A Very Large Expanse of Sea(42)

I would’ve known.

But I was now knee-deep in metaphorical cow shit, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think ignoring Ocean was an option anymore—in fact, I’m not sure it ever was—but I also didn’t know if talking to him would help, either. I’d already tried that. Today, in fact. That was the whole plan. I thought I was being mature by ending things in person. I could’ve been—in fact, would’ve preferred to have been—a coward who sent him a simple, unkind text message, telling him to leave me alone forever; but I’d wanted to do the right thing. I thought he deserved to have a proper conversation about it. But I’d somehow screwed everything up.

I dragged my feet that night. I stayed downstairs with my parents for far longer than I normally would. I ate dinner slowly, pushing my food around my plate long after everyone else had left the table and said, “I’m fine, just tired,” to my parents’ many concerned questions. Navid didn’t say much to me except to shoot me a sympathetic smile, which I appreciated.

Nothing helped, though.

I was stalling for time. I didn’t want to go up to my room where the closed door, the quiet, and the privacy would force me to make a decision. I was worried I would cave and call Ocean back, that I would hear his voice and lose my ability to be objective and then, inevitably, agree to try, to see what happens, to ultimately be alone with him on another, imminent occasion because wow, I desperately wanted to kiss him again. But I knew that this whole situation was hazardous to my health. So I put it off.

I managed to put it off until three in the morning.

I was lying in bed, wide-awake, completely incapable of shutting down either my brain or my body, when my phone buzzed on the table beside me. Ocean’s message was at once simple and heartbreaking.

:(

I don’t know why it was the sad-face emoticon that finally broke through my defenses. Maybe because it seemed so human. So real.

I picked up my phone because I was weak and I missed him and because I’d been lying there, thinking about him for hours already; my brain had succumbed long before he’d texted me.

Still, I knew better.

I clicked through to his number and I knew—even as I hesitated, my finger hovering over the call button—I knew that I was only inviting trouble. But I was also just, you know, a teenager, and my heart was still too soft. I was not a paragon of anything. I was definitely not a saint, as my brother had so clearly pointed out. Not a saint, not by a long shot.

So I called him.

Ocean sounded different when he picked up. Nervous. I heard him exhale, just once, before he said, “Hey.”

“Hi,” I whispered. I was hiding under my covers again.

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

I waited.

“I really thought you weren’t going to call me,” he finally said. “Like, ever again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is it because I kissed you?” he said, and his voice was strained. “Was that—should I not have done that?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. This conversation was already doing things to my nerves. “Ocean,” I said. “The kiss was amazing.” I could hear him breathing. I could hear the way his breathing changed as I spoke. “The kiss was perfect,” I said. “Kind of blew my mind.”

He still didn’t say anything.

And then—

“Why didn’t you call me?” he whispered, and he sounded suddenly broken.

I knew then that this was it. Here it was. Here was the moment and I had to say it. In all likelihood it would kill me, but I had to say it.

“Because,” I said. “I don’t want to do this.”

I heard the breath go out of him. I heard him turn away from the phone and swear and he said, “Is this because of the idiots at school? Because people saw us together?”

“That has a lot to do with it, yeah.”

He swore again.

And then, quietly, I said, “I didn’t know you were a basketball player.”

It felt like a stupid thing to say, like it shouldn’t have mattered what sport he played in his free time, but it had also begun to feel like a blatant omission on his end. He wasn’t an average kid who’d decided to take up basketball in his spare time. He was a star player on the team. He’d apparently scored a lot of goals for someone his age. Baskets. Whatever. I’d looked it up online when I finally mustered the courage to lock myself in my room. There were articles about him in the local papers. Colleges were already circling him, talking about scholarships, talking about his potential, his future. I came across a few blogs and school-sponsored webcasts that were pretty illuminating, but when I dug deeper I discovered an anonymous LiveJournal account devoted only to him and his statistics over the years—a ton of numbers I couldn’t understand about points and rebounds and steals—and I was suddenly confused.

Basketball was clearly a huge part of Ocean’s life; it was obvious it had been for some time. And it had just occurred to me that, while yes, there was some fault on my end for not asking him more questions about himself, his omission was also strange. He’d never even casually mentioned basketball, not in a single one of our conversations.

So when he said, “I really wish you’d never found out,” the whole thing began to make a little more sense to me.