Just Last Night(16)
You’re probably wondering why I left it until three minutes before we left to say something. I can answer that in a word: cowardice. I’ve been so terrified of rejection & I couldn’t find any clue or hope you felt the same way that I did. (You laugh at my jokes, but that could be sympathy.)
Also, I really cherish our gang. I didn’t want to do anything to harm it. I kept thinking: what if you’re (somewhat justifiably) repelled and weirded out, and it ruins everything? I knew it would change things between all of us, whether you felt the same way or not. Especially if not.
Then that night in The Trip, I looked over at you. You were talking to Nick Hennigan about his micro scooter, which takes patience and a big heart. I couldn’t stop gazing at you—the way you smile and lower your eyes when you start to crack up, as if you’re doing something you shouldn’t. I live for that smile. (Sorry I’m bad at this. This is how a love letter works, isn’t it? You just embarrass yourself horribly?)
And I realized—I couldn’t bear to let you leave without you knowing how I felt, whatever the consequences. I had to say it, just once.
By the way, E, I don’t want you to think it was some spur of the moment whim, faced with being apart. I’ve spent two years infatuated with you. (Does this sound creepy? I sound creepy, don’t I.) What I’m trying to say is: you’re everything to me. If you want to be mine, well, I am already yours.
Write back.
Ed xxxx
PS it occurs to me that if you are finding this too heavy and too much, and a quick kiss—after 4 pints of Old Scruttocks Buttocks or Ferret’s Achy Hole cloudy cider at 6.5% or whatever it was we were drinking—didn’t mean much more than “yeah sure OK, bye Ed”—I get it. I also get that explaining yourself might feel awkward. If you want to go back to being friends, at Christmas—leave this letter unreplied to, and I’ll get the message that way.
Hah. I had already stocked up at Ryman’s for this task, with mint-green notelets, and immediately embarked on a five-page epic. Despite lots of rethinking and rewording, it was on its way, envelope flap tamped down with tape for privacy and security, before the last post.
Ed never wrote again, and while I agonized about this, I already knew how he felt, and how I felt. And I rationalized: maybe he was both swooning, and overwhelmed with First Terming.
It added to the build-up of seeing each other. To be safe, I texted him short friendly updates about uni life, signed with a newly risqué “xx.” He always replied swiftly, in kind, an “xx” at the end too. So it was OK? I thought. I hoped.
Sending another letter, when the last had been so febrile and detailed, seemed overkill. Was it my fevered prose, was it too much? No, surely not. I remembered the intensity of that kiss, and the look in his eyes. I was a nervous, insecure teenage girl but not so insecure that I could believe a man in love wouldn’t want to hear his bones were jumpable.
Maybe a phone call? I steeled myself on two lager and blacks, and got his voice mail. He rang back a day later and I missed it, though the whole twenty-four-hour lapse had already spooked me. Wouldn’t he have returned it when he saw it? Then lots of What are we like! texts, Ed flattering me that: lol, perhaps face to face chat was best? Still, two kisses.
Thank you for your letter xx
I concluded, hoping to prompt a gear shift, and getting only:
xxx
in response, which stopped somewhat short of “F. Scott Fitzgerald to Zelda.”
I should take the bull by the horns, I knew it, but I was deeply inexperienced with bulls, horns, and how to take bulls by them.
It was weird. It felt like avoidance, but his tone was affection. It looked clingy to push it. If you want to be mine, well, I am already yours. He’d said it, I had my pledge.
The first meet-up back home was on a smoky-cold December night. As I put my eyeliner on wonky and had to sponge it off and redraw it, I finally acknowledged to myself that my anticipation had curdled into apprehensiveness. Something felt badly off.
Shouldn’t Ed have immediately asked for a date for the two of us, an emotional homecoming, squirreled away in the corner of a country pub with mullioned windows, doing what tabloid papers call “canoodling”?
Susie arrived before the lads. After we traded stories of freshman year dirt, Susie said:
“I can’t believe Ed has a girlfriend already.” She wasn’t looking at me, absently patting her pockets for her tobacco tin, unaware she had verbally stabbed me with an eight-inch serrated knife.
A girlfriend, a girlfriend, what the fuck—A WHAT?! my inner monologue screamed, deranged.
Susie was busy rolling her roll-up on the cigarette-ash-strewn metal table in front of the chain bar in town we’d chosen for our reunion. It was a “pitchers of Sea Breeze for a tenner” rowdy kind of place that you never see the inside of again after the age of twenty-three. TLC’s “Waterfalls” billowed from the doorway.
Funny how trauma gives you a pin-sharp recall for detail.
My heart boom-boomed like the bass from a passing car.
“Girlfriend?” I asked, in a tiny voice.
A vain hope: by “girlfriend,” did she mean me? Had Ed presumptuously taken it upon himself to break our news, omitting my identity for a shock reveal? My gut already knew the answer.
I had been frightened he’d cooled on me, but I had been too na?ve, too trusting, too mutually in love, I thought, to imagine there could possibly be a usurper.