out and embraced me so tightly and kissed me so passionately I considered diverting us to a hotel because I knew we would be in the car for a while otherwise.
When I opened the rear door to put my duffel bag in the back seat, I saw a kiddo buckled in a booster.
"Well, hello!" I offered the little guy.
"Hi," he said back.
"That's my brother, JJ. He begged me to bring him along for the ride," said Sunny with an apologetic expression.
I laughed. "Yeah? Maybe he
could
kick my a—um, backside," I acknowledged which made Sunny laugh beautifully.
I knew her home wasn't near the airport, but I didn't realize how far away it was until we'd been on the road almost two hours. I began to worry when I saw lightning to our west.
I'd been on farms before, but never stayed overnight at one. Sunny's home was in the middle of God-knows-where and burned the only lights for at least a mile. It was
remote
. It was shy of midnight when Sunny pulled onto a gravel road, then onto a dirt driveway.
The place was, to put it politely, "quaint." The farmhouse had seen better days. A few courses of siding were falling down on a wall of the house, and there was one of those huge C-band satellite antennas in the yard. And, holy crap, there were the headlight-reflecting eyes and streaked tail of a skunk about fifty feet in front of the car.
The only mention of it Sunny made was, "Don't walk toward it and you'll be fine."
No sooner than she'd unbuckled her brother and his feet hit the gravel, he darted off after the animal. Sunny ran after him and managed to yank him off the ground as the skunk turned its back and lifted its tail. Thankfully, it missed them, and the gusting wind blew the spray the opposite direction.
Her mother, father, and sister had come outside on seeing the approaching headlights. Sunny's father was a big fellow. Short, but
big
. He offered me a coarse, leathery hand, and I shook it. He about made me fall down on my knees with the intensity of his grip.
