Type your cut contents here.And it was spring when I fell in love with a wild, sexy, heartbreakingly damaged carny boy named Doug.  He looked exactly like a young Bruce Willis except for the four inch scar right at his hairline.  Car wreck in which he was pronounced dead twice, resulting in a metal plate holding his skull together.  He could actually stick a refrigerator magnet to his head.  I made him do it a dozen times.   The first time I laid eyes on him, he quite literally stopped my heart.  His eyes were so blue, his smile so winsome.  He wore skintight levi's and knee high moccasin boots and moved with the natural confidence of a jungle cat.  I'm not making this shit up.  He was and I assume still is amazing.  All the girls on the concourse were all a'twitter when word came around that he was coming home, coming back to the Mac, after a stint on the road with the carnival.  

When I met him I was in rough shape.  Just had my second kid, gained a lot of weight.  I wore big ugly glasses and hadn't been able to afford a professional haircut in three years.  Or a perm.  Or a color.  Or makeup.  My self-esteem was in the toilet thanks to my hubby who'd recently put me through a year of torture over a skanky band-ho named Monni.  But that's a whole other story...

One day I was up on the concourse at the Mac, putting together the new sandwich boards and cleaning out the stands in preparation for an upcoming event.  I'd seen Doug a time or two, from a distance and of course I'd heard the legends and the warnings...he was bad news.  Heartbreaker.  Worked his way through all the girls every season.  I had no reason to believe he would even give me a second glance so I wasn't worried.  Then he walked right up to me that day and looked at me with those incredible ice blue eyes, all crinkly at the corners when he smiled.  He asked my name and told me his and then smiled and squeezed my hand.  "are you married?"  He said, running his thumb across my wedding band.  I nodded my head, miserably, wishing with all my heart that I was not.  LIfting one eyebrow in surprise he asked, "Happily?"  and I was lost.  

For the next three years Doug alternately made me deliriously happy and deliriously miserable.  He made me care about myself again, brought me back to life.  I got contacts when he said my eyes were too pretty to hide behind glasses.  I saved up enough money to have my hair cut when he said he was tired of seeing it up in a ponytail all the time.  When he said "no offense to God but you were meant to be a redhead" I ran to the store and bought my first red haircolor.  He was the one who stood behind me in the mirror in his bathroom one day and made me look at myself, really look at myself.  "That is a beautiful woman."  he said to my reflection and to my surprise I realized he was telling the truth.  I was beautiful.  

Because of Doug, his friendship, his passion, his lust for life and his lust for me, I became a better person, a better mother, a better friend.  I had been so sick and so miserable, my post-partum depression left virtually untreated.  Because I'd allowed my husband to define me and knew that I would always come up lacking in his eyes,  I had lost all confidence in myself.  I saw nothing for myself in the future as long as I stood in his shadow.  Suddenly I was dreaming again, writing again, feeling things instead of being numb.

Not that my relationship with him was perfect.  Far from it.  He had led an interesting life in his 23 years, seen and done things I could not imagine.  Things that he eluded to that at first I thought were bullshit.  He said he'd been busted for traficking pot and instead of  doing time he'd made a deal with the cops.  Now whenever they needed help getting info on someone they called on him.  Sure, I thought. sure they do.  And then one night two guys showed up at the Mac after an event and pulled him aside.  Without a word to anyone, he left with them, disappearing for three days and when he came back he had a black eye and a split lip.  After that every few months the same two guys would pop up unannounced and off he'd go...he told me stories of life on the road, traveling with the carnival.  He told me he was smarter than the other guys who traveled and lived in the cramped, smelly trailers.  When he came into a town the first thing he did was look for a likely candidate, usually an older woman, not particularly attractive.  "They have to be hungry."  He said, not meaning they wanted dinner.  Invariably these women, grateful for the attentions of a handsome younger man, would take him home, do his laundry, feed him well, let him shower and sleep in their beds.  In exchange he used his considerable bedroom skills and his gift for blarney to make them feel like the most incredible, most desirable sexiest woman on the planet.  How many times did I wonder how much of that skill he employed on me but since I had benefitted greatly from it I tried not to dwell on it.  

Besides, I knew that I had seen a side of Doug that none of those other women had seen.  I'd seen the scared, broken, sad little boy inside.  I'd been the one that made him go to the emergency room after he'd had the hiccups for six days straight.  The one who made sure he took the valium and xanax cocktail they prescribed him, saying he was overstressed and if he was going to seriously hurt himself.  I was the one who woke up with his hands around my throat, when he dreamed he was being attacked.  And I was the one who held him when he cried afterward, begging me to forgive him.  I rubbed his head when the headaches were so bad he begged for death, praying in the dark for God to give him some relief.  I knew how empty and hollow he felt because of the life he'd lived and I knew how badly he wanted to be a different kind of man.  And how scared he was that he never would.  

And then I won the money and my husband said it was time to move home at last.  The thing I'd dreamed of for years was finally going to happen.  And I had to make a choice between the life I'd chosen and the one I wanted so bad.  And I had two young children to consider.  I wanted to go home.  And I wanted Doug to ask me to stay.  And since he didn't I began to make my plans.  We didnt' talk about it until two weeks before it was set to happen.  My husband left me in Vegas, heading up to find us a place to live and get himself a job.  I stayed behind with the kids, working one last week at 7-11 and spending every minute I could with Doug.  Every minute was bittersweet, the last time we would go to the MGM Grand theme park where he worked.  The last time we walked down the strip at night or went bowling at the Showboat or drove his mom's cadillac out to the lake or played poker in the smoky back rooms at the China Trader.  And then it came down to the last night we'd spend together.  My friend kept the kids so I could stay the whole night and we hit the town.  All our old haunts, bars where everyone knew him, where girls looked jealously at me.  We drank a lot, shot pool, played songs on the jukebox that made us choke up a little.  Goodbye songs.  I cannot hear the song Desperado without seeing his face in the dimly lit club, his eyes glittery with sadness.  And later we drove to the airport, parking in the lot near the fences, watching the planes take off and land like we'd done so many times before.  Making love in the backseat of a borrowed car, clinging to each other like there was no tomorrow.  Because there was no tomorrow.  We went back to his house, sneaking in so we wouldn't wake him mom, making love again, one last time, in his big old bed.  And as I drifted off to sleep in his arms I heard him whisper, "stay, please stay with me.  don't go"

And then in the dim light of early morning as I got dressed, fighting tears, he said it again, "Stay.  Stay with me."  but we both knew it was too late.  In some ways I was already gone.  I had kids and I didn't fully trust him, his dark moods, his lapses in judgement, his tendency to view sex as currency.  I was too scared to risk being left on my own if it all became more than he could handle.  I was too scared of a lot of things and so I kissed him goodbye one last time, leaving a little piece of my heart behind in his safekeeping.

I never saw him again.  We spoke on the phone a few times in the years to follow but he could not forgive me for leaving him and I could not forgive him for waiting so long to ask me not to.  A year later he married another girl and last I heard he finally got the life he always wanted.  He is a nice guy with a nice job and a nice wife and even a couple of nice kids.  I'm happy for him because I know how bad he wanted all those things.  

And every year when the season begins to change, when spring starts to spring, I think of him.  And what might have been.  But mostly about what was...