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She stood in his living room and knew she didn't belong there, but she didn't move. His keys dangled from her nerveless fingers, and she looked around, memorizing his environment. It was as close to him as she'd been in eight years. And now, with all that time between them, now she was finally sure that she'd made a mistake. It had been a constant thought since she'd retreated to California.
She recognized the earmarks of a roommate and smiled. He was living with a woman. Trailing further inside, she let her eyes roam over the shelves. She didn't know why she tortured herself. But then again, maybe she didn't have a choice. She stopped at a shelf of pictures and stared. He was there, laughing, his arms around a beautiful girl with honey-colored hair. He looked happy, and with a smile, she touched his face.
Eight years. He had moved on. She moved to the next picture, where the happy couple made a face for the camera. And the next, where she recognized her brother and his fiancee, along with him and his girl. She should have been angry at the betrayal, and maybe she was, but she was numb on the surface.
She dropped her eyes to the carpet. Saw the stain from when she'd spilled a glass of wine when they'd celebrated his acceptance to NYU. She'd been sixteen. He'd tried to shove the entertainment unit over the stain but the edge still peeked out. She wondered what his new girlfriend thought of it, or if he'd ever even told her why it was there. But she was glad to see it. It meant that, in some obscure way, she'd marked him.
She should leave. She knew it. Somewhere deep down, a primal instinct told her she'd lingered too long already, and that he'd catch her here with her pants down, unprepared to face the twenty eight-year-old version of him. The man of him. She'd only known the boy.
She turned, and she looked down at the keys in her hand. She'd kept this piece of his domain for over a decade. But after eight years of neglect, it didn't really belong to her. She'd come back to return it, taking advantage of his swing shifts at the firehouse. But suddenly, she wasn't sure she could part with it. She hesitated, and then decided that this last small bit of him she could keep. It wasn't greedy, to keep this little thing. How could it be? They'd had a lifetime together, before she'd disappeared off to college and left him in her wake.
Ashamed, needy, she turned toward the door so she could exit stage right one last time, and then she froze.
He was in the doorway, and he was staring at her, one hand on the doorknob. His eyes were an intense blue, and his expression was masked, and he looked so good and so forbidding that she lost a little more of herself to him without wanting to.
"Aspen," he said. She couldn't look away, although she would have paid dearly for the luxury of tearing her eyes from his. "You're supposed to be in California."
"I...I got a job at..." She floundered in shallow water, then she tossed her hair back and tried to remind herself of who she was, although it had always felt like a shadow while in absence of him. "I moved back, and I...I still had a key." |
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crazy
cranky
drained
creative
