Page 137 of Xavier

Forty-Two

Him

“Can you drive any faster, man?”

The Uber driver just shrugs, but I feel the car lurch forward and knock me back into my seat.

“What’s the hurry?” he asks over his shoulder.

“I need to see a girl. About something. Something long overdue.”

“Ah. Well, we’re almost there. You sure you know what you’re going to say?”

“Yes. I just don’t know how she’s going to respond.”

The youth center looms ahead and I point to it. “Over there! Just pull over!”

I jump out even before he’s come to a complete stop.

Turning almost immediately back into traffic he yells, “Good luck, man!” out the rolled-down window, and merges into the throng of cars.

I spin around to face the building, eyeing the signs and banners announcing today as the grand opening. I don’t have time to take in the finished construction before she comes walking around the corner.

“Malynda!” Her name comes spilling out from deep in my gut and onto my lips.

She instantly stops in her tracks, her hands full with a box of decorations, causing a chain reaction of people almost banging into her and each other. Someone curses as he jumps to the side to avoid her.

She doesn’t say anything for a moment.

I don’t say anything for a moment longer.

I thought I knew what I wanted to say. But seeing her in front of me right now makes all the declarations, all the revelations, all the promises seem unworthy of what I feel. Unworthy of her.

“I didn’t know if you were going to come today,” she finally says. And I nod. I can see why she might’ve thought that.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, I was out of town. But I’m here now,” I say, as if I need to convince her I’m real. Just as I had needed to convince myself over and over that she was real in those first few days she came back into my life. It was so much easier to think that she’s been just an aberration. Memories are much easier to deal with than reality.

But now, we are both real and both here. Just where we’re meant to be.

“Do they know?” she asks, her eyes giving nothing away. I feel more nervous than I ever have in my life. My fingers feel clammy and I shove them into my pockets to stop from fidgeting.

“Jade and Kaine?” I ask. She nods in reply. “Yes. They’re the ones who told me what time you’d be here,” I say before I think that that might come across as a betrayal to her.

“Where did you go?”

“Maine.” My answer makes her eyebrows shoot up, but she doesn’t respond.

I take a step closer, the letters slowly starting to form into words and sentences again in my head. And then I speak, and say all the things I should’ve said a long time ago.

"Malynda. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. The things I said, the things I did. I was wrong. You're right, all this time I've been trying to pass it off as my need to protect you, but it was just my misguided machismo at having failed you all those years ago. I should've been here convincing you, showing you that the things that happened to you mean nothing in the scheme of how I see you, how I respect and admire you… how I love you. I was off nursing my own bruised ego, and getting more bloody bruised in the process. And then to blame it on you? I don’t even know why you’re still here listening to me. I don’t deserve it. But I need you to know how sorry I am. The truth is, I’ve been in a state of suspended animation for so long. I thought I’d grown up, matured, when I've just been making excuses for my immature way of thinking. While I've been waiting and searching, I should've been working on making myself worthy of you, for the day you might come back. I realize that now. I also realize that my role was never to protect you; it’s to support you. It’s not to inspire you; it’s to help you inspire yourself. And that I should never have put that burden on you, to be my reason for living. And I should’ve told you, there’s nothing you can’t do without me. You don’t need me. I need you. Then, you might’ve known that there’s nothing you should’ve been afraid to tell me. Because I would never have stopped loving you because of something that had happened to you, or something you had done. My love was never contingent on you staying the same. You were always meant to grow. I just wanted to get to watch it. It’s still what I want.” I take a deep breath and say the final thing I came here to say. I hold out my hand to her, outstretched, open. “Come with me. Please, I want to take you somewhere.”

She doesn’t answer me right away, just stands and stares at me for a moment.

She looks down at my hand and there’s the slightest shake of her head.

“I can’t, Xavier. It’s - it’s the youth center opening today. I have to be here. And so do you.”

Her words slash through the breath I’m holding, and I feel every cell in my body convulse.