jesse #3
I could move on from all the things that my heart, my soul, and my body wanted, had screamed for all night on Sunday, and I could breathe out.
If I was right at all, Finn would go out on Friday, meet Alejandro, and have a blast. And the next thing I’d know, I’d be invited to their house party, where they would be three couples, and I’d be an honorary token friend from Finn’s ancient history.
It was done.
It wasn’t done.
Friday, seven-thirty, and my heart was hammering as I ran from my room and into the evening air, having forgotten my jacket in the hurry.
The cold found the gaps in my shirt before I’d made it half a block, and I let it.
Going back for the jacket meant going back into that room, and the version of me who lived in that room had spent four days being smart and careful and quietly noble about somebody else’s happiness.
I wasn’t going to be him for one more minute.
I’d been lying since Monday morning. Just not with my mouth.
I’d texted Taylor one word and told myself it meant I was finished, and I’d spent four days rehearsing it the way you rehearse phrases of a language you don’t actually speak.
Ten years of silence, and every year of it had been my doing: the shrinking replies, the slower texts, the whole thing I’d done to us both because I was twelve and scared, then twenty-two and still scared, just better at pretending.
What was one more bad night stacked on top of that?
What was Alejandro’s face doing whatever a stranger’s face does when somebody worse dressed and ten years too late turns up uninvited, set against a whole decade of nothing?
The street thinned into smaller streets past the bookstore, and my shin caught the edge of a bike rack hard enough to promise a bruise by morning.
I didn’t slow down for it. If he wanted to never speak to me again after tonight, fine.
That was still one decade shorter than the last time I’d let silence do the deciding for me.
La Taqueria came up in red neon two blocks down, over a dark window, and whatever had been pure momentum in my chest turned into something with more weight to it, which was worse.
I slowed to a walk without deciding to.
Through the glass, in the corner booth, was the back of his head, and something low in my chest pulled tight before my brain caught up enough to ask why.
I knew him from the back. I’d have known him from the back in a crowd of a thousand, the particular refusal of his hair to lie flat, the set of his shoulders mid laugh, which he was, right then, shoulders going once, hard, silent behind the glass.
Across from him, elbows on the table, was a good mustache and a low collar with the edge of a tattoo showing under it, and his eyes hadn’t left Finn’s face since I’d started looking. Not the menu. Not the door. Just Finn. He’d won him over. He’d impressed him.
I’d told myself for a month that this was wanting, plain and simple. Standing there watching a stranger look at him like that, I didn’t have plain and simple anymore, and I didn’t go looking for a better word either.
My hand found the door handle.
He looked happy.
That was the number I hadn’t run, in four days of running every other number there was. Not whether he’d want me. Not whether Alejandro would take it well. Just that. Whether Finn, given the choice, might actually be glad I hadn’t shown up to make it harder.
I let go of the handle.
There was a version of the next five minutes I’d been carrying since my dorm room, door opening, bell over it ringing, Finn turning around in the generous way he turned for anyone who walked in near him, his face doing the thing it used to do at ten years old when I showed up somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.
I’d had four days to write the lines that went with it.
None of them were getting said tonight.
I’d done this to us. I’d done it to myself.
Congratulations, I thought, to nobody. Well done.
The cold caught up with the rest of me all at once, now that I’d stopped giving it a reason not to, and I crossed my arms over my chest and stood there being cold on purpose.
Then I turned around and walked back the way I’d come.
I didn’t run. Nothing left to run toward.
Past the bike rack, my shin already stiffening, back onto a bigger street where the streetlights had come on and the leaves underfoot were louder than they should have been.
Somewhere around the library I settled on the one thing I was allowed to take out of tonight, and it wasn’t much.
I wasn’t going to say anything. Not tonight, and maybe not ever.
I wasn’t going to corner Finn in some hallway and list my qualifications.
I wasn’t going to keep running the math on who deserved him more, since I’d already lost that argument the moment I stopped being brave enough to make my case before I picked somebody else’s name instead.
Our door was locked when I reached it, silence blanketing our room. Malcolm was out for the night. I sat down on the edge of my bed.
I was going to be fine with this. Eventually. Some Tuesday a long way off, I’d look back and be glad I hadn’t wrecked a good thing for someone who deserved better.
I just wasn’t going to be fine with it tonight, and I didn’t pretend otherwise, not even to myself, not even in the dark, where I usually got away with it.