Kiss Her Once for Me (13)
I changed names and identifying details, told the story to myself to try to figure out where it all went wrong. Then I posted that art anonymously on Drawn2 because isn’t the purpose of art to make yourself and others feel less alone?
“Do you remember last Christmas Eve?” I say to Andrew. “When we got that freak snowstorm?”
“I was at my parents’ cabin for Christmas, but yeah.”
“I met her that morning. At Powell’s. We sort of… ended up spending the entire day together.” Some combination of the alcohol and the constant reminders of her all day make it impossible for me to stop talking once I’ve started. “I was upset that morning because my mom was supposed to come to Portland and see my new place for Christmas, but then she canceled her plans at the last minute. I didn’t know anyone in town, so I was completely alone for the holidays, and there she was, like the universe had handed her to me when I needed her most. And damn—she was really beautiful. She had this hair,” I say. Or maybe I slur it. “And this mouth and these big, brown eyes and these… these hands!”
“You’re painting a very clear picture here.”
“She had this presence—this way of taking up space. She always talked at full volume, and she stomped around in these giant boots, and she just—didn’t give a shit what other people thought about her. That’s always been my problem. I give way too many shits.”
Andrew’s eyes flutter down to the table. I’m not sure when I pulled the pencil out of my bag, or when I started absentmindedly drawing on a napkin, but a shape is starting to take form beneath my fingers. The shape of a woman. Tall, with wide shoulders, narrow hips, strong thighs. She’s faceless, silhouetted, but her hair is there, falling into unseen eyes.
“So… what happened with her?”
I close my eyes and wish I could forget it all. The way she led me back to the Airstream trailer where she lived. The smell of her skin and the taste of her body. It had only been sixteen hours, but I’d never felt more emotionally bonded to another person. I’d never felt so safe. Safe enough to want. Safe enough to feel desire.
I’d convinced myself that it all meant something. But it hadn’t.
“It was just a one-day thing. Two people, meeting by chance, crossing paths. The next morning, I learned it hadn’t meant anything to her.”
He nods slowly, and I struggle to remember how I got here, how in the course of two hours and four drinks, I somehow unloaded my romantic history on a hot investment bro sitting there with his mouth half-open. “I get it now,” Andrew Kim-Prescott says knowingly. “You won’t fake-marry me because you’re a hopeless romantic.”
I snort. “There are a lot of reasons I won’t fake-marry you.”
A tray of shots materializes on the table. I have no memory of Andrew ordering shots, but he picks one up and raises it in my direction. “To living spontaneously.”
I stare down at the napkin, at the brutal evidence that my fingers know what the rest of me refuses to admit. That I’m stuck on a memory, on a moment, on a person. That I’d been so terribly wrong about what we had.
“To forgetting,” I mutter as I throw back the whisky, but there isn’t enough alcohol in the world to make me forget her.
A Webcomic
By Oliverartssometimes
Episode 1: The Meet-Awkward
(Christmas Eve, 10:18 a.m.)
Uploaded: December 26, 2021
Creator note: Hi everyone! I’m excited so many of you have found your way to this first episode of my new webcomic! Just a friendly reminder that this is not a romance. Readers expecting a happy ending should proceed with caution. For more original characters, fan art, and commissions, follow me on Instagram @Oliverartssometimes.
There is almost an inch of snow on the ground, and I’m crying in a bookstore.
The tears and the snow are mostly unrelated.
Crying on a snow day feels particularly unjust. Snow days are for freedom and magic and joy, not publicly wiping snot onto your sleeve while you sob in the Gold Room at Powell’s City of Books.
This is supposed to help, I think as I look up at the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the graphic novel section. Why isn’t this helping?
I’ve only been in Portland for a month, but I’ve already come to this city-block-size bookstore a dozen times, sought solace in the color-coded rooms housing approximately one million books. After my onboarding meeting at Laika, where one of the animation bros called my grad school thesis short film—which had earned me praise and accolades from all my professors—trite and immature, I went straight to the Rose Room and sat among the children’s books with their beautiful illustrations. After my first seventy-hour workweek, I retreated to the Blue Room, grabbed an armful of romance novels, and sat on the floor reading for an entire Sunday until I forgot the real world completely. And after my direct supervisor ridiculed my work publicly and told me he “didn’t want to regret hiring a young girl,” I cried in the bathroom, yes. But then I took the MAX to Powell’s, went to the café with my bullet journal, ordered a large iced coffee, and hashed out a new plan for how I’d work harder, be better, and prove them all wrong.
And, of course, when my mom called me on Christmas Eve morning to tell me she wasn’t coming to visit, I came here, to the graphic novels of the Gold Room. Yet even the graphic novels aren’t helping.