Two
Years After, On a New Year’s Eve
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. To avoid
them.
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, and 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 needed 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.”
“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, 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 to roll over and realize she wasn’t there, because she was.
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,” she murmured. And I
loved hearing her say those words, and my breathing rose, and the blood
raced through me. As it did, everything became fever-dream clear.
Especially the ring on her finger. And that
brought me back to
the earth. Like a stone.
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, and I took my hands from underneath
her clothes. My arms wrapped tightly around her, holding her
close like I used to. “I can’t,”
I whispered into an ear I desperately wanted to kiss.
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.
She pulled away, probably just to let me see her
reddened eyes.
Still she said, “I know what you mean.”
We sat back on the couch, separating ourselves as far as we
could. She adjusted her blouse as I tried to slow my heart.
I dragged the words out against my will. “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. “Even when you wish you could.”
She laced her fingers with mine one last
time. Held on to that smile, and it made me want to cry.
And as we went down the stairs, we unlocked our
grip, and that was that.
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