Page 51 of Roadrunner

I went to Riley’s on Wednesday night.

I told myself I was going to tell him everything. I rehearsed it in the car. The wine, the hotel room, the test, the three weeks of carrying a question I couldn’t answer even for myself. I got as far as the driveway with the whole speech sitting in my chest, fully formed, ready.

He was on the porch when I pulled in. He stood up when he saw my headlights, the way he always did, like my arrival was an event worth standing for.

“Hey,” he said. Then his face changed, because he was looking at mine, and mine was apparently saying something I hadn’t given it permission to say.

“Hey,” I said back.

He came down the steps. He didn’t touch me right away, which told me he already knew, in the way he knew most things about me before I said them out loud, that something was different tonight.

“Talk to me,” he said.

I opened my mouth.

What came out was not the speech I’d rehearsed.

“My parents want me to move back to California,” I said.

He went very still. “What did you tell them?”

“I didn’t tell them anything,” I said. “I didn’t say no.”

I watched that land on him. Watched him absorb it the way he absorbed everything, fully and without flinching. Then I watched him do the thing that broke something in me that has never entirely gone back together. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t demand I choose him. He just looked at me with those steady eyes and asked the only question that mattered.

“Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know what I want,” I said, and it was the first true sentence I’d managed to say out loud in three weeks, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. “I don’t know anything right now. I feel like I’m underwater and I can’t tell which way is up.”

“Then don’t decide tonight,” he said. “Stay. Figure it out with me instead of alone in California with people who’ve never once figured anything out on your behalf.”

I wanted to tell him. Standing in that driveway, I wanted more than almost anything to say the actual words. That I made a mistake, and I was pregnant. I was so afraid of what he’d think of me that I would rather run away than watch his face while I told him.

I said none of it.

“I need some time away to think clearly,” I said instead. “Away from everything. Away from even you, because I can’t think straight when I’m looking at you, and I need to think straight about this.”

It was true. It was also a door I was closing on purpose, and I knew it even as I did it.

“How long?” The words were almost a whisper.

“I don’t know.”

“Alex.”

“I don’t know, Riley.” My voice cracked on his name in a way I hadn’t intended and couldn’t take back. “I just need you to let me go figure this out without asking me to promise you anything about when I’ll be done figuring.”

He looked at me for a long moment. His face was already grieving something, like he could feel the shape of what I wasn’t saying even without the words for it.

“Okay,” he said finally.

“Okay?”

“I’m not going to beg you to stay,” he said. “I’ve never once done that with anything in my life and I’m not about to learn how tonight, even for you. But I need you to know I’m not letting go easy either. You go figure out whatever you need to figure out. I’ll be right here when you’re done.”

I have thought about that sentence more times than I could count if I tried.

I’ll be right here when you’re done.