“Let me do things for you, okay?” I said when I faced her. “I wanted to do all of that, and I’m able to do it. I just expect you to give me a few extra kisses in return.”
She gave me an attack of really short pecks, ending it with a longer one, a kiss more passionate and loving than the twenty others.
“Now I have one more present.”
She grunted and rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, you have a problem. Seriously, stop buying me things.”
I reached into my sweatpants pocket and pulled two Ring Pops. She threw her head back in laughter as I gave her the watermelon ring.
“Since we’re making our house-playing days official,” I said. “We need to have our Ring Pops, just like old times.”
She unwrapped her candy and gave the ring back to me. “You have to propose.”
“Even though I already did when we were nine?”
She sucked in her lips, and her growing grin indicated she was enjoying this as much as we had when we were kids. I rolled my eyes and acquiesced. “Kennedy Renee Reed, will you make me the luckiest girl in the world and be my live-in girlfriend? Can we finally make all of our years playing house official?”
She tossed her hands over her heart and feigned shock. “Oh my God, a thousand times yes,” she said facetiously and stuck her left hand out so I could put the ring on her finger.
She made the proposal official by tasting it, and I followed her by putting my ring on and doing the same. I closed my eyes for a moment as I enjoyed the taste of my youth. I studied the ring on her finger, and sure it was just a Ring Pop, but I liked that something representing our relationship was on her finger. It was a fake proposal, but why had my pulse twitched faster than it should have? Why did a smile linger a little longer than the quick taste of nostalgia? My mind sent me back to the jewelry store the day before I left Tokyo and that blue topaz ring. The feelings were similar.
Warmth traveled through me. Here we were together. In our own place. Our own balcony. Our own city. All those years of playing house, all those summer nights throughout our childhood being so excited when our parents allowed us to have a sleepover, that was all real now. She was part of my life, and after the past few weeks of spending every day with her, I never wanted to be without her again.
“It’s kinda funny that we used to play house, and we were always married,” Kennedy said softly, a warm smile pulling her lips upward. “It wasn’t until after those days that I realized I had a crush on you. If I’d known then that I was going to like you, I would’ve tried to get you to kiss me.”
“Oh, would you?”
“Yes, I would have.”
“Maybe it was because you finally saw how hard I worked as a professional swimmer to put invisible cheeseburgers and fries on my wife’s plate that you realized how much you loved and appreciated me.”
“Hey, I worked too. I was an English teacher, remember? And look at you now. You really are a professional swimmer.”
My smile loosened. Even when I was a kid dreaming about being an Olympic swimmer, I couldn’t come up with a real job for house like a teacher or a cop or an accountant. I latched on to swimming so hard from a young age that I didn’t know my life without it. I’d always thought that immortal happiness took the form of a gold medal decorating my neck. There was no Plan B. And now I was at an age when I wished that there was a Plan B, but instead, I’d put all my eggs in one basket.
“Yeah, I’m a professional swimmer and nothing else,” I said, and then realized as my words hung there how self-pitying I sounded.
“Quinn, that’s not even true.”
“But what am I, Ken? I’ve only focused on swimming my whole life, and for what? A few medals? A swimming career that will get me to one more Olympics, two if I’m super lucky? Swimmers don’t last for that long. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life.”
She rubbed my arm. “There’s plenty of time to figure it out. I mean, does any twenty-three-year-old know what they’re doing?”
“I don’t know. Do they?”
“I don’t think so. We just got our training wheels off, Quinn. We’re all riding into the adult world for the first time on our own. I feel like it’s normal to struggle a little bit.”
“But you’re not struggling.”
“Define struggle. I decided to go to grad school partially because I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my journalism degree. Broadcast? Print? Neither of those sounds exciting to me. I still don’t know what I want to do with it, and I’m lucky that I have this internship for the next six months, but I have no idea what the hell I’m going to do after it. I’m kind of banking on making connections through the filmmaker, but that might not happen. So I’ll feel as lost as you do in the summer.”
I had no idea she wrestled with those thoughts, and I felt like a horrible girlfriend for just finding out and not giving her more time to talk about her issues.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said softly.
She shrugged. “I worry, but I’m hoping for the best. But you want to know what I think?”
“What?” I asked, enjoying her still rubbing my arms in the most nurturing way.
“I think you’ve been so used to having everything written out for you, like every minuscule detail of your day-to-day schedule was decided by coaches and practices and diets. Right now, you’re staring at a blank page for one of the first times in your life. It’s scary for everyone, but it’s especially scary for you because you’ve always had something to work for.”
“That’s exactly it. What I worked for, I’ve already achieved, and it didn’t transform me like I thought it would. It sounds so selfish and ungrateful, but I can’t help it.”
“I don’t think you’re selfish or ungrateful. I thought grad school would answer all my questions, but it didn’t. If it wasn’t for this internship, I would be terrified and scared too. I think you should give yourself more credit. You’re in a lot better shape than you think.”
She kissed me on the cheek, and I let out a sigh of relief. It was nice to hear that she thought I was in good shape because all my thoughts told me that I wasn’t. I wanted to be more than a machine. Kennedy had wanted to major in journalism because she wanted to bring attention to certain issues that needed attention. Back then, it was LGBTQ+ rights, the environment, immigration, and women’s rights. Talia studied community health and prevention research in hopes of one day researching the cancer that took her mom’s life when she was only fifteen. Lillian was pre-med and wanted to do physical therapy after swimming. The people in my life all had these amazing goals to better the world, to have their career impact so many people for the better. And here I was just thinking about myself, going after a medal, and now after ten years of being on the national team, I wanted to make a difference too?
I was so angry at myself for chasing after something so superficial. Half of the reason why I majored in psychology was to better understand how the brain worked and to use my knowledge to beat myself at stresses, doubts, and anxieties about swimming. I was so used to looking through a narrow swimming lens that I didn’t even think about what I could use my degree for other than my sport. Why couldn’t I have thought long-term when I was in college? Before it was too late?