NOW
Jaan
Underneath the orange glow of the candlelit hall he watched her sway playfully in the arms of her oldest cousin. The peek-a-boo game the bits of her exposed skin played with his mind gave him a foggy, distracted feeling in his head. He felt increasingly unclear. At his table sat other friends from high school, people he hadn't seen in years, the atmosphere was strangely jovial. People were excited to be at this wedding, excited to see each other, and excited to be in the presence of the ethereal Brown clan. A family, at times too strange to be believed, one so loving, so caring, so open that it made others suspicious of their motives.
In the small but open hall, Jaan could see each of them clearly commanding their own space in separate parts of the room. Sanchez, on one end of the room, near the floor to ceiling windows that lined the back wall and gave him the appearance of a backlit demi god, nearly floating as if he himself was the light he was emerging from. He was speaking loudly, sucking all of the attention on that side of the room towards him. Faces tilted up to watch his standing glowing frame, his long locs tied behind his head, his arms outstretched resting on the backs of two separate chairs in which women sat. He was slightly bent forward, almost as if telling a secret, save his incredibly loud voice. Jaan could only make out snippets of what he was saying. He was telling a story about Santiago from childhood. Something hilarious, no doubt, because Sanchez was a gifted storyteller and Santiago had been an utterly odd yet charmingly hilarious child. Everyone within an 8-foot vicinity could barely look away.
In the center of the room, seated at long table reserved for the wedding court was Santiago and his bride, surrounded by their family, yet alone, completely absorbed in their own world. Their heads huddled together, newly married. Jaan could see they were being closely watched by their families, each with the satisfied look of contentment, of having known if they had done anything right in their lives it was this. Bringing these two people together, the children of immigrants, hard pressed to find anyone else out there who would understood the particular confusion of having to be two people, two places, at once, they had found their way to each other. Jaan watched the families glance quietly across tables at one another, speaking the secret, silent, and safe language of understanding, over plates of their traditional food, while sampling a few bites of the new tradition of the other.
Then off in another corner, on the dance floor with her cousin was Santos. Her hair dreadlocked just like her brothers, long and flowing to her back, longer than it had been when he knew her well in High School. He watched them flow together to the song, the tinn-y sounding music of their island, her legs moved in sync with her cousin to a rhythm and step they knew by heart, one they'd learned in childhood.
Jaan remembered suddenly and intensely a feeling he had felt one night in her bed during high school. One that came to him suddenly as he held onto her naked waist and watched her sleep, their bodies still connected, her legs wrapped around him, the clammy feeling of her skin underneath his hand. The feeling of dread of knowing this couldn't be forever, the excitement he felt at knowing that he was experiencing a particular love, a knowing he would always feel for this person, and the total anxiety that all those things brought him. Jaan remembered how he shook her awake, still inside of her, and said.
"Why are you sleeping?" Her eyes drifted open and closed a few times before she answered.
"What's wrong?" she asked. And then he remembered feeling calm, hearing her voice, knowing she knew that something was wrong with him, even in the middle of her sleep, made him relax. He kissed her barely open eyes, pulled himself to her chest, and then drifted off to sleep with her.
He felt that feeling again now. In that moment watching her dance with her cousin. He felt so deeply for her that he began to sit up in his seat and move towards her.
"Where are you going?" She asked him mid chuckle. Her voice rose up to him like a hand, pulling him out of a fog, and into the moment. He had forgotten where he was, who he was. He looked down into her beautiful freckled tan face, her hazel eyes and flaxen hair, the mole on her lip. The mole that he thought of when her bought her engagement ring. He sat back down.
"I don't know." He laughed. She leaned her warm head on his chest, he passed a hand over her shoulder lightly and kissed the top of her head. He just needed to remember, he just needed to get out of the fog. He needed to get away from Santos.
Santos
There was a point in High School when she thought about Jaan obsessively. The second winter after they had started sleeping together, It was the winter of their senior year. It was, at this point when she had made it clear that she wasn't just ignoring him, she was going to pretend he did not matter. She was so cordial it bordered on severe. From the outside she had perfected the sincerity of casualness, it seemed as though they never knew each other in the first place, and never would. At times she even had to question herself if she had ever known him more. Her casualness and cordiality so convincing that at moments she forgot that he had lived in her bed for nearly a year.
But she never really forgot.
How could she when she lived inside her head. A world where she could endlessly reconstruct and deconstruct every scenario in which she maybe, might of, possibly, or on the off chance, said something to him that had made him not want to be with her anymore. She built castles of the times when she had openly, unabashedly questioned him or laughed in his face, even when it was in jest. Over and over again she churned their time together. Was she wrong for finally confronting him as she did. Especially when it meant she had to be in this much pain? Or was she right? Was she right for finally telling him that he couldn't possibly love her like he said if he didn't actually try loving her, if he didn't want to tell her brother about them, or walk beside her in the hall. Was she right for finally saying to him, please don't visit me at night if you can't look at me in the hall in the morning.
But hadn't she too been complicit in this deceit? Wasn't she the one who insisted on keeping things a secret at first? Wasn't she the one who didn't want to feel the wrath of her brother, who wanted to keep experimenting, who wanted things to be safe?
She had, she was- initially- the engineer of their clandestine affair, the one who went out of the way to make things sneakier, to make things more exciting. So wasn't it ironic, that she was also the one to end things over the fact that he was reluctant to go public?
Now she watched him from the corner of her eyes. It seemed in the past 3 months she had bumped into him, talked to him, thought about him more times than she would like to count. After 10 years of complete silence, suddenly there he was. She remembered that obsession she felt the winter of her senior year. The way her mind couldn't turn or move without the thought of him. She remembered dreaming of him, her mind in such a constant loop that it wouldn't even stop thoughts of him while she slept. She remembered the phantom knocks she would hear at her window. How she would run to check to see if he was hanging on the edge of her shutters, only to be met by wind, and the strange feeling of missing someone. She was having dreams again too, Simple ones, ones where she would open her apartment door and he would be standing there. It never went further than that. But the fact that she had had this dream nearly a dozen times since the first time she first saw him 3 months ago was eerie.
She closed her eyes and thought about Peter. His dark skin, his soft pillow-y lips, the lull of his voice, the strong way he made her feel about herself. She opened her eyes and looked at Jaan. His hair was much shorter now, cut like one of those trendy barbers who worked in one of those shops down in Soho. He looked good, and not over styled in the way she thought most men who cut their hair in that way looked. There was always something very cool about Jaan, an offhanded way that he handled his inherit stylishness. The crease in his pants, the certain hang of his shirt, Jaan had always looked preternaturally cool. She remembered that he was one of the only white kids she knew who could wear jewelry and not look weird. He wore always two thin gold necklaces and sometimes a ring. Now he wore a slim cut navy tailored suit that had a slight shine to it and a crisp white dress shirt with the top two buttons undone. She closed her eyes again and tried to breath, but all she could remember was the subtlety of Jaan's two different colored eyes, one brown, one green, his chipped tooth and scared chin.
