"I don't know, you know?" she said. "It's like, inertia. Or, I guess that's being harsh. It's just hard to give up someone when being held by them still makes you feel like everything is alright."
She stopped and turned to me, looking at me expectantly. We'd been walking so close to one another that she instinctively put her hand on my chest to stop us from colliding. We just stood there for a moment like that, drinking the situation in, her eyes locked on mine, looking for an answer when no question had been asked.
I finally said, softer than I intended, as my voice caught in my throat in the nervousness of the moment, "But does he make you happy?"
Her gaze fell from my eyes, and she took several steps away from me. But there was no purpose to her steps, so I didn't follow after, and she just sort of wandered for a moment, searching her thoughts, staying a few steps away, as if the distance was required to focus on analyzing him, on analyzing them.
"Sometimes. Sometimes he can be really sweet, and I remember why we ever got together to start with. Once, when we were kids, I don't know, maybe eight or nine, this one day he came running into my backyard as I was playing with another girl from our grade, and he was so excited because he had found this really unusual flower back in the woods by our street, but the excitement was in giving it to me, and he had the sweetest, most sheepish look on his face for this moment before he ran off, embarrassed because this other girl was there. And sometimes he still reminds me of that little boy, like, I look at him and I see that sweet boy who couldn't wait to give me the prettiest thing he'd ever found."
At first her eyes were glued to the ground as she told me this, but she gradually came back to looking me in the eyes. It was so strange, knowing someone for barely a day, and yet here we were, wandering aimlessly for the last two hours, opening up like we'd known each other for years, each the closest friend the other had in this strange new place. As I stared back into her hazel eyes, no words came to me.
So she said, after the pause had become a silence, "I'm sorry, I guess it's not fair, unloading all of this on you, as if orientation were some big therapy session for me to figure out my love life." Her gaze again fell to examining the ground, and she suddenly sat in what must have looked like a nice spot in the grass.
As I sat down beside her, the right words finally came to me, "No. It's alright. I mean, not just alright. I'm enjoying listening. To be honest, the whole orientation thing just seemed like it would be a drag at first. But getting to know you has been cool."
Her smile told me that she felt the same, and her right hand, with its turquoise stone flower ring, came up to the top of ear to pull out the joint she had stored there, hidden behind the thick waves of her long auburn hair. It sat between her lips, bouncing lightly as she fished around in her crocheted, long strap purse, looking for a lighter.
I gave her a moment before I pulled mine out of my pocket, interrupting her search with the scratching of the flint as I lit the flame in my extended hand.
"Can you just light it? Since you've got the lighter anyway..." she asked, extending the joint to me in her hand instead of taking the lighter from mine, the tone in her voice ringing of seductiveness of a young girl who knows how to get boys to do things for her and make them feel good about themselves in the process. A strange tone, I thought, for such a request.
The joint on my lips tasted of her lip gloss, watermelon or some such sweet and juicy thing, but that was washed away as the skunky smoke drew into my mouth, and in that moment as the taste of her lips disappeared from my own the desire that had been welling inside me as we wandered aimlessly through the growing dark finally took tangible form, moving from a desire simply for this girl to a need to taste her lips again, and not through the intermediary of a rolling paper.
"So," I began, passing the glowing cherry to her, "what's the problem? I mean, I get that you're afraid of being stuck in a situation where you rarely see him but are tied down to him anyway. But, honestly, even when you talk about how sweet he is or that he's a big, strapping jock, you've kind of got a tone of derisiveness."
Her eyes were fixed on the grass again, breathing out her hit, then, after a moment of pause, another drag to buy some time.
"Maybe I shouldn't say derisiveness. It just seems like, you know, even forgetting about the long distance thing, does he really make you happy?"
Her hand moved the faint glow across the nearly dark air into my outstretched fingers, fingertips glancing across knuckles, lingering long enough to betray something, before she dropped her shoulders flat onto the ground, lying her head back under the arm folded there to cradle it.
"No, you're right. I mean, in so many ways, we're not compatible. As much as his stability and always being there and acting chivalrous and occasionally really sweet are great, really, just, you know, brighten your day kind of goodness, he's just..." her free hand waved about above her face as if searching the sky to pluck the right words, before it dropped, as if giving up. Then she suddenly turned to me, resting on her side, her hand holding her head up.
And, looking at me like that, she found the words, "I mean, I don't presume to know you yet, like, really know you, but I think I can say very confidently that he's nothing like you." If it wasn't dark I maybe could have seen her blush at speaking these words, but the light had grown so faint that I could no longer see the dusting of freckles over her nose and across her cheekbones. "Like, he's not the kind of guy that I would make friends with, you know? Or even really talk to at all. We were only friends to start with because we grew up a few houses apart, and we've changed so much but never shed those old friendships even when they stopped making sense."
When she'd turned toward me the change in position had also taken her closer to me, and we were again so close that it was odd that the situation remained comfortable, my knee at most an inch from her belly, my thigh running off at a mere ten or fifteen degree angle to her torso so that her chest stuck out to almost close the gap at my hip. That absurdly gorgeous chest I'd watch bouncing towards me in a light tank top and seemingly no bra the day before as she approached to ask me and my new friend Ben for a hit from the joint we thought we were surreptitiously smoking.
The joint got passed again, back, and forth, the comfort we both felt deepening, the mood staying upbeat despite the sudden sour turn to the conversation. It was finished before I had anything to say again.
"Yeah, but, I guess that happens even with people you haven't known since childhood. I mean, honestly, I wouldn't say I have much in common with my girlfriend either."
She was quick to cut in, "I thought she was your ex-girlfriend?"
"Well, kind of, I mean, when we talked about it, it ended with us both saying that yeah, we didn't want to stay together once I left, even if we'd both been going off to school, but moreso because she'd be a high school senior and it just didn't seem to make any sense to do. And we decided it was easier to break up then than to drag it out, go through a summer marked by an expiration date. And there were the requisite tears, but, surprisingly, no anger. She's usually so fiery. But then we never really stopped spending time together, or, you know..."
"Fucking?" she offered, helpfully.
"Yeah. So we broke up but still act the role. Only I think she has gone on at least one date with this other guy. Kind of getting something warmed up on the back burner. And she made a joke as I was leaving yesterday morning that I better bring condoms with me, otherwise she wouldn't keep sleeping with me, because she wasn't risking catching something from some college tramp."
"Did you?"
"What? Catch something?"
Her face broke out into a huge smile and she barely got the word, "No," out before breaking into laughter, my own laughter beginning before hers as I immediately realized the stupidity of my response.
Then, as our laughter died down after a moment and we both drew deep breaths to regain composure, she said, "So what were you saying about not having much in common with her?"
