Time stopped, and Wren leaned into me—just marginally, not even an inch—but I felt it. My mind went into overdrive, thumb still resting on her lip, and when my eyes dropped to her mouth, Wren leaned in just a little more, her shaky breath warming my skin.
A thump sounded behind me, and we both jumped.
Rev let out a scratchy meow as he sauntered up from the top stair and I cleared my throat, dropping my hand and taking a long stride back from Wren.
No step was big enough to get me as far away from her as I needed to be in that moment. My body was moving of its own accord, and I needed to leave. Now.
“I should probably get home, actually. It’s later than I thought and I have an early morning.”
Wren’s voice was light and breathy, her hands flying to nervously play with the ends of her hair. “Oh, you’re not off tomorrow? I thought you might want to go tubing with all of us.”
My heart jumped into my throat, stopping mid-beat to clog my airway. “What?”
“Tubing?” Wren said, uncertain, her brows bending together at my reaction. “I guess it’s supposed to be pretty hot tomorrow, hot enough to get in the freezing river, apparently. I’ve never been tubing, but everyone’s going—Davie, Yvette, Momma Von, Tucker, Sarah, and a few others. You should come!”
She was so excited, her eyes bright, but my ears rang as the small space of the bathroom closed in on me.
“I can’t. Sorry. Have fun.”
Without another word, I blew out of the bathroom and down the stairs, not taking a breath until I’d hit the fresh air. My feet carried me home faster with each step until I was practically jogging, and when I made it back to my cabin, I slammed the door behind me, leaning against it dropping my head back with a thud. Harsh breaths burned my chest, and I clenched my jaw, forcing the air through my nose as slow and steadily as I could until my pulse slowed down.
When my eyes finally opened, they fell on Dani’s smiling face. Pain ripped through me, blooming under my ribs, spreading like a virus through every vein until I nearly doubled over from the force. But before the tears could fall, I tugged my shirt over my head and walked with purpose up the stairs, losing my swim trunks just as I turned on the shower. I stepped in before the water had warmed, and the icy shock of it cleared my head.
I wasn’t sure how long I showered, but it didn’t matter. Whether I stayed under the water or crawled between my sheets, midnight would come, and June seventeenth would overshadow any light I’d managed to hold onto in the past year. Because it didn’t matter that I’d talked about her to a girl in a green dress or that I’d felt her as if she were still here, right down the road in Aunt Rose’s old cabin. She wasn’t.
She was gone.
And tomorrow, I’d spend every second of the day reminding myself who’s fault that was.
RETROSPECTIVE
ret·ro·spec·tive
Adjective
Contemplative of or relative to past events : characterized by, given to, or indulging in retrospection
The next morning, I laid in bed a little longer than usual, desperate for coffee but not desperate enough to stop myself from staring out the glass door at the river, thinking about the night before.
So many thoughts had assaulted me, and it wasn’t even nine yet.
I’d had the perfect opportunity to tell Anderson about Keith last night, but I hadn’t. I’d asked him to open up to me about his cousin, to bare the most sensitive part of himself to me, and yet I’d cowered away at even the thought doing the same.
What was even more distressing was that I felt the need to tell Anderson about Keith at all, but I did. I wanted to know everything about him, and I wanted to tell him everything about me. It’d been so long since I’d had the urge to expose myself that the realization of it paralyzed me in bed.
And then there was the bathroom.
Just the thought of us both in that tiny room made me squirm, and I curled in on myself, rolling to one side as Rev hopped up onto the bed. When I closed my eyes, I could still see Anderson’s as they traced every line of my face. I felt his hand cradling my neck, his thumb on my jaw, my lips.
Had I wanted him to kiss me?
I tried to convince myself I’d made it up, that I’d overanalyzed a perfectly innocent exchange between new friends. Yet my body and mind willed it to be true, yearned to read too much into every little look in the hopes of finding something more.
But why?
I was leaving. More importantly, I was divorced—and freshly so. It was like trying to cut into a wound that hadn’t yet scabbed a new skin. I was dipping a sharp blade into warm blood, and I didn’t have any concept of how crazy that made me.
Frustration finally won over, and I kicked the covers off. Rev skittered off the bed and ran down the stairs as I padded to the bathroom. I thought through my bathing suit options with tubing in mind as I went through my normal morning routine, tying my hair into a high ponytail before reaching for my makeup bag.
I paused, eyes meeting my reflection.
I tried to remember a day when I hadn’t worn makeup, tried to recall even a single day in the past several years. My head tilted, eyes squinting, reaching back for a day I wasn’t sure existed. Even when I was sick, I’d never wanted to miss work, and that meant putting on a full face of makeup.
But I did remember one Sunday—Keith and I didn’t have plans, which never happened, and I’d had no reason to put on makeup. I’d woken up that morning and baked us an entire sheet of cinnamon rolls before settling in on the couch with a book. I didn’t even like to read, but I had nothing to do, and it felt like the right way to spend a lazy Sunday.
When Keith woke up, he’d walked over to kiss me and had paused, his brows furrowed as he looked down at me. You look different, he’d said. And when I’d asked him if it was a good or bad kind of different, he’d simply stared at me, as if he were seeing me for the first time and wasn’t sure if he liked what he saw.
He’d responded with only two words, but they were enough to make me abandon my book and reach for my concealer.
Just different.
Later, when we would sit down in front of our marriage counselor, I’d learned that Keith said things like that on purpose, because that was how he communicated. He was passive aggressive, hinting to what he desired rather than asking for it. He’d even admitted to not responding to my I love you when he would leave for work before me, my penance because he was upset about something I’d done, but he didn’t want to verbally tell me. It was a game to him, and I’d played it for years without even knowing the rules.
For so long, I’d tried to decipher what I needed to do to make him happy, all while forgetting to ask myself the same.
I’d always taken my makeup off one side of my face at a time, but after that day with Keith, I’d paid even more attention to the differences. Looking back on our relationship now, it was like finding Easter eggs—remembering all the tiny moments like that one, hidden in the tall grass of the good times. I’d never seen them, but I think I’d always known they were there.
It was like a mosaic: none of the pieces made sense individually, but when I took ten steps back and saw them all together, they painted a crystal-clear picture of the truth.