Twenty-Five
before
Cary, at nineteen, in his black uniform, was the most handsome man Shiloh had ever seen.
She didn’t recognize him at first—and it wasn’t because he was so changed (though he was changed). It was because she forgot what it felt like to look at Cary.
She hadn’t looked at anyone she really cared about in months—and Shiloh more than cared about Cary. Cary’s face cut right
through her, always. She’d become inured to it in high school—he’d sliced her open every day for years, sometimes several
times a day.
As soon as she saw him standing in her dormitory lobby, she felt that old urge to touch him. (An urge she’d never once resisted.)
Within seconds, she was tugging at his tie. Brushing her hands against his arms.
She could hardly look at his face. His hair was so short, there was no avoiding his golden-brown eyes, his long nose and pointy
chin. The deep lines in his cheeks when he even thought of smiling.
The Navy uniform seemed to boil Cary’s whole body down to its essential components: Sharp, square shoulders. Slim legs and
narrow hips. Adam’s apple. Knobby wrists.
Why did the military need to make its recruits look so clean and vulnerable before they taught them to commit atrocities?
Shiloh wanted to touch him everywhere at once. To test and check him. (Are you Cary here? And here and here?)
She’d forgotten how to be normal around him. Their version of normal. She didn’t know where to stop.
When he finally kissed her, Shiloh felt all her internal architecture collapse—everything she’d ever told herself about how she and Cary fit together and what they were meant to be.
He kissed her, and she realized that she was always going to kiss him back. That she would have kissed him back at thirteen.
At fifteen. After any day of school. At prom. At graduation. When they’d said goodbye last summer. At no point would Shiloh
ever have refused him. At no point could she.
Cary could have what he wanted from her, if he ever wanted it. She was an unlocked door. An open book.
It was her first kiss.
In her dorm room. That day. She was nineteen, too.
It wasn’t a kiss that changed anything, externally.
Shiloh was still in college and hoping for something bigger and better than the life she’d left behind.
And Cary was very definitely still in the Navy. Contractually obligated to walk away from her.
Cary had always been walking away from Shiloh... He’d never taken his eyes off the prize, as long as she’d known him.
There was no future where she told him she loved him and he told her that he’d stay. There was no future where he followed
her or turned back for her.
There was possibly a future where she chased him...
Shiloh’s brain was busy during that first kiss. (Her brain was always busy.) She was choreographing her fall. Calculating
the softest landing.
What could she have with Cary? What could she have that day? Or ever? How much life could she squeeze from one weekend?
Having sex seemed like a no-brainer.
Shiloh couldn’t imagine more ideal laboratory conditions for losing her virginity. She loved Cary. She trusted him. She was
wildly, manically attracted to him.
Plus she knew—she’d been told—that you’d always remember your first time. What better way to pin Cary in her memory? To make
him indelible?
Shiloh still felt like she was proving a point: Cary couldn’t make her forget him by leaving.
It was too soon to have sex. She hadn’t even acclimated to kissing. (He should never have let her take the wheel.)
Shiloh couldn’t really absorb all the sensations—and Cary was too close for her to keep him in focus.
Feeling him actually inside of her body, feeling him actually connected to her... It was more intimacy than Shiloh could begin to process.
The first time was fast and incalculable.
The second time, she started to feel it. To understand what was happening. To recognize Cary’s face above hers. All her self-discipline
came unraveled. All of her anchors lifted out of the ground. She held him too tight. She kissed him excessively. She told
him she loved him, again and again.
Shiloh didn’t have an orgasm. (She thought that might just happen ? Incidentally? It didn’t.)
But, still, every part of what was happening felt so right...
Maybe Shiloh had been wrong.
Maybe she and Cary weren’t meant for separate skies. Maybe the future could never offer anyone to rival him. Maybe the two of them fit—were meant to fit.
Maybe they could bend their paths toward each other.
Shiloh held his face in her hands. “ I love you, Cary. I love you. ”
Cary had to take a city bus to the airport. He was starting a more specialized training program in Florida—nuclear science.
He told Shiloh that aircraft carriers had their own nuclear power plants. Just floating in the ocean. She’d had no idea.
Cary had enlisted for six years. (Two more than usual.) Eventually he’d be assigned to a ship—or possibly a submarine. Imagining him under the water, in the dark, in close quarters, made her feel panicky. She’d pinched his thigh while he explained it to her.
Cary was getting on a bus, and then on a plane, and then the Navy was going to bury him alive for six years.
And still Shiloh was bending toward him. Trying to imagine them together. Wanting him to ask her to imagine it.
He didn’t ask.
Cary didn’t bend—in general, as a person.
He didn’t change his mind.
He wasn’t going to accommodate Shiloh.
He was just going to leave.
She wrote him letters.
He sent back postcards.
He said that he tried to call.
He wrote her one letter, about six months after that weekend.
“Shiloh, you’ll always be so special to me. You’ll always be in my heart. What happened between us meant a lot to me. You
should know that it meant a lot to me.”
Shiloh felt like she was being wrapped in tissue paper and set in a shoebox, like she was being shoved under Cary’s childhood
bed.
She’d already met Ryan.
A few months later, they were dating.