Page 99 of My Unfinished Heart

I watch him take a sip after handing it to him.

“That's way better than the ten dollar bottles we get,” he says.

I sit down in the seat next to him. “It was fourteen, I think. Middle shelf.”

He smiles. It’s a sad smile, but it’s enough.

I decide to stick with small talk. “Are you out of school for the summer?”

“I'm taking one class,” he says.

“What are you studying?”

“I'm pre-law.”

“Oof. Sounds hard,” I say. Our knees brush as Tristan shifts, but he fixes the issues quickly by crossing his legs, which I can see through the table. White shorts, shoes, and golden tan skin. His shirt is white, too, but it’s got a blue stripe print.

“This part isn't so bad,” he says. “I think it's law school that actually kills people. It’s very competitive. Or so I hear.”

“Art History wasn't like that,” I tell him. “I think there were four of us, and we just got each other.”

He smiles again, distant. The silence that follows has mass and density. It weighs something. Supposedly, there’s a room somewhere—the quietest room in the world—where the silence is so deafening no one’s ever been able to stay inside it for more than about forty-five minutes. My house becomes that room for those few seconds—the roar of nothing pushes against my eardrums with a force so hard it hurts.

Evidently, he can’t stand it either and comes up with some words before I do. “You said you wanted to talk.”

I nod. “I did. I do.”

“Wanna get started on that?”

I take a breath and let it out. Share my heart. I can do this. “Yes. I’d like to talk about you and me.”

He picks up his wine and looks past me, out the kitchen window. “Okay.”

“I think about you a lot,” I say.

He stays quiet.

Metaphorically speaking—I bend over and pick up the ball I dropped four years ago.

“I think about how it was between us…how you were with me.”

When he doesn’t respond, I drink down a healthy portion of my wine as he sips his, keeping his eyes on it, rather than me. If I could grab my heart in my fist, I would—just to make it stop for a second so I can think. “I've missed you.”

He does look at me now. “I wouldn’t know.”

That stings. It hurts. I let myself feel that one, because he’s right.

While I nod my understanding, I commit to the moment. The whole—“life is not a dress rehearsal” thing Helen was hinting at months ago. “I know I fucked up. A lot. I think I know what my first mistake was, and after that it all just snowballed, and I⁠—”

“What was it?” he asks.

“The first mistake?”

He nods.

I’ve thought about this a lot, but it’s kind of a no-brainer. “Not calling the next day. Or on your birthday. Or any other day.”

He blinks and stares at me for a long moment. He swallows. His lower lip trembles, but he bites it even as his eyes lose a shade of color. “Go ahead,” he finally whispers.