Chapter 49
Miles
Friday
“I don’t know anymore. I don’t even know what I was saying,” I answer Asher when he asks me exactly how it went, even though I already explained it to him the exact night it happened.
“I just wanted to tell her I didn’t want to lose contact with her.
” Like for good. Like forever. Like last time, when we didn’t even say goodbye.
“And you took it back when she told you she was engaged?”
“No. I did not,” I say, slowly spinning my beer on our bar table. “I just… wasn’t expecting it.”
“I think it’s weird you guys spent those hours together, and she never told you about that life update.”
I shrug my shoulders. “But I never asked if she was seeing someone either.”
Finn frowns, his eyebrows knitting together as he sets down his beer. “And why didn’t you ask?”
“Because we were just having fun, like the good old days, reliving our friendship,” I say, “having fun, with no second intentions.”
Elliot tilts his head, clearly not satisfied with my answer. “Why didn’t you try to understand if she was seeing someone back home?”
“Because that didn’t matter,” I answer quickly.
“Or because you didn’t want to know,” Asher says, cutting in with certainty, replacing my answer. And Finn clinks his beer with his.
“Alright, alright.” I raise both my hands in surrender, dropping my defenses. “I miss her already.”
“You don’t say…” Finn replies ironically. “For a guy who’s usually so feet-in-the-ground, your head has been miles away in space since she left.”
“But when we ask you what’s on your mind, you never admit it,” Asher points out. “It’s okay to miss her, bro.” He pushes my beer closer to me from across the table.
I do miss her already. It’s hard to say it out loud, but it was a feeling I had known for a while.
Being an adult now, I thought it would be easier to shake its hand, invite it in for a moment, and then ask it to leave.
But the truth is, the feeling leaves, and then comes knocking on my door again and again, far too often, in short spans of time, ever since the night she left.
“Last month, Lisa left the city for ten days and Finn cried every single night,” Elliot says.
“I did not,” Finn tries to defend himself.
“Don’t lie,” Asher points a finger at him.
Finn laughs and doesn’t fight the words.
He did cry. Not every night. But seven nights after Lisa had left New York, on another Friday night like this one, we were hanging out playing darts. Finn had a bit too much to drink and rambled emotionally to the whole bar about how he could never live without Lisa in his life again.
“When you love someone like that, you don’t whisper it. You let the world hear it echo,” he said drunkenly on that echoing Friday night.