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A Visa gift card showing up like clockwork each month fully loaded with a thousand dollars.
Maybe I was being greedy to expect his love as well.
Despite how many times I told myself that I didn’t need him, that I didn’t love him anymore, I feel a beat inside my chest the second I see him again for the first time in years. Damn duplicitous heart.
I reply, “Aren’t we all sometimes?” He offers me a hand, but I pull myself up, gripping a higher shelf just in case my knees weaken and become traitors as well.
There’s no chuckle although I thought I was quite clever. Just that damn smile that always used to do me in, lying on his face. His face . . . God, I missed seeing it. I removed the photos from my phone the summer after he left. I packed away any reminders when I moved out. How can a face be so familiar that it’s like I see it every day?
I guess I do.Even if I’m buried in books, papers, and tests, a memory of Harbor joins me at some point. Sometimes I spend time with him, and sometimes the visit is too short. It hurts all over again as if the wound is still fresh every time, though.
“I was,” he says, his smile fading under the cover of sincerity.
Searching his features for the man I can hate again, I struggle to find him when he looks so much the same as when I loved him. Sure, he looks older, twenty-five versus twenty-three when he left. But only in that way that men age to become even more beautiful than they were.
It’s almost annoying, considering I wouldn’t have worn jeggings, a baggy sweatshirt, and dirty sneakers if I knew I would be seeing him . . .or him see me.My hair is bundled into a mess on top of my head, and I didn’t bother with makeup—Oh my God, snap out of it, Lark!
“Well,” I say, “I hope you found yourself wherever you’ve been.” I walk around him and down the aisle toward the stairs.
“I did,” he replies to my back.
I stop, not giving him a front-row seat to my emotions or even my expression. I start walking again, this time faster until I’m running down the stairs. I’m given a look by the librarian, so I slow down and pretend my body isn’t ready to launch from my skin. Everything inside tells me to run, to get out of here as fast as I can. Not from fear but from the love that I just realized I still have for him.
Bastard.
I gather the notebooks and shove them in my bag before slamming my laptop closed and tucking it inside. Swinging it onto my shoulder, I collect the books and hurry back to the librarian. “Hi, I need to return these.”
“Just leave them here.”
“Thank you.”
There’s no sign of Harbor, and I don’t know how to feel—do I want to see him again, to talk, to argue, to freaking kiss? Or is it best if he’s gone?
Please let him be gone.I don’t have time to figure out which emotion suits me best in this situation.
I push through the doors to see him waiting outside—hands in his pockets, a shier side of his earlier smile, but unfortunately, no less charming. His shoulders appear broader, but I’d have to be splayed across him to measure, and that’s not going to happen . . . I don’t think.
No.
It’s not.
Why am I like this? What am I doing?
When I start walking in the direction of the apartment, he asks, “May I walk with you, Lark?”
“No.” I keep walking. Despite how tempting it is to turn back and get one last look, his disappearance was child’s play compared to this torture.
“Hey, Lark?”
“Leave me alone.” I keep walking, too unsteady in my frame of mind to think rationally. That’s what I need to think clearly around him, and I’m lacking all capabilities to reason.
The feeling of his presence earlier makes more sense now. He was freaking following me. I knew it.I felt him in the fall air, in the rustling of the leaves as a breeze blew through, and inside me, my intuition told me he was near.The stalker.It was cute back in Beacon. Here, on the streets of New Haven, it’s not anymore.
As soon as I get into the apartment, I lock the door and the bolts, so basically do what I usually do. Toss my backpack to the table and head straight for the blinds to close them. Once the living room is secured, I close the blinds in both bedrooms as well.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I hold out my shaking hands. Thank God I don’t plan to be a surgeon. I sit on them, hoping that calms them down as I take several deep breaths.
For an organ that refused to cooperate the past two years, my heart is putting on quite the performance after seeing Harbor.
