Fluffy(63)

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“And you make life choices based on what feels right? Inside yourself, intrinsically?”

“We talked about this already,” I say with a long sigh. “I know, I know. I turned down Harvard.”

He squeezes my hand. “No. That's not what I mean.”

“Then what?” Turning toward him, I open my eyes. In shadow, his profile is a work of art, throat moving as he swallows. Greys and browns, black and the flash of light as doors to the building open and close, cars coming into and out of the parking lot, all mingle to make him look like an Escher etching, a Picasso, but 3D and with movement.

“You seem like the kind of woman who likes to take it slow. I’ve known for a while now that I wanted this,” he says, sitting up, hand still holding mine, waving at the ever-shrinking space between us, “and I knew you wanted it, too.”

“Then why not say that?” I sit up, too, unable to stop myself.

“I tried. Repeatedly,” he says pointedly. “You need a soft sell, though. Pinning you against the wall and kissing you madly next to the coffee machine didn’t seem like your style.”

“Is it yours?”

“With a woman I want? Who wants me, too? Sure.”

My entire body ignites.

“But not with... me,” I say slowly, emphasizing the word me, setting it apart from the others the way he's setting me apart from his... others.

“You’re a smoldering fire, Mallory. Not a sudden blast. You’re deep. Shallow bounces right off you. I don’t want to skim the surface. I want to explore the uncharted waters with you.”

“I don’t need this,” I explain to him. Beseeching him, really. Almost begging him to understand.

How can he? He’s not me. Wasn’t me. Never had my role back in high school.

“Need what?”

“For you to make some grand, empty gesture that doesn’t mean anything. It’s sweet, Will. Really. But I don’t need it.”

“Did you ever consider the fact that maybe I do? Not the empty part. No part of how I feel about you is empty. It’s full. Overflowing. So intense that I need help breathing sometimes.”

His words are a firehose to the face, a siren to the ear, a million ping pong balls flooding a dorm room through the cracked door. Will is a tsunami of hope carrying me off with the tide, pushing me so far inland I smack against the side of a mountain, unable to climb it to safety.

“To those people–your high school crowd–I’ll never be anything more than Mallory Monahan, the high school nerd. The chubby chick who blended into the lockers. I might as well have painted myself blue and turned my belly button into a combination dial,” I hiss in his ear, knowing his words are fueled by hyper-emotion. By nostalgia. By the fact that Will is a decent guy who’s swept up in the moment and trying to do the right thing.

“You really think that?”

“Your friends just proved it. To them, I’ll never be anyone but who I was in high school.”

“Seems like it works both ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sounds like I’ll never be the man I am to you. That you’ll always see me as the teenager in high school. Maybe my friends aren’t the only ones stuck in the past, Mal. You’re back there, too.”

I stiffen.

“Here’s the question, Ms. Monahan: where do you want to live? In 2009 or 2019?”

I want to be with you.

I’ve always wanted to be with you.

The words are stuck, caught at a gate held shut by an enormous deadbolt that my raw, prying hands can’t move. No matter how hard I push and shove, heave-ho and grunt, I can’t do it.

I can’t.

Or perhaps it’s more than that: I can’t do it alone.

“Do you have any idea how I felt about you? In high school? You were my biggest crush.” The words whoosh out of me like a hot air balloon descending too fast, rushing toward the ground, out of control. “Crush. What a word. It's perfect, really, because the emotions all crush you from the inside out. They crowd out who you really are and put these hollow, carved-out warehouses of hope inside. Impossible hope. I imagined you out of thin air. Created entire worlds–no.” I laugh, the sound old and new at the same time. “I created parallel universes where we were together, because it would take quantum physics for that to have happened.”

One eyebrow goes up, the cocky look on his face making me mad with desire and equally mad with rage, both feelings true and co-existing inside the very same Mallory here before him, confessing everything, shaking in her heels and all too certain this is the right thing to do.

Feeling the fear, doing it anyway, and knowing she'll pay for it.

“You have no idea. No idea how hard it was to say yes when you asked me to be your date to this reunion, Will, because I knew I wouldn't just have to pick a dress and do my hair and makeup. I'd need a U-Haul for all the ghosts and baggage I'd bring here tonight. And it turns out I was right. Ramini and Fletch and Osgood and you confirmed it.”

“Me? What did I do? Or... not do?” His eyes search my face for an answer.

“Let me ask you the same question you just asked me, Mr. Lotham. Where do you want to live? Past or present?”

“Anywhere you are, Mallory. We’re in a parking lot again. This time, you don’t get to run away. I shouldn’t have let you ten years ago, and I’m sure as hell not going to let you now.”