“Are you okay?” I looked over and Tatiana was sitting against a wall, with her phone in her lap, looking up at me free of malice, but full of concern. She held up a bottle of water to me. “Here.”
I walked over to where she was sitting and slid down against the wall opposite her. I sat and it felt like a two ton building was crashing off of me. I grabbed the bottle of water and took a huge gulp. “Thanks.”
“Sorry I’m not in there.”
“No, don’t be. I don’t want to be in there either.” I tried to hand the bottle of water back, but she held out a hand telling me to keep it.
In the minutes that followed, Tatiana quietly flicked through her phone while I sat there staring at her. It should be a crime to be as beautiful as she was, and an even bigger one for me to still be so in love with her even after how she treated me. Maybe I was a sadist?
Tatiana looked up at me finally, I could only imagine she could feel my gaze drenching her. “So. How are you doing?”
I shrugged. “I’m okay.”
She tilted her head to one side in disbelief. “Colin.”
Hearing my name linger on her lips was the best sound I’d heard in years. “Yeah.” She always could see right through me. “I’m overwhelmed. I keep getting all of these questions I don’t know the answers to and I feel like everyone is expecting me to know what’s next and I just… don’t.”
“Say that,” she replied. “It’s insensitive for people to throw all of this at you right now. Just tell them you don’t know, that you’re just trying to deal with today. They can accept it or they can f--” she looked around herself at the church, “fudge off.”
I gave a quick smile at her correction before losing the grin again. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Well…” she sighs. “I can.”
I furrowed my brow. “What?”
She got to her feet. “I can tell people to mind their own business. You just worry about staying on your feet.” She held out a hand. “I’ll go with you.”
It was like someone had thrown a match on a bonfire they’d been covering in gasoline. Tatiana staring down at me, her hand outstretched, with a promise to be by my side, if only for a few hours, it lit a fire that blazed so high it was definitely going to burn me. I reached out and took her hand and let her pull me to my feet. Even once I was steady, I held on. Her skin was even softer than I remembered, warmer. She looked up at me, not pulling her hand back, and we stood there in a tense silence that could be split with a knife. I couldn’t calculate it. The look in her eyes matched the way I felt, so why was there such dissonance between us? Why did she hurt me the way she did?
“I fucking knew it.”
We looked over and Harlie was standing in the hallway to the church. More than a few students were in attendance, along with their parents, it only stood to reason that Harlie would be there too. She took one look at Tatiana and I holding hands and stormed out. I actually considered running after her, unsure of what she meant, but then I felt Tatiana pull my hand from hers and it dragged me back to attention.
She walked a few feet towards the door back into the chapel before looking over her shoulder at me. “You ready?”
If only that meant so much more than it did. “Yeah. I’m ready.”
10
Tatiana
I massaged the hand that Colin had hung onto with my other one. I thought about that day he kept hold of my hand at the mall and tried to push the feeling that it meant something more out of my mind. That was how I felt about that hand-hold too, but in the end, it didn’t mean anything. Those moments between Colin and I always felt profound, like that single, rare second, the hour, minute, and second hands on a clock all line up. Blink and you miss it, but if you can be present in the moment, it feels like the earth itself stands to applaud.
But the second hand moves and that moment is gone. You blink wondering if it even happened at all or if you’d just made it up. Did you just make up his thumb gently smoothing across your skin or the ‘I need you now’ look in his eyes?
Probably.
“Good morning.” I was wandering into the kitchen where my dad was mixing together a breakfast scramble, but I was far from home.
“Hey dad.” I noticed neither my mom nor Colin was around. “Where is everyone?” My dad raised an eyebrow at me and my eyes flicked from side to side, searching for a reason for his piqued curiosity. “What?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.” A light laugh bubbled out of him. “Colin had to meet with his lawyer, so your mother took him to deal with that this morning and then she’s going to drop him off at school. Speaking of which,” he pointed at the bar stool next to me where I noticed, for the first time, that Colin’s backpack was sitting there. “I need you to bring his backpack to him.”
“Come on dad,” I whined, “we don’t talk at school. Like at all. Everyone thinks I hate him.” My dad’s eyebrow went up again and it was starting to piss me off. “What?” I barked.
“So you’re saying you don’t hate him?”
Shit. I didn’t even realize that I’d phrased my sentiments that way. “I mean… I… You know… It’s…” I shuddered and rolled my eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine.” My dad turned back to his pan and scooped some of the scramble onto a plate and slid it over to me. “Let’s talk about something else then.” I forked the eggs and threw them in my mouth, for some reason not anticipating how hot they’d be. “Careful, Tati!” My dad quickly fled to the fridge and poured me a glass of milk, handing it over, and I downed it. “Goodness. Anyway. Football is starting up this week, right?”
I looked up at him, this time my eyebrows were raised. “Uh, how the hell would I know?”
“I’m telling you it does.” I shrugged and he rolled his eyes. “Colin is on the team. His parents went to all of his games so…”
I saw where the conversation was going and didn’t like it. “No, dad. I’m not going to Colin’s football games.” I thought of how my younger self was waiting with bated breath for the opportunity. “I don’t even like football.”
“You used to. You liked the Broncos.”
“I liked horses,” I spat back. “Besides. There’s no reason for me to be there.”
“There is: the fact that I told you to be.” He took my empty glass from me and refilled it.
“But dad, I--”
“No, Tatiana. You’re going. I didn’t want to say anything, because I know your mother has been pretty harsh with you, but the way you’ve responded towards Colin is beyond disappointing. We’ve all had to find ways to be cordial with people we don’t care for, and I would think that given how close the two of you used to be and the fact that he lost both of his parents in a single night would have made you step up. I mean your mother and I raised you better than that. It’s time for you to take whatever issues you two have and put them behind you. He’s trying and I expect you to as well. We are going to his games as a family. End of discussion.”