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“Ah, yes, but look how civilized we’ve become.” She smirked, but something in it was forced.Maybe like me, she feels the weight of what little time we have left hanging over us.
The memories washed through me, then. Maybe it was because I was leaving soon, or maybe because we had felt like friends today for the first time in so long. Hell, maybe it was the Sangria, but suddenly I couldn’t stop the onslaught of images of a lifetime spent with Lina.
The two of us sitting on the sidelines of a stickball game, loudly commentating on the plays and calling out the score. Patching up wounded animals together, her using her tiny hands to extract splinters or soothing the animal, while I administered stitches. Sitting down for dinner with either of our families, and the way everything had always felt so easy, so right, except for the way it never could be.
“I miss her,” Lina said abruptly, pulling me from my thoughts. Her color had gone pale blue.
“I miss her, too, for what it’s worth. I’m so sorry that you had to go through that. That I wasn’t… there.”
Lina met my eyes, and I could already see the question burning in hers, even before it came out of her mouth.
“Why weren’t you there?”
That wasn’t a story I wanted to tell, especially not tonight. I was silent, deliberating, when she spoke again in a quiet voice.
“I’ve been racking my brain, trying to put the pieces together. I believe that there was a time our friendship was real. I want to believe that even with all the complications of your deal with Uncle, there were times it was true later.”
“It was, Lina.” I tried to will the truth into my voice, wanting her to hear it for what it was.
“Then where were you?”
I took a deep breath. Maybe I didn’t feel like telling this story, but she deserved the truth this time. “I was in a dungeon, chained to a wall because of an evil woman who doesn’t like to hear the wordno.”
Her eyes widened in horror, and I held a hand up.
“No, I don’t want sympathy. I just want you to understand that I couldn’t possibly have known what to say to you after that, how to explain that when your world had just fallen apart. So, writing you those five words… it was all I could do,” I admitted. “Do you see now why I don’t like to talk about my job?”
There was no sound aside from her carefully labored breaths while she processed everything I had just thrown at her.
“I do see,” she finally said. “What I don’t understand is why you would take a job like that. Were you so desperate to get away from… home?” She had been about to ask if I was so desperate to get away from her, I was sure.
I clenched my jaw, trying to find a way to make her understand, to take away some of her hurt without giving up every last damaged piece of myself.
“It wasn’t always like that,” I muttered. “The job, I mean.” In a louder tone, I asked her, “Did you ever think that maybe I left for your sake?BecauseI cared?” I was dancing perilously close to things I didn’t plan on revealing, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“For my sake?”she muttered, in disbelief, before flashing an alarming shade of crimson.
“No, Edrich.” She stood up, like she couldn’t contain her aggravation sitting down. “If you had left for me, you would have explained it. You would have talked to me. You would have written. You left foryoursake.”
“And how would that explanation have gone, Lina?” I got to my feet also, frustrated at her, and at myself, and at the way we kept dancing around the truth.
Mostly with myself, though, because I had managed to convince us both that I resented her when the only thing I had ever really resented was not being able to find a way for us to be together.
“You tell me,” she shot back.
We were standing closer now, and I found myself having to look anywhere but her face, just so I could focus enough to answer. Whatever else was true about our situation, I knew that I owed her that much.
“All right.”
“What?” She tilted her head like she thought she had heard me wrong, but I nodded.
“All right, I’ll tell you how that would have gone.”
It felt like time stopped in that tenuous moment, that endless space of possibility, but I was too far in to stop myself now.
“If I had given you the truth, then, it would have been this. I wanted a future with you. Wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything else, and I didn’t care about our sizes, didn’t care that we could never have… ” Talking about a physical relationship when she was standing in front of me in a gauzy dress that hugged her perfect body like a glove felt like juggling with double edged knives, so I hedged. “A traditional relationship. You were my best friend, and I thought that would be enough.”
“And then you, what?” she asked, in a voice so quiet I could hardly make out the words. “Changed your mind?”
