Before & After You

by Michelle Chamberland

  I slammed the front door closed behind me, wishing I could fast-forward time. To tonight. Next year. Ten years from now. But I’d settle for the next few hours. Just get me to that party.

  Instead, the day seemed to go by in slow-mo, mocking me with a middle finger raised to my face. But eventually, after for-fudging-ever, I landed myself on that same couch, with my same best friend, drooling over the pictures we’d taken over the last few weeks. I’d brought my favorite one for Greyson. The one of him chugging down his water at football practice. The one where half of it was sliding down his chin and neck. The same one that I may or may not have had hanging in my room since the day after I took it.

  I wasn’t a complete psycho, though. It was only one of a few dozen other black and whites that were pinned to my wall. That were not of Greyson, thank you very much.

  Sara noticed me finger-petting the image of him in my lap. “He’s still playing hard to get, huh?” she asked.

  I made some sort of indecipherable noise. A snort; a grunt; I don’t know. It only made her laugh, before saying under her breath, “Speak of the devil.”

  I looked up, only to find Greyson sauntering into the room like a goddamn model straight out of GQ. Honestly, it wasn’t fair for someone to look that good. He was wearing some new black chucks, dark jeans, and a plain white shirt, so really, it didn’t even make sense, the effect he had on me. How the hell was I supposed to make a move when he looked like that? But let’s face it, he kind of always looked like that. Without even trying. I wasn’t sure he even knew how good-looking he was.

  Our eyes met from across the room, and he threw one of those tilted smiles my way before heading into the kitchen with Jaymes and the guys.

  And that was my cue. I was going to go outside and wait for him on the grass, and when he met me out there, like he always seemed to, I was going to suck it up and make my move. No matter how scared shitless I kind-of-sort-of felt about it.

  I was outside for maybe five minutes before I felt him sitting down beside me. My eyes were closed, my back pressed against the grass. Two shots in, and the devil on my shoulder was screaming at me to not back out, while the angel on the other was reminding me of the thousand and one ways we were about to embarrass ourselves.

  “Hey, Jess,” Greyson said, the smoothness of his voice slipping beneath the surface of my skin the way it always did.

  I could feel the weight of his gaze on me. It settled over me like a warm blanket. And I lingered there, in that moment, believing that maybe he did want me as much as I wanted him.

  “Hey, Grey,” I eventually said. I opened my eyes to him, and I was right. His eyes were already on mine. Communicating something that definitely didn’t equal just friendship.

  So, I went for it. “Listen, Greyson. I can’t keep pretending that I don’t like you. Like, really, stupidly like you, so…are you actually oblivious to my ridiculous attempts at flirting with you or have you really not noticed me making an ass out of myself?”

  The corner of his mouth hitched up the tiniest bit. So, he hadn’t been oblivious, that much was obvious. “Listen, Jess,” he turned the tables on me. “I’ve already told you I’m into you, but I can’t give you anything more than friendship right now.”

  “Right now?” I latched onto those words mischievously.

  “Jess,” he warned, a little exasperated. But if his smile had anything to say about it, he was also kind of amused. “Friends. That’s all we can be.”

  “But why,” I whined.

  “Because Jaymes—”

  “When are you going to get that Jaymes and I aren’t together?” I interrupted. I was so sick of Jaymes and his stupid claim on me.

  “He says he loves you,” he offered.

  “Ha!” I laughed. “Is that a joke?” But his face said that it wasn’t. “Okay. Wow. That’s ridiculous. You see that, right? What he does every night? With all those girls? I don’t know much about love, but that…that is not it.”

  His eyes lingered on mine, hanging on my last words. I could see the way he was turning them over in his mind, deciding what they meant. To him. To me.

  “And what about me? What about how I feel?” I pushed.

  He took a deep breath, quickly releasing it. There were words on the tip of his tongue. Words I could tell he was holding back. “I still can’t do that to him, Jess,” he said instead, forcing an alternate set of them forward. “And like I said before—Jaymes is a really good friend of mine, and I owe him a hell of a lot better than that. I couldn’t do that to him, genuine feelings for you or not. So again, friends are all we can be. Take it or leave it, I guess.”

  I’d be lying if I said his offer didn’t crush me. Just a little. “That’s not fair,” I said quietly.

  “Life isn’t fair,” he shrugged.

  And touché. Because didn’t I know a thing or two about that.

  Twelve After

  “JESS?” HE STEPS closer, this grown man version of who Greyson used to be. He’s taller, older, wiser. There’s no way I could actually know that just from looking at him, but somehow, I know it’s true. This man in front of me knows things he didn’t all those years ago, has lived things, seen things too, maybe.

  And he is definitely, definitely, leaps and bounds sexier than I remember him being.

  It’s almost too overwhelming to handle—his familiar eyes, that same tilted smile, the angular line of his scruffy jaw, and above it all, the fact that he’s even here, in my hometown, in my coffee shop.

  I watch him, and he watches me, and neither of us says anything for far too long. I think it’s because we’re both in shock.

  He looks good. Really good.

  His hair is buzzed short on the sides, the top longer and thrown back in a perfect mess. It’s no longer bleach-blond. Just dark. Black, black, black. His army-green tee perfectly fits the form of his sculpted arms and broad chest, and he’s wearing these dark shit-kicker boots, and ripped black jeans, and is clenching and unclenching hands that have touched and healed and broken so many different parts of me.

  Emotion lodges itself in my throat. I want to run out that door and launch myself into his arms all at the same time.

  I don’t miss the way he studies me as intently as I do him, a flood of emotions raging behind his eyes that match the ones playing in mine—fear, joy, excitement, regret.

  “How are you?” he asks.

  So, this is going to be the point where we start talking and using all of the words. Okay. I can do this. And because I’m an adult, and I’m Zen as fuck, I can totally, totally handle it. “I’m good. How are you?” See? Piece of cake. Liar.

  “I’m good.” He smiles, glancing down at the floor.

  I duck down just a bit and catch his eyes. “You still smile the same way,” I say softly. That was such a stupid, vulnerable thing to say. But I’ll own it. Because he does. And I’ve missed that smile. So much more than I’ve allowed myself to believe.

  He rubs the back of his neck, eyes intense. “Shit, Jess. It’s so damn good to see you,” he ends on an exhale. He’s looking at me as if he’s been searching for me every single day of the past eight years we’ve spent apart.

  And I’m sure that’s what I’ll be telling our kids someday, when I tell them the story of how we found each other again after all these years and fell madly in love—for the second time in a lifetime.

  But that thought strikes me down as if I’ve been hit by a bolt of lightning, because: What if he already has kids?

  In reality, I know next to nothing about this man standing in front of me. Not anymore. For all I know, he could already have a wife and kids, and a nanny and a dog and a white-picket fence, and a big, giant house and a who the hell knows what else, but I can’t stick around and find out. And his hands are in his pockets, and I can’t see if he’s wearing a wedding band on his finger. And I should have dug deeper when I saw him online, except that I couldn’t bear to do it then either.

  But that’s okay. I take a deep breat
h. It’s okay. Because I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know how much happier he is with his life without me in it.

  My god, this was such a mistake. Standing here with him, soaking in every little detail and difference between the Greyson I used to know and this stranger in front of me, who doesn’t feel anything like a stranger at all. Seeing his smile and letting it wash over me. Hearing his voice. The way it’s changed and deepened after all of these years.

  It’s too much. It’s all too much, and I can’t do this.

  I fumble with a hasty goodbye and make a quick exit, running the entire two blocks back to my house, iced mocha long forgotten. Tears stream down my face, my neck, my arms.

  Such a mistake. A lapse in judgement that twists and churns my stomach with the pain of regret, with all of the mistakes I made back then, too.

  Because that’s the thing about mistakes. Some of them you learn from, and some of them you grow from, and some of them even make you a better human being in the end. But sometimes we spend our entire lives running from the ones we can never escape.

  Thirteen Before

  SOMETHING I HAD noticed about Greyson pretty quickly…was that he made me laugh. A hell of a lot more than I was used to. And it was the real kind of laughter, too. The kind that plants a tiny seed of light inside your soul and lingers there for a while. It was just so easy for him, so effortless, to dig through the muck and climb right up and over my walls and casually take a seat next to my heart as if it were no big deal.

  And the funny thing is, I didn’t even notice it at first—how happy I was around him. I just knew that I was drawn to him, that there was nothing in this world I’d ever liked more than the way I felt when I was with him.

  It’s how I’d managed to keep my attraction to him to myself since the night he’d drawn the friendship line in the theoretical sand between us. Because surprisingly enough, whatever it was that we did have, it wasn’t worth losing because of how badly I wanted him.

  I kept reminding myself of this as I watched him worrying his lip between his teeth.

  He was sitting across from me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his eyes glued to the notebook that sat on the table between us. We were in the library working on our poetry assignment, and I was having the hardest time keeping my eyes off of his mouth. A mouth I was going to draw the shit out of later. I could fill an entire sketchbook with those lips alone, really.

  He had no clue, though, seeing as how he was the only one of us two actually focused on the assignment in front of us.

  “This is shit, isn’t it?” he asked suddenly, looking up from his notebook.

  I shrugged. “I mean, yeah, sort of. But like, unicorn shit. All pretty and glittery on the outside, but when you get down to it…it’s still shit.”

  He laughed, and my god, the way he laughed. Deep, and throaty, and genuine. I wanted to swallow it up and keep it as my own.

  It kind of felt like mine, though. Because he’d laughed at me, at what I’d said, and he hadn’t once taken his eyes off of me the entire time. He still hadn’t. And as his green eyes penetrated mine, I couldn’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t try to kiss him.

  His laugh drifted into a sigh as he leaned back in his chair, running his hand through his hair, effectively pulling me away from that thought. “We’re never going to finish this,” he said.

  I didn’t tell him that I was totally okay with that, that I liked the time it forced us to spend together—alone. I shrugged instead, saying, “Our views on it don’t exactly mesh well, but we’ll figure it out. Eventually.”

  We both smiled at that, our eyes drawn to each other’s as we waded into a comfortable silence. That familiar fluttering began making its way through my body, starting at the core of my stomach. Those looks of his were going to kill me. Everyone has a breaking point, and I was way too close to mine.

  As if he sensed it, he broke the contact, looking down at his things. “Can I take you somewhere?” he asked, tossing his stuff into his backpack.

  Fucking duh, I almost said, but managed a slightly saner, “Sure.”

  “Cool. I just need to stop by my house to grab something really quick.”

  “Sounds good.” I was pretty sure I’d made a decent enough attempt at seeming calm and collected on the outside, but on the inside? I was screaming in excitement while simultaneously waving sparklers and doing cartwheels through the neighborhood of my mind.

  Because, Greyson’s house!

  I was going to see where Greyson lived. Maybe see where he slept. Maybe steal something of his that smelled like him to cuddle with at night.

  Nope. Rewind. That was creepy, Jess.

  We gathered our things, walked out to the parking lot, and hopped inside his car. Excuse me, hopped inside of Lady.

  Was it weird to be jealous of a car? Probably. But I wasn’t jealous because I wanted to drive a car like her, even though that was a thought too. I was jealous because I wished I held the spot in Greyson’s life that Lady did. The slot of his girl, which it was clear Lady was.

  We peeled out of the parking lot, and Greyson threw his arm up to rest on the center console, pressing it fully against the length of mine. I was sure he’d move it, but he never did, only leaving for brief intervals to shift gears before putting it back.

  When I finally managed to look up at him, there was a sly smirk on his face. So, he was doing it on purpose. If he wasn’t careful, I was going to fling myself across his car and kiss that smirk right off his mouth. He seemed to register that thought as soon as it drifted through my mind and moved away, but not without shaking his head and smiling while doing so.

  It was only then that I realized the direction we were heading in. And the farther we drove, the more I was sure Greyson was playing some sort of joke on me. We were getting closer and closer to my dad’s house on the opposite side of town. Had he figured out where I lived, and this was some twisted way of throwing it in my face?

  I was well aware of the difference between mine and my friends’ living situations. But I didn’t consider any of it mine. I was like them. Used to the barely scraping by, welfare check to welfare check kind of life. It was why I’d never told any of my friends the truth. But I was starting to think I’d been found out, until Greyson pulled into a long driveway five estates down from my dad’s.

  Turned out, Greyson lived right down the street from me.

  Turned out, his family was just as rich as mine.

  Fourteen Before

  “NOBODY’S HOME, IF you want to come in for a sec.”

  I stared at him like an idiot. But was it just me, or did that sentence have layered meaning? Clearly, I wanted it to have layered meaning, but the sincerity of his expression told me that it was all in my head.

  I cleared my throat. “Um, sure, yeah, sounds good.”

  And then he got the door for me. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but he hadn’t done that since I’d stupidly become “off limits” in his mind. And I was probably reading too much into every little thing he was doing, but it sort of felt like things were shifting. Sliding back to the way they were before.

  It was confusing; he was confusing.

  Or maybe it was just me and my hormones desperately wanting to make something out of nothing.

  We quietly made our way up the long pathway and few short sets of stairs that led to his front doors. I didn’t know why my heart was pounding so hard. But I could feel it in my throat, and in the tips of my fingers. This doesn’t mean anything. We’re just grabbing something from his house real quick. Get it together.

  But when we stepped inside his house, I just sort of…froze.

  Because his house was insane.

  Black and white on white and black; and marbled floors; and sparkling, ornate glass fixtures; and smooth, sharp, geometric lines; and a huge, open space that directed my attention straight to the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the entire back wall of his house, showcasing a gigantic pool as big as a f
reaking lake—that overlooked green hills and an actual lake down below.

  I’d thought my dad had money. This was on a whole other level.

  “Jess?” Greyson was stopped halfway up his dramatically curved staircase.

  “Sorry.” I moved my feet, belatedly following him. “Your house is stupid beautiful,” I admitted.

  “Thanks,” he replied with a forced smile, seemingly out of habit—an automatic response. Interesting. I took note and quickly filed it away.

  As I made my way up the stairs, my eyes were drawn to the picture frames that lined the walls of his staircase. Professionally taken black-and-whites of France, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Brazil…

  “Does Jaymes know you live here?” I wondered out loud. I was surprised Jaymes wouldn’t have given him shit for it—or have said anything about it at all. The fact that he even liked Greyson in spite of it was kind of a shock in itself.

  He laughed. “Yeah, he knows.” And I could tell he knew exactly why I’d asked.

  We reached the top of the stairs, and my heart was still pounding. I couldn’t help it. But weirder than that, I felt kind of hollow all of a sudden. Because I was there, in Greyson’s house, and it felt like it should mean something, except that it didn’t. It didn’t mean anything at all.

  There was no buzz of anticipation. He wasn’t holding my hand and sharing secret looks with me. I wasn’t there because his parents weren’t home and he wanted to sneak me into his room and have his way with me. He wasn’t going to lead me in there and push me onto his bed, and he wasn’t going to climb on top of me and kiss me speechless.

  But I wanted that. I wanted it desperately. And it killed me that he didn’t.

  Because it was clear to me then, that these desperate feelings of mine were completely one-sided.

  I hated it. Hated the constant underlying feeling that I was all alone in this world. Stranded on an island with my SOS drawn in the sand and no one there to rescue me.