editorscut/twoyearsafter

                    So, Callie and me, we’re sitting on the couch. And she’s got her dark hair pinned back like always, and she’s resting her head against my shoulder like she used to. It’s not unpleasant; never was. But that’s the problem. I can’t have her doing that. She’s not even supposed to be here.
                    See, Callie’s with this guy named Richard (or Richie or Rick), and they came here together. Arrived on the doorstep, fresh from their car, all smiles and gladness, full of Auld Lang Syne cheer. It took less than three hours for them to lose that feeling, for him to be AWOL for some time now, for her to be next to me on a couch we both remembered, and in my case, fondly.
                    We first-kissed here. Among other things.
                    It was good for quite a while. We had decided not to live together; we’d watched too many friends lose their good things under the same roof. I gave her a ring one night - not an engagement thing, just something to indicate that I was serious about her. She accepted it with a smile, she wore it. We didn’t plan on getting married, we didn’t really want to. We were okay with what we had.
                    And one day we realized it wasn’t going to last. We didn’t have a gigantic fight, nobody was unfaithful - our feelings just sort of cooled. I didn’t hate her. She didn’t hate me. We just weren’t into it anymore.
                    For a few weeks after we were finished, though, I could still taste her. Not often, but now and then. And once I had a dream about her, just after the breakup, laying naked in my bed, and she turned and looked at me. Just as she was about to speak, I realized she wasn’t there.
                    After that, she hadn’t crossed my mind in what felt like forever. I moved the couch to the attic, where we are now, next to some other old furniture, and boxes of things I’ve forgotten.
                    Flash ahead to yesterday. I’m buying cheese in a supermarket for this party. I look up for an instant. And Callie’s standing there, a shopping basket in hand. Her hair’s pinned back, she’s in those old grey sweats, and for a moment I’m seeing a ghost. Then she says hello, and I know she’s real, and suddenly I can smell her and taste her all over again. We trade smiles and glances, and her face - well, it does what it always did. Levels me.
                    And now she’s on the couch, her body pressing against my side. And she’s sad. Sad about him or me or something. She won’t tell me why she’s sobbing into my shirt. She found me up here, just sitting and thinking by the light of a single bulb, and she flopped down by my side, and that’s when the tears began to fall.
                    I shouldn’t have been happy to see her yesterday. She shouldn’t have been happy to see me. We shouldn’t have talked. She shouldn’t have asked about my plans for tonight. And I definitely shouldn’t have asked her to come.
                    She gave back my ring two years ago, and it didn’t kill me, didn’t crush me into dust. We couldn’t stay together, so we accepted it as a fact of life, and when I heard from a mutual friend that she took this other guy’s ring last year, this Richard (or Richie or Rick) guy’s ring, I was amazed at how genuinely happy I was for her, not angry or in denial or full of self-pity.   No, I don’t know the guy that well - my not being sure of what he likes to be called should make that clear enough - but Callie and me, we haven’t seen each other since, well, since the day we decided to split.
                    I came up here to avoid her, in fact.
                    So she shouldn’t be sitting here. In an attic, on a wearing-out couch, with her ex.
                    She needs to be up and about with Richard (or Richie or Rick), draped all over him, whispering in his ear, not leaning against me and my loneliness.
                    Not so close as I can smell the sweetness of her hair, and feel the wetness of her face soaking into my t-shirt, or the warmth and weight of her body against me.
                    Not so close as I’d once had her, our mouths open and together, limbs knotted in an embrace.
                    Not so close as to stir up the old desires.
                    “I hate it when you cry,” I said.
                    “I know. I just haven’t cried in a while,” Callie replied. “All bottled up, I guess.”
                    I need to keep talking to her, if only to keep my mind off the nearness of her. “Richard. Or Richie, or Rick. He seems like a good guy.”
                    She sniffled and chuckled at once. “You remembered his name.”
                    I exhaled. “It’s not like I was trying to remember something difficult, like your birthday or anything.”
                    I felt her give me a small smile of recognition. “He is a good guy.” She nodded, like she needed to verify her words. And then, quietly and quickly, she added, “I’m going to marry him.”
                    Just like that, I feel a nail go through my heart. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I did. “Good,” I said, trying not to make it sound like a lie.
                    “He has a good job, and we have a lot of fun together, and tons in common, and - and he asked.”
                    A sharper sting, because it was true. “I didn’t know you wanted anyone to.”
                    “Neither did I,” she said. “But there were a lot of things I didn’t know. At least I thought I didn’t know them.”
                    I didn’t want to look at her now. There was something in her words, something lovely and familiar. And I knew that if I looked, she would level me again.   But like so many times before, she turned my face to hers with no effort at all, while tracing my jawline with her fingertips.
                    “I - I didn’t know I missed you,” she said finally. “I was sure until yesterday.”
                    She shouldn’t have been saying this to me. I shouldn’t have been feeling her lips against my neck and ear, her warm breath against my skin. And I shouldn’t have been feeling what I was beginning to feel. “Same for me,” I said.
                    She kept talking in that low, soft voice. “Then you kept showing up in my mind all the rest of the day. And night. And I haven’t thought about us in so long. . . .”
                    And then her mouth was on mine. At first, it was a quick peck, but then she gave me another kiss, and it was as full and sweet as I could ever remember, and I could feel her arms reaching around me. Reflexively, I returned the embrace, my hands flattening against her, caressing from her clothed shoulder blades to the sliver of exposed skin on the small of her back.
                    It was the first time on that couch, all over again. The heat, the flavor of the liquor on her breath and mine, our bodies together. It was all the same, like some kind of little miracle. All the time apart had vanished. We were now who we were then. Nothing had changed.
                    “I need you,” she said, with a tremor in her voice that sounded like a tear.
                    At that I had a realization, as intense as a thunderclap. I hadn’t stopped thinking about her. That was all denial, me lying to myself. She’d been everything to me: the first one, the last one, the one I compared every other girl to, whether I realized it or not. And her words, her needs, they still controlled me. All I wanted was to fall into her and drown, like I’d done so many times before. And she was real, and here, and willing. I wasn’t going realize she wasn’t there, because she was, if just for tonight. She was my Callie again.
                    It took me no time to slip my hands under her shirt, to let my fingers graze against the softest flesh I’d ever felt, before or since. I knew the tenderness of her, the most sensitive places, and even though they were concealed under cotton and lace, I let my fingertips wander and explore.
                    She responded, like always, with soft exhalations and rising sighs. “I love it when you touch me there,” she murmured.
                    And I loved hearing her say those words, and my breathing rose, and the blood raced through me. As it did, a kind of lust-filled courage colored my words. "I need to be inside you," I whispered. "Will you let me?"
                    "Yes," she whispered, her voice still trembling.
                    And at that, everything became fever-dream clear.
                    I could see it all from my vantage point on that couch, leaping from moment to moment. My other self, taking her to the bed we'd shared a time before. Callie letting her hair fall. Me, lifting her up, then laying her down. Our fingers interlacing, our arms tightening around each other. Her long, lean body, disrobed, warm and soft and waiting, and my body too, tensed and aroused. The long, lingering kisses. Her back arching ever so slightly as I enter that tenderest part of her. My hips slowly grinding against hers. Her head turning from one side to the other, hair spread out on the pillow. Then a shared exultation from low and deep.
                    And then, seeing his ring again.
                    Remembering that it wasn’t the first time. That it wasn’t the same as before.
                    That everything had changed.
                    So back on the couch, while I had a chance to keep myself from surrender, I stopped kissing her. I even took my hands from underneath her clothes, but I couldn't manage to release her from my arms. “I can’t,” I whispered into an ear I desperately wanted to kiss. “We can’t.”
                    After a moment, I heard her reply. “I know,” she said.
                    “I still want to,” I said.
                    “Yeah,” she said. “But it’d be a bad trade, wouldn’t it?”
                    “It would.” I felt my eyes stinging. “I wish I’d never seen you again,” I said. "I don't mean anything by that, I just - "
                    She pulled away, probably just to let me see her reddened eyes. Still she said, "I know."
                    We sat back on the couch, separating ourselves as far as we could. She adjusted her blouse as I tried to slow my heart. “Maybe you should go find - uh. . .”
                    “Richard,” she said, a smile breaking through.
                    “Or Richie,” I said.
                    “Or Rick. Yeah.” Her smile was still killing me.
                    We stood up together, and as we found our way to the stairs, I heard her say, “That’s your old couch, isn’t it?”
                    “Yeah,” I said. “I just can’t seem to let it go.”
                    She nodded, lacing her fingers with mine one last time. “Even when you wish you could.”
                    And as we went down the stairs, we unlocked our grip, and that was that.