“I love it, Bryan. I totally love it.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
Then, his hands were in my hair, and he kissed my neck, my earlobe, my eyelids. I sighed and swayed closer. I was floating, I was flying, I was in Manhattan with the man I’d fallen in mad, crazy love with.
“Why aren’t we just in your apartment right now?” I whispered.
“Because if we are, I will not be able to resist you.”
“You’re not doing a good job resisting me right now.”
“I know. Can you even imagine what it’ll be like if it’s just you and me?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I can imagine. I think about it all the time. I’m so crazy about you. I want to be with you in every way.”
“Me too. Let’s go walk around NYU. You’re going to be there in just a few weeks.” He held my hand and squeezed my fingers when he said that, his touch a visceral reminder that we’d be together then. We wandered around the campus for the next hour, and with each building, dorm and classroom that we managed to find open in August, I grew more excited about college.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be here soon. It’s going to be amazing.” We walked along the outside of one of the dorms. “Did you love it here?”
“Yes. I loved it. College is everything they say it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s the time when you find yourself. When you figure out what you want. And when you have a ton of fun.”
“I can’t wait to start. I know I’m going to love it.”
“You are,” Bryan said, but there was something sad in his tone.
I looked at him. “Hey. You okay?”
“Totally.”
“Because you sounded…”
“I’m fine.”
But he grew quieter as we checked out the campus bookstore, and a cafe where I said I would probably do all my homework, and the library, which was speckled with students for the summer session. His mind was elsewhere, and he didn’t tell me where he’d gone.
At the station on Sunday night, I thanked him again for the necklace.
“You should always wear it,” he said before I caught the last train to Mystic. His voice was wistful, and when he kissed me goodbye, the moment had become melancholy. I didn’t feel like a girl who was returning in a week for her eighteenth birthday. I felt like a girl being sent off with only a Hello Kitty necklace to remember him by.
When I called a few days later to confirm our weekend plans, his voice was different. Strained and distant.
“I don’t think you should come in,” he said.
Something didn’t compute. We’d been planning this weekend for more than a month. “Why? Did something come up at work?” My shoulders started to tighten with worry.
“No. It’s just…I don’t think we should.”
“Should what?”
There were so many ways to answer the question, but the scariest one was the one he said next.
“I don’t think we should be together.”
I looked at my phone briefly as if it were a radio, mistakenly tuned to a channel I could no longer understand. I brought the phone to my ear and said the only thing I could think of. The thing I was clinging to. “But I’m totally in love with you, Bryan. One hundred percent and then some. And I want to be with you.”
Then I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
Words didn’t come.
The silence choked me. It was as if hands were on my neck, gripping me.
How could I have misread him so badly? He’d said he was falling for me. Where else do you fall but in love?
Then he spoke, and his words were sharp glass. “I have to go.”
Breaking the clasp in a single, fierce pull, I ripped off the necklace, then tossed it into the trash, stuffing it at the bottom of the can.
That was the last time I spoke to him.
Even now, five years later, those words rang through me. I could hear them, the pause before he spoke, the shape of each and every syllable. I have to go.
That’s exactly what he did. He left.