A derecho and an ultimatum
This is an excerpt from the first piece of creative nonfiction writing I've ever submitted for publication. I'm still waiting to hear whether it made the cut BUT today is the tenth anniversary of the start of the climactic weekend of the piece, which seemed like a decent reason to put this part of it out into the world.
So here goes:
That weekend opened with a bang — literally. At around 8:30 p.m. on Friday, June 29, I deftly parallel-parked my car on Vermont Avenue right in front of Mio, the downtown restaurant Dan and some colleagues were visiting for an excessively extended happy hour. About a half hour later, one of the most violent storms in D.C.’s history blew through. The 2012 derecho knocked out power for days to large swaths of the D.C. metro area, including Dan’s neighborhood in Arlington. With no air conditioning in his house and absurdly hot weather on tap, we decamped on Saturday morning for an Orioles game in Baltimore, then Dan’s friend Dave’s house in Annapolis, Maryland, for cooler air and a night of bayside bar hopping.
All that night, I struggled to stay present and enjoy my time with Dan, drinking and laughing and dancing. But the question I planned to ask the following day kept getting in the way. Finally, somewhere around midnight, the alcohol dulled my willpower so much I couldn’t hold the question back any longer. Dan and I sat on the top level of a multi-story bar, the pulsating house music giving us a bit of sonic privacy from those around us. We sat on a bench, and as Dan put his arm around my shoulders, I leaned my head on his. After a minute, I spoke.
“So tomorrow, before I leave, I need you to do something for me,” I said. I sat back up and checked his expression to make sure he could hear what I was saying over the noise. He looked back at me and nodded. “I need a yes or no answer tomorrow. ‘Yes,’ we’re together, like…dating. Or ‘no,’ we’re not. But I don’t want to hear ‘maybe.’
“We can be together if it’s ‘yes,’ or we can be friends if it’s ‘no.’ I can deal with ‘no.’ But I can’t live with ‘maybe.’ We’ve always been ‘maybe.’ I’m tired of ‘maybe.’ I need a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’”
He nodded again but didn’t reply.
“You don’t have to tell me now, but you have to tell me tomorrow, OK?” I asked, my anxiety clenching my throat. Before he could answer, Dave rushed up to us.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” he panted. “People are taking their clothes off downstairs. We just gotta go.”
Confused, we followed Dave down the stairs to the third floor where, sure enough, people were dancing in bras and boxers and various levels of undress. The bizarre scene had all of us gasping with laughter as we stumbled down the stairs toward the bar’s exit and into the humid Annapolis air. It also changed the subject, and Dan never acknowledged whether he’d heard my question.
__
The following afternoon, we pulled into the driveway of Dan’s house in Arlington. He popped his trunk, and I took out my weekend bag and slung it over my shoulder.
“You remember the question I asked you last night?” I said, returning to the topic for the first time since we fled the bar-turned-strip club. He took his sunglasses off and perched them in a tuft of his thick blonde hair. I left my sunglasses on.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“So, what is it? Yes or no?”
I steeled myself for the disappointment of a “no” but resolved to keep my word to accept it if that were the case. But the longer he stayed quiet, his face contorting in obvious discomfort, I felt anger rising up the back of my neck.
“Kristin I –”
With those two words, I knew what was coming. The heat of the anger reached my ears, clogging them to the point I almost couldn’t hear the rest of his sentence.
“—I just don’t know. Right now, I don’t know. OK? I just –”
“No,” I snapped, grateful I decided to keep my sunglasses on so he couldn’t see the hot tears springing to life in the corners of my eyes. “I told you there was one answer I couldn’t accept, and you chose it.”
He tried to say something, but I didn’t hear it.
“Goodbye, Dan.”
I spun around and walked with long, purposeful steps to my car. There was no hug, no goodbye kiss, nothing. I opened the door, threw in my bag, fell into the driver’s seat, and slammed the door shut. Dan didn’t move to stop me.
I cried until I reached Richmond about two hours later. In that time my phone buzzed at least a dozen times. Dan kept calling and texting me, saying he was sorry and asking if I was OK. I shut the phone off; I had nothing to say. My decade-plus crush on Dan Hanson was officially dead.
__
Four days later, after scores of ignored phone calls, texts, and G-Chats, Dan decided to try a new avenue: email. Could he call me that night, he asked? He had something he wanted to say, and it wouldn’t take long.
Realizing that he’d probably never stop until he had a chance to say his piece, I gave in. I tersely responded that I was going to dinner with friends, would be back at 10 p.m., and would be asleep at 10:30 p.m. If he wanted to talk, he could call in that window. Not before, not after.
My phone rang at about 10 o’clock and four seconds.
“Hey,” he said.
“Well?” I answered, half a week’s worth of resentment dripping from the word.
“You were right,” he said. “I want to give this — us — a shot.”
I didn’t know how to respond. “You there?” he asked after about 30 seconds of silence.
“Yeah,” I finally spoke. “That’s a ‘yes,’ then? Not ‘I don’t know?’”
“Yes. It’s a yes.”
My tightly shut jaw loosened, allowing a smile no one could see break across my face.
“OK. But I’m going to need you to come down here and tell me that in person,” I said.
“That’s fair,” he answered. I could hear in his voice he was smiling, too.