SAM KISSES MY CHEEK TO SAY GOOD-BYE. No words. He leaves me outside my building as used to be usual, and sure enough the girls come scampering out of hiding the moment he’s out of sight.
“Ooh, you let him kiss you!” Patrice scolds, laughing.
“Are you taking him back?” Emmalee asks.
Is it really that simple? It wasn’t like he dumped me. It ended because it had to, because we’re not the same as we used to be. Either of us. I touch my cheek, where his lips brushed. “I don’t know.”
Sam turns my world over in his hands every time he looks at me. Today, especially, I’m spinning. Dizzy to the point where there is ringing in my ears.
Patrice says it’s a “crush” and I have to get out from under it. But she’s never had a “crush,” at least not one who crushed back or held her hand or kissed her, so how would she know? It’s a good enough word, I guess. “Crush.” It lays me flat sometimes. The whole weight pressing on me. The weight of Sam and his sad eyes. The weight of Steve and his memory, which grows smaller and more blurred every day, but not any lighter to carry.
It feels like a dream sometimes, how it used to be between us. At times like that it’s easy enough to believe there’s no such thing as love, like Mama says. What I thought we had was never real, this long, slow, happy moment when everything was good. But then I see him, and I know, sure as my palm aches without his up against it. I see him and the breath slips out of my body. It all really happened.
When I can breathe again, I want to curse the sky for tearing us apart. I want to forget his name, his scent, the way his arm twists when he reaches for my hand.
I want to go back to being the girl I was before him.